Strike up the bandolim

Hamilton de Hollanda (see yesterday's post) is only one of a number of younger Brazilian musicians who have revitalised interest in the bandolim. As you can see from the picture, the main difference between a mandolin and a bandolim is the name and the body shape. Otherwise, both instruments have similar scale lengths, tuning and stringing.

Jacob do Bandolim was probably the first musician to bring the instrument to prominence, and is responsible for one of the most well known and frequently recorded choro tunes, Noites Cariocas (Rio Nights - 'Carioca' is a slang trem for a person from Rio de Janeiro). Here it is played by another superb bandolimist, Armandinho, with the late, great Raphael Rabello on 7 string guitar (another instrument that deserves a posting of its own - watch this space...).

Another young musician working in the choro field is Dudu Maia. His speciality is the 10 string bandolim which as the name implies has an extra course of strings, thus extending the harmonic range. here he is seen in a choro club in Brasilia, playing another Jacob do Bandolim composition, Vibrações (Vibrations). Hamilton de Hollanda, whilst retaining a great love and respect for the older musical forms has, in recent years been taking the bandolim in a more jazz-oriented direction. Here he is with his quintet in 2006. I can't name the tune but I did notice that de Hollanda is also now playing a 10 string instrument.

I have a couple of Déo Rian albums but know very little about him other than the fact that he's about the same age as me, was much influenced by Jacob do Bandolim and is another great player. There are very few YouTube clips of him and most of them have not been uploaded very well, but here is his version of Vibrações. Another player of similar vintage is Joel Nascimento, whose work I first encountered on a double CD devoted to the compositions of Jacob which was released on the Biscoito Fino label in 2003. Unfortunately the quality of the YouTube material is not good - mobile phone videos and TV news clips with the presenter talking over most of the performances, but his recordings are well worth seeking out.

Finally, to bring this particular strand full circle, here Mike Marshall performs in Brazil, with Hamilton de Hollanda, singer Zelia Duncan and an unknamed guitarist. The song is Doce de Côco (Coconut Candy) and is yet another classic composition by Jacob de Bandolim.

I shall be returning to the subject of choro again at some point, but for now I'm off up to London for a few days. My next posting will be a revue of tomorrow night's Maria Rita concert at the Barbican. Maybe I'll see you there...

Mandolin windows

When my brother 'G the D' and his wife returned from a protracted trip to the U.S.A at the beginning of the 80's, he gave me a tape of an album called 'Hot Dawg' by a mandolin player called David Grisman. They had been to see Grisman's group at a concert in California, mainly because Stéphane Grappelli was a featured guest. G the D and I had first come to hear Grappelli through an enthusiasm for Django Rheinhardt's music But this stuff from Grisman was something new. Yes, it had elements of 'Gypsy Jazz' in it, but it also contained a large helping of Bluegrass and more than a hint of modern jazz influences. It was a knock-out mix and I loved it.

Not long after this I opened a specialist guitar shop in partnership with 'Fingers' Bartram, who by now was better known as Richard Bartram and was an accomplished Luthier (see my links). As well as selling instruments and music we decided to keep guitar records, so I set about building a varied stock that featured every possible aspect of guitar playing except the rock side of things (on the grounds that was already covered in depth by every other record shop in the known universe). My thoughts turned to the Grisman album, which had featured a superb acoustic guitar flat-picker by the name of Tony Rice. I soon found other albums by Rice and was led in turn to the world of bluegrass and also to the new acoustic music movement that was getting underway in the States. This clip of Grisman, Rice, fiddle player (and, incidentally, also a great guitarist) Mark O'Connor and bassist Rob Wasserman playing a tune called 'E.M.D.' should give you an idea of the impact that this stuff had on me and why the mandolin was now also engaging my attention. Pretty soon I picked up on Sam Bush - now known as a stalwart Nashville session player but capable of transcending the genres and playing all kinds of music. Here are two clips. The first shows him with another great musical 'genre bender', 5 string banjo player Bela Fleck (I will be coming back to him in a later posting). This is part of an American TV documentary about Fleck from the mid 90's and features one of his original compositions, 'Cheeseballs in Cowtown'! The next shows Bush, splendidly over the top, playing a tune called 'Funk 55' on a 4 string electric mandolin (same tuning but only one course of strings instead of two).

Another stalwart of Grisman's circle of musicians was Mike Marshall, who I have mentioned before as one of my favourite guitarists (see The twang's not the thang). In fact, mandolin is his first instrument. Here he shows off his bluegrass chops with 'Psychograss' at The Old Settler's Music Festival 1n 2007. In recent years and in common with one or two other musicians from the North American acoustic music scene, he has turned his attentions to choro and has recorded with a number of Brazilian musicians. Here we see him with the great bandolim player, Hamilton De Hollanda. They start with a bluegrass classic and segue to a choro favourite.

My next posting will follow the line back into Brazil, but for now we'll conclude with a clip of Mike in France last year, playing Ravel's 'Laidronette Imperatrice des Pagodes' with Nov' Mandolin Sextet . Another classic example of what can happen when the barriers come down and it's all just about the music!

Cavaquinho country

As I wrote in yeterday's posting, the cavaquinho is the Portuguese ancestor of the ukulele, now used widely in Brazil both in samba and in choro music. The first time I became aware of it was on a great Chico Buarque song called 'Vai Passar' that came out in 1984 when Brazil was still in the grip of a military dictatorship. Buarque, like many other MPB artists of the time was an ardent critic of the regime and his lyrics were full of irony and satirical imagery, the understanding of such things not being the strong suit of most military dictators. However, the vast majority of the public new exactly what he was talking about and the song was a massive hit. Here's a translation of some of the lyrics to give you some idea ('Vai Passar'= 'On its way', also sometimes translated as 'It will pass') It starts -

On its way

A samba's coming down the street

All the cobblestones of the old city tonight will be shivering

Remembering that immortal sambas passed by here

That here they bled about our feet, that our ancestors danced here...

and concludes -

...Oh, what a good life, olerê

Oh what a good life, olarâ

The banner of the lunatic assylum

On its way

The superficial jollity of the performance is all that non-Portuguese speakers hear at first, but as soon as one has an idea of the subject matter the whole thing takes on a glorious feeling of potential liberation. and it is that wonderful, driving cavaquinho that kick-starts this song and propels it on its way. Vai passar!

I soon discovered that the cavaquinho was also capable of expressing a great sense of yearning, of heart-felt emotion, a feeling that runs particularly through the musical form known as 'choro' (see yesterday's posting). My first introduction to this was an album called'Desde que o Choro é Choro...' (Since choro was choro - a play on the title of a famous Caetano Veloso song 'Desde que o Samba é Samba) by Henrique Cazes & Família Violão, which came out in 1995 on the Rio de Janeiro based Kuarup label. I could find no performance clip of the group but here is their leader playing his own composition, Study no.1 for Cavaquinho.

I was lucky enough to go to a choro club in Sao Paulo last year. It was an informal meeting of choro enthusiasts who varied in age between about 15 and 75. The common interest is choro music and there was an ever-changing line up of performers, which included at least five cavaquinho players, most of whom also doubled on 'bandolim', which is the Brazilian mandolin and also features heavily in choro music. Alas I have no record of this experience other than my memory of it, but events like this are not at all uncommon all over Brazil. I managed to find this clip of such a gathering on YouTube, which gives you a rough idea of this kind of event, although in the case of the one I attended there was a little less background noise. Here, a bunch of friends are playing for their own amusement in a bar. The tune is 'Apanhei-te Cavaquinho' (You took the Cavaquinho) by another great choro composer, Ernesto Nazareth.

On our first visit to Brazil in 1994 I first met with 'Woody' (see my blog links), who has been one of my best friends ever since. Although his principal interest is in Rock and Blues and mine is primarily Brazilian music we got on extremely well because he knew a huge amount about my subject, I knew a fair bit about his and we both shared a passion for jazz. When we left Brazil the first time, Woody had made a number of cassette tapes for Mrs Voltarol and me, of stuff that we might not know about. Amongst these tapes was an album by a group called Novos Baianos (The New Bahians), entitled 'Acabou Chorare' (No More Crying), which was "a groundbreaking mix of rock, samba, frevo and choro that would influence performers, songwriters and bands in the years to come" (All Brazilian Music). This intriguing bunch of Brazilian hippies freely mixed psychedelic rock with traditional music such as samba and choro and electric guitars and basses with cavaquinhos and violão (nylon string guitar). The net result was in fact typically Brazilian, in that the pigeon holes were ignored and the result was just great music. Probably the most popular track on the album was 'Preta Pretinha' (for which their is no literal translation), but it's all great stuff and well worth looking out for. It was reissued on CD in 2000.

As I said earlier, the Bandolim also features heavily in choro music, afact that was to grab the attention of quite a few North American musicians who were playing in the bluegrass and new acoustic music scene, resulting in several collaborations between players from the two genres. I'll be looking at this from the perspective of the different instruments over the next few weeks, starting tomorrow with the mandolin.

Anarchy in the UKe

And before we go any further, this is the only mention that the Sex Pistols will get in this posting. I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist the horrible pun. So - now that we've got that cleared up...

My father was dead against me having a guitar and so I had to do a great deal of saving and scrounging before I finally got the massive sum of £5 together and bought a beat-up nylon string model from the son of our next door neighbour. I was fourteen by now and we had moved from the flat over the hardware shop to a semi on the main road (although still less than a mile from where I was born). The guitar's previous owner was the cousin of Johnny Kidd (of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates) and he made much of this connection as Kidd was beginning to have some chart success, but this was completely wasted on me because I had already given Rock and Roll the thumbs down and was far more interested in accompanying myself on folk songs.

There were inevitable ructions when my father came home to find the guitar in the house. I was instructed to 'take it back right this minute' and told firmly that "...you'll never play that thing as long as you've got a hole in yer arse." After much ranting and roaring he finally conceded that I could keep it, on the strict understanding that he never, ever saw or heard it again. I took it upstairs to my bedroom and with the aid of a picture hook and a piece of string, hung it on the wall. Later that night, when I had retired to my bedroom, I gently lifted the instrument down from the wall and held it an an approximation of the playing position. Before I had so much as touched the strings my old man's voice came bellowing up the stairs - "PUT THAT BLOODY UKULELE DOWN!!!" It was uncanny. The man was definitely psychic. For the rest of the time that I lived at home I could never go near the thing when he was in the house. He always knew and always complained vociferously. It just wasn't worth the hassle so I would do all my practicing at a friend's house.

Some years later, during The Jugular Vein years, Max Emmons introduced us to the ukulele as a credible instrument. Max grew up in Clapham and his mother would take in lodgers to help balance the family budget. One of these lodgers was a young Chinese actor named Bert Kwouk, who, according to Max, was a reasonably competent uke player who taught him to play 'The World is Waiting for the Sunrise' on that instrument. Thus it was that that tune became a favourite with the J.V. Thank you Bert. I couldn't find a pure uke version of the tune on the net but this one features two Japanese enthusiasts on banjolele and ukulele respectively, performing a version that is uncannily similar to our performance of it. We used mandolin ( played by 'Fingers' Bartram) as the other stringed instrument and also featured washboards (me) and Jug (Mr Murfet). I eventually acquired a uke myself and would play it on some of our numbers.

I retained a fondness for the ukulele long after I had left the jug band, but rarely had an opportunity to play it in public. I eventually sold my uke during a bout of minor impoverishment and did not own another one until I was given one as a birthday present a few years ago. Alas, by then arthritis had begun to rob me of what little nimbleness I had and I was never really able to play one again, any more than I could the cavaquinho (pronounced cav/ar/keen/yo) that I had purchased in Brazil the previous year.

The cavaquinho is widely played in Brazil in samba and especially in choro. I had noted the similarity between the cavaquinho and the ukulele but had never realised that the uke had actually evolved from the Portuguese instrument. The two are very similar in size and appearance (like a mini four string guitar) but they are tuned slightly differently and the cavaquino has steel strings as opposed to the uke's nylon ones. Both are remarkably versatile instruments but the uke, with its softer sound, can often have a somewhat comic edge to it, whilst the cavaquinho can be a very driving sound (when used as a rhythm instrument) and both plaintive and aggressive when used as a solo instrument.

This is not to say that the ukeulele is not a serious instrument, but this comic aspect has more to do with the general public's perceptions of it. Say 'ukulele' to most people and they think of George Formby, the toothy Lancastrian film and music hall performer. Formby did not in fact play the uke but rather the banjolele (same tuning but with a banjo body), although it seems almost impossible to get this fact recognised. Even the Wikipedia entry for Formby has him down as playing the Ukulele! In fact, the above clip of the two Japanese musicians playing 'The World is Waiting for the Sunrise' clearly illustrates the difference between the two instruments.

The late George Harrison was a great uke enthusiast and played both 4 and 6 string versions of the instrument. This clip of him performing 'Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea' with, amongst others, Joe Brown and Jools Holland, is presented in a light -hearted and comical fashion but it still manages to be - for me at any rate - remarkably moving. (Incidentally, it also illustrates what just what a good singer Harrison was.) Talking of the Beatle, here is a virtuoso performance by Hawaiian uke wizard Jake Shimbukuro of 'While my Guitar Gently Weeps'

Australian Azo Bell is a phenomenal musician who just happens to have settled on the ukulele as his main means of expression. Here is a clip of him performing the Miles Davis classic 'Milestones' with his trio, The Old Spice Boys. Although the veneer of this is comical, the actual musicality of the piece is positively awe-inspiring.

In the last few years the uke has been brought back into prominence - at least in the UK - by the extraordinarily successful Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. They also take a comic approach to the instrument which thinly disguises a high level of musicianship and some great arranging skills - witness this extraordinary rendition of David Bowie's 'Life on Mars'. Incidentally, it was only whilst compiling this posting that I noticed that the U.C.G.B. had actually recorded a number entitled 'Anarchy in the Ukulele', so I'm not alone in my crime. If you're still not convinced about this much-overlooked instrument then go and have a look at what YouTube has to offer when you search on 'Ukulele'. I think you'll be surprised.

In my next posting the subject will be the uke's close relative - the cavaquinho.

Classical Guess

I've related elsewhere in these pages how the record player first came into my life (see Wonderful round, black, shiny things). My brother Alcohol is eight years older than me so at this point already had an income and a social life (although this was interrupted for a couple of years by National Service around this time). Inevitably, some of this income was spent on records and Alcohol's interests lay in a classical direction. I knew very little about classical music other than the fact that I liked most of what I heard of it, without actually stopping to think that that was what it was, if you see what I mean. So far I knew that I had liked the music for the BBC Chidren's Hour production of John Masefield's 'The Box of Delights' ( a Carol Symphony by Victor Hely-Hutchinson) and that was a good start. (In the early eighties the Beeb did an excellent Television Production of The Box of Delights and to my great joy they used the same music. Here is a clip of the opening titles.)

Alcohol's choices also tended to be influenced by the use of music in films and plays. the BBC TV production of 'The Quatermass Experiment' in 1953 had used 'Mars, Bringer of War' from Gustav Holst's The Planets' Suite and as a consequence had received a certain amount of exposure. Prokofiev's 'Lieutenant Kijé' had been used for the film of Joyce Cary's 'The Horse's Mouth'. Both of these works soon turned up in the house, rapidly followed by Mussorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition', Rimsky Korsakov's 'Scheherazade', Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony and '1812 Overture', Sibelius's 'Finlandia' and 'Valse Triste', Saint Saens' 'Dance Macabre' and an EP of José Iturbi playing Debussy's 'Claire de Lune' from the 'Suite Bergamasque' and Chopin's 'Polonaise No 6 in Ab'. This was the bundle of goodies that kick-started my taste for classical music. I loved every one of them and would play them endlessly whenever I had the front room to myself.

Pretty soon I was buying my own classical records but, as usual, I was restricted to EPs and singles by lack of funds. I bought Mendelssohn's 'Hebrides' and 'Ruy Blas' overtures, De Falla's 'Ritual Fire Dance (from 'El Brujo Amor), Tchaikovsky's 'Slavonic March', Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue', a single of the intermezzo from Sibelius' 'Karelia Suite' (the theme for ITV's 'This Week', Dag Wirén's 'Serenade for Strings' (part of which was the theme for BBC's 'Monitor' arts programme) and Wolf-Ferrari's overtures to 'Susannah's Secret' and 'The Jewels of the Madonna'.

It was a great basis to build musical taste from and it eventually led me to a love of a huge diversity of so-called 'serious' music, without ever replacing my other passions for jazz and folk. I didn't realise that I was already beginning to consider everything in its own right and was doing away with the 'pigeon-holes' approach to music. These days I have a pretty sophisticated sound system and a vast collection of music, but sometimes I just imagine myself back in the front-room of that flat over the hardware shop, crouched on the carpet in front of the Bush record player, with the smell of hot vinyl in my nostrils and the sound of 'Mercury, the Winged Messenger' filling my ears and transporting me into space. I don't have many fond memories of my home life as a child but that one will do...

NB. If you scroll right to the end of most of the Wikipedia links here, you will find a link to a performance of the music referred to.

Puttin' on the style

These days you can generally tell what kind of music 'young people' are in to by their clothes and haircuts. Children as young as one or two frequently seem to be making fashion statements and declarations of tribal allegiance on behalf of their parents and by the age of five and six they seem to be making them for themselves, but it was not always thus.

Like most children of my generation I had very little say in what clothes I wore until I was about fourteen and I had even less say about my haircut. My younger brother, G the D and I would be dispatched regularly to the barber's shop at the end of the parade of shops where we lived. Our dad ran the hardware shop and we lived over it from 1953 until about 1959. As a consequence my parents knew the barber well and instructions were already given well in advance of our respective arrivals in the chair at 'Maison Bert's', as it came to be known. My friend Muff was also a regular victim of Bert's ministrations and in later years we would enact little 'Barber shop' cameos for friends, nearly all of whom seemed to think that we were making it up. But we weren't.

Bert was, as far as I know, quite a nice man. He was short and Welsh, smoked incessantly, was addicted to the Welsh national sport and had learned his trade in the army. The waiting customers in his shop were provided with three or four hard-backed chairs and a small table containing a selection of racing papers and 'Tit Bits' and 'Blighty' magazines. There was one barber's chair and one mirror over a sink, around which were arranged a selection of display cards containing combs and nail clippers. Next to the sink was a small wooden cabinet on top of which sat Bert's tools of the trade (clippers, scissors and cut-throat razor), bottles of hair tonic and brilliantine and some jars of 'Brylcreem' and in which lurked 'something for the weekend', whatever that was. There was also a leather strop attached to the side of the cabinet, on which he would (occasionally) sharpen the razor.

As a consequence of his military training in the tonsorial arts, a 'short back and sides' was a short back and sides, but as a concession to civilian life the front - at least on us youngsters - was left just long enough to form a fringe, which was then cut dead straight across. The general effect was as if he had given one a 'pudding-bowl' haircut and then gone round the back and sides with the clippers as an afterthought. As you sat in the chair he would hack and snip away at you, all the while with a lighted cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth, the smoke from which caused his eye to water and him to squint constantly. He would shower you with fag ash and the occasional live spark as he worked, whilst holding a non-stop conversation with his older waiting customers on his favourite topic - " See the rrrRugby last night, did you?". At last it would be done. "Any 'Evenin' in Paris' is it?" he would ask and, not waiting for a reply would slosh hair tonic on one's head and give it a brisk rub. "There. Lovely! Tell your dad I'll see him later." And it was done and you escaped.

When we moved to live over the shop we were only about six hundred yards from our old house. I was a frequent visitor to my old haunts as we had lived only five doors away from Muff and he was still there. There was another, slightly older boy to be seen in what had been my garden. His name was Geoff and I got chatting to him. His mother (there didn't seem to be a father about) bred St Bernard dogs and the garden was now full of dog pens. It wasn't long before I was invited in to the house and Geoff got out the record player. " Listen to this!" he said, putting on a seventy eight r.p.m record of 'The Riff Song' from Sig Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein's operetta 'The Desert Song'. (The recording I've found here is not the one he played me. I'm sure it would have been from the soundtrack of the 1953 film but this was the only clip I could find). Geoff had obviously seen the film and proceeded to fashion an Arab headdress from one of his mother's headscarves, wrap an old curtain about his person to double for a cloak and to charge around the room singing along with the record and wielding an imaginary sword. This was fantastic. "I've got to go home for my lunch," I said. "I'll come back later"

I ran home and bolted my lunch, then as soon as I was allowed to leave the table, went and rummaged in the coat cupboard. I emerged triumphant with my school mac, several long woollen scarves and an old cricket stump which for years had been used by mother as a 'copper' stick. (For the uninitiated - before the advent of the washing machine, certain clothes and items of bedding were washed in a 'copper' - a container with a gas heater underneath it. The 'copper stick' was used to stir the soap into the copper as the water heated, as well as for extracting the washed items afterwards and transferring them to the rinsing water. Interestingly, this information as not so far found its way on to an internet reference site.) I quickly fastened my mac by one button at the throat in the approved 'cloak' style, tied a woollen scarf on my head and, for good luck, draped the rest of the scarves about my person. Clutching my copper-stick like a scimitar I dashed from the house and galloped an imaginary arab steed all the way back to Geoff's house, attracting a multitude of bewildered stares from baffled passers by as I went. I confess that I must have been a strange sight. To my mind I was The Red Shadow, galloping across the desert in full battle cry. Everybody else saw a slightly overweight nine year old, short trousered, Macintosh bedraped, woolly scarf-festooned boy with a pudding basin haircut, who was waving a cricket stump and singing -

"Ho! So we sing as we are riding,

Ho! It's a time you'd best be hiding

Low, It means the Riffs are abroad

Go, Before you've bitten the sword..."

in an unbroken voice, as he gallumphed up the road sweating profusely. (It was a hot day during the summer holidays). I arrived at Geoff's house and knocked at the door. It was answered by his mother who told me that Geoff was not coming out, and suggested rather frostily that, as I didn't live there any more, I might like to go away and not bother them again. So I did. And I didn't.

That was the first time I made a conscious connection between music and clothing. I would see Geoff around from time to time but he always refrained from speaking to me, then after a while he wasn't around so much. Being a couple of years older than me he was beginning to hang out with the older boys and I didn't see him again until I was about fifteen. The one-time, would-be scourge of the desert was walking down the road in full Teddy Boy gear, complete with 'brothel-creepers' with inch-thick crepe soles and a combination 'Duck's Arse' and 'Elephant's Trunk' hairstyle. This time I found it strangely easy not to rush home and copy his outfit...

I'll give it a bash

Since arthritis stopped me playing guitar to an acceptable level I have fallen back on my percussion skills for my main musical outlet. In fact, to tell the truth, I am a better percussionist than ever I was a guitarist but I was always drawn to the guitar even though I have never been very dexterous. My sense of rhythm has always been good and my first musical efforts were in fact percussive. A guitar playing friend (Paul - see various references to his father's tape recorder in previous postings) also owned some bongo drums and I would often pick these up and bash along whilst he strummed the guitar and sang Leadbelly songs. Somewhere along the way we spent one afternoon with another young would-be musician who at that time was learning to play the guitar. As far as I know I may well have been the first drummer that Roger Glover ever worked with.

I had got to grips with the guitar, faffed around the folk scene and ended up co-founding the Jugular Vein with three other people, one of whom, The Rev. B. Sprules 'Muff' Murfet played the jug and the other two of whom - 'Fingers' Bartram and Fred Kettle (or Max Emmons, to give him his real name) were considerably better guitarists than me. We made it a golden rule never to have more than two guitars playing together on any given song and so, as the repertoire was developed and arrangements were worked out, I found myself learning to play other instruments, not the least of which was the washboard. As our career developed we frequently played jazz clubs as well as folk clubs, and I became a regular washboard 'sitter-inner', often playing with Mike Messenger's Jazz Band,sometimes with Steve Lane's Southern Stompers and a couple of times with the legendary Ken Colyer.

The next percussive influence was a big one. I have already talked about my discovery of Sivuca (see Accordion Crimes). One of the tracks featured the triangle being played in the Brazilian manner and the moment I heard it I was hooked. I had to learn how to do that so I bought a triangle and a beater and took to the woodshed (metaphorically speaking) for six months, practicing obsessively until I could play like that. (I searched long and hard on YouTube for a good example of triangle playing but unfortunately this example was the best I could find. Still, it gives you a rough idea of what it's about). I would play my triangle at every opportunity, and although there weren't many Brazilian-style bands around at that time, funk was beginning to edge its way on to the scene and Latin percussion worked well with it. Soon I was expanding my arsenal of 'toys' (as hand-percussion devices were somewhat disparagingly known), and began to take percussion kit with me on gigs.

In the meantime I was beginning to take notice of the percussion credits on albums. Paulinho da Costa was an early favourite. Next up was Airto Moreira, whose 1971 album 'Seeds on the Ground' was an absolute revelation to me when I first heard it. I immediately longed to add the berimbau to my percussion skills but it was to be 1994 before that happened (but that's another story). That album also introduced me to Hermeto Pascoal and was another link in my journey towards Brazilian music. By the time that I heard Naná Vasconcelos with Egberto Gismonti on the album 'Danca das Cabeças' I was totally hooked on both percussion and the music of Brazil.

Around about 1979 I was asked to join a band called Zarjazz as percussionist. Most of the members were from Wooburn Green, near High Wycombe, and the unit had been formed by a group of friends with an enthusiasm for jazz funk. They had recruited a keyboard player who was a friend of mine, by the name of Stewart Edmiston. Unfortunately the drummer in the band wasn't the greatest player in the world, and Stewart had suggested that I be brought in to reinforce the time keeping. I stayed with that band until it self-destructed a year later, although not before such luminaries as bassist John McCartney (see Accordion Crimes), drummer Hossam Ramzy and saxophonist Andy Sheppard had passed through its ranks. I'll tell more of the doings of Zarjazz in another posting, but for the moment I'll just add that this was where I really paid my dues as a percussionist, learning that you needed stamina as much as you needed rhythmic sense and musicality.

Since then I have travelled extensively in Brazil, playing whenever the opportunity arises, as well as playing with various bands in England, but these days mostly I just listen and write. Mind you, I do have a habit of typing in time with whatever music I'm listening to. Unfortunately the result is generally gibberish...but you knew that already.