Episode 18 — Serpents, shanties and shells
Recorded around the First Light Festival in Lowestoft, this episode moves from ancient low-brass oddities to beach-side harmony. Steve visits multi-instrumentalist and period brass specialist Jeff Miller to explore the serpent — a strange wooden ancestor of modern tubas and basses — and uses it to trace how brass and woodwind evolved.
From there we head to the Suffolk coast to meet the Lowestoft Longshoremen sea shanty group and dig into how work songs, call-and-response and global song routes end up on an English beach. Woven through are shells, drones and thoughts on musical evolution: from conches to serpent to big-band brass.
What we cover
The serpent: Construction, sound, and its role bridging chant, bands and the modern brass family.
Instrument evolution: How breath + tubing + experiment lead from conch shells to orchestral low brass.
Sea shanties: Caribbean, Atlantic and labour histories hiding inside familiar seaside singalongs.
First Light Festival: Free coastal festival as a living lab for sunrise music, shells and community singing.
Hearing history: Why “old” instruments unlock different listening habits and expectations.
Further listening & links
Full Transcript
Verbatim transcript, reflowed for readability only. No wording edits.
Hello, my name is Steve Pretty. I am a musician, composer and performer from London, and this is my podcast, Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces. This is the podcast that helps you to listen to, understand and enjoy music in new ways. Hello, everyone, it's lovely to be back a little bit later than planned. It's been a busy few weeks, as I'll come to shortly. But yes, here we are again for all you musically curious people. Lots of interesting stuff coming up on the show today. But before we do that, just a quick recap of what we did last time. I headed down to Maida Vale, where I had a session and I had a great chat with Martin Appleby, who is a very long-standing BBC engineer or sound balancer, as he describes himself. I thought that was really interesting, a little insight into the sound recording process. And I know a lot of you guys enjoyed that as well. Lots of lovely feedback about that. Thank you very much. And of course, also, we looked at Debussy and specifically Arabesque music. And I wrote a piece of Arabesque style music in the sort of mode of Debussy and chatted to a brilliant expert in Debussy over in New York. But coming up in today's show, I have a chat with the brilliant multi-instrumentalist and low brass and period brass specialist, Jeff Miller. And Jeff talks me through his Serpent, very interesting kind of period instrument from many centuries ago. He talks us through the evolution of brass instruments and how that's connected with woodwind instruments. I mean, it kind of sounds maybe, when I describe it like that, a little bit inside baseball perhaps, but I think we have a really wide ranging and interesting chat about music more generally as represented by the low brass family, in Jeff's case. And then we link it all the way up to the modern day. And after that, take a trip over to the East Coast of England to talk to the Lowestoft Longshoremen, amazing sea shanty choir. And I talk about some of the history of that with those guys. And most importantly, both from Jeff and from the Longshoremen, we have loads of fantastic music for your listening pleasure, so stay tuned. But first, speaking of the East of England, I was over in that direction last weekend for the amazing First Light Festival in Lowestoft. Now Lowestoft is the most easterly point in the UK, so it gets the sunrise first out of everywhere in the country. And of course, it was the longest day of the year, or thereabouts, when the festival was being held. And so, yeah, it's all about the sunrise, and it's all about celebrating the summer. But more than that, really, it's this fantastic festival with a lot of really well-known acts, and a lot of really great talent from the local area as well. All free, all pretty much on the beach and just above it. Lots of different stages, and it's just a really, really lovely thing. I did it last year with another band, and off the back of that, I had some meetings with the festival, and we really hit it off. I had lots of ideas that happened to kind of align with a lot of the festival's ideas. Long story short, I ended up doing, I think it was probably about five or six very different gigs over the course of about 18 hours. I started the whole festival with a kazoo piece that I'd written for
Kazoo Choir, which didn't quite land as I would like, just because the distribution of kazoo's wasn't quite where it should be. So there are only a few kazoo's. So anyway, after that inauspicious start, I then opened the festival with Hackney Colliery Band. My band were there, and we did a little parade down to the main stage, and then there was a really lovely opening concert by a lot of local amateur musicians and choirs and all sorts of things on the main stage, which was incredible. And then I had a couple of hours off before my show with Chris Lindtott, who you would have heard some excerpts of a couple of episodes ago in this show. Chris is an astronomer and a professor of astronomy at Oxford and has written loads of brilliant books about astronomy. He presents The Sky At Night, which I think I'm right in saying is the longest running TV show in the world. I think that's right. Yeah, he's a fascinating guy and we do this occasional double act called Universe of Music, which is about space and music and the kind of overlap of those two things. So we had a lovely show doing that in one of the more sort of talky tents. And then Hackney Colliery Band on the main stage, which was really fun. Lovely to be playing with all the gang again. And then I had a few hours off to hang out with some friends and the family who were all there as well. And then I went and did a set in a church with Valeria again, who you would have heard on the podcast. My harpist friend in the guys of our Soundbox Ensemble. Really nice set at about 11 p.m. in a church locally. And then I headed down to the beach to do a sound check for my Dawn set because I was having to do a Dawn set of shells, which I've come to shortly. But before I did that, I had a little snooze on the beach. It was a perfect night, a full moon more or less, and very silvery sea, very still, very unusual for that part of the world to be so still. Slept on the beach for an hour or so and then got up to do my Dawn set. And I have to say, I've been a working musician for more than 20 years. And hopefully you'll have got the message on this show that I really try not to be jaded and I'm very grateful and aware of the privilege that I have to be able to do this for a living. But still, it's pretty rare that gigs fully move me. My own gigs move me, if you like. But something about playing Shells at Dawn and sort of summoning the sunrise was really, was pretty special. So I found it very, very moving and emotional. And all of the stuff I've talked about on this show about sort of tapping into that kind of primeval spirit, the spirit of our ancestors summoning the sun up. I mean, it really felt very, very special. So nothing much more to say really, other than to say it was an amazing weekend. I'd urge you to take a visit there next year. If you can make it next year, 2025, it'll be towards the end of June again, of course. And it's all free. It's brought a lot of people to the town. And I think it's really helped to reinvigorate the area. I love that part of Suffolk. There's a lot of deprivation. There's a lot of difficulty in that part of the world. Not a lot of culture always happens around there. So to have this big free festival on the beach is really special. So check it out. Anyway, I'm gonna leave you with a few seconds of my
shells. Out of context, it might sound a bit nuts, but it was, yeah, it was very special. And I hope to be back next year. Yeah. So now it's time to hand over to my interview with Jeff Miller. Now, Jeff and I have been friends for a very long time. Jeff was the original sousaphone player in Hackney Colliery Band. I refer to the sousaphone here. It's the big kind of tuba-like instrument that you step into, that wraps around your body. And yeah, I met Jeff doing that, and we've played in lots and lots of bands over the years. And I caught up with Jeff before a gig a few weeks ago, because Jeff is an amazing specialist of early brass instruments in particular, and he's very, very knowledgeable. He leads to the PhD that he's doing at the moment. It's very complicated, basically algorithmic musical analysis, as far as I can tell. He's a fascinating guy. So for this entertaining noises section, special extended entertaining noises section today, we're gonna pass over to Jeff in his room, absolutely chock full of low brass instruments and all sorts of other toys. And if you wanna check out what any of this stuff looks like, this whole interview is filmed, so you can see the whole thing on Patreon. And you can see what the serpent looks like. I'll also be putting some bits and bobs on social media, so do check out my social media accounts for that at Steve Pretty. But yeah, do check out the Patreon for the full visual interview, because it's quite something to see, the serpent. Anyway, here's Jeff Miller. So I'm Jeff Miller, player of strange instruments. Particularly low brass, right? Yeah, low brass instruments. Stuff that we use now in today's music, but also the things that came before that. So we have the instruments everyone's familiar with, like the tuba and the euphonium and stuff that you'd see in a brass band. But there's this question, like where did that stuff come from? It's not like someone just woke up and had this amazing idea, and just built the first trumpet with valves and it was ready to go. So I got interested in that, particularly with the low brass side of things. It's just some super massive, deep, incredibly expensive, not very lucrative rabbit hole. But what's interesting, you talk about the origins of stuff, because the show is called Origin of the Pieces, so it's about musical evolution partly. I've banged on any possible opportunity about the shell. Obviously, I play the concert a lot these days, and about that musical evolution from someone fashioning a shell right through to fashioning a modern trumpet or modern brass instrument. Much more than I do, you have the intermediary steps, if you like, the evolutionary steps between the shell and the trumpet. Yeah, that's right. I suppose the simplest thing I've got is probably a didgeridoo, empty hollow tube made of wood. And it's cool because although it's working on the same principle in terms of how you make a noise on it, it's so unlike the stuff that we play today that it just doesn't fit in with the way that music works now, really, in many ways, until probably within the last 20 or 30 years when people started getting into drones and electronic music and
trance music, where suddenly it exists as a sound that people can recognize and work with again. I think it's sort of always been there, hasn't it? But it's just that sound, the sound of drone music, and I guess in terms of the Western imagination has been kind of a bit hidden for a long time because we think the obsession with developing harmony and melody, which is obviously fantastic stuff, but almost at the expense of that more trance-like drone type of state, which once people have reconnected with that, partly through, I guess on some level, through globalization of music and cultures and things. Or recordings. I mean, that made a huge difference. Because if you think about it, it's kind of like art. You know, for hundreds of years, the people who were able to make art kind of exclusively, they tended to be working for the church or rich people or both. And the same thing happened, I think, with, you know, certainly with Western music that, you know, ended up resulting in tonal systems that we've got, you know, this idea of chords and harmony that we're so used to and everything. But coming back to the drone thing, you know, that exists in a lot of folk cultures around the world, right? Obviously, the didgeridoo is a native Australian Aboriginal instrument, I guess, predominantly. But there's versions of like drone instruments that can be found all over the place. You know, things like the hurdy-gurdy, for example, like in Europe. Yeah, bagpipes, fifth string banjo. Yeah, and it's funny how as soon as you just throw that in, it just immediately adds a kind of a certain character to a piece, so that you can hear how all the harmony kind of grinds against that and then releases, you know, when it gets back home. It's just about that juxtaposition, isn't it? I think that's the thing to think about with music. It's all like one tone doesn't have a kind of much meaning by itself sometimes, unless you put it with something else. I mean, one tone, the timbre of that sound can be really interesting, but until you put it with another sound, whether it's because the next tone follows it or whether you've got two tones playing together, like with a drone or harmony or anything else, that's where the kind of context rises. I mean, one thing that I've found really interesting. So a couple of years ago, I started doing a PhD in mathematical modeling of harmony, right? And things that I never really thought about or questioned before I started doing that, you have to start asking fundamental questions like, what does it actually mean for two things to sound similar? Or for something to sound dissonant or consonant or in sort of normal language, you know, nice or ruby. And one of the things is that basically, you and I, you know, living in this culture that we live in, we're so inundated with the idea of harmony that even when we don't have any other notes there, we're still hearing everything within the context of that. So we can hear a single melody with no accompaniment whatsoever, but we'll still be hearing it through harmonic function. And so our brain will be supplying all these harmonic constructs and sort of chord changes and things behind it to some degree or
another, that if you were to play the same melody for someone from a completely different culture, like say from Polynesia, for instance, then they would have a completely different experience of exactly the same melody. And I found that really fascinating. It is fascinating. And again, it's just proving time and time again, on one level, music is a universal across all cultures, but on another level, it's completely different languages we speak. That's why I always think when people say music is the universal language, it's something that I often take issue with, because the fact that music is made in every culture on earth is universal. But the fact that it's all made in different ways and with different systems and with different ways of thinking about it, with different functions, with different instruments, it's like that's what makes it exciting. To some extent, musicians can talk to each other, of course, from across boundaries and things, of course, and it's something we try and do a lot in this show. But at the same time, I think it's not right to simplify music. It's like, oh, well, musicians can kind of talk the same language. Well, actually, you know, everyone's got their own dialects, or everyone's got their own things that you can learn about. And that's what keeps it exciting. Even fundamental things, like there are cultures where they, you know, we have this idea of the third, you know, which is a C and an E, for instance, played together. And there's some question, you know, does it sound nice? Does it sound not so nice? There are cultures where they don't even hear that as a thing, you know. So it's kind of like, in fact, there are a couple of cultures where they don't hear an octave. I mean, if we played two different C's, you know, like... You know, those are three octaves of what we would call the same note. And there are not many, but maybe two cultures that they found that don't even recognize the similarity between those. And to be clear, the reason that they're similar from a physical point of view is that there's a doubling of frequency as you go. Yeah. And so, you know, it's interesting you mentioned that, because I was always taught that all of our ideas of harmony came completely naturally out of physics and acoustics, which is certainly there's a lot of validity to that. But, you know, it was kind of presented, certainly when I was in university and studying this stuff in the books, you know, did a lot of reading, and in a lot of the acoustic books and harmony books, it was presented as like sort of manifest destiny of sound, that that obviously is the one true way of listening to sound because it comes from physics. And actually you find that's not true. I think that's quite a kind of post-colonial kind of way of looking at it. Definitely. I think it definitely is. It really is. And I think that's what again is tried to do with this show wherever possible is to try and find different ways. I mean, part of the tagline for the show is helping you to hear and understand music in new ways, you know. I think that's a big part of it. There can be a tendency for people to think, oh, well, music works like this, and if I don't understand this. And it can often be carried through into people who don't have any theoretical musical training. So I don't know anything about music.
Like, you know absolutely loads about music. You spend eight hours a day, in the case of I've got friends who don't have any musical training, but who are really great listeners and often quite good players or singers as well, because they know loads about music. They just can't articulate it with the words that are in books. And the words that are in books are incredibly useful. You and I use them all the time to communicate musical ideas and stuff. But yeah, as I again, I emphasised a lot of times on this show that that's not what music is. That's our way of communicating music. Yeah, because like you, I play a lot of different kinds of music and in different contexts. And I remember I was once playing in a rock band on electric bass, and we were just playing sort of standard, like, you know, kind of 80s and 90s and 2000s, rock covers and things. But what I realised was that the singer didn't actually know the meanings of any of the words like sharp and flat. So he had heard the words, but he didn't actually know what they meant, right? Which is not a criticism of him at all. I mean, it was just, but the problem was, was that when we were then trying to talk about music, it was actually really, really difficult. Because even though we're playing the same music, we're familiar with the music, it's a well established instrumentation and type of music and way of playing it. But just to try and say things like we need to go faster, or I think that bit, maybe it's a bit sharp there, a bit flat. It was incredibly, incredibly difficult. I can't remember who it was. There was a really famous conductor whose first language wasn't English. And he said, really, to conduct an orchestra in any language you only need to know six words, higher, lower, slower, faster, softer, louder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that was it. And he said, really, if you know that and everyone's trying, that's the bare minimum that you need to try to get this stuff done. That's interesting, yeah. So. We should talk about instruments. Yeah, sorry, yeah. No, no, no, no. No need to report, Joe, it's all fascinating. I can talk about this stuff for hours. I mean, I have talked about it for hours on this show already. Actually, yeah, we had a gig starting 20 minutes ago, Steve. But yeah, so we were talking about the, you play the bass end of, so that's the kind of low frequencies in an orchestra or in a band or anything else. You're talking about playing the bass guitar. We met because you play tuba and sousaphone. So we met doing Hanny Colliery Band and other associated projects. Can you just maybe give a little background to some of those instruments? Yeah, sure. Well, so mostly specifically, I play brass instruments. I mean, I do play electric bass guitar, which I enjoy a lot. But other than that, all the instruments that I play are brass instruments. But it's a bit misleading because like the one that I'm holding, which I'm going to talk about in a few minutes is actually made of wood. And then you've got a saxophone, which is made of
brass. But we call that a woodwind instrument. And so the way that we actually make the sound on an instrument really classifies what kind of instrument it is in most cases. All musical instruments, you do something as a person, some movement or action, and it creates a bit of sound and the instrument is just designed to make that sound louder and better. So you can use it to make music and say stuff, right? So the woodwind instruments, they use a little piece of reed, like a big giant grass slice and they vibrate that and then that creates the vibration that the shape of the instrument sculpts and kind of tames. And so with brass instruments, it's our lips, right? So all the instruments that I play, except for string stuff like the bass and the guitar, they all involve buzzing my lips like you would on a trumpet. Like that, beautiful sound, but they can make it even more beautiful if you can believe that by putting these different instrument shapes into them. So nowadays, all of those instruments are pretty much made out of brass. But if you go back, actually, it was only a couple of hundred years ago that people learned to make these really complex shapes out of metal. So I guess if you go all the way back to the beginning, maybe not quite as far back as your seashells, but you have people doing things like finding pieces of wood, shells, whatever. One thing that they found that was really good, human bones and animal horns. So the animal horns are what we'll focus on because they have an interesting property in that they're cone shaped, right? And when you have a cone shaped thing, it immediately locks it all in to those physics that we were talking about earlier and starts to make the sounds more harmonious for lack of any other better word, but it starts to make the sounds a little less random and chaotic and a little more musical, as we would call it now. So the earliest brass instruments that we recognize, you know, like in Western music, sort of pantheon of instruments, the earliest brass instruments were probably these instruments called cornetts. And these aren't cornetts like we have in a brass band, but these were essentially wooden instruments that were the size and the shape of an animal horn that had been bored out on the inside, and they had some holes in them, and a little tiny, tiny mouthpiece, which is a cup-shaped mouthpiece, which is the thing that you put on your lips. And basically what it is, it's like a funnel that lets you get more lip into this little tiny hole. So those instruments were made of wood, and, you know, they found that you put some holes on them, and suddenly you can change the pitch and everything. And that was great, but the problem is, is that you get to a point where you want to make the instruments lower. And how do you do that? Well, okay, so you can make longer tubes made out of wood, which is what I've got here, the serpent. And it was an attempt to make that cornet, or those kinds of instruments, lower. So they thought, well, you know, we like these lower sounds. How can we get them? And for a long time, I mean, there were no lower sounds. I mean, that was like, you got to a certain length, and that was as low as it got. And it was only when they thought we can make something longer, you know, that it added entire depth to music that wasn't
there before. So the serpent was an attempt to make a cornet, which was lower, a bass cornet. So I'll describe it. So essentially, what we've got is we've got this instrument. It starts off with a mouthpiece, which is essentially the same as a trombone mouthpiece or trumpet mouthpiece. It's a cup, has a hole through the middle, and it's a funnel, basically. This one's made of wood. They tend to be made of brass now and actually plastic. But in the older days, before they had the technology to work with those materials, they were made of wood and animal horn, and I have some animal horn ones as well. And then basically that plugs into this pipe, which is called a crook or a bocal. So it's sort of a curved metal pipe, right? Yeah, yeah. So it's a curved metal pipe. And it serves several functions. But for one thing, by that point in the instrument, because the instrument's a cone, it gets very small and narrow. And if you tried to make the entire thing of wood, it would be too fragile and wouldn't be strong enough. And also, if, say, you're playing somewhere and for whatever reason, the instruments that you're playing with are a lot higher or a lot lower, as often happens, particularly now, when we're trying to cover music from 800 years, and, you know, tunings have changed and moved up and down, you can use shorter and longer ones of these to kind of help adjust the pitch of the instrument. It looks a little bit like the crook on a saxophone, right, this bit, in terms of the shape? Yeah, yeah, very much. I mean, particularly from this sort of an angle, it's a very saxophone shaped. Once we get to the body of the instrument, then it's actually made of wood. And hollowed out on the inside, there's different ways to do it, but it's a really complicated process to make one of these, even for a very, very skilled woodworker. But what you've got then is you've got about two meters of tubing made of wood coiled around, but it ends up in the shape of a snake and thus the name serpent. And the two reasons that they coil it really are, one, so that you can actually carry it and you can move it around, but also because it makes it possible for you to reach the holes, right? There's six finger holes on a serpent. And those would be much closer together on a cornet. And they'd be in the right place to make musical notes, right? So if you think about a guitar and you look at the frets, in fact, here, I've got a guitar here. So if you look at this guitar, you see the frets are evenly spaced. I mean, they get closer and closer together as you go higher because of acoustics. But basically, you can see that from one fret to the next is a very regular pattern. And that's the way that the holes on wind instruments are, and should be anyway. Now, the problem is that the serpent is twice as big, but the hands of the player are the same size. So the holes are situated where we can reach them. But they're not actually situated in the right place to make the notes that we need them to make. And the other problem is, is that they're all the same
size, because, you know, our fingertips are of a certain size. And actually, if you see that the tube up here is quite small, so that's probably, I don't know, that's like 10% of the size of the tube is open. But by the time you get down here, it's the same size hole, but even though the pipe is much bigger, you know, it gets a lot larger. And so that's why when we see like saxophones and instruments like that, you can see that the pads and the keys actually get bigger as the instrument goes along. But the serpent predates all of that. This instrument, the closest thing we've got to go on is that it was invented in the 1500s. So if you imagine trying to play this, the problem would be that to design it with the holes in the right place, we'd have to have these sort of giant frog hands with fingers like this long and big sort of frog spatula suckers on the ends of them. And we don't. So the holes are in the wrong place. And what that means is that the serpent acoustically is a really weird instrument because it's kind of like a brass instrument like a horn. You can play brass instruments sounding things by just by changing your lips without moving your fingers or anything. So you can do sort of the bugle call sort of effects. It has those ways of changing and choosing notes. And it's kind of like a recorder. We can sort of run our fingers up and down the halls. And that kind of works. But the other thing that it's like is it's actually like an ocarina. And if you see an ocarina, it's called a vessel flute. And so they've got these holes, and you can put those holes anywhere, but as long as the holes are the right size, it works. So the serpent has all three of those characteristics, and the end result is it's really hard to play. It's even harder to play in tune. And it's quite hard to play it with sort of consistent sound. One last thing that I'll mention about the serpent is that it was originally designed to accompany the voice parts of Gregorian chant. And so it was designed to be used in big churches and cathedrals with a really reverberant space on the inside with lots of echo. So when we listen to it now and we listen to it in my little room here, which is full of carpet and stuff, there's no reverberation or resonance. And as a result, you hear this really fuzzy sound with a lot of acoustic noise in it. But if you're in a really big reverberant environment, that disappears. It's something we've touched on before in the show as well, about how spaces and instruments and compositions are tied really intricately together. And it's why these days on recordings or live sometimes as well, we use artificial reverb to try and get a sense of that kind of grandeur back. Yeah, I mean, it's super important with this in particular because it just doesn't sound the right way without that space. I mean, the space that you play it in is part of what the instrument sound is. Yeah, because you're using the resonance of the space as part of the sound, as you say. Yeah, I guess the thing was that a lot of these places, they didn't have any instruments in them. I mean, they may have had organs, they may not, but they weren't always using them. And often you had
choirs of clergy and congregation singing, and they needed something to carry the tune. And so you'll find that they used, in France, they used serpents a lot. In Spain, they used serpents, but they also used bassoons. So it's got a really unique history in that sense. It wasn't a fanfare instrument until the mid 1700s. It was used almost exclusively in liturgical music, church music. There was no music written for it that had the word serpent written on it, or almost none, because you would just play. I mean, it was a bit like jazz now. We often, people don't use any music because they all know the tunes. Or if you do, you're using a lead sheet. And a lead sheet is basically the melody with some chords there that you can improvise around or you can base. They wouldn't have even had the chords then. It would have just been the melody. But the idea being that the serpent was just this tune that everything, to remind the people who didn't know the tune that well how it went and also to keep the pitch from going too sharp or too flat as people get tired or excited or whatever. So anyway, as a result, there's very, very little documentary evidence of what music the serpent actually played. But in the mid 1700s, when the marching band was essentially invented, there was this idea of having, they call it harmony music, and it was essentially these small groups of wind instruments that were loud enough to be heard outside, and they were portable. So you could have this kind of outside music. Very quickly, that was adapted to be what we would now consider to be marching bands. When George III came to the UK, he came over and he felt that there wasn't anything like that here, or certainly nothing that was suitable. So he actually imported his band from Germany to the UK. I think, was it George III, George II? Anyway, King George. Anyway, he came over and he brought his band with him from Hanover. So they started using it for marching, because it was the loudest thing that was that low that you could get. And that was great for about 50 years. But then someone invented the key bugle, which is essentially a bugle with keys in it like a woodwind instrument. An instrument maker named Hallery saw that key bugle. In fact, someone hired him to copy one that they'd borrowed from a band that was visiting. So he copied the key bugle. But then, maybe six, seven years later, he introduced this instrument called the ophiclide, which is a bass key bugle. And the ophiclide, if we see it now, people think it's a saxophone, because it's a big shiny brass thing with keys on it, and it looks like a saxophone. And when he was growing up, Adolf Sachs made ophiclides. So there's this question that Adolf Sachs, as you may have guessed, invented the saxophone as well. And so there's this question that, you know, was he to some extent influenced by seeing the ophiclide when he started not thinking about a better way to make a saxophone? There were no saxophones. He invented this instrument basically out of nowhere. So when you look at the serpent, what you're really seeing is you're seeing in many ways the ancestor of not only all the brass instruments, but also all the saxophones as well. Not the only ancestor, but
certainly one of the ancestors. Yeah, and again, coming back to this idea of musical evolution. And because you play it off the cloud as well, don't you? I mean, I think we have to have you back in the future because we've got so many amazing instruments around here. We've got a contrabass trombone here behind me, an enormous trombone and a bass trombone, multiple tubas, lots of tubas. I know you've got a sousaphone, there's guitars in here. And then there's a whole rack of stuff behind you, which we'll talk about in a bit. So we better hear some of this if you don't mind. That's all been absolutely fascinating. Maybe you can show the range of it. So how low it goes, how high it goes. So the lowest official note is a low C, which is the same bottom note as on a cello. But you do actually see music that's written that goes below that. And the way you do that is you essentially, you just put your fingers down and you lift the notes down. So it sounds pretty horrible, but within the context, and a load of other stuff banging on, you can get away with that. In a big church. Yeah, in a big church. And then it goes up, there's no official top note on the serpent, like any brass instrument, but more or less it goes up to, it's about two and a half to three octaves. So I'll just run up the scale, I'll get to the bit that's kind of the top, and then I'll try and squeak out a few of the notes above that. Thank you. That's sort of the top safe note, but then you can go up a bit more. No. Sorry. And also, interestingly, and that's not just me being rubbish, there are a couple of notes that on certain instruments just don't really exist. For me, the B is one. So what you do is you try, if you can, to play the note above that, and then lip it down with your chops, which is very hard. Which I can't do, but luckily, I don't think anyone's ever asked me to play up there. So that is like, that's about the top of where you'd go. But generally speaking, you would never play up there. If someone's writing up there, they probably actually want a different instrument. So most of it... That's so great, and it's just so interesting watching you play it, because it just makes me think, come back to this idea of evolution. And I mean, just as with biological evolution, where you have divergent paths, if you like, you know, where you have a kind of foundational thing, in our case, I guess, the shell or equivalent, things like that. But then one branch develops off into the brass family. And as you say, this is a member of the brass family, but the fingering and the key, there's a couple of metal keys in it as well. It looks a lot more like a recorder with those holes. Well, it is effectively, yeah. So I mean, it's a wind instrument in terms of the way you operate it. So it's a weird, crazy, weird hybrid. But again, yeah, it's interesting just thinking of those different branches diverting off. Would you mind playing us some music of some sort?
Yeah, sure. What have you got for us? Well, this is just a little theme from, it's actually a cello piece because as I said, there isn't any music really. And so when you play this, when you play this out in concerts, what's the ensembles that you play that with? Well, the thing that I've used it the most for has actually been with orchestras playing 19th century music on original instruments or instruments that are copies of the originals. Mendelssohn used it to some extent. Wagner actually used the serpent in some of his really early pieces, and Berlioz used it. There's a bit in the Fantastic Symphony where the artist has had his heart crushed by this girl that he's in love with, and he's had enough, so he takes a load of opium and has a feverish dream where he basically goes to hell. And when he's in hell, he sees her, and it turns out she's a witch, of course, because she's broken his heart, so she's evil. And she's dancing around, and there's a black mass. So Berlioz, in that last movement, he's trying to evoke this religious setting, but in a real dark, twisted, grotesque sort of way. So he used the serpent. In the same way people would have heard the serpent, they would have immediately associated it at that time with that scenario. In the same way that when we hear Tremont doing glissando, everyone immediately thinks of Dixieland Jazz now, for instance. Okay. Or Lerpac. Beautiful, it's got this really unusual timbre, unusual sound, it sounds very woody. I mean, it is made of wood, obviously, but so maybe I'm just being influenced by the fact that I can see it, but it does feel, it's quite kind of warm, it's got much less ring to it than a brass instrument. Yeah, it does. And to be honest, if you hear one, particularly in the right kind of reverberant space, it just has this great mix of, it sounds a bit like a horn, like a French horn kind of horn, and it sounds a lot like a bassoon. So I mean, I've been away on tour with another serpent player in her and playing, and you think, what is that? Like I'll be somewhere else in the hall, and I'll be trying to figure out, and I'll think it's a French horn, and then I think it's a bassoon, and then you come around the corner and like, oh, of course. And I mean, I'm a serpent player. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's still on to place. And I think with a lot of these instruments, the things that we identify as being a sound of the instrument, a lot of it isn't about the noise that the instrument makes when it's just playing a single note, it's about the way that we change from one note to another. And does that give it a wobbly attack? Does it give it a really loud attack? Does it give it a kind of a scoop into the next note? It's a really good point. And it's something we talked about in recent episodes with the cello and the trombone, which are sort of fretless instruments, right? Like the voices and you can slide between things. And obviously you can with valve brass instruments or with key brass
or woman instruments, but it's slightly different because you've got more, it's a bit more precise, but this is somewhere between the two, it feels like, because you're doing a lot with your lips as well. Yeah, in many ways, it's kind of the worst of both worlds because it's basically hard to play steadily and in tune with your lips, and it's also hard to play with your fingers. Speaking of which, would you mind mentioning a little bit longer? That's really beautiful. It reminds me a lot of the bassoon, actually, it's interesting you're just talking about the bassoon. It's got that, again, that woody, slightly, slightly sort of, what's the best way of describing it without sounding bad? It's sort of a mellifluous, quacky, do you know what I mean? There's a certain quackiness to it, but still very sort of mellow somehow. Yeah, I mean, it can be really frustrating to play as a modern brass player because the instruments we have now, you know, they've just made them so, although it doesn't feel like it to us, they've made them so easy to play that playing something that isn't that easy to play can be really frustrating. You know, you split a note or, you know, or you hit something and it's out of tune and you can't really fix it. That's really frustrating. I had to play a little bit of cornet in the show once. Did you? Yeah, many years ago. And yeah, I used to call it the chair leg because it just looks like a chair leg with holes in it. Yeah. And it's, yeah, I mean, it's a real specialist thing. And you've got this tiny little kind of acorn piece, you know, it's a nightmare. But you know, at the time, I mean, the people who could play them, it just, it sounded like a cross between a virtuoso violin and a human singing. I mean, it's just amazing to listen to people that really know how to play that instrument. Yeah, I mean, they were the superstars of the day. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting. So before we finish, sitting behind you is this whole rack of wires and synths and things. And on the recent episode, we looked at this stuff with Jake Chakravorty, which is a modular synth you've got set up here. I just wanted to talk to you about what attracted you to this stuff as a player of traditional brass instruments and also period brass instruments, like some really old stuff. And I find it interesting because like me, you've got both ends of the spectrum, right? So, again, I'm fascinated by shells and very early instruments. But also the very cutting edge electronic instruments and production methods and stuff. And I'd just be interested to hear your thoughts on what connects those things up. Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, I know now, I can't quite remember. I mean, I used to think it was the stupidest thing in the world to get into because on the one level, and this is something that you'll often hear people say, on the off chance that my partner ever listens to this interview, I can't even tell you how much it costs, but it's not cheap, still cheaper than a violin. I'll just leave that out there. But it's quite interesting because it actually goes back to the period instrument thing. So the serpent that I was playing, you know, it's not a 200 year old instrument.
That instrument was made for me in, I think, 2019. So it's a reproduction of an old instrument. Now some of the instruments that I play are original instruments, but a lot of them, those instruments are super rare. They're in museums. They're damaged, so you can't play them. So people have to recreate them. And they present a lot of challenges, right? But by learning to know what those challenges are and overcome those challenges, or accept them in some cases, like the serpent is kind of out of tune. And if you accept that, it's actually okay, because that's part of the nature of what it is in the same way that the human singing is kind of out of tune. And the thing is with all the synths, it's the same thing, the early synths. So I got really intrigued with Vangelis. And I was listening to the soundtrack to Cosmos, I think. Yeah, so for those who don't know, Vangelis is a real pioneer of electronic music and particularly soundtracks. So Cosmos, the brilliant documentary with Carl Sagan, he composed the theme for that. But also Blade Runner. Oh yeah, of course, Blade Runner, yeah. And also what's the Marathon film? Well, Chariots of Fire. I mean, he did loads and loads of films. He just had this sound, right? And it was really that sound that intrigued me. And so I started thinking, gosh, I wonder how you could make that sound. And that was really what it was. I started watching a YouTube video on how to make the Vangelis Blade Runner sound. It's just exactly the same process that ended up with me buying the serpent. My first thought was that is a stupid idea. Who would waste their time and money even thinking about trying to buy and play something like that? Yeah, and then hard cut to five years later with three serpents and a rack of modular synths. Yeah, lying in a flat on a stained mattress with nothing else like in train spotting. So what intrigues me is the interface, but also understanding the nature of sound on a really, really visceral level. Like as a tuba player, we don't have a lot of notes to play. And so most of the training to become a professional tuba player isn't actually about learning to play really fast or learning loads and loads of virtuosic solo pieces. A huge amount of it is just learning about how to make a nice sound, right? And you spend so much time in this headspace about sound and thinking, you know, how can I change that or change that and move this around a bit? And with the synthesizer, it's all right there in front of you. You've got these dials and sliders and stuff, and you can tweak sound and try and really understand how it works. And this was the same time that I just started this Ph.D. And the area of electronic engineering that my research is in is mostly, well, it was at the time it was signal processing. So people there, although they were big fans of music, were and still are mostly coming at music from the side of signal processing and electronics. And so they talked about things like filter banks and filter sweeps. And someone described to Didgeridoo as basically being, you know, a
particular noisy waveform with a filter sweep across it. And I had no idea what that meant. So that was, you know, I started looking into that. You would think that the synthesizer kind of died out in the late 90s, you know, when they invented software and stuff. But actually there's this whole, I guess maybe in the way that ham radio was a big thing in like the 50s and 60s, there's a huge, beautiful global group of people who were just mad about this stuff. And so they're creating all these new modules and new ideas and new ways to make sound and play with sound and modify sound. It's really interesting to hear you say that. It links back to your career as a tuba player and as a low brass player, because it's the same for me when I've got interested in this stuff. The show is for musically curious people, not necessarily musicians, but people who are just interested in what music is and where it comes from, why it exists. And that's very much the same for me. Once you start poking something, once you start prodding something, you then see the commonalities between these things and also the differences. But you see, for me, it's, yeah, you see, oh wait, this is a bit like when I play the trumpet and I can, the attack of a note, you know, I can tongue it like this and that means I get this particular sound. And then you can do the same thing on synthesizer and you've got all these different controls. And then you combine those things in some ways. And yeah, and it just suddenly opens up a whole new world of things. But talking, almost talking a language that you already know as a musician from I think playing acoustic instruments. You're then thinking, well, I can control the acoustic instrument with my breath. And now I'm just controlling this electronic instrument with voltage basically. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's one of the biggest challenges I have is that I'll sit down to try and make some music. And I hope I'm not the only one this happens to, but. You're definitely not. I'll sit down and I will realize 45 minutes later, I've been listening to the same note for 45 minutes. Yeah, and not even really tweaking, but just exploring it, you know. A single note, but then I think, well, I used to do that on the tuba, which is hard to believe now, but you know. Absolutely, I think that's the thing. And that's how you learn it. Modular synthesis is often criticized for being bleepy, bloopy music that is hard to make tracks with. But the thing is, that's fine. If you're doing stuff because it's interesting and sonically pleasing for your ears. I mean, of course it's nice to put music out into the world and other things, but it's also fine just to do for fun. I was talking to someone the other day about, yeah, they've just got a loop pedal and they were just really enjoying just noodling around with it. They might not ever do anything live with it. They might not ever record anything with it, but it's just a satisfying hobby basically. And that's fine. And I know it's obviously more than that for you. Well, financially at the moment, I'm not sure about that.
No, but I mean, you're a professional musician and you're integrating it in all sorts of interesting ways. But I think my point is for people listening who think, oh yeah, but I'm never gonna put anything, I'm never gonna release any music. That's fine, I don't need to. So, you know, I've got all these traditional brass instruments here, right? And I've noticed that amongst my professional brass playing friends, there are two types of people. You show them an instrument that you've just got and people will either say, wow, that's really cool. Or they'll say, well, how many gigs are you gonna have to do to pay for that? And everyone has a different way of approaching stuff. But I think that's just a really, really limiting way to look at it, because my sousaphone, which is in this black bag over here behind the serpent, I paid five US dollars for that sousaphone. I bought it at an auction, no one else bid on it, five bucks. I've made more money on that sousaphone than all of the other instruments that I own put together. It's not like if you were a builder, and you think, oh, I need a band saw for this project. You're not gonna buy the band saw and then throw it away after the project's done. And think, oh, I'm annoyed it didn't pay for itself. It becomes part of who you are and how you approach things and how you solve problems, and you grow from that. And so I just see the synthesizer as an extension of that. Absolutely, and you never know where it's gonna go, and it might go nowhere, in which case, maybe at some point down the line, you sell some things or you hold onto things and maybe it'll come into use at some point. But also, it's coming back to this idea of play, right? We call it playing music, and it's a job for you and me. But it's a playful job, right? And I think often professional musicians can sometimes lose touch with that element of play. And I think often by getting a new instrument, whether it's an acoustic instrument or electronic instrument, it forces you to think about music in different ways, in new ways, crucially. Yeah, and also some of the stuff that you just need to think about all the time anyway can get really boring. I mean, I know you play the trumpet, you bought a tenor horn a few years ago. I did. So I'm sure there was stuff that you used to practice on the trumpet and you were sick of playing it on the trumpet, but suddenly when you're playing it on the tenor horn, it's interesting again. Absolutely. So you're still playing that and you're learning more from it and you've got a different voice, but at the same time, it's actually still a skill set that you're working on all that time. So yeah, I think it's part of the package. And also I think another thing that we have in common is, I think we're both known for doing fairly eclectic stuff. Certainly. So for me, a lot of the work that I get is someone needs a weird brass instrument and they don't really know what it is or where to get one, but they know that I'm weird, low brass instrument guy. So they get in touch. And usually, if I'm lucky, it's something that I
can play. And if it's not something that I do, then I'll usually know, try this person. Last year, there's a band called Hawken basically. It's a progressive metal band. And Ray Hearn is the drummer, but he's also tuba player, amazing drummer, very, very good tuba player. And he got in touch because they needed a cowhorn, right? And it's like, well, do you know where we can find a cowhorn for this thing? I don't even know if it was for the band. It might've been for some friend of his. But anyway, the point was, I was like, oh, no, I don't, but I'll find you one. And within like two days, I'd found them this cowhorn that they managed to use for this project. So it's like- Well, I think, yeah, it's just keeping it interesting, keeping it fun for yourself as well. I think that's a big part of it for me. Listen, man, thanks so much. That was fascinating. And my thanks once again to Jeff Miller, fountain of knowledge about all things brass. Maybe we'll come back to him at some point in the future to look at some of the other weird and wonderful instruments that he has in his room. Now, a little bit of a mea culpa, and that is that for the genre tombola section, where I try and examine a different style, randomly chosen for me every episode, I'm not gonna be doing corrido, which was allocated to me a couple of episodes ago, or the flamenco style that was allocated to me last time. And that is because I've been very busy, quite busy, and I have not had the time to properly dig into those in the way that I would like, but they are coming. I'm working on both of them. I'm seeking out people to talk to and researching both of those that are on their way. I should say that this is the first summer that the podcast has been running. I set it up in October, and so this is the first time I've hit a summer, which is traditionally a very busy time for me and many musicians and running the podcast. So I'm absolutely loving digging into it amongst everything else I do over the summer, but it is a learning curve trying to balance everything out. There's loads of stuff I've been working on for the show, including some very exciting, exclusive interviews and all sorts of things. But I reserve the right to slightly tinker with the format over the next few weeks, as things are quite hectic, but loads of cool stuff to come. Anyway, since I was in Lowestoft for the First Light Festival, as I talked about earlier, I had the chance to interview the amazing Lowestoft Longshoremen, who are a brilliant sea shanty choir. Now, I caught them just after their gig at their First Light Festival, right at the end of the festival. And of course, I'd only had one hour sleep on the beach the night before and it was very noisy. So I'm afraid it's not perfect sound conditions, but I've done a bit of processing to try and get rid of as much background noise as possible. So if the voices sound a bit weird, that's why. But anyway, over to the Lowestoft Longshoremen in, you guessed it, Lowestoft. From Fraserborough and Aberdeen, from Whitby, Yammertown, the fleet's away at the break of day.
To the northern minch, on the Norway deeps, on the banks and knolls of the North Sea Holes, where the herring shoals are found. It's off with a boil up for the... Well, the Lohresdorf one, surely. Then we'll see Shanty Grubbson. And you just done a show as part of the First Light Festival, right? Which was absolutely, I just saw the whole thing. It was absolutely amazing. I loved it. Now we do. And how did you start? How long have you been going? I used to go to the Seagull Choir and sing in a choir. And then two or three lads broke away and started this up, you know. So it started as a more conventional... Yes. Right, right. And what made you want to move over to doing... Well, I just went with the lads, you know. I couldn't make it. Maybe because we couldn't get on up the high notes with the choir. And we had... And they're easy to sing as well. Right, right, right. Nice and easy to sing. Yeah, because have any of you got like musical training or anything? Or... You're singing in the pub on a sack. Singing in the pub, that counts, that counts. I play the bike bikes. I think you. I said musical training. No, Jeff. I've got 23 instruments and I can't buy any of them. Oh, well. I said, but you do have a music job. Well, we've got a lot of music in our family, but I'm probably the least tannited one. But it just evolved out of the choir originally. And what made you want to do shanties over the stuff you do? I think one of the lads were a longshore fisherman and he wanted to sing the shared is. But when you say longshore fisherman, can you just explain to people who don't know what that is? What I mean? Well, it's fisherman who worked for the B-Team, yes. So if you're familiar with pike, some of those boats that are up on the shingle there, longshoremen, by definition, are guys that in the past rowed out vessels that are anchored off on shore, and also brought cargo in, but also they would be fishing as well to supplement their inputs. You had to do whatever you could to a bit of penny. So the term longshoreman is always traditionally being linked with dockside guys. But in somewhere like Suffolk, there'd be guys who've got the boats on the beach, they'd row out and say, fish a bit. And then if anybody was anchored off, they'd get their cargo brought in. And see, yeah, yeah, because there's a lot of boats still there in Papeville, right? Yeah, some of them still do fish. They still do fish. Yeah. Right. And do any of you guys fish regularly? Or is this...? Someone who pretends.
I'm the only one who owns a boat. And that's on the board. And I sold mine. I sold mine. But what is it that brought, like, the people who weren't in that choir, what is it that brought you guys in? Is it just through being on the thing they had? The actual songs and the singing. But traditionally, they all tell a story. Yeah. And so you feel as though you're passing on heritage when you sing these songs. Well, some of them are contemporary and quite up to date, but the majority, we do try and do the old, authentic ones. So it's partly about passing down the tradition? Yeah, that's part of it. And enjoy singing. We enjoy the singing. Yeah, well, you can see that. It's giving really courage to the audience, you know, you guys are so full of fun and joy. It keeps these old guys young. But yeah, it's really, it's a really useful kind of fun, fun performance. Well, it is the way we interpret it. Not all groups do the same as us. But some people do... Well, they have more static and just do the singing. Perhaps they can sing to a higher standard than us, but it would be difficult, wouldn't it? Yeah, so we try and do all sorts of animation to try and get the shenanigans. Yeah, shenanigans, of course. Yeah, definitely. I think I saw you guys at the Suffolk show a few weeks ago. Yeah, that's there. Suffolk show. Suffolk show. Henham. Henham. Yeah, we've been there. And so the tradition is obviously singing the Shanti. Has anyone, has been around for a long time? Does anyone know much about that history? Did you really talk about that? Well, it's all about keeping your timing. When you were on the sailing ships, that they would work songs. And there was a Shanti man that took the lead. And he used to sing the songs to a certain rhythm, to certain jobs. And so if they were hauling, that would be a hauling type tempo. And if they were on the caps, then it would be a marching type tempo. And so that was where they originate. So that's why some are faster? Yes. Yes, depending what job you were working at. So it's basically to keep people working in time. Yes, that is what he thought too. We've had the Folk Soul shanties where, when very little downtime that a seaman would have, they'd be enjoying themselves singing, dancing, playing instruments, just enjoying. That's more of a Folk Soul shanty. So that would be like in the pub after, basically? No, no, it'd be on ship.
Oh, still on ship? Yeah. In the sleep, you know, because they aren't on deck or whatever, on call all the time, so every eight hours or so, they'd have a break. Usually, I think they worked in eight hours stints. Do you know where some of these songs came from originally? You know, were they made up on ship, presumably? Yeah, from the Caribbean. Some of the verses are nonsense, just to keep time. I mean, no matter what they're singing, I mean, I'm not a big riskier, but they aren't really fit for today's audience. We have to be careful. Yeah, we have some of our songs adopted to actually fit in with the political correctness of the time. So the songs come from all over the world. We've got songs that originate in obviously the UK, England, Ireland, Scotland, but we've got songs that come from France, the Americas, right the way down to Australia. Yeah. We haven't got any Chinese ones yet, though, have we? There's lots of wailing songs because wailing was a big thing at one time, getting the wailers, and that was all the way around the world because wailing was an international type thing to do. And so there were wailing fleets, most big nations had wailing fleets. And so they would have songs appertaining to wailing. You've heard of The Wellerman, of course? Yeah, that's a great example. That's all about wailing. New Zealand. Oh, is it New Zealand? That's weirdly one of my kids' favourite songs. We missed it when it first came out, that my kids were too young, but now the song they request more than anything. And The Wellerman, that was an actual ship that went around supplying all the other ships that were doing the wailing, because they used to be out sea catching, where I suppose six was a year. And so they need new resupplying. And The Wellerman was the ship that went around all these different things. Gotcha, gotcha. Got all the kids, though. Yeah, they went. We've done school gigs. The kids have known everything. They know, they really did like it. They loved it, they loved it. Well, I find it so that my show is called Origin of the Pieces, and it's about sort of evolution of music, where music comes from, how it evolves and stuff. I find that shanty is such an interesting example of that, because you say it comes from all over the world, comes from the Caribbean, but here we are in low stuff, you guys singing these songs that have been around for hundreds of years, but might have come from New Zealand or the Caribbean. The thing that links all of them, no matter what part of the world they come from, they're all songs by working people. They're working class, working people songs, you know. I mean, some of these songs would have been sung in protest as well, because the lyrics are not quite... To the audience around more than the ships. Yeah, but I mean, they are the songs of working people.
So is there something kind of interesting there because about like the way that we think of things like diversity as being in different places, but actually when you're thinking about something that unites all those different places is working people in all those places have got the same struggles. Yeah, assuming they work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And having songs to kind of bring the work together, but also have fun at the end of the day. Yeah, yeah. Thanks guys, that was really fascinating. Really, really loved it and loved your comments. Thank you. I'm serious. Loved it. Cheers. You're very welcome. Keep an eye on us on Facebook. Yeah, we'll do. We'll do, exactly. Tell us your Facebook page. It's the Lowest Off Longshore Mill. Search for Lowest Off Longshore Mill. Lovely, all right. And if you do want to hear more from the Lowestoft Longshoremen, you can of course check them out live, go to their Facebook page and see where they're performing next. But also, there is the full concert that I recorded and videoed that is up on my Patreon, as well as the full interview that you just heard, plus some extras. So head over to Patreon. Speaking of Patreon, there's gonna be a few more bits announced there over the coming weeks. In fact, I think later this week, as I've talked to you now, it's the beginning of July, very beginning of July, I'm gonna be announcing some live dates and there's gonna be some exclusive ticket offers coming up on that Patreon. So do head over to originandthepieces.com. There's a mailing list on my Patreon. You can sign up for all of those. And as always, that really helps. As does spreading the word about the show to friends and family and all the rest of it. Reviewing, of course, it's all grist to the mill. So really, really appreciate the word of mouth. Support, that is incredibly welcome. I think that's about it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. As always, the theme tune is by Hackney Colliery Band, me and Angelique Kidjo. And thanks very much for listening. I'm gonna be back in two weeks. Should be back on schedule for two weeks time, for episode 19. And I've already got some great stuff in the can for that one. So do make sure to tune in. Meanwhile, drop me a line about the show. Any comments you might have, things you've enjoyed, things you might wanna see on future episodes. And I'll speak to you in a couple of weeks. Stay musically curious. Bye. You live and you die. Just don't let it pass you by. You have choices to make. You have chances to take. You will laugh, you will sing, and you will cry.