Martyn Bennet
Album: Grit (Expanded Edition)
Label: Real World
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.martynbennett.com

Martyn Bennett was undoubtedly the most groundbreaking force in the field of Scottish roots fusion. His majestic final album Grit was originally released in 2003, barely two years before his tragic death from cancer in 2005 at age 33, and many regard it as his crowning achievement.

Dedicated to Hamish Henderson, it dealt with triumph in the face of struggle, in the form of a kind of story of the people and songs that Martyn grew up with. In digging deep into his cultural roots, Martyn created in Grit something uniquely earthy and very personal, while embracing and celebrating intrinsically Scottish culture. He achieved an almost painful intensity through the incorporation of samples from many of the singers on whose recordings he himself was raised (Sheila Stewart, traveller singers like Jimmy MacBeath and mother and daughter Jeannie Robertson and Lizzie Higgins, Gaelteachd traditional singer Flora MacNeil, and even chanteuse Edith Piaf), surrounding and counterpointing these with musical samples and beats from anywhere and everywhere, invariably to entrancing and often distinctly visceral effect.

Grit's emotionally charged sequence of mini-epic tone-poems was indeed an endlessly fascinating, cathartic - and often terrifyingly innovative - experience: perennially challenging and yet immensely rewarding, and a truly extraordinary record. Its tenth anniversary is now celebrated by an expanded-edition reissue, which usefully appends two bonus tracks. The magnum opus of these is the superlative, and even more highly emotionally charged, Mackay's Memoirs, a (quite literally) chokingly tear-inducing 14-minute extravaganza which turned out to be Martyn's final recorded work; both genuinely epic and organically episodic, it was scored for pipes, clarsach, voice, two percussionists and the ensemble Mr. McFall's Chamber with further samples incorporated. Originally written in 1999 for the students of the City Of Edinburgh Music School, the piece was based around the theme and first variations of the piobaireachd Lament For Mary MacLeod in order to explore the possibilities of pipe music as a basis for contemporary music. Mackay's Memoirs is the most fitting of memorials for Martyn, and gains even more emotional resonance from the fact that its recording was only completed the day after his death (with the news being kept from the young performers until after the session was finished). The second bonus cut is Martyn's remix of the Peter Gabriel track Sky Blue; it was the last thing Martyn worked on, and apparently a lot of fun to make. I can appreciate why it had to be included here, as a postscript of completeness for Martyn's œuvre - but if I'm brutally honest I don't entirely "get it", even in the context of Martyn's evident, relatively newly-discovered talent for remixing, and it doesn't quite sit easily with Grit and Mackay's Memoirs. But this expanded reissue of Grit is worth the outlay just for Mackay's Memoirs alone; it really is that stunning.

David Kidman