Martin & Haynes specialize in suitcase-sized sounds
By Alexander Varty
The cover art—two scruffy dudes in black turtlenecks, leaning up against each other and looking sensitive—pays tribute to Simon & Garfunkel’s 1968 classic Bookends. The song titles include such promising numbers as “Sittin’ in a Puddle”, “Pretty Ugly”, and “She’s Not My Girlfriend, My Girlfriend Is Normal”. And the featured instruments are a $30 pawnshop-prize ukulele and a Salvation Army suitcase, the latter played with sticks and brushes like a drum.
But don’t mistake Martin & Haynes’s debut, Freedman, for a comedy record, for nothing could be further from the case.
It’s not that Jean Martin and Justin Haynes don’t have a sense of humour. They’re fully cognizant of the fact that their ukulele-suitcase duo is an inherently funny combination—after all, their other band is called Blah Blah 666. But what really attracted the two musicians to their unusual format is the surprising delicacy of its sound, and how well it suited the sketchy, enigmatic compositions of their colleague Myk Freedman, who gave the disc its name and all but one of its 17 tunes.
“It’s a small sound,” says Martin, reached at the Toronto home he shares with singer Christine Duncan, a wild assortment of instruments and recording gear, and the offices of their Barnyard Records imprint. “And sometimes the noises from the movements of our hands around the instruments are almost as loud as the actual melodic content. So it feels very frail, to me, and very honest.”
Some of Freedman’s tracks are so abstract that they sound almost disembodied; others are more conventionally structured, and more seductively melodic. Their composer, Martin explains, is a Toronto bandleader and lap-steel guitarist who had the bright idea of compiling a selection of his pieces in book form. When played by Freedman’s own eight-piece band, St. Dirt Elementary School, they apparently have a somewhat Burt Bacharach–like quality. As reinvented by Martin & Haynes, however, they’re less chamber pop than dollhouse balladry, and the ukulele-suitcase format lends itself to the material’s inherent wistfulness.
“What we’re doing is kind of an antidramatic thing,” says Martin, “and I think that’s what makes it so melancholic.”
Perhaps in an attempt to make the Martin & Haynes stage show a touch more theatrical, the two will be accompanied on their upcoming West Coast tour by multi-instrumentalist Ryan Driver, who shares a similarly unconventional musical aesthetic. His instrument? The “streetsweeper bristle bass”, a metal tine plucked from a City of Toronto road-maintenance machine and amplified by a rudimentary contact microphone. So while this band might be growing in size, its minimalist aesthetic remains intact.
In fact, Martin—who can usually be seen playing an elaborately customized drum kit, while Haynes prefers hollow-body jazz guitars—notes that one of this format’s attractions is that the whole show can be packed up into the same suitcase he plays on.
“You know, it’s amazing,” he says with evident amusement. “Everybody always takes so much equipment with them when they go on the road, but this time we’re all just laughing.”
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