eat that chicken

I like to listen to jazz while I’m cooking. Mrs Dodman keeps out of the kitchen while I’m being creative with food, so I have free rein to play whatever appeals to me at the moment. The CD player is in the dining room which is open to the kitchen. Thus I can close the door to the rest of the house, turn up the volume a little, open a bottle of dry white wine and bounce around the place while chopping onion, squeezing garlic and calculating the calories.

Recently I had a moment of amazing self-discovery - my selection of music varies according to the type of dish I’m preparing. How have I never realised this assonance of tastes before?

Yesterday, for example, I cooked a sort of Remoska of fillet steak, sweet potato, asparagus, fine green beans and paprika stock. To accompany the preparation I listened to a compilation CD of jazz from the Chicago era. I bought it from the Sunday Times about 12 years ago and I resurrect it whenever the culinary mood takes me. Tucked in the middle of the tracks is The Eel by Bud Freeman. Actually, billing is given to Eddie Condon, but he rarely took centre stage, preferring to give the limelight to his sidemen. When I listen to numbers such as this, I find myself being forced to place the music in its chronological context. The track was recorded in 1933 and still sounds as fresh as last year’s wine. So how original and exhilarating did it sound when it was first released 75 years ago and jazz was yet to be seen as a somewhat pretentious and too often introspective art form? But I digress – that’s another debate.

A few days ago I cooked a prawn risotto. Then I listened to Art Blakey live at Birdland, when he had Lou Donaldson on alto (before he turned R&B) and Clifford Brown on trumpet (a couple of years before his premature death). Recorded in 1954, it features one of my all-time favourite dance tracks: Parker’s composition Now’s the Time. When I say ‘dance track’ I use the term in its broadest meaning. All sorts of jazz makes me want to dance, but it’s not the conventional granddad-at-the-disco style; mine usually involves no more than fingers, feet, shoulders, chins - and knives used as drum sticks on saucepan lids, a practice meeting with severe disapproval from Mrs Dodman.

When I cooked a chicken korma, I listened to Tijuana Moods. I think I first heard Los Mariachis in about 1963 soon after the album was released. For some reason it took 6 years to hit the shops but when it did, it jolted me out of my trad groove and sent my jazz preferences spinning in an entirely different direction. Charles Mingus gave me one of my first truly seminal musical moments in life.

For some reason ham, egg and chips goes perfectly with Wynton Marsalis and his Majesty of the Blues album. Chicken, couscous and salsa salad sits very agreeably with Gerry Mulligan’s West Coast sound, although I find that when I substitute pork for chicken his Concert Jazz Band actually aids digestion.

The Modern Jazz Quartet seems to suit cheese on toast, Georgie Fame and the Harry South Big Band sprinkles deliciously on potato and leek soup, and Dexter Gordon is a magnificent vegetarian pesto pasta, unless I’m listening to The Chase with Wardell Gray, in which case the dish turns into a bolognaise variant.

My top food is lamb chops, served with beetroot, tomato and fresh mint salad, caramelised balsamic carrots and pureed broad bean and potato mash with an optional side-dish of celeriac. That’s when I listen to recordings by Chris Barber before he was Big. Funnily enough, if for some reason I can’t find any fresh mint, I prefer to listen to Chico Hamilton. That’s weird isn’t it?

fine and mellow

One of my favourite books about jazz is “All What Jazz” by Philip Larkin. It’s a compilation of articles he wrote as recordings critic for the Daily Telegraph over a ten year period in the 60s and 70s. Most books about jazz are written retrospectively, with commentators using hindsight to try to analyse events and find meanings in what happened. Larkin was writing contemporaneously as huge changes were taking place in the jazz world. And I appreciate the fact that in places, he sounds perplexed and almost distraught at some of the albums he was sent for review.

When his words were hot off the press, I didn’t necessarily agree with him. I’m an entire generation behind Larkin. He could associate with Pee Wee Russell while my formative years were spent in the aural company of Parker, Coltrane and Mingus. But today, I am in simpatico with Larkin’s sentiments. This is no epiphany on the road to Damascus, if you’ll permit the mixed metaphor. Rather I walk a parallel path of gradual enlightenment.

What prompted this blog is that yesterday I listened to Geoffrey Smith’s Jazz Record Requests on BBC Radio 3. He played a track by a band named Led Bib. It left me totally bemused and puzzled. The music bears a jazz tag, yet as far as I can see the link is tenuous at best. Even the instruments sounded as if they belonged more on a rock stage at the 02 than in the one-time smoky atmosphere of Minton’s. My view is that these musicians have a perfect right to perform whatever type of music they like, but I question whether they should be allowed to call it jazz. I like to think that Smith is merely doing his duty by broadcasting the stuff.

Later in the programme, he played a Billie Holiday number. In the line-up were names Larkin applauded – Lester Young, Ben Webster, Vic Dickinson, Gerry Mulligan, Roy Eldridge and more. Some say Holiday declined towards the end. If Fine and Mellow recorded in 1957 is any indication, commentators who believe that talk rubbish. The hair at the back of my neck curled and bristled. This was Holiday at her best; this was jazz at its best. Changing the subject slightly, I think I can remember a Norfolk girl (Stella Goodey) doing this number superbly. I think she’s still around on the circuit. Catch her if you can. She’s a wonderful performer of Holiday and Bessie Smith numbers.

Like Larkin, I can understand that the essence of jazz is evolution. Led Bib shares genes with Billie Holiday in the same way that cabbages and humans have something like 38% common DNA. I can understand why the music carries the appellation jazz, but I can’t agree with it. When I scratch my head in bemusement, I feel as if I’m at one with Philip Larkin. I forget my gripes by losing myself in his writings of July 1966 and if I’m seen as a bit of a dinosaur, at least I’m a happy one.