Voices: Corrina Hewat: harps and suspects

Corrina Hewat is an artist whose vision encompasses both solo performance and composing for large ensembles, who believes in the interconnectedness of jazz and folk music, and who relishes the collaborative nature of working with other artists and the solitary time needed to create on her own. She is also an artist with a full schedule: she’s appeared on more than thirty albums in the last dozen years in addition to composing several major commissions and keeping up her own practice in performing and teaching.

Hewat is from Scotland, and her chosen instrument for her own playing is the harp, both the small harp and the big pedal kind. He latest album, called Harp I Do, is a series of tunes that are at once melodic and percussive, and, if you need categories, would fit into both jazz and folk. “You know, I think the jazz thing is really folk music too. I don’t see them as merging folk and jazz, I actually think it’s just one big music. I don’t distinguish between them,” she says.

Hewat grew up in the Scottish Highlands, in the Black Isle northwest of Inverness. Her family moved there from Edinburgh when Hewat was eight, “and it was a really good thing for me. There was a real community there, a sense of sharing our lives, and of sharing music, in the Highlands,” she recalled. She was led to the harp “because I saw this woman sitting and playing one. I said to her ‘I like that, can I have a go?’ and she let me try, and it was like I could do this. I was twelve, and knew some piano and some fiddle, but the harp immediately made total sense.” The harp player, Christine Martin, offered the young Corrina lessons, “and so once a week for a year, we did that. My mum would drive me over, and Christine lent me a harp, and later on her husband built me a harp -- which exploded six months later! But if it wasn't for their kindness, I don’t think I’d be playing the harp, ‘cause it’s kind of an expensive instrument,” Hewat pointed out. To own her own harp, she recalled, “it took eight years -- my family and I, and my granny too, we all saved up for the harp.” She followed traditional music through Feis Rois weekend workshops and a time at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. Her love of jazz took her to the University of Leeds, where she received an honors degree in jazz and contemporary music on the harp and studied with respected Irish harpist Maire Ni Chathasaigh.

She and her husband David Milligan, who plays piano, formed a duo which became a quartet with addition of a trumpet player and a drummer. The group, called Bachue, was about to add another aspect to Hewat’s musicianship, as well. ”We were booked for a gig at the Celtic Connections festival, and we were playing all instrumental music, involved, complex stuff. The festival director suggested that we add some songs. People relate to songs, he said, they'll connect to you if you do some songs. So we added a few songs. That was that!” says Hewat of her early experience singing from the stage. “My mum and dad played a lot of music around the house, Neil Young, Bob Dylan -- that’s where I learned my first harmony singing really, singing along and finding different harmony parts there,” but it hadn't been something she’d done in public much until that gig at Celtic Connections. These days she’s known as much for her singing as for her playing, and is in demand as a teacher of lively and engaging harmony singing workshops. You can also catch her singing as part of the trio Grace, Hewat, and Polwart, in which she joins fellow Scots Annie Grace and Karine Polwart for evenings of music that are very musical and often also very funny.

Singing songs has another benefit for Hewat. “It’s one of the times when the music going on inside my head stops and I focus on that song,” she says. “It’s like I have this constant flow of music, like an orchestra going in inside my head all the time -- which is grand!” It’s also sometimes hard to keep up with the flow of ideas. “I use my mobile phone a lot, sing myself messages, and I have a little half size manuscript paper that I carry around to make notes, too. They might just be phrases or lines. Then, when I have a moment, I’ll start looking at batches of them and seeing what works and what doesn’t, and six pieces might all go together to make one big grand piece of music -- or they might end up being six different things!” she says, laughing.

One place her musical ideas go is to the band she and Milligan started, The Unusual Suspects. It’s a folk orchestra of sorts, “there’re twenty two of us, each coming from different regional traditions-- I love hearing which one is from the borders, who’s from Aberdeen, who’s from Inverness or Shetland, all come out in their music,” she says. A recent commission to compose and play at L'Orient Interceltique festival gave the group time to play and rehearse together, something they don’t often have, or have the budget for. “As a composer, and musical director, it’s hard. We don’t get to rehearse much, and then when we do something has to work right away or drop it because the time’s so short. But this is a passion David and I have, to work on this band,” Hewat says. With the quality of their music and performance, they are igniting that passion in others, too. Audiences and music writers alike call The Unusual Suspects one of the most exciting bands working today.

Hewat will be performing several times at the Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow later this month. She’ll be touring behind her new record, and also be doing the occasional show  with piper and fiddle player Kathyrn Tickell, and short tours with Grace, Hewat and Polwart, as well as teaching workshops, composing, and working to pull together more performances and recordings for The Unusual Suspects. And listening to the music. “Just walking down the street, I can hear rhythm and music in the sounds around me, and it’s grand,” Corrina Hewat says.

Corrina Hewat’s website

you may also want to see

video of the Unusual Suspects

Music Road: Celtic Connections 2009 on the way

another fine composer: hanneke cassel

You'll find music content from many genres and plenty of other music fans at Gather Essentials: Music. For more of Kerry Dexter's Voices columns, look here. It's published on Thursdays.

Kerry Dexter, Music Correspondent Kerry's credits include VH1, CMT, the folk music magazine Dirty Linen, Strings, The Encyclopedia of Ireland and the Americas, and The MusicHound Guides. She also writes about the arts and creative practice at Music Road and contributes to Fred Bals' Series of Tubes.