Author Archives: Emily Norris

Birmingham performance with Aly Bain

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MOJO Magazine

Martin Longley

 

Savourna Stevenson & Aly Bain
Midland Arts Centre, Birmingham

 

HOISTED UP ON HER HIGH STOOL, precariously perched beside her Celtic Harp, Stevenson begins her quipping, informative talk-through, adopting just the right balance between concert formality and pisstake. She’s at the forefront of the current harping revival, playing with the expected Swarbrick, Carthy and Tabor as well as the unexpected Toumani Diabate and The Bhundu Boys, displaying a keenness for fusing worldwide ethnic traditions. Playing solo at first, Stevenson shows off her dextrous technique, flipping and tweaking the semitone levers on her amplified harp, changing key and making mystery alterations to her impressive sound.
She’s joined by double bassist Brian Shiels and drummer Mike Travis, effectively becoming a jazz harp trio, their sensitive backing sympathetic to the ethereal quality of Stevenson’s compositions, Shiels lyrically bowing or velvet-thumbing precise lines, Travis having a subtle touch, playing quietly when needed, but hinting at reserve power when tunes reach a climax. Stevenson’s verbal confidence is matched by her assured playing: detailed, shimmering and glacial, she always seems to know exactly what’s going to happen next, never straying off too far into the more improvisational reaches of jazz.
So, along comes Aly Bain … A Boy from the Lough for 20 years, he’s become soothing of an authority on world fiddling styles, as well as being a master proponent. Bain peeks out from stage right and scampers on to his seat, immediately disrupting any attempts at order: fine-tuning has fiddle, bantering with Stevenson, forgetting the names of tunes and concluding: what the hell, what do names matter anyway? Frazzling under the relentless stage lighting, his electric fan proceeds to underpin the rest of the set with intermittent speedboat noises. This stick-through-the-spokes approach lends a more informal bearing, but doesn’t detract from the rich complexity of the compositions or their spirited execution.
In celebration of the Robert Louis Stevenson centenary, the duo have been working on Clyde to California, a suite of pieces that corral bluegrass and Cherokee elements into an already diverse palette. This is the piece with which they seem most familiar, during which the more disparate elements of folk fiddle plus jazz harp trio achieve their most satisfying and exhilarating blend..

Cutting the Chord

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Taplas

by Keith Hudson

Savourna Stevenson
Cutting the Chord
Eclectic ECL CD 9308

Any lingering doubts about the role of the harp in modern music must, surely, be dispelled by this magnificent piece of work. Scotland’s Savourna Stevenson has always been an adventurous boundary-breaker, but with this performance of her own compositions, written to commemorate the bi-centenary of the Belfast Harp Gathering on 1792, she establishes entirely new parameters for the instrument, while still maintaining a healthy respect for age-old traditions.

Adding their own touches of genius are Irish harpist Aine Ni Dhuill, ubiquitous double bass guru, Danny Thompson, and percussion expert, Jim Sutherland. The latter is also responsible for eerie, and enormously affective, wind sounds ( how he does it is open to speculation ) notably on the aptly titled Aeolian.

It’s one of two pieces that owe a big debt to the Scots/Irish baroque harping tradition, the other being Harplands in which O’Carolan and Rory Dall Morrision are transported into the minimalist realms of the West African kora, before adopting the characteristic decorative devices of South American. Basse Breton Rhapsody is a freer, jazz improvised piece, the title track is sublimely atmospheric and, rounding things off, is a quirky 10/8 blues.

If you think Scotland’s strongest intoxicant is a good highland malt, try this. Sip it slowly and savour every drop!

Trio performance at Glasgow Jazz Festival

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The Sunday Times

Ninian Dunnett

Glasgow Jazz Festival

At the Society of Musician’s Club, harpist Savourna Stevenson once more demonstrated a talent which deserves to be shouted from the rooftops.

Stevenson Draws together strands of ragtime, funk, Scots folk traditions, blues and even African influence with invention, virtuosity and joy. Solo she can fully underscore a melody with her own bass and chord accompaniment. In trio she makes such effective use of the harp as an ensemble instrument that you wonder there is not a legion of jazz harpists taking over the world.

Here is one of the rare few talents to be charting new ground in the 1990’s, and we must hope her gifts as a composer enable her to fulfil its rich promise.

Tweed Journey

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The Scotsman

Plucking suite themes from the river

Alastair Clark swings along the Tweed on a musical journey made memorable by a Borders harpist

Savourna Stevenson’s Tweed Journey is a jazz-folk hybrid that really should be reviewed somewhere between Tony Troon’s jazz page and me. But, as you can see, there’s not much space there – certainly not enough for someone who can make the harp sing and swing in the way that Savourna does. So, she has got my space, and that suits me fine.
Tweed Journey is an original suite commissioned from the Border harpist by a formidable team that includes Judy Steel, the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Borders Council. It made it’s first appearance at the end of last year in a novel series of concerts at seven venues that followed the full course of the river from source to sea.
Just as the river itself swells as the tributaries make their contributions, so the suite demands a steadily increasing flow of instrumentation. While the opening concert, at Tweedsmuir, had Savourna playing solo, by the time the suite had reached Berwick she had six musicians with her.
The opening track of Tweed Journey should be enough to persuade the most wary listener that a treat is in store. This section, The Source, is a delicious, bubbling harp solo that sets the scene for what is in my view the finest track of all – ‘Fording the Tweed’, where Savourna is joined by Neil Hay on fretless bass for a fast, tinkling run through a delightful jazz theme which is full of sparkling freshness and buoyancy.
Savourna Stevenson, like the American harp player, Deborah Henson-Conant, tends to look for her jazz-waves in the ebb and flow of modal themes, and as the suite builds up through the bluesy ‘Waulk’, the enchanting ‘Lost Bells’ and the spritely ‘Trows’, where the saxophonist, Dick Lee, in commanding form, makes his first appearance, the themes become more insistent.
‘Forest Flowers’ is greatly enlivened by a tremendous, pummelling hand-drum solo by Jim Sutherland, and the introduction of a variation on the ‘Flowers o’ the Forest’ lament ( like the suggestions of ‘Broom of Cowdenknowes’ earlier ) is superbly fashioned. The suites closing piece is worth waiting for too. There’s some interesting, grumpy doodling on the bass clarinet by Dick Lee and an assertive, sweeping guitar solo by Graham Muir.
But the dominant instrumental contribution throughout comes from the harp of Savourna Stevenson. She seems to develop into a more adventurous and more skilful performer with each hearing, and here shows how she can be comfortable, persuasive and interesting in a musical territory that few rivals have explored…

Harp Nouveau Band at Edinburgh Festival 1987

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FOLK ROOTS

By Neil Hedgeland

 

HARP NOUVEAU
THE SAVOURNA STEVENSON BAND
Assembly Rooms Edinburgh Festival Fringe

 

On first reading in the programme for this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe that Savourna Stevenson, one of the most prominent of today’s harp players in Scotland, was playing with a bunch of rock and jazz musicians, I was uncertain what to expect, although the Harp Nouveau concerts were listed under “Folk/Ceilidh/Scottish”, and the Scotsman described Harp Nouveau as “exploding your preconceptions and pulsating with jazzy, rocky, funky music you never imagined possible from a harp”.
Harp Nouveau’s music did turn out to be very far removed from the traditional material generally associated with the harp, and although, being myself a lover of traditional Celtic harp music, I found the strong jazzy flavour of the performance I attended highly enjoyable, stimulating and quite unique. Savourna’s harp blended perfectly with the percussion of Dave Hasswell, the fretless bass of Neil Hay, and the keyboards of Rab Handleigh to provide an extraordinarily rich mixture of melodies, harmonies and rhythms which proved so mesmerising that the concert was alas too soon over.
This was only their forth gig together, so there was no encore prepared, though the reception would certainly have merited on – however it was apparent that confidence was growing with each performance. The material consisted mostly of material composed by Savourna, the opening number being an interpretation by the complete band of Tickled Pink, the title track of Savourna’s solo album. This was followed by a new composition, Soapy Water, and then her only solo performance, a piece called Borders On The Insane. Various other striking new compositions followed, such as Nadir, a spine-tinglingly beautiful slow melody, then the aptly named Caught in the Web, an intricate and complex piece involving remarkably dextrous harp playing, along with another track from the Tickled Pink album with the mysteriously titled Djalan. The final number was named after the group, or could it have been the other way round – anyway, it was called Harp Nouveau and was a fitting end to an extremely interesting and innovative mixture of music.

Apparently, although the band is at an early stage of existence as yet, they have already attracted the attentions of a record company, and they hope to tour more widely eventually. Certainly if they do come to your part of the world, Harp Nouveau is well worth checking out if you’re interested in modern forms of music. Alongside Sileas’s experiments with syncopation and the electroharp in a more traditional folk idiom, Savourna Stevenson’s playing of the harp within a jazz/rock context underlines the healthy prospects for the harp in today’s musical climate.

Durham University Music Club performance

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The Critics

Musicon, Durham

Dave Robson

The first thing that one noticed at this concert in St Mary’s College, Durham, was the blend of ancient and modern – the use of high-tech seating and support for both harpist and harp and the use of old and new musical styles and idioms in creating the music.
Savourna Stevenson plays the Celtic harp or Clarsach – an understatement: she plays it supremely well, and also composes and arranges all the music that she plays.
The opening arrangement of a folk melody The Trip We Took Over The Mountains had a simplicity of form that was projected with playing as clear as a mountain stream. More complex musical forms followed as Scottish and African music was atmospherically combined in Dawn, Earth, Wind and Water, and a composite of Scottish, Irish and Breton harp music in Harplands.
Her music transcends easy classification. It covers folk, jazz, international influences and classical forms with great inventiveness and originality.
In Logan Water, she retains the essential simplicity of the folk air using tone colour to create an image in the listener’s mind. Later, in her own composition The Ballad of Grey Weather, the sound mixture is created in terms of impressionism of Debussy or Ravel – a haunting piece.
This was all a fascinating study of the past, present and future of the Celtic harp in the hands of a unique artist…

Tickled Pink

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SCOTSMAN

Clarsach swings across some new frontiers
By Alastair Clark

I enthused – necessarily briefly – over Springthyme Record’s ‘Tickled Pink’, featuring Savourna Stevenson, in my best-of-the-year selection a fortnight ago. Frequent listening have done absolutely nothing to alter my view that this is a superb clarsach album, worth anybody’s money – one in which an ancient instrument is thrillingly coaxed towards and across new musical frontiers.

Savourna Stevenson has presented not only arrangements of traditional tunes but also a number of her own compositions, and it is these, borne on the wings of enviable technical dexterity and outstanding musicianship, that provide the most memorable moments. Her ‘Lament for a Blind Harper’ where fiddler Aly Bain makes one of several knowing and telling contributions, is quite simply one of the most beautiful pieces of music I have heard in the past year.

Her ‘Jalan’, a deliciously bright, prancing tune in which she makes full use of her particular penchant for ebb-and-flow and light-and-shade contrast, is a joy from start to finish. And her ‘Tickled Pink’ is a waterfall of sweet, swinging sound.

Miss Stevenson also takes smoothly in her stride a testing array of traditional music, ranging from slow Scots airs to Irish jigs. She clearly finds that fast dance music holds no technical terrors: the fingers fly, and the music ripples along as if she were tinkering with a toy mandolin. Great Stuff…