John Martyn

John Martyn passed away last January 29th: he was a sixty-year-old Scot to whom life had given, with one hand, an immeasurable vocal talent, while with the other it had gradually stripped away his peace and tranquility. Of course, he had his own part in it too, hitting the bottle hard, waging an endless Risk-style battle between his timid will to quit and the voluptuous allure of the drink; needless to say, for him it was always a losing war. Love didn't treat him any better: his marriage to singer Beverly Kutner, his collaborator in the early days of his career, fell apart in 1979 after ten years, plunging John into what he himself called the darkest period of his life. But that wasn't the end of it: in 2003 he lost a leg and ended up in a wheelchair, yet he kept on playing live.

But John Martyn's story isn't a sad one; rather, it's mocking and treacherous in its fate. The albums released between 1971 and 1975, from "Bless The Weather" to "Sunday Child", are considered by almost unanimous critical consensus to be hugely important records, yet ones that brought Martyn little in terms of sales. His name would instead become widely known in the Eighties, when he began collaborating with stars such as Phil Collins and Eric Clapton, in a decidedly minor phase of his artistic career.

As already mentioned, Martyn's finest work lies between 1971 and 1975, and his two masterpieces - capable of redeeming all the ugliness of a life that was by turns generous and cruel to him - sit between "Bless The Weather" and "Sunday Child": "Inside Out" and its predecessor "Solid Air", both from 1973. These are the records that earned him weighty, imposing comparisons with Tim Buckley and Nick Drake. Certainly, like Buckley, Martyn too was a "navigator of the stars," someone who turned his voice into an instrument, who used singing as a stream of consciousness, who transformed words into sublime or terrifying sounds. And certainly, like Drake, he too hid torment and a sense of human loneliness behind celestial harmonies and never-overwrought arrangements. But John Martyn was, musically, entirely his own man: he had started out in Glasgow's folk underground with Hamish Imlach as his mentor and Davey Graham as his idol, beginning to cross-pollinate folk-rock with the rhythmic and harmonic structures of jazz and blues.

"Solid Air" is the definitive record of the stylistic balance John Martyn achieved, whereas the following, equally essential "Inside Out" is, in a sense, its unrepeatable surpassing.

On "Solid Air", produced by his longtime collaborator John Wood, Martyn's voice and guitar are backed by Fairport Convention (Richard Thompson on guitar, Simon Nicol on violin, Dave Pegg on bass, Dave Mattacks on drums), Pentangle's double bassist Danny Thompson, and keyboardist John Bundrick.

The title track is an astral journey dedicated to his friend Nick Drake, at the time still alive but already prey to a suffocating depression. Martyn's hypnagogic blues singing melts into the velvety touches of vibraphone (Tristan Fry) and the hazy melody of the sax (Tony Coe). The nocturnal anguish of "Solid Air" fades into the rustic folk of "Over The Hill", carved out by Richard Thompson's mandolin and violin, marked by a joyfully melancholic vocal melody.

"Don't Want To Know" recreates the dreamlike atmosphere of the opening track (again it's the imaginative dialogue between acoustic guitar and vibraphone that gives the song its intensity), before morphing into jazzy folk-rock thanks to Bundrick's pyrotechnic organ phrasing. The album's masterpiece is the cover of bluesman Skip James' "I'd Rather Be The Devil", turned into an infernal pandemonium: Martyn's werewolf-like vocal grows feverish over a tribal, menacing pulse of congas (Neemoi Acquaye), electronic keyboards and electric guitar, until, suddenly, the percussion settles down and the track expands into an interstellar psychedelic folk. That same possessed strain of blues returns in "Dreams By The Sea", where the lycanthropic mood is tempered by phenomenal touches of sax and electric piano.

It's worth pointing out that John Martyn, besides possessing extraordinary vocal skills, was also a superb folk guitarist, able to summon from his inspiration both the sighing arpeggios of "Go Down Easy" and the undulating, airy harmonies of "May You Never". Speaking of that latter track, John Wood recalled that Martyn, dissatisfied with the final version of "May You Never" at the end of the album's recording sessions, walked into the studio at two in the morning, alone with his guitar, to record its definitive version.

The two closing tracks sum up all the artistry found on "Solid Air": "The Man In The Station" flows through a melancholic folk before shifting into an energetic blues; elegant British soul meeting the tribulations of the Mississippi delta. Tribulations that become ghosts to be chased away amid the cascading chords that flood "The Easy Blues", fading out in a delicately jazzy finale.

Having reached the end, this writer will spare you any mawkish eulogy for an artist who slipped away in silence, and will spare himself the crocodile tears meant to move you with flowery prose: it's too easy to play the poet at someone else's expense. Now is the time for silence: let only that wandering, aimless voice of John Martyn be heard, in "Solid Air". Wherever that voice is headed, safe travels, old John.

In memory of John Martyn (1948-2009)

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01/02/2009