Welcome to The Buzzard, the homepage and diary/magazine for Cry Havoc, Cotswold morris side from Botley in Oxford.

Summer is icumen in ... in March! Brilliant weather for the folk festival, and the sun continues to shine as I write this. Enjoy it, this is probably all the summer we'll get if the last few years are anything to go by.
Your Spring issue of the Buzzard reflects on the folk festival, where we were joined by hordes of other morris persons, and the Cry Havoc Ale. There are the usual bits and pieces for your amusement and education, and some pictures of Stephen with hair!
Spring forward ...
Ed
This issue 5.4.2009

What's That Instrument?

No. 5 The Bouzouki

There are a lot of pear-shaped fretted instruments out there with 4 pairs of strings … it’s confusing. But it seems if it’s got a long neck it’s probably a bouzouki. Mandolins are very small and mandolas have short necks. Citterns have 5 pairs of strings. The bouzouki’s strings are usually tuned GDAD (or GDAE for fiddlers who can’t multi-task).
Here’s the lowdown from our expert John Creber:

The bouzouki's roots extend back to the long-necked, bowl-backed lutes of ancient Persia and Byzantium. It is often confused with the bazooka, which is a long metal tube used for firing missiles in an unfriendly armour-piercing way. Be careful in those army surplus stores.

‘Rembetika’, the improvised Greek music often compared with American blues, is played with a large bouzouki and a smaller one called a baglama. This was also often confused with a traditional Greek dessert called baklava and a piece of headgear called a balaclava. Ever been stuck on a bus out of Corfu Town with a bunch of guys with Union Jack pants on their heads, with endless Greek music playing – then you know what I mean – that’s when you need a good woolly hat – with earflaps if you can get them.

The biggest issue at this stage was that a round fronted bouzouki player was often quite difficult to interface with a round backed bouzouki, resulting in excessive movement of the instrument during playing and a general feeling of discomfort.

So then the Irish got involved and decided ‘blow this for a game of rembetika’ – let’s cut the back off and make it flat. Johnny Moynihan introduced the bouzouki into Irish music in 1966 when a friend sold him an instrument he’d brought home from a Greek holiday, along with ten kilos of pistachios and a kebab stick the size of an elephant’s leg. Moynihan tuned the instrument into G D A D and began using it at gigs with Andy Irvine and others. Irvine recalls that the reception of the bouzouki was greeted with the term made immortal by the Monty Python team of ‘Stop playing that bloody bouzouki!’

Despite the initial flak, the sound caught on, and Moynihan and Irvine were soon playing the instrument in Sweeney’s Men. Irvine gave Donal Lunny a bouzouki, and their experiments became the core sound of the legendary band Planxty and set the standard for rhythm sections in subsequent traditional bands. If there was ever an Irish bouzouki guru then Donal Lunny is your man. From the original Bothy Band recordings (which are excellent) his album ‘Coolfin’ is a MUST for bouzouki players. If you are serious about the bouzouki you should get this album, and play it until your family implores you to stop.

So now we have reached the modern Irish flat-backed bouzouki with 4 pairs or 'courses' of strings that can be picked or strummed as you wish. There is no impact from the girth of the player and this has led to it being widely used (and misused) by many attendees at local sessions.

The favourite zouk in my employ was made by Paul Hathway in Wanstead (well known bouzouki capital of east London). It is not octave strung (which is pointless and makes it sound out of tune) but strung in pairs with a heavy bass string gauge for those Led Zep moments.

Kalispera. JC

Barbara P says: I first met the bouzouki a few years ago when I was playing the guitar, and recognised straight away the advantages of only having to worry about 4 strings (OK, 4 pairs of strings, same thing) two of which were tuned to D. I borrowed Geoff’s (thanks Geoff) and then I bought one like it, and a couple of years later I strayed into the instruments tent at Towersey and bought a lovely Oakwood one. It is octave strung, a subtle refinement not appreciated by some heavy metal type thrashers, John. It is brown, this is so I can lurk unnoticed in corners of dimly lit wood-panelled pubs. (It's hard, being an introvert morrisperson, with a morbid fear of being discovered playing G when everyone else is in D ...)

My conversion to zoukdom has led to a general interest in strange small stringed things, and I now also have two stick dulcimers, a mountain dulcimer, a cuatro and a stick-type-tenor-guitar … I am looking forward to the moment when I can buy a sheitholt! Can’t wait for somebody to ask me what it is …

Geoff has an Ozark bouzouki, mentioned above, which he bought from the Music Room in 2004, and promptly had it borrowed a lot by Barbara. Recently he has had it re-strung from octave to unison.

Ed says: The bouzouki is indeed a fine instrument, but I prefer the superior bonzonki, or zonk, so called because of its capacity for inducing a pleasurably trance-like state in player and listener alike (who, when they achieve this higher state of consciousness, are said to be ‘zonked’). It has four curses of stings in pears, the two lower patched curses being active stung. It has a float bock, a cheddar tap, and twenty-two frites, and was made by Orcwoad of Lewds. Jungle, twinge, or strim, it does the lot!

Finally, Wikipedia tells us ‘Bozuk in Turkish means "broken, not functioning, or modified”.’ Hmmm ……

The Limericks

An apprentice upon the bouzouki,
Convinced that her chords were all fluky
Upended the beast
And stood on it; ‘At least
I can use it for surfing at Newquay.’

So keen was a musical rookie
That in bed she would play the bouzouki
She'd lie there and twang
Till the cats came and sang
And put her husband right off any thought of sleeping.

I once had a girlfriend called Sukey:
she had a great hairy Saluki,
a terrible scar
on her je ne sais quoi
and a bloody great pair of bouzoukis.

There once was a sketch on TV's
Monty Python show, all about cheese;
The background bouzouki
Was decidedly spooky
And upset the bloke played by John Cleese!

Bar bought a bouzouki one day;
took it home in the usual way;
but when at her leisure
she inspected her treasure
'it's gone pear-shaped!' she cried in dismay.

Emma gets her picture

On her 21st birthday at the beginning of January, Emma had a party and received a portrait of herself done by very our own Barbara Payne.