root salad Three Cane Whale
They’re evocatively minimalist purveyors of perfectly formed music. Ian Anderson finds out how that works.
O
ne thing I’ve learned since the fRoots office relocated to a stylish dungeon in Bristol is that this city has a vibrant and original music
scene. In retrospect I’d already got wind of that when the fascinating debut CD by the mysteriously named Three Cane Whale had shown up a year or so ago. Playing evocatively minimalist pieces with little fuss on a boot full of acoustic instruments, it’s possibly the smallest music I know: but then size isn’t everything.
Not long after I ran into mandolin, bowed psaltery and music boxist Alex Vann at a gig by his more celebrated ‘other’ band Spiro, 3CW convened in the fRoots kitchen to explain themselves.
A quick bit of archaeology revealed
that Vann played in punk bands as teenag- er, has worked in theatre a lot, and been in Spiro for 20 years. Guitarist Paul Bradley apprenticed as bass player in Belfast post- punk bands before founding noted Bristol bands Me, and the Organelles which also included 3CW’s trumpet, harmonium, glockenspiel and lyre player Pete Judge. The latter grew up in Watford where he played in “weirdy free-form jazz punk” bands: he is also currently in BBC Jazz Award winners Get The Blessing and a duo called Eyebrow.
Judge recalls that “Alex and I started doing Three Cane Whale during a lull in theatre work, as a relief from all of that.” “When Pete first started writing,” elabo- rates Alex, “we weren’t forming a band, we were just eating a lot of cake and drinking a lot of tea and chatting. We’d just write little tunes. For me, I’d acquired a few instruments over the years and it became a possible outlet for them, like the bowed psaltery and zithers. When I was much younger I was influenced by the Incredible String Band and the wide range of instruments that they used. And the realisation that if you’ve got an idea and it doesn’t translate into a four or five minute piece, that doesn’t actually matter. You follow the idea as far as it goes and if it’s a minute, then great.”
Three Cane Whale are unusual in that their music genuinely seems to have no padding.
“All the other music that I’ve done in the past few years has had a huge amount of improvisation in it,” explains Pete. “The initial ideas are often quite small, simple tunes and riffs but then there’s a lot of improvisation, which is fantastic and exciting. What I love about this band is it’s a complete antidote to that. And it’s not a ‘look at our technique’ kind of thing. I do my writing on the piano which I can barely play, which com-
pletely limits its nature but I really like that – it means that we don’t mind doing a piece that has eight notes in it.”
Although their music gives the impres- I
sion that it’s quite free around a melodic core, they stress that it’s completely arranged. “That’s the nature of us as musi- cians because we’re not classically trained, we’ve come up from these slightly odd, different backgrounds. We don’t play things with that methodical, technical pre- cision of classical players.” “It’s never the same, although the notes are the same,” chips in Alex.
note that Spiro base some pieces on traditional tunes but that doesn’t seem to be the case with 3CW. “But I’d suggest that the character and style of some of our melodies are probably influenced by things that happen in English folk,” comments Paul.
“My writing is definitely influenced by English folk,” says Alex. “Something like Eggardon Hill, that’s definitely influenced by English traditional music. And the sec- ond part of Bird From A Cloud, I originally wrote that as something like a morris tune in 4/4 and then put it into seven.”
Do I sense a relation- ship with 20th Century English composers like Vaughan Williams or But- terworth? “Yes definitely,” they chorus, name-checking Gerald Finzi, the Enigma Variations, Nimrod, Dives & Lazarus…
So why purely instru- mental music?
“One of the things I like about this band,” notes Paul, “is that there’s a lot of space in the music. If you make something a song, then inevitably there’s something about the human voice that will focus your attention on it, even if it’s singing in Portuguese or something. It’s just nice not to have human voice for a change. We’re not Spiro, but the thing both groups have in common is that col- lectivity. All the instrumen- tal voices can be very strong but it’s not like ‘here’s my solo.’” “That’s another thing about not having improvisation – we can con- centrate on interplay. Sometimes you’re not quite sure who’s playing the tune,” points out Pete.
“To me the best thing about this group is the tying of images to pieces – that’s not really something I’ve had in another band,” he continues. “It’s a little hook for people to hang things on, and I think it does have an effect on us playing it. Because the pieces can be very short we often cluster little groups of them togeth- er that may be related, like things to do with the night for example. There’s a defi- nite atmosphere. It doesn’t feel whimsical to me, there’s something a little bit more felt about it. That’s what I love about those English composers, it’s their lyricism and their kind of elegiac quality, it’s from the heart. It’s not playfulness for the sake of playfulness.
“I think it has a modest power – a great gentleness and authority. It’s able to tell those virtual stories without trying too hard,” concludes Paul.
Three Cane Whale – I never did ask about the name – will be playing at our Weirdlore event on Sunday 10th June (
www.weirdlore.com) and at festivals including Cambridge.
whale.php
www.idyllicrecords.co.uk/three-cane- F
13 f
Photo: Paul Wigens
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84