Rob Adams reviews Gary West’s biography of celebrated piper Martyn Bennett. Brave New Music: The Martyn Bennett Story was launched at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 30 January, 2025.
He was the piper who caused a sensation at Glasgow Jazz Festival. But then, Martyn Bennett’s musicality drew attention wherever he played, whether that be busking on Sauchiehall Street, performing on Millennium Night on Edinburgh Castle esplanade, or at Cambridge Folk Festival.
Bennett had a natural aptitude for music, a talent that was guided by expert tuition. Yet the music that is his legacy was compiled largely on a computer. The last of his five albums, Grit, was the triumph of a man who had smashed his instruments in a fit of frustration at no longer being able to play to his own exacting standards. He became “the singer”, painstakingly bringing together sounds and songs sampled from the tradition he grew up in, and fusing them with the dance beats he had fallen in love with while a student.
His life was short. He died aged thirty-three in January 2005, and the last years of his life were marked by extensive chemotherapy, radiotherapy, a bone marrow transplant and a splenectomy. Yet he persevered with music, revising, editing, adding to and perfecting his final work (although he never felt he’d achieved perfection).
Gary West is a piper himself: he presented the specialist piping programme, Pipeline, for BBC Radio Scotland for two decades, and is well placed to tell Bennett’s story. He knew Bennett, and in writing this very readable account, he must have had to hold material in reserve because everyone who met Martyn Bennett has a story.
Bennett was born in Newfoundland, but at age five came to live in the Highlands, in Kingussie, with his mother Margaret after her marriage to Welsh geologist Ian Knight ended. Perhaps because Margaret Bennett is such a valued presence in Scotland as a folklorist and singer, Bennett’s father has often seemed to be a shadowy figure until now. West has ensured that he is very much part of his son’s story and shows that the music gene came from both sides of the family.
Attending folk festivals with his mother, the young Martyn was exposed to the singers and characters who fed into his own grasp of the tradition, and when he gravitated to the pipes – via the practice chanter that he apparently mastered in record time – he became quite the junior phenomenon.
Bennett won a place at Broughton High School’s specialist music unit in Edinburgh by auditioning on the pipes. This led to classical training in violin, piano and composition. He might have become an international soloist on violin – he ‘depped’ with the exacting Edinburgh Quartet on several occasions – but classical music wasn’t in his blood. The pipes, traditional songs and club beats were.
And so began an adventure that involved a classic television commercial for Drambuie, with Bennett playing an extraordinary fluent reel on the smallpipes as Robert Hardy’s butler delivers a specially flown in bottle of the liqueur – then drops it. It also included some heroically chaotic international touring, a frenetic session in Paris during the 1998 World Cup that saw Sean Connery and Ewan McGregor cavorting onstage, and a duo with drummer Tom Bancroft that showcased Bennett’s improvisational capabilities. There is also the appreciation that Peter Gabriel and his record label, Real World, showed for Bennett’s work, and the praise from Hamish Henderson, the father of Scotland’s folk revival, that gives the book its title.
Gary West marshals all this – and more – with considerable skill, alongside informed assessments of Bennett’s recordings. There is much about Bennett’s later years that is tragic, but Bennett himself was quite the mischievous sprite, full of humour, and what shines through above all is his determination to present the music he heard in his imagination to the very best standards.
These days, the music Bennett created through his combination of alchemy, musical brilliance and computer technology is largely presented by the Grit Orchestra, an eighty-strong ensemble of traditional, classical and jazz musicians. They fill large auditoriums, including Glasgow’s 13,000 capacity Hydro, with music whose details are still revealing themselves, possibly even to violinist Greg Lawson, the man who has orchestrated and conducts this ambitious celebration of Bennett’s work. Lawson actually predicted that he would orchestrate Bennett’s blend of tradition and electronica, and told this to Bennett himself. He delights in sharing Bennett’s poker-faced response: “Are ye, now?”