I’m up early and going to be out of here for the day, so here’s a bit of music to keep you going. It’s another of Charlie Parker‘s variations on the blues in F, this time called Now’s the Time. It’s definitely one of the bluesiest of Bird’s blues, and indeed it’s quite close to the usual 12-bar chord progression:
I just spent an amusing evening watching a football match with the sound turned off on the TV and some experimental compositions by George Ligeti playing on my sound system. I thoroughly recommend playing music instead of listening to the commentators, by the way; it’s much more fun! Anyway, a piece that worked particularly well was the pioneering electronic composition Artikulation (1958). Having a look on Youtube I found this wonderful video which adds an even more appropriate visual to Ligeti’s extraordinary sound world than a football match, in the form of a graphical score (created by Rainer Wehinger) which you can follow along as the music plays.
In order to capture the dynamics of the performance Rainer abandoned the conventions of standard notation, concluding it was ineffective in dealing with compositions devoid of regular meter and harmonic scale. The alternative system he developed relied on color, shape, width and position to capture Ligeti’s work. Color in the score was used to denote pitch or timbre, combs represented noise, dots marked impulses and the width of the elements indicated their duration. The video below maps Ligeti’s compostion on to Rainer’s graphical score to demonstrate how effectively it describes the performance.
I imagine many readers of this blog won’t agree with me, but I find the result absolutely fascinating. The visual score has an abstract beauty on its own, but together with the music it creates a particularly interesting effect; each page of the score had me trying to imagine in my mind’s ear what was going to happen next….
I was looking through Youtube this morning and found this, which I noticed was recorded exactly 60 years ago today, on 14th August 1951, which gave me an excuse to post it. Not that I needed an excuse. It’s a bit of contrast with my previous jazz post, but I’ve never had a problem with loving New Orleans traditional jazz as well as its more modern varieties.
Apart from the fact that this is a joy to listen to, it also gives me an opportunity to pay tribute to a much underrated figure in the history of British jazz. I don’t mean, “The Guv’nor”, Ken Colyer, who plays super lead cornet on this track (and who, incidentally, was one of John Peel’s favourite musicians), but the fabulous trombonist Keith Christie who led this band together with his brother Ian, who played clarinet.
Before forming the Christie Brother Stompers, Keith Christie was a mainstay of Humphrey Lyttelton band that made many wonderful recordings for the Parlophone label. Together with Humph on trumpet and Wally Fawkes on clarinet he was part of the finest front line of any band of that era. His characteristically rumbustious trombone playing can be heard to particularly good effect on this track, a version of the classic Heebie Jeebies, first recorded by Louis Armstrong and his famous Hot Five way back in 1926.
Clearly inspired by Kid Ory, Keith Christie’s always seemed to bring out the comic aspects of the rorty old tailgate trombone style without ever mocking it. It’s interesting to reflect that although this kind of music is suffused with a robust humour, the musicians themselves were deadly serious. When he was with Humph’s band, Humph tried many times to persuade Keith Christie to tone down the humorous aspect, something that he admitted in later life was entirely the wrong thing to do.
Indeed, Humph’s band at one point in 1949 had the chance to do a recording session with the great Sidney Bechet, after which Bechet summoned Humph into his dressing room and gave him a kind of end-of-term report on the band, pointing out little criticisms of their playing. Humph recalled in radio programme many years later the unqualified admiration with which Bechet spoke of Keith Christie’s trombone playing then. I can’t think of higher praise.
When Keith left to form a band with Ken Colyer it was a topic of great speculation how his playing would go down with the Guv’nor, a name Colyer acquired because of his strict adherence to New Orleans principles. I don’t know what went on behind the scenes, but it is a fact that the band didn’t stay together very long.
When this particular record was made it was heavily influenced by the revivalist records coming over from the USA at the time of Bunk Johnson’s 1940s band and also the Kid Ory band, so the “recorded in garage” sound was sedulously acquired. It might be low-fi, but you can hear well enough to enjoy it, especially Keith Christie’s absolutely brilliant trombone, both in solo and in as part of the front line collective passages.
I thought I’d post this now because (a) the title is topical and (b) because playing a piece by a black musical genius is the best way I can think of to refute David Starkey’s on Newsnight last night that there’s nothing more to “black culture” (whatever that means) than drugs and gang violence. This track, called Riot, is from the album Nefertiti, by the superb Miles Davis Quintet of the late 60s, which included Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock (who wrote the tune), Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums. It’s one of the most played albums on my iPod, but I very much doubt Dr Starkey has ever heard of it…
As regular readers of this blog will know, I have a – sometimes excessive – interest in the origin and meaning of words. It’s not something that many people share, but I think language is a fascinating thing, in the way that it evolves so that words and phrases take on different nuances.
It’s not just in English that this happens, of course. The other day I received in a brochure about Welsh National Opera’s forthcoming production of Don Giovanni (for which I’ve already got first-night tickets). I’ll no doubt post a review in due course, but probably the most famous scene of what is arguably Mozart’s greatest opera is near the end of Act II when the statue of the murdered Comendatore arrives to claim Don Giovanni’s soul, with the words
Don Giovanni a cenar teco m’invitasti e son venuto!
(Don Giovanni, you invited me to dine with you and I have come!) It’s a stunning scene from the point of view of both music and drama, and can also be genuinely frightening when done well.
Here’s an example from Youtube, with the doom-laden basso profundo of Kurt Moll as the Comendatore
Some years ago in Nottingham I went to see Don Giovanni performed by the Lithuanian National Opera. It was a nice but unremarkable production until it reached the Comendatore scene. The arrival of the ghostly figure is preceded by an ominous knocking sound which, in this production, emanated from offstage, to the right, as the audience watched. The cast all looked in this direction, as did all the audience. But it was a classic piece of stage misdirection. Suddenly, the music announced the arrival of the statue, a spotlight flashed on and there was the Comendatore already in centre stage. It took me completely by surprise and I gasped audibly, to the obvious disapproval of the team of old ladies sitting in the row in front of me, who shook their heads and tutted. I had seen Don Giovanni before, and knew exactly what was coming, but was still scared..
Anyway, that’s not really the point of this post. At a conference some years ago I was talking to an Italian colleague of mine and he told me something I found fascinating, which is that the Comendatore scene had led to an idiomatic expression in Italian Il Convitato di Pietra (“The Stone Guest”) which is in quite common usage.
So what does it mean? It’s not quite the same as the Comendatore scene would suggest. In Italian it is given as
(una) presenza incombente ma invisibile, muta, e perciò inquietante e imprevedibile, che tutti conoscono ma che nessuno nomina
which I’ll translate with my feeble Italian as
an impending but invisible presence, dumband therefore disturbing and unexpected, which everyone knows but no-one names
In other (English) words, “The Stone Guest” is someone who’s not actually present – at least not physically – but who nevertheless manages to cast some sort of a shadow over the proceedings. I’m sure we can all think of occasions when this would have been a very apt phrase but there seems to be no English equivalent. It’s not quite the same as the Elephant in the Room, but has some similarity.
Now that I’ve had a chance to think, though, perhaps there is an English equivalent. A person who is perpetually absent but despite that exerts baleful influence on those present? A name connected with stone?
I seem to be in an unaccountably nostalgic mood this Saturday morning so as a consequence I’m going to post a musical blast from the past that I hope at least some of you will enjoy.
I first heard the following track on Humphrey Lyttelton’s Radio 2 show The Best of Jazz, which I used to listen to every Monday night when I was at School. I must have heard this sometime around 1981, i.e. about thirty years ago. From the moment I heard the first achingly beautiful phrases of theme of this tune, called Ophelia, I was entranced and it did more than any other single record to fill me with a love of modern jazz. Although I’d always loved jazz, I had tended to think of it as music “of the past” – even the “modern” jazz of e.g. Charlie Parker fell into that category – and usually made in a recording studio. This sounded so new, so exciting, and indeed so beautiful, that it filled me with the urge to hear live jazz whenever and wherever I could. It cost me a lot of money and a lot of late nights, but I think it was worth it.
The performance was recorded live at Ronnie Scott’s Club in London in June 1980 and released on the small British record label Mole Jazz, an offshoot of the famous (and sadly now defunct) record shop of the same name that used to be on Gray’s Inn Road. I loved the track Humph played so much I got the album Blues for the Fisherman straight away (by mail order) and, although I still have it, I have almost worn it away by playing it so much. It’s a brilliant, brilliant album, with the intense atmosphere of a live performance adding to the superb playing of the musicians.
The band is listed as the “Milcho Leviev Quartet featuring Art Pepper”, although that was probably for contractual reasons, as this was the same band that toured extensively as “The Art Pepper Quartet”: Art Pepper on alto saxophone, Milcho Leviev on piano, Tony Dumas on bass and Carl Burnett on drums. I was lucky enough to see this band play live at the Newcastle Jazz festival not long after I got the record and they were great then too. Art Pepper sadly passed away in 1982.
As far as I’m aware this record wasn’t released on CD until very recently and, fortunately, a public-spirited person has put the tracks from the original album and some previous unreleased material on Youtube, so I’ve seized the opportunity to post the track which did so much to inspire me about jazz when I was 18 years old. There’s so much to enjoy in this piece, including the superb drumming of Carl Burnett and virtuosic piano of Milcho Leviev, but the star of the performance for me is Art Pepper (who also wrote the tune). His playing is at times lyrical and at times agonized, but always compelling and this band was especially good at spontaneous transitions of mood and dynamic. I love this performance, and I hope some of you will too.
I had the good fortune to catch last night’s Promenade Concert, featuring the excellent City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andris Nelsons, the best part of which was Sergei Prokofiev’s patriotic cantata Alexander Nevsky, which comprises music he wrote for the film of the same name directed by Sergei Eisenstein. I thought it was a wonderful performance (which you can still see on iPlayer at least for a week) of an amazing piece and was glad I stayed in to watch it. Apart from everything else it reminded me of going to see the film at the Arts Cinema in Cambridge when I was a student. Here is a segment from the thrilling Battle on the Ice. Shot in 1938, without benefit of digital effects, the photography of this sequence is absolutely amazing, as is the music. The point at which battle commences – and the music falls silent – is one of the greatest heart-stopping moments in all cinematic history.
I thought I’d put this up because I’ve just found it and I think it’s great. It’s an interesting facet of jazz history that the clarinet, a mainstay of jazz styles from the New Orleans roots through to the Swing Era, fell into disfavour in the post-war era with the advent of bebop when it was largely replaced by the saxophone. Very few musicians persisted with the clarinet into the era of modern jazz, but this is one that did. It’s the superb Buddy DeFranco, one of the most technically accomplished clarinettists in all of jazz – few have ever been able to match his control in the upper register. The tune they’re playing is a Charlie Parker composition called Billie’s Bounce, another tune based on the standard 12-bar blues sequence (in F) but with some alterations. As far as my chord book says, it basically goes like this:
It’s a Charlie Parker trademark to have a “turnaround” at the end, with the dominant chord C7 instead of the tonic F and, as you’ll hear, these changes produce quite a different feel to the standard blues sequence.
Anyway, one thing I particularly love about this performance is the perfunctory instruction given by Buddy DeFranco at the start: “Play the Blues in F for a while”. That’s all they needed to send them on their way.
..is a place near Marrakesh, a fact I didn’t know until I stumbled across this long lost original recording by Noel Coward of the song later made famous by the late Amy Winehouse.
During the afternoon’s play at the Test Match on Saturday I picked up on Twitter the sad news of the death, at the age of 27, of singer Amy Winehouse, an event which susbsequently stirred up the internet pondlife as much and as tastelessly as the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. I don’t really follow pop music much these days, but Amy Winehouse caught my ear when she recorded a version of the Thelonious Monk jazz classic Round Midnight and I was impressed that she had taken on such challenging material, although the track itself is horribly overproduced.
For what it’s worth I think that Amy Winehouse was an exceptionally talented singer, in an age that celebrates mediocrity rather than talent, although she sadly never came to terms with her addictions to drugs and alcohol. I feel sadness at her passing, not least because her potential remained largely unfulfilled. For those who cling to the belief that taking drugs somehow accompanies or even enhances musical ability, I can only offer this quote from another supremely gifted but tragically dissolute singer, Billie Holiday:
Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better. All dope can do for you is kill you – and kill you the long, slow, hard, way.
Billie was 44 when she died, so she lasted longer than Amy, but they trod a similar path. Both made great music despite, and in no way because of, being drug addicts.
As well as sadness, though, I also feel disgust, as much for the vultures picking over Amy Winehouse’s remains after her death as for the parasites that profited from her addiction during her life. No addict can be cured of his or her addiction by another person – one has to take control of oneself in order to do that – but that does not make it right to simply mock a junkie as the newspapers did relentlessly with Amy Winehouse, willing the car crash to happen. Well, it worked. She’s dead now. I hope they’re proud.
Amy Winehouse’s life and death represent a kind of Shakespearean tragedy, in that her character contained the seeds of its own destruction and that her life seems largely to have been acted out for the “enjoyment” of others. I hope her death serves as a warning to those youngsters who have been tempted to emulate her. There are enough dangers in the world without being a danger to yourself.
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In the Dark 