Tribute albums are tricky things, aren’t they? For every Famous Blue Raincoat, there’s a hideous Beatles-sung-by-dogs album, for every Dinah Sings Bessie Smith, there’s an album of Metallica songs rendered unlistenable on a harp. Fortunately, The John Martyn Project Volume 1 falls, very much, into the former category. A thoughtful, beautiful tribute to a brilliant, but complex, man.
Almost seven years ago, six musicians came together, at the Jazz Cafe, to celebrate Martyn’s work – that night laid the foundations for this project. The core of the project are from Bristol and, perhaps, that is why this album is able to grab at the diverse influences so often present in John Martyn’s best work, and makes them cohere. As with much of the best music from the Rebel City, the John Martyn Project perfectly encapsulates the sum of its parts.
Starting, fittingly, with Intro, a whoosh of electric guitar and a jumble of raised voices usher in what is to come. Layers and whispers, echoes and over-laps, there’s Martyn’s wide-screen guitar, a shimmer of jazz, a burble of people. It’s a fuzzy, hazy opening sequence to the unmade movie of his life. It slides into Go Easy, originally from Bless the Weather, and, here, Blythe Pepino turns all of your perceptions upside down. Pepino was the vocalist with Indie-electronica band Vaults and she allows a different viewpoint on these songs, and their singer. Martyn’s difficult relationship with women is well documented but Pepino becomes the star, the voice that you long to hear, interpreting songs and leaving behind any air of masculinity that might be considered uncomfortable. There’s a feeling of gentleness, of something laid-back, Pepino adding a light jazziness, a skip to the summer-y guitar and keys.
Even when Pepino isn’t the focal point, The John Martyn Project still carries with it a lightness, an elegiac celebration of the music. Just Now is rich in harmonies and love, it’s woozy and sleepy, Kit Hawes’ guitars ringing in that signature Martyn way, there’s delicacy rather than gruffness, there’s a heat-haze rather than Glaswegian drizzle. Pete Josef’s (of Roni Size fame) keys glisten and the Bristolian core – Hawes, Sam Brookes, Jon Short and John Blakeley (the latter two the rhythm section of the mighty Sheelanagig) – add the early evening sunlight.
There are glorious harmonies on Head and Heart too, the male voices, in particular, almost Eagles-like. Brookes is gorgeously folky but Hawes and Josef compliment beautifully. Again, you feel that the diffusion of one central, powerful male voice only adds to these songs, rather than taking anything away. Any lingering toxicity is gently removed even as the outcome stays pretty close to the original.
Martyn was always a restless musical soul, whether giving us quintessential 70s folk, slick 80s folk-rock, meandering improvisations or jazzy inflections. To that end, there’s a joyful sense of genre hopping here too. The jazz, though, pokes through time and again. Pepino gives Stormbringer a soul jazz-flavour; it’s all summer afternoons and cigarette smoke. It reminds me of the lovely things that Matt Deighton does, or Dr Robert’s Monks Road Social. That faintly 60s-washed, Soho jazz club thing. The keys, the wordless incantations, the glinting steel guitar strings, the harmonies and then Blakeley’s crashing drums show that the Jazz Cafe is their spiritual home.
Bless The Weather is festooned in jazzy twinkles too – it’s the keys again – and those hammered guitar strings are unmistakably Martyn-esque but everything feels smoother. Awkward angles are, not exactly, removed but lightly sanded until a delightful jazz-tinged reverie overtakes them then, thrillingly, there’s a groove that feels almost like a desert blues. Guitar and piano looking, longingly out across the horizon.
It wouldn’t be a John Martyn tribute album with the three big hitters and May You Never, Solid Air and Don’t Want to Know are utterly fantastic. It is, once again, Blythe Pepino that delivers, once again the female voice that makes this project entirely worthwhile. She is awesome amongst the Laurel Canyon harmonising of May You Never; smoky, sinuous and fluid. She creates a molasses-thick environment around Solid Air; it is woozy and sleepy, her voice spinning, slow-motion, out through the atmosphere. Finally, on Don’t Want to Know, she unleashes great washes of pure love, overtaking the smouldering swirls and ending on splendid positivity.
The best tribute albums add something to the originals. Just as Jennifer Warnes feminised and softened Leonard Cohen so The John Martyn Project help us to glory in the best bits of these songs.
The John Martyn Project Volume 1 is out now on digital, CD and vinyl, available on Bandcamp. You can catch the band live around the UK during March and September 2025
