Arthur McBride
Paul Brady singing and self-accompanying
My latest obsession of the last five minutes is “Arthur McBride,” a folk song, likely originally Irish, and specifically the performance of Paul Brady that I was guided to by Matt Gold and Jim Tashjian while talking to them about their Storm Jameson project.
This is a great song, by which I mean that its elements—a narrative lyric, a melody, a harmony—are inseparably joined such that one cannot be distinguished as subordinate to the other. It’s great in that its structure, the recurring form or melody and chords, proves so well able to trace its larger emotional arc, from a jaunty walk on Christmas morning, to the seductive speeches of the recruiting sergeant, to the threatening words that follow and the depiction of violence that follows that. Everything is integrated into this structure.
It’s also highly distinctive: a song depicting resistance to the imperial press. An anti-war song that imagines scrapping with and beating the shit out of the warmongers.
I messed with it enough on the keyboard to notice some enticing elements structurally: the melody begins by shooting upward to a high tonic. It’s kind of unusual to hit such a high note right off the bat, but it grabs attention, and means that the beginning of every verse will have this jolt built it. While the melody shoots up to start, the harmonic root motion waits until the second phrase to make a similar upward advance, while the melody has now dropped to a lower and therefore less tense register. This little setup is pleasing enough that I don’t mind at all hearing it over and over, but it also proves able to sustain a great variety of dramatic and dialogic turns in the narrative.
Paul Brady who is singing shows himself likewise capable of developing the voices of different characters and their emotions all while singing at what at first to appears to be pressing the limits of his range. And then accompanying himself on guitar he deploys a similarly dazzling array expressive devices and variations in support of everything else that is happening. This dazzles me the most, as it is part of the great and perhaps slightly underappreciated skill set that has absorbed me in recent years, namely what in jazz we call “comping,” or playing accompaniment.
For a jazz keyboardist this is the less-important seeming flip side of soloing. When you solo, you are the center of attention, and you are playing lines (usually with your right hand, in the upper register of the piano, as in right of center) that are meant to jump to the top of the mix of chamber jazz. Comping is happening there too, however, namely usually what your left hand is doing, playing some chords and rhythms in support of your right hand, to name the basics. Then when you aren’t soloing, you are playing with both hands in support of what’s happening. This is normally not meant to be at the top of the mix, not what gets the most attention from listeners.
But of course as one gets deeper into this music, and if one accepts some of the premises that, for example, Stephan Crump set out in last week’s interview, then you start to realize that both of those activities, comping with your left hand for yourself, and comping with both hands for other people, for the band, are just as important, and just as studded with subtleties and possibilities.
Comping is arguably a harder skill set to develop if for no other reason than that it has an ancillary (or seemingly ancillary) relationship to other things happening. How do you prepare to play this role better? There are lots of answers, but it’s just worth pointing out the difficulty.1
The accompanying guitar on “Arthur McBride,” though it comes from a duo album, actually all comes from Paul Brady, who in this case sounds closer to two guitarists than one: he covers the accompanying core tasks—creating a solid rhythmic world, guiding us through the harmonic progression of the song—and then has a deep store of moves to make to amplify narrative development and dramatic moments. An early indicator this depth is the introduction, where he plays riffs and ornaments (“solos”) while setting up the basic structure of the song—it’s a “solo up front” kind of introduction, as jazz folks would say.
I’ll zero in on a turning point: the sergeant declares himself insulted by Arthur and his cousin’s refusal to join, and threatens to take their heads off. At this point Brady plays a substitute chord voicing, not a wild substitution, just an inversion, and not with a complex rhythm but rather a startlingly simple single stroke on the first beat of a measure. But for me it’s like a window is opening or a world emerging. So it’s going to be like this? Yes.
I didn’t know if that move, or the one soon after with a rapid set of strums, were planned or had become a regular part of this arrangement, but a look at a live version of the song from 1977 shows that, indeed, he does not make the same move at this point—he makes it at other dramatic points. That to me means that he’s treating the comping task as a jazz musician would: drawing from a range of possibilities as the moment calls for.
There’s also a break from the vocals mid-tune before the speaker and cousin Arthur reply to the sergeant, which also seems like a good thing to do live, and also likely another possibility that could be done or not done as Brady wished on a particular evening.
What seems more stable across the two performances is the expressive vocals, or at least, the care around making every word understood. There’s fabulous consistency there, every word, every pickup phrase given a place. A story is being told and you have to be able to follow it—even if you don’t know what a shillelagh is. And so there’s a “core” role for the vocals that he assiduously attends to.
And that’s all I have time for today, friends. See you next week with the fellows from Alta Vista.
I don’t think, when writing about Storm Jameson, I gave sufficient praise to what those two musicians do on every track, namely to integrate two guitars seamlessly. There’s no reason this should work out! Would it be easy for two pianists to provide accompaniment when they are confined to playing in the same relatively limited range? And yet these folks do it, over and over.