Not for the first time, pianist and composer Huw Warren – a creative force for four decades now – has a brace of new projects to talk about for the turn of the year. A solo piano recording rooted in Brazilian Choro and a duo CD featuring traditional Welsh carols might sound worlds apart. Jon Turney spoke to him to hear what, aside from excellent music, they might have in common.
Anyone who has enjoyed Huw Warren’s solo or trio recordings knows of his affinity for Brazilian music. It can manifest as a sudden burst of sunshine on a single track highlighting one of the country’s great composers, or as an entire project, as with the CD some years ago dedicated to Hermeto Pascoal.
Deeper investigation brings on the appetite for more, though. As he says, “I keep thinking I’ve done with it, then something else comes up”. This time, that something is a solo album of Choro tunes, the hybrid genre first heard in Brazil a little before the turn of the 19th century. Like much of the music of that country, it’s rhythmically vital, melodic, stuff, often quite complex but very danceable, deploying European classical harmony and Afro-American strains from Brazil’s vast, imported slave population to conjure a popular form with a beat.
Not quite respectable, but immensely successful, Choro fed into much other music-making, but still rewards study in its own right – a study Warren had the chance to pursue thanks to a small research grant from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama where he professes jazz piano. “I’ve known about Choro for long time, but the grant allowed me to dig a bit deeper.”
There’s plenty of digging to do: early Choro composers such as such as Ernesto Nazareth, Chiquinha Gonzaga and Pixinguinha were prolific and their contributions to a movement to create a new Brazilian music mean scores exist – lots of them. Warren, as well as interviewing contemporary scholars of the form, got a library together. “I had a huge pile of Choro books and that, plus Bach’s well-tempered clavier, was all I played for a month.”
Making them one’s own is the point, and he does, encouraged by the fact that, rather like ragtime, the original genre coalesced in a cultural milieu in which music creators were trying to make something new out of many disparate influences. As in the North, a by-product of slavery was a trading zone between European and African musics, and between classical and popular. Chopin preoccupied some of the composers. Some used counterpoint extensively. European dance rhythms, like the Polka, come into it. But there are other rhythmic feels to absorb, too. “I knew the word “maxixe”, and knew what the pattern was, but now I can play one!”
The music he recorded after this intense study is a convincing answer to the conundrum that has cropped up in other forays into music distant from his own background, and that was formalised this time as a research question: how do you take something from another culture without just appropriating it? For him, it’s a matter of “disrespecting it just enough” to make something new, without forcing it into a radically different, maybe incompatible context – avant garde jazz, say. For Choro there were a couple of things already working in his favour. “For me, the music sits on that line between Brazilian strains and jazz”. Improvisation, he says, is simply another flavour of this music, not the main business, as in jazz. And the ingredients all these composers used to create Choro were so various to start with that remixing them feel right.
Audiences will soon be able to judge the results for themselves. On the forthcoming CD, the solo piano set was imagined as a recital. “I actually recorded way more, but tried to select thinking how this would work as a set.” And there will be a few solo gigs – but the CD tour, with a launch at the Vortex on January 24th, sees the pieces arranged for a quartet. Tori Freestone, a fellow Pascoal devotee, will play flute, traditionally a lead instrument in Choro, with Yuri Goloubev on bass and Brazilian expatriate Adriano Adewale on drums.
Meanwhile, he is delighted with the response to another project reinventing a genre, this time the much older Welsh tradition of Plygain carols. Calennig – or New Year’s Gift – began as an online project with the Welsh folk artist Angharad Jenkins to celebrate the eisteddfod during lockdown. Remarkably, Jenkins, well-known as a violinist, had not sung for others before, but the duo’s recording sounds like the work of a vocal artist of the first order. They created arrangements of the carols, sung in Welsh, on the fly, informed by Warren’s many years working with singers such as Maria Pia De Vito and June Tabor.
The pieces here are traditionally performed unaccompanied, at gatherings where friends take turns to lead the singing. The Welsh of the carols, Warren avers, is fairly archaic, but the mood he describes is crystal clear to the Anglophone listener, “that understated, slightly somber, almost medieval feeling”. Just like Choro Choro Choro, the challenge is to make the music sound fresh without doing violence to the sources. “In a way, it’s like playing jazz standards: how do you not make it sound like other versions that have been done hundreds of times?” The tunes are refreshed here by the piano and violin accompaniment, the results having something of the quality of Warren and Tabor’s work with Quercus, sounding both timeless and modern. If you insist on categories, the result sounds more like folk than jazz, but “for me it’s all jazz. The improvisation is in the arrangements.” And, as he put it referring to the Choro sessions, the important thing, in arrangement or performance, is to “approach it with your heart rather than your head”. And that, no doubt, is what listeners will respond to in both projects.
Choro Choro Choro launches at the Vortex on 24 January, with other January gigs in Cardiff and Cambridge, and further dates to follow in May and June.
