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.’

I.M. Philip Madoc

A few years ago I saw the Welsh actor Philip Madoc, who has died this week, performing Under Milk Wood with Stan Tracey’s quartet at the Brecon Jazz Festival. Tracey’s composition – now more than 40 years old – is one of the outstanding moments of British jazz; Tracey seems to be tuned in to both the tone and story of Dylan Thomas’ play. The performance at Brecon was simple enough: Madoc read some extracts from the play in between (sometimes during) the music, bringing both alive with his sonorous Welsh voice and underlining the connections between play and music. I thought the record of the performance had been deleted, but it seems I was wrong. It is an interesting version of Tracey’s Under Milk Wood Suite and a fitting memorial to Philip Madoc.

The sleeve of the recording of the collaboration between Stan Tracey and Philip Madoc is from Trio Records, and is used with thanks.

Miles and Robert

Listening to Miles Davis’ record Miles Ahead the other day, I realised with a bit of a start that Robert Wyatt had lifted the opening phrase of ‘The Maids of Cadiz’ for his song ‘Alliance’, on his 1980s record Old Rottenhat. (The Maids of Cadiz is embedded at the top of the post; Alliance can be heard here.)

They’re very different records, of course: Wyatt made Old Rottenhat in the early ’80s in anger about the Thatcherite government and its works, among other things, before moving to Spain for a period of time, although it’s not an angry sounding record. (Actually, it’s pretty much him and a synthesiser, which makes for a very distinctive sound). ‘Alliance’ is a song to the politicians who had left the Labour Party to set up the more centrist Social Democratic Party:

There is a kind of compromise you are master of
Your endless gentle nudging left us polarised
You’re proud of being middle class (meaning upper class)
You say you’re self sufficient (but you don’t dig your own coal)
I think that what you’re frightened of more than anything
is knowing you need workers more than they need you
“A herd of independent minds” Chomsky got it right
Joggling into battle waving old school ties

Of course, he was wrong about ‘knowing you need workers, more than they need you’ – globalisation put paid to that – but that’s a story for another day and probably a different blog.

What struck me here was that musicians and their publishers have ended up in court over far less, but that Wyatt was in a long tradition – going back at least to Bach and Shakespeare – of borrowing something old to start something new. And also that if Miles knew, he’d just smile – or perhaps throw in a quote from ‘Alliance’ the next time he played ‘The Maids of Cadiz’.

Dancing Gershwin

One of the first pleasures of Strictly Gershwin at the Coliseum (it was someone’s birthday treat) was seeing – as the curtain rose – that the orchestra has been lifted out the pit and placed across the back of the stage. It was, immediately, a reminder of the big bands of the Jazz Age, of which Gershwin was unaguably the greatest composer.

Do ballet and jazz mix? The answer is: mostly. Ballet and show dancing are very different, as Darcy Bussell was reminded when she set out recently to recreate some of the great dances of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. The first is straight limbs and square ends, the second is more hips and bends. The dancer’s centre of gravity is in a different place.

The ballet sequences which worked best were the ones which allowed ballet to do what it does best – a a visual and physical interpretation of a piece of music. An American in Paris was all colour and movement, a tale of love found, lost and found again. Rhapsody in Blue was more stylised, more formal (as seen in the photograph at the top of this post), but also added a dimension to the music. A moment’s digression here: Gershwin kept procrastinating over writing the piece, until the bandleader Paul Whiteman, for whom it was being written, simply announced the concert at which it would premiere, forcing Gershwin to get on and finish it.

Some of the songs didn’t respond so well to treatment. The story of The Man I Love or Someone To Watch Over Me is all in the lyric, so dancing it as well added little. On the other hand, the more open lyric of Summertime made for a fine interpretation.

The company was augmented by a couple of champion ballroom dancers, whose tango, improbably to It Ain’t Necessarily So, was one of the highlights of the show. But the warmest applause was for the tap dancers. I don’t know if it’s because tap dancing came of age at the same time as jazz, and remains one of America’s great contributions to dance, but when they were on the energy levels in the theatre increased decisively.

But back to the orchestra. There’s nothing quite like a 30-piece big band playing jazz standards, and the programme reveals that – as with the dancers – the ENO orchestra was augmented by jazz specialists, who led each of the horn sections. You could hear it as they traded dirty notes in some of the numbers, which reminded me of lines from Carl Sandburg‘s fine poem, Jazz Fantasia:

Moan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome treetops,
moan soft like you wanted somebody terrible, cry like a
racing car slipping away from a motorcycle cop, bang-bang!
you jazzmen…

Kudos, by the way, to the ENO Box Office. There was a problem with my tickets, which may have been my fault, and they swapped them in an instant for tickets elsewhere which had just as good a view, and without any of the eye-rolling or customer blaming you sometimes get in such circumstances.

The picture at the top comes via Georgina Butler’s blog, and is used with thanks.

Short ride, fast machine

John Adams’ insistent piece ‘A Short Ride in  a Fast Machine’ popped up on my Shuffle this week, which reminded me of its fated history with the Last Night of the BBC’s Proms. ‘A Short Ride’ is a little over four minutes long, driven along at pace for most of that time by an urgent percussion which cuts through the orchestra.

It’s been scheduled twice for the Last Night of the Proms, and pulled each time. On the first occasion Diana died in a car crash just before the concert; on the second, the planes went in to the Twin Towers. The Proms planners held their nerve and it has been featured twice since on concerts for a younger audience, the Blue Peter Prom in 2004 and the Dr Who prom in 2010. But will  Fast Ride In A Short Machine ever be scheduled again for The Proms’ last night? Depends on how superstitious you are.

Getting loaded

I was prompted by an interview with Bobby Gillespie to dig out a copy of Screamadelica, a record I’ve always liked. Listening to it again after a while I was struck by – and maybe this is obvious – the extent to which it sounds like  mid-period Rolling Stones reinvented through a haze of ecstasy. (I’m talking Exile on Main Street-era Stones here; the comparison is not a dismissive one). Certainly tracks like ‘Movin’ On Up or Loaded or Damaged could have been covered by the Stones before they descended into caricature, and without seeming out of place.

Primal Scream, of course, have marked the 20th anniversary of Screamadelica by reforming and playing the album in concert. Personally, I usually find this depressing: in the words of the Irish poet Paul Muldoon in Hay,

All great artists are their own greatest threat

As when they aim an industrial laser

At themselves and cut themselves back to the root

But I’m going to argue with myself here and cut Primal Scream a little slack. Perhaps playing concert versions of Screamadelica is just a way of acknowledging that they understand, in their 40s, that for a moment back then they were touched by greatness.

The picture at the top of the post is from the Bagging Area blog, and is used with thanks.

Found: harmonium

I stumbled across my copy of Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s Broadcasting From Home this morning, so naturally put it on. The opening track, ‘Music for a Found Harmonium’, is irrepressible. Every time I hear it, it lifts my spirits.

Rock el Casbah

We were having a discussion about a song to mark the January 25th uprising in Egypt. Rachid Taha’s Arabic cover of The Clash song was my choice.

He’s Algerian, and rather than write a couple of hundred words of cultural commentary I’m going to let one of the comments posted on the video sum it up for me:

Rocking the Casbah from _within_ the Casbah. And in Arabic, too! No wonder the Clash loves him. He’s bringing their song to the people for whom it was written.