EVAN CARSON
Family history and WWII inspire drummer’s prog star-studded debut.
Evan Carson’s Polish grandfather, Jerzy Ocipinski, was just 14 when, at the start of World War II, he and his family were put on a train bound for a labour camp in Eastern Poland. The train was destroyed by a British air raid but Ocipinski escaped the wreckage and fled, and went on to join the French Resistance. From there he enrolled in the Free Polish Navy, then the merchant navy after the war, and settled in Newcastle, raising his family under a newly assumed, altogether more English name. Only when ‘George Carson’ died, in December 2016, did the details of his incredible story emerge.
“We couldn’t believe it,” says his grandson now. “He had only spoken about it once, but he’d written a journal about it. It reads like a novel. We reconnected with the family in Poland, a lot more stuff came out, and the album began to write itself.”
Evan Carson’s solo debut, Ocipinski is a fittingly grand record whose Eastern-flavoured, folk-inflected soundworld does justice to its epic source story. A percussionist by trade, Carson wrote much of the music with piano maestro Gleb Kolyadin, one half of Russian prog duo Iamthemorning. It’s a rich, colourful tapestry (among the trademark sounds are the ‘sedi donka’, a Bulgarian dance rhythm in the reassuringly prog metre of 25/16), recorded all across the world, from Bath to Brisbane, by an ensemble including Prog-approved multi-instrumentalist Charlie Cawood
(on everything from hammered dulcimer to zither), Caligula’s Horse vocalist Jim Grey and noted folk singers Ben Savage, Georgia Lewis and Hannah Sanders.
Carson makes his living drumming for folk artists such as these and Sam Kelly, with Seth Lakeman and Robert Plant also on his CV. “I love the folk scene, but if I had suggested a lot of these new ideas in my day job
I’d have been fired! Dad brought me up on Deep Purple and Dream Theater, and there’s a definite crossover between prog and folk: it’s always about a story, a narrative. Hopefully this will be attractive to both worlds.”
Now nudging 30, Carson graduated in 2013 from BIMM Brighton with a degree in Professional Musicianship. While there he developed a fondness for Frost*’s brand of thinky-yet-fun prog.“I looked at Jem Godfrey and thought,‘That’s how I want to write and perform – with a sense of humour even if the music is a little heavier going.’ I really got into that side of prog but got burnt-out on it, and then got in with the folk crowd.”
Around 2015 his college band Stark (tantalisingly described as ‘Tool meets B.B. King’) happened to play a gig in London’s Soho on the same bill as Iamthemorning, and a year later he got a call out of the blue from them requesting his services. He played on 2016’s Lighthouse and every album since, and he’s now their regular tour drummer. “It’s a fun working relationship,” he says. “Some people might draw comparisons between Ocipinski and Iamthemorning because of the female voices, and nobody plays and composes like Gleb, but it wasn’t done on purpose!” GrM