Mad with us

Madness, of course, are well on their way to becoming British National Treasures, ever since they sang ‘Our House’ from the roof of Buck House to mark the Queen’s Jubilee last summer. Their outdoor performance as part of the BBC’s ‘Goodbye to Television Centre‘ programming, outdoors in sleet and near-freezing temperatures, will only speed this process. (Television Centre, where I worked briefly in the ’80s, has been sold off as the BBC moves much of its programme production to Salford in the north of England).

I like Madness, without being a huge fan, but there is something quintessentially British about them - by which I mean modern British, with their social roots in inner-city multi-cultural London and their musical roots in ska. And outdoors, on Friday night, in the blustery wet cold, they worked their socks off, gave the well-wrapped audience a thoroughly good time, paid dues (to the dying Wilko Johnson, who joined them on stage), and made this member of the television audience wish I had been out there in the cold on the forecourt of Television Centre.

Fortunately, there is already a whole load of clips on YouTube, which the BBC, also a national treasure, is not rushing to block. Just saying.

The story of the blues

You’ve got to love Jack White. He’s going through with his plan – definitely file under “labour of love” – to release on vinyl through his Third Man label the records by Charley Patten, the Mississippi Sheiks, and Blind Willie McTell on the blues label Document Records. He expects to lose money on it, but he doesn’t care. In a long feature in the Guardian that might as well be a hymn of praise to the early bluesmen, he says:

“Some people might go out and buy a Ferrari or something, but I would rather spend my time and energy in releasing these records. If only a thousand people get something out of them, it’s still something that makes me and the people here feel excited, because they know the power of this music.”

In the article, he gives the journalist, Dave Simpson, his potted history of how these early recordings emerged from a clutch of different trends (and as a futurist, I like these kinds of trends stories too):

White is still in awe of the process by which events came together in America’s deep south to create the blues. There was the Great Depression, the technology of recording music and the fact that furniture makers had started making record players, and needed something people could play on them. So they started recording the poor black singer-guitarists that were emerging in the Mississippi Delta. “Something magical just occurred to create a moment in history that changed the world.”

White, though, is more interested in the cultural history – he argues that in that moment of recorded history, for the first time, the songs that individuals had written from their own experience were recorded and therefore available to people outside of their immediate world. It’s not quite right – for example the early recorded material of some of the English music hall performers was similarly personal and rooted – but it still represents an interesting tradition, and also a different perspective on the way in which blues and rock music, obviously deeply rooted in the idea that we share personal stories about the world, has changed our cultural ways of telling.

And I also liked his rationale for going back to these first recordings:

“It’s important to go back and cleanse your palate. If you like punk rock now, there were people who did this with way more things against them than a suburban kid who goes to a guitar shop or someone buys him one and he starts singing punk songs. There’s beauty in that, too, but to be black and Southern in 1920 and have no rights … that exemplifies struggle.”

Cleansing your palate. In our too-knowing post post-modern era, when (as Umberto Eco said) media has genealogy but no memory it’s important to strip away the layers of interpretation and irony and try to listen as if for the first time.

The picture at the top of this post is the cover of the first of Third Man’s Charley Patten releases, and is used with thanks.

 

Edited with BlogPad Pro

Just seventeen (you know what I mean)

If I were ever on one of those programmes where you have to choose a single Beatles song, mine would be I Saw Her Standing There, the first song on their first LP, Please Please Me, recorded fifty years ago this week. For me the song is both urgent and suggestive, the moment English rock ‘n’ roll stopped talking with an American accent and acquired its own voice. Lennon recalled having little to do with it, but McCartney’s version, later, was that he started it and he and Lennon finished writing it together one afternoon in the front parlour in McCartney’s house. A collaboration seems more likely. If the rule of thumb on Beatles’ songs is (I’m indebted to my brother for this) that McCartney songs go up and down and Lennon songs go along, I Saw Her Standing There definitely goes along.

The shift from American to English can be seen in a change Lennon made to McCartney’s original opening lines. McCartney’s version was, “She was just seventeen/Never been a beauty queen”. Lennon changed it to the more provocative, “She was just seventeen/You know what I mean.” The new line is at once both direct and indirect. Direct: English doesn’t get much more direct than five one-syllable words. Indirect: the listener is drawn complicitly into the world of the the singer. They have to know the code.

In his companion to the Beatles’s songs, Revolution in the Head, the late Ian MacDonald explains how the song’s lyric signalled a cultural shift in gear.

“[I]t called the bluff of the chintz-merchants of Denmark Street with their moody misunderstood ‘Johnnies’ and adoring ‘angels’ of sweet sixteen (the legal age of consent). By contrast The Beatles’ heroine was seventeen, a deliberate upping of the ante which, aided by Lennon’s innuendo in the second line, suggested something rather more exciting than merely holding hands. But the clincher for the teenage audience was the song’s straight-from-the-shoulder vernacular. Its hero’s heart didn’t ‘sing’ or ‘take wing’ when he beheld his lady love; this guy’s heart ‘went boom’ when he ‘crossed the room’ – a directness of metaphor and movement.”

The picture at the top is from the website Beatles Autographs, and is used with thanks.

Double bass

I went to see the David Murray Big Band and the Jay Phelps Quartet on the last night of the London Jazz Festival, another reminder, as if one were needed, of how accomplished jazz players are. In among the rest of it there were a few fine bass solos. By chance I’d seen on the Tube the previous day – for the first time – John Fuller’s fine poem about double bass players, capturing the paradox of the bass, the essential awkwardness of the playing and the grace of the sound.

Concerto for Double Bass
He is a drunk leaning companionably
Around a lamp post or doing up
With intermittent concentration
Another drunk’s coat.

He is a polite but devoted Valentino,
Cheek to cheek, forgetting the next step.
He is feeling the pulse of the fat lady
Or cutting her in half.

But close your eyes and it is sunset
At the edge of the world. It is the language
Of dolphins, the growth of tree-roots,
The heart-beat slowing down.

(John Fuller)

The painting at the top of the post is ‘Bass Blues’ by Ann laForge, and is used with thanks. It, and other jazz-themed paintings can be found at her website. Thanks to Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog for the tip.

Songs from the north-east

I just came across an old notebook with a playlist in it, left over from a trip a few years ago to Lindisfarne, off the north-east coast of England. It seems a shame to waste it. My family comes from the region, so I have a particular interest; here’s my top eight records, in no particular order, from the north-east.

Alex Glasgow: Vol 3/Now and Then. Perhaps more than any other single individual responsible for popularising the north-east’s repertoire – both the folk songs and the 19th century broadsheet songs – during the folk revival of the ’80s and the ’70s, while also adding some classics of his own, as in his work with Alan Ayckbourn, which resulted in songs such as Close the Coalhouse Door and When It’s Ours. Vol 1 & 2, also available on a single CD, with far more of his own songs on it, is also worth a listen.

Thomas Allen and Sheila Armstrong, Songs of Northumbria. The two classically trained singers have collaborated on a couple of records of Northumrian songs, accompanied by orchestra and choir. I’ve chosen Volume II because it has Lambton Worm on it, a song with a particular family meaning for me, which was, incidentally, once utterly murdered in a version by Brian Ferry.

Kathryn Tickell, Back to the Hills. I first learned of the Northumbrian bagpipes tradition through Kathryn Tickell. This record is recorded in modest locations around the region with the traditional fiddle player Willie Taylor.

Northern Lights, Airplay. Folk and jazz collaborations are often unfortunate. This one, commissioned by the Sage Centre in Gateshead, with the concertina and Northumbrian pipe player Alistair Anderson and the jazz trombonist Annie Whitehead, and an accompanying band, is not.

The Animals: As, Bs, and EPs. Newcastle’s contribution to the ’60s R&B boom. The animosity between the band members seemed to force its way into their performances, which was probably a good rather than a bad thing. And I liked the way they adapted the blues songs they were covering to match the local geography: Gonna Send You Back to Walker, for example, started life in the US as Gonna Send You Back to Georgia, but loses nothing (even gains something?) in the translation. When they sing We Gotta Get Out of This Place you get the impression they mean it.

Rachel Unthank and the Winterset, The Bairns. The north-eastern tradition keeps renewing itself, as the Unthanks recent run of fine records demonstrates. The Bairns is a fine collection of songs which captures some of the distance and desolation of the region.  Their third, Here’s The Tender Coming, after they changed name (to The Unthanks) and lineup, which came out after this playlist, is even better. The Unthanks are currently one of the most interesting and inventive folk groups in Britain.

Field Music, Tones of Town. Spiky but subtle Sunderland post-punk. (Their latest record, Plumb, has been nominated for the Mercury Prize this year).

Alistair Anderson, Islands. The only musician who has squeezed in twice. partly because this record has on it a suite inspired by the Farne Islands, south of Lindisfarne, which are home to thousands of seals.

There’s others of course. I’m a fan of Republica’s song Ready To Go, which Sunderland used in the Peter Reid years as a theme song when the players came onto the pitch. I could be persuaded that Kathryn Tickell’s earliest records sound fresher. And some post-punk fans would press the claims of The Futureheads over Field Music. Certainly their strangely compelling a capella record Rant would probably have forced its way on if I’d done this playlist last week.

The photograph of Lindisfarne is a Creative Commons image from Wikimedia. 

Seeing Carmel

The singer Carmel was big in the mid-to-late ’80s, and although I jumped at the chance to see her again this week in London on a mini-tour that also took in Stockton-on-Tees and her home town of Manchester, I was worried that I might be disappointed, that her voice might not have held up. I shouldn’t have been; as soon as she launched into her first song, I could hear that her tone and control were as fine as ever.

As she sang ‘Jazz Robin‘, a mix of scat and jazz, I couldn’t help think that there weren’t many singers in Britain who could achieve the same vocal effect. Looking back, she should have been bigger than she was; British promoters (and record shops) found her mixture of pop, soul, blues and jazz hard to categorise. She was bigger in Europe, where there is a tradition of the chansonnier. Perhaps shrewdly, her last record was a collection of Piaf songs.

At the Islington Assembly Hall on Wednesday, accompanied by a versatile and sharp young band, she performed songs from across her catalogue, rolling back the years. There was venom in ‘I’m Over You‘ and soul in ‘Bad Day‘. Her version of the much covered ‘It’s All in the Game‘ deserves to become a landmark. At times, at risk of seeming overblown, some of her phrasing reminded me of Dusty. Let’s hope that someone recorded it, or one of the other shows.

The Drumfire label has reissued her first six records with new photographs and liner notes, along with the obligatory (and welcome) bonus tracks. We should cherish singers with Carmel’s voice and talent. In her case there is still time.

Goodbye Pork Pie Hat

Charles Mingus’ great musical eulogy for the saxophonist Lester Young shuffled across my iPod on my way to work this week. Although it is an elegy, it is a compelling piece of music, and has become something of a standard, covered by many musicians. Mingus, of course, is one of the towering figures of post-war jazz, and Mingus Ah Um, the record which featured Goodbye Pork Pie Hat was released in jazz’s ‘golden year’ of 1959.

I heard Pentangle’s version of the tune as a teenager before I really knew who Mingus was (they also did a fine cover of Mingus’ Haitian Fight Song) though I did know the name from the Merseybeat poet Adrian Henri. So I was primed, at least, when I saw a “cut out” copy of Mingus Ah Um going for a song in a discount jazz shop in Cambridge.

Anyway, the Pentangle version was built around a duet between their guitarists, John Renbourne and Bert Jansch, which they used to perform together before joining Pentangle:

A few years after that I came across what seemed an unlikely cover by Jeff Beck (on his record Wired). It seemed unlikely since Beck had only just finished with the hard rock power trio Beck, Bogert and Appice (think Cream: no, think Mountain) but again, although he plays it very differently from Jansch and Renbourn he brings something to the song (you’ll be redirected to youtube to watch this for copyright reasons):

And then there is Joni Mitchell. She wrote some plangent lyrics for a version of the song that was included on her record Mingus, which Mingus himself collaborated on. The record has a bizarre moment in which Mitchell and her band sing the jazz musician ‘happy birthday’ but can’t remember how old he is. The record is also blessed with the sublime playing of Mitchell’s sometime bass player Jaco Pastorius. Unfortunately there are no copies of this on youtube, but here’s the American singer, Lenora Helm, singing Joni’s words to Mingus’ tune:

The song of John Ball

I’ve been listening to Chris Wood’s version on his Trespassers CD of the song ‘John Ball’, written in 1981 by Sydney Carter (who also wrote ‘The Lord of the Dance’) to mark the 600th anniversary of the Peasants’ Revolt in England. Ball was a radical Lollard priest who had been expelled from the priesthood and jailed for asking questions about equality in the eyes of God, and he gave the sermon to the peasant army as it was camped on Blackheath, overlooking the City of London.

His sermon started with these words:

“When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”

This sentiment would have chilled the beneficiaries of England’s hierarchical and feudal society. After the revolt had been put down – its leader, Wat Tyler, tricked into negotiations – Ball was arrested and hanged, drawn and quartered as a traitor.

But the phrase, and the radical idea embedded within it, has echoed down the centuries, to the Diggers, to Tom Paine, to the Chartists, to William Morris, even, it seems, to the Occupy Movement. We still remember him, more than 600 years on, and have long forgotten those who had him killed.

The picture at the top shows John Ball addressing the rebel Peasants on Blackheath. It is published by Wikimedia Commons and is used here with thanks.

Jazz bagpipes

One of the most remarkable jazz duets I’ve ever heard is between the saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the jazz bagpipes player Rufus Harley, playing a 14-minute version of Swing Low Sweet Chariot. I first came across it years ago on an LP called The Cutting Edge, recorded live at Montreux, which I’d bought as a heavily discounted ‘cut out‘. (in the days of vinyl records and cardboard sleeves, distributors would make a physical cut to the sleeves of their deleted records to make sure that shops couldn’t pass them off as full price records).

I was astonished: I’d spent much of my childhood in Scotland, which has too high a population of bagpipes players for its own good, and where the instrument is associated mostly with skirls and dirges. Hearing Rufus Harley swing low on the bagpipes was a revelation to me.

It seems that The Cutting Edge has turned into a modest classic in the meantime; it’s one of those CDs that seems to stay in print, albeit at a budget price. But I hadn’t realised until recently, when I saw it on BBC4′s ‘lost’ film of Rollins at Ronnie Scott’s Club in 1974, that there was also footage of Rollins and Harley playing Swing Low Sweet Chariot. (And, of course, there’s a version to be found on YouTube, seen at the top of this post).

Everyone knows about Sonny Rollins; he is a colossus of the saxophone, after all. But I had to look up Rufus Harley, who appears in the Ronnie Scott’s film resplendent in a yellow tartan. He was of African and Cherokee descent, brought up in Philadelphia, and learnt trumpet and saxophone as a teenager. He became interested in the bagpipes after seeing the Scots regiment Black Watch playing them at John Kennedy’s funeral (Harley was 27 at the time), and had to travel to New York to find a second hand set, there being none in Philly. He was the first person to adapt the instrument to the rhythms of jazz.

The yellow kilt in the film – a MacLeod tartan – was given to him by a Scots family after they had seen him play on television (every bagpiper needs a tartan, right?). But he played cultural games the other way around. Bagpipes are hugely noisy, and as one profile explains:

“I started playing the pipes, and the neighbor would call the cops on me,” Harley recalled. “So I see the cops coming, and I stop blowing the pipes.

“The cops would come to the door and say, ‘I’m sorry, but we have a complaint that there’s bagpipes being played here.’

“Then I tell the cops, ‘Do I look like I’m Irish or Scottish to you?’

“I got away with it for a long time.”

One of jazz’s originals.

Heading out to wonderful

One of my unexpected pleasures this week was was catching up with Still Bill, a documentary about the singer Bill Withers which was released in 2009 shown on BBC4 a few weeks ago. When I first heard Withers’ songs, I labelled him as a bit of an MOR cocktail singer (a bit like Johnny Mathis, say) and it took a friend and colleague who knew his black music, Paul McCrea, to put me right on that. All the same, I had no great expectations of the documentary, beyond a mild surprise that it ran to 75 minutes, and when I started watching it I wasn’t even sure if he was still alive. (If you’re still not sure who I’m talking about, you’ll know his songs – ‘Lean On Me‘, ‘Use Me‘, ‘Grandma’s Hands‘ (covered by Gil Scott-Heron), ‘Lovely Day‘, ‘Just The Two Of Us‘, ‘Ain’t No Sunshine‘.)

It turns out that he is still alive – he turned 70 while the film was being made – and he last recorded in 1985, because he decided he had had enough enough of the music business and wanted to be a father to his young family.

The picture the film painted of Withers, and the reason it was so memorable that I ended up watching it twice (I had’t been very attentive the first time), was of a man who was both grounded and self-reflective, two qualities that obviously reinforce each other. He didn’t start in the music business until he was 32, after serving in the Navy and working in California fitting toilets into 747s, and although this late success could have made him desperate for success, it seemed instead to have given him the confidence to be his own person, respectful of the people he had worked with before he was famous. He’s been married to his wife, Marcia, for 35 years.

The film takes him back to Slap Fork, West Virginia, where he grew up in a coal camp (‘Grandma’s Hands’ is autobiographical), and follows him to a tribute concert to raise money for an American foundation which supports stammerers – a condition Withers suffered from as a child. He was visibly affected when he went to meet some of the kids at the foundation afterwards, as meeting them clearly dragged him back into a childhood that wasn’t entirely happy. But it’s built about a long interview, in which he tells his story. He clearly has little time for the music industry (early on in the film he recounts scathingly an A&R man coming up with the idea that he should cover ‘In The Ghetto’), and talks about the way in which the music industry thinks in formulas which he was lucky to escape precisely because he was a late starter.

But what comes through is a deep sense of humanity and respect for people who haven’t had his good fortune. Half way through, he talks about some advice he gives to his (now adult) kids:

‘One of the things I also tell my kids is that it’s OK to head out for Wonderful, but on your way to Wonderful, you’re going to have to pass through Alright, and when you get to Alright, take a good look around and get used to it, because that may be as far as you’re going to go.’