Joe Broughton likes to play varied crowds. Here's a clip of his Conservatoire Folk Ensemble, shot on Monday 25th. Joe took his 68-strong troupe to blast bleary-eyed morning and evening commuters at New Street station; it was part of Birmingham City University's open day.
Audience numbers? Who knows, but maybe ten thousand people passing through the station caught the blast.
Dig around on YouTube and the like. You'll see Joe with his Urban Folk Quartet, one of the finest Folk outfits the UK has right now. There are festival gigs filmed in Europe in front of audiences in their thousands. That's before you pick up on the specialist fiddle masterclasses, or his own one-day festival, Power Folk, at The Spotted Dog in Digbeth.
And in a couple of weeks he's playing the 60-seater Kitchen Garden Cafe in Kings Heath with long time friend and collaborator Kevin Dempsey. So is the Dempsey / Broughton gig likely to sell out? I would expect so.
It's that time of year. The Folk Ensemble will run riot. All 50 of them.
I'm sitting with a university lecturer in deepest Smethwick. If truth be be told, I'm not here for his academic chops. He's a muso, and a bloody brilliant one at that. We're at the bottom of his garden, drinking coffee. In a shed; brick-built, but still a shed. But instead of bamboo canes, rakes, spaces and shears cluttering the floor, you step around guitars and fiddles. There's posters and a couple of really tasty speakers hanging off the walls, hooked up to quite a large Mac.
You've guessed by now. This is actually a studio. It belongs to the Urban Folk Quartet's Joe Broughton. This is his workplace.
How can Urban Folk Quartet handle Frank Moon's departure? Time for radical thinking.
Joe, Paloma and Tom are staying.... Frank's going.... and Dan's coming
Urban Folk Quartet are
a cheerful bunch. They're fun to watch and very good at going about their business. In fact, they're a shining example of how to do things; other bands could learn from them. Musically, they deliver mainly storming high-octane instrumentals,
with a bit of vocals and a lot of badinage, and bravura instrumental work from all
four members. Up to now, this included fabulous oud and guitar playing from
Frank Moon. But Frank's skills and career are taking him to all sorts of new
places. So, regretfully, he is moving on, leaving UFQ with a huge
hole to fill. The big question was: how do you replace someone like Frank Moon, who has been so integral to the band? How do you transition?
Joe Broughton (fiddle, expansive personality) and Tom Chapman (cajon, percussion, clever stuff with triangles) spent time with me this month going though their options.
Scoot up a flight of stairs in one of central Birmingham’s least appealing 70s concrete piles, duck down a
passageway, head through reception, left, right, big space, down more stairs, hang another left down a long corridor with music on all sides, follow the noise, follow the noise, follow the NOISE as it grows, and… bang!
I’m in the New Lecture Hall, in the midst of an unholy and magnificent racket. It’s absolutely thrilling.
There are, maybe, 45 young musicians in the room. It’s hot. In the middle, Joe
Broughton of Urban Folk Quartet fame is exuberantly taking them through their paces.
They rock. Hang on, there's three-quarters of UFQ in the room. And a
big fat brass section, fiddles, woodwind, melodicas, cajon and percussion,
proper electric bass. Way in the back, a tiny elegant harpist, dwarfed by her
instrument, is dancing like a maniac while
she plays. They’re all dancing, Joe included. You'll know exactly when you listen.
It’s rehearsal time. The Folk Ensemble were preparing for the Birmingham’s Olympic Torch shindig in CannonHillPark, which took place this weekend... although you won't find any sign of them - or, disgracefully, any other local performers, apart from Soweto Kinch and the CBSO, who were way down the bill - on the Birmingham 2012 page. A new number was commissioned for the
event. As the choirs and other musical collaborators aren’t here today, I’m
only getting a partial picture of how it will eventually sound. It’s still
great. I’d hate to be the band that has to follow them on stage.
I didn’t expect to see UFQ
members working with the Folk Ensemble.
"Well, this is a different
one-off show. We’ve just come off our annual spring tour, but as it’s the end
of the academic year, some people have left. So Tom Chapman’s back to help –
and yes, that was Paloma Trigas you saw playing there. Some people are raring
to go; some are in it for the first time."
So the song for the
Olympics…?
"Birmingham City Council has
commissioned it. There’s other choirs coming – who I haven’t met yet, so I
don’t know how that’s going to go. I sent them the music!"
It’s a tight schedule. On Tuesday, Joe was due to meet with a group of djembe
players, on Wednesday it was the turn of the choirs. This was to be followed by
a dress rehearsal on Thursday, and a performance at the Adrian Boult Hall on
Friday. As torch day neared, the whole troupe went out to play at several
different venues across the weekend, to wrap up the year for the ensemble.
Is this going to be recorded
when you do it live, after all the work you’ve put in?
"I hope so… But I have no idea. They’ll have the facilities to do it, but that’s
not my area."
Well, one bit has been
recorded, bootleg style, by me. It’s from the Ensemble’s own repertoire - and
Joe has kindly allowed me to put it up in this post, as long as I make it crystal
clear that this is a recording of a rehearsal. It’s not perfect, and the brass
outweighs the strings. But it’s enough to give you a little taste. I think it’s
a brilliant listen: it makes me want to shed forty-something years and pick up
a sax or a clarinet all over again.
A few posts back, I wrote
about Mendi Singh, and his generous and deep involvement in all types of music
making in the region. I suggested, not for the first time, that there is a collaborative vibe to much of the
region’s music which is enriching the city. This is driven by generosity of
spirit, and a genuine musical curiosity on the part of dozens, hundreds maybe, of creative
souls.
Joe’s work with the Folk Ensemble, over the past 14 years, is also key. If you
wonder why there is so much adventurous jazz, folk and world music coming out
of one of the UK’s
most industrial cities, follow those musicians’ careers back. A staggering number
of them came out of the Conservatoire.
I’ve said this before, too:
this musicianship is a priceless cultural resource in our city. It’s never been
better, richer, braver, more cross-cultural and more welcoming, in almost all
genres. And it’s time we recognised it, at all levels, and gave it a more
prominent place in the city’s creative landscape.
We can design all the
computer games we want, and that's fine, because it creates jobs and wealth...but unless they are works of towering creative genius as well as snappy pieces of tech, they won't enrich our cultural life.
If we
want to commemorate past glories, we can stick as many blue plaques up, and lay
as many walk of fame stars down, as there is time and space… but all that celebrates yesterday. We also need to celebrate, right now, the vital
groundwork going on, in the city and beyond.
I’d love to see the powers
that be recognise this. It has been shown, time and time again, that where creativity
flourishes and is cherished, jobs can follow. Check this link from the US. There's also, if you have the energy to plough through it, a dry as dust report from 2011 from The Department of Culture. There's some local stuff too - I was going to post a link to an impressive local government study from earlier this year, 'Destination Birmingham', but it appears to have been expunged from all the websites I had hoped to find it on.
Simply put: right now, powers that be, is the
time to do something. The creative sector - according to ex-head of the Arts Council Christopher Frayling - accounts for between 8 to 9 percent of our national GDP... which, says Frayling, is a couple percentage points less that our vastly discredited financial sector. We take our creative sector for granted... and we let the financial sector walk all over our economy while trousering obscene amounts of our tax money.
Central to our creative and media sectors, especially in the West Midlands, is the astonishing diversity and creativity of our musicians. Right now, there’s a new generation of great musicians building the region's creative and cultural reputation up all over again. And I’ve just seen some of
the next batch. It's time to acknowledge this.
