mercy, mercy, mercy

This posting is not strictly about jazz. It’s a cry of despair. Music is becoming far too intrusive into my life and I don’t know what to do about it.

Everywhere I go, I’m bombarded by music. I love my jazz (and often listen to other genres of music) but I would like to be able to listen to it when I want, not when some faceless cynical misanthrope in a seriously misguided marketing department feels I should.

For example, we lunched with friends at the Unthank Arms in Norwich. It’s an excellent pub serving good food. I was slightly disappointed with the range of real ales (meaning they didn’t have Abbot) but the Wherry was in good shape. In spite of the average age of the clientele being somewhere between middle-age and the catafalque, we were assaulted by pumping heavy metal rock, inappropriate for a pub at 10pm on a Friday night, never-mind 1.45 on a Thursday afternoon. Of course, the girls behind the bar were very pretty, but were only recently through puberty; obviously they chose the only music they know. Where’s the landlord’s guiding hand? My impression of the pub was severely tarnished. I’ll not return.

After lunch, we moved on to Dunelm, a vast household and fabrics warehouse on the inner ring road. Mrs Dodman wanted fabric for the cushions she’s making for our new house (subject to contract). As we waited to be served, we found ourselves standing beneath a loudspeaker set into the ceiling. It blasted a scattergun of Radio Dunelm at us so we could scarcely hear what the very helpful shop assistant was telling us. Background music I can just about tolerate, but this was virtually inside me. Why so damnably loud? Hasn’t somebody told management that the military use such techniques as a form of torture to weaken the resolve of the Taliban? And it works.

The problem is becoming endemic; it’s a plague. Few shops and pubs are without blaring perambulatory accompaniment, especially larger chain stores. It’s a greater threat to my health than swine flue, blue-tongue disease and e-coli all rolled into one. If I find a blissfully quiet shop, a car will pull up outside with its 5000 amp multi-woofer pounding until my eardrums are aching in sympathy with the welding holding the car together. What is wrong with a little silence occasionally? Will we all suddenly die of boredom if the music stops for just one minute?

Let’s start a campaign to abolish piped music once and for all. As part of the lobby, everybody over the age of sixty could drive around with car windows open playing Coltrane’s “Love Supreme” at full volume. That’ll get the bastards running for cover. And let’s see if we can force a change in attitude before the shops all start playing those excruciating Christmas tracks.

portrait

On the wall of my study (which, incidentally, the estate agent insists on dubbing bedroom 3) is a poster-sized reproduction of Art Kane’s famous 1958 photograph of 57 jazz musicians assembled in Harlem for an Esquire Magazine photo-shoot.

Many of the greats of the day turned up. The perimeters of the image are defined by Benny Golson (top left – ts), Johnny Griffin (top right – ts), Dizzy Gillespie (bottom right – t) and Gigi Gryce (bottom left – as). The odd shaped trapezium thus formed circumscribes such illustrious names as Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Max Kaminsky, Jimmy Rushing, Art Farmer and Lester Young. Count Basie is also in the photograph, but he chose to sit on the kerb at the edge of the group, alongside twelve local youngsters who were determined to get in on the act.

Imagine - fifty-seven of the top jazz musicians in the world standing together on a set of grubby steps outside a bland Harlem tenement building straight out of the Godfather. I know if we could give them all instruments and ask them to play Perdido the sound would probably be excruciating, but how many permutations of small groups could we have jamming together in sublime symphony? The mind boggles.

Now take it one step further. How many didn’t make the photo-shoot for one reason or another? Henry ‘Red’ Allen, for example; Eddie Condon; Edmond Hall; Lionel Hampton; Dexter Gordon; Barney Kessel; Bud Powell…. the list is not endless but it’s significantly longer than my blog capabilities. I can’t attempt to calculate how many jazz greats could have been involved, given the time or the opportunity. So what’s the number of permutations of potential small groups now?

New York in 1958 must have been the Mount Olympus of jazz. From here, these musicians wrought their instruments for domination of the universe of music. It all seems so long ago – so historical. And yet about half the youngsters sitting proudly in front of their living idols were probably born in the same year as I was.

Art Kane was in exactly the right place at the right time to take a precise snapshot of the state of jazz in the USA at a critical juncture. Thereafter, change accelerated and the idiom moved in new directions – for better or for worse. In some ways, the photograph must have been a valedictory, an end of term group photograph. What’s the chance of a 2009 version? If one was produced today, how many of us would be able to put names to more than a few faces, let alone know their oeuvres?

The best thing is the poster covers a mark on the wall. Such versatility; Art Kane was obviously a genius.

the music goes round and round

These are names we don’t hear much of these days: Red McKenzie (kazoo); Yank Lawson (t); Eddie Miller (cl-ts); Nappy Lamare (g); Bob Haggart (b); Ray Bauduc (d). Bunny Berigan (t) and Eddie Condon (g) drifted in and out of the band known for years as the Mound City Blue Blowers.

I’ve never fully understood how anyone can make a living playing a comb and paper anywhere other than in an underpass adjacent to Charing Cross tube station. And yet Red McKenzie was a successful band leader from about 1924 until at least 1937, and in fact continued playing at his own New York club until his death in February 1948.

The recordings I listened to while cooking a pair of lamb chops were from 1935 and 1936. They are mostly well-known standards such as High Society and Muskrat Ramble. Vocal numbers include She’s a Latin from Manhattan, On Treasure Island and Mama Don’t Allow It. Red was first and foremost a vocalist, although his singers on this album also include Spooky Dickenson and Billy Wilson. They all have that natural resonance in their voices as if they’re singing through a megaphone. The Temperance Seven took them off perfectly.

In the days when radio was called wireless, the Mound City Blue Blowers could be heard quite often in Britain. Today, I can’t remember the last time I heard one of their tracks on the airwaves. But then I play my albums rather than listen to the radio (except R3 JRR when I can) so I’m not a reliable source. The rasping notes of the kazoo swept through my kitchen as a great waft of fresh air on a sultry day.

What these tracks do is swing. That’s swing with a lower-case s, not to be confused with Swing which is an entire genre of jazz. And it reminded me of the essence of jazz, something which many musicologists and commentators apparently ignore – jazz was first and foremost dance music. It was for roughly the first 50 years of its existence a means of getting people dancing. A cynic might say the next 50 years was all downhill as arty jazz musicians started prodding around introspectively in their navels rather than trying to arouse the audience. But that would be to make an unjust sweeping statement, true though it is in part.

Yep. The Mound City Blue Blowers had me stomping my feet and banging saucepan lids in Krupa exuberance. The noise from the kitchen was cacophonous but the music was sublime, just sublime, as Para Handy would have said. And please don’t confuse Para with John, Captain or otherwise.

Let’s start a campaign – bring the kazoo back to jazz.

kirk's works

I try to avoid using the term ‘greatest’ of any individual jazz performer. Occasionally I’ll forget in my enthusiasm for one particular player, but as a rule I prefer to think in terms of many greats rather than the single greatest. Lists appear everywhere claiming to identify the “100 Greatest” this or that, but in reality the heading is merely a felony against the conventions of English grammar.

In jazz, nobody is the greatest.

To illustrate my point, consider what goes into making someone great, and let’s use an alto sax player as an example. Many varied factors combine to allow the player to produce the sound he or she does: the quality of build of the specific instrument and the artificer’s skill; the player’s embouchure and cavity of the mouth; type of reed and mouthpiece; choice of style; originality and creativeness of improvisation; robustness of performance; fingering technique; determination, practice and inspiration. No doubt I’ve omitted a few, but the sound that comes out of the horn is a meld of all these different influences. Rarely do two players sound exactly the same, despite my frequent failure to name a soloist correctly.

Now consider three saxophonists: Paul Desmond, Ornette Coleman and Cannonball Adderley. Each is (or was) a distinctive player, immediately identifiable. All were massively successful jazzmen. Each produced a vast personal catalogue of brilliant music enthralling the world for years. All three were technical masters of their instruments. Each played his own idiom of jazz. So how can we select out of this diversity which one could truly be awarded the title of “The Greatest”? We’re comparing brie with claret with whisky.

I have my favourites, of course. But that doesn’t mean they are greats, yet alone be nominees for the accolade of greatest. My preferences are purely subjective, as are yours. The most technically proficient player of all time might well bore me rigid because I don’t enjoy the creativity coming out of the instrument. Often I can’t define what it is that draws me to a particular player. So to attempt to pin the red rosette for best of breed on one specific person is fatuous.

And yet, if I was locked in a dungeon and denied freedom until I nominated a definitive candidate for investiture of the title ‘The Greatest’ I’d probably have to nominate Rahsaan Roland Kirk. His contribution to the history of our music arguably left a tad fainter mark than many others but, when considering the material characteristics of this Hector of jazz, his greatness is possibly just a little more effulgent than that of all others.

For a start he was self-taught but as a teenager he was performing with a band and at the tender age of 25 he stood artistically proud alongside Mingus. He originated his own musical instruments and adapted the keys so he could play three at once. Whistles and sirens became part of his palette. He perfected a system of circular breathing (in the nose and out the mouth) so he had the dubious ability to sustain a note almost indefinitely. I read somewhere that he could even play two melodies at once, but I’ve never heard that in practice. Even after he suffered a stroke and became virtually paralysed in one side, he still continued to perform. He wrote wonderful compositions. His range of styles started at be-bop and never finished, yet incorporated New Orleans, blues, mainstream, modern and funk. When he played the flute, he would sometimes sing along simultaneously, guttering and humming growlingly. He had superb mastery over all his chosen instruments. The creativity and originality of the man seemed to be unbounded.

And he was blind, almost from birth.

Kirk had his critics. Purists would look down their noses at his strange assortment of instruments and dismiss his work as gimmick. As jazz went through anxious and melodramatic metamorphosis in the 60s, leaving many of us perplexed and confused by what we heard, Kirk drove his chariot furiously in the vanguard of the hedonistic charge towards exploration and chaos. Sometimes excruciating, sometimes sublime, Kirk was salient in pushing boundaries of contemporary creation. Genius? I’m not qualified to say, but the man undoubtedly had greatness beyond just great.

Then my bubble burst. Somehow I missed his Blacknuss album of 1972 (six years before he died at the age of 41). I bought it on e-bay recently. I have to admit if I’d heard his version of My Girl before Hog Callin’ Blues I’d probably have turned my back on Kirk and rejected his music as stuff to play in a lift at a seedy hotel. What was his thinking in producing something so lacklustre and mediocre? Even the arrangements make little more than a barely discernible nod towards jazz.

But the great are human too. No doubt Blacknuss was a bid for commercial success. I hope it worked for him at the time. If Einstein or Masefield were to be judged by their weakest efforts, they wouldn’t today carry the respect they do. Kirk deserves the same consideration. Dare I reiterate he was the greatest ever jazzman? Of course not, but Kirk is certainly up there among the best.

i know that you know

Although you’re probably no more interested than I was, I thought I should report that the painfully young candidate won the North Norwich by-election on Thursday. She was the one who kept saying “you know” during the hustings.

She pronounces the words “you know” without any hint of a question mark at the end - you know, when the final word is given an upward lilt, as in “You know?” Rather she uses the phrase as an imperial command, as if to hint that I’m being perverse in affecting not to know, but she knows that I do know. I feel as if I’m being reprimanded, as in “You damned well do know!”

She’s one of Cameron’s bitches. I suspect she’s full of good ideas. Someone ought to tell her that throughout history new ideas have been responsible for all the world’s ills. We humans should take our lead from nature. Animals don’t have new ideas. They simply get on with life, evolving slowly without ambition or schemes other than to live beyond the next crepuscular curtain fall. But I have a feeling that a whole charnel-house of new ideas is about to drop into our lives. Sometimes I’m relieved to be old.

I wanted to ask a question of this newest and youngest MP. Why do programmers at the BBC treat their listeners with such contempt? Yesterday I tuned in at the regular time for Jazz Record Requests, only to hear some distant and tuneless organ grinding away like background tracks to a Gothic Hammer House of Horror film. Apparently, the BBC decided to delay my jazz (yes – MY jazz) in favour of a live (another parenthesis – I’m not sure live is the correct word) recital from the Albert Hall. What is this curious obsession the BBC has with live broadcasts? Why must my music be delayed to make way for something which sounds a damned sight better on record anyway? I had to miss the first ¾ of Geoffrey Smith’s programme because I had other things to do.

Already I can sense somebody saying you can listen to the programme on the internet. But that’s fine if you have a high-powered 48 gigabit fibre-optic super-fast Virgin internet connection less than 100 yards from a telephone exchange. I don’t. I have an old-fashioned dial-up system giving me about 0.25kb a minute. It would take me about 2 weeks to listen to an hour’s worth of jazz albums through my computer.

I wanted to ask the new MP whether she would take my plaint to parliament and raise the issue in the House. But I think she’s probably too busy being clear about things and assuring us she’s entirely transparent. She’s undoubtedly fully occupied formulating youthful new ideas that are brimming to be released into the atmosphere as soon as the holidays are over. God help us all. You know?

monk, bunk and vice versa

For yesterday’s supper I cooked a chicken marinade of garlic, whole-grain mustard and soy sauce, dished up with potatoes and runner beans. As an aperitif, I quaffed lightly of Art Pepper and to accompany the meal I served a classic fine 1947 Monk. I avoid writing the latter’s forename because I don’t know how to spell it. Some experts cite Thelonious and others Thelonius and they’re pretty well evenly split. But then I’m grateful for the fact that the pianist is one of the small band of famous who manage with purely a surname, like Beiderbecke, Roach and Ellington.

Digestion was not aided by a later night cap – a TV programme about the Norwich North by-election taking place this week. What a depressingly young and inexperienced bunch of candidates, most of whom look to my ageing eyes as if they should still be practising their seven times table. They talk in clichés, as if they’re reciting from an issued reader. They were all “clear and transparent” which in reality means they are obfuscating the truth. Each and every one followed the party line while claming to be an independent spirit. We watched them with a creeping feeling of doom, Mrs Dodman and I. One says “you know” all the time as if the short phrase automatically implies axiom. They are all ardent and sincere; each and everyone will put aside ambition to work tirelessly on behalf of the local community. Yet we all know the elected candidate will eventually be just another expendable grinning yapping avaricious head on the Hydra of politics.

Not one mentioned jazz, at least before I dozed off. For twenty-five years I’ve voted independent, putting my cross against any candidate professing to enjoy a good foot-tapping clarinet solo. I figure that anyone appreciating jazz should be given a chance. The rest are too worn out from the exhausting requirement of keeping up party appearances. I know that’s a non-sequitur, but I had a late night.

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?