3. Nick HartThe Colour Of Amber
I love Nick Hart. I don’t know much about him and I’ve never seen him play live. I don’t even know exactly where he’s from, but his choice of traditional tunes I love very much. A lot of them come from the Martin Carthy universe – either tunes Martin Carthy himself played, or from Waterson:Carthy, Eliza Carthy or Norma Waterson. That’s a bunch of folks I adore. There’s a lot going on right now with English, Scottish, Irish traditional folk music – a lot of experimentation, taking ideas from other musics, and I love a lot of that – but it’s really nice to hear people just sing the tunes, too.
Usually it’s [Hart] on guitar, but there’s very little guitar, if any, on this. I don’t know if it’s him on violin. The tunes are great, he sings great, his cadences are beautiful – the way he finishes phrases I adore. It’s a really straightforward approach to the tunes, which I think I’ll never lose interest in. No one should, they’re so good.
I think Martin Carthy is the greatest guitar player who’s ever lived, for sure. There are a lot of greatest guitar players who’ve ever lived, and he’s one of them. For me, it’s how he grooves. I think he was the first to really push the backbeat in a Highland pipes kind of way, a kind of English-Scottish funk; I would call that music funky as hell. He also has a lot of counterpoint and leaves a lot of holes. He harmonises incredibly interestingly, and his ornamentation is beautiful, which I think he takes from pipers and stuff like that.
I love traditional music – a lot of Norwegian hardanger music, English, Scottish, Irish, French, others. I think my earlier records, like 20 years ago, were more influenced by that. I hit a limit with where I thought it could take me, but it’s a huge part of my listening life.
