8 Writers Who Also Made ( or Make) Music

At long last I am conforming to that classic format for the informative blog-post, the listicle of numbered items on a shared theme, even as I toil under the stinging indictment that "no-one reads blogs anymore" (I can't remember on which American sitcom I heard the quip "2006 is on the line, it wants its blog back"). Ploughing on:

1. Frederico Garcia Lorca (who as an adolescent had dreamed of a career as a musician and composer rather than a poet), played piano on this rather crackly 1932 recording of traditional flamenco songs performed by the Spanish-Argentinian singer and dancer, La Argentinita (Encarnación López Júlvez). During this period, he was concentrating more on his work as a dramatist and theatre-director; in the same year he produced his most famous play, Blood Wedding.        

2. Boris Vian was a multi-skilled creative dynamo: not only a poet, playwright and novelist (author of one of my favourite French novels L'Ecume du Jours (1947)) but also a singer, songwriter, actor and jazz trumpeter, as this video of Vian playing with his brothers Lelio and Alain captures. Dead at 39, his life was an intense blaze of literary and musical endeavours, bohemian parties and desperate attempts to cobble money together: he wrote parodic potboiler-thrillers, the earliest French rock'n'roll numbers and even a single for Petula Clarke.

                             

  

3. Out of the extraordinarily varied career outlined in her seven volumes of autobiography, in the 1950s Maya Angelou was working as a dancer and chanteuse in New York nightclubs. She was chosen to perform one of her own songs in Stan Katzman's 1957 movie Calypso Heatwave, which hoped to ride the wave of a new fad for calypso music, briefly seen at the time as a youth trend ready to supplant rock 'n' roll.

4. Nicola Griffith was the lead singer with Hull-based all-woman post-punk band Janes Plane, seen here playing in Brixton in 1982. Griffith went on to write the science fiction novels Ammonite (1992) and Slow River (1995), as well as other works of speculative and historical fiction. In 1993 she received a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and has since written on disability and LBTQ issues. She now lives in Seattle with her wife, the writer Kelley Eskridge

5. In early editions of Ursula K Le Guin's 1985 book Always Coming Home, a kind of "future archive" of texts and images relating to an imaginary people called the Kesh, a cassette was included containing the album she made with electronic composer Todd Barton Music and Poetry of the Kesh, a rich amalgam of field recordings, sounds generated on invented instruments (such as a 7 foot horn called the hambouta) and Guin's intoning of poems in the language of the Kesh.

6. Don Paterson - a stunningly accomplished guitarist as well as poet and aphorist - formed the "folk-jazz crossover" group Lammas with saxophonist Tim Garland in 1990, about the time when his poetry career was also taking off. This video captures a more recent revisiting of the first piece they composed together, demonstrating his intriguing style of playing jazz voicings on a classical guitar. What I didn't know until just reading it on his website was that Paterson also took some lessons with the seminal improvisatory guitarist Derek Bailey in the mid-80 and was part of the London "free-improv" scene before Lammas. 

7. The Kolkata-born novelist and essayist Amit Chaudari is also a singer in the North Indian classical tradition, a skill he learned from his mother Biyoja Chaudhari, also a highly acclaimed singer and performer. He has recorded two albums fusing Indian and western stylings, despite one being called This is Not Fusion (2004) - the other is Found Music (2010). Most recently he published a book exploring Indian music entitled Finding the Raga (2021).

                                       

8. English-Welsh poet Zoe Skoulding, whose poetry is often preoccupied with resonance and transmission (cf. her 2013 Seren collection The Museum of Disappearing Sounds), is also the bass-player and vocalist with "psychogeographical musical/artistic collective" Parking Non-Stop, alongside musicians Alan Holmes and Dewi Evans. In its melding of urban field recordings, industrial soundscapes and elements of krautrock and retro-pop, their album Species Corridor (2008) recalls the evanescent sub-genre of "hauntology" disseminated by Simon Reynolds et al circa 2006, inhabiting a roughly commensurate sonic zone as Broadcast, Stereolab and the brilliant Ghostbox label.