'S Wonderful...part one

In previous postings I've described at length how I've found my way into music, but I have forgotten to mention one vital link from the early days. If 'Blues Fell This Morning'(see Woke up this morning) was my atlas for the blues, then "This Wonderful World of Jazz" was my 'Rosetta Stone' for jazz. This LP compilation was issued by Philips Records around 1960, at a time when that company were distributing the American Columbia Records catalogue in this country. I had acquired my copy from a friend of my older brother ('Alcohol'), who had purchased it under the impression that all the tracks would be Traditional jazz, and had been more than a little disappointed to find Modern jazz performances on there as well. I swapped my copy of another compilation - 'Great Jazz Reeds' on RCA Camden, which was much more to his liking, despite one Charlie Parker track. (It wasn't that I didn't like 'Great Jazz Reeds' - it was just that my friend Muff owned a copy as well so I knew I had access to it whenever I wanted to hear it.)

As you can see from the photograph at the top of this page, I still own the Philips compilation, although I haven't played it for many years. In fact, it's virtually unplayable these days. I acquired it second hand nearly fifty years ago and played it regularly on a record player whose sapphire stylus must have tracked like a baby plough, but I can't quite bring myself to part with such an old friend. However, musical memory is a wonderful thing and I have only to look a the track listings to hear the music in my head again. Fortunately I don't have to do that in many cases because I own a lot of the tracks in different formats these days, but over the next few postings I shall give you a complete rundown on the titles that helped me make musical connections and advance my understanding and appreciation of jazz.

Side one opened with Big Bill Broonzy performing his own composition, 'Texas Tornado', a recording made in 1956. This was another pointer to the relationship between blues and jazz, and I really liked the guitar playing on this one as well. This and other Broonzy recordings were to influence my own attempts at the guitar. I couldn't find 'Texas Tornado on YouTube but here are a couple of other performances. Firstly his classic Black ,Brown and White (which was another of the treasures on Paul's dad's tape recorder (see Wonderful round, black, shiny things)

Allthough this was not a blues, it was a powerful statement against racism and was something that we often sang. However this instrumental clip of Bill playing 'Hey Hey' contains all of the elements of fingerstyle blues guitar that grabbed my attention.



The next track on the album was 'Papa Dip' by The New Orleans Wanderers (recorded 1926) which was a group led by pianist Lil Hardin (then wife of Louis Armstrong) and was in fact Louis' Hot Five but, due to contractual problems, without Armstrong himself. This introduced me to clarinetist Johnny Dodds and trombonist Kid Ory, as well as banjoist Johnny St Cyr. And here it is...



Track three was 'Potato Head Blues' by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven, recorded in 1927. This was my first real taste of Armstrong. Up to now I had just seen him as a popular entertainer, based on his performance in the movie High Society. It now began to dawn on me that here was something rather special...





Next up was my first taste of another musician that I came to love and admire - Bix Beiderbecke. Bix recorded a number of sides with a group known as Bix Beiderbecke and his Gang, the personnel of which varied from recording to recording. This particular track - Jazz Me Blues (recorded in 1927) - also introduced me to Adrian Rollini ( multi instrumentalist, here playing bass saxophone), who was by no means in the same class as Bix, but an interesting fellow none the less. (The Jugular Vein - see Mutt and Jeff would later take great delight in regularly hamming up a Rollini Orchestra number as a part of their stage performances. I couldn't find 'Jazz Me Blues' so here's 'Royal Garden Blues', which was recorded on the same day and with the same personnel



Parts two and three will include Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman and Count Basie, Dizzie Gillespie, Horace Silver and Miles Davis - amongst others.

(High) Street life

From my earliest memories of getting together with friends to play records I have enjoyed sharing music with other people, so it seemed only logical that I should start work in a record, hi fi and musical instrument shop when I was just nineteen. I was newly married, had a three month old daughter and took a 20% pay cut from my previous occupation as a stock handler and counter cutter (don’t ask) at Hallmark Cards in Perivale. With hindsight I realise that this was not one of my smartest moves in terms of financial security for my family, but I was desperate to do some kind of job that involved music and no force in the land would have kept me from answering the advertisement in the local paper. I started work at the shop in August 1964 at a wage of £10 per week.

One of my first jobs when I started there was to take down the window display which was advertising the Rolling Stones first LP (the cover of which was title-less, consisting only of a moody profile photo of the group) and replacing it with one promoting the Beatles’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, which would be showing the next week at the local cinema. I think the number one single that week was Manfred Mann’s ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’, which was soon to be replaced by The Honeycombs with ‘Have I the Right?’. The Honeycombs were possibly the first pop act to feature a girl drummer and certainly the first to achieve a number one hit. Manfred Mann, the South African leader of the eponymous group, had previously come to my attention with a personal advertisement in the back pages of Jazz News, offering jazz piano lessons at reasonable rates.

I quickly got into the swing of things and began to learn how to monitor the charts and construct record orders, how to create a ‘master bag’ for a new record, how to file stock numerically and alphabetically and how to use a record catalogue. The shop had two listening booths and two turntables for the benefit of record customers, as well as several functioning ‘quality rigs’ in the hi-fi department. We also had a small selection of acoustic and electric guitars and a selection of accessories appropriate to our three areas of trade – plugs, cables, batteries, styli (both sapphire and diamond), cartridges (crystal, ceramic and magnetic) ‘dust-bugs’, record cleaners and cloths, anti-static mats, paper and polythene inner sleeves for both LPs and singles, guitar strings and straps, sheet music (to order only) and Reel to Reel tapes (the cassette recorder was still a year away in the UK).

The shop had an ‘in depth’ selection of music. There was a large classical section, a wide range of jazz , folk and blues, an international section and a range of spoken word and specialist material (location recordings of steam locomotives, bird song etc. We also had a large selection of Indian music (see Indian summer). Apart from the latter, this was the pattern for all good general record shops then. The money generated by the chart material allowed one to stock material which turned over more slowly but did not date – the absolute opposite of today’s ‘supermarket shelf space’ approach of the average high street record outlet.

It was a great time for me – musically, at any rate - because I suddenly had access to unlimited music. Anything that I wanted to check out was there for me to listen to whilst I was at work. And if it wasn’t, I could order it for stock and still audition it before spending any of my (extremely) limited cash. Thus it was that I discovered the music of Ravi Shankar, Jorge Morel, Baden Powell, Jaques Ibert, Leoš Janáček, William Walton and others too numerous and diverse to mention.

And meanwhile the (now) classic hits kept coming. By the end of 1964 I had participated in the sale of the following number one hits – The Kinks - 'You Really Got Me', Herman's Hermits - 'I'm Into Something Good', Roy Orbison - 'Oh, Pretty Woman', Sandie Shaw - '(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me', The Supremes - 'Baby Love', The Rolling Stones - 'Little Red Rooster' and that year’s Christmas number one - 'I Feel Fine' by The Beatles. I was to support my attempts to make a living as a musician by (mostly) working in record shops on and off for the next twelve years and - apart from some of the people I had to work with, I enjoyed every minute of it, and I certainly wouldn’t have developed as catholic a taste in music without those years. I sometimes day-dream about starting a little record shop again, and then I remember that the internet has sounded the death knell for that kind of shop. Mind you, if it wasn’t for the internet I wouldn’t be doing this…

Bass thoughts

One of my Christmas presents was a copy of the Anniversary Edition of Jaco by Bill Milkowski. This revised and expanded biography of the great but troubled electric bass guitarist Jaco Pastorius is well worth reading, even if you have read the previously published version of this book. Pastorius was, of course, far more than just a great bass player. He possessed a formidable musical mind which produced many superb compositions and arrangements, as well as inventing an entire new vocabulary for his chosen instrument which irrevocably changed the way the electric bass is played.

I don't intend to repeat the Pastorius story here - if you want to know more about his life then read the book - but I did find myself having a bit of a 'Jacofest' on the CD player and thinking about some of the bassists that rushed through the door that he opened. My late friend John McCartney was one of them and I will be writing about him in the near future, but for the moment I have an abiding memory of the expressions of astonishment, disbelief and then delight that chased across his face when we saw Jaco perform with Weather Report at Hammersmith Odeon (as it was then) in 1980. Incidentally, I rate this gig as probably the best I have ever attended, and I've attended quite a few. I've not been able to locate any clips of that concert (although I've discovered that a bootleg recording of it does exist) but here is a Clip from German TV c. 1978 which does give flavour of the band in full flight.




And here is Jaco's Word of Mouth Big Band live in Japan in 1982, playing the Pastorius composition 'Three Views of a Secret'. This features the great Toots Theilmans on harmonica.



Here is another of my favourite bass players of all time - Nico Assumpção. The Brazilian 6 string bass maestro is seen here in Salvador in 1992, playing with Larry Coryell and an all star line up. Alas, Nico died of throat cancer in 2001.




Ney Conceição is another great Brazilian 6 string electric bass player. Here he is with João Bosco's band performing a Bosco composition - Incompatibilidade de Gênios.



Ney, fellow Bosco band members, guitarist Nelson Faria and drummer Kiko Freitas also perform as Nosso Trio. Here they are playing the classic Roberto Menescal composition 'O Barquinho' (My Little Boat).



Anthony Jackson is credited with inventing the 6 string bass and he's another of my favourites Here he is playing with Michel Camilo: piano and Horacio Hernandez: drums.I'm afraid I can't 'name that tune', but I'd be grateful if anybody else can...



Finally, here's a clip of Abraham Laboriel with Lee Ritenour in Japan. I don't know when this was recorded, what the tune was or who the other musicians are (although I'd guess at Patrice Rushen on keyboards) but it's a fun solo and incredibly 'high energy' Given that he's been cutting these capers for many years (I saw him play in London in about 1980 and he was leaping about a bit then) you'd think he'd be a bit slimmer!




These are by no means the only great electric bass players around: they just happen to be some of my favourites - and if regular readers of this blog are surprised by the absence of Richard Bona from this posting, it's only because I've covered him exhaustively elsewhere ( a quick search within the blog will reveal at least three mentions (including a concert review) and a number of clips). In the meantime I hope you enjoy this selection.

A Happy New Year to all my readers...

There! I've always wanted to write that! I suppose some sort of retrospective thingy is in order so - here goes:-

This is my first year of blogging (I started back in May) and I have been enjoying it immensely. Whether or not you lot out there in cyberland have is another thing entirely but it's all the fault of my old mate Leigh Heggarty (for more details of the attribution of blame, see "The time has come", the Walrus said...), whose excellent blog documents the everyday life of a jobbing Rock guitarist in great - and frequently amusing - detail.

I have made a new 'cyberpal' through the blog, courtesy of my Emily Remler memoir - See Emily Play - which put me in touch with the author of the All Things Emily website. We have been corresponding regularly and have been exchanging music and political opinions, both of us expressing joy (along with most of the Western World) at Obama's election. And talking of politics I am now the proud possesor of a 7 metre telescopic flagpole to go with my red flag (see A bit of flag waving). I do urge you to pass this idea on and to participate yourself. In a recent interview, Adrian Edmondson made the observation that, when Margaret Thatcher finally dies there will be a very large queue of people waiting to dance on her grave. It occured to me that they would probably get their feet fairly muddy because there will also be an awful lot of people pissing on it...

I have also got back in contact with an old pal, Paul Marsden, who was a fellow traveller on my early forays into discovering music. Whilst I was writing about some of these exploits ( see Folk me sideways Part Two for photographic proof of them) I checked for online evidence of his existence. Lo and behold - there was his website and contact was duly made. We have been exchanging emails and phone calls on a grand scale ever since (and as there had been a thirty year hiatus in our relationship there has been a lot to talk about).

I've been to some excellent gigs, bought a lot of CD's and DVD's, read a lot of good books, joined the wonderful world of blogging and - apart from becoming the proud possesor of hearing aids (see Mutt and Jeff) and high blood pressure - have, by and large had a jolly good year. I trust that yours has been at least as good as mine (but without the deafness and the blood pressure!) and that this coming year will be even better. That's it...see you in the new year!

Davy Graham 1940 - 2008

I was greatly saddened to learn of the death of Davy Graham on the 15th December. He was a musician that made a huge impact on the folk music scene of the 1960's and then seemed to slowly faded from sight over the next decade, although his musical influence continued to spread outwards like ripples in a pond. I've written elsewhere in this blog about discovering his music for the first time (see The twang's not the thang) but in recent years his albums have been reissued and I for one have bought a few of them and rediscovered his music all over again,

With another forty or so years worth of listening and playing experience under my belt I realised that Graham wasn't just an innovative guitar player: he was an extraordinary musician who just happened to play the guitar. I'm fairly certain that he would have made great music on whatever instrument he had focused on. We may well have been denied a virtuoso trombonist or harpist or kazoo player, come to that - the instrument wasn't the point. It was the ideas that were so stunning. That he did focus on the guitar was fortunate because there was a very receptive audience for acoustic guitar music out there just waiting to be wowed. Personally, I find that the more I listen to those records, the more wowed I become. Davy Graham seemed to have the same attitude as another of my heroes, the Brazilian composer and multi-instrumentalist Hermeto Pascoal, characterised by a refusal to think in terms of musical pigeon holes but rather to see music as a whole - as a river flowing past that could be dipped into at any point.

Here's a nineteen year old Davy, caught on film in 1959 playing 'Cry Me A River'

And here's some footage from the BBC's 'Folk Britannia' documentary series -

and here's a track from the EP that originally introduced me to his music.



For further information, here are some links -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davey_Graham
http://www.daveygraham.moonfruit.com/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/dec/17/folk-blues-music
http://www.cosmicsurfer.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Davygraham.html

Desert Island Discs

Desert Island Discs is one of those programmes that irritates me more often than it delights me, but sometimes, delight me it does, and that’s why I continue to listen to it. Often the interviewees are thoroughly unmusical, sometimes they are extremely boring and occasionally they are self important prats. More often than not though, it’s a case of ’vaguely interesting person chooses vaguely uninteresting music’ - there’s an awful lot of Bob Dylan and Puccini…But once in a while someone chooses something that I love – which always gets my attention, and once in a while somebody chooses something that I’ve never heard before but end up loving.

I first identified one of the Bach cello suites when Tom Courtenay chose it about forty years ago. I say identified because I’d heard the piece before and had been entranced by it. There is a scene in Jazz On A Summer’s Day (see Folk me sideways for more about this film) when the camera cuts back and forth between shots of the America’s Cup races taking place off of Newport, Rhode Island, and Fred Katz, cellist with the Chico Hamilton Quintet, practising in his room. At the time I assumed that Katz was improvising (albeit brilliantly), but the music stuck in my mind and stayed with me until Tom chose it and the light dawned. I subsequently bought the Pablo Casals recording of the complete Bach Cello Suites and it has remained a favourite ever since. Much to my surprise I found this clip of Casals playing part of Suite No 1 around 1953


Quite a few years later I was listening to the adventurer and writer Tim Severin’s choice. He had, amongst other things, emulated one of the Celtic saint’s legendary crossing of the Atlantic ocean in a leather boat, and had written a book about it. One of Severin’s selections was a jig called Water Under The Keel, which was from an orchestral suite for Uillean pipes and orchestra by the composer Shaun Davey. This immediately grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and gave me a damn good shaking and I was forced to go out and by the record of The Brendan Voyage – which was the title both of the suite and of the book that inspired it The piper on this was Liam O'Flynn, who was one of the founder members of the Irish group Planxty, one of the most innovative and influential musical units that Ireland had ever seen. The 'embedding feature for this YouTube clip of an extract from the piece has been disabled but you can see it by clicking here.

In 2004 my attention was grabbed again when the ‘death row’ lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith chose the forty part motet Spem In Alium by Thomas Tallis as one of his eight records. Again I marvelled at a sound, and couldn’t wait to buy a recording so as to hear that glorious noise on my Quad speakers instead of on the bathroom radio. (I tend to take a late shower on a Sunday.) Here is a clip of the work, performed by The Tallis Scholars.


I’m sure that I’m not alone in occasionally fantasising about being on the programme, and I’ve often started to compile my own eight records. I say ‘started’ because no matter how I try, I can never finish the list because there are so many great pieces of music that I just couldn’t do without. In fact if I’m ever invited on to the programme I shan’t take any music with me at all. I’ll choose a gun as my luxury and shoot myself as soon as I land, because the prospect of living for years with only eight records is just too awful to contemplate…

Richard Bona Band at the Barbican, November 26th 2008

Left to right: Adam Stoler, Etienne Stadwijk, Ernesto Simpson, Richard Bona,
Robert Quintero, Taylor Haskins

I travelled up to London at the weekend with mixed feelings. On the one hand I was on my way to see a concert that I was greatly looking forward to. On the other hand, the last gig I had attended at the Barbican (Maria Rita) was ruined by appalling sound mixing. I need not have worried. The sound mix was spot-on for the whole show.

The evening's music was kicked off by the excellent Danilo Perez Trio. Under other circumstances I would have enjoyed their set considerably more, but it really did not fit the mood of the evening. Never-the-less, the musicianship was of a very high order and the other members of the trio - Ben Street (bass) and Adam Cruz (drums) - integrated perfectly with Perez's playing, complimenting every twist and turn within the music. Despite some light-hearted attempts at audience interaction by Perez, the trio never really took charge of the proceedings. However, I would not hesitate to go and see them perform in their own right. Here's a clip of them performing 'Alone Together' at Arturo Sandoval's club last year.

The problem was that most people were anticipating more of a party atmosphere - which was exactly what they got when Bona and his band took to the stage!

There was an immediate sense of - what I can only describe as - security as the band commenced to play. The audience knew that it was in safe hands for the rest of the evening, and the groove was so immediate and insistent that you could practically feel the Barbican resonating in sympathy. This was not achieved by volume but by the sheer infectious precision of the musicians. The programme notes included a quote from a Guardian review which sums it up beautifully -"...music that makes you smile, moves your feet and touches your heart in ways that more celebrated music personalities can only dream about."

Bona is a virtuoso electric bass player who has - as did the late Jaco Pastorius (the man that inspired him to take up the bass in the first place) - the ability to play exactly the note you want to hear at exactly the moment that you want to hear it, only you don't know that that's what you want to hear until you've heard it! He also has a beautiful voice and writes most of his own material which he sings in (I think) his native Douala language (he is from Cameroon). The songs utilise an eclectic selection of grooves, moving freely between Latin, jazz-funk and African beats. Bona's bass and voice were complemented by a superb band whose unbeleivable tightness kept a big grin plastered more or less permanently on my face. They were :- Adam Stoler - guitar; Taylor Haskins - trumpet; Etienne Stadwijk - keyboards; Roberto Quintero - percussion and Ernesto Simpson - drums. It is difficult choose a favourite moment from the evening but if pushed I would nominate the band's version of Jaco's 'Liberty City' (see the previous posting for a YouTube clip of an earlier line-up's performance of this tune) and the moment when the band left the stage and Bona transformed himself into a choir with the aid of 'sample and hold' technology. At the end of the evening the performers were thanked with a standing ovation which brought them back for an encore,provoking yet another standing ovation, but this time a -no doubt exhausted - band stayed in the dressing room. This, for me, was undoubtedly 'gig of the year'.

Here are another couple of clips. First, here's the 2006 line-up perforing one of Richard's songs at the Stockholm jazz festival -

and finally here's Richard performing another of his compositions -'Dina Lam' with Bobby McFerrin'



Roll on the new album!