I’ve been lecturing and writing bumf all day and decided I could do with a bit of a break, but my fingers are so used to typing today that they insisted I should use this ten-minute hiatus to write a blog entry. And who am I to argue with my digits?
Anyway, I had an idea last night of something to put up so I’ll take it off the mental shelf on which I store silly blog ideas and present it now.
Last weekend I went to see the Opera Doctor Atomic in London, and last night I was tidying up my CDs which I usually leave lying around all over the place. In amongst the ones I found in my study and moved back to their rack was the brilliant album that my version calls The Atomic Mr Basie, but I think was originally issued in 1957 on LP with the name E=MC2. I doubt that there is that much musical fare with the word “Atomic” in the title so it struck me as a bit of a coincidence. Apart from anything else it’s a reminder of how far the language of atomic bombs had entered into popular circulation during the 1950s. I can’t think of any other Jazz albums with an equation as the title either.
I’m not sure why Count Basie became Mr Basie for the purposes of the later title, but there you are.
Jazz historians tend to distinguish quite sharply between two versions of the Count Basie Orchestra. According to the books, the first Basie Band was a rough-and-ready blues outfit that arrived in New York from Kansas City in 1936 and the second was a magnificently slick powerhouse machine that emerged after a short hiatus in 1951. Actually both bands were terrific, able to slip from laid back swing to full-throttle up-tempo rabble-rousing in barely the bat of an eye. Anyway, how “rough-and-ready” could a band be with the great Lester Young in the saxophone section? Another invariant between the two bands was the brilliance of the rhythm section which had a featherlight touch but was able to drive the band along like no other.
The late and very great Ella Fitzgerald described the Count Basie Orchestra as
They’re the swinginest band there ever was. They swing ya into bad health.”
Quite.
The real difference in the two bands wasn’t really the personnel (although that did change substantially over the years), but in the style of playing. The early Count Basie Orchestra didn’t have very sophisticated written arrangements so it relied a lot more on punchy riffs and call-and-answer exchanges between the brass and reeds, which were executed incredibly tightly considering that they were ad-libbed. The second manifestation drew on superb arrangers, particularly Neal Hefti who wrote most of the arrangements on The Atomic Mr Basie. The band still had an almost telepathic gift for synchronized riffing, especially playing behind a star soloist improvising in one of the many gaps left in the arrangements.
I had a quick shufti for hefti on Youtube and found one of the tracks from The Atomic Mr Basie, Whirlybird, performed in 1965 but with the same tenor sax soloist, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis that plays on the album. I remember going to see him play in Newcastle once and was blown away by his enormous sound, the muscular leatheriness of his tone, and his uncanny ability to change up a gear just when you think he’s going flat out. Then in his sixties, he was an exhilirating musician to listen to and he was even better twenty years earlier with this great band punching out riffs behind him. I love this version nearly as much as the original, even if the drum solo (by the overrated Rufus Jones) does go on a bit, because the brass section is just awesome…
It’s not often that my interest in Opera overlaps significantly with my career in Physics, but this Saturday night (28th March) was a definite example, with English National Opera‘s production of Doctor Atomic by John Adams providing the opportunity. I even went with a group of six physicists to see it.
The piece is, of course, centred around the personality of J Robert Oppenheimer “The Father of the Atomic Bomb” and is set in Los Alamos in the runup to the first “Trinity” test detonation of an atomic bomb in July 1945. Other physicists feature in the story, especially Edward Teller and Robert Wilson, and images of many more taken from their security passes are projected onto the set at the opening of Scene 1.
According to what I was told, John Adams originally engaged a librettist to write the text for the Opera but this didn’t work out, and a libretto was instead stitched together by Peter Sellars from a variety of sources, including the poetry of John Donne, the Bhagavad Gita, scientific documents, and assorted memoranda from Los Alamos.
This means that the work doesn’t really have a real narrative trajectory, and there is very little in the way of character development, but instead it resolves itself into a series of impressionist tableaux. Rather than attempting to provide the coherence that the libretto lacks through the music, Adams chose to work with what he had and not try to impose a larger structure on it via the score.
The result is fascinating but it’s not without its problems. I greatly admire John Adams’ music, which manages to be both innovative and accessible. There certainly are many places in Doctor Atomic where the music, words and drama come together to make wonderful Opera. Frankly, though, there are also some passages where it gets becalmed, especially in the domestic scenes between Oppenheimer and his wife which didn’t seem to me to add any special insight into the character of either. The Opera ends with the countdown to the detonation of the Trinity Test, but I thought this was also too long, robbing the event of some of its power, although the last moments and the explosion itself were brilliantly done.
This is a new Opera, first performed as recently as 2005 in San Francisco. This production is only the second, as it has moved directly to London from a successful run at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Many of the great operas which we now regard as standards went through several iterations before they arrived at their final version. This may happen to Doctor Atomic too. The running time of around three hours is by no means excessive by opera standards, but I do think it would work even better on stage if it were shortened quite a bit and tightened up to remove the longueurs from both acts and focus on building the tension as the test approaches.
I hope all this doesn’t sound too negative. It really is a fascinating and compelling piece. The ending, involving an empty stage and a tape recording of the words of a dying Japanese woman asking for water, moved at least one of our little group to tears.
And of course there’s that aria. At the end of Act 1, just before the interval, Oppenheimer is alone on stage while the prototype bomb is suspended behind him. His thoughts are expressed by the words of a Sonnet Batter my Heart, by John Donne:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to’another due,
Labor to’admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly’I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me,’untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you’enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Coming back to Cardiff on the train this morning I read a glowing review of Doctor Atomic in the Observer by Fiona Maddocks which referred to this aria as the greatest written since Puccini. I’m not sure I’d go as far as that, but it is truly wonderful, especially when sung as it was last night by the flawless Gerald Finley. It also struck me that it has many parallels with, and is as at least as good as, the aria When the Great Bear and Pleiades in Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten. Whether Doctor Atomic eventually comes to be regarded as a great Opera in the way Peter Grimes has remains to be seen, but I would bet my bottom dollar that this aria will anyway be performed many many times as a concert piece.
Fortunately, though, you don’t have to take my word for how good it is. Since the Met version of this production has been released on video, I can end with Batter my Heart just as we saw and heard it last night, with John Adams great music stuttering uneasily at the start but taking on a radiant quality as the aria develops. Superb.
Today’s the day we call in England Shrove Tuesday. We’re apparently all supposed to get shriven by doing a pennance before Lent . Another name for the occasion is Pancake Day, although I’m not sure what sort of pennance it is to be forced to eat pancakes.
Further afield the name for this day is a bit more glamorous. Mardi Gras, which I translated for the title using my schoolboy French, doesn’t make me think of pancakes but of carnivals. And being brought up in a house surrounded by Jazz, it makes me think of New Orleans and the wonderful marching bands that played not just during the Mardi Gras parades but at just about every occasion for which they could find an excuse, including funerals.
The Mardi Gras parades gave rise to many of the great tunes of New Orleans Jazz, many of them named after the streets through which the parade would travel, mainly in the famous French Quarter. Basin Street, South Rampart Street, and Bourbon Street are among the names redolent with history for Jazz fans and musicians around the world. I also remember a record by Humphrey Lyttelton‘s 1950s band called Fat Tuesday.
The New Orleans Mardi Gras has on recent occasions sometimes got a bit out of hand, and you probably wouldn’t want to take kids into the French Quarter for fear they would see things they shouldn’t. Personally, though, I’d love the chance to savour the atmosphere and watch the parades.
The clip I’ve chosen is of Bourbon Street Parade. The one and only time I went to New Orleans I felt a real thrill walking along this street, just because I’ve heard the tune so many times on old records. I didn’t go in Mardi Gras time, however, but in the middle of summer. The heat was sweltering and the humidity almost unbearable, but the air was filled with music as well as moisture. It was impossible to sleep in the heat, so I stayed up moving from bar to bar, drinking and listening to music until I was completely exhausted.
The tune was written by the late Paul Barbarin, who died in 1969 during a street parade in New Orleans. What a way to go. He also plays on the clip I included here.
I picked this particular clip because it features a much underrated British musician, Sammy Rimmington (although the notes on Youtube have muddled it up; he plays saxophone on this, not clarinet). My dad once played with Sammy Rimmington and I remember the unqualified admiration with which he (my dad) spoke of his (Sammy’s) playing.
Just to balance the books here’s a wonderful version of the classic bebop tune Anthropology, performed by Bud Powell who I mentioned in my previous post about Thelonious Monk.
This really is authentic bebop, with its complex yet propulsive drum patterns and jagged melodic lines characterized by unusual intervals and little punctuating tags at the end of each phrase in the solo. Also brilliant, but quite different to Monk, Bud Powell was very much a direct translation onto the keyboard of the saxophone and trumpet styles of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
The tune was written by them too, although it uses essentially the same chords as George Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm. It was a standard bebop procedure to write a new melodic line on top of an existing harmonic structure and give the result a new name. Jazz improvisation is always based on the harmonies (chord changes) rather than the tune, so this is a way to build new compositions quickly with the knowledge that the harmonic foundations would be sound. In the 40s there was a classic Charlie Parker recording session during which the band decided to do such a variation of the standard Cherokee (written by Ray Noble). In the middle of the performance they absent-mindedly played the Cherokee theme and there was a cry of anguish from the control room by the Producer who obviously hoped that if they stayed off the actual tune of Cherokee he wouldn’t have to pay composer’s royalties. So that take was abandoned, and they did another. The final version was called Koko and it’s one of the Charlie Parker classics. Many other classic bop tunes were made in this way, with different standard tunes underneath them. Necessity and budget restrictions are the mothers of invention.
Oh, and just listen to the fantastic double bass by the brilliant (and then very young) Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen who drives it along like the clappers!
When you read about the structure of bebop it seems so complicated and obscure that it’s hard to believe that the result is such a thrill to listen to. I think it is the highest point of twentieth century music-making, both in the creativity and skill of its proponents and in the sheer excitement of its sound which is made all the more remarkable when you realise how difficult it is to play!
Some weeks ago I posted a clip of Billie Holliday and Lester Young that was part of a 1958 TV programme called Sounds of Jazz. I found another clip from that show and decided to put it on here because it’s absolutely fascinating. The star this time is the great Thelonious Monk, whose middle name was Sphere.
Thelonious Monk was a unique musician. His remarkable self-taught style of piano playing was unlike that of anyone who came before him. Look at his hands in this clip and you’ll see that his fingers are straight as he plays: he uses them a bit like mallets in order to get such a percussive sound from the instrument (although the audio is a bit muffled on this track).
Monk was often called “The High Priest of Bop” and regarded as one of the leaders of the post-war bebop revolution in Jazz alongside Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Actually, I don’t think Monk ever really played bebop: the archetypal bop pianist was undoubtedly Bud Powell whose style was quite different to Monk. But the “High Priest” tag owed at least something to his eccentric personality: he hardly ever spoke and, aside from his music, he communicated mainly through his choice of hat.
Monk’s piano style is hard to describe – his wife Nellie once described it as “Melodious Thunk” – but I’ve always loved his music. To me his solos sound like someone talking directly at you in a strange and wonderful language that you don’t quite understand but which sounds beautiful anyway. His use of syncopation is quite different from the usual bebop musicians and it seems, to me anyway, to echo the rhythms of everyday speech. But, above all, when you hear Monk play the piano, you know immediately who it is. He had many admirers, but nobody could play like him. He was a genius.
In later life his behaviour became disturbingly erratic; he would sometimes stand up in the middle of a performance and go wandering around the stage. His music also deteriorated, I think, from the early sixties onwards. His best records are from the 40s and 50s. I think it was generally assumed that he had a drugs problem, which he may well have had, but it was eventually realised that he was suffering from a serious mental illness. Although attempts were made to treat this, he stopped playing in the 1970s and lived out the rest of his as a recluse.
I remember very well the day he died in February 1982. It was during the Newcastle Jazz Festival and on the day when the great British jazz pianist Stan Tracey was due to give a concert there. As we took our seats in the Newcastle Playhouse for the gig, an announcement was made that Thelonious Monk had died. Stan Tracey, for whom Monk had been a major musical inspiration, responded to the occasion by playing two sets exclusively consisting of tunes by his hero. It was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to and remains strong in my memory to this day.
That also reminds me to say that as well as being a completely unique and individualistic piano player, Thelonious Monk was also a great Jazz composer who penned some of the great modern standards of the idiom: ‘Round Midnight, Straight No Chaser, Epistrophy, the list is substantial. And then of course there is the tune he plays on this clip which became something of a signature tune.
Off the record, I don’t think it’s completely fair to say that Thelonious actually wrote Blue Monk. The main theme was in fact borrowed from an earlier tune called Pastel Blue written by the trumpeter Charlie Shavers. It’s basically a straightforward 12 bar blues, lacking the twists and turns and stops and starts of his more typical compositions, but Monk recorded more varied versions of this tune than practically any other. This clip is a short rendition, but it’s fascinating to see the other characters in shot. Sitting at Monk’s piano looking straight at him is none other than Count Basie, and we also get a glimpse of blues singer Joe Turner standing at the side. Later on, there’s a shot of the great saxophonist Coleman Hawkins clearly enjoying the music as I hope you will.
I’ve lost track of how many different productions I have seen of this strange and wonderful masterpiece, but this one was as good as any I can remember. It is sung in English rather than the original German (all productions by English National Opera are in English, in fact). Translating the libretto isn’t at all necessary for this work because the plot makes no sense whatsoever in whatever language the words happen to be sung or spoken. It’s all so weird it might as well be about particle physics.
Technically it’s not an opera, but a singspiel: the recitative – the bit in between the arias – is spoken rather than sung. It’s really more like a musical comedy in that sense, and was originally intended to be performed in a kind of burlesque style. That blends rather nicely with the Coliseum‘s own history: it only became an opera theatre relatively recently; before the Second World War it was a Variety Theatre or Music Hall. The Magic Flute also has many points of contact with the pantomime tradition, including the character of the villainous Monostatos (Stuart Kale) who, at this performance, was roundly booed at his curtain call in authentic panto fashion. His retaliatory snarl was priceless.
I won’t even attempt to explain the plot, if you can call it that, because it’s completely daft. It’s daft, though, in a way that much of life is daft, and I think that’s the secret of its enduring popularity. Mozart’s music carries you along and constantly seems to be telling you not to take it all too seriously.
This production never gets bogged down or, worse, stuck up its own backside as some I have seen. Instead it’s played straight to the gallery and none the worse it is for that.
The English text is very clever, including dextrous rhymes and plenty of puns, but I’d still have to say I prefer the original language because it fits so much better with the music. The Queen of the Night’s aria “Die Holle Racht” has so many harsh Germanic sounds in the original which just can’t be done in English with anything like the same effect.
I don’t think there are any really weak points in this production. The sets are simple but stylish and effective, and it all looks and sounds wonderful. Tamino (Robert Murray) is earnest and rather dull, but then I think he’s supposed to be. It might have been a mistake for him to go bare-chested in Act II though, as I don’t think man boobs were really what the audience wanted on St Valentine’s day. The comic momentum was kept on the boil by on the crazy birdcatcher Papageno (Roderick Williams). Pamina (Sarah-Jane Davis) was a little hesitant at first, and can’t act at all well, but sang her show-piece aria in the Second Act with real emotion. Robert Lloyd’s Sarastro added the right amount of gravitas without the pomposity the role sometimes generates; his bass is a lovely voice too, deep and warm with a rich texture to it. And then there’s the Queen of Night (Emily Hindrichs) who also seemed a little hesitant as she found her way through the difficult coloratura of the famous Act I aria that culminates in a nerve-jangling Top F, but was awesome in the second act when calling for the death of Sarastro. Her costume and hairstyle were more than a little reminiscent of Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein. The three ladies had similar hairstyles, but without the side streaks and in a shocking blue. I couldn’t help thinking of Marge Simpson.
There were many funny moments, perhaps the best being when Papageno and Papagena fasten their safety belts before being hoisted into the rafters in a giant bird’s nest. Papageno even managed a reference to a Valentine. I wonder if that was put in specially for Saturday?
I’m getting a habit of forgetting birthdays. I meant to post this yesterday but it slipped my mind owing to me writing some bullshit for a grant application.
Anyway, I just wanted to post a birthday greeting to the wonderful Leontyne Price who was 82 years old on Tuesday 10th February. In case you’ve never heard of her, before she retired from the stage she was one of the great opera singers of her generation, famous for her enormous vocal range and smoky mezzo tones. She had a relatively light voice, without the thrilling power or dangerous edge of, say, Maria Callas, but she certainly knew how to use it for a big dramatic effect.
Amongst the many notable things about her was that she was the first black soprano to star at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The great jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, never one to be exaggerated in his praise of other musicians, said of her
I have always been one of her fans because in my opinion she is the greatest female singer ever, the greatest opera singer ever. She could hit anything with her voice. Leontyne’s so good it’s scary. Plus, she can play piano and sing and speak in all those languages… I love the way she sings Tosca. I wore out her recording of that, wore out two sets.
I’m not sure she was the greatest singer ever, and she wasn’t that marvellous as an actress, but she’s definitely up there amongst the very best. I have an old LP of her singing Aida which is truly magnificent (despite all the scratches). In fact, according to a BBC poll in 2007 she was voted the 4th greatest opera singer, behind Maria Callas (who else?), Dame Joan Sutherland, and Victoria de los Angeles. That’s pretty exalted company.
Anyway, the later performances on Youtube aren’t the best, so I’ve picked an older one of her near the peak of her powers, with her voice gorgeously expressive and very fluid in the upper register. Here she is in probably her best role, as the eponymous Aida who, incidentally, is Ethiopian.
Happy Birthday Leontyne Price and very many happy returns!
After a week of miserable inclement weather it was a relief to have beautifully crisp sunny Saturday yesterday, capped by the prospect of a Night at the Opera. The “Spring” season of Welsh National Opera is now underway so I went to the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay to see their production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (italian name: Le Nozze di Figaro).
I’ve been going to the opera for quite a while now, and I’m definitely mildly addicted to it. It’s quite an expensive thing to get hooked on, but not compared to some things. For me, there’s a kind of excitement about opera that is almost childish. As we settled down into our seats last night, I had butterflies in my stomach and when the overture started, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.
Here’s the overture played at a good lick by the English Baroque Soloists.
With that as your starter, who wouldn’t be looking forward to the rest of the meal?
The Marriage of Figaro, a classic Opera Buffa , was the first of three to derive from a collaboration between Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte that also produced Cosi fan Tutte and Don Giovanni. According to the programme notes, da Ponte wrote the libretto for Le Nozze di Figaro in less than six weeks, which is truly remarkable considering what a wonderfully polished work it is.
And of course there’s the music. Starting from the bustling ebullience of the briliant overture, the score is just beautiful from start to finish, the slapstick comedy punctuated by truly moving expressions of love and heartache such as the arias Porgi amor and Dove sono i bei momenti that make this piece much more than just a bit of fun. It also boasts one of the most beautiful duets in all opera, Sull’aria….Che soave zeffiretto, also known as the Letter Duet. Anyone will who has seen the memorable film Shawshank Redemption will recognize it because that’s what’s on the record Andy plays over the prison public address system after breaking into the warders’ office.
The lovely tunes wash over you one after the other in a way that’s so typical of Mozart; only Puccini had anything like his gift for wonderful melodies. With such sublime music and such a clever text, it’s very difficult to go very wrong. The one thing you have to make sure of in an Opera Buffa is to keep the pace going, much like a classic stage farce: if you dwell on it too much it’s no longer funny, just embarrassing to watch. The hectic pace only abates when the characters sing their wonderful solo arias, the surrounding comic context heightening their dramatic impact, but when these pieces are over we’re off again into the mayhem. The whole thing scurries along with never a dull moment and, by the end, you can hardly believe that it’s been the best part of four hours. The running time for last night’s performance, including one interval, was about 3 hours and 45 minutes but I never once looked at my watch.
This production is slick, beautifully sung, and keeps the momentum going in exactly the right way. The costumes are dated somewhere in the early 20th Century, with Susanna‘s French maid costume reminding me a little bit of the dress Kylie Minogue wore in Doctor Who. The sets are quite spare (although with sufficient props to hide behind, and there’s a lot of hiding behind things in this opera), with large mirrors at the side giving an extra sense of space. I was wondering how they would manage the garden setting for Act IV with this relatively simple set, but this was all done with mirrors too, this time with images of trees superimposed on them. It was quite effective, at least at first, although the mirrors kept moving around in a distracting and sometimes alarming way which spoilt it a little.
The cast was very good, especially Rosemary Joshua’s pert Susanna and Rebecca Evans as the Contessa Almaviva (both of them born in South Wales). The unflappably resourceful and charismatic Figaro was sung by David Soar, who played the part quite “straight” and let the libretto do the work. A good call, in my opinion. The Count Almaviva, Jacques Imbrailo, also sang very well and had considerable presence, but he wasn’t nearly pompous enough for my taste. Part of the joy of this opera is the subversion of roles, Figaro being so much smarter than his boss. I don’t think they quite made the most of this.
I should make a special mention of the stunningly beautiful Fiona Murphy as Cherubino. This character is a sex-starved adolescent boy, sung by a girl soprano, with definite shades of the principal boy in English pantomime. In fact, the English translation of the libretto seen in the surtitles cleverly uses the word pantomime in his/her scenes. In her Cherubino persona in the first Act, wearing a sports jacket and plus-twos, and with her hair cut short, Fiona Murphy had more than a touch of KD Lang about her. Later on Cherubino has to dress as a girl, and I found the result very interesting in all kinds of unexpected ways, not all of them comic…
Oh and I should mention that it is sung in Italian too. Call me old-fashioned but I always prefer things in the original language, especially when it’s Italian.
All in all, an excellent night out, and judging by the prolonged cheering and applause at the end, I don’t think I’m the only one who thought it so!
I just remembered that today (February 3rd 2009) is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Felix Mendelssohn. Rather than sing Happy Birthday, I thought it would better to celebrate with a Song without Words. Mendelssohn wrote eight famous books each containing six Songs without Words for solo piano, but I’ve picked one written for piano and cello (Opus 109) because I think the cello can sing like no other instrument, and also because I found a rare clip that features the wonderful Jacqueline du Pré on cello, with her mother Iris du Pré on piano. Enjoy!
I noticed this morning that I’ve passed a bit of a milestone on here. I’ve actually reached my 100th post. That probably means I’ve been spending way too much time blogging but, undaunted, here I go again.
Ages ago (or it seems like ages ago) I posted an item about Humphrey Lyttelton and during the course of it I mentioned that my Dad had played the drums with Humph some years ago. I did mention in that post that I would put up a picture as soon as I found it, which I have now done. Here it is, taken probably somewhere around 1990.
I’m not entirely sure of the venue. I always thought this session took place in the Corner House in Newcastle but on closer inspection it doesn’t really look like it in this photograph so I wouldn’t bet on my memory being right. It’s not a great photograph, but that’s definitely my Dad (Alan Coles) on the drums. I don’t know the other personnel, but you do get a proper impression of how tall Humph was (he’s on trumpet, of course) .
Humph of course had his own band but many jazz venues (including the Corner House) preferred to invite soloists only to come and play with the house band. The main reason I think was that it was cheaper that way. And of course the local musicians loved it because they got to play with their heros. My Dad idolized Humphrey Lyttelton but when he finally got to play with him he was extremely nervous and didn’t particularly enjoy the evening.
Semi-professional bands like the Savoy Band shown here couldn’t afford fancy band uniforms or outfits so for some reason they all seem to settle on cheap red nylon shirts, as shown in the picture. I don’t know why because they’re not at all pleasant to wear if you’re going to be sweaty. But these shirts reminded me of a story that I’ve bored people with over many years. When I was little (in the 70s) there was a similar band in Newcastle called the Phoenix Jazz Band. They also wore horrible red nylon shirts for gigs, except for their young bass player (a guy called Gordon) who refused to do so. This uppity young student teacher turned up for gigs in a black-and-yellow hooped jersey so he looked rather like a bumble-bee or a wasp. The rest of the band called him, rather sarcastically, Sting. He soon went on to other things but the name stuck.
My dad always claimed that Sting had played the double bass in our garage – when I lived in Benwell village. I don’t remember having seen him though, and I might well have been having my leg pulled. Actually it wasn’t a garage anyway, more of a big wooden shed where he kept his drums and lots of other junk.
Anyway, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this but I did for a while have dreams of becoming a Jazz musician myself. I wanted to be a saxophonist but my Dad persuaded me that I should learn to play the clarinet first and it would be easy then to switch to sax. I don’t think it was very good advice because they’re quite different instruments to play, but I rather think he had pushed the clarinet because he wanted me to play traditional Jazz rather than modern stuff.
I found that I had quite a good ear for music and a pretty good sense of rhythm so I mastered the rudiments fairly quickly but never got much further than that. I even got as far as sitting in with some bands, but never became a full-time member of one.
Sitting in with one of these traditional Jazz bands is a very informal business. Usually the repertoire consists of standard tunes that everyone knows and there are no real arrangements as such. The trumpet usually plays the lead for a chorus or two, with impromptu clarinet and trombone alongside, then there’s a sequence of solos (usually a couple of choruses for each player, unless you really get into it and the leader shouts “take another!”), and then you play out to the end. Other than that you make it up as you go along.
But there is one notable exception to this, a number called High Society. This probably began as a Mardi Gras parade tune but later on came to be played as an up-tempo flag-waver. Almost every Jazz band, however, plays it the same way. It starts with a sort-of call to arms with drum rolls and a few phrases on the horns a bit like a fanfare before moving into tempo and it has quite a few scored passages that are played straight (i.e. without improvisation). When it breaks eventually into the solos there is an unwritten rule that the clarinet soloist plays a standard set-piece solo obbligato, at least for one chorus, after which it’s back to the more normal improvised solo.
I don’t know how this became such a strong tradition but you can check it out yourself. There are dozens of versions of High Society played by different Jazz bands and the clarinettist will always play the same basic notes. There’s a classic recording by Jelly Roll Morton on which there are two clarinettists (Albert Nicholas and Sidney Bechet) who both play the original licks, one after the other.
The story I heard was that this solo (as well as possibly the tune itself) was written by a man called Alphonse Picou who was born in 1878 and played with the first real Jazz band in New Orleans, which was led by the legendary figure of Buddy Bolden, the first great jazz trumpeter. Bolden died in 1931 but no recordings by him have ever come to light because he stopped playing before 1910 and spent most of the rest of his life in mental institutions. It is said that Buddy Bolden’s band did make a cylinder recording, but this grail-like object has never been found.
High Society is such a well known tune and is such fun to play that it is very often part of after-hours Jam sessions at clubs like the Corner House where I did once actually play the Alphonse Picou solo from memory (or at least some sort of approximation to it), having heard it so many times on different records.
Last weekend, when I was playing around on Youtube, I chanced upon a bit of film of New Orleans Jam Session from 1958. It was looking back down a very long tunnel into ancient history but you could have knocked me down with a feather when I saw, sitting down next to the piano at the left, the great man himself, Alphonse Picou. I never thought there would be a film of him, thinking that he was, like Buddy Bolden, an almost mythical figure. I later found elsewhere, a clip from the same session of him playing his own famous solo! However, he was 80 years old and very frail at the time and he doesn’t actually play it that well so I’ll spare his posthumous blushes (he died in 1961) by picking a rather better number from the same session.
The tune I’ve picked to put on here is called Mamie’s Blues. They play it with that lovely lazily lilting beat that’s so typical of authentic New Orleans Jazz but is actually so difficult to get right. And if it wasn’t enough to see Alphonse Picou, there are several other legendary names too: Paul Barbarin (drums), George Lewis (clarinet) and Jim Robinson (trombone) amonst others. The session happened 50 years ago at which point these were all very old men and they’re all long gone now.This clip, to me, is every bit as important a piece of history as, say, an original score by Mozart.
They may all look like they’ve seen better days, but they certainly still knew how to play!
The views presented here are personal and not necessarily those of my employer (or anyone else for that matter).
Feel free to comment on any of the posts on this blog but comments may be moderated; anonymous comments and any considered by me to be vexatious and/or abusive and/or defamatory will not be accepted. I do not necessarily endorse, support, sanction, encourage, verify or agree with the opinions or statements of any information or other content in the comments on this site and do not in any way guarantee their accuracy or reliability.
In the Dark 
