Ian Anderson

The title of this article is ambiguous. For more meanings, see Ian Anderson (disambiguation) .

Ian Anderson in December 2007

Ian Scott Anderson , MBE (born August 10, 1947 in Dunfermline , Scotland ) is a British singer , composer , lyricist , flautist and guitarist . He became known as the front man of the band Jethro Tull .

Life

Childhood and youth

Ian Anderson was born to a factory owner and the youngest of three brothers. He spent the first years of his childhood in Edinburgh . He returned to Scotland much later in life.

His family moved to Blackpool in North West England in 1958 . From 1964 he attended the Blackpool College of Art, where he studied art .

Early career

As a teenager, Anderson worked as a salesman at a Blackpool department store, then at a newsagents kiosk. He later reported that reading Melody Maker and New Musical Express during the breaks inspired him to play in a band.

In 1963, Anderson formed the band The Blades with school friends . Besides him, Barriemore Barlow ( drums ), John Evan ( keyboard ), Jeffrey Hammond ( bass guitar ) and Michael Stephens ( guitar ) played. The band played soul and blues , with Anderson as a singer and with the harmonica - he only found his way to the flute later . From 1965 the band was called the John Evan Band . It dissolved soon afterwards. Anderson then moved to Luton , where he met drummer Clive Bunker and guitarist and singer Mick Abrahams of the blues band McGregor's Engine . Together with bassist Glenn Cornick , they founded the band Jethro Tull , with whom Ian Anderson stayed together until 2014. It was then that he gave up his plans to play the electric guitar . He traded his guitar for a flute, which after a few weeks of practice he could play in rock and blues style. According to the record text of the first Jethro Tull album, This Was , he had only started playing the flute a few months before the recordings for this LP. He was able to apply his knowledge of guitar playing while playing the acoustic guitar . He also played the soprano saxophone , mandolin , bouzouki , balalaika , keyboards, bass guitar, various flutes and other instruments throughout his career .

As a flutist, Anderson is self-taught . His flute playing is characterized by overblowing , playing with a fluttering tongue , growling = singing the fingered note, humming and even grunting. He was influenced by the jazz musician Roland Kirk , whose piece Serenade to a Cuckoo was covered on This Was . When playing the flute, Anderson often stands on only one leg, the other leg is bent. In his early days with Jethro Tull, he instinctively adopted this posture while playing the harmonica, holding the microphone on the microphone stand to keep his balance. One journalist wrote, probably due to inaccurate memory, that Anderson adopted this posture when playing the flute. From then on, he was forced to live up to this description at concerts, which required some practice, as it is not possible to lean on the microphone stand when playing the flute. Another trademark for a long time was his one-sided shortened tailcoat.

Later career

Ian Anderson has released a number of solo albums and has worked on various projects by other musicians - but has been seen in public for 50 years as the head of the band Jethro Tull. This is particularly due to the fact that Anderson has developed a characteristic type of music and stage presence in his career with Jethro Tull, which mostly ran counter to the prevailing trends in rock music. At times he was inspired by British customs - he appeared as a medieval fool, Elizabethan juggler, English junker and Scottish squire. At other times he slipped into the role of an astronaut, pirate or vagabond. His depictions often contain a great deal of self-irony.

Anderson plays the Orchestral Jethro Tull - at the Hessentag in Butzbach on June 6, 2007

In the 1990s, Anderson began working with simple bamboo flutes . He used techniques such as overblowing and partially covering blowholes to create bound and smoothed tones. In this way he was able to elicit new types of sounds from this simple instrument. He recorded several pieces on which he played all the instruments himself and was also active as a sound engineer and producer, such as Another Christmas Song (1988). He gained his first experience in the "one-man business" in 1971 with the play Locomotive Breath . To convince his band of the piece, he played all the instruments himself, made a demo tape and sang to it. This particular title became the most successful of Jethro Tull and is still played today at almost every appearance of the band.

Anderson's music mixes styles such as folk , jazz, blues, classical, rock and world music . His lyrics are mostly complex. Often they deal with criticism of the absurd rules of society, such as the churches (My God , Hymn 43 , Thick as a Brick ) , which are not meant to be very serious . Often the texts contain motifs from times past, mythology and literature , as in Minstrel in the Gallery , Jack-in-the-Green , Broadsword and One Brown Mouse . Anderson often describes scenes from his daily life, especially on the younger albums (Rocks on the Road , Old Black Cat) .

Although he never completed a classical music education, Anderson's skills are also recognized by classical music protagonists. In 1985, Jethro Tull was invited to give a concert as part of the celebrations for Johann Sebastian Bach's 300th birthday in West Berlin , which was broadcast on the third television programs.

A trademark of Anderson is his energetic stage presence - haunting facial expressions and gestures, movement patterns that exploit the stage space and sometimes extended to the rows of seats of the audience, juggling the flute, the band directing arm and dance movements - which gives him titles like "Flötenderwisch", "madman flautist" and " Pied Piper " and brought comparisons with Rudolf Nurejew .

Ian Anderson at the 2016 Blacksheep Festival

Parallel to his other activities - numerous productions and arrangements for other musicians and guest appearances, but above all Jethro Tull - Anderson has also been involved in the projects of Leslie Mandoki , who has gathered some well-known rock musicians around him in the 21st century , since the late 1990s Playing “handmade” rock music in the 20th century. In 2004 and 2005 Ian Anderson went on an orchestral tour with the orchestra of the Neue Philharmonie Frankfurt . With a band specially put together for this purpose and the Symphony Orchestra, he presented a cross-section of his solo work and the work with Jethro Tull. A double CD and DVD documenting this tour was released in mid-2005.

Ian Anderson was in Vienna in 2006 to perform with Dee Dee Bridgewater on the 250th birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, his classical works in a new style. On April 30, 2006 he performed at the Konzerthaus in Vienna with the program Ian Anderson plays Orchestral Jethro Tull & Other Music feat. The Blue Danube Chamber Orchestra . The US-born Lucia Micarelli performed as a guest soloist on the violin . Anderson is also a guest musician on a Toto album and he accompanied the band on their "World Tour 2006" at times.

In 2014, on the occasion of the release of his solo album Homo Erraticus , he declared that he would no longer perform under the name "Jethro Tull".

The solo albums

Anderson experimented from around 1980 with the possibilities of music electronics. His first solo album Walk Into Light (1983) was created in collaboration with the then Jethro Tull keyboardist Peter-John Vettese and was characterized by sprawling synthesizer sounds. In the 1990s, his folk-inspired acoustic ambitions came to fruition with increasing world music influences. In 1995 he presented his second solo work. On Divinities - Twelve Dances With God he illuminates the spiritual worldview of different cultures with twelve instrumental pieces in classical style under the strong influence of Indian and other music.

Ian Anderson at the Jethro Tull concert in Zagreb , 2018

The trend towards exotic instruments and largely avoiding amplifiers continued with the third solo album. The Secret Language Of Birds (2000) is clearly folk-oriented and documents Anderson's musical maturity. The same applies to the fourth solo album Rupi's Dance (2003), which appears a bit more rocky compared to the previous album and is again characterized by mischievous or thoughtful lyrics.

In 2012 the album Thick as a Brick 2 was released , which Anderson recorded with his "Touring Band" and published under his name. Lyrically and musically, it ties in with the 1972 Jethro Tull album Thick as a Brick . The album Homo Erraticus , released in 2014 and recorded with the same band, also a concept album , gives an outline of British history.

Business activities

Anderson is also a successful businessman outside of the music industry. Among other things, he owned several salmon farms . His firm on the Isle of Skye , Scotland, was worth £ 10.7 million in the late 1990s before some of the shares were sold. In 2007, he and his wife Shona owned a group of companies that had a 2004 profit of £ 1.8 million.

Private life

From 1970 to 1974 Ian Anderson was married to the photographer Jennie Franks. Some sources, including the record text, suggest that she contributed parts of the text to the song Aqualung .

In 1976 he married Shona Learoyd, daughter of a wealthy wool producer. He got to know her through her work at the then Tull record company Chrysalis Records . After moving several times, including to Scotland, the couple lives in Wiltshire , England. You have two children. James Anderson is also a musician, while daughter Gael works in the film industry.

In the 1990s, Ian Anderson suffered a thrombosis of deep vein caused by a long-haul flight. Since this life-threatening incident, he has been involved in the fight against this phenomenon by, among other things, advocating wearing support stockings on long flights on his website.

Honors and reception

In recognition of his lifelong contribution to non-classical music, Anderson received the Ivor Novello Award for International Achievement in 2006 and an honorary doctorate in literature from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh that same year . In 2007 he was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire by Elizabeth II . In 2011, the University of Abertay Dundee awarded him another honorary doctorate.

Because of his commitment to endangered animal species, Ian Anderson was awarded the NatureLife Environment Prize 2012 in Stuttgart on May 17, 2012.

In 2013 he was awarded the title Prog God at the Progressive Music Awards .

Ian Anderson is recognized worldwide as the musician who brought the flute to rock music.

Interests

Anderson counts among his interests:

• the protection of wild cats
• the protection of endangered horse breeds
• old cameras, especially Leicas
• the Indian cuisine
• Motocross (however he never took a driving test)

Discography

See also : Jethro Tull / discography

Albums

year	title	Top ranking, total weeks, awardChart placementsChart placements (Year, title, rankings, weeks, awards, notes)					Remarks
		DE	AT	CH	UK	US
1983	Walk into Light	-	-	-	UK78 (1 week) UK	-
1985	A Classic Case - The London Symphony Orchestra Plays the Music of Jethro Tull	DE30 (8 weeks) DE	-	CH30 (1 week) CH	-	-	The London Symphony Orchestra feat. Ian Anderson
2000	The Secret Language of Birds	DE66 (3 weeks) DE	-	-	-	-
2003	Rupi's Dance	DE40 (3 weeks) DE	-	-	-	-
2005	Ian Anderson Plays the Orchestral Jethro Tull	DE68 (3 weeks) DE	-	-	-	-
2012	TAAB2 - Thick as a Brick 2	DE13 (6 weeks) DE	AT19 (2 weeks) AT	CH31 (4 weeks) CH	UK35 (2 weeks) UK	US55 (2 weeks) US	Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson
2014	Homo Erraticus	DE13 (4 weeks) DE	AT41 (1 week) AT	CH69 (1 week) CH	UK14 (3 weeks) UK	US111 (2 weeks) US
	Thick as a Brick - Live in Iceland	DE22 (2 weeks) DE	-	-	-	-	J ethro Tull's Ian Anderson double live CD / DVD
2017	Jethro Tull - The String Quartets	DE57 (1 week) DE	AT50 (1 week) AT	CH77 (1 week) CH	UK56 (1 week) UK	-	The Carducci Quartet feat. Ian Anderson

More albums

• 1995: Divinities - Twelve Dances with God

Singles

Single releases with Leslie Mandoki :

• Hold On to Your Dreams / Leslie Mandoki with Ian Anderson, David Clayton-Thomas , Jack Bruce , Bobby Kimball (1993)
• Mother Europe / Leslie Mandoki with Ian Anderson, Jack Bruce, Bobby Kimball, David Clayton-Thomas

year	Title album	Top ranking, total weeks, awardChartsChart placements (Year, title, album , rankings, weeks, awards, notes)	Remarks
		DE
1997	On and On People in Room No. 8th	DE80 (6 weeks) DE	Mandoki with Ian Anderson, Nik Kershaw , Jack Bruce , Bobby Kimball

Web links

Commons : Ian Anderson  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Literature by and about Ian Anderson in the catalog of the German National Library
• Homepage of Jethro Tull (English)
• Biography (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Interview: Ian Anderson, frontman of Jethro Tull, is playing his own tune. In: The Scotsman, November 16, 2011, accessed January 21, 2014.
2. ↑ http://www.abendblatt.de/kultur-live/clubs-konzerte/article539791/Ein-Stehaufmaennchen-mit-englischem-Humor.html
3. ↑ An evening with Jethro Tull Variety November 26, 2007 ( Memento from December 23, 2007 in the web archive archive.today )
4. ↑ http://www.725-jahre-rattenfaenger.de/eng/content/download/678/7318/file/Interview_Ian_Anderson_Rattenfaengerjubilaeum_ger.pdf
5. ↑ http://www.tullpress.com/crmay73.htm
6. ↑ information on Anderson's website (English) ( Memento of 20 October 2007 at the Internet Archive )
7. ↑ Report at www.mediabiz.de , accessed on September 15, 2012
8. ↑ Anderson at naturelife-international.org , accessed November 28, 2015
9. ↑ List of the 2013 award winners ( Memento from July 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
10. ↑ ^{a b} Chart sources: DE AT CH UK US
11. ↑ A Classic Case - The London Symphony Orchestra Plays the Music of Jethro Tull (The London Symphony Orchestra feat. Ian Anderson) in the German charts
12. ↑ TAAB2 - Thick As a Brick (Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson) in the German charts
13. ↑ Thick As a Brick - Live in Iceland (Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson) in the German charts