'He thought like a jazz musician': Iain Ballamy to play tribute to Matthew Sweeney

The English saxophonist is coming to Triskel to perform a piece inspired by the work of his friend, the Cork-based poet who died in 2018

Left, Iain Bellamy; right, the late Matthew Sweeney.

English saxophonist Iain Ballamy first met late Irish poet Matthew Sweeney at the end of the 1990s, during the making of a jazz television series filmed in Southampton. The pair had a passionate and mutual love of jazz, yet the connection between them seemed more powerful, immediate and unspoken. 

“I think by the way I played, and by the way he wrote, we just knew that we liked each other,” says Ballamy. “We could relate. We clicked.”

 The saxophonist remembers Sweeney reading two poems: one about a man swimming the Channel – on the back of a horse (‘Crossing’); another on an all-night card game between four men and their Uncle Charlie, who was “stretched out in his coffin”, dead (‘Poker’).

“I was struck by the way Matthew’s mind worked, by his extraordinary flights of fantasy and imagination,” says Ballamy. “He thought like a jazz musician: the poems were free-flowing, a stream of consciousness – they made all kinds of unpredictable connections. There was also something dark, humorous and bitingly honest about his writing, and that appealed to me too.” 

After filming, the men made off with a bottle of red wine from the studio’s green room, and jumped on a train back to London. “We talked and drank and laughed the whole way,” continues Ballamy. “By the time we pulled into Waterloo, Matthew already felt like an old friend.”

 Over the next 20 years the bond between the duo deepened and developed, helped perhaps by their similar outlook on the world. Both, for example, had a staunchly European sensibility that reached out beyond the borders of birth and abode.

Sweeney was born in Lifford, Co Donegal, moved to London in 1973 and lived in Berlin, Paris and Timisoara in Romania; he settled in Cork in 2008. His guiding light was Kafka, his work remains highly regarded in Germany, and he is the second-most translated modern Irish poet, after Seamus Heaney. “I don’t think Matthew was a Vote Leave person,” jokes Ballamy.

Iain Ballamy. Picture: Lis Wormsley

Fifty-eight-year-old Ballamy may be renowned as “the fantastic Englishman” who was one of the founding members of iconoclastic British ’80s collective Loose Tubes and a key member of English prog-rock drum legend Bill Bruford’s band Earthworks, yet he has also forged a distinctly continental identity.

In the late ’90s he formed Food, an ambient electronica duo (plus occasional guests) with Norwegian drummer and electronics wizard Thomas Stronen; so far three Food albums have appeared on quintessential European jazz and new music label ECM. Ballamy also has a second Anglo-Norwegian pairing, Little Radio, with virtuoso button accordionist Stian Carstensen.

Both musician and writer were adventurous spirits too, non-conformers ever-eager to challenge themselves and expand their work and practice. As well as his 16 award-winning collections of vibrant, mischievous and darkly fabulist poems, Sweeney wrote poetry and novels for children and co-wrote a satirical crime thriller with English poet John Hartley Williams.

The scope of Ballamy’s work is dizzying: from collaborating with famed English folk singer June Tabor to writing film soundtracks and appearing as a soloist with the BBC Philharmonic. Ballamy and Sweeney were also committed and generous teachers and mentors. “I think we were both fascinated by the many different facets of the disco ball, of the whole,” says Ballamy.

The pair worked together on a number of intriguing ventures, from a 2001 joint commission to mark the opening of the Jerwood Library at Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London, to gigs at a Berlin jazz club and an ambitious cross-arts project titled An Ape’s Progress as part of the 2015 Manchester Jazz and Literature Festivals.

The world premiere that brings Ballamy to Cork this month, however, is a posthumous one. A concert co-commissioned by Triskel Arts Centre and Cork World Book Fest, and supported

The English saxophonist is coming to Triskel to play a piece inspired by the work of his friend, the Cork-based poet who died in 2018

by the Arts Council of Ireland, The Owl is Ballamy’s response to a poem of the same name that Sweeney wrote over 12 haunted and helpless nights in October 2017 while waiting for a neurologist’s diagnosis. The news was not good. Sweeney was to die of motor neurone disease ten months later, aged 65.

“Matthew sent me ‘The Owl’ shortly after he’d written it and I promised him that, whatever was to come, I would make a setting for it,” says Ballamy. “And then, after he died, I wrote the music as a way of both cauterising the loss and paying a tribute to him. I think of it as a response piece – to Matthew, our friendship, his poetry and his predicament. It’s also all tied up with ideas of mortality, darkness, hope, music and truth. I tried to be honest about it all.” 

 Ballamy’s music for ‘The Owl’ is structured in a similar way to the poem: the composition alternates between “quiet ambient improvisations” that accompany the 12 stanzas – recited by celebrated stage and screen actor Denis Conway – and written tunes that echo the varying themes and moods of each one, closing with “a kind of Irish air” titled “Donegal Son”. The outstanding quartet Ballamy has assembled comprises the leader on saxophones, Huw Warren on piano, Matthew Sharp on cello and Roy Dodds on percussion.

“In my imagination, Matthew is something like Jiminy Cricket – he’s there with me, like a partner or presence,” says Ballamy, smiling. “I can imagine so strongly how he’d react to the concert. I know he would like it, that he’d have been thrilled.” 

•  The Owl is at Triskel, Cork on Saturday, 23 April, at 8pm (triskelartscentre.ie) as part of Cork World Book Fest (corkworldbookfest.com)