One of the aspects of Jo’s life that doesn’t always fit comfortably into the folk world is her life as a composer. Whilst Jo is very at home in the folk world composing songs and tunes for her own trio, Blowzabella, old Swan Band and others there are other compositions that rarely see the light of day.
Historically there were 2 shows written that were directly related to folk music. ‘Perjuring Little Whore’ was a 45 minute piece inspired by the ballad of ‘Fanny Blair’. Despite being about Fanny, the ballad never let her actually speak although her speech is recorded. It’s yet another one of those ballads where half the story at least is definitely missing so Jo took the liberty of filling in the gaps. This was written for a six piece band of singers and instrumentalists. It toured including festivals like Beverly and was done as a community performance at Whitby.
Jo later received a commission to write about Lord Byron from a Woman’s perspective. She decided to this as a co composed piece with wonderful cellist Kathryn Locke. Here the music referenced many types and was written for 5 musicians and singers. This o toured as part of a scheme called music in quiet places and also at several literary festivals.
Jo was invited by Distil England to attend a residential course with 7 other adventurous musicians with folk backgrounds to have some time with musicians and composers from other genres of music. This resulted in Jo meeting the wonderful contemporary classical composer Judith Weir. The result of this was that Jo asked Judith to mentor her whilst doing some personal development on the compositional side. This related to a substantial Arts Council grant that Jo received and was ostensibly to work with a community choir and a school wind band. The community choir definitely resulted in a significant development in arranged music, both traditional and Jo’s own compositions. The wind band was not so helpful as the personnel changed each week and therefore progression was hard to factor in. Not daunted Jo also used the time to do a composition for voice called ‘Voices of my Island’ which was selected as part of a Distil showcase to be performed at Loughborough Town Hall. Jo created a soundscape to represent the sights and sounds of the British Isles. All sounds were created by Jo’s voice and then manipulated digitally. Live, half of this was used as a backing track then Jo sang certain parts live and looped it useing a digital loop pedal. This was a dramatic piece with the dynamism of the live voice giving a very special quality.
Jo then went on to develop a piece called ‘The beginning’ this time it was an exploration of voice and sax and their interrelationship and developed into a piece reflective of the fact that Jo was fostered for the first four years of her life. It was performed as above with live voice sax and loop. In the last month Jo had a member of the public seek her out to tell her what an amazing and brave piece it was. They had seen it as, again, it was selected by Distil the year after ‘Voices of my Island’.
Jo composes constantly, either to demand for community groups or, because the ideas present themselves. Often there is no platform for this work but Jo always hopes that one day they will see the light of day. She is thinking of posting them on MySpace or Facebook just so that people can hear another aspect of her life as a musician.