Each piece in Joby Burgess’s A Percussionist’s Songbook tells its own, rich story
From the warmth of West African drumming to the marimba-laced electronics of Prokofiev’s grandson, Music on Main and PuSh Fest concert is expansive and collaborative
Joby Burgess. Photo by Nick White
Music on Main and the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival present Joby Burgess’s A Percussionist’s Songbook at the Annex on January 25 and 26
YOU CAN HAVE IT both ways. Or at least Joby Burgess can.
The British musician’s album and touring project, A Percussionist’s Songbook, is both a serious survey of 21st-century composition and a delightfully tuneful, even exuberant massage for the ears. (See the trailer at bottom.)
Feel free to think of it as a kind of gateway for modern “classical” music. Burgess certainly does.
“Yeah, that was the ambition,” the virtuosic multi-instrumentalist reveals in a Zoom interview from his home, just north of London. “I’m not particularly interested in playing for just a small handful of people. But at the same time I’m not a rock star or whatever; I don’t have that huge audience or fanbase. I’m just making something that I feel will connect with people.”
Burgess might not be a rock star, but he knows how rock stars operate. As he points out, something like 50 percent of his life, pre-pandemic, has been spent in the recording studio, working on film scores and album projects; he’s contributed to records by the Who, Goldfrapp, Pete Tong, Stewart Copeland, and many more. When conceptualizing A Percussionist’s Songbook, he was clearly trying to find a way to introduce a number of composers whose music he loves to audiences that might not normally listen to solo percussion, and he hit upon a brilliant solution: narrative.
Everyone likes a story, and each of the nine pieces on A Percussionist’s Songbook—which Burgess will perform in its entirety as part of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival—are based on some kind of text. These range from the dryly statistical (a United Nations report on global population grown) to the wildly fantastical (novels by Michael Ondaatje and Isaac Asimov). And while none are delivered in a straightforward manner, the forward momentum of a good story is embedded in each score.
One standout is Tunde Jegeda’s The Ancestors are Within, a warm expansion of traditional West African drumming styles that also touches on how that music inspired early American minimalism. More specifically, the music pays homage to a pair of global percussion masters that both Burgess and Jegede respect deeply.
“One is Nana Vasconcelos, the great Brazilian berimbau player,” Burgess explains. “I was really lucky: I got to work with Nana for a week in about 2005; he came over and we did a quintet project. It was just a one-off concert, but it was just a magical experience—and, basically, a very expensive berimbau lesson for me. But he was the most wonderfully giving man, and [he emphasized] that thing about playing enough but not too much, not talking too much in the music… Wow! It was really eye-opening to spend a few days just rehearsing and talking and playing with him.
“The other percussionist was a guy called Trilok Gurtu,” he continues, referring to one of the first South Asian musicians to be fully at home in jazz improvisation as well as in the world of raga and tala. “So Tunde was thinking, really, about history, about looking at our ancestors and where our heritage is in terms of our musical journey. The text Tunde ended up choosing is by the Senegalese poet Birago Diop. It’s a short text from a poem called ‘Breaths’: ‘Listen more often to things rather than beings/Hear the fire's voice/Hear the voice of water/In the wind hear the sobbing of the trees/It is our forefathers breathing.’ He’s really trying to convey that sort of passing of the baton, and maybe the joy of the spirit of those two musicians as well.”
Searching for the breath of the ancestors might be more difficult in the piece that Gabriel Prokofiev wrote for the Songbook. Yes, he’s the grandson of that Prokofiev, but Dr. Calvin Remembers marries surging marimba patterns to futuristic electronics, glitchy Morse-code transmissions, and synthesized drums. It’s a long way from the older Russian’s Romeo and Juliet or The Love for Three Oranges. But it also combines a very human, very conversational pace with hints of cyborg abstraction in a way that’s perfectly appropriate for a work inspired by Asimov’s I, Robot.
Other contributors to A Percussionist’s Songbook include Duke Quartet violist John Metcalfe, Italian film composer Dario Marianelli, British-Bahraini jazz trumpeter Yazz Ahmed, pianist Graham Fitkin, and Bulgarian-born Dobrinka Tabakova. Burgess allows himself the last word, however, with his own Take Me Home, a glowingly open-hearted homage to the electronica singles he remembers buying as an ‘80s kid—and to his occasional employer Peter Gabriel, whose song “Solsbury Hill” is referenced in the title.
“I don’t compose very much,” Burgess confesses. “Most of my involvement in music is through my collaborations with composers and producers. But I really wanted to write something about home, about what home means to me. And when I think of home, I think of where I grew up, which is a small country called Wiltshire in the southwest of England. The closest big place to the small village where I grew up is called Bath. And when I think of going back to that part of the country, it’s ‘green England’; all those green fields and stuff. So I’m kind of thinking of those memories. I haven’t lived down there fo 25 years, but I still have that sense of home, of belonging, when I go back into that part of the world.”
Which brings us to another aspect of A Percussionist’s Songbook, one that Burgess doesn’t make explicit in the project’s press material, but which is certainly an animating factor. With such a diverse cast of contributors, this is music from a greater Britain, not from the Little England of Nigel Farage’s Brexit fantasies. Happy and engaged as Burgess is when discussing his work, he’s also ready to express regrets about the direction that his home has taken.
“It’s horrific,” he says bluntly. “As someone who spends time travelling and working abroad, just seeing the repercussions… I’m at a bit of a loss about it, like many of us are. Most of the people I know work in music and/or the arts, and we’re 99.99 percent stunned, still. It’s always been pretty obvious what was going to happen, and guess what? Now everyone’s realizing it. You’ve got less money in your pocket, the economy’s shrunk… It’s mental.”
But at least we’ll always have music, and perhaps therein lies home.
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