He
co-produced the RSPB birdsong recording that has hit the Top 20, and duets with
nightingales – to highlight the beauty of a fragile world
Wed 15
May 2019 11.34 BSTLast modified on Fri 17 May 2019 16.48 BST
It’s just
before midnight, deep in the Sussex countryside, and a small group led by the
bravely inventive folk singer Sam Lee sets
out to go singing with nightingales. We walk in silence in the dark – no
torches are allowed – skirting a wood and then clambering up a bank on to a
disused railway track. And here, in the bushes, a male nightingale is singing,
blasting through the silence with a song that is astonishingly loud and
exuberant, with a constantly changing, complex flurry of notes broken by
periods of silence.
We sit
and listen, then Sam picks up a shruti box – the instrument used by Indian
musicians to create drone effects – and begins overtone singing, where two
notes are produced at once. “They love the harmonics”, he explains. Instead of
flying off, the bird now joins in, singing even louder than before. And he
continues singing when tonight’s guest musician, the composer and
arranger Kate St
John begins
improvising on cor anglais. And so it continues for well over an hour, with Sam
switching to folk songs, including The Nightingale, of course, and Kate playing
thumb piano. “The birds know how to create a dialogue,” Sam explains. “They
love cellos and flutes and folk songs – but not guitars or singer-songwriters.”
This is
the fourth year in which he has invited audiences to listen to nightingales and
learn about their plight – “an 85% decline in 30-40 years, and only 5,500 pairs
left in the whole of the UK. They could be gone in 20 or 30 years. It’s
unbelievable”. But this spring the project has taken on a new significance,
because the nightingale has become a symbol of resistance, thanks largely to
Sam.
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