The recently reviewed album, The Rhythms of Migration, is part of a broader set of activities under the Freedom to Roam umbrella. The driving force behind it all is the outstanding flute player Eliza Marshall. Best known in the folk world as a member of Ranagri, she’ll also be found playing in various genres from classical to film scores to West End theatre productions. I caught up with Eliza and started by asking about the origins of both the Freedom to Roam project and album.
“In 2018, I’d contacted the Born Free Foundation (the wildlife and animal charity fronted by actress and campaigner Virginia McKenna) about doing a project that would use music in a meaningful way so that we weren’t just dragging ourselves from gig to gig. This was selfishly very enjoyable, but I wanted to use the platform we have as musicians to do something more widely useful. So that was in 2018, the initial introduction to Born Free, saying, look, I’m going to put something together, we’d like to raise some money for you.
“So, then, a year later, a group of us were up on Coll (the Hebridean island). In Scotland you have the right to roam, the right of access to the land. We were talking about this and someone called it Freedom to Roam. I really loved that because it doesn’t just have to be specifically about the land it can have much wider connotations which, essentially, is what this project is about. Rewilding the land, and having access to it, is really vital to having Freedom to Roam for wildlife and also for humanity. Whilst Freedom to Roam is staying very apolitical, it’s significant that the idea came about during the Trump times of let’s build walls to stop people coming in and let’s have Brexit. Freedom to Roam, then, is about what would the world be like if we didn’t have those attitudes.”
It only takes a few minutes in Eliza’s company to realise the depth of her engagement with both environmental and humanitarian issues. I wondered if this had always been with her or had something specific motivated her to get involved?
“I would say there’s been a lifelong passion for the love of nature and the love of kindness. I don’t want to sound like a total idealist here, but I think I am. I have always wanted to be very inclusive. Nature is at the core of my love of life and I suppose over the last decade, as we’ve all become more aware of these issues, it’s tied together in my mind the connections between everything. There’s an awful lot of negativity in the world, but if we explore some of the positivity, how can we then harvest that to look out for one another and look out for the planet?”
The Rhythms of Migration is the first completed piece of work to emerge from the Freedom to Roam umbrella, and so the conversation moved on to explore how that had come about. Four people had a hand in writing the music and so separate Zoom meetings allowed Catrin Finch (harp and piano), Dónal Rogers (bass, guitars, piano, percussion and vocals) and Jackie Shave (violin and piano) to contribute to the conversation. I was interested in knowing how each of them had become involved, suggesting to Don that it was easy as he and Eliza are a couple.
Don: “I suppose it is easy, having sat chatting with Eliza all this time, but I’d suggest over a few years we’d all chatted about doing something together. I recall, must be all of 5 years ago, being at the Bhavan Centre, Eliza, myself, Jackie, Kuljit Bhamra plus a few others and we had a go at something that may have been an embryonic Freedom to Roam.”
Jackie began her recollection even earlier: “I met Eliza about ten years ago when we played together on tour with Peter Gabriel, and we really connected, had lots of late-night chats and realised we had a lot in common. Since then, we’ve hung out together, having good times. I remember us walking along a beach on Coll, talking about making something together. That was Eliza, Don and me and Eliza saying she had a great friend, Catrin, who should also be a part of it.
“Eliza’s original idea for collaborating was that we would sculpt it all jointly, creating the compositions together. Of course, this was before Covid had reared its head and so the path it took wasn’t how we’d imagined. It had a strange gestation really, where we all went away and wrote on our own. I think the only track we all made together was Arctic Lament. Incredibly, bizarrely, it all came together and worked. What we had all written, completely separately, made a story together. That was quite wonderful and kind of magical.”
Catrin: “Eliza approached me with the project and, of course, it was at a time when there was a huge amount of uncertainty. When Covid struck in March ’20, none of us had anything to hold on to, career-wise. As musicians I think we’d all taken a dive into this very deep swimming pool, we were at the deep end and nobody knew where they were swimming to. We needed something to latch on to and, because there was, there still is really, so much negativity about, it was a real pleasure to be part of this positive project. We were given the brief that we’d all do a little bit of the writing. It was a very creative and organic process. There has to be an element, when you’re starting an artistic and creative project, of good will and the want to do it. So, you need everyone’s heart in it and then it kind of organically moulds and morphs into something. It was very timely, it was very needed, I think, for a lot of us that were involved.”
Eliza (flutes, whistles and bansuris) can have the last word on how the writing team of four came about: “As Jackie has said, we’ve known each other since the Peter Gabriel days and we’ve always wanted to do something together. Cat and I were at college together 20 years ago, we were good buddies and did lots of playing together. Obviously, Don and I are a couple and have been in a band together for a long time. So, I had an amazing connection to these three people and the thought of having them together was like a dream team.”
A further six musicians contributed to the album; here’s Eliza’s explanation of the connections that got them involved.
“Kuljit (tabla, electronic tanpura) is the most phenomenal human, just the most amazing man, he kind of illuminates a room. He’s got a huge story of his life, that goes through his music and he’s such a joy to work with. I’ve worked with him before and he’s worked with Jackie a lot. So it was a no brainer that Kuljit would be involved. Robert Irvine is just an amazing cellist and was in a quartet for years with Jackie. In quartets you have a real connection with the people you work with, so they’re very tight players together and very fond of each other as friends as well. Joby Burgess (percussion) and Lydia Lowndes-Northcott (viola) are people I’ve known for a long time as well. I’ve toured with Joby for a while and Lydia does a lot of film sessions, so we know her from that world. It just felt that what they could bring both personally, and musically, would really benefit the project. It was really important to have a string trio for this particular album and percussion is a massive part of all this music. As you know from my flute playing, I think, at heart, I’m a drummer. I’d much rather play rhythms and be a bit Jethro Tull, with a few floaty melodies here and there. Rhythm ties it all together, doesn’t it? Ties us massively together.”
Adding emphasis to this point, the final two musicians added yet more percussion. The connection that brought in Evan Carson is simple; he plays bodhrán in Eliza and Don’s band, Ranagri. In addition to being the producer, Andrew Morgan is credited with adding percussion and synth; Eliza had this to say about his involvement.
“He’s an amazing composer and arranger in his own right with whom I’ve worked over the years. He has a wealth of knowledge of all musical genres so was the perfect fit for this project. And he’s a dear friend of mine. His input was integral to the final sounds of the album and he toiled long and hard in the weeks and months after the Rockfield Studios sessions to make sure we got the extra sounds and arrangements that we wanted. So that was how the orchestra came about. As Catrin said, it was very organic.”
When talking about the writing process, Catrin, Don and Jackie each alluded to the way pieces, given Covid constraints, had necessarily been written independently. They nonetheless fit together into a story that captured the essence of Eliza’s original vision. She can now confidently tell that story; this is my re-telling of it.
The first two pieces reflect an Awareness of the beauty of this planet’s awakening and the gentleness of The Rhythms of Migration. Arctic Lament introduces a sadness about what is going on around us, what’s happening environmentally, the turbulence. Turning Tides raises the possibility of change, and Freedom brings in the hope that we could be helping one another, not creating borders, not seeing only environmental disasters. But the following seven pieces reflect the realities of people forced to leave their homelands, becoming refugees. Brutal encapsulates for the listener the aggressive and painful situations these refugees find themselves in. Though, the final pieces determinedly reintroduce the notes of hope, culminating in the joy and peace of Coming Home.
The first musical idea to surface was from Eliza: “There was a small demo that I sent out initially. I was already thinking of how it would open on stage. So, open with a huge drone, quite dark, kind of lure people in and then put a haunting melody over it. That’s how I envisaged it opening.”
Catrin: “Eliza, you had a picture of the general ideas behind the album, the emotions you wanted to get out and the places. And then I think we kind of discovered between us which were the bits that we would be contributing to.”
Eliza: “For example, Catrin’s piece Turning Tides coming after Arctic Lament. The lament references the Arctic crumbling apart and Turning Tides moves into this amazing harp and electric guitar passage, hinting at water, evaporation, ice melting. The album took its journey naturally as people brought in ideas but with a gentle steering and a conviction we had to end it with a kind of cuddle.”
Don: “Eliza had this beat that she really liked, I wasn’t sure that it was going to work with anything I was going to write. But it does work, maybe there was a masterplan. It might have been Eliza’s cunning plan all along. What was delightful was our heads were in the same space for what we were trying to evoke from the music and the issues we were tackling. Especially interesting for me as there were going to be no lyrics in it and so, to come up with the story in just a musical way was brilliant. A little bit challenging but it all seemed to work fantastically in the end.”
Picking up on Jackie’s comment on how the band’s Covid enforced isolation had caused the album to have a “strange gestation”, I was intrigued to know the extent to which there was now a score of the Rhythms of Migration. Had there been much improvisation developed during the recording process? I posed these questions to Eliza and Catrin, their initial response, nervous giggles.
Catrin was the first to answer: “This is what we’re going to find out. We had 3 days at Rockfield during which we could jigsaw puzzle it together. There were some scored parts and some people were improvising on top. Koljit, for example, doesn’t really read music, there were people in the band who read music and some who don’t. Having put the recording together the task in hand now, before the December gig (the album launch gig at Cecil Sharp House) is to put the live show together. We’ll take the recording and adapt it to the live show. On some of the tracks Joby laid down 4, 5, 6 different instruments. Well, he’s not going to be able to play all of them live. We were all doing a bit of that so we’ll have to figure out how to put it all together for a live show. I’m quite looking forward to that, it won’t be the recording, it will be something different.”
I commented that the need for that keeps the whole thing alive. Catrin’s response: “We will be very alive on the night, we’ll be like ‘Oh my God’ (hysterical laughter).”
Eliza: “Yeah, it’s exciting. Because we have lots of readers and non-readers, that’s a great combination because it allows it to flow, it’s not ‘here are the dots and we’ll just perform it.’ I definitely intend to do it without any music because I know I can immerse myself in a way that I much prefer. I can let it happen and develop.”
The Cecil Sharp House gig on December 18th will comprise more than just a music performance. Two other projects under the Freedom to Roam umbrella will also have their premieres – Eliza commissioned environmental filmmaker Nicholas Jones to make a documentary.
Eliza: “The documentaries he’s done in the past have all connected to his understanding of nature. Even though it’s attached to our project, it’s a very personal documentary for him. I planted the seed but it’s become his journey. It’s very much based around rewilding, taking inspiration from George Monbiot’s book, Feral. The book’s headline is rewilding the land, sea and human life.”
The third element of the evening is a series of visuals that will run as background to the musical performance.
Eliza: “There’s a fabulous girl, Amelia Kosminsky, some of her work can already be seen in the video that accompanies the Folk Radio review of the album. She’s producing largely abstract video, scenes that change very slowly. So slowly that you almost wouldn’t be able to tell they were changing. The idea is to not distract from the music rather to enhance the experience.”
Don: “It’s a similar experience to watching clouds. You may look and see a face but look away and when you look back it’s not there. The clouds have moved but if you keep watching you don’t actually see the motion.”
Jackie: “She’s really allowing space for the audience to receive the music. They’re not going to be transfixed, looking at the screen.”
Eliza sees Freedom to Roam as providing an umbrella for an expanding range of activities. This is her view of the future.
“Freedom to Roam can provide, especially as we get slightly older, a platform for musicians, so it’s not just about performing. The Rhythms of Migration has already developed by linking with a documentary and visuals that go alongside the live performance. It’s been eye-opening in so many ways. They’ve all kind of connected up, which, at its heart, is what the project is all about, how interconnected everything is. My big hope is that, for the next 10 years maybe, we can have more albums, more films and branch out, I’d love to see it opening up to dance companies, different musicians, different film directors. The umbrella is Freedom to Roam. It’s a real platform, giving creatives a voice to say something useful.”
The project has just been awarded Arts Council England funding to take the project on tour next Spring with their line-up of world-class musicians.
Freedom To Roam Tour
Album launch
Saturday 18 December 2021 at Cecil Sharp House, London (Tickets)
Spring Dates
Tuesday 22 February – The Apex, Bury St Edmunds
Wednesday 23 February – Aberystwyth Arts Centre
Thursday 24 February – The Stoller Hall, Manchester
Friday 25 February – Howard Assembly Room, Leeds
Wednesday 2 March – St George’s, Bristol
TICKET LINKS https://www.freedomtoroam.earth/live
Freedom To Roam is released on 26 November 2021. Pre-Order here: https://smarturl.it/fiv7rw
More details: https://www.freedomtoroam.earth/album/