Jim Sutherland
Biography
La Banda Europa
Jim Sutherland’s La Banda Europa performs at Celtic Connections in January.
Award-winning producer, songwriter, composer and multi-instrumentalist Jim Sutherland’s thirty-year career ranges across a vast spectrum of musical genres, and has included major commissions for film, TV and theatre. He has performed and recorded with The Chieftains, Page and Plant, The Bhundu Boys, Billy Bragg, Emmylou Harris, Maddy Prior and June Tabor and the Shotts & Dykehead Pipe Band.
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He has produced more that 60 albums for Scottish acts like Salsa Celtica, Shooglenifty, Savourna Stevenson, The Whistlebinkies and Alyth McCormack. Jim’s own influential folk tune compositions have been recorded on more than one hundred CDs by artists all over the world. As a founder member of pop trio The Lanterns, he was signed to Sony as a songwriter in 1997. |
Jim’s roots are in the Thurso folk and country dance scene, but his writing has extended across many European cultures in such work as a project combining Hungarian folk band Muszikas and Scottish musicians, and his new creation, La Banda Europa. Other recent projects include a score composed for the BAFTA-nominated Gaelic language feature film Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle, which was performed by a specially selected chamber group made up of the Scottish Ensemble along with pedal harp, percussion, bagpipes, whistle, carnyx, fiddles and voices. He composed the score for a feature film, Trouble Sleeping, created by Theatre Workshop/Maakar Films for Scottish Screen and the BBC. The film has a refugee theme and Jim brought in middle eastern and Balkan musicians to perform his score.
La Banda Europa is an extraordinary 35-piece band assembled from some of the finest musicians across Europe.
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The idea for the project was inspired by Jim Sutherland’s score for the BAFTA- and British Comedy Award-winning film Festival (directed by Annie Griffin), when the Drambuie Pipe Band was flown to Seville to record the soundtrack with 80-piece Semana Santa band La Banda Tres Caidas. |
Jim loved the sound and was inspired to create something with a European atmosphere that had a feeling of real folk music and concert music.
Winning the Creative Scotland Award in 2006 allowed Jim the opportunity to develop this idea of an orchestra that could make a unique 'sound of Europe', and the project reached fruition on 30 April 2007 when it received its world premiere at Saltwell Park in Gateshead, and the Scottish premiere at the Big in Falkirk festival followed in May.
| The theatrical spectacle included the piece Before the Wolf, a 40-minute sequence of music named after 'wolf tones', which are jarring resonances that can emerge from a defective instrument, or are sounds that fall between the notes of the tempered musical scale. |
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Amongst the pan-European ensemble are leading Scottish musicians such as Fraser Fifield (pipes), James MacKintosh (percussion), Su-a Lee (cello and musical saw), John Kenny (carnyx), Ryan Quigley and Creative Scotland Award-winner Dick Lee, with Rick Taylor conducting the band.
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Less familiar instruments make up the unique ensemble: the hurdy-gurdy, Swedish nykelharpas, bagpipes from five countries, Armenian duduks, Turkish drums, and Celtic carnyx, a bronze war horn 6 feet long and held vertically above the player’s head. |
La Banda Europa, who in November were awarded the Scottish Arts Council's first organisational development award grant, can next be seen in Scotland on 26 January 2008 at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall as part of the Celtic Connections festival.
La Banda Europa was developed with a Creative Scotland Award and received funding from other European countries involved in the project through the European arts consortium In-Situ. The world premiere was commissioned by the Newcastle Gateshead Initiative. |