Interview: Paul James of Blowzabella. 'Blowzabella's peculiar bit in the middle'

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FOCUS ON BLOWZABELLA

Blowzabella’s Peculiar Bit in the Middle

An Interview with Paul James

At the first Annual General Meeting of The Bagpipe Society on December 1, 1985, Sangit Jashan (alias German Jo) interviewed Paul James about Blowzabella’s repertoire and their approach to arranging their music.

The Learning Process
Sangit Jashan:
So, to get down to the nitty-gritty, you start from knowing a tune, or maybe you actually start from hearing a tune, you tape it, or write it down from tape. Sometimes you just play it I guess. Obviously you might mis the odd note, you might get something wrong and you don’t bother abou that.

Paul James:
Tunes come from various sources - like somebody’s heard somebody els playing it and either it’s been recorded or more often we’ve just learnt f from someone at a pub or a festival - and we’re reasonably accurate I think There are some tunes that we’ve collected and we play which are actuall quite different from the traditional ones, but I think that’s part of th process. Obviously you try to reconstitute the tune, say you know 98% of and if you put in another 2% that’s different, then that’s completely vali Sometimes I even find, when we check back with the original, that we hav improved a tune. So we change quite a lot of tunes very subtly. That just nothing to worry about really.

You might get people turning round and saying ‘that’s not right.’ But m attitude is that if it sounds good and is a functional tune then that surely the only point.

S.J. It’s a bit of a purist thing . . .
P.J. Yes, but I’m all for trying to get the tune right where we can, ofte the tune’s good because it’s got those bits in and the design of the tune as good as it’ll ever be.

Aural Arrangement
S.J. Right, and then you start playing the tune all together?
P.J. In an evening of dancing we probably only play three or four s arrangements, the rest of the time we’re just playing tunes that either son or all of us know.

Often we all know the tune but we don’t have an arrangement for it. We know each other so well that we can knock out an arrangement that changes from gig to gig and so if a new tune comes in - say Nigel’s got a really nice tune, maybe Jon’s heard it too, and I know it, or half know it, we just play it at a dance, play it at the next dance, and the dance after that. Dave Shepherd will pick up on it, and he’ll write some chords . . .

S.J. That’s on the melodeon is it? P.J. No, the violin, because he plays a lot of unusual chords on the violin, which Dave Roberts will pick up on the Melodeon. Then we find that we’ve got a ‘half’ arrangement and everybody likes it. So then when we have a rehearsal (which isn’t often I must say) we’ll actually say what we thought was good about it and we’ll make some conscious decisions. We’ll sort out what the chords should be and make sure that everybody is abiding by them. Really what we do is to edit it. We take all the rubbish out the bits that weren’t working. There’s a lot of give and take. You know what bands are like - you’re constantly compromising - and because we’ve been at it for some time we’re good at compromising. We always reach a situation where most of the band like the arrangement and often we’re totally unanimous. I think that’s the hardest thing about bands - you’re forever compromising your ideas, in Blowzabella’s case with five other people. The bigger the band the more compromises there are, but we get on well enough that we can manage.

S.J. Is the arrangement totally written out in staff notation? P.J. No, it’s all in our heads. We’ll write the bass line out, we’ll write the chords out - that’s just so that we can remember what they are for reference - and then they get stuffed into the bottom of a melodeon case or something . . . Then sometimes we’ll decide that a tune will benefit from an introduction or adding a peculiar bit in the middle and we’ll consciously compose those. That’s the way we do it. It’s a largely aural arrangement that has developed. We keep notes, we sometimes just tape-record them. Often we don’t even bother . . . So that’s how we develop a nice melody that we’ve heard somewhere into a piece that is immediately recognizable as a Blowzabella arrangement.

Blasting Away From A to Z P.J. One of the problems with folk music - and we’ve all found this - is that you get a tune and you all blast away from A to Z. It’s far more interesting to try to get away from that and start leaving holes. Because I’m used to playing pipes and woodwinds, I’m used to playing the tune, I start at the beginning and at the end of the thing I stop. What I’m more interested in doing now is not playing, is leaving gaps. It’s a cliché of arranging really, but sometimes it doesn’t occur to people playing folk music. Another thing is to start thinking about dance music as being a music where the rhythm is first and the tune is a completely secondary issue - it’s just the icing on the cake. The primary thing in any dance music, whether it’s tango, or tex-mex, is the rhythm. The tune is nothing. The tune is just a way of making the rhythm more palatable.

S.J. So you take the rhythm and the chords . . . P.J. How we tend to do it now is to work far more on the chords and the rhythm. Sometimes we can go right off the tune and it’s more or less the chords pumping away against the rhythm: percussion of trumpette of the hurdy-gurdy. You can actually stop playing the tune, they’ll keep dancing because they’re dancing to rhythm. When you come back in with the tune it’s a huge crescendo . . .

Blowzabella started off as a monophonic band - six people playing the tune, and that’s ludicrous. The second thing we did was to have six people playing the tune but we’d interweave the harmonies. Now we see it as a completely different thing: a layer of melody, harmony against melody, then chords in the middle, and a bass line at the bottom. Within this structure everybody has the potential to play or not to play. So that adds an extra element to the texture.

S.J. So you write down the melody line. Somebody plays it all the time, presumably? P.J. We don’t write it down! We just agree on it. Different people play the tune at different times. S.J. Say the hurdy-gurdy plays the tune and you have the bass line and harmony in between . . . P.J. So then we have a nice structure, it’s always the same chords, it’s always the same bass-line, and then on top of that we can improvise. Once you know what the structure is you can mess around and improvise on it.

Making Sure it Works S.J. And how do you make sure that if you drop out and Jon picks up the whistle and you pick up the rauschpfeife that the improvised arrangement still works? P.J. Well, at dances we don’t. Sometimes it goes terribly wrong, you know. We’re playing away, say Jon and I are playing bagpipes, and I decide to put my bagpipes down and come in on another instrument when we change to another tune. At the same moment Jon’s thought of the same thing and we

both stop playing at the same time and it sounds terrible! So we do have our disasters, sometimes it sounds awful, and sometimes it sound really good. For concerts we decide which intruments to use and we stick to it. You have to because in concerts people expect us to put on a certain level of professional performance. So concerts are much more organised.

Influences
S.J. I used to think that people like Jon Swayne - who play keyboards and have a vast understanding of harmony and music - that they’d do a lot of the arranging . . .
P.J. Surprisingly, it rarely happens that way. It does in some cases where it just needs a clever thing that has to be worked out technically. I can think of three or four instances where Jon has written out three recorder parts in harmony. That’s really nice, but I wouldn’t want it to be that way all the time. I think the essence is to do all these things, have a bit of a free-for-all and a bit of worked-out stuff and everything in between. If we improvised all the time it would be too hit-and-miss. On the other hand, if we worked in a very technical way we’d get bored with the band. We’re not an orchestra, we’ve got a lot more to do with jazz (I suppose). There’s a bit of folk music, a bit of jazz influence, even a little bit of rock music influence. You probably can’t hear it, but you can feel it as a sort of attitude. There’s a little bit of classical music influence as well, you know, just a little bit . . .
S.J. I listened to some French group - and their sound was very close to Blowzabella’s. I don’t know who was around first, but there’s this French group with a ‘cello …?
P.J. Oh, Les Ecoliers de Saint Genest. Well, actually we were around before them, but there were other French bands that influenced Blowzabella. In England we sound unique, but on the Continent we didn’t. Initially, we based a lot of our ideas on French and Flemish bands. Now I think we’ve got our own style. When we started we were basically a rip-off of the Continental bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy bands.
S.J. Importing French ideas …
P.J. Yes, that’s right. But now we’ve got our own identity simply because we’ve been doing it for a certain amount of time and we’ve developed our own musical character.

Composing
P.J. We compose a lot of our tunes now. A growing part of the repertoire is self-penned. I think this is a brilliant area. There’s nothing wrong with playing traditional tunes, but it’s nice to try and invent something of your own.

S.J. Who does the composing?
P.J. Jon, Dave Shepherd, Nigel, Cliff Stapleton. I’ve composed a couple. Writing simple dance tunes is very easy. If you play the pipes or something when you knock out a little tune what you tend to do is to write something that you’ve already heard. All the tunes I’ve composed are really pastiches of everything I’ve heard. But the traditional tunes were probably composed in the same way, they were pastiches of four or five other tunes. There’s nothing very complicated about it.

(Interview transcribed and edited by Peter Stacey)