root salad Will Newsome
Using the kora rather than the ubiquitous guitar for song accompaniment makes him stand out, says Ian Anderson.
“S
o is there a support tonight, Sam?” I ask Mr Lee, who is lurking at the entrance to his recent gig at Bristol’s Folk
House, where we are to present him with his 2012 fRoots Critics Poll Album Of The Year award. “It’s some guy called, er… Wiggy Smith,” he replies, sowing considerable confusion about the status of the octogenarian gypsy singer who passed away a few years back.
“Oh, not that one. This one’s a singer-
songwriter,” he clarifies. Hmm, well, you know the editorial resistance to that ilk: should we hang about in the bar for a while? Eventually my friend and her friend and I decide that bagging the last avail- able seats is the greater priority. And hang on a minute, there’s a bloke coming on stage with a kora, and not a syrup in sight.
We are mesmerised. After a very
decent West Africanish instrumental, he launches into song, a meandering (but catchy) and unconventional structure pushed along by cascades of kora notes and an attractive voice that sits in style somewhere between Robin Williamson and, erm, Nancy Wallace. No, don’t ask me to explain that either.
It turns out that our new hero was indeed once a guitar-toting songwriter, initially influenced by the inevitable tri- umverate of Nick Drake, Bert Jansch and Joni Mitchell (especially the latter’s use of different tunings) and billed as Wig Smith. But somewhere along the line he’d come across The Indestructible Beat Of Soweto and Toumani Diabaté. One thing led to another, and six or so years back he bought a kora on eBay from somebody in Belgium and started his metamorphosis into Will Newsome. I never did ask him which was his real name.
A few weeks later in the fRoots dun- geon we’re swapping kora tales and remarking how extraordinary it is that they are everywhere now, compared with a mere 30 years back when the kora expe- rience was as rare as the proverbial hen’s.
“It’s a really approachable instru- ment,” he says. “I saw it straight away as a songwriting tool and just a really versatile instrument. I’ve never wanted to be a tra- ditional kora player… which is a good thing because I never could be. Maybe others from outside the tradition could be, it’s arguable, but I couldn’t. I was just fasci- nated by the instrument so I developed my own way of playing it. I looked on the internet for tunings and found sauta which I used until I went for one workshop with the Kora Workshop people and they showed me the other one, sila ba. Occa- sionally I experiment with other tunings.”
He finally went to visit the Gambia for the first time about three years ago. “I got frustrated with not being able to make some of the noises that I listened to other kora players being able to make, so I thought what better way to learn than to go to the Gambia. I stayed in Malamini Jobarteh’s compound. His son Tata Dindin is an amazing man, very funny and witty and his voice is something special. I spent most time with Moriba Kouyate: he’d show me something and then go off while I played it a thousand times, and then come back and say ‘Yesss, well done Will’ and give me something else to go on with. My fingers got adapted to that way of moving and suddenly I was addicted to the kora, not just interested in it.”
The wigless Will’s day job has been on the ferry boats which travel in, out and around the waterways in Bristol. But where has he been performing?
“The last couple of years I’ve been working a lot because I had some debt I needed to pay off, but I’ve clawed out of that now and can get on with more music again which is really exciting. I haven’t done a UK tour since the end of 2010, when I did one with a singer-songwriter from New York called Diane Cluck. But I’ve done tours around Europe with my friends Rachael [Dadd] and Ichi, and Japan. Rachael and I are in a duo called The Hand, in which I play kora, ukulele and sometimes guitar, and she went to live in Japan for a year. She expected to be teaching English but ended up just doing music, so invited me out to do a Hand tour. We’ve done three now. The
A
first time we did maybe fifteen dates, the following year in the winter we did 50 shows, and last year about 25 or 30. Everything from pop-up gigs in garden centres and hairdressers to ‘live houses’ as they call them – gig venues – to festivals. A great way to travel Japan”
s Will Newsome, he’s made one EP which you can get on Soundcloud or iTunes (and we featured a track on last issue’s
fRoots 44 compilation). There are also some atmospheric YouTube videos filmed in one of the ferry boats with swans swimming around outside the porthole as a surrealistic feathered audience.
“We had a supply of bread so every time I finished a song we’d feed them for ten minutes and they stuck around. It was about minus-2° that night, very cold.”
“|’d like to have a new album record- ed by autumn – a solo one, with a few guests collaborating. This coming winter or next spring I’ll possibly go to Japan again, but I need to get back to playing around the UK: at the moment I’m just playing in London and Bristol. I was on a bit of a roll with the music but I couldn’t sustain it, I was only breaking even and had that debt to pay off. But now that things have levelled out a bit I hope to gain some more momentum again. I just need to get some really good recordings done so that I feel a bit more pride in sell- ing myself!”
It would not be misplaced.
somenewwill.blogspot.co.uk soundcloud.com/willnewsome
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