let's fly down

Cromer is getting better. Once an elegant and genteel Victorian resort, the town went through a bad patch some years ago. Its haute-couture blazer wore through at the elbow, the cuffs frayed and a button dropped off. Now the seamstresses have been hard at work. A smart leather patch has been expertly sewn onto the arms, the cuffs have been turned and sparkling new brass buttons adorn the front. Today, part of the original grandeur is again being glimpsed.


Our arrival in the town had a touch of ‘good news, bad news’ about it. The good news is we parked easily and avoided the frantic crush. The bad news is we were a day early for Carnival. Never mind. We found in the town an air of expectancy, as if a band could be heard approaching from afar but the leader had yet to appear over the brow of the hill. To call the anticipation ‘fever pitch’ would be gross exaggeration. This is Norfolk. Full of character and characters it is; febrile it is not.

Yet we knew something was about to happen. For a start, the sun broke through at last. Then we saw fairgrounds and fluttering breeze-tickled bunting; the signs for extra parking; heavily laden drays delivering extra supplies to the pubs; holiday-makers wandering around with programmes in their hands; a jazz band playing. Cromer was a-buzz.

Jazz? To my delight, I encountered The Smokehouse Blue Jazz Marching Band marking time in a lazy circle on the corner by the old tobacconist’s shop, saxophones (Mick Murphy on alto), trombone, clarinet, trumpets, drum et al pumping out pure New Orleans. For what is Carnival without a jazz band? Nothing but a wan replica, a plastic Mona Lisa, a £20 note bearing the image of Cheryl Cole, a cheese and tomato sandwich made with Edam.

This band is good. Paucity of live jazz leads us to be grateful for small blessings and so we tend to consider most of what we hear as worthy, but this was beyond worthy – it was unquenched primitive excellence. Early jazz had a rawness and un-sophistication about it. Marching jazz - carnival jazz - rekindles that early enthusiasm and energy from the times when jazz was still being played as intended – to get people dancing, even, or maybe especially, at New Orleans funerals. What the music set out to do, this band seems to achieve. A small but appreciative audience applauded cheerily.

Smokehouse Blue processed along the High Street. At the band’s head, the grey-beard Grand Marshal, resplendent in black coat and hat, ceremonial sash and ornate traditional umbrella, led his musicians to that most appropriate of NO anthems – Bourbon Street Parade. Impatient cars squeezed past. Not even good jazz can be allowed to halt commerce and the traffic.

Serendipity! Around the corner was a carnival music market with a huge stock of covetable LPs for sale. I could have spent a lot of money, but I settled for a 1962 recording by the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band. I still reckon Mulligan had one of the best swing (with a small s) bands around at the time. In my choice is an irony. Mulligan purposefully formed his big band with the objective of playing music for the concert hall, not for dancing. But I can’t always square the circle.

Take a look at www.smokehousblue.com. You can listen to a few of the band’s favourite tracks.

half way up the stairs is the place where i sit

Our Lincolnshire garden had an unusual visitor last week. It was sitting in the middle of the front lawn looking lost and confused. For a moment, I felt quite emotional – our first frog. The camera was to hand, so I snapped one image quickly and before I could recompose myself for a second, the frog sprang forward on its straggled rear legs and disappeared into the hydrangeas, where no doubt one of the neighbours’ many cats ate it. If the image is a little blurred, put it down to excitement rather than my novice skills.


Serendipity again – the sighting was unexpected. Frogs are common enough, but not in our garden. In France recently we heard thousands of marsh frogs singing tunelessly all round us when we camped in the Marquenterre. There, twilight trembled to the croak and rasp of a clamorous ranarian opera with a cast of thousands. They performed well into the night before the multiple-antiphony gently subsided, hopefully not because of sore throats. But les petites rascals kept out of sight. We saw not one.

Of course, as soon as I’d spotted the Lincolnshire visitor, I reached for my old copy of “Collins Field Guide to Freshwater Life” and turned to Plate 322. “Rana ridibunda” it cited. “Marsh Frog.” That’s with a capital M rather than the more generic little m I used earlier. According to the book, frogs come in all sorts of shadings and patterns, so I have no idea how we’re supposed to obtain a definitive identification. The olive-green on our lawn looked exactly like the one in my book, so - tick! But if I’m realistic, it was more likely to be a common frog

Tick and move on. The other day I bought another LP from a charity shop in Boston. Why do so many Bostonians dispose of their old jazz albums? I rarely find them elsewhere, but I can usually find something worth buying in the Market Place. This one was by someone I think I’ve mentioned before – Wild Bill Davison. Or was that Will Bill Davis? I always confuse the two.

The line-up is like a who’s who of British Jazz. The American cornet player is backed by Freddy Randall (t) George Chisholm (tb) Bruce Turner (cl/as) Lennie Felix (p) Dave Markee (b) Tony Allen (d) and Ronnie Gleaves on vibraphone. Annoyingly, the recording date is omitted, but the World Record Club issued the album in 1966 and a quick Google revealed the recording to have been made in February 1965, during Davison’s tour of England. The music is good old British trad, rhythmic and joyful and a cut above what you’ll hear in the local pub on a Sunday lunch time. And perhaps a little uninspiring.

What has this to with frogs and serendipity? A very good question.

serendipity in saltfleetby

If I’ve said this before, I make no apology for repeating it. The most uplifting discoveries are those which are unexpected. Guide books tell us what we should see, but so much more pleasure is gained when we stumble over something omitted from the pages.


Saltfleetby has just such serendipity. A mile from the enigmatically named “Prussian Queen” pub, a wooden finger-post points cryptically up a sombre green lane towards “The Stump ¼ mile.” The sign seemed to us an imperative, so we dutifully followed the grassy and rutted track.

After a short distance, the path suddenly opened onto a large enclosure in a sun-mottled glade. Passing through a wooden gate, we arrived in an old graveyard, once attached to a church. In the middle of the hallowed patch, a stumpy stone tower leaned at a crazy angle as if disturbed in the act of settling down to rest. This, we learned, is the last remnant of the original St Peter’s church of Saltfleetby.

The relic stands in a shaded corner of the Lincolnshire northern flatlands and is reached by crossing a short wooden bridge over a shallow ditch. A narrow, almost deserted, country lane snakes quietly by. The tower’s large stones are weathered and eroded. The doors are sealed. One corner has sunk into the soft sub-soils of the farmland on which it was built.

At first sight, the scene could be one of abandonment to the powerful elements of nature. The cemetery surrounding the tower is rustic and uncultivated. No attempt is made to groom verges or walkways. Instead, the woods’ claim is staked and granted; the ground could have been a forest floor. Tombstones lay where they fell. Yet this is not a forsaken burial ground.

Far from it – the cemetery has tended gravestones, old and new. Some are eroded and scarcely legible now, but a few gleam in dark marble and stand testament to recent interments. The old graveyard is still very much in use. And then we found the stone plaque hoisted high onto the tower’s time-darkened wall. The old St Peter’s Church has friends.

To be precise, The Friends of Friendless Churches has adopted the tower. Apparently, the organisation accepts responsibility for some 40 disused churches throughout England and Wales. Essential maintenance is carried out to ensure that the old church continues to be accessible to the public, even if services are no longer held within the precincts.

St Peter’s Church at Saltfleetby started to subside sometime between the 14th century and 1875. A faculty was granted to allow the church to be demolished, the stones subsequently being removed to a nearby field known as Willoughby’s Close, and the new (and existing) St Peter’s Church was built from salvaged materials. The tower was to serve as a cemetery chapel until such time as “funds were available” for it to be demolished. Fortunately for the curious visitor, the money was never found. The tower remains as a monument to philanthropy.

In 1976, the decrepit tower was taken into the avuncular custodianship of the evocatively named organisation – The Friends of Friendless Churches. And so it remains - a sequestered fastness hidden away and available to be seen only by those willing to see. I’m not into contemplation, but if I were, here is where I could do it very effectively: TF 43592 89941.

you must have been a beautiful baby

Early in 1947, a grumpy baby was born – me. Around the same time, another few million babies came into the world. We were what became prosaically known as “The Baby Boom.” This bulge in normal demographic patterns was a result of hundreds of thousands of servicemen being demobbed after the war. They arrived home with more on their mind than finding jobs and decent housing. They wanted to celebrate in time-honoured ways and prophylactics were probably on ration at the time. As a result, midwives had the busiest couple of years of their careers.



The baby boom was a well-known phenomenon. My first words were “I’m a baby boomer.” At school we were taught the implications of the term as a form of sex education (or at least that’s all we received in those days). Politicians of the 50s and 60s would stick their thumbs into grey waistcoat pockets and give lengthy orations about the future perils of demographic changes, although I’m not sure we’d then yet become demographs. In short, everybody, from infants to dowager aunts, knew about the baby boom. We baby boomers all understood about shifts in age to population distribution ratios. I was expecting the country to be mainly populated by elderly people by time 2010 arrives.


So why didn’t the Office of National Statistics know about it? The statisticians there have pointed an accusing finger and reprimanded me for deigning to live so long. The demographic curve is weighted heavily in favour of the elderly – we far outweigh youth. Economists and sociologists are suddenly worried. The impression I get is that these young academicians producing these scary reports have been taken by surprise, along with our politicians. Why didn’t they ask me? I’d have told them for a damned slight less than one Network Rail manager’s bonus.


Oddly, whereas the population is ageing, the very ethos of our culture is becoming increasingly youth focussed. For example, my life is blighted by incessant drum and bass powered at me from trillion-watt speakers in H-reg Astras with wound-down windows and primary-school kids at the driving wheel. Surely, if we baby-boom demographs are in the ascendency, we should be hearing Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, the Rolling Stones and Zoot Money floating in the summer air and not just a vibrating, chest-curdling bass string?


It’s not solely that I’m now an old grumpy man. I realise I’m just an awkward statistic, an embarrassment, a non-economically-active-unit, a state liability, number 3,000,001. And I know that subsequent baby booms have probably subverted my promised status. But occasionally I’d like to be treated like an adult with a brain. I want to say “I’m in the room, you know” when they talk about me. I don’t want to be SAGA patronised; I simply want non-political proportional representation. I too was once the future of this nation. Yep – it’s all my fault.


For a while, I did consider forming an activist direct-action apolitical association to promote the interests of the elderly. I even had a name for it – the Ancients Strike Back Organisation (ASBO for short). But when I thought about it, I couldn’t face the idea of spending my evenings in meetings with people like me.


So I’ll do what’s expected. I’ll leave our streets and popular culture to youth, close my windows, turn up the volume and immerse myself in some Jelly Roll Morton, Wynton Marsalis and a bottle or two of Montana Reserve Sauvignon Blanc.

a string of pearls

In desperation to avoid encounters with the World Cup, I turned to the internet. By accident, I find I’ve invented a new game. I call it the “Lester Young” for want of a more apposite title. Better suggestions will be welcomed.



7digital is a legal music download website. I pay about £7.99 for a typical album and can then listen to it for perpetuity on my MP3. I visit frequently, not necessarily to buy but to listen to the snatches of jazz they allow me to preview free before I commit to actually giving them my credit card details.


I search on a musician and am then presented with a list of albums by that artiste. Beneath the list is the inevitable beckoning finger – a section headed “Like this? Try these downloads?” And on the screen appears a box containing recommended listening which I could enjoy having declared an interest in the original artist. Click on one of them, and the process is repeated – that musician’s albums are listed and beneath is another box recommending similar performers. And so it goes on – ad infinitum if I had the patience and the download bandwidth. It’s a progression, albeit not always logical.


The game I devised is simple. The objective is to enter the name of a recording artist and then repeatedly click on the recommended others until the name of my original choice appears under the heading of “try this.” I am debarred from clicking on the same artist twice. Although I invented the game, I’m still a novice. But here’s my first attempt, starting (and finishing) with my favourite tenor saxophonist.


Lester Young – Al Cohn – Don Pullen – Cecil Taylor – Thelonious Monk – Ornette Coleman – Sun Ra – Randy Weston – Gerry Mulligan – Chico Hamilton – Charles Lloyd – Dave Holland – Chick Corea – Art Tatum – Teddy Wilson – Count Basie – Duke Ellington – Charles Mingus – Pepper Adams – Elvin Jones – Thad Jones – Art Blakey – Fletcher Henderson – Benny Carter – Clifford Brown – Roy Eldridge – Henry ‘Red’ Allen – Mugsy Spanier – Eddie Condon – Bunny Berigan – Charlie Barnet – Jimmy Lunceford – Don Redman – Bob Crosby – Glen Gray – Artie Shaw – Woody Herman – Paul Whiteman – Chick Webb – Ella Fitzgerald – Tommy Flanagan – Billy Taylor – Ahmad Jamal – McCoy Tyner – Bill Evans – Lennie Tristano – Roy Edridge (oh bugger – I’m disqualified for repetition but it’s my game so I’ll finish anyway) – Ruby Braff – Chet Baker – Freddie Hubbard – Hank Mobley – Cannonball Adderley – Lester Young. PHEW.


The progression is curiously logical, albeit sometimes in a bizarre sort of way: Art Blakey to Fletcher Henderson, for example, and I’m not sure about Woody Herman and Paul Whiteman. But I can trace the links for most of them. I wonder if the rules should limit the moves to say twenty. I’m pretty confident I could have returned to Pres with a little more judicious thought and application. And perhaps I could vary the game by trying to discover the most disjointed and incongruous sequence, maybe something like Louis Armstrong – John Coltrane – Monty Sunshine – Howling Wolf – Madonna – The Bachelors – LPO – Louis Armstrong. This is a sort of Mornington Crescent with music.


I think I must be bored.

les oinions

I’ve just returned from a vacation motor-homing in France. I’d like to say that I’ve been chasing the shadows of legends such as Django Reinhardt and Sidney Bechet, but the fact is that the jazz scene in Brittany seems to be as lively as the jazz scene here. The amorphous yet ubiquitous trio is advertised in places and I did see that Maceo Parker is appearing somewhere on a Breton stage, but generally April is obviously not a good month for the jazz band in France.

We did have a brighter musical interlude in a pub in St. Malo. Playing in the background was a compilation including a couple of jazz numbers. The Visigoth behind the bar turned out to be a classically trained singer (at the Conservatoire in Paris, no less). And, as if to prove the point about the eclecticism of world music today, he later played one of his favourite albums, a sort of blend of Irish jigs and traditional Breton improvisations on Vivaldi. The band turned out to be Planxty.

Looking back over the three weeks, a few impressions now spring to mind. Pure white aubergines; Cedric the omnipresent herring gull watching us warily (we obviously don’t have guardian angels; we have guardian seagulls); bundles of bedding airing on high window sills; toilets without seats or loo paper; efficaciously stinky cheese; crepes; the sudden disappearance of fresh moules frites after the 30th April; immaculately pollarded trees; gaily painted shutters on quaint old houses; freedom from “no camping” signs; GR34; Rodin and Max Jacob; and coruscating oceans of blue coastline, craggy and fractured, hazy and breezily warm.

Before we went, somebody told me that Bretons hate the English. That is a canard of monstrous depth. I write ‘canard’ in the English meaning of a false rumour, not the French which means ‘a duck’. Wherever we went, we were met with friendship and good humour from interesting people. We saw vivid light in French eyes which seems to have been extinguished in those of the English. And my schoolboy French got me through – “Je m’appelle Pooter Dodman. Comment-allez-vous?”

For our next visit, I’m determined to learn the language. I have the first two Michel Thomas CDs and I’ve made a start on translating the poetry of Jacques Prevert. I have to run before I can walk because it’s all downhill from here. At my age, I don’t have the time to amble any more.

So for now I’ll stop rambling. But for pedants world-wide, I know many of the words I use above demand accents over some letters, but I don’t know how to find the right keys on my QWERTY system.

sent for you yesterday

Earlier this week I put in an E-bay bid for an elderly Bush record player capable of playing 78rpm records at roughly the correct speed. It was never going to be an exquisite piece of furniture. But it had a multiple changing arm and classic early 1960’s design in ‘vintage’ plastic and Formica. It would be a perfect fit in the nascent music room-cum-workshop-cum-model trainset yard-cum-craft workshop-cum shed.


Mine was the sole bid. I opened with a fair margin above the starting price and kept a close watch on proceedings. Then, at the critical moment, I had a lapse of memory and discovered too late that another auctionee had leapt in at the last minute and trounced me by 50p. I lost my treasure to somebody named “Bidder 2.”


This means I still have a few shellac 78rpm disks waiting to be played for the first time. Two actually: a George Webb rendition of “South” and a Mugsy Spanier version of “Dipper Mouth Blues” the latter of which is disconcertingly described as a fox trot. Both are protected from 21st century dust by their original sleeves of thin card, printed with the retailers’ names. George Webb was first sold by C.H. Irwin of 78 Bedford Street, North Shields – slogan: ‘Try Irwin’s First!’ Mugsy Spanier’s sleeve advertises Sydney Scarborough of Under the City Hall, Hull – slogan: ‘Let us play them over for you!’ They knew how to use a good exclamation mark in those days, even if the advertising messages were a little less than zippy.


I wonder if anyone remembers C. H. Irwin of North Shields. Is it possible Sid Scarborough is still buried under the City Hall at Hull? Did he get to know Philip Larkin? So many questions; so few answers!


A German radiogram has come up for auction. It has 1957 art-deco renaissance blue period shiny avant garde blackness about it. I rather like it. I’ve come to the conclusion that to heighten the pleasure of our listening experience we should listen to recordings on equipment manufactured at the same time as the recording was made. Such congruence is the only way to achieve true and faithful euphony. Mrs Dodman said a rude word and tucked herself into her MP3 player for the night.


We’re refurbishing the old workshop. Progress could move with a little more alacrity if only the plasterer and electrician would actually do as they say they will. In Norfolk we discovered that the locals taught Spaniards the meaning of manana. But they are mere whippersnappers compared with Lincolnshire trades’ people. Here the words “I’ll give you a call with a starting date” should be interpreted with a timescale measured in years rather than days. If I press for something a little more specific, he’ll stroke his chin and say “I’ll have to get back to you on that.” But he won’t! See – I know how to use an exclamation mark as well. I didn’t before we moved to Lincolnshire. The old workshop, by the way, is where the record player will go, in case you wondered about the relevance.