"I mean, music's just as much about listening as about playing. I've met some great players but they're hopeless to play with because they just don't listen . . . there's an important distinction there." Folk musician Chris Wood is one of an extraordinary English folk ensemble, The Two Duos Quartet. The quartet - first-generation Irish accordionist Karen Tweed, and her guitarist partner Ian Carr, both heavily into Swedish folk music; another beautiful accordionist Andy Cutting and his long-time accomplice, Wood - perform next week in Ireland.
Wood is quite a composer and folk musician, whether he's sawing out an English jig, droning along to the others with often bluegrassy fiddle harmonies, or plucking two specially tuned fiddles across his knees and singing over them. His singing is beautifully persuasive, in the English-accented vein of his part-mentor, the great English folk singer Martin Carthy. But hark his take on traditional ballads like Lord Bateman, or his own little masterpiece, The Shouter, which he adapted from a Sufi parable.
Instrumentally, playing the English folk repertoire is a real job of reconstruction. "We don't have that great big collection of 78s that you have in Ireland, the Michael Colemans and stuff. We've just got the smallest, smallest handful. So while we have the tune books and manuscripts, we don't have evidence of how to play them. We've got lots of fantastic cylinders and 78s of singers, so it's as a singer that I have most chance of finding out how to play the fiddle."
His own creative archaeology involved immersion in spunky Quebequois music, and later, with Andy Cutting and fiddler Jean Francois Vrod, French music. "Jean Francois actually showed me that violin-plucking technique. It comes from hearing so much of the kora, the African harp."
More recently, himself and Cutting have worked up a repertoire of English folk music for their fourth, most recent, album, Knock John. As we talked, Wood often bristled as though English folk music had laboured for 800 years under the yoke of Irish diddleyaye. "For English players, Irish and Scottish music is constantly in your face, and they are increasingly beginning to understand that, playing it themselves, they'll only ever begin to get so deep and no further, until they begin to really looking at their own music."
But if there's such a gap in the living tradition? "Aha yes, but folk music has found its way into other music. I'm thinking particularly of hymn tunes. I mean, at school you just had to stand in assembly while the whole school sang around you. And in that church music, there are very particular cadences which are really from English song, and my heart swells whenever I hear them. A big part of it is in the accent, the way we speak to each other . . . "
He spends a lot of time excavating Morris music. "What I find most fascinating about Morris tunes is that they rarely fit very neatly into 4/4, jig-time or what have you. Of all the English music, it probably represents the repertoire before the melodeon came - that was the first nail in the coffin. If you look at the tunes from the 1850s onwards, they all tend to have this very major, rumpy-pumpy feel which people have come to despise.
"Before that, it was the same as elsewhere in Europe - music was played on flutes and fiddles, the English pastoral pipes. Pipes and tabor would have been the morris instrument, like a tin whistle with three holes held in one hand, and the tabor beneath that in the same hand, and you beat the tabor with your free hand. So it had a very limited range, but you had these interesting modes, and you got this slightly older-sounding music. But when the melodeon came, everything was shunted into the major key, and anything that was a little bit too difficult was just kind of chucked out."
The English folk songs provide a wonderfully alternative, latent history of England. "Yeah, if the Irish feel hard done by, who do you think the English practised it all on first? It was on us here in England. That's why there are so many Napoleon songs in the English repertoire, thousands of them. Because if you were some poor sod, working the land, you were always on the knucklebones of your arse, and the only person who was ever going to come and rescue you was Napoleon. People wanted him to cross the channel and bloody take over."
Mind you, Wood himself had "your average North Kent upbringing - my Dad worked in advertising, and they were of the generation where my Mum didn't work, so she was at home looking after three sons".
There was no music in the family, but he picked it up in the local church choir. "As a chorister you worked from sheet music and were taught how to sing. And that was an amazing musical grounding, because the music was just gorgeous - hymns and sacred pieces, like Bach anthems and cantata, St Matthew's Passion . . . "
Meanwhile, during summer holidays, he went on courses to Canterbury Cathedral. "Can you imagine that as a 10-year-old? You wake up in the morning and get dressed, and you go and sing Matins. Then you have breakfast and then you sing all morning, lessons and stuff, and you sing all afternoon, and then you sing Evensong, and then you go to bed.
"A lot of that sacred music is beginning to come out now in my compositions for my trio, with cellist Nick Cooper - ex-Balanescu Quartet, I hasten to add - and a baroque fiddle player, Clare Salaman."
Their repertoire doesn't fall neatly into folk, early or contemporary music, but rather encompasses the whole lot of them, while Wood scores the parts. "I worked out a top part and then I harmonise or whatever. And then I sit down and play it out on the fiddle to see how . . . violinistic it is. And then I take it to the trio, and I'm really listening to their response, to whether they think it feels good under the fingers."
With the Quartet, folk musicians and composers all, they just take the spine of the tune and improvise around it. "It's very instinctual, particularly between me and Andy. At one time, we had 250 gigs a year, and so we often hardly need to rehearse, and it's only now that we're realising how weird and how precious that is."
The Two Duos Quartet perform at St Mary's Cathedral, Limerick on Tuesday as part of the Blas Summer School of Irish Traditional Music and Dance at the Irish World Music Centre, University of Limerick. Other concerts include the Michael Sexton Ceili Band. Phone 061-202917 for details.