Hooptedoodle #417 - The Year Comes to an End

 

Funny time of the year, this. Today is very dark and very wet - nothing much happening apart from the occasional tractor fighting through the mud, on its way to prepare the fields for next year. Now there's an act of faith - worth thinking about.

This morning I've been listening to Jan Garbarek, which captured something in my mood and the general vibe of the season. If you have a few minutes for a listen, click here for something very ancient and very northern; something watching from afar to see how we are getting on with our after-Christmas sales, and our pandemic.

Hooptedoodle #403 - Radio Tarifa

 This morning I have a lot to do, so I was having a look through my CDs to find some invigorating music to get me going. Ah! - Radio Tarifa - just the job... 

I was a big fan of these guys - still am, I guess, though they no longer exist. I am always a little nervous of World Music as a heading - so much of it can be meaningless if you weren't brought up in the culture and the musical traditions of the country you are listening to, though it's often very refreshing, and sometimes eerily familiar.

Radio Tarifa were something of an enigma - founded by two Spanish students of medieval music and North African music, they teamed up with a Flamenco singer, and became very successful in 1993. The band is named after a fictitious radio station they dreamed up, in Southern Spain, and the music, they reckoned, is the sort of stuff you would pick up late at night on such a station. The emphasis is Mediterranean, rather than Spanish, so there's all sorts in there - Flamenco, Jewish, Algerian and Moroccan music, and what I would regard almost as "Turkish Wedding" music, a rich mixture - always energetic, always brilliantly performed. They specialised in exotic and ancient instruments, and, though much of the material was traditional, they wrote a lot themselves, "in the style of" this multi-cultural genre they had created. I have seen a couple of live shows on video, and was confused to see that the band, on tour, was enormous - though nominally a 3-piece, they had many guest players. A real riot.

Their aim was to explore the music of the Mediterranean area as it was before the current nations were so well defined - when the Moors were still in Spain - maybe 15th Century is some kind of watershed; though this sounds a bit academic, the music is often festive and exciting. Heartily recommended by me, for what that is worth. The band took an extended break in 2006, which became permanent, alas, when the main singer died in 2012.

The track in the video clip is from, I think, their 3rd album, Cruzando el Rio, which dates from 2001. Of course, you may find it irritating, but it's great music for washing the recycling, I can tell you!

Hooptedoodle #394 - Auprès de Ma Blonde

 Here we go - a song from the time of Louis XIV, reckoned to date from the Franco-Dutch War of 1672-78, and much loved as a marching song by French soldiers right up to modern times. The informal performance here is by the remarkable Olivia Chaney, who is English, though her accent is spot-on. I'm very much in favour of Olivia, generally.

I was taught this song by my mother when I was a toddler. Years later, in my French class at school, we were asked if anyone knew any French songs, and I offered this, for which I was put on detention by our teacher (the Headmaster, as it happens), because the song was inappropriate. When I protested that it was a very old song, and told him where I had learned it, he said it had been inappropriate for a very long time, and my mother could take a detention too.

The romantic drama in the verses has been hand-polished over the centuries, I am sure, but the chorus is straightforward enough:

Next to my blonde, who does it well, does it well, does it well;
Next to my blonde, who makes me sleep well.

The Headmaster, Bill Pobjoy, has been dead for years - his biggest claim to fame was the fact that he expelled one John Winston Lennon from the school (before my time, I hasten to add), of which he was always rather proud. In truth, I think old JWL needed to be expelled. 

***** Late Edit *****

My old friend Norman, who is something of an expert on all things to do with the Beatles, has gently taken me to task over the Lennon episode - he points out that, strictly, JWL was not expelled, but the school arranged for him to transfer to Liverpool Art College. Technically, that is correct, and there are a number of books which testify to this now (some of them almost certainly written by Norman), but there is no doubt that there was no way that Lennon was going to be allowed to stay - the place at the Art College was engineered (partly under pressure from one of the teaching staff, Philip Burnett, who was convinced that Lennon was a mad genius), but JWL was very firmly escorted to the exit.

A digression follows - possibly an unnecessary one, but fairly conclusive in my mind.

It was the practice at the school for successful or prominent Old Boys (former pupils) to return from time to time, to give an address to the senior school (this was a boys' school, by the way). On one such occasion, Peter Shore, who after many years of active work for the Labour Party had finally been elected, a few years before, as MP for Stepney, came to speak to the 5th and 6th forms about his life in politics. The talk was pretty boring, I regret to recall, but it was also heavily Socialist, which caused very apparent unease to Mr Pobjoy, who shared the platform with our guest speaker.

Shore finished off his talk with an unbelievably weak call to glory (this was mid-1960s): "...and let us work to make sure that the Britain of the Beatles is a Labour Britain!".

There was a smattering of routine applause, then the headmaster, po-faced, stood to offer very taut thanks to our guest, and added the message that one of the Beatles had been a pupil at the school, and that he was pleased to say that he had expelled him. Dead silence - we all filed out, listening for pins dropping, to return to our classes.

It goes without saying that no musicians were ever invited to speak.

 

Peter Shore, MP

I raise the matter only to give the unofficial, but obviously whole-hearted, view of the individual involved. Further claptrap: Peter Shore went on to hold a number of Shadow posts in Labour Opposition cabinets, and held some real offices in Harold Wilson's government. His political career is thought to have been hindered by his lengthy devotion to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (to which he became strongly opposed in later life). He died, Wikipedia tells me, in 2001. As a side issue, I am delighted to note that his father-in-law was the Canadian-born historian and academic, EM Wrong. A finer name for a historian never existed, surely. This is straight out of Monty Python.

Enough - I hope that gets Norman off my back.

***********************

Hooptedoodle #393 - Music - Instant Time Travel

 Righto - lovely morning here, so I was browsing through the CD racks, looking for something suitable, to keep me in a mellow mood while I try to sort out my mother's tax return. I came up with this, and it stopped me dead...

 I remember exactly when and where I bought this album, and I can see it like a photograph. My first wife and I went on holiday to California in about 1990 - we flew to San Francisco, rented a car (a Chevrolet Monte Carlo, which had sort of sporty, "coupé" pretensions, but drove like a small lorry), then we had 2 nights in San Francisco, drove up through Sacramento and Auburn (which places I knew a little) and then stayed at Nevada City, up in the old goldfields, for a couple of days, then through the forests to Mendocino. A few days there (we stayed at the MacCallum House, which I think is still there - great food) and then we drove down the Pacific Highway, stayed at Carmel for a few nights, and then on to LA to fly home. About 12 days total, I think - I have a slightly blurred recollection of most of it, but I remember we had a good time.

One thing I remember very clearly. Last morning in Mendocino, early, after I'd packed our lorry ready for the run south, I was taking a walk down by the sea, to bid the place farewell - it was very misty, and at one point I was walking across some sort of "village green" area, thinking about coffee, when I heard music. Unmistakeable - Jim Hall on guitar, floating over the gardens. I found the source of the music, a bookshop, opening onto the green, exchanged greetings with the owner, and bought coffee and a pastry from him. I asked was the CD for sale, and he said yes, it was, so I bought it and took it away with me, which didn't please him a lot, because he was listening to it. Such is commerce, I guess.

This is the first track from the album - the tune that was playing through the mist in Mendocino - 30 years ago. This is Paul Desmond, on alto sax, with Jim Hall on guitar, playing When Joanna Loved Me.

Perfect. I shut my eyes and it's a misty morning in California, in another century.

I'd like to revisit Mendocino again sometime, but it's on a long list, and I realise I probably never will.

Hooptedoodle #385 - Chick Corea

 Another personal hero gone. Chick Corea, the jazz pianist, died this week, aged 79. He became famous when he played with Miles Davis in the late 1960s (in a band which for a period featured 3 electric pianos - Herbie Hancocks, Keith Jarrett and Corea, which some might say is at least 2 too many...).

Then, of course, he became a leading light in his own right in the Jazz Fusion thing, which divided the world neatly into those who felt it wasn't proper jazz at all and those who felt it didn't quite make it as rock music either. I was playing a couple of his CDs this morning, and it occurred to me that the 1990s was longer ago than I had thought. Good, though.

Here's a track that I like. Thanks from me, Chick. Rest easy.

Dondaine

 Moving swiftly on (before I get a glimpse of Mr Trump's pardons and have an aneurism), here's a workmanlike wargaming picture. My original reasoning for my WSS basing scheme was that, since the units only have 3 bases and they'll be doing some Old School tactical manoeuvring, I wouldn't bother with sabots, though I've become very used to using them of recent years.

After just a few test games, I confess I have changed my mind. Sabots there will be. They will not be magnetised, and - since my cunning WSS base sizes give a standard footprint (approximately) - I have adopted a one-size-fits-all plain sabot. Current thinking is that sabots will be a resource for the battlefield, and will be issued when needed. My Napoleonic units each have their own magnetised sabot, and they spend their lives on them, so this is a conscious departure from my standard system.

Because the sabots are a bit long and narrow, I was worried that 2mm MDF might warp if painted on one side only. I ordered in some samples from Uncle Tony Barr at East Riding Minis, and am pleased to find that they give no problems, so a bigger order will be on its way.

 Here's a quick photo, to give the idea. These should save time and broken bayonets.

Infantry and cavalry in line or column of march - even one of my strange limbered batteries 

 

Oh yes - dondaine. One of the many French nursery rhymes my mother taught me when I was an infant was En Passant par la Lorraine, a lengthy tale of a peasant girl who may or may not have captured the heart of the King's son (the song has a quirky, uncertain ending) through her fetching appearance, complete with clogs. This song contains the chorus hook-line:

avec mes sabots, dondaine,
oh! oh! oh! avec mes sabots

I have never been able to find out what dondaine means - and still haven't really got to the bottom of it. I am assured by one of my French relatives that in fact it means nothing - it is just a song-filler expression (equivalent to "tra-la-la" or, I suppose, "hey-nonny-no"). That's kind of an anticlimax after all those years of wondering, but I guess life is a bit like that.

If anyone knows different, please shout.

Here's a noble rendition of the song - just to prove it exists. I am confident you will not last to the end of the clip, but - take my word for it - this version only uses about half the verses my mother taught me. Obviously French kids had a good attention span in the days before Instagram.

 

Hooptedoodle #373 - Annie Ross

Sad to learn that the death has occurred of Annie Ross, the singer - mostly known in Scotland as Jimmy Logan's sister, and mostly not known very much at all elsewhere. Annie was a class act - she joined the prestigious American vocal act Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, a move which was almost unknown for a British artist in those days.

Here's a link to (probably) their most famous record - Centrepiece, from 1958. Quality. Love this stuff. The trumpeter, by the way [nerd section], is probably the great Harry Edison, since he is credited as co-composer on the recording. [If the link doesn't play - which is happening to me a lot lately - just click on "Play in Youtube"]

Hooptedoodle #317 - Segovia - Not to Be Sneezed At

 I've had a fiddly sort of week, sorting out my accounts, paying bills, tidying up. I also invested a little time in sorting some more of the dreaded lead pile into potential units for painting, and boxing them up in plastic sandwich boxes, labelled with Sharpie pen - "3 bns French lights - no command" and similar. You can see how this might work - if I can find where I have now put the little boxes I can get them painted up - if I can't find them then at least I have lost the lot in a single step, which is efficient in a rather specialised sense.

While I was involved in this scientific and worthwhile activity (which must look uncomfortably like mucking around to the rest of the world), I was listening to BBC Radio 3, as one does (or could do - other stations are available, of course). One of the recordings they played was of the great Spanish maestro of the classical guitar, Andres Segovia, and I was reminded that I am old enough to have seen him in concert - long ago, when the world was young.

Sketch of Segovia in concert in Brussels in 1932 - before my time...

My recollection was that the concert took place at Leith Town Hall (that's sort of Edinburgh to you), but I could hardly believe that such a gig ever took place. So I took time off the sorting and boxing to check online, which, of course, is exactly why these jobs take so long and where the accusations of mucking about probably arise.

The Leith concert did take place - in winter time, in early 1971, when Segovia was a plump-but-sprightly 78, on what was expected to be his final European tour. I got a ticket through my friend Thomas, who was very keen and had recently joined (I may not get this quite right) The Edinburgh Classical Guitar Society - it was they who were putting on the concert, and it must have been something of a coup for them. I went along because I was a fan, and also because I might never have the chance again [digression: I once saw Louis Armstrong at the Liverpool Philharmonic, exactly because my mum thought I should go, since it might be the last chance. If Napoleon comes to your town, you should go to see him, so you can tell the grandchildren, or bore some future generation of blog readers].  

Leith Town Hall in sunnier times - in fact, I'm not convinced the concert was in this part of the building

Thomas and I arrived late, just before the concert started. There were a couple of hundred people in the audience. It was dark in the hall, and pokey, and freezing cold (you could see your breath at the start, and the guests all kept their hats and coats on). We seem to have been seated on folding wooden seats, so it was also creaky and uncomfortable, but the worst thing of the lot was the acoustic ambience of the hall. Church-like echoes, and Segovia himself was almost inaudible - everyone had to keep very quiet throughout, and it all got a bit tense. I am getting ahead of myself...

At the appointed hour, Old Andres came out onto the platform. He didn't speak or smile at any time of the show - I can hardly blame him. He tuned up for a minute or so, and then began his performance - a nice bit of Albeniz or something. After about 30 seconds, someone coughed, Segovia stopped, glared around the hall and started again - from the beginning. Same thing happened during the third or fourth piece - laser-beam stare and start again. Since everyone seemed to have a seasonal cold, the whole thing became very edgy indeed. Everyone in agony in case they sniffed, or their chair creaked. I began to convince myself that I was certain to sneeze. While aware of the privilege of just being there, I spent the rest of the first half just wishing the thing was over.

Came the interval, and I joined Thomas in an adjoining room, where cups of tea (from the municipal urn) were available. I recall that I was still wearing my gloves. Thomas was spotted as a new member, and was buttonholed by the secretary. How were we enjoying the concert? Thomas and I had just been moaning to each other, but Thomas was tactful enough to avoid telling the Hon Sec that it had been one of the most harrowing hours of his life. He did ask why the heating wasn't working, and the question was dismissed out of hand. Warming (wrong word) to his theme, Thomas suggested that if the concert had been at the Edinburgh Usher Hall, or any serious concert venue, some tasteful amplification would have been used to boost the sound to a level where the paying audience could actually hear it. A couple of good condenser mikes and a competent sound man and the music would have been perfectly fine with just a gentle boost. Tasteful - you know how it might be.

The Sec almost had apoplexy, and raved on about how you cannot possibly reproduce the sound of the guitar through a microphone or any type of amplification equipment. Eventually he paused to take a sip of his tea, and presumably to gather his strength for a further onslaught.

For the only time I can ever remember, Thomas got a bit annoyed.

"Tell me," he asked the Sec, "at home, do you have recordings of Segovia?"

"Oh yes, I have just about everything he has recorded, including some very rare pieces which I obtained through a Spanish subscription club of which I am a member - wonderful, wonderful music, much of it from when he was in his prime."

"And you enjoy listening to these recordings?" asked Thomas, innocently.

"Of course - there is nothing finer"

"You do realise," Thomas continued, "that there isn't a little man in your gramophone playing a little guitar? - the sound comes from an electric amplifier, though a loudspeaker, and was captured for purposes of the recording using microphones. You did know that?"

The Sec turned on his heel (quite rightly), went off to rub shoulders with Andres himself. With luck, Segovia might just have bent his ear about the state of the hall, especially the sound, the near-darkness and the bloody temperature, and the fact that, by the way, the tea was crap...

The second half was slightly less stressful - the presence of all those coated bodies must have warmed the place up a bit, but I was still more than a little pleased when it was over, we could move around a bit and I could get rid of the flat area on my backside.

Segovia may have stopped touring, but he was still recording in 1977, when he was 84. He finally died in 1987 - I hope he was warm and comfortable and everyone kept quiet for him. Thomas lives in Northamptonshire now, and is still trying to play classical guitar, bless him.

Me, I live in Scotland and spend time mucking around with toy soldiers. We are - all of us - always just one cup of tea from history.

Hooptedoodle #312 - The Limpet and the Critic

This evening I have the house to myself, since my wife and my son have gone to an information evening at his school.

I like to dine simply on these occasions, so I made myself a sandwich of peanut butter (crunchy, of course), Jarlsberg cheese and just a touch of Marmite. Pretty good - all I needed apart from this was a glass of water and I was happy enough. Switched on BBC Radio 3 and caught part of a concert given in Edinburgh by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Main item on the programme was to be Vaughan Williams' Sea Symphony, of which I've never been very fond, but we kicked off with Thea Musgrave's Turbulent Landscapes, which I really don't know at all. The theme of Ms Musgrave's suite is a musical interpretation of 6 paintings by the artist JMW Turner, and batting at No.4 was Turner's very quirky War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet, which I hadn't thought about in years. I have always found this picture very haunting, though I never quite knew what to make of it. You may write an essay on it for your homework - 1000 words will be fine. Perhaps you could bring out the implied contrast between imperial glory and the minutiae of Nature - or any other theme you like will be fine. You will have marks deducted if you mention the size of Napoleon's hat, by the way. Reference to the British guard will be OK, however.

Mention of marks deducted reminds me of a private joke which my late cousin Dave and I kept going for years. We lived through a period when it seemed that new works of art were judged by the weight of the justificatory text which accompanied them, rather than the work itself. We once attended a concert at the Liverpool Philharmonic at which the first item was a recently-commissioned orchestral piece about the coming of the Industrial Revolution to agricultural Britain (well, England, I guess). The composer himself gave an introductory talk lasting about a quarter of an hour, in which he described his interest in the subject, how (and why) he had been approached to compose the piece, and how he  had attempted with contrasting tone colours and symmetrical harmonies to create an image of smoke and fire against a rural idyll. He then conducted the piece himself, and I swear it lasted about 4 minutes.

Dave and I were transfixed. We were about 17, and we immediately declared war on critics, radio announcers and all pseuds in general, and we invented a scoring system, which awarded "faults", rather in the style of equestrian show-jumping. The speaker/writer could collect single faults for the use of undergraduate gushiness such as "lambent" or "plangent" (etc), and there were also a few biggies for words or phrases we really disliked. A "clear round" was a rarity - a text or talk which contained no offending words at all.

Back to the present, the night of the peanut-butter sandwich. Tonight's announcer on the BBC (who was only reading a prepared script about  the Musgrave piece, poor sod) scored 4 faults for "juxtaposition", which is always accompanied by a faint klaxon, but otherwise performed well enough. Dave died and dropped out of the game years ago, but I still keep my hand in with the scoring system when I get the chance. I have a few newbies since Dave's time - "Zeitgeist" gets 8 faults - which is a double-refusal or something - and I have a few others.

This all smacks a little of inverted snobbery, which is never attractive, but it really just reflects a long-held prejudice against the posturing bourgeoisie - though it occurs to me that it may reveal me as the biggest pseud of the lot!



**** Late Edit ****

Because the comments got me interested again, I thought I'd put a link to the relevant Part IV of Thea Musgrave's suite, as discussed.

Now here's an interesting idea: after you've heard the music, you could go and paint a picture giving your idea of what it portrays. Then someone could write another new piece of music interpreting your new picture, and so on, for ever. Great, eh? Like the most pretentious game of Chinese Whispers in history. If we produce a variation on the showjumping analogy, the limp little quote from La Marseillaise must be worth 8 faults on its own? And, just in case you missed it (because you were asleep?), there is a reprise at the end, which is no more inspiring and must be worth a further 8 - no VAR allowed.

****  ****

Hooptedoodle #262 - Owls of Derision - plus one more from the Small World Dept

Topic 1: Lately we've been puzzled to hear owls hooting during the day in the wood behind our house - even experienced countrymen like Dod the Gardener are puzzled by such behaviour. Well, we've now seen one in the garden - a couple of visits. The Contesse is still working to get a better photo - this is what she's managed to date.

Online experts suggest that it is a Little Owl, though we had thought it might be a Short-Eared Owl, more renowned for their daylight hunting. In the upper picture, you will notice that the blackbird sitting close by does not appear to feel at all threatened.

Topic 2: I only relate this story because it involves a couple of surprising coincidences - the subject matter may be of little interest, so I shall deal with it as quickly as might be decent.

My view on coincidences is boringly downbeat - they interest me, but I believe that the proportion of truly unlikely events in our lives is about as small as you would expect; when something unusual happens, however, we remember it clearly, so that our perception is distorted - we think remarkable things happen more often than they do. Get to the story, Foy...

Well, I've recently been trying to sort out my mp3 collection of the old BBC radio Goon Shows from the 1950s - many of the official published compilations of these shows were edited to drop the musical interludes, but most of mine are intact - sometimes a bit frayed, admittedly, but all the shows are complete. The Goon Shows had music of a good standard - apart from Wally Stott and the BBC's own orchestra, they also featured Ray Ellington's Quartet, and then there was Max Geldray, the virtuoso jazz harmonica player. All a bit dated now, maybe, but good stuff - and, anyway, nothing could be more dated than the Goons, dear boy.

Ray Ellington had a hot little band - on hearing them again, I was interested to note that his electric guitarist was exceptionally good - in fact he sounded most un-British, to be unkind about it. A little research revealed that he was Lauderic Caton, a Trinidadian, one of the leading pioneers of electric guitar on the English jazz scene in the years after WW2. He was friendly with, and a major influence on, a couple of the other lads of note of the day - especially Dave Goldberg and Pete Chilver. He was also noted for being a skilled luthier, and produced good-quality converted electric guitars in the days when it was impossible to obtain modern American instruments in the UK.

Pete Chilver circa 1948 - with electric guitar produced by Lauderic Caton

Goldberg I knew of - a Liverpudlian - but Chilver was a new name, so I read on. He shared a flat in London with Goldberg for a while, was very highly regarded - even by visiting American players - and played with (amongst others) the Ted Heath band and, for a while, Ray Ellington. Then, it seems, he married the sister of the girl singer in Heath's band (are you taking careful notes here? - there will be a test at the end), moved to North Berwick (which is where I live!) in 1950, retired from playing professionally, and thereafter managed his wife's family's hotel, the Westerdunes (now long gone). He also opened the West End Jazz Club, in Shandwick Place, Edinburgh - a place which I vaguely remember, though it was no longer a jazz club by the time I went there. Pete died in 2008, in Edinburgh.

Remarkable - so here's an important English jazz guitarist from the 1940s that I had never heard of, and he even became a prominent resident in my own neck of the woods! Only thing to do was email my old chum and former associate Hamish, for many years a hero and stalwart of the Scottish jazz scene, who has now also retired to the North Berwick area. Sorry to bother him, but did he know anything about Pete Chilver? - and I included some background details.

Hamish mailed back to say yes, he did know Pete a little - latterly Pete and his wife Norma retired and moved to Barnton Avenue, in Edinburgh. Hamish had been to his house there.

It seems that the handyman who now helps Hamish's wife around the house and garden used to work for Mrs Chilver - who is now in a care home, I understand - and only recently he had to dump a load of old acetate 78rpm masters of recordings from Pete's professional days [ah - drat]. Furthermore, the very night before he replied to my mail, Hamish had been a dinner guest at Westerdunes House - for many years converted into apartments, but now restored to its original state. Prior to this he had never heard of the place, never been there, and until my note was unaware of the connection with Chilver.

Westerdunes House

Now that is a bit of a long shot, I think. It looks a nice place - must have been a swanky hotel - healthier than the London clubs - a smart move by Old Pete? In passing, his friend Goldberg died of a drug overdose in the 1960s, when he was only 43. The Devil's music, your Honour.

Hooptedoodle #259 - Allan Holdsworth - A Unique Voice

I only just found out that Allan Holdsworth died last month, at his home in California. Another guitar hero gone. Oh well.

Holdsworth was never everyone's cup of tea - often too intense, too inaccessible. Of course, the equipment freaks and the technique warriors and all the rest of them (and just about every moron you know probably plays guitar - there's me for a start) have consistently missed the point by an enormous distance over the years - how he played, and the hardware he used, are very small parts indeed of a complex whole; the important bit, in the end, is what he had to say musically, and his was a unique voice - sometimes a breathtakingly emotional one.

He will be commemorated for his pioneering use of polychords, his completely original, alternative approach to functional harmony, his terrifying technique (based on what has become known as the "hammer-ons from nowhere" style of legato playing - no-one ever played like Allan - probably it's just as well), and the characteristically wide intervallic leaps in musical phrases. He developed his own way of playing, and he didn't sound like anyone else. He was born and raised in Bradford, and he took a pride in being an awkward Yorkshireman - he developed his own approach because he didn't find anything else that could produce the music he heard in his head. I guess he really was a genius - we hear a lot about geniuses, but they are thin on the ground.

Even as a (sort of) disciple, I can't take too much of it in one sitting - a lot of the music is very angular - uncomfortable - and if I try to visualise what he is doing I have to go and lie down. If you are a fan, please excuse my bumbling effort to pay tribute. If you are not, then I suggest he was worth a listen. He was never hugely popular - you will see why - but once you've heard him you will recognise him.

Here's a ballad from 1989.

And here's a live piece recorded in Frankfurt 8 years later. The album version of this track (same line-up) uses double bass, which I think is a big improvement (more space to breathe), but this is still good.

 Thanks, Allan.

Hooptedoodle #257 - Noddy and the Demon

Yesterday I put on an old sweatshirt - I'm doing some exercise bike sessions to get the old fitness worked up a bit before we start going cycling and hillwalking as the weather improves. I have a silly collection of old teeshirts and sweatshirts, mostly souvenirs of my days touring with jazz bands, which are useful for sweaty workouts. Yesterday's specimen is one of the few surviving long-sleeve jobs - this one from the Riverboat Jazz Festival, Silkeborg, in Denmark's Lake District, from 1994.

That was the trip on which I shared a hotel room with Noddy, the trombonist. Noddy was a gentleman, really - unusually correct for a muso. No trouble at all. He was married to a very loud lady who had been a professional singer of some note (as it were), and he tended to fade into insignificance when she was around. At that time we had some pretty wild drinkers in the band. The jazz festival in Silkeborg was based around a huge marquee venue in the centre of the old town, and there were some very late shows. One night we played a set starting at midnight, by which time a couple of the more seasoned members of the band were already unfit for duty (it's a funny thing, but it was always the supposed professionals who let themselves down in this way...). In particular, Jack Duff, the tenor sax man (an absolute monster of a player, by the way), was staggering drunk - he couldn't stand up but he could still play like an angel - maybe he'd have lived longer if that hadn't been a common situation.

We got through that set by the expedient of lashing Duffo to one of the big tent poles that supported the marquee - he was OK. We released him during the break, and carted him home after we had finished. There were a few characters like that - I found much of this rather unnerving, to be honest.

Anyway, back to Noddy. He was from Kent, originally - he had served as a bandsman in the army, and after that he got a job as a music teacher. I'm not suggesting that there was anything wrong with guys like Noddy, nor with the teaching system at that time, but the entrance criteria for instrument teachers in the schools seemed less rigorously based on academic qualifications than you might expect. I hadn't spent much time with Noddy, so sharing a room with him was a new experience. During off-duty spells we went out for a few trips to local attractions - we went to see Tollund Man (the prehistoric chap they pulled out of a local peat bog), we walked around the big lake, we had some good chats about music and films, and I learned that Noddy was another boozer. Not a raving drunk, like some of them, just a rather sad, quiet alcoholic, who did his drinking in private.

Tollund Man

When we went out for our walks around Silkeborg, Noddy would always excuse himself just as we left the room, claim that he had forgotten something, and go back. When he joined me downstairs, he smelled of whisky.

In his wardrobe he had a secret bottle of Canadian Club. As the week went on there were a series of successors to this bottle. I only knew the whisky was there because his wardrobe door swung open on the first day (by itself!), and there it was. I was fascinated, because Noddy obviously carried a chinagraph (wax) pencil, with which he recorded the level in the bottle each time he took a slug.

I was sorry that he had to keep his drinking a secret, and slightly miffed that he kept a check to make sure that outsiders (such as myself) were not pinching his booze. If he had simply told me that he liked a drink when on tour then I wouldn't have cared - would not have disapproved, and certainly would not have raided his supply. I mentioned this to Fergie, the trumpet player, and he came up with what we considered a great prank. He and I jointly purchased a half-bottle of Canadian Club of our own, which I kept hidden away, and for a few days I used to sneak a bit extra into Noddy's current bottle, so that the level was appreciably above the latest chinagraph mark. We were interested to see what happened - it seemed unlikely that he would accuse me of putting whisky into a bottle of whose existence I was supposed to be unaware. He would, in any case, have to out himself as a secret boozer to do this. We didn't go crazy - there were just a few days when the whisky level definitely went up instead of down.

If Noddy noticed then he didn't say anything. Disappointing, really. When the half bottle ran out I stopped, and presumably he just assumed he had made a mistake with his pencil. Ultimately it wasn't as much of a laugh as we had hoped, but since it would not have been a very kind sort of laugh maybe that's right and proper.

All long ago - Noddy, like so many others in that band, is no longer around. He died, quietly and politely, of early-onset dementia a few years ago. I hasten to add that I was very much a relative youngster in that company!

Hooptedoodle #255 - Goodbye, Johnny B Goode

I would be embarrassed to be seen to offer up another me-too tribute - it's an activity I disapprove of. Private feelings are nicer and somehow more sincere when they remain private.

I am reminded by yesterday's news of the passing of Chuck Berry that - rather to my surprise, in the long run - he was a sort of hero of mine. Someone who made my life a little richer, in the influence he wielded as much as by his own work.

Already the media are wheeling out all sorts of has-beens from show business to make over-inflated utterances about pop music as Great Art, and all that. I really wouldn't know, and would hesitate to attempt an academic assessment.

Berry is especially significant for what he represents. A black man from St Louis, he began recording for Chess Records in the mid 1950s. Chess, bear in mind, were a specialist blues label who published artists like Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Bo Diddley - primarily for black audiences - and a worse fit than Berry with the accepted marketed image of the popular music world of the day is hard to imagine. The spending power of the record-buying teenager was a new phenomenon, and major record labels in the US were struggling to push coiffed, sterilised, parent-approved products such as Johnny Tillotson, Fabian and similar - white, acceptable to the church, not overtly masculine. He was surprisingly old, too - if I recall correctly, his first commercial success, Maybelline, was released in 1955, when he was 29. That is positively ancient.

He was not an admirable character, in many ways. He had spells in prison - notably for tax evasion and (once) for statutory rape (a charge which looks a bit like police entrapment, all these years later). He is famous for being difficult to deal with, complicated, devious. I read his autobiography some years ago and was disappointed - it wasn't a great read, overall, and he came across as an unusually self-obsessed character. I suspect that I wouldn't have warmed to the great man's company. I saw him once, live - he was excellent, a consummate showman, but he was accompanied by a disappointing English tour-band which did nothing for him at all.

There is a definite thread of racism through many of the bad breaks which he suffered - especially in the early years, though his combative personality cannot have helped. He came through a hard school. I read that in the dance-halls and the provincial theatres he got into the habit of threading his guitar lead through the handle of his guitar case before plugging into his amplifier - thus making it impossible for anyone to steal the case without the matter coming to his attention. He also would not play until someone put actual cash into his hand. Incongruously, he still insisted on these technical safeguards when he was appearing at the Paris Olympia - a quirk which is not without a certain rough charm.

It would be wrong to claim that his records were history-changers in their own right - famously, he was very fortunate in that his music impressed the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the (white) rock bands that swept to power in the 1960s. Without that connection, Berry and a lot of his contemporaries would probably have disappeared without trace decades ago. This has all been much-discussed in the past - however it worked, it worked. I love him because of the unpretentious nature of the music (though he did tend to release thinly-disguised rehashes of his earlier successes), and his cute, street-poet lyrics, which offer an interesting social history of American youth.

This is getting close to a tribute, and I wouldn't want that.

Thanks, Chuck. That's really all I wanted to say.

Hooptedoodle #221 - Barry

This is not Barry.

I spent a number of years playing in a jazz group with Barry. He was a professional bass player – very politically active for the rights of your artisan, blue-collar musical intellectual, and endlessly contemptuous of amateurs like me.

I quite liked the guy – sometimes his attitudes made him a hard person to warm to, but when he forgot himself he was affable and amusing company. There was a specific amount of alcohol required – after a couple of drinks he was relaxed and articulate, a few more and he was aggressive and paranoid.

“The big problem I have with blokes like you,” he would tell me, “is that you are just playing at it – you are taking work away from hardworking professionals, who earn their living at it, and who are mostly better than you.”

“You mean to tell me,” I would respond, “that if I were to pack in my day job – today – I would instantly become a better player and you would take me seriously?”

And Barry would mumble vague obscenities and shuffle off for a drink.

Barry was a Glaswegian – with matching chips on both shoulders. As a musician, I thought he was sort of OK – maybe I never saw him at his best, but I would not have taken much trouble to book him myself. When he was a young chap, he got busted by the police for possessing cocaine, and they made a deal with him. If he told them who supplied his stuff, they told him, he would not go to prison.

Classic double-cross. Barry told them everything they needed to know, and they put him in Barlinnie anyway, and when he came out there were people looking for him. So he worked on the P&O cruise boats, and he worked for a while in London, and then he went to live in Zurich. While he was there he played with a lesser-known elder statesman of the English Dixieland jazz scene – Bob Wallis, and his Storyville Jazzmen, no less. Wallis may have been in political exile too – I have no idea – but Barry had some wild tales of Zurich and of tours with Wallis’s elderly band of alcoholics. Bob Wallis had only one eye, and he used to carry a variety of glass eyes with him to suit the occasion; apart from having one which made a pair with his good eye, he also had a red one, a plain white one and a spectacularly patriotic Union-Jack one. He also used to feature the tune Please Don’t Talk about Me, One Eye’s Gone. Must have been quite a show – apparently the band were very popular in Russia.

Eventually Barry got married, and Wallis retired in ill health and broke up the band (he returned to England and died not long afterwards). Barry decided that things in Britain were probably calmer now, so returned to his homeland – which is when I met him.

Barry was always very nervous – he always owed money to the Union, or the taxman, or somebody or other, and – of course – there was still a faint echo of Glasgow from the old days.

One day someone phoned him from the Performing Rights Society. Sorry to bother him, but they had been trying to trace one Barry Shaw, the double-bass player – was this him? No, said Barry, instinctively, from years of practice – never heard of him. The man apologised for any inconvenience, and left a contact number, in case he somehow came across the right Barry Shaw.

After a couple of days of being encouraged by various drinking friends, Barry phoned the man at the PRS. He had just remembered that he was, after all, Barry Shaw the double-bass player.

The man was delighted – could he confirm, then, that he had played on the original Tubular Bells sessions with Mike Oldfield?

In fact, I knew something of this. Barry used to tell of a nightmare booking he had once received, where he was required to play double bass at a “pop” recording session full of “upper class hippies”, in “a ****ing castle in Oxford or somewhere”, which experience he still recalled with a shudder, though he understood the record had been quite successful.

Ultimately, Barry was delighted, too – Oldfield’s record had, of course, been a very considerable success, and at the time – in error! – Barry had signed for a share of royalties instead of a cash fee – something he would never normally have done (since he always needed cash). The PRS now had a cheque for him in respect of his back royalties accumulated since 1973. Barry had only been a makeweight on the session, but his share was still many thousands of pounds – far more than he would normally see in years. I don’t know how long it took him to drink his way through this windfall, but I know he gave it a serious go.

Eventually the years of bad living caught up with him – he had increasing problems with his joints (which we all thought was most apt), caused by excessive alcohol intake and many years of poor diet, and he suddenly died of pneumonia, one winter following a fairly insignificant illness. He was only in his early 50s, but old beyond his years.

That’s all a bit downbeat, I guess, so I’d like to end with a story of Barry which he used to tell about himself. Once he was established back in Edinburgh, he received a phone call one day from a well known firm specialising in double glazing and conservatories. They asked him to confirm that he was Mr L B Shaw of 56/3 King’s Road, and – guardedly, I imagine, he admitted that he was.

In that case, he was told, he was in luck, because the firm in question was looking for sales in his postcode area, and if he would be prepared to allow it to be used as a showhouse for a year, they had decided that his address would be ideal for their purposes, and they would build him a conservatory at only 50% of the normal cost.

This may be what Barry imagined...

Barry played along with this – he said he was really quite interested, but he wanted to know more about the type of conservatory – what would it be made of?

Well, they said, you can have one in Canadian Cedar, or Lacquered Pine, or just straightforward white UPVC – all weather-proofed and double glazed and insulated to the appropriate British Standard, naturally.

Sounds good, said Barry, but what about the legs?

What legs?

Well, since they knew all about him and his postcode, and had selected his address specially, they would also know that he lived in a 2^nd-floor flat, so he wanted to know what the conservatory would stand on.

The phone went dead. Barry said he was actually very disappointed. Cold callers, eh?      

Hooptedoodle #217 – Julie & Steve – where do dreams come from?

Thoughts over coffee on a foggy morning.

I awoke this morning with a tune running in my head – not an uncommon occurrence, in fact, but sometimes puzzling. This morning’s tune was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it, so I tried to concentrate. It was obviously the bridge from some well-known standard song or other, and I knew the song, if I could just identify it. Bad news with bridges from standard songs, of course, is that many of them are interchangeable – you can substitute the middle section of a different song, and a lot of people will not notice. This is common practice for an ageing pianist friend of mine, whose memory is not what it was; these days, bless him, he is still working – he does a solo spot on Monday nights in a vegetarian restaurant – and his unorthodox musical arrangements are all right in such a context, but the combination of his fading memory, his increasing deafness and his growing reluctance to listen to what anyone else is doing makes him a dangerous man to do a gig with. That was a digression.

Back to this morning.

The words “a cottage for two” seemed to belong with this fragment of tune, and after some more runs-through [correct plural form?] I convinced myself that I could sort of imagine Julie London singing it, in a slightly breathless way, but I still couldn’t work out what it was. Eventually, after breakfast, before I lost the thing altogether, I dug out my Julie London CDs (and there are a few) and I found it. It seems I had woken up humming (in my head) the bridge from “Give Me the Simple Life”, which is a so-so sort of song – the only recorded version I have is on a middling (and little-known) album called “Julie at Home”, and it’s probably one of the less memorable tracks on that album.

So it is a song I have not heard in 12 years, I would guess, and have not thought about during that time. If someone wanted to play it, and gave me the key, I could probably busk my way through it, and I would probably remember the bridge when we got there, but otherwise it doesn’t mean anything to me. So why was it on my mind this morning?

Hmmm.

I am reminded of an occasion a little while ago when I woke from a dream in which I was having a conversation with a chap named Steve Platt. Nothing worrying or threatening about that, but Steve Platt in my dream was about 15 years old, and wearing the same blazer and spectacles as he was the last time I saw him, at grammar school in the 1960s. Strange? – Steve was not a particular friend of mine, I had very little to do with him – after age 15 or so he went off in a different class, to study Arts subjects, when I did Science. We never had any fallings out, played no sports together – hardly any interaction at all – I didn’t particularly admire or dislike the kid. If someone had now shown me a photo of my school class at that time he might be one of the half dozen I couldn’t remember a name for. So what was he doing, in such clear focus, in my dream half a century later?

It doesn’t matter, of course, but it’s kind of interesting. Somebody told me once that the human brain does a lot of re-organising of itself while you’re asleep – this is a healthy and necessary activity, and dreaming is part of this. People who do not dream are liable to develop mental and nervous disorders – prolonged reliance on sleeping pills can result in such a condition. The reason we cannot remember our dreams is, apparently, because they do not use memory in the same way as our conscious thoughts do – it also occurs to me that it would drive us all crazy if we could.

I suppose I dream most nights – most of us do. I don’t know how long I dream for, but I must have spent many thousands of hours of my life humming tunes and meeting ex-school chums during adventures which I could not remember the following day. OK – if that’s how it works I have no problem with it, but the nightly defragmentation job (or whatever it is) must get to some pretty dark corners if it comes up with Steve Platt or the bridge from “Simple Life”. Idly (of course), I wonder about it.

I have the impression that sometimes I have recurrent dreams, or bits of dreams – especially in terms of finding myself in a town or a place which I recognise, and do not like, though when I have woken from the occasional recurring nightmare I have been fairly sure that they were not real places I remembered from real experience – they were some synthesis which I recalled from previous dreams – or maybe I just dreamed that I recognised them.

Anyway – that was this morning’s pointless ramble, over my coffee. These things intrigue me, in a casual sort of way, but surely you must have something better to do than read this? Have a good day, whatever it is.