SIMON THOUMIRE

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13/11/2007: Scots Fiddle Concerto

Come along and listen to my Scots Fiddle Concerto on Friday 16th November which is being premiered as part of the Scottish Fiddle Festival in the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, 8pm. We just finished rehearsing it and I'm very happy with it. Gordon Gunn, the soloist, is a wonderful player and is pulling of my new music with great aplomb. The ensemble are Harris Playfair (piano), Kevin MacKenzie (guitar), Sarah Wilson, Lori Watson (fiddles).

Also on Friday night, top Scottish fiddlers Aidan O'Rourke, Jenna Reid, Mairi Campbell and Patsy Reid are performing my series of fiddle solos and 1 duo. They are all based on Scottish tunes (3 west highland and 1 east coast) and are written to show of the players and their skill.

I'm really looking forward to hear these compositions realised by all these brilliant players. Thanks for Fiddle 2007 for agreeing to a night of new music which is completed by Lau, theirselves an improvisory and exciting crew. Read the Scotsman preview http://living.scotsman.com/music.cfm?id=1777602007

Programme:

A fonn gunbhitrom (I am disposed to mirth) - soloist Mairi Campbell
Allan Ramsay, a Jig - soloist Aidan O'Rourke
Tiree Air - soloist Jenna Reid
A' cheud luan do'n raidh (The First Monday of the Season) - soloists Patsy Reid, Aidan O'Rourke
Scots Fiddle Concerto - soloist Gordon Gunn

http://www.scotsfiddlefestival.com/

27/08/2007: YouTube clip of me playing the concertina.

I've just worked out how to embed YouTube clips! Here's me playing the concertina!

06/08/2007: Herald article written by Rob Adams on Simon's Garvie Bagpipe Concerto.

Simon Thoumire tends not to think up ideas in ones and twos. No sooner had he launched the Young Scottish Traditional Musician of the Year competition back in 2001 than he was initiating the Scots Trad Music Awards to help raise traditional music's profile.

At around the same time came the slightly less visible but no less valuable Distil project, which, during retreat weekends, encourages composers from within traditional music to work on a grander scale than the reel and air formats.

So as Thoumire announces the premiere of his bagpipe concerto as part of this year's Piping Live! celebration in Glasgow, it's no surprise to learn that he has three other similar projects on the go.

After the bagpipe concerto, Thoumire starts work on a fiddle concerto to be premiered at Edinburgh's Fiddle 2007 festival in November. Then he turns his attention to a symphony. He's also planning a clarsach concerto for 2008.

All this creative activity is timely. Even Thoumire himself was beginning to forget that he is a musician first - he's a brilliant and innovative concertina player - and an administrator by default.

"Admin can very easily become distracting," he says. "I mean, don't get me wrong, I enjoy it and there's a lot of satisfaction in seeing these projects come to fruition.

"But it's not really creative and oddly enough, it was during the last Distil weekend when I realised that we've been getting all these great composers to come in and work with the musicians on the course and I wasn't making the most of their advice and encouragement myself."

Thoumire is no stranger to larger-scale composition. In the past he has written such pieces as a suite for the new Scottish parliament and a New Voices commission for Celtic Connections.

These were, he concedes, marathons of up to 50 minutes' duration and while he learned a lot from working on them, it was one of the most basic frustrations that he experienced with these pieces that made him look at his bagpipe concerto differently.

"The biggest bugbear about new work is that, generally, it gets played once and you can hardly ever get a repeat performance," he says. "And no wonder. Most pieces are so long and are generally written for either very particular instrumentation or really big line-ups.

"I want these pieces I'm writing to be played. So I'm not writing for an orchestra - or at great length, just about 15 to 20 minutes - I'm writing for folk groups. The bagpipe concerto, for example, is written for the pipes, a piano and two fiddles - a line-up that most folk groups can turn their hands to. And the idea is for these new pieces to go into the folk repertoire."

This shouldn't be taken to mean that these are simple tunes. With the bagpipe concerto being written for the new Garvie smallpipes - which have a chromatic chanter instead of the Highland bagpipes' eight notes - Thoumire was keen to showcase the virtuosity of the soloist, Simon McKerrell.

"I really like technique and although I know that's not everything, I wanted to write difficult music to challenge the players and to show the broader audience just how good traditional musicians are," he says.

"In fact, another reason for writing for the small line-up was that, for me, pipers and fiddlers don't work well in front of an orchestra.

"Classical violinists are taught to project whereas traditional musicians don't necessarily have that kind of presentation. I want people to sit up and pay attention."

As well as challenging the musicians, Thoumire wants to challenge other composers to write music based on the tradition in the concerto form.

"When people hear the word concerto', they automatically think classical music'," he says. "But that's only because, over the centuries, classical composers have made the most of the form.

"There's no reason why traditional music shouldn't have a catalogue of concertos.

"They're fun to write, if quite hard work too, and you can leave room for the soloist to improvise within the piece and make it his or her own."

Simon Thoumire's Garvie Bagpipe Concerto premieres at the National Piping Centre, Glasgow on Thursday. Piping Live! runs to Sunday. For further details, call 0141 564 4242 or log on to < a href = " http://www.pipinglive.co.uk target=_blank> www.pipinglive.co.uk

31/07/2007: Garvie Bagpipe Concerto to be performed on 9th August.

My latest composition will be performed on the 9th August at Glasgow's Piping Live Festival at 5pm (National Piping Centre). It is written for smallpipes, fiddles and piano, an ensemble I feel that the instrument and traditional music is more comfortable in - rather than orchestra. The soloist is Dr Simon McKerrell, and the ensemble consists of Harris Playfair (piano), Sarah Wilson (fiddle), Shona Mooney (fiddle)

Anyway here are some facts I compiled about the piece:

• First ever Scottish Smallpipe concerto (probably even bagpipe but I can't substantiate this)
• Commissioned by Garvie Bagpipes
• Utilises Garvie Bagpipe’s unique fully chromatic chanter
• Written for a traditional music ensemble where the instrument is most at home
• Written to show off the virtuostic capabilities of the instrument and to expand the Scottish Smallpipe repertoire.

I'll upload the score after the event.

11/06/2007: Reviews for Third Flight Home

It’s always risky claiming uniqueness in the music world, so if there are other concertina and piano duos out there whose repertoires include tunes from Jimmy Shand and the Moscow Arts Trio, apologies. If they incorporate the Scottish and jazz traditions with anything like the same brio and sheer cheek as Messrs Thoumire and Milligan, then bring them on. The Scottish folk scene’s Mr Ideas and his genre-straddling piano-playing buddy have a ball taking strathspeys, reels and pipe tunes down unpredictable paths, but alongside the fun and funky rhythms, there’s the beautiful expression of Thoumire’s lyrical My Mary. A hugely enjoyable release from two of our leading talents. The Herald – Rob Adams 9th June 2007

The duo of concertina player Simon Thoumire and pianist David Milligan is a well-established musical partnership, and one that offers a diverse range of stylistic options. The combination of instruments is an unusual but effective one, and both players wear their considerable virtuosity lightly. Their selection of material, much of it from contemporary sources, is spot-on, and the music has a refreshing zest and sparkle that never flags, whether on conventional reels and Strathspeys from the Scottish tradition or more off-the-wall selections like Russion pianist Misha Alperin’s Wedding in the Wild Forest. The Scotsman – Kenny Mathieson 8th June 2007

Concertina wiz and folk entrepreneur Thoumire brings out a second album with ace jazz-piano player Milligan in the festive folk/fusion style that's become associated with the Edinburgh scene. Fast fingering, quixotic diversions, cheeky asides and an unfettered musical imagination are given full reign in pieces that originate in Highland traditions, the work of the Moscow Art Trio, or even English Morris music. If there is little tonal variety in the free-reed and piano pairing, there is certainly huge variety of form. Norman Chalmers, Scotland on Sunday. Scotland on Sunday - Norman Chalmers 3rd June, 2007

Scotsman Article "Old squeeze given a new lease of life’"
IN THE comforting realms of cliché, concertinas are associated with salty dogs and shivering timbers. In reality, the little squeezebox was once, along with the melodeon, "as common as blackberries", as one 19th-century Dundee observer put it (see the compendious dissertation by Stuart Eydmann, The Life and Times of the Scottish Concertina at www.concertina.com .

It was once played by everyone from Salvation Army bands to music-hall turns. But consider another scenario, however unlikely: a concertina in full fling with an 18th-century Scots reel as, on piano, a louche left hand churns out stride rhythms, à la Jelly Roll Morton.

The concertina in question is wielded with panache by Simon Thoumire, the piano by David Milligan, on Third Flight Home (Foot Stompin' Records), the second album combining two of the most inventive talents from the Scottish contemporary folk and jazz scenes. Thoumire is a concertina wizard, composer and folk music activist - among other things the man behind the Scots Trad Music Awards; Milligan is a widely acclaimed player on the Scots jazz scene and beyond, who has made frequent cross-over excursions, often in the company of his wife and musical partner, the harpist Corrina Hewat, including the rumbustious folk-jazz stampede of the Unusual Suspects Big Band.

This stripped-down, wonderfully agile piano-squeezebox partnership had its origins in the Edinburgh Queen's Hall Christmas show, A Winter's Night, explains Thoumire. "Dave and I played one of the tracks on the new record, Welcome Christmas Morning [a plaintive Jimmy Shand air], and we just really hit it off. We did the show again the following year and after that we decided to do our first recording, The Big Day In.

"I love playing with Dave," he continues. "He's a great listening musician, and the combined sound really works for me." An unlikely instrumental pairing? "I suppose you could say that about the concertina with anything," he laughs.

Rather indulging in overt fireworks, Milligan's piano integrates with lissom ease into the tunes, many of which are vintage Scots fiddle or bagpipe material (although the late John D Burgess could scarcely have imagined his already eccentric bagpipe hornpipe The Ballachulish Walkabout romping over a beefy boogie roll). But can the concertina cope in such company? You bet. "I play the English concertina," says Thoumire, "with four octaves, fully chromatic - of all the folk instruments, it's probably closest to the piano. I mean... 56-note chords if you really want to go for it."

Going for it is Thoumire's style, He's currently busy writing two concertos for soloists and folk ensemble, one featuring Border pipes for August's Piping Live! festival in Glasgow, the other for Edinburgh's Fiddle 2007 in November.

Despite jazz leanings from an early age, Milligan used to be roped into playing piano with fiddlers in the Border village of Denholm where he grew up, and renewed his acquaintance with the tradition when he met Hewat at Leeds College of Music. He dismisses any suggestion of compromise in his duetting with Thoumire: "That suggests you're having to restrict in some way. Any compromises, certainly from my point of view, are more to do with what's right for the music itself, because the way Simon plays is certainly not compromising at all. But there are times, for example, when you might be playing a Scott Skinner reel, with a particular tonality, and there's no point in trying to force oblique jazz harmonies just to make it interesting.

"Sometimes," he laughs, "A major is just thing you're looking for."

In A Major or otherwise, these tried-and-tested tunes are rediscovered here with rare freshness. Catch the pair live if you can, though unfortunately not until the Edinburgh Fringe in August. Jim Gilchrist, The Scotsman – 8th June 2007.

08/06/2007: New Third Flight Home CD with David Milligan out at last!

Well we finally managed to bring the CD out! I'm really happy with it. The cover looks great (no we weren't sitting on a plane) and our new music is great fun to play. You can download a track from it here.

25/04/2007: Download Simon's latest free improvised CD for free.

You can now now download my new improvised CD FREE_C for free by clicking here. I'm very proud of it and I think it shows off the English concertina to its full extent. Please note this is not a CD of Scottish tunes.

04/04/2007: Simon's online blog

I've just set up a blog at http://simonthoumire.vox.com/. My idea is to make reports in the run up to the Scots Trad Music Awards and everything else that happens in my life. Feel free to make any comments.

24/01/2007: Two great reviews from Simon and Dave's Celtic Connections gig

"Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow An interesting contrast in approaches, here, between two pianists whose styles incorporate their native traditions and jazz. While David Milligan uses his formidable improviser's chops almost as an inspirational tool in firing up the reels, jigs and strathspeys that he and concertinist Simon Thoumire play, Brittany's Didier Squiban constructs jazz trios and quartets using Breton measures and melodies as the building bricks.

There was much mirth and a little more musical danger with Milligan and Thoumire. They're heard all too rarely in these parts, considering they're local, but they have a terrific mutual understanding, allowing for apparently random melodic feints and changes of tempo, and have developed a repertoire full of variety. Delicate lyricism, playful stops and starts, big funky chords, brilliantly agile fingering by both musicians, spontaneous invention and the rollicking ragtime drive of Jelly Roll Morton - well, it's a Scottish surname - combined in a set that was as understated in its presentation as it was commanding in its execution." Rob Adams, The Herald

"THE Scottish duo of Simon Thoumire and David Milligan unites small and large members of the keyed instrument family, with Thoumire on concertina and Milligan on piano - here, a Steinway grand. Both players' backgrounds in jazz as well as folk, have long marked them out as two of the most inventive talents on the contemporary Celtic scene, and their set was nothing short of electrifying.

Rarely, if ever, have I heard material and arrangements of such difficulty, complexity and sophistication wear those qualities so lightly, be it in the pair's many marvellous reworkings of traditional-style tunes - brimming equally with wit, mischief and virtuosity - or in their version of a fiendishly intricate piece by the Russian pianist/composer Misha Alperin, itself spliced with a Jelly Roll Morton-ised fiddle reel.

Another highlight was Thoumire's slow air My Mary, a setting of a William Cowper love-poem addressed to a dying wife, with Milligan's introduction of it as "a very beautiful tune" proving the understatement of the night." Sue Wilson, The Scotsman

12/01/2007: Simon is shortlisted in the Creative Scotland Awards

Simon has been shortlisted in the Scottish Arts Council's Creative Scotland Award. The list contains 20 artists who are all hoping to be one of the 10 chosen to receive a grant of £30,000 to realise their project. Simon's idea is to write a symphonic work based on Robert Burns’ burlesque on rural, outdoor, communion festivals, ‘The Holy Fair’. Anyone who hasn't read this poem should as it is fantastic. It is not as well known as some of Burns' works but well worth a read. Put the name into a search engine and you should find. The winners are announced in March. Visit the Creative Scotland Awards website.

12/01/2007: Simon commissioned to write a fiddle concerto

Simon is currently writing a series of Scots fiddle solos, duets and a fiddle concerto. The concept of the music is to write for the fiddle and not the violin. This way the music will sound like the player rather than the composer dictating everything that happens on the page. The manuscript for the music will be posted shortly. The series will be premiered on the 16th November 2007 at the Scots Fiddle Festival.

29/04/06 Simon Thoumire web concertina course

Simon has started a web concertina course at www.ayepod.net. It costs $36 and will run for 4 weeks. Each lesson is live and will be then available for unlimited streaming download after the event. Check it out http://www.ayepod.net/webcasts/simonthoumire_teaching.htm

17/04/2006 Live Webcast of Simon playing on Ayepod.net on Saturday 22nd April.

Simon will be playing live on Saturday 22nd April for an hour. There is live webchat so if you have any questions please get in touch. Tickets will be $5 (approx £2.80) and will be available on the day from http://www.ayepod.net/webcast.htm

15/04/2006 New Scots song submitted to Liet - Lavlut, the alternative Eurovision Song Contest for minority languages.

You can download an MP3 here. You can view the music for the song here. I'll keep the page updated with the result.

25/11/2005 New album recorded with David Milligan

We've just been in the Sound Cafe studio for two days recording our new album. It was a lot of fun. We had a bit more time to record than the last time (one day!). I'll put more details up soon (track listing etc) and hopefully we have a title soon as well.

30/06/2005 Portsoy Boat Festival Ballads fae the Bairns

05/05/2005 Simon and Dave playing in Italy

Dave Milligan and myself are heading out to Italy on the 28th and 29th May. We'll be playing in GANDINO(Bergamo) on the 28th and TREVISO on the 29th. We're looking forward to it and hope the weather keeps nice! Check out some photos.

03/05/2005 Teaching concertina at Limerick World Music Centre

I've just come back from an afternoon in Limerick World Music Centre teaching amazing anglo concertina player Edel Fox. Edel was this year's Young Irish Musician of the Year and is a great talent. Look out for her in the future.

01/05/2005 EXPERIMENTS IN CULTURE

This is my new CD. It is an exploration of Scottish culture and identity. It features live recordings of everyday life and musicians, who are the people within the culture, improvising over the top of it. The musicians are Phil Bancroft, Mairi Campbell, Paul Dunmall, Dave Francis, Corrina Hewat, Kevin Mackenzie, Clare McLaughlin, Mark Maguire, Dave Milligan, Rachel Newton, Aidan O'Rourke and Simon Thoumire. .

It is not a CD of tunes and is a continuation from my previous compositions Celtic Connection's Suite, Music for a New Scottish Parliament, and the Scottish Requiem.

Buy it at Foot Stompin'.

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