It might be easier to list the highly regarded musicians Kate Ellis hasn’t collaborated with than to roll out the names of those with whom she has. The latter include Bono, Iarla Ó Lionáird, Julie Feeney, Gavin Friday, Martin Hayes, Lisa Hannigan, Francesco Turrisi, Fovea Hex, Bryce Dessner, Beth Orton and Ye Vagabonds. The Irish cellist is also artistic director of the acclaimed Crash Ensemble.
“I play a lot of different music, but I don’t really see that they’re any different,” says Ellis, whose latest collaboration is with Ed Bennett. She and the Co Down composer have just made the album Strange Waves together. “I don’t really compartmentalise the work that I’m doing. I see it as the whole of my musical output. You’re always learning when you’re playing with different people, playing different music or working with people in all sorts of genres. One project feeds into the next, which then feeds into the next – there’s an overlap of information as well as musical knowledge.”
Is has always been that way, she says. “I studied classical music, but then on the side I would always dabble.” There were lots of instruments in her house as she was growing up. Her father, an avid jazz fan, “used to renovate and collect instruments as a hobby, so there would have been a double bass at home, which I would have messed around with. There was also a saxophone that he picked up in a charity shop.” Ellis would jump in and try different things. “To my detriment, probably, I’ve never tried to focus on one particular route within music. I think it’s more important that everything is seen as a whole.”
Does she ever decline projects because the music doesn’t resonate with her? “Absolutely, I do, because I think musical integrity is incredibly important. As a freelance musician it’s very easy, obviously, to keep saying yes, yes and yes, because you don’t know where the next project is going to come from. You get to a point, however, where you have to maintain integrity in terms of your own musical output, and you have to play music that resonates with you and your musical voice. So there are situations where I would say no, but I would offer those to other people for whom the project might resonate more.”
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Strange Waves coincided with the oozing of time during the pandemic and her own general “sense of calm”. When Bennett, whose work includes big orchestral works, solo projects, opera, installations, and music for dance and film, forwarded her early drafts of the music for the then tentative collaboration, what did she feel she could add to it?
“I knew he had total faith in me to realise what it was, to give it a shape and make it into a sort of living, breathing piece of music.” The album’s six movements unfurl unhurriedly, with electronic rhythms and marine recordings tumbling in tandem with Ellis’s playing. The resonance with her musical sensibility is what makes it work, she says. “It’s all about listening to the work and whatever the musical content is. It’s hard to describe, but it is magic gold dust that is very personal to me.”
Ellis collaborated with Bono on his tour of the US and Europe last year to promote Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, his memoir. Along with Jacknife Lee’s dive into electronics, and the harp playing of Gemma Doherty of Saint Sister, Ellis’s cello playing was part of the shows’ intriguing readjustment of a series of U2 songs, which, pared back, appeared in a wholly different light. Oddly, as she politely explains, it turns out she’s not allowed to talk about them. Even in the general context of artistic recalibration? “No, sorry.”
So what’s next for Ellis? Strange Waves took three years to materialise. “Other projects may take longer. It varies. My work is diving into a world of collaborations and going back to creating music as opposed to playing other people’s music. I don’t know what else is next. I’m juggling.”
Strange Waves, by Kate Ellis and Ed Bennett, is on the Ergodos label
