JOHN POTTER - The Art Of The Tenor
Jazz and classical music have rubbed shoulders in one guise or another for many years. The purists will steadfastly stick to their respective genres, often shunning other forms of music as beneath them, but the musicians and composers have a far more open mind and ears to what they can borrow from other idioms; and more importantly what they can bring to the collective table.
One such musician is John Potter who is perhaps best known to readers of the site for his work with the Hilliard Ensemble, and in particular the recordings made with saxophonist, Jan Garbarek. In a long and well established career, Potter has performed in a variety of contexts that have seen him work with improvising musicians, pop and rock artists along with musicians/composers specialising in live and studio electronics.
His latest release on the ECM New Series imprint finds him employing the services of Sting, John Paul Jones and Tony Banks to write new music for lute using existing texts by Thomas Campion, Peter Warlock , A.E. Houseman and others in an doing so looking to bridge the gap between "art song and popular song", and It was with the latest album that this illuminating interview with John Potter kicks off.
One such musician is John Potter who is perhaps best known to readers of the site for his work with the Hilliard Ensemble, and in particular the recordings made with saxophonist, Jan Garbarek. In a long and well established career, Potter has performed in a variety of contexts that have seen him work with improvising musicians, pop and rock artists along with musicians/composers specialising in live and studio electronics.
His latest release on the ECM New Series imprint finds him employing the services of Sting, John Paul Jones and Tony Banks to write new music for lute using existing texts by Thomas Campion, Peter Warlock , A.E. Houseman and others in an doing so looking to bridge the gap between "art song and popular song", and It was with the latest album that this illuminating interview with John Potter kicks off.
Can you tell us about the new album, Amores Pasados, and why specifically songs for lute?
It’s about very specific sorts of songs. I’ve always loved both lute songs and songs with piano. Sadly, there’s no market for voice and piano these days, but there is lute song audience. It just happens that some of my favourite composers from the early 20th century set poems by 16th & 17th century poets. Peter Warlock, for example, could read 17th century lute tab and I’m sure would have written lute songs if there’s been any lute players around in the 1920s. It was then a small step to persuade Jacob Heringman and Ariel Abramovich to arrange and intabulate these songs for two lutes (with two you can cover most of what a piano does). It sort of rescues a repertoire which is hardly ever heard, and it provides fantastic new material for lute players and singers.
How did you go about selecting the ‘rock’ composers that were invited to write music for lutes?
I’d met Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks on a couple of occasions when he came to Hilliard Ensemble concerts. Ariel Abramovich is also a big fan so we decided to ask Tony to write us some lute songs. Ariel was a friend of Sting’s lutenist Edin Karamazov, and it turned out that Sting had listened to my Dowland record when he was contemplating his own, so we asked if he’d write a song for us too. He had one he’d originally intended for Russell Crowe in the last Robin Hood movie, but it didn’t get used so he passed it on to me. By this time we’d done our album Secret History for ECM (still not released) with Jacob Heringman and Anna Maria Friman, and it occurred to me that John Paul Jones’ Amores Pasados songs which he’d written for my band Red Byrd back in the eighties, might work very well for the four of us. John Paul was happy for us to give it a go, so with the 20th century arrangements and some 17th century originals we then had the basis for an album.
It’s about very specific sorts of songs. I’ve always loved both lute songs and songs with piano. Sadly, there’s no market for voice and piano these days, but there is lute song audience. It just happens that some of my favourite composers from the early 20th century set poems by 16th & 17th century poets. Peter Warlock, for example, could read 17th century lute tab and I’m sure would have written lute songs if there’s been any lute players around in the 1920s. It was then a small step to persuade Jacob Heringman and Ariel Abramovich to arrange and intabulate these songs for two lutes (with two you can cover most of what a piano does). It sort of rescues a repertoire which is hardly ever heard, and it provides fantastic new material for lute players and singers.
How did you go about selecting the ‘rock’ composers that were invited to write music for lutes?
I’d met Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks on a couple of occasions when he came to Hilliard Ensemble concerts. Ariel Abramovich is also a big fan so we decided to ask Tony to write us some lute songs. Ariel was a friend of Sting’s lutenist Edin Karamazov, and it turned out that Sting had listened to my Dowland record when he was contemplating his own, so we asked if he’d write a song for us too. He had one he’d originally intended for Russell Crowe in the last Robin Hood movie, but it didn’t get used so he passed it on to me. By this time we’d done our album Secret History for ECM (still not released) with Jacob Heringman and Anna Maria Friman, and it occurred to me that John Paul Jones’ Amores Pasados songs which he’d written for my band Red Byrd back in the eighties, might work very well for the four of us. John Paul was happy for us to give it a go, so with the 20th century arrangements and some 17th century originals we then had the basis for an album.
In reinventing these songs for the 21st century, were you looking to show how songs have evolved over the last four centuries, or were you wishing to illustrate the difference, or relationship, between the art song and pop song?
It’s almost impossible for classically trained singers to sing pop songs convincingly – even singers like Anna and me who’ve unlearned most of what we were taught. Opera singers stepping out of their comfort zone are excruciating to listen to (though it can work the other way round, as in Sting’s Dowland recording). The problem is that classical singers make a generic sound – tenor, soprano or whatever – and sing formal poetic texts. Non-classical singers just have to be themselves - they’re all individual as their singing is very close to their speaking. So if you believe (as I do) that many living songwriters have as much to say to us as, say, Schubert or Dowland, the answer is to persuade them to set existing poems rather than vernacular texts. Then we can make it work. Lots of people have commented that it’s hard to tell the difference between composers or periods on Amores Pasados – which I hope means we got it about right.
Many visitors to this site will be perhaps be most familiar with your work with the Hilliard Ensemble and Jan Garbarek. Can you tell us about your time with the Hilliards and the unique relationship that the Ensemble had with Jan?
I suspect I was the only person apart from Manfred Eicher himself who was totally convinced by the idea as soon as Manfred suggested it. There were so many parallels between Jan’s modal improvising and what we Hilliards did with medieval and renaissance music. Those first few years of our collaboration were some of the exciting of my musical life. We never rehearsed – a huge joy to us as we’d always thought rehearsing was a waste of time once you knew the notes (which in our case was pretty well straight away). So there was an instant meeting of minds, an understanding that the music happened only during the performance, and only once. It meant that each performance was unique. Even if we sang the same notes (as happened with chordal pieces such as the Morales Parce Mihi) Jan would do something completely different every time. An amazing musician with an extraordinary musical brain. He literally blew us away. I was very touched to be asked back for the last few farewell gigs.
It’s almost impossible for classically trained singers to sing pop songs convincingly – even singers like Anna and me who’ve unlearned most of what we were taught. Opera singers stepping out of their comfort zone are excruciating to listen to (though it can work the other way round, as in Sting’s Dowland recording). The problem is that classical singers make a generic sound – tenor, soprano or whatever – and sing formal poetic texts. Non-classical singers just have to be themselves - they’re all individual as their singing is very close to their speaking. So if you believe (as I do) that many living songwriters have as much to say to us as, say, Schubert or Dowland, the answer is to persuade them to set existing poems rather than vernacular texts. Then we can make it work. Lots of people have commented that it’s hard to tell the difference between composers or periods on Amores Pasados – which I hope means we got it about right.
Many visitors to this site will be perhaps be most familiar with your work with the Hilliard Ensemble and Jan Garbarek. Can you tell us about your time with the Hilliards and the unique relationship that the Ensemble had with Jan?
I suspect I was the only person apart from Manfred Eicher himself who was totally convinced by the idea as soon as Manfred suggested it. There were so many parallels between Jan’s modal improvising and what we Hilliards did with medieval and renaissance music. Those first few years of our collaboration were some of the exciting of my musical life. We never rehearsed – a huge joy to us as we’d always thought rehearsing was a waste of time once you knew the notes (which in our case was pretty well straight away). So there was an instant meeting of minds, an understanding that the music happened only during the performance, and only once. It meant that each performance was unique. Even if we sang the same notes (as happened with chordal pieces such as the Morales Parce Mihi) Jan would do something completely different every time. An amazing musician with an extraordinary musical brain. He literally blew us away. I was very touched to be asked back for the last few farewell gigs.
photograph by Jana Jocif
Working with jazz, or improvising musicians is something that you do on a regular basis with John Surman and Barry Guy both playing in The Dowland Project. Can you tell us about the Project and how the two seemingly opposite disciplines of early renaissance songs and contemporary improvisation are brought together?
Before I left the Hilliards Manfred had asked me to suggest a project of my own but I’d declined as our relationship with ECM was very much a group one. Once I began to detach myself he asked me again and I suggested Dowland, having had a Dowland recording with the American lutenist Steve Stubbs fall through a few years before. Manfred said yes, great idea but you don’t want to use any of those boring early music players do you...what about Barry Guy and John Surman. As so often happens with Manfred, he stuns you with an idea that you’d never thought of but immediately becomes perfectly logical. In some ways it was a kind of continuation of the Officium principle (Manfred referred to it as a coda) – and a couple of the pieces we did were actually ones I’d originally intended for the Hilliards and Jan. Basically I stuck to Dowland’s notes, but the players did their thing. It’s a kind of nexus where early music and jazz meet. Both have improvising traditions of their own, so no one ‘crosses over’. There’s a creative space like the overlapping portion of a Venn Diagram. That’s where you can speak to each other and retain your integrity. The first album only had the composer’s name on the front as I’d refused to have my name on the front without the players, so I joined them on the back (my manager, not entirely convinced this was a good idea, said I’d get my reward in heaven...). We’d been referring to it as the Dowland project, and that became our name when we thought about recording some more. On our three subsequent albums we moved both forwards and backwards in terms of our source material – again applying the principle that jazz and early music share a common attitude to composers’ notes – that they’re a point of departure. On the Night Sessions album – recorded when we’d had a lot to drink and had run out of material so had to make it up – I think I finally came to understand what improvising was all about. Everything on that album is a virtually unedited single take. It was the ultimate living in the moment, and to be able to do it with those amazing musicians was an incredible privilege.
Before I left the Hilliards Manfred had asked me to suggest a project of my own but I’d declined as our relationship with ECM was very much a group one. Once I began to detach myself he asked me again and I suggested Dowland, having had a Dowland recording with the American lutenist Steve Stubbs fall through a few years before. Manfred said yes, great idea but you don’t want to use any of those boring early music players do you...what about Barry Guy and John Surman. As so often happens with Manfred, he stuns you with an idea that you’d never thought of but immediately becomes perfectly logical. In some ways it was a kind of continuation of the Officium principle (Manfred referred to it as a coda) – and a couple of the pieces we did were actually ones I’d originally intended for the Hilliards and Jan. Basically I stuck to Dowland’s notes, but the players did their thing. It’s a kind of nexus where early music and jazz meet. Both have improvising traditions of their own, so no one ‘crosses over’. There’s a creative space like the overlapping portion of a Venn Diagram. That’s where you can speak to each other and retain your integrity. The first album only had the composer’s name on the front as I’d refused to have my name on the front without the players, so I joined them on the back (my manager, not entirely convinced this was a good idea, said I’d get my reward in heaven...). We’d been referring to it as the Dowland project, and that became our name when we thought about recording some more. On our three subsequent albums we moved both forwards and backwards in terms of our source material – again applying the principle that jazz and early music share a common attitude to composers’ notes – that they’re a point of departure. On the Night Sessions album – recorded when we’d had a lot to drink and had run out of material so had to make it up – I think I finally came to understand what improvising was all about. Everything on that album is a virtually unedited single take. It was the ultimate living in the moment, and to be able to do it with those amazing musicians was an incredible privilege.
As well as bridging the gap between early music and contemporary improvisation, you have also worked within other areas at seemingly opposite ends of the spectrum. I am thinking about the Being Dufay album with electronic music specialist Ambrose Field and the Conductus recordings with fellow tenors Christopher O’Gorman and Rogers Covey-Crump. Can you tell us about these two contrasting musical associations?
Both actually have their roots in the past. Ambrose was a colleague at the University of York when I was there and one day he came into my office and asked me to find him some fragments of music by Guillaume Dufay. I duly found him about eight minutes worth of material which we then recorded in the Music Department studio. I was dumbfounded when a few months later he presented me with an entire piece made out of that eight minutes. Manfred Eicher was in York at the time to give a lecture, and he heard it, liked it and the rest is history. Once it was recorded Ambrose re-conceived it as a live piece which he re-composes from hundreds of tracks as we go along. I mostly sing what’s in front of me, but Ambrose dances around like a DJ, synchronising his instant composition with Mick Lynch’s film. We’ve done it in very large venues with a huge PA. I’m hoping he has another album up his sleeve one day. In the meantime he’s written a great piece for me and string quartet.
Before we made Officium the best selling Hilliard album was of organa (a type of medieval polyphony based on plainsong) by the 12th century composer Perotin. In the nineties my group Red Byrd made three CDs for Hyperion of Perotin’s illustrious predecessor Leonin. The music was edited for us by Mark Everist at the University of Southampton, and when Mark wanted to research the conductus repertoire (same period but not based on chant) he asked me to join him. It was a great opportunity to re-visit the period, in the first instance with a former Masters student of mine Christopher O’Gorman, and then with my old Hilliard mate Rogers Covey-Crump. This is a purely early music project (quite hard core at times, especially the last of the three albums which Hyperion are about to release) but the results are radically different from anything heard in the last 800 years.
Both actually have their roots in the past. Ambrose was a colleague at the University of York when I was there and one day he came into my office and asked me to find him some fragments of music by Guillaume Dufay. I duly found him about eight minutes worth of material which we then recorded in the Music Department studio. I was dumbfounded when a few months later he presented me with an entire piece made out of that eight minutes. Manfred Eicher was in York at the time to give a lecture, and he heard it, liked it and the rest is history. Once it was recorded Ambrose re-conceived it as a live piece which he re-composes from hundreds of tracks as we go along. I mostly sing what’s in front of me, but Ambrose dances around like a DJ, synchronising his instant composition with Mick Lynch’s film. We’ve done it in very large venues with a huge PA. I’m hoping he has another album up his sleeve one day. In the meantime he’s written a great piece for me and string quartet.
Before we made Officium the best selling Hilliard album was of organa (a type of medieval polyphony based on plainsong) by the 12th century composer Perotin. In the nineties my group Red Byrd made three CDs for Hyperion of Perotin’s illustrious predecessor Leonin. The music was edited for us by Mark Everist at the University of Southampton, and when Mark wanted to research the conductus repertoire (same period but not based on chant) he asked me to join him. It was a great opportunity to re-visit the period, in the first instance with a former Masters student of mine Christopher O’Gorman, and then with my old Hilliard mate Rogers Covey-Crump. This is a purely early music project (quite hard core at times, especially the last of the three albums which Hyperion are about to release) but the results are radically different from anything heard in the last 800 years.
photograph by Paul Arthur
I understand that Conductus is composed using two different forms of musical notation. One relatively straight forward and the other rather less so. Can you elaborate on this?
The notes are what we’re used to apart from being written on four lines instead of five, and some of it can be transcribed to look exactly like a modern score. The interesting bits are those that don’t work like that because they don’t have any measured rhythm. That’s fine if there’s only one of you singing chant, but if there are three of you singing different lines simultaneously it presents some intriguing questions about how you get it together. That’s what we’ve been working on for the last three years. It’s terrific fun to do – full of risk-taking and very high powered listening. And different every time. Like everything else I do, you have to hear it live – a recording is only as record of a moment and this particular project evolves constantly.
You have published several books on the art of singing. Is it difficult to analyse and put into words something that you make sound so natural and joyous?
That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about my writing! Musicians make pretty hopeless writers – we’d rather be doing it. Everything I write is informed by my own experience one way or another, and I’m fortunate enough to have had quite a wide range of experiences. My first book was based on my PhD thesis and the next three were written while I had an academic day job so they’re in that sort of genre. I’m writing another one now – provisionally called ‘The Trouble with Classical Singing...’ - and it’s much more polemical and less academic sounding. It’s about things I feel passionate about and I don’t want it to end up festering on university library shelves.
During your career you have worked with quite diverse musical settings and genres, and I understand that you started as a pop and rock singer. Can you tell us about your musical background and how you got started?
My dad was a church organist who’d been a student at the Royal Academy just after the War. He put me in his choir as soon as I could read and I’ve been singing ever since. He was a great musician but had rather narrow tastes, mostly J S Bach and his contemporaries (he was also a biker and once made a pilgrimage to Bach’s church in Leipzig on his BSA 500). He sent me to King’s Cambridge as a treble (where I sang that famous Once in Royal solo one Christmas). A scholarship (in oboe playing) and discreet help from lots of charities enabled me to go to King’s School Canterbury. It was there I discovered pop music and jazz and played (keyboards & guitar) in several bands – just before Robert Wyatt and the ‘Canterbury scene’ sadly. The demos we made are excruciatingly embarrassing to listen to but meant a lot to us at the time. I got a Choral Exhibition to Caius College Cambridge, where I sang in a group that eventually made records for Polydor as The Gentle Power of Song (‘sixties freakbeat’ – whatever that was). We did a couple of TV shows (including the legendary Simon Dee). When Ward Swingle started his British group I joined them and did lots of acappella as well as backing vocal for Manfred Mann, Mike Oldfield, and loads of others. I co-founded the avant-garde ensemble Electric Phoenix which took me in yet another direction, had a brief career as wielder of the first custom made vocal synthesiser and then joined the Hilliard Ensemble. At no point did I know what I was going to do next. I just knew it was going to be something I’d never done before.
The notes are what we’re used to apart from being written on four lines instead of five, and some of it can be transcribed to look exactly like a modern score. The interesting bits are those that don’t work like that because they don’t have any measured rhythm. That’s fine if there’s only one of you singing chant, but if there are three of you singing different lines simultaneously it presents some intriguing questions about how you get it together. That’s what we’ve been working on for the last three years. It’s terrific fun to do – full of risk-taking and very high powered listening. And different every time. Like everything else I do, you have to hear it live – a recording is only as record of a moment and this particular project evolves constantly.
You have published several books on the art of singing. Is it difficult to analyse and put into words something that you make sound so natural and joyous?
That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about my writing! Musicians make pretty hopeless writers – we’d rather be doing it. Everything I write is informed by my own experience one way or another, and I’m fortunate enough to have had quite a wide range of experiences. My first book was based on my PhD thesis and the next three were written while I had an academic day job so they’re in that sort of genre. I’m writing another one now – provisionally called ‘The Trouble with Classical Singing...’ - and it’s much more polemical and less academic sounding. It’s about things I feel passionate about and I don’t want it to end up festering on university library shelves.
During your career you have worked with quite diverse musical settings and genres, and I understand that you started as a pop and rock singer. Can you tell us about your musical background and how you got started?
My dad was a church organist who’d been a student at the Royal Academy just after the War. He put me in his choir as soon as I could read and I’ve been singing ever since. He was a great musician but had rather narrow tastes, mostly J S Bach and his contemporaries (he was also a biker and once made a pilgrimage to Bach’s church in Leipzig on his BSA 500). He sent me to King’s Cambridge as a treble (where I sang that famous Once in Royal solo one Christmas). A scholarship (in oboe playing) and discreet help from lots of charities enabled me to go to King’s School Canterbury. It was there I discovered pop music and jazz and played (keyboards & guitar) in several bands – just before Robert Wyatt and the ‘Canterbury scene’ sadly. The demos we made are excruciatingly embarrassing to listen to but meant a lot to us at the time. I got a Choral Exhibition to Caius College Cambridge, where I sang in a group that eventually made records for Polydor as The Gentle Power of Song (‘sixties freakbeat’ – whatever that was). We did a couple of TV shows (including the legendary Simon Dee). When Ward Swingle started his British group I joined them and did lots of acappella as well as backing vocal for Manfred Mann, Mike Oldfield, and loads of others. I co-founded the avant-garde ensemble Electric Phoenix which took me in yet another direction, had a brief career as wielder of the first custom made vocal synthesiser and then joined the Hilliard Ensemble. At no point did I know what I was going to do next. I just knew it was going to be something I’d never done before.
And your plans for the future?
The Amores Pasados quartet (me, Anna Maria Friman, Jake Heringman and Ariel Abramovich) is probably the most perfect ensemble I’ve worked with. We just breathe each other’s music. Tony Banks, Sting and John Paul Jones have all said they’ll consider writing us more stuff. I asked Robert Fripp but he’s declined. I also tried Ishiguro, who was a songwriter before he became an author but he also said no. I’d love to get a piece from David Gilmour and Polly Samson but he’s on a world tour so I can’t see that happening either, unfortunately. It’s not easy to get hold of rock singers. Meanwhile we have an ever-expanding repertoire of English 20th century song and some off the wall pieces by Gavin Bryars and Roger Marsh. More with my fellow Conductus tenors too – we’re really firing now and have gigs in Spain and the UK coming up. I’m off to Canada in April to do Peter-Anthony Togni’s Responsio with bass clarinettist Jeff Reilly (our recording has just been nominated for a Juno). The future is the same as the past really – finding out what you can do and running with it. I hope to keep running for a good few years yet.
For more information visit John Potter's website & ECM Records.
Click on the album cover to read our review of Amores Pasados.
The Amores Pasados quartet (me, Anna Maria Friman, Jake Heringman and Ariel Abramovich) is probably the most perfect ensemble I’ve worked with. We just breathe each other’s music. Tony Banks, Sting and John Paul Jones have all said they’ll consider writing us more stuff. I asked Robert Fripp but he’s declined. I also tried Ishiguro, who was a songwriter before he became an author but he also said no. I’d love to get a piece from David Gilmour and Polly Samson but he’s on a world tour so I can’t see that happening either, unfortunately. It’s not easy to get hold of rock singers. Meanwhile we have an ever-expanding repertoire of English 20th century song and some off the wall pieces by Gavin Bryars and Roger Marsh. More with my fellow Conductus tenors too – we’re really firing now and have gigs in Spain and the UK coming up. I’m off to Canada in April to do Peter-Anthony Togni’s Responsio with bass clarinettist Jeff Reilly (our recording has just been nominated for a Juno). The future is the same as the past really – finding out what you can do and running with it. I hope to keep running for a good few years yet.
For more information visit John Potter's website & ECM Records.
Click on the album cover to read our review of Amores Pasados.
