Wolfe has that gift of good songwriters: an ability to make lyrics sound like conversation, and vice-versa. I’m not sure that it’s a technique you can learn, but there are a few people with a genuine ability to live their personal life in song. At the same time, arguably from Nick Drake onwards, there seems to have been something nihilistic, fatalistic, running through contemporary lyrics.

Talking of Nick Drake, there seem to be few modern singer/songwriters that don’t acknowledge a debt to him, and I’m sure Alex Wolfe would too. Drake’s death was clearly a tragedy, but it’s the kind of tragedy that seems indelibly entwined with modern song. Themes of death, suicide, pointlessness, run through the lyrics and the actual lives of musicians like Tim and Jeff Buckley, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, Chester Benington, Michael Hutchence and many more.

DEAD MEN SINGING

Wolfe’s final song Talk (a performance which held the audience mesmerised) goes further: ‘We love the dead men singing on our radio, romanticise their fears/but we can’t talk about the kid next door, who killed himself last year,’ is a statement about society as well as a plea for the intercommunication that most of us crave but rarely achieve. Wolfe’s own musical survival technique is to objectify, in song, personal emotions that would otherwise be unbearable. This is his strength – so the paired works The Toughening and The Softening on the new album, are about grief and loss but also about being told to be other than what you are, to suppress emotion, and addressing the disconnect between how you feel and how you think you ought to behave: ‘I almost drowned myself in a bathtub rather than admit I was scared.’

The concert last Saturday, in Christ Church St Leonards, was the official launch of Everythinglessness. His music sensitively addresses issues such as masculinity and mental health. Despite the nihilism there is, in most of the numbers, an ultimate gleam of hope. His lyrics, like the best poetry, address the existential through the personal.

DRAWING PEOPLE IN

It’s a fine album, accomplished, authentic, and well produced, and the whole of Saturday’s performance was similarly well-planned. Wolfe plays electric and acoustic guitars and a mandolin. A string quartet were on stage, four very talented women who all also have clear admiration for Wolfe as an artist. His voice and instruments are perfectly tuned; he addresses his audience with an egoless directness and clarity that draws people in. He knows, in other words, how to sing. He communicated with, and held, this most diverse, wonderful, multi-generational example of Hastings audiences.

Wolfe’s long-time friend Spencer Jones was the support act; many people clearly did not know he was going to be there so he kindly explained why he was. (I recognised him but couldn’t think where from, until today when faithful Wikipedia reminded me that he played William Kempe in Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow, one of the wittiest and cleverest series ever produced on TV, in my opinion). His stand-up routine is unique – he does a lot of voice work with a looper and introduces, towards the end, a vibration plate. He invites the audience to present soup recipes and ladles out imaginary soup, which he refers to as imaginary soup. He also introduced a large talking home-made COVID virus. Altogether, very interesting and unexpected, and the audience enjoyed the whole thing.

More and more I see one-off, world-class performances of everything in Hastings, in the unique environments of our churches and secret venues in ancient houses and the back rooms of pubs. This was a home-grown concert – Wolfe lives part of the time here and part in London. Local musicians are named in the album credits. Once again I feel lucky to be living in the middle of this joyfully creative environment – despite any cultural Angst, Art is life-affirming.

Alexander Wolfe officially launched his latest album, Everythinglessness, at Christ Church St Leonards on Saturday 24 January. More details, dates, and teeshirts at alexanderwolfe.co.uk

Deepak has nine solo albums to date, and in 2000, his Searching for Satyam was awarded Best Instrumental Album at the South African Music Awards. He has also wonmany awards in the USA where he is based. He has collaborated all over the world with musicians of all genres.

Ram is genial and unassuming and, as a true educator, has a gift for clarifying what he is about to play in terms that his audience can understand. Thus, for instance, when I saw his concert at the Kino a couple of years ago, he explained that the ragas they played were based on a seven-beat sequence, or a nine-beat rhythm: Taa Taa Taa, Taa Taa Taa, ta-ka-ta ta-ka-ta ta-ka-ta. He also demonstrated how much variety can be achieved through a pentatonic scale, just five notes. If you haven’t already bought a ticket, please do so or queue at the church door for the chance to see this important musician in a spellbinding live performance.

“Deepak is a master of the Bansuri flute … Music for the soul, make no mistake”- Wax Magazine

Saturday 10 May, 7pm at Christ Church, Silchester Road, St Leonards. Tickets £15 on the door or in advance from Reg Hendrickse, 01424 250221 or JC Mcfee, 07842 623217

The Lodestar – guiding light, inspiration, Pole Star. The word is from Middle English. Middle English was strongly related to Old Norse. Old Norse was spoken by Vikings. Vikings inhabited Scandinavia and indeed England, until William The Conqueror, that is. 1066, and here we are in Hastings. The rest is tapestry, castles, and cookery. 

Erik, Olav, and Max were brought together not by a star but by their own stardom. The advance of technological communications over the last twenty years has enabled unprecedented advances in musical collaboration and re-imagining. This supreme trio is fully representative of this – a kind of re-positioning of classical music, not just in the staid respectable middle England suburbs where nice people applaud politely and go back home to agreeable suppers and fine wines, but as a central genre to be joyfully embraced, learned from. Jazz has long been incorporated into music of the classical genre: composers have introduced jazz cadences and rhythms into their symphonies, concertos, preludes, and sonatas – Satie, Debussy, then more obviously Copeland, Gershwin, Bernstein. Many more have similarly incorporated folk music. 

So although classical music has often transcended the barriers of form, it is only comparatively recently that the ‘genre’ has been opened up to a newly-receptive kind of audience. So it is that we can now hear erstwhile royal harpist, Catrin Finch, making beautiful music with virtuoso African Kora master Seckou Keita, or conversely Vikingur Olafsson playing Bach with notable imagination and originality, reaching out with rhythmic perfection to the farthest corners of the listening public. Olafsson, Icelandic genius, also a Viking, is interested in nurturing the roots and branches of Bach that reach into almost all music written in the Western world since. 

So here we are, back to Bach and this Viking trio. Much of what they played in the church can be found on their album, Bach to Folk, which I thoroughly recommend. It’s beautiful. But very few albums can transmit the sheer love and delight that these three excellent musicians have in making music together, and their pleasure in offering it to listeners. Erik Rydvall plays an extraordinary instrument: the nyckelharpa, a quintessential Swedish folk instrument dating from the 14th century. It looks like a cross between a violin and a hurdy-gurdy, and adds glorious drone and resonance to every piece – very much in evidence in Baillie’s own Rolling to Røros.

Røros is the town where Olav Mjelva lives. Mjelva plays a traditional Norwegian instrument, the Hardanger fiddle (hardingfele), often tuned differently from a normal violin and played with a different technique. Read the Wikipedia entry for this instrument – it’s fascinating, full of myth, trolls and dragons. Nothing troll-like about Mjelva, though – like the other two musicians in the ensemble, he’s a clear musical force, and witty with it.

Baillie loves Bach, loves to explore the connections between Bach’s music and traditional folk music. With this trio he has the perfect vehicle. It’s one thing to know about the musical connections, quite another to present the connections to the audience at this level of internal blend, tuning, accomplishment, and panache. His own violin, made in 1845 by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume in Paris, has a glorious tone – cinnamon and oranges, wood fires and furs. And for me, concerts without music stands mediating the transmission of the sound to the listeners are always the most rewarding.

The Lodestar has of course a whole other significance – it’s the star that, in the story, guides three kings to the cradle of Jesus. Whatever your belief system, it’s a good story, gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And here were three kings of their instruments, guided by who knows which star, making towards a rare interpretative freshness, a completely non-traditional way of presenting tradition.

The Lodestar Trio played at Christ Church St Leonards on Sunday 26 November as part of a national tour.

The interior of Christ Church St Leonards has a subdued beauty, borne perhaps of its relatively inornate interior. Much of the stained glass is early twentieth century, and the comparatively small framed gilded Stations of the Cross, gilded, traditional, installed while the church was constructed, look almost modernist in their angularity and subdued uniform colouring. The church is particularly tall, and the interior upper level with its multiple small arches echoes the design of medieval abbeys like Rievaulx or Fountains.

Fitting then, that the Hastings Philharmonic Choir should be rehearsing a Haydn Mass here in the wonderful acoustic space. I was privileged to watch the director, Marcio Da Silva, in action. Hastings Philharmonic Choir is an 80-voice choir for which there is no official audition, but to sing these masses and oratorios and long orchestral/choral works requires stamina, energy and confidence in sustained singing. 

Da Silva works, not by assuming that the choir will sight-read the score and sing, but by singing the phrase to each section of the choir. Not only does he sing the baritone and tenor parts but, in a perfectly tuned falsetto, the alto and soprano parts too. He began his musical career early as a singer, but since 2016, he has also directed and conducted the Hastings Philharmonic Orchestra. During the rehearsal, the voicing of the first movement improved massively due to the diligence of the singers, but also the well-tempered enthusiasm of the conductor. 

Like most choirs, this one is voluntarily administered by and for its singers, who sing because that is what they love. Founded in 1928, they aim to do four concerts and a carol concert locally each year. Maestro Marcio Da Silva took over their direction in 2012, and in 2016 he also took over the direction of the Hastings Philharmonic Orchestra. Besides Da Silva, the only other paid musician is the piano accompanist, Francis Rayner, an outstanding award-winning, long-established soloist who has been with the choir since 2006. Most of their repertoire is 18th-19th century Romantic, and they rehearse mostly in Christ Church. 

A good choral leader will not only conduct time (and this is much more important than most people seem to give it credit for, in fact, of the ultimate importance) but will add voice balance, timbre, style, enunciation, dynamics, expression, musical education – all of that is under the conductor’s control. Further, he or she needs to know how to extract that from their singers. Da Silva – genial, thorough, efficient, brilliant – is rightly admired by all members of his choir, and I can guarantee this concert, Haydn Te Deum and Mozart C Minor Mass, in the beautiful setting, will be an uplifting experience. 

Hastings Philharmonic Choir Spring Concert

Saturday 15 April

Christ Church, Silchester Street, St Leonards.

Haydn: Te Deum. 

Mozart: Bassoon Concerto (featuring Ben Exell, bassoon). 

Mozart: ‘Great’ Mass in C Minor, K427.