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Heebie Jeebies

Posted in Jazz with tags , , on August 14, 2011 by telescoper

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.

 

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Riot

Posted in Jazz with tags , on August 13, 2011 by telescoper

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…

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Il Convitato di Pietra

Posted in Literature, Opera with tags , , , , on August 7, 2011 by telescoper

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.

In fact there  are other works that allude to this phrase including an earlier opera called Don Giovanni o Il Convitato di Pietra and a later play by Pushkin called The Stone Guest.

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, dumb and 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?

It’s got to be Keith Mason….

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Ophelia

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , , , on August 6, 2011 by telescoper

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.

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Alexander Nevsky

Posted in Music with tags , , , , on July 31, 2011 by telescoper

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.

 

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Billie’s Bounce

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , on July 28, 2011 by telescoper

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:

| F7| F7 | B♭7| F7|| B♭7| B♭7|F7| F7| G7| C7| F7| C7|

while the standard blues progression in F would go like

| F7| F7| F7 |F7 | B♭7| B♭7| F7| F 7| C7| B♭7| F7| F7|

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.

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Rehab…

Posted in Music with tags , on July 26, 2011 by telescoper

..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.

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Round Midnight

Posted in Music with tags , , on July 25, 2011 by telescoper

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.

Rest in Peace, Amy Winehouse (1983-2011).

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From Major to Minor

Posted in Music with tags , , , , , , on July 17, 2011 by telescoper

I was looking around for something to post next week in honour of our graduation ceremony (which is coming up on Tuesday) and came across this, which brought back a flood of memories. It’s the wonderful Annie Lennox singing the classic Cole Porter song Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye as performed as part of the AIDS fund-raiser Red Hot and Blue way back in 1990. Was it really that long ago?

Cole Porter has to be  one of the cleverest songwriters of all time.  His ability to produce tune after lovely tune was matched by his supreme skill in crafting the lyrics, often managing to produce rhymes in the middle of lines as well as at the end. He often used this superb craftsmanship to comic effect, but produced his share of beautiful ballads too, though none more beautiful than this. I’ve always loved the Ella Fitzgerald version of this song so much that I didn’t believe anyone could outdo it, but this track (and the video) moved me to tears when I first saw it, and it’s never lost its impact on me, especially when heard with the poignant video. The  little  boy shown in the home movies is a young  Derek Jarman, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1994.

This song exemplifies Cole Porter’s art as both  composer and wordsmith. The trademark clever rhymes are there, but in this case there’s a wonderful juxtaposition of  the words “how strange the change from major to minor” and an interesting chord progression, which is a minor scale variation of the plagal cadence (sometimes called the “Amen cadence”, because it’s how the word A-men is often sung in hymns). The plagal cadence involves a IV-I step back to the tonic chord (I), via a major 4th (IV) but in Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye, the progression goes via   IV-iv-I with the interpolation of a minor 4th chord (iv), which in the original key of E♭is an A♭m chord. It’s a lovely touch, no less lovely for being so clever.

This progression – or a variation of it involving a dominant 7th chord (i.e. IV-iv-♭VII-I) –  can be found in many jazz standards, as  a kind of “bluesy” alternative to the more usual V-I “authentic” cadence, and many pop songs use it too, including several by The Beatles.  However, I doubt if even Cole Porter could have come up with a rhyme for “dominant seventh”!

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The Presenters Play…

Posted in Music with tags , , , on July 8, 2011 by telescoper

Regular readers of this blog – both of them – will know that I’m an avid listener of  BBC Radio 3, and will be listening even more over the summer when the annual season of Promenade Concerts (“The Proms”) begins in a week’s time. That’s why I thought I’d post this video I came across recently, which shows a number of the presenters playing duets on the piano. It’s quite a surprise to see what people look like when you only know them by their voice, so here’s your chance to see if they look like you think they sounded!

The piece they’re playing – with varying degrees of success – is the Berceuse from the Dolly Suite by Gabriel Fauré which those of us of a certain age will remember as the music from Listen with Mother.

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