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!

Odds, sods and apologies

Dear loyal readers (all three of you), please accept my humble apologies for a somewhat lengthy break since the last posting. I plead pressure of work and the headaches, along with a singularly annoying Flash! Bang! Wallop! that was in fact my computer deciding to celebrate Guy Fawks Night in its own inimitable fashion ( for the benefit of my overseas reader - see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_Night )

There are, you will be depressed to find out, several postings in preparation at the moment, including a piece about Desert Island Discs as an occasional source of musical inspiration, and an interview with the greatly underrated British jazz guitarist, John Coverdale (He's so underrated that you'll have to scroll through this directory to find him). These will be proceeded by a review of the Richard Bona concert that takes place at The Barbican this coming Sunday and to which I am greatly looking forward (to boldly split an infinitive or two).

The Bona concert gives me the excuse to include another YouTube clip just to whet your appetites if you're not already familiar with his playing. Here's his band with a nod from Bona to one of his big influences as they play the Jaco Pastorius composition -'Liberty City'



And I really should mention the excellent Randy Newman concert aired on BBC4 last week. He gave a great performance of what ought to have been 'greatest hits' if there was any justice in this world, accompanied superbly by the BBC Concert Orchestra, who were clearly enjoying every minute of it. He also played a couple of songs from his new album, 'Harps and Angels', which are (and is, if you follow me) as good as ever. Here, however is an old favourite that is as pertinent as it was when he wrote it in 1972 or thereabouts - 'Political Science', performed by him back in 2004.


Finally, here's another look at the problems expressed above - 'A Few Words in Defence of Our Country' which is on the latest album.

That's it for now. Enjoy! I'm off to see Richard Bona...

Further tales of Berkhamsted...

This was not what I had intended to be posting next but life often throws stuff at you that you weren't expecting...

During the course of writing my last posting (See Emily play) I made contact with Al Merritt (the drummer on the gig that I had described there) and sent him a link to the page. I soon received a reply from him which said (amongst other things)-

"...I read some of your blog this evening and I need to take you to task concerning the night at Berkhamstead Town Hall. You are quite wrong in your interpretation of the sequence that lead to Monty playing the bass. The unnamed bass player and I had played quite a few times with Monty and if anything he was impressed with this unmentioned player. Can I ask you not to go any further with that particular reminiscence until I have had a chance to talk to others who attended the concert. I will deal with this subject as quickly as possible and come back to you with further comments.
Cheers
Al

I replied as follows-

"re the blog:

I may well be wrong in my interpretation of events but I have carried that as an extremely strong memory for a long time. That's certainly the way things seemed to happen - so much so that I did not put in the usual caveats of - "it looked as if..." or "it seemed like...". However, I know from personal experience that truth can be a subjective thing that is often a matter of perceptions, so I welcome your version of events - you were, after all, a lot closer to the action than I was - and will happily post it on the blog. That, after all, is why the 'comment' box is a part of my blog. It is to allow people a place to state their own opinions, or, where necessary, correct me. Incidentally, if I'm not mistaken, the bass player was Alan Simmons,for whom I had considerable respect. I personally could not see what Monty was apparently complaining about and left Alan's name out of the recollection for that reason..."

A week went by and then Al sent me this -

"Here's the answer from 'the horse's mouth' via Mike Hennessey.

Hope that now clears up the matter.

Attached was this email from Mike Hennessey -

Dear Al:
I just had a call from Monty who says that (Votarol)'s blog is rubbish. What I did, says Monty, was just a gag. Alan Simmons is a very fine bass player and there is no way in which I would do what (Voltarol) says. If I had seriously thought that Alan wasn't measuring up, then the last thing I would do would be to deal with the matter onstage. But the fact is, Alan's playing was fine and what I did was just a joke.
And he sends his best regards to you, Alan and Brian.
Cheers!

Mike

This was my reply -


Dear Mike Hennessey,

Al Merritt has just forwarded your email to me and I have noted its contents and will of course post it on my blog. There was, I assure you, never any malicious intention in telling that story. I reported what I thought I had seen in all good faith, and I was not the only person in the audience to walk away from that evening with the same impression. In fact, hearing from 'the horse's mouth' that it was a gag makes me feel like a bit of a horse's arse, but a rather relieved one because I had thought less of Monty because of it. Please offer him my unreserved apologies and explain that his acting was as convincing as his piano playing! I genuinely believed that I had seen an altercation.

Regards,

(Voltarol)

...and that was that, I thought. I'll eat my humble pie and move on. But never underestimate a nice bloke. By return I received the following -

Dear (Voltarol):
Many thanks for your message. I appreciate your response and I am quite sure that there was no malicious intent on your part. It is easy to understand how such an incident could be misinterpreted.
I will pass on your apology to Monty.
With best regards,

Mike

All this left me with rather mixed feelings. Should I have reported what I thought I saw without checking with someone first? Well - yes and no. If I had had any doubts about what I had seen then - no. But I didn't have any doubts at all so - if you are trying to be an honest reporter then you have to call it as you see it. And yet I had totally misinterpreted what I had seen. It just makes one wonder how many other 'truths' are out there that could be nothing more than a joke taken at face value. I'll just wipe the remains of the egg off my face whilst saying once again "Sorry, Monty".

Just as a reminder of what a fine musician he is, here are a couple of clips. First, here he is duetting with fellow pianist Billy Taylor on 'Joy Spring'


and here he breathes new life into Bob Marley's 'No Woman, No Cry' -



For further information about Monty Alexander, here's his website

See Emily play

I was talking to Tony Oreshko the other day about our mutual enthusiasm for the late Emily Remler, a fine jazz guitarist from New York who was just beginning to emerge as a truly distinctive voice when she died of heart failure at the tragically young age of 32. Tony has written an essay about her on his website (see right for link) and I was reminiscing about having seen her play in, of all places, Berkhamsted in Buckinghamshire in the early 1980’s.

I first became aware of her when I was running a specialist guitar shop in partnership with luthier Richard Bartram (you’ll have to Google his web site - he’s asked me to remove the link from my pages because he’s convinced that the more links there are, the more spam he gets, and he’s up to his ears in spam!). We stocked a great many guitar records along with the instruments, amplifiers, accessories, strings, spares and sheet music, and I was importing a number of specialist labels which included the American jazz label, Concord. The label featured quite a few interesting guitar albums by the likes of Herb Ellis, Tal Farlow, Charlie Byrd, and George Barnes. As a consequence, when I saw the name ‘Emily Remler’ listed in such company I thought it might be worth stocking some of her albums. I was not disappointed. She was not a great player but she was very good. You could easily detect the influences on her playing and she did not yet have a distinctive voice of her own, but she was only in her very early twenties and it was clear that hers was a talent to be watched or rather, listened to.

At this time I was running a weekly jazz club at The Load of Hay in Uxbridge. (By an odd coincidence, my good friend Leigh Heggarty is about to launch a music venue there - see his blog under Leigh's mad world of... harps?!? He and I, in our Blue Five persona, played there together in about 1986.) I received a phone call one day from a fellow jazz promoter, who told me that the great Jamaican pianist Monty Alexander was touring England and had a spare date to fill. Was I interested in putting him on? The catch was that I only had five days in which to organise it! (If you are not familiar with his playing then here’s a clip of his trio playing ‘Satin Doll’ at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976. Don’t be fooled by the little boogy intro…)



Needless to say, I was very interested in deed but knew that The Load of Hay did not have the capacity to make this into a financially viable event unless the ticket price was outrageously high. Despite the fact that there would be no way of advertising this except by word of mouth, I attempted to secure the use of Brunel University’s main hall. It was close by, it held enough people, it had a bar and would suit the occasion very well, provided that I could also hire in a Steinway and a piano tuner for the day…

The potential cost of the event was snowballing rapidly but I am nothing if not optimistic so after a frantic day of phoning and cajoling I was able to phone back and say “Yes please”, only to be told that the date had been snapped up by the Berkhamsted jazz club whilst I’d been running around like the proverbial azure-bottomed insect trying to make it happen. I had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I had been saved from the possibility of losing a lot of money (my best hope for this event was that I would have – with luck and a following wind – broken even) but on the other hand Monty Alexander would be playing within easy driving distance of my home. I bit the bullet and bought the tickets.

I think the gig was in Berkhamsted town hall and I think it was on a Saturday night, but I can’t be sure of either of those facts. What I can be sure of is that the evening’s music was kicked off by the Chas Burchell quintet, whose drummer, Al Merrit, I knew well and had worked with in the past. After their set there was an interval and then Monty Alexander took to the stage, accompanied by the rhythm section of Chas Burchell’s group – Al and a bass player who shall remain nameless. Monty quickly took exception to the bassist's whole choice of notes, intonation and ability to play generally, and proceeded to take him to task about it, eventually getting up from the piano, taking the bass from him and demonstrating the part himself. Finally, he handed the bass back to its owner and returned to the piano, played one tune and then announced that he would now be joined on stage by his wife – Emily Remler. Emily duly took to the stage and played for the rest of the evening.

I would like to report that it was a memorable night musically but I can’t in all honesty. I suspect that the pair of them were not playing at their best that night – it was never less than very good, but I can’t recall any details of the music at all, other than who was playing it. In fact, Emily was still developing. With each album that she released she became more distinctive, continuing to work mainly within a hard bop framework but occasionally venturing into bossa novas (she had worked with Astrud Gilberto for a while). However, her development was somewhat hampered by an ongoing heroin habit, and her early death (in 1990) came as no great surprise, sad though it was.

Then a few years ago, Richard Bartram played me an Emily Remler album that I didn’t know about. It was called ‘This Is Me’ and I was completely blown away by it. It was the last thing that she recorded and had been released posthumously. It marked an entirely new direction for her, consisting as it did entirely of original material - much of it with a strong Brazilian flavour – and it inhabited a much more contemporary environment. You could still hear traces of her original inspirations - Wes Montgomery and Herb Ellis - and she had also taken note of Pat Metheny, but there was something fresh and original about this album that really moved me. I was delighted when it was reissued a few years ago and I was able to own a copy. I still play it regularly but can never hear the last track on the album without feeling the tears well up with the knowledge that all that was promised by this album will never now be.

Here are a few clips that will give you an idea of what she was about. Sadly there are none of the ‘This Is Me’ material. Here she is playing one of her own - Brazilian flavoured -compositions called 'Nunca Mais' ('Never Again'), with John Abercrombie.




And here she is duetting on 'Stella by Starlight' with John Scofield (who, incidentally was the announcer for the previous clip).



For much more information and many more clips, including an interview with Emily, go to allthingsemily.com

Unfortunately, the CD has once again been deleted but you can buy it in MP3 download form at last.fm