root salad f20 Kate Young
The original Scottish songwriter & fiddler a.k.a. Kate In The Kettle talks to Elisavet Sotiriadou.
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classic teapot rests on her CD stand during the Eliza Carthy Open Arms Orchestra concert, where Kate Young has been the warm-up act. Her alias is Kate In The Ket- tle. If you’ve seen her Grow Down video, she’s brewing herbs and songs. Making music, she says, is about “combining and looking for similarities between different cultures, while still writing my own songs as well.”
She’s recently co-operated with Eliza again, as both have taken part in the Songs Of Separation project bringing together ten English and Scottish female folk musicians exploring the theme of separation in tradi- tional music.
Young is from Scotland, though listen- ing to her music momentarily transports me to Sweden, India, Greece and beyond. While she’s got a strong hold in the British tradi- tion, it’s no coincidence her debut album is influenced by Swedish harmonies. One of her friends and fellow musicians, Sweden’s Marit Fält, plays on the album.
Swedish polskas and kulning – Scandi- navian herd callings – have fascinated Young. “I’m not trying to be Swedish but I’m just interested in playing them.” She is also interested in traditions of singing with- out real words: the Scots call it vocables and the Swedes trallning. ”Actually every music tradition around the world has their own
tradition of that… and I love it. I’m an instrumentalist, so I think in an instrumen- tal way, but I’m also a singer and so it’s this relationship, between where I want to put the words in and use the power of poetry and then also use my own voice as an instrument…”
Young mixes elements of music from
different folk traditions from around the world in such a delicate and intelligent fash- ion that you don’t notice the transitions in between. Brave enough as she is, she tried out a new song live in front of her audience at London’s King’s Place. The spectators loved it, as if Young had exposed the secrets of song crafting, right in front of them – a bumpy road as she had to start over a few times. Apologetically, she laughs, “that was a bit of a risk but I was thinking I had fin- ished the song a couple of days before,” and due to touring, she had had no time to prac- tise it in. “I really wanted to play it; actually it was a song I adapted, an American song that I found in Alan Lomax’s collection called Which Side Are You On.” An eleven-year-old girl had written it about her dad in the coal mine. Young’s version makes the song rele- vant to the Scottish independence; she arranged it after the referendum last year.
The urge to put that song and message across was stronger than a flawless presen- tation, she confesses. “I much prefer when I’m going to see someone if they’re saying
something honestly from themselves to you, it absolutely transfers, you can feel an audi- ence sort of, their empathy for you, you just kind of know … being honest doesn’t always mean it’s always really clean and sparkly all the time. It’s about opening your- self up to this void of creativity and mes- sages I guess, that’s what really people come to hear!”
Her album Swimmings Of The Head is addictive (its title referring to Nicholas Cul - peper’s book Complete Herbal which sug- gests herbal remedies for different ail- ments including “swimmings of the head”). This is her debut solo album: in 2013 Laylam was released where she played fiddle and sang with Eliza Carthy, Bella Hardy and Lucy Farrell.
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he uses the violin to create both melody and rhythm, as if the beat relies on the violin. Surprisingly, she admits: “Sometimes I feel I’m not a
violin player. I know it sounds kind of funny, I have lots of friends who’re play- ing violin really violiny, but… but I’m try- ing to find a way out of it, not that I don’t like it, I just try to explore the sounds… Finding the bass sounds, I love this way of playing like chopping, it’s a rhythmic thing. I’m using this technique in Green And Gold and some other songs.”
The chopping method helped Young find how to unite her voice with the violin, because until then she had kept them sepa- rate. “I had been singing Tori Amos type of songs with the piano, and then I’ve been doing hardcore Scottish folk music that I grew up with in Edinburgh.” Now she teaches fiddle and singing workshops.
The way folk, blues and jazz mingle and how guitar, double bass and fiddle swirl around the melody in Young’s music is thrilling. She combines traditional with dif- ferent styles of music on her violin, yet her music flows naturally without any hurdles.
“I love to listen and watch people really playing from the heart of their culture. There is nothing more pure or amazing than that. I’ve always felt that my role in the world is about connecting cultures together and exploring them. It’s a tricky thing, because you need to always have that level of respect. It’s very easy to make it sound like you’re laughing at a tradition and that’s not what it’s about. For me it’s about find- ing the freedom within and outside of each thing… sometimes I do think ‘maybe I shouldn’t sing this song from this culture, it’s not mine,’ but then I just love to do it so why should I stop?”
www.kateyoungmusic.com F
Photo: Elly Lucas
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