MICHAEL Marra, the gritty-voiced sage of Dundee whose piquantly surreal songs frequently lace whimsy with human truth, is associated with engaging solo performances at the piano, but can also be found in diverting company – his fruitful collaboration with playwright Liz Lochhead, In Flagrant Delicht, for instance, or most recently his appearance in the irrepressible Scots early music group Concerto Caledonia's Edinburgh Festival programme.
This weekend, however, he ventures into what is for him relatively unexplored territory, writing a piece to be performed by massed choirs at "Choired for Sound – The Big Sing" on Sunday as part of Dundee's Fest 'n' Furious roots music festival. The W
rights of Man, as the piece is called, is a typically Marran concatenation that connects his home town to the wider world with an egalitarian vision.
The piece celebrates the Dundee-born socialist, reformer and free-thinker Frances Wright and her sister Camilla, the orphaned daughters of a wealthy Dundee merchant who, in the early years of the 19th century, used their wealth to travel to the United States and set up an experimental community at Nashoba, Tennessee, which Wright operated along the lines of the reformer Robert Owen's social experiment in New Harmony, Indiana.
Appalled by slavery, Wright bought slaves and freed them, offering them work and education.
Working on the choral commission, Marra tells me, he was further inspired by reading Professor Geoff Palmer's book The Enlightenment Abolished, about Scotland's involvement in the Caribbean slave trade.
"The way it fitted in with what I'd been writing was incredible, so the opening of the song is like … if you can imagine selling slaves on Grampian Television, with a wee jingle."
The song goes on to combine, in characteristic Marra style, such pawky lines as "My sister Fanny is as canny as she is sweet/ She could buy and sell your Granny", with epic references to stormy seas and Burnsian sentiments of international fraternity. "I heard a rehearsal the other night and it's sounding good," says Marra, adding that this is the first time he has composed "a full-blown choral piece", although he has worked in the past with Dundee's Loadsaweeminsinging choir, who performed in his comic operetta If the Moon Can Be Believed, and are also among the Big Sing's participating choirs.
Last year's event saw 148 singers on the stage of Dundee's Marryat Hall; this year, with eight choirs performing The Wrights of Man, Marra reckons it will top 160. Also among them, according to the festival programme, may be the Birmingham-based female a cappella quintet Black Voices, who also perform in their own right on Friday night.
The singer-songwriter seems slightly vague about exactly who will be taking part. "I just want to make sure the music's all correct before it gets to Wilma (Kennedy, director of the Big Sing]," he chuckles.
Marra, who was awarded an honorary doctorate by Dundee University last year in recognition of his contribution to his home town's cultural profile, is looking forward to the event, at which he hopes to add a gravelly bass vocal to the women's voices.
He fits this choral excursion into a busy schedule. With his Concerto Caledonia exercise not long behind him, he was off on a short English tour the day after our interview and was also in the throes of rehearsing with dancer Frank McConnell in A Wee Home from Home, the extraordinary two-man song and dance show the pair have revived 21 years after its first performances won ecstatic reviews and produced his enduring song Mother Glasgow.
• Fest 'n' Furious runs from 2-4 October, with other guests including Wendy Weatherby, Saltfishforty, Sophie Bancroft, Sheena Wellington and Catriona McKay with Nils Okland. For further information, see
www.festnfurious.co.uk and
www.marra.me.uk.
