root salad Moor Music
You don’t have to be as old as the hills to be proper job traditional musicians. Steve Hunt meets the proof.
I
n these years of plenty for English folk music, one doesn’t have to look very far or hard to see someone of a squeezeboxing or fiddling persuasion
receiving an award here, attending an expo there or cooking pease pudding for morris dancers with Adrian Edmondson on teatime television. In the midst of the brouhaha, it would be easy to miss three unassumingly affable blokes from Devon with an arsenal of cherished old instruments, performing old-fashioned waltzes and marches with intriguingly arcane titles like Uncle Jim’s, Harry Gidley’s and Uncle George’s. After all, none of them plays music full-time, they’re never seen attired in ‘stage wear’, and there’s nothing that resembles any kind of PR strategy. They are Mark Bazeley (melodeon, concertina) Rob Murch (five-string banjo) and Jason Rice (piano accordeon, vocals and step- dancing). They call themselves The Moor Music Trio and they are (whisper who dares) the Real Thing.
All three are members of the Dart- moor Pixie Band, the venerable West Country dance outfit founded by Bob Cann (Mark’s grandfather) which also included (from the mid 1970s) Rob’s father, Bill Murch. The two boys got involved in the music very naturally, as Rob explains: “We just grew up with it – every Saturday you get taken to the dances and it was just a progression from sitting on the back of the stage to playing some tunes. I started on the ukulele, then took banjo lessons in 1982 from Tom Baribal, who played with Bob Cann in the Pixie Band in the 1970s, so it’s all the same music.”
While Mark and Rob grew up knowing each other from a very young age, it was through a chance encounter at the 1995 Dartmoor Folk Festival that Mark first met Jason. “I distinctly remember it! I was walk- ing by the craft market and could hear someone who sounded like me playing Rip- ple Of The Teign on a squeezebox. Gramps had been gone for five years and there was nobody else, I thought, so who the hell is that?! By the Saturday night Jason was on stage with us and in the band.”
Jason takes up the story: “My grand-
father, Jack Rice, knew Bob but didn’t play for dancing. He just played for pleasure at home in Chagford or maybe down the pub with friends, and I learned directly from him. The fact that my granddad played mouth organ brilliantly – you think that everyone’s granddad plays the mouth organ and it doesn’t seem anything unusual. My mum and dad and granddad all played tunes, so it’s just what hap- pened at home.”
L to r: Jason Rice, Mark Bazeley and Rob Murch T
here’s an immediately identifiable bounce to the Moor Music sound, marking it as something discernibly different, even to other southern English country dance traditions. I remark that something about their moorland music pushes the same buttons as its Co Clare equivalent. Mark ponders this for just a moment or two (before I get to postulate too many long-winded theories on the inherent similarities of the Pixie Band and the Tulla Ceili Band).
“I think there’s definitely similarities in our grandfathers’ music to music from Scotland. My gramps loved Scottish music and had a lot of tapes and records, with the Dick Black Scottish Dance Band a par- ticular favourite. But then again, he learned directly from his uncles, who did- n’t own any records, and also from gypsy musicians, so it all goes in and gets gradu- ally absorbed.”
Jason offers something on the mechanics: “The sound is also to do with the instruments that we play, as well as the way we play them. These four or five reed boxes have a really full sound.” Mark again: “Occasionally we get asked by festi- vals to run workshops in Dartmoor tunes, and we’ve tried to teach the style, as well. With the melodeon it’s all very much to do with keeping the bellows really tight together, so you haven’t got a big volume of air to keep squashing out, bouncing the box, tapping your feet and touching the
keys while imagining they’re hot. That’s what gramps used to say.”
Moor Music aren’t just a slimmed- down dance band however, their concert performances include Rob’s virtuoso banjo solos, Mark’s vintage dancing jig doll, Sailor Jan, (“people tell us he’s the only reason they came!”) and Jason’s songs and expert step-dancing. The name just came about from the duo CD that Mark and Jason made for Veteran. “John Howson is a good friend of ours,” Mark explains,” the very first Veteran tape was A Dartmoor Country Dance Party by Bob Cann’s Pixie Band. If it hadn’t been for John kicking us up the arse to record, we probably wouldn’t have ever done it!
There’s talk of more recording, though as Jason says: “we wouldn’t want to just record a load of tunes that other people play. Like Ed [Rennie – Pixie Band bass player] says, people regard us as source musicians now, even though we’re still young, really. Mark offers that they’re keen to play more festivals, too. “Yeah, I’d be up for that,” agrees Jason, “but for us, this is still really a hobby, not a profession. People are often surprised by the fact that when we appear at, say, Whitby, we’ve all taken a week off work to do it.”
Last word goes to Mark: “Someone said to me there, ‘oh, I see you’re working here,’ and I said ‘no I’m not, I’m here to play music!’”
www.moormusic.co.uk F 23 f
Photo: Judith Burrows
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