Tag Archives: Ayanna Witter-Johnson

BBC SSO: Ayanna’s Hometown Roots

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SWG3, Glasgow

The marketing team at the BBC Scottish will doubtless interrogate the result of this away fixture in a Glasgow Finnieston club venue looking for first-time ticket-buyers, but superficially it was difficult to see the advantages over the orchestra’s home at the City Halls and Old Fruitmarket.

In under ten days, after all, Ilan Volkov will demonstrate how that complex can be filled with new music – and its own audience – for the weekend of his annual Tectonics extravaganza. Perhaps some of those attracted to SWG3 will be tempted to that event’s more radical experimentation – and perhaps that will be a journey easier to make than one to the orchestra’s mainstream classical season.

It was also a happy coincidence that Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s concert with the SSO and pianist Fergus McCreadie occurred on the same day that Glasgow International Jazz Festival unveiled its 40th anniversary programme.

Witter-Johnson is an engaging personality, as she demonstrated at The Hub during the 2023 Edinburgh International Festival, and some of the ingredients of that performance were repeated here in what was something of a composer portrait, fronted by the woman herself.

The three movements of the Ocean Floor Suite were more thoughtfully presented this time around, prefaced by an improvisation from McCreadie and carefully narrated by the composer, whose voice and cello were otherwise accompanied by percussionists. It is a work rooted in personal experience, and so was the more surprising inclusion of songs by Glasgow-born rock and jazz bass-player and vocalist Jack Bruce earlier in the programme.

Like her, his student study was cello (at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama) and he had encouraged his daughter’s friend in her earlier years. Her reading of his Rope Ladder to the Moon, from the Songs for a Tailor album, first released more than 15 years before she was born, revealed a deep understanding of a revered classic, and it was equally fascinating to hear McCreadie bring his specific style to FM, which Bruce wrote and recorded in the early 1990s.

The evening built from a partnership with a string quartet of SSO desk principals through those selections to more substantial orchestrations of songs from Witter-Johnson’s Road Runner album, and the first half ended in a lovely Katie Chatburn arrangement of the jazz standard, Misty.

After the interval, the Ocean Floor Suite was followed by the opening movement from Witter-Johnson’s Windrush Reflections, entitled Mango Dreams and dedicated to her grandparents, with harp and bass clarinet joining the quartet, before the programme’s sole symphonic orchestral work, FAIYA!, an LSO commission that showed off her own orchestrating ability. Conductor Enyi Okpara, currently assistant conductor at the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, directed all the ensemble pieces, and he seemed less comfortable with that work, where assured opening and closing sections bracketed some rhythmic uncertainty in the middle that only the players’ professionalism kept on track.

A Chatburn arrangement of another Road Runner track, Rise Up, closed the programme, save for an encore of Witter-Johnson’s regular party-piece solo version of Sting’s Roxanne. It’s a crowd pleaser, but one this musician has long out-grown.

Keith Bruce

Concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3

Picture of Fergus McCreadie and Ayanna Witter-Johnson, credit BBC

Ayanna Witter-Johnson & LSO Percussion Ensemble

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The Hub, Edinburgh

Since Ben Tindall created a home for the Edinburgh International Festival in an abandoned Church of Scotland building on Castlehill in 1999, the architectural confection lumbered with the prosaic name of The Hub has presented a challenge for successive directors of the event. Although there have been successful one-off concerts and productions there over the years, it possibly achieved maximum usefulness as a studio for filmed chamber music during the restrictions of the Covid pandemic.

Nicola Benedetti’s solution to the use of the place during the three weeks is an eclectic series of recitals reflecting the range of the wider programme, which she hopes will make it a venue for the conversation she wants to have with the audience about the future direction of the Festival.

Few of the musicians performing there will encapsulate that range more individually than songwriter and cellist Ayanna Witter-Johnson. She last appeared in Scotland as a member of Peter Gabriel’s touring band and at EIF as a composer, her specially-commissioned work, Blush, paired with Judith Weir’s woman.life.song, performed by Chineke! and Andrea Baker during those Covid years. That piece, which plundered the archives of 70s jazz orchestration and Blaxploitation movie soundtracks, suggested a restless musical mind which her cheerful engaging combination of soulful performance and virtuosity here quickly confirmed.

Her collaborators were jazz pianist and composer Gwilym Simcock and the long-serving Principal Percussionist of the London Symphony Orchestra Neil Percy with three of his LSO colleagues from the section. The Hub stage was filled with their instruments, tuned and simpler, but the metronomic beat of much of the music came from a foot-pedal and woodblock operated by Witter-Johnson herself, as, standing, she also played riffs and improvised on her long spiked cello, both bowed and pizzicato, and sang quite beautifully. As her solo encore of Sting’s Roxanne, complete with Bach-like introduction, demonstrated, she developed that startling one-woman-band technique to perfection before success brought her the luxury of these musical partners.

Her relationship with the LSO goes back more than a decade to her youthful involvement with the orchestra’s composers’ hub (every arts organisation has to have one) initiative, but it has reached a new level with the release in October of an album by this ensemble, Ocean Floor, on the LSO Live label. This concert was a showcase for that recording, built around her suite that gives it its title.

There are tragic stories, historical and personal, behind the music Witter-Johnson has composed for the project, but you might not guess that on an initial listen. She has a gift for joyful melody, both instrumental and vocal, and the complexity of her own writing teamed beautifully with Neil Percy’s improvising and Simcock’s arranging of her earlier tune, Chariot, in a distinctly Steve Reich style.

Simcock’s own composition for the album, Holding, although expansively introduced by the pianist, was less successful, probably because the short theme which it explores is less interesting in itself, but it did give each of the other players – David Jackson, Tom Edwards and Sam Walton (also a member of Colin Currie’s quartet) – their own moment in the spotlight.

Keith Bruce