Back in the 1940s, early in his career, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie incorporated the theme from a tune called Be-Bop, or sometimes Dizzy’s Fingers, into a swirling big band arrangement and called the resulting piece Things to Come. It was a wild, gyrating score usually played at breakneck speed (often around 300bpm) that invariably proved a handful to perform. The Things Are Here is the eventual sequel to that composition that the Dizzy Gillespie Reunion Big Band played in the 1960s. Many concert performances of this are very long indeed, but this one (recorded in Berlin in 1968) lasts only about 8 minutes. I have this on vinyl but haven’t get got around to transferring it to digital. Here you hear the stunning power and virtuosity of this thrilling band; there must have been a tough entrance examination to get a place in it!
As you’d expect there’s a lot of solo space in this performance for Gillespie himself, but also room for solos and duets from the other musicians, including James Moody and Paul Jeffrey on tenor saxophone, Sahib Shihab on alto saxophone, Cecil Payne on baritone sax, Curtis Fuller on trombone and, right at the end, Otis Finch brings the house down with a drum solo.
It’s a wild, white-knuckle ride, so strap yourself in!
I lived in London from late 1990 until the very end of 1998. One of my favourite places for shopping in those days was the excellent Tower Records. There were two stores then, but I only ever visited the one at Number 10 Piccadilly as it was very conveniently placed to skive off from meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society at Burlington House, which is just round the corner.
It wasn’t just the huge selection of records, tapes and CDs across all musical genres but also the extremely helpful and knowledgeable staff. I always found their advice very helpful and often left with many more things than I intended to buy when I went in.
Tower records was acquired by the Virgin Group in 2003 and the store in Piccadilly closed down completely in 2009. I haven’t been past the site recently, but I think it is vacant and awaiting redevelopment.
The reason for mentioning this is that Tower Records is alive and well and living in Dublin. There are two stores in the city but I’ve only ever been to the larger one in Dawson Street. It’s not as big as the one in Piccadilly, but it does have a very good selection of music (including a large section of classical music) and very friendly staff. It also has a wide range of hifi equipment, including turntables for those of us who have a vinyl collection. It also has an online service. The last thing I ordered from them was delivered to my house in Maynooth the next day at no charge.
It brought back a lot of memories when I first went inside as it has the same old yellow and red signage and very much the same vibe as the old London store; you can see some interior pictures here. Tower Records (Ireland) is highly recommended for those who are nostalgic for the old Tower Records (London) as well as those who just want to visit a proper, independent, music store. I hope it not only survives but prospers.
I listened to a Proms performance of Gustav Holst’s The Planets the other night. It’s a piece I’ve heard dozens of times, but it was definitely the first time that I felt the most resonance with the Fifth movement, “Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age“. According to Wikipedia, this was Holst’s favourite section. It comprises three parts, “a slow processional which rises to a frightening climax before fading away as if into the outer reaches of space”. The central part has a touch of Charles Ives about it, I think.
Since moving to Ireland I haven’t seen much cricket, though I do follow some games on the internet and watch the highlights from time to time. Yesterday’s final-day victory by India over England by just six runs at the Oval brought to an end an excellent series of five Test matches, drawn 2-2 with one match drawn. Chris Woakes had to go into bat at Number 11 with an arm in a sling because of a dislocated shoulder. Shades of Colin Cowdrey going in to bat against the West Indies at Lord’s in 1963 with a broken arm. Neither Cowdrey nor Woakes faced a ball, actually. England drew in 1963, while still six runs behind with one wicket standing, while Woakes was not out as India won by six runs. A series draw just about seems a fair result to me.
Test cricket is something special and the 2025 England vs India series had more than the usual share of memorable moments. The two teams were evenly matched, tempers got a bit frayed from time to time, but both sides should be congratulated for providing such magnificent fare. A Test Match series is a cricket feast like no other.
As Keith Flett mentions in his blog, the Oval test has traditionally the last of the summer, usually taking place later in August, the lengthening shadows given that distinctive end-of-season feel. This year, however, the Oval test finished on 4th August (yesterday), and there’s no more Test cricket this summer. The schedule has been pushed forward to accommodate the gimmicky and unintestering competion called The Hundred, which starts today. The first of the last three County Championship fixtures don’t start until September 8th. It’s all a bit shit, really.
Anyway, just for nostalgia’s sake, I thought I’d post the old theme song from the BBC’s cricket coverage (when it used to be free on TV). It is Soul Limbo by Booker T. & the M.G.’s. We never got to hear the whole track, but as proper cricket is in Limbo for a month it seems appropriate to do so now.
I couldn’t resist adding a little anecdote by way of a postscript to yesterday’s item about the the late Tom Lehrer. I didn’t know anything about this story until yesterday when I saw it as a thread on Bluesky (credit to @opalescentopal). The whole thread can be read here, so I’ll just give you a short summary and add a bit of context.
Tom Lehrer’s debut album, Songs by Tom Lehrer, released in 1953, contained a number called Lobachevsky. At concerts he would introduce this song with the words “some of you may have had occasion to run into mathematicians and to wonder therefore how they got that way”. If you don’t know the song then you can listen to it, for example, here. This song contains this verse:
I am never forget the day I am given first original paper to write It was on "Analytic and Algebraic Topology Of Locally Euclidean Metrizations Of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifolds" Bozhe moi!
That’s relevant to what follows.
In 1957, while he was still working as a mathematician, Lehrer co-wrote a paper for the U.S. National Security Agency, with R.E. Fagan, under the title Gambler’s Ruin With Soft-Hearted Adversary, the full text of which can be found here. For those of you unaware, the Gambler’s Ruin is an important problem in the theory of probability. The paper was an internal document but was unclassified. It was later published, in 1958, with some modifications under the title Random Walks with Restraining Barrier as Applied to the Biased Binary Counter.
The 1957 paper was filed away, attracting little attention until 2016 when the person who wrote the Bluesky thread looked at it and noticed something strange. The reference list contains six papers, indexed numerically. References [1], [2] and [4] are cited early on in the paper, and references [5] and [6] somewhat later. But nowhere in the text is there any mention of reference [3]. So what is reference [3]? Here it is:
(It’s a pity about the spelling mistake, but there you go.) Although the song Lobachevsky had been written a few years before the Gambler’s Ruin paper, and had proved very popular, nobody had spotted the prank until 2016. This is episode is testament to Lehrer’s mischievous sense of humour, and to his patience. He made a joke and then kept quiet about it for almost 60 years, waiting for the payoff!
P.S. The Lobachevsky reference was omitted from the modified paper published in 1958.
I just heard that the great musical satirist Tom Lehrer has passed away at the age of 97. I was trying to pick one of his songs to post as a tribute but I couldn’t decide which one to choose. I was going to go with “The Elements” but that would be lost on an audience of astronomers for whom there are only Hydrogen, Helium and Metals…
So instead of picking one tune I thought I’d share an entire concert of his, recorded in 1967 in Denmark, that contains no fewer than 17 of his songs including such favourites such “The Elements” and “The Vatican Rag” but also some less familiar numbers. There are even Danish subtitles to help you.
The Sixties were a hot time for satire, and it’s amazing how well some of Tom Lehrer’s songs stand up sixty years later, even today when satire is mostly impossible. Tom Lehrer”s irreverent, and sometimes rather dark, humour brought laughter into the lives of so many people.
It’s worth mentioning that, having decided that he’d made quite enough money, Tom Lehrer released all his songs into the public domain. Class.
I just heard the very sad news of the death at the age of 97 of that great jazz singer, Cleo Laine. Although stylistically related to Sarah Vaughan, her voice was instantly recognisable. It always struck me that most British jazz singers would adopt an American accent when performing, but Cleo Laine always kept a very crisp diction and sounded very English…
I think it’s her musical and personal partnership with John Dankworth (who passed away in 2010) for which she will be known best. He hired Cleo Laine as a singer for his small band in 1951; they married in 1958 and remained together for over 50 years, until separated by John’s death.
I think it is appropriate to use this lovely version of George Gershwin’s great tune Lady be Good (with lyircs by his brother Ira) as a tribute. It’s always good to end on a high note. John Dankworth takes a back seat – as he often did when Cleo was singing – but the band is in great form. Unfortunately there is no personnel listing, apart from John Dankworth. The small band you see and hear here was drawn from his larger orchestra and many of the musicians therein doubled on different instruments. The vibes player, for example, could be Alan Branscombe, who also played piano. Or he could be the pianist. The trumpeter could very well be a young Kenny Wheeler.
Anyway, if you didn’t realise what a terrific vocalist Cleo Laine was, then pin back your lugholes around 2 minutes in where she demonstrates a range and level of vocal ontrol that would put many opera singers to shame.
The BBC Proms having started on Sunday (20th July), I decided to listen to some of the concerts via BBC Sounds. One can’t get BBC Radio 3 on the radio here in the Republic, at least not this far from the border.
I was disappointed, then, to see that BBC Sounds is no longer available to listeners outside the UK. Apparently The BBC is making BBC Sounds exclusively available to UK license fee payers, meaning users outside the UK, including those in Ireland, will no longer be able to access the full service. This change came into effect yesterday (21st July).
So here I am, as I write this, on 22nd July, listening to this evening’s Promenade concert via BBC Sounds. No, I’m not doing anything illegal or unlawful. Neither did I last night, when I listened to Mahler’s Symphony No. 7. It’s just that the change has been implemented in a very peculiar and confusing way.
To start with, this is what I see a see on my screen right now:
I don’t think you get the top message if you listen in the UK, but then you might be listening on the radio anyway.
At the top it says use the BBC.com or the BBC App. For one thing I can’t find any sign of the “BBC App” on PlayStore on anywhere else. For another, BBC.com offers only Radio 4, BBC World Service and a random selection of podcasts. So neither of those options are any good for listening to Radio 3.
If you click to “Find out how to listen to other BBC stations” you get this page which “explains”:
Earlier this year, we launched a new audio service outside the UK on BBC.com and the BBC app. This includes access to BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service English, thousands of hours of podcasts (including Global News Podcast, World of Secrets and Infinite Monkey Cage) – as well as some of the best of the BBC’s journalism and storytelling including news and history programming.
As part of the announcement, we said we planned to close BBC Sounds to audiences living outside the UK later this year, making it available exclusively to people in the UK. Anyone who lives in the UK will still be able to use the BBC Sounds app when they go on holiday abroad. We can now confirm that BBC Sounds closed for listeners based outside the UK on 21 July 2025.
Leaving aside the mystery of the “BBC app”, this suggests that BBC Sounds is closed to listeners outside the UK. Except it isn’t.
The article goes on to explain:
Please use the links below for live listening access to the BBC’s other radio stations from across the UK, including BBC Radio 1, Radio 2 and Radio 3, 6Music, 1Xtra and Asian Network, Radio 4Xtra and 5Live, all the BBC’s stations from the UK nations and every local radio station in England.
In other words, it takes you back to BBC Sounds, which is where I am listening now! As far as I understand it, one can still listen to the live internet stream of BBC Radio on BBC Sounds, so it’s not closed to listeners outside the UK after all. What is closed (to us foreigners) is the back catalogue of past recordings. I only ever listen to live broadcasts, however, so after all that it’s business as usual for me.
I’ve just caught up with the news of the death last week of composer, arranger and pianist Lalo Schifrin. He was 93. Most of the media coverage of his passing concentrates on his many excellent TV and movie scores, such as Mission Impossible*, Dirty Harry and Bullitt, but he was first and foremost a Jazz musician so I thought I’d pay tribute by posting a relatively early work by him.
Lalo Schifrin was a huge fan of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie whom he met when Gillespie toured Schifrin’s home country of Argentina in 1956. This long piece, Gillespiana was written for Gillespie’s big band in 1958. You can here in it many of the musical ideas that Schifrin was later to include in his film scores. In 1960, Lalo Schifrin moved to York and joined Gillespie’s band as a pianist after the departure of Junior Mance. He only stayed with the band for a couple of years but together they made some great records, especially Dizzy on the French Riviera (which I have blogged about here).
Anyway, Gillespiana is suite in five movements (Prelude, Blues, Panamerica, Africana, and Toccata) that takes up an entire album that was released in 1960. It’s not so well known nowadays but I think it’s great. It gives ample opportunity not only to listen to Dizzy’s trumpet and Lalo Schifrin’s piano – as well as the enormously underrated alto saxophonist and flautist Leo Wright – but also to enjoy the wonderful arrangements.
*The original theme for Mission Impossible is written in 5/4 time. Not a lot of people know that the resulting rhythmic pattern (dash dash dot dot) is Morse code for the letters M I…
Thinking back to yesterday’s EAS 2025 social event, I think the song that attracted the greatest degree of audience participation was this one. It’s very well-known and the chorus is great for a singalong. Anyone who has any Irish relatives – especially an uncle with a fondness for the drink – will certainly have heard this!
P.S. It wasn’t sung by the Luke Kelly and the Dubliners last night.
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In the Dark 