Robin Williamson
“When I started out in the 1960s, I wanted the ‘spontaneous’ voice of Kerouac and the Beat writers, I wanted the ‘bardic’ voice of the Celtic tradition, but most of all I wanted my own voice in the tradition.”
Multi-instrumentalist, poet, storyteller and extraordinary singer, Robin Williamson has been called “perhaps the last true bard”. He was born in Edinburgh in 1943 and has been a working musician for well over half a century. Although his background is in traditional music, his experimental impulses have long challenged the conservative character of Britain’s folk scene. In the mid-1960s his legendary avant-folk group, the Incredible String Band, took folk music down previously undreamt of paths and in the following decade his work with his Merry Band enabled him to develop his interest in the Celtic harp and ancient bardic poetry.
The solo album The seed-at-zero, Williamson’s ECM debut released in 2000, presented [...]
“When I started out in the 1960s, I wanted the ‘spontaneous’ voice of Kerouac and the Beat writers, I wanted the ‘bardic’ voice of the Celtic tradition, but most of all I wanted my own voice in the tradition.”
Multi-instrumentalist, poet, storyteller and extraordinary singer, Robin Williamson has been called “perhaps the last true bard”. He was born in Edinburgh in 1943 and has been a working musician for well over half a century. Although his background is in traditional music, his experimental impulses have long challenged the conservative character of Britain’s folk scene. In the mid-1960s his legendary avant-folk group, the Incredible String Band, took folk music down previously undreamt of paths and in the following decade his work with his Merry Band enabled him to develop his interest in the Celtic harp and ancient bardic poetry.
The solo album The seed-at-zero, Williamson’s ECM debut released in 2000, presented setting of verse by Dylan Thomas, placing the Welsh poet in the relation to the bardic tradition. The album typifies Williamson’s approach to what he calls “wrought language”, in which words are treated almost as though they possessed sculptural properties. When he went into the studio in 2001 to record Skirting the River Road, he was joined for the first time (they met in the studio) by multi-instrumental jazz improvisers; the result was a “thoughtfully assembled and paced” (Guardian) disc “squarely in the tradition of spontaneous improvised music” (Jazzwise). This is an approach which Williamson has pursued on subsequent albums, The Iron Stone and Trusting in the Rising Light. Thom Jurek wrote of the former: “Williamson has grown increasingly comfortable with something approaching the free jazz idiom and its reliance on close listening, dynamic, and the uses of space and texture – which, in its way, derives from poetry itself.”
For the past 15 years, Williamson has worked as a painter as well as a musician, charting, as he puts it, “his own inner journey in psychedelic colours”.
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