Martyn Bennett was a master musician and composer, an innovator who carried the Scottish tradition naturally into the worlds of club culture and technological advancement and created bold, exciting new music with huge personality, heart and soul.
Martyn was born on February 17th, 1971 in St John’s, Newfoundland. His earliest musical memories were of hearing Gaelic songs sung by his mother, Margaret, a prominent folklorist and writer, and traditional fiddle tunes played in the Gaelic-speaking communities of Cordroy Valley in Western Newfoundland and in Scotstown, Quebec, where he spent a year before moving to Scotland.
In 1981 they settled in Kingussie and encouraged by his history teacher and first piping mentor, David Taylor, Martyn began playing the pipes. Within two years he was winning junior piping competitions and making a big impression at folk sessions, sneaking into pubs and bars at folk festivals where he also became aware of the traveller singers who were upholding the ballad singing tradition.
At fifteen, by now living in Edinburgh, Martyn became the first traditional musician to be accepted at the City of Edinburgh Music School. He studied composition, violin and piano and in 1990 he enrolled at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, where he met his future wife, Kirsten.
While working hard on his classical violin technique Martyn was also applying his talent to other music. An early sign of things to come came when he recorded with Martin Swan of Mouth Music, including an iconic Drambuie commercial that featured Martyn’s superb piping. After undergoing treatment for testicular cancer, Martyn began looking for new ways of expressing himself. He bought an electronic keyboard then a sampler and mixing desk. The DJ sets that Martyn enjoyed so much at Club Latino and Black Bo’s were about to filter into a musical revolution as he merged his enthusiasm for the rave scene with his love of traditional music.
Recorded and mixed in just seven days in 1995, Martyn’s first, self-titled album combined samples of Sir Harry Lauder, big grooves, a Hamish Henderson recitation and delirious tunes. He followed this with Bothy Culture’s gathering of Punjabi, Turkish, Scandinavian and Irish influences and a commission, MacKay’s Memoirs, for the opening of the Scottish Parliament in July 1999 that featured his beloved pipes with the City of Edinburgh Music School’s chamber orchestra. In 2000 came Hardland,, whose ecstatic launch at Cambridge Folk Festival that year was soon tempered by the news that Martyn had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Over the next two years Martyn underwent major surgery and exhausting radio- and chemotherapy but still managed to produce the extraordinary Glen Lyon, documenting his mother’s singing of Gaelic songs set to music and recordings of the sounds of nature and agriculture. He then signed with Peter Gabriel’s Real World label to create his final masterpiece, Grit, a painstakingly produced and glorious synthesis of sampled street songs, ballads, Scottish folk tales, ecstatic rhythms and pan-global influences and featuring Michael Marra’s magnificently resonant reading of Psalm 118.
On January 30th, 2005 Martyn died. His time on Earth was far too short but his musical vision lives on through a small but emphatically creative body of recorded work, through compositions for string quartet and orchestra and through the Martyn Bennett Trust, which supports performances, commissions, recordings and education projects by musicians who embrace the spirit of this brilliantly imaginative musician.