Simon Thoumire is a young man going places. He’s sprinted up through the ranks to a position where his musical services are much in demand.His original work is being commissioned by festivals and he has his own flourishing record company.
One of Scotlands Brightest young composers tells Alan McIntosh Brown about pushing the barriers of music.
Simon Thoumire is a young man going places. He’s sprinted up through the ranks to a position where his musical services are much in demand.His original work is being commissioned by festivals and he has his own flourishing record company.
His musical career began in his home city of Edinburgh at the tender age of nine. " I was in the Boys Brigade" he says "and I played the bagpipes. But sometimes piping is all about piping and not so much about music", he says, not altogether tongue in cheek. "My Mum and Dad used to have these old McCalmans records and we used to dance round the room to them, so that’s how I really got into Scottish music."
He was impressed by the concertina playing of the Mac’s Hamish Bayne. "I just heard it and totally loved it." He says. Simon’s sister was learning accordion at the time with legendary Edinburgh teacher Chrissie Leatham. "She knew a concertina player called Tom Ward who got me a concertina and that’s what happened," he says.
After a musical apprenticeship in Scotland’s accordion and fiddle clubs, he played with the Hopscotch Ceilidh Band before joining Seannachioe in 1987 at the age of 17 and was with them for 5 years. Quite a lot happened in that time: the band made a record, Simon won the BBC Young Tradition Award in 1989, recorded an album with guitarist Ian Carr and then another one with Seannachie.
This was followed by The Simon Thoumire Three and a well-received album Waltzes for Playboys before his brilliantly titled Green Linnet release March Strathspey and Surreal took the ear of reviewers. At this point he decided to more major composing and contacted the Celtic Connections Festival. "I said: I’ve got this idea ro write a suite – a folk/jazz one for nine people with lots of sax, trumpet bagpipes and fiddles. I was just getting into writing bigger pieces and listening to quite a lot of records," he says.
His latest big composition is The Scottish Requiem, again done for Celtic Connections. "I’m greatly patriotic and just love Scotland and I just want to write about Scottish things," he says, "but it’s not necessarily mountains or anything like that but more about the people. I wrote the music commemorating the last thousand years of the Scottish people using the Roman mass, but had it translated into Scots by Rod Paterson. Then I wrote the music for choir and orchestra, bagpipes, Scottish fiddles and solo singers as well. It hasn’t been recorded yet but hopefully it will be later this year."
Last year he he commemorated a very special event by releasing Music for a New Scottish Parliament on his own label. "I decided that we had this momentous coming up and no one was doing too much for it," he says. "I wanted to write a new piece of music using old styles and old traditional stuff, but the new parliament had to go forward so I wanted a piece of contemporary music. It came out on the first July, the day of the Parliament opening. It was great to be able to commemorate that."
Another feather in Simon’s cap is his record company Tartan Tapes, which began to cater for the tourist market. "Basically the tourist stuff out there is total crap," he says. "There’s a lot of companies doing it and it makes a lot of money, I wanted to put records out that tourists would want to buy and take home with real traditional musicians." He’s now created a fiddle-orientated subsidiary Foot Stompin’ Records which has already released albums by Liz Doherty and Fiddlesticks.
His latest solo concertina album is available only on his web.site – that’s www.tartantapes.com – and Simon classes his own music as still very experimental."I play lots of reels and jigs but also work with some freer concepts." He says."I’m working on free music but in a Scottish way. I think we should be listening to everybody’s music and not just pigeon-holing it. So many folk musicians just listen to folk music. You’ll learn form other folk musicians but you’ll learn as much listening to Oscar Peterson or Pinchas Zukerman or someone like that."
There seems to be no end to Simon’s creativity and while he may continue to keep us guessing musically, the end result will always be both challenging and satisfying.
Alan McIntosh Brown
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