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Chris Wood - Artist Profile
After a beginning in church music Chris Wood's first steps as a professional musician were with the Royal Shakespeare Company and then the National Theatre where he also took some early steps in composition. The use of Folk song as a narrative provided a strong model for schools work and he devised several successful projects in East Anglia. Towards the end of his time at the National Theatre he began to establish a presence on the British Folk scene with Martin Carthy as his mentor. At this time he also guested on Martin's Rights of Passage album.An arts council grant allowed him to undertake a research trip to Canada to study the music of Quebec. Upon his return he recorded his first solo album Ever Simpler. As part of this project he began working with Andy Cutting. This duo was quickly taken up by Andy Kershaw and voted best newcomers in the Folk Roots readers' poll. Chris and Andy then went on to play on average 190 concerts a year for the next 5 years. Their duo took them all over the world from Sudan to Sweden, Hong Kong to Vancouver. Chris established RUF RECORDS and the duo recorded 4 CDs which garnered great praise from both the folk and mainstream press in the UK and overseas.
This profile also created a demand for Chris as a teacher and he began teaching at established folk music workshop events such as the annual Summer School organised by Folkworks. His teaching activity quickly developed and he found himself invited to address the British Forum For Ethnomusicology at their convention in Limerick. His relationship with the University of Limerick developed and he is a regular guest lecturer there still.
Back in the UK his educational work has also led him to become a visiting fellow on the Folk Degree course at the University of Newcastle. The course is housed at the Sage Gateshead where Chris performed his piece Listening To The River in April 2005.
LTR is major composition which came out of a desire to demonstrate the link between landscape and music. Initially undertaken as a research project and a teaching aid it was soon taken up by the BBC who commissioned a half hour version. This was first broadcast on BBC RADIO 3's Between The Ears in 2002. This work has been broadcast again this year and drew attention from abroad leading to a concert in Bruxelles in March 05. It will be released as a CD in the spring of 2006.
In 1999 he established The English Acoustic Collective as an umbrella for his increasing independent teaching activities and the first event was an annual String School hosted at Ruskin Mill near Nailsworth. The Summer School has continued and has developed from a strings-only event to include players of all instruments. The ethos of the EAC is important to set out here: all great musicians and singers have one thing in common, they are all completely individual. This sets the EAC apart from many of the existing music teaching environments whose model is to teach their students the skills and techniques of the teacher. The EAC uses folk music as a precedent to show the student that they have a story to tell and that their music will be at its most compelling if they tell their own story and not someone elses.
The Summer School soon began producing strong and compelling musicians and three years ago Chris joined together with Robert Harbron and John Dipper to form The English Acoustic Collective. Their first CD 'Ghosts' was released in August 2004 and they are fast establishing themselves as a fresh and powerful composers' ensemble focussed on taking indigenous music forward. Last year they played at the National Portrait Gallery where they recorded a session for BBC RADIO 3's Late Junction. This year has saw an article in fROOTS magazine and concerts coming in every day including the Cambridge Festival.
While this has been going on Chris has recorded a solo CD 'The Lark Descending' which was released in June 2005 supported by a session on Late Junction later this month.
Also due for release this year is a recording with storyteller Hugh Lupton. Hugh and Chris have produced a series of Praise Songs which celebrate the lives of four individuals. The first of these was nominated for the Forward Poetry Prize by the literary editor of The Times. Chris was also been commissioned to compose a piece for Junctions, a collaboration between the EAC, the Tacet ensemble and the Copper family. This was performed at three concerts in the South East in June and July 05.
Future projects will include the facilitation of the development and creation of a meaningful music making culture at Ruskin Mill using some of the highly effective techniques and approaches he has developed over the years.
Nominations in the BBC Folk Awards:
Chris Wood has been nominated for four BBC Folk Awards:
Best Album - The Lark Descending
Best New Song - One in a Million (with Hugh Lupton)
Best Traditional Track - Lord Bateman
Folk Singer of the Year - Chris Wood
"Chris Wood is one of the most stimulating and inspirational teachers to have visited the Irish World Music Centre. He is also one of the few tutors to have taught across several of our MA programmes, from Music Therapy, to Ritual Song & Traditional Music Performance. His ability to communicate with his students at the deepest level is one of his particular gifts. His innate musicianship, expressed through his passionate interest in the traditional music of England puts him at the forefront of contemporary performers of this genre."
Dr Micheal O Suilleabhain, Professor of Music, Director of the Irish World
Music Centre, University of Limerick.
"I think Chris Wood is an incredible artist.... he combines stories and music in such an original and completely melodic way."
Laurie Anderson
Reviews
MOJO
Entirely solo Wood offers a uniquely sensitive meeting of old and nu folk.
A lot of wimpy garbage is being hailed as part of a brave new world for folk music - they might want to listen to this guy. In a warm, dark brown voice with sparse, minimalist accompaniment, Wood is an intimate storyteller, applying such nuance and gravitas to every phrase you are imperceptibly lured into his world. Some of the stories are old - John Barleycorn, Our Captain Calls and, especially, Lord Bateman are familiar traditional tales born anew with fresh, bold arrangements. Yet what perhaps marks this album as one of the best of the year is Wood's own songs. Whether about his daughter (Hard), suicide (Albion) or a chip shop (one in a million), he seamlessly knits the spirit of the tradition into his very contemporary parables. And it's magnificent.
Colin Irwin
The Times
...it is his own compositions, which share the same timeless quality as Richard Thompson's best writing, that make this CD special. Most striking of all is Albion.
Nigel Williamson
The Observer Music Monthly
The unshowy charm of The Lark Descending has emerged on to the folk scene like a gentle, shy bird, to be greeted with widespread chirps of acclaim. Wood, a Kentish teacher, reveals himself to be a talented interpreter of traditional material on the organic 'John Barleycorn', but it's his own bewitching treatises, played on fiddle and acoustic guitar, that prove particularly engrossing. The likes of 'Hard" and 'Albion" are rooted in the English folk tradition, albeit refracted through Wood's reflections on political disaffection and familial love. It's a lyrical, pensive album, shaped by his plangent vocal and possessed of a timeless quality.
Sarah Boden
The Irish Times
Solo recordings don't come more solitary than this one form the Renaissance man of English folk, Chris Wood. His is a world populated by glorious minor chords, life-affirming songs and stomach-churning tales of urban decay. It's a stark terrain he navigates, melding his own tales of fatherly affection (Hard) and alienation (Albion) with an uncannily timely reading of the traditional Our Captain Calls all Hands, a four-minute distillation of the idiocy of warfare. "How can you go abroad fighting for strangers?" a question as apt in Downing Street as it is in dimly lit folk clubs. Wood's ferocious musicality is everywhere: from the fiery cello scaffolding John Barleycorn to the somnolent guitar of Bleary Winter. Unapologetically and quintessentially English - and unmissable.
Siobhan Long
fRoots July
Mixing his own extraordinary songs seamlessly into exhilarating adaptations of traditional material, this is unquestionably one of the albums of the year. He has a deceptively laid-back style, an entirely solo album of seemingly straightforward accompaniments but he invests the words with such gravitas - even the more comedic lines - that you are instantly sucked into the narrative. The seriousness of the approach doesn't always equate with the mood of the song and initially creates the impression of an ultra-heavy album - the warmth, charm and pride of a father's love for his daughter in the opening track Hard, is initially deflected by the solemn delivery before the full impact of the lyrics seeps through. But as we become accustomed to his style and adjust to the persuasive directness of his singing, we enter an intimate, inclusive atmosphere of gentle intelligence that is very special.
The greatest challenge for any contemporary folk song is does it bear comparison to a traditional song? Having made a fine art out of arranging trad songs in a fresh manner - his wondrous arrangement of Lord Bateman previously featured on a Wood, Wilson & Carthy album and controversially used by Jim Moray is included - Wood knows very well those stringent demands. He meets them all with the extraordinary Albion, a disquieting tale which tells of finding a hanged man on a tree and relating it to Thatcher's Britain.
It's also an album that holds together far more tightly than most, almost thematic in the way the songs weave into each other amid a running overview of English life. Albion is followed by Bleary Winter, one of two songs written with Hugh Lupton, commentating further on a bleak aspect of cultural history; and he follows Lord Bateman with his second Hugh Lupton collaboration, One In A Million, which also centers around someone called Bateman (and his daughter Peggy Sue!). This Bateman runs a fish and chip shop and the very modern parable Wood gradually unveils with patent relish is worthy of Richard Thompson, so vivid the characters and so cinematic the narrative. An epic that runs for nearly 10 minutes, it must surely be in the frame for song of the year.
On slightly more familiar territory, he also turns out committed versions of Our Captain Calls All Hands and John Barleycorn before ending in relatively rousing fashion with the life-affirming Walk This World With Music. With a radically different treatment it could be an anthemic chorus song to end them all, but with a trundling fiddle, Wood chooses to offer it as a clarion call of optimistic defiance that offers a stirring coda to the bleakness that is a key ingredient to all that's gone before. It leaves you with plenty to think about.
Colin Irwin
Written: 14th Feb, 06
Read: 3479 times
