By Jim Gilchrist

Published 8th Jan 2024, 09:55 BST

African grooves, church music and Glasgow’s seething crucible of young jazz all inform the distinctive music of hybrid guitarist Nathan Somevi. It’s the guitar that’s the hybrid, one hastens to add, although Somevi himself, it might be argued, is an interesting cultural concatenation himself, having been born in Ghana, but, following an early spell in London, having lived most of his life in Scotland – Aberdeen then Glasgow.

He cut a tall, affable onstage presence when I heard him at the Jazz Bar during last summer’s Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival, coaxing spacey, warm toned sound from his seven-string hybrid guitar which, combining standard and bass registers, added a quartet dimension to his tightly matched trio with saxophonist Simon Herberholz and drummer Niall Ford.

At times he generated shimmering chords for the sax to sing against, snappy funk or stealthy riffs from those bass strings; some of his compositions rode a township-style bounce, while there was a stately yet catchy hook to Hymn – a simply titled echo of the church music which has helped shape his playing.

Now 29, Somevi, who was shortlisted for the recent Scottish Jazz Awards’ Rising Star prize as well as for Best Newcomer in the 2022 Scottish Alternative Music Awards, still maintains a “day job” with HMRC, but is considering how his music will evolve in the coming year. Having produced two well-received EPs, Can’t Be Done and Brave, he is now contemplating an album, as well as possibly broadening his approach to involve keyboards and singers.

Somevi’s embracing of the guitar came about at least partly through sibling rivalry – he watched his older brother take piano lessons and would have liked to have played keyboard but found it challenging, so turned to guitar. Both of them showcased their skills playing in church, an environment which, he reckons, has helped him expand his musical vocabulary. “I started playing in churches with better musicians,” he recalls, “and they were playing all these fancy chords, so I was trying to figure out a way to deal with that and I got into Martin Taylor.”

Studying the fingerstyle virtuoso’s playing, he was conscious of how Taylor generates bass lines while playing, “and I thought, wow!”

In addition to Taylor, he was listening intently to the likes of Joe Pass, George Benson, rock guitarist and teacher Guthrie Govan and Instagram guitar star Mateus Asato. Then he discovered the American guitarist and bandleader Charlie Hunter, whose custom-made seven and eight-string guitars enable playing melody, chords and bass lines simultaneously. Somevi was hooked, and in 2018 finally acquired one of the instruments manufactured by Hunter’s Hybrid Guitars company.

As well as guitar heroes, his Ghanaian background continues to exert an influence. One of his tunes, for instance, Family Party, reflects just that – family gatherings back in Africa. It’s music that reminds him of the popular Ghanaian highlife singer Pat Thomas. He adds, however: “When you go to Ghana, or other parts of Africa, you find there’s not so much separation between musicians and non-musicians. Here, you’re either a musician or you’re not: in Ghana, everyone can kind of play or kind of sing.”

A major catalyst has been Glasgow’s intense jamming scene – energised substantially by the young musicians emerging from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s BMus jazz course – including Herberholz and another of Somevi’s saxophonist collaborators, Rachel Duns.

He is looking now to make his first album, possibly incorporating tracks from his EPs, rather as did Australian jazz-funksters Hiatus Kaiyote, a band he admires, with one of their albums. He already has new music written, and would like to use some or all of the musicians he’s played with so far – Herberholz, Duns and another saxophonist, Mateusz Sobieski , as well as Ford, whom he has known since his Aberdeen years, and another drummer who used to play with him in church, Ifedade “Dade” Thomas. All, however, have busy schedules, so the line-up remains to be decided.

While he sees himself playing with saxophonists in the foreseeable future, he’d like to collaborate at some point with a keyboard player. He has worked in the past with Glasgow singer-songwriter Scarlett Randle and also visualises another format with drums, guitar and singers, gospel style.

When composing, he explains, the chords come first: “With the guitar the melody comes with the chords, although when working with saxophone players they add other melodies. There is a lot of collaboration with the music.”

Like much in jazz, however, the unexpected plays its part. The opening track of Brave, his last EP, is a snappy number called Vanessa which partly shaped itself, he says, when he was playing another tune, “and I made a mistake that turned into Vanessa.

“It was one of these things that wrote itself. I’m a fan of happy accidents.”

For further information, see www.nathansomevi.com

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