Barclay Martin
Barclay Martin Went From Thinking About Leaving Music To Fronting Two New Projects...
Sometime in the middle of a difficult tour last spring, Barclay Martin nearly left the world of music.
Martin, 28, a longtime and well-known folk singer/songwriter in Kansas City, confronted something personal and distressing: the realization that the path he was on was headed in a direction he didn’t want to take.
“I figured out that I was going at it all wrong,” he said. “I was trying to will something into being. I was forcing it: I thought the way to do the singer/songwriter thing was to go in and build a market where I didn’t have one.
“It was such a bad tour. It almost undid me. It shut off my internal sense of hearing.”
These days his instincts have found truer bearings. Martin is now the leader of his own group, the five-piece Barclay Martin Ensemble, a band that includes some well-known local jazz musicians.
He is also the sole creator of another music project: the soundtrack to a Third World documentary. Neither has anything to do with the other, but both have revived that internal sense of hearing he’d lost last year.
“I’ve been compared to James Taylor since I started,” he said. “For so long I’d just been grinding things out and asking questions later. Now I’ve learned to really listen to where I am as an artist and then act.”
His ensemble is pianist Mark Lowrey, bassist Rick Willoughby, percussionist Giuliano Mingucci and vocalist Erin McGrane of the local cabaret/rock band Alacartoona.
“I’ve always been a fan of jazz,” Martin said. “I don’t play it; I don’t have a theory background. … But I got into listening to jazz and really started to love the nuances, the musical intelligence, the raw honesty. When I heard Mark play, something resonated. I thought, ‘I need to see how I can make this work.’
Martin had known Lowrey through Willoughby, a former jazz student at UMKC and, like Mingucci, a member of the rock/fusion band Bixby Lane. When Lowrey came into the picture, Martin said, “he was like the missing piece to really help identify the next season of my songwriting.”
A few months ago the band brought in McGrane as a vocalist and auxiliary percussionist.
The ensemble’s music, Martin said, is all about spontaneity, about following instincts and trusting impulses.
“I’d already had some songs leaning toward jazzier stuff,” he said.
“As I got to know Mark’s playing styles, it has become more natural to write atypical songs that accentuate each member of the group. I don’t’ say ‘This is a samba,’ or whatever. I leave it up to them. No rendition of one song is ever identical, and I love that. The whole process has been very natural and organic.”
Martin will interrupt that process at the end of April for about a month so he can tend to that other project. Through a longtime friend who is the director for the Christian Foundation for Children and Aging, he asked to help produce a documentary about people in the Maguindanao province in the southern Philippines.
CFCA is a lay Catholic foundation that fosters relationships between sponsors in the United States and children and elderly people in developing nations.
“They want to create a true documentary,” Martin said, “not an infomercial or advertisement but a true documentary of some of the communities in the southern Philippines … They sponsor around 50,000 kids in the Philippines alone.”
Martin’s role is to be the observer, the guy in front of the camera who will introduce his viewers into the lives and customs of the region, which is a mix of Catholics and Muslims.
“We’ll interact on a personal level with the citizens of the region,” he said. “We’ll visit people in their homes and get to know what a day in their lives is like.”
He will also write a soundtrack of about 20 songs. The music, he said, will employ “as many elements of Filipino music as I can.”
Sometime in January 2008 he will make his fourth trip to the Philippines. If all goes as planned, he will participate in a concert with Filipino musicians at a 3,000-person venue that is being built by the people of the province, which he calls a fascinating place. It can be exciting, too.
“There has been some terrorism there from a group of separatists who want the province to be controlled by Muslims,” he said.
“They’ve had bombings, kidnappings and beheadings and all sorts of wild things. They keep me pretty well protected when I’m there. There’s no real imminent danger; I never felt unsafe. But, you know, better safe than sorry...That’s an element I try to downplay with my parents a little bit.”
Less than a year ago he was pondering life without music. Now he is behind two significant music projects based in different hemispheres. How is he handling it all?
“It’s massively exciting,” Martin said. “You know when people ask you if you could make up your dream job, what would it be?
This is better than anything I could have come up with, and I’m pursuing it with a great sense of gratitude. The gifts I have will play out well with the opportunities I’ve been given.” (Timothy Finn/ The Kansas City Star)
No comments:
Post a Comment