"A Master Musician" -Guitar Player

"Martin Simpson Plays with Breathtaking Musical Clarity." - Los Angeles Times

"..The Best Guitarist on the Planet." - Chicago Tribune

"He Sounds Like a Whole Band." - Loudmouthed heckler

MARTIN SIMPSON:

AN APPRECIATION AND BIOGRAPHY

BY KEN HUNT

Martin Simpson presents a world-class paradox. Whether as a soloist or accompanist, he is a guitarist that breathes the rare air that only an Olympian pantheon of guitarists get to breathe, yet, figuratively speaking, he has the Lincolnshire soil and Mississippi mud beneath those well-kept nails. What needs no equivocation is what he does on the metal-strung acoustic guitar. Martin has a command of the instrument and the imaginative powers to do it justice. And regardless of whose instrument he plays, the voice that emerges from the guitar could be nobody else's.

Martin was born in May 1953 in Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire, a particularly fertile tilth for English traditional music as Percy Grainger and generations thereafter discovered. After leaving school in 1970 and abandoning a half-hearted stab at further education, he threw it all in to become a professional musician in 1971. By the age of 12 he was playing guitar, by 13 banjo and at 14 he made his first paid appearance. Like his friend and fellow Martin, Martin Carthy, he still plays the British folk club circuit as eagerly as the grandest music rooms that the world of music can offer.

It was back in 1975 that the singer Barbara Dickson (another so-called 'graduate' of the folk club scene) recommended Martin to Bill Leader who went to see Martin perform. It led to Martin's first solo album, Golden Vanity, (1976) for Bill Leader's Trailer label. Word got out quickly. Within the year, he was supporting Steeleye Span and, by 1977, he was accompanying that magisterial song-interpreter, June Tabor, whose previous principal guitar accompanist had been Nic Jones ­ no easy size 10s to fill. Their remarkable decade-long partnership produced a triptych of highly influential albums in A Cut Above (1980), Abyssinians (1983) and Aqaba (1988) and a body of performance pieces that never received commercial release. Martin moved to the United States in 1987 but it was not to be the end of their partnership. He guested as her accompanist on her An Echo of Hooves (2003) and in her television special in the BBC4 Sessions
concert performance series (2004).

Martin has continually added new colours to his palette, expanding on his primary musical interests in British, Anglo-American and Afro-American traditional forms and building on the foundations and expressiveness laid down by Harry Cox, Blind Willie Johnson, Big Joe Williams, Percy Webb and Blind Willie McTell. Gradually,hesitantly at first ­ with the full flush of 20:20 hindsight ­ he found a singing voice to complement his voice on the guitar. An influx of songs from Bob Dylan, Bob Franke, John B Spencer, John Tams and Richard Thompson, not to mention his own compositions on albums such as Bootleg USA (1999) and Righteousness & Humidity (2003), showed other sides of his musical character. Still, the basic rule of engagement remains: that of balancing the traditional and the contemporary. That said, with The Bramble Briar (2001), he concentrated on British story-telling of traditional kinds, whether derived from the tradition or tradition-based material from the likes of Peter Bellamy, Cecilia Costello, Louis Killen and Cyril Tawney.

Much of Martin's music reflects the places where he has lived. Time spent in England and the United States underpins his art, yet years ago he learned to apply the artistry of experience in different contexts. A Closer Walk With Thee (1993) explored the Christian Hymnal tradition as planted and cross-fertilized on American soil. Later he collaborated with musicians such as the great Wu Man of the Pudong School of Pipa (Chinese Lute) playing with whom he recorded Music for the Motherless Child (1996). The all-instrumental Cool & Unusual (1997) partnered him with members of the Malagasy band Tarika Sammy, Kelly Joe Phelps and that musical saucier, David Lindley for one hell of a feast.

Martin has released several albums with words like 'Live' in or near their titles. The reason for that is simple. Simpson's magic can only be totally experienced in concert. His live performances illuminate the creative process beyond the one dimensionality of an audio recording. Concerts furnish those moments of spontaneous 'insight' in which we, the audience, see what he is doing first-hand, even if comprehending how he did it lags far behind.

Martin's playing deploys a control of pace and dynamics that touches the heart, like the best music, irrespective of whether the listener has a bit of Lincolnshire, Mississippi or Ganges beneath their manicured or careworn nails. In his playing he focuses upon economy and how to make each note pay. Listen to him playing now and you will hear how he measures not only the impact and length of each note, but, tellingly how he delivers the space that frames each note.

In early 2004, seasoned Simpson-watchers noted him attaining hitherto unsuspected artistic heights with new levels of intensity and economy. He put it down, in part, to taking delivery of a new banjo from Ron Saul and rediscovering the place of the banjo in his guitar-playing. After one truly transfiguring concert in Nettlebed in Oxfordshire, the club's master of ceremonies suggested a group-hug for the guitaristically shell-shocked whilst the rest of the audience concentrated on coming down from a state of music-induced euphoria, while floating happily out of Nettlebed .

Ken Hunt is a full-time freelance writer, broadcaster and translator working exclusively in fields of music that excite him. His writing appears in numerous periodicals, journals and concert and festival programmes in North America and Europe, in UK broadsheets such as The Guardian and The Independent, and in reference works for the All Music Guides, Oxford University Press, Penguin and The Rough Guides.