root salad f26 Jim Ghedi
His guitar playing is inspired by landscape, communities and heritage, finds Cara Gibney
in the ass.’” It’s worth it though, Ghedi’s gifted musicianship runs like clear water through his second album A Hymn For Ancient Land, a seven-track journey through the landscapes, communities, and heritage of locations across Britain and Ire- land. His skilled fingerstyle playing crosses folk and orchestral arrangements, buoying his vocals, defining the places that have captured Ghedi’s imagination.
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It can’t be a surprise to his family that things have reached this stage – the second album, the tours, the record label (Basin Rock). “I’ve always been obsessed about music, from really young… my mum under- stood that I had an ear for something, so she got me a guitar at the age of eight.” After one disastrous guitar lesson he went on to teach himself. The years have added piano, various organ/harmonium instru- ments, “and I play a bit of banjo.”
He was born in his grandparent’s small terraced house in Crookes, Sheffield. “Nana, grandad, and my mum. The whole family really. It was a bit of a busy house… we had an open yard with the other ter-
im Ghedi was discussing his six- and twelve-string guitar playing. “It’s just double strings basically, or as my friend puts it, ‘It’s a double pain
races. The kids played with each other and everyone looked out for each other… it was just a really nice upbringing in a really nice community.”
His aunt would send him weird CDs, from alternative folk to classical, Sun Ra to Miles Davis. “Pretty much every weekend I would get something in the post… it really triggered something in my head.” At the same time, he was producing music for peo- ple from home. “It was just a computer and some software I had when I was a kid. I had an old kind of Windows thing. I used to lis- ten to all these CDs and would be quite inspired to try and mess around with them, do something with them, little bits of sam- pling I suppose. A lot of instrumental, inter- esting, experimental, jazzy kind of things with percussion, and other bits and pieces.”
Over the years Ghedi has moved, laid down roots, and moved again around Der- byshire, Shropshire and Scotland – until he came to a soft landing in Moss Valley, which he now calls home. Moss Valley has changed greatly over the years, from rural and agri- cultural to industrial and mining. When “that collapsed I suppose nature kind of reclaimed what was hers… it’s a forgotten area, an abandoned area as well.” But with its natural and reclaimed beauty, and strong
community, Ghedi feels settled. “It’s a strange thing, that connection and that sense of place.”
All of this seems to have left traces in A Hymn For Ancient Land. Uprooting, shifting from place to place, yet honouring the sense of place that each track signifies. His first album, Home Is Where I Exist, Now To Live And Die, was written as he travelled through Europe. “The whole album was formed from being in Europe, travelling in strange places, and feeling the big urge to come home and find that place again in the village, try to lay my roots down.”
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Hymn For Ancient Land is inspired by the nature and the communi- ties around him, now that those roots have been laid. “I wanted to say something a bit more with reference to the landscape, and be a bit more respon- sive in terms of the instrumentation… A lot of the songs came from touring as well… We were seeing aspects of areas and of landscapes while we were in motion. Sud- denly these ideas started to form where there was this classical element, and there was this sense of instrumentation that was a bit wider because we were taking in so much visually.”
The result is Jim Ghedi on six- and twelve-string guitars, accompanied by musi- cians on harp, double bass, trumpet, violin, cello and piano. He sings on only two of the album’s seven tracks, one of them a haunt- ing version of the traditional Banks Of Mul- roy Bay. “I’m sorry, I’ve stolen it,” he laughed. He found the song on one of his granddad’s tapes – his grandparents descended from County Mayo. “Sheffield has a tight-knit Irish community,” he told me. “It was a big community that was very together... Our house seemed like all of the buggers were there, to be honest. An abso- lutely massive household of people; nuns in the kitchen, and old boys singing songs in the lounge.” The more we hear, the more Jim Ghedi ‘s love of music, and community, makes sense.
Look out for Ghedi in the coming months. “February and March are all to do with the album release, and then pretty much for the rest of the year if I’m honest.” He also has a new album coming out “prob- ably in October.” Hawksworth Grove Ses- sions “is an album of six- and twelve-string guitar instrumentals” with friend and fel- low twelve-string guitarist Toby Hay (fR413). It seems there will be plenty of Jim Ghedi to catch over 2018.
jimghedi.com F
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