SEE Magazine
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.

FOLK
BY JERRY OZIPKO

PREVIEW
Vox Violins, with Harvey Andrews
Riverdale Hall
Saturday, Oct. 4

Beth Bartley, a classically trained violinist, and Mark Clifford, a rock and jazz guitarist, comprise Vox Violins, a London, Ontario-based duo. Their music has been described variously as “a magic melding of widely disparate styles” (London Free Press) and a “special paradigm-popping fusion of voice and instruments” (Peter Harris). 

But in reality, their music simply can’t be pigeon-holed; it’s too interesting and different. The duo’s début CD, on the independent Double V label, Playing with Pollywogs in the River of Life, features a wide variety of influences, ranging from klezmer to reggae and beyond. At different times, Clifford’s voice and guitar recall Leonard Cohen or Mark Knopfler, and Bartley’s violin is wonderfully diverse, considering her classical training (she studied at London’s University of Western Ontario with Yuri Mazurkevich, shortly after he defected from Russia with his wife).

Vox Violins shares the bill with British entertainer Harvey Andrews at a concert sponsored by the Full Moon Folk Club at Riverdale Hall on Saturday, Oct. 4. I recently spoke with Bartley from a tour stop in Jasper.

SEE: What was the influence behind your arrangement of Amazing Grace? I hear blues in it as well as stride bass. Did Mark play the guitar in bottleneck style?

Beth Bartley: He did, with the slide. How that came to be was that the guitar itself found its way into his hands from a friend. It’s basically a Simpson-Sears catalogue ordered guitar and it was from the ’50s or the “40s. My girlfriend was going to get rid of it, so she handed it to Mark (her father had bought it and he had died when she was a baby). A couple of years after that she was getting married in Montreal and her mother requested Amazing Grace at the wedding. So we thought that it would be nice to play it on her dad’s guitar. There was no way he could finger the thing, so Mark put the bottleneck on it and that’s how that arrangement came to be.

You originally met in 1980 at London’s Home County Folk Festival. What was it about the meeting that clicked, where you felt you could do something together, because you have such diverse backgrounds?

At the time I was beached. I kind of skipped school and had finished two years of university. I’d been in a folk band. We did Allman Brothers and John Prine and we got really good folk harmonies. I always liked to sing and harmonize . . . Then I got involved with some bluegrass guys . . . I’ve always been sort of influenced by Stephane Grappelli and the whole jazz sound. So we ended up doing Charlie Parker with bluegrass instruments. It was a blast! 

(Mark) was playing with a rock band . . . He was writing on acoustic guitar and he just wanted to change from what he was doing. So he said, “Well, let’s try something out.” We rehearsed a few tunes and the arrangements were fun and challenging. He invited me out to his solo act . . . We did our rehearsed tunes and never left the stage. It just seemed to really click.

You have got an interesting name as a duo, Vox Violins.

When we started out it was Vox Violence, a play on words. People thought we were a punk band so we changed it when we went down to Nova Scotia and figured that we must have a softer approach. It stuck. Now people think Mark should be playing violin.