Mutt and Jeff

I've been having some problems with my hearing recently, and was finally driven to visit my GP. He duly dispatched me to the local hospital's audiology department and I ended up sporting a couple of hearing aids. During my sessions with the audiologist it had emerged that I was a musician. "Oh, that would explain it then." she said. "There's some evidence of damage to the eardrum. It's quite consistent with the effects of very loud noises. You know, Pete Townshend and all that. You get the same sort of thing from industrial noise or constant exposure to the sound of gunfire or explosions". I was quite taken aback at the time. Very little of my working life has been spent in heavy industry, I've never been to war and (and my good friend Leigh can certainly confirm this) I don't play like Pete Townshend. I continued to puzzle over this for a week or two and then it suddenly hit me. I bet it was that gig at The White Hart, Southall! Perhaps I should explain.



I was a founder member of 'The Jugular Vein', a fairly successful jug band that operated from the late sixties on into the early nineties. At the top of our fame we were a regular fixture around the British folk scene and appeared fairly regularly at the famous Troubador club, under the auspices of the late Red Sullivan and the equally late Martin Windsor. However, as you might guess from reading some of the other entries in this blog, we didn't exactly conform to a strict definition of a jug band and we definitely weren't folk musicians (other than in the sense of the famous Louis Armstrong quote -"Folk music? I ain't never heard a horse play no music...")



If I might just digress for a moment -It has to be said that the Folk Club scene of the 1960's was one of the most vibrant musical environments to be in. For the most part the organisers and audiences would consider anything as long as it was more or less acoustic - blues, jazz, poetry, comedy and experimental music all found a home in the folk clubs. Many folk musicians transmogrified into other things (Billy Connolly, Jasper Carrot, Mike Harding, Tony Capstick, John Martyn, Gerry Rafferty and Ron Geesin to name but a few) but it all came to an end when the Arran-sweatered, tankard-clutching, finger-in-ear traditional music fascists took over for a very long and sterile period. Today though, thanks mostly it seems to the offspring of some of the original traditional music enthusiasts, the scene is bursting with life again. And here is another theme that I will undoubtedly return to. Meanwhile, back to the White Hart...



The band had, under the influence of the very splendid Bonzo Dog Band, been experimenting with explosions and smoke bombs.We had purchased a selection of theatrical maroons and had been using them to some effect during our act. It was our habit, when we arrived at the venue, to hide a small maroon somewhere in the audience. Said maroon was then connected by a long, concealed cable to a foot switch, which in turn was connected to a car battery which was kept out of sight behind the band. The routine went something like this - at a convenient point in our performance (often to stall whilst someone changed a broken string) I would start to rummage around in a large bag that I kept by my side. This contained my harmonicas, kazoos, penny whistles etc that were used in the act. It also contained various bits and pieces of the 'flags of all nations, knickers, rubber chicken' variety, that I would pull out on to the floor as I continued my search. Finally, I would produce a toy plastic hand grenade, pull the pin and - with a slightly bewildered expression - lob it into the audience in the direction of the concealed maroon. Short pause. Step on foot switch. Startling bang. Much hilarity.



On this night we realised as we set up for the gig that we were down to our last maroon and it was a bit bigger than the ones that we had previously used, so we decided to take some precautions. Instead of placing the maroon in the audience we put it in a waste paper basket, placed a small sheet of asbestos on top of that and placed the whole lot under a table which was to one side of the stage. Now, the room used by the Freeman Syndicate club (I can't give you a web link but you can read a bit about the Freeman Syndicate in Jeff Nuttal's excellent book 'Bomb Culture' - if it's still in print,that is.) was, and may still be for all I know, long and low ceilinged. The bar had a hatch that was kept closed during performances and the stage area was in front of French Windows that were kept covered by heavy drapes when not actually in use.



So - comes that point in the act when the hand grenade is chucked. I hit the foot switch. Nothing happens. The audience (one well noted for its cynicism) lets out a loud groan of derision. Nobby the Roadie (aka Dendron) spots the fact that a wire has become disconnected from the battery terminal and makes a hasty repair.

KABLOOIE!!!!

The maroon goes off like the crack of doom. Doors open, people rush in to find out what the hell has happened. A worried landlord throws open the hatch and peers in from behind the bar. The smoke slowly clears. Desperately pretending that that was what we meant to happen, we launch into our next number but the audience can't hear us and we can't hear ourselves.



At the end of the evening, and with our ears still ringing, we inspected the waste paper basket - or what was left of it. It had been blown open like a tin flower, and shards of asbestos were embedded in the underside of the table. To the best of my knowledge, nobody was actually hurt by the explosion, but if there's anybody out there that was present on that night and remembers it then I'd love to hear from you. In fact, I'd love to hear anything! Pardon?



p.s.

The other members of the band at this time were: The Rev. B. Sprules Murfet (jugs, recorders, concertina, leg), 'Fingers' Bartram (guitar, mandolin, kazoo and vocals) and Fred Kettle (guitar, cornet, ukulele, harmonica, kazoo and vocals). I played guitar, washboards, harmonica, kazoo and ukulele and also contributed some vocals. I shall be returning to the doings of this motley crew from time to time - and I really would like to hear from anyone that remembers the band, or has any photographs or recordings.

Accordion Crimes

There's an old joke about jazz musician's hell that goes something like this - An old jazzer finally turns up his toes and soon finds himself in a long queue at the entrance to hell. Up ahead of him he recognises a whole bunch of guys that he's played with at on time or another who have shuffled off the mortal coil in recent years. He taps the shoulder of the guy in front of him and says "Hey man, do we get instruments in there?" "Yeah," replies the guy. "We even get a choice - banjo or accordion".

Like many musicians I had always hated both instruments. With hindsight I realise that there is something about banjos and accordions that tends to attract the efforts of some profoundly unmusical people - far more so than with almost any other instrument. It wasn't until I first heard the music of Sivuca in the case of the accordion and Bela Fleck in the case of the banjo, that I began to revise my prejudice. I'm still not a huge fan of the banjo although I do recognise that there are some fine musicians out there for whom it is the instrument of choice, but the accordion has risen greatly in my affections.

I first heard an album by Sivuca in the early seventies, when I was managing a record shop in West London. It was a Vanguard album, long since deleted, simply called 'Sivuca'. The cover picture, as I remember it, was of a short, stocky, white haired, white bearded man playing a nylon string guitar outdoors against a backdrop of hills. I was intrigued and so put it on the turntable for a listen. I was completely blown away by it, despite the fact that it soon became apparent that Sivuca's principal instrument was not the guitar but the accordion (or, strictly speaking, its Brazilian equivalent, the Sanfona). I no longer have that album as I literally played it to death! The surface of the disc actually turned white over the years and it became unlistenable to. I had, of course, made a cassette copy of the album but that finally died about five years ago, when the tape stretched beyond playability.

That album turned me on to two things and confirmed a third: I recognised the potential of the accordion for the first time, I became obsessed with the triangle (more of this anon) and I realised that whenever I heard Brazilian music I tended to like it (and more of this anon as well). I began to search for recordings by Sivuca, although mostly without much luck. He featured on a fine album by Dom Um Romão called 'Hotmosphere', and cropped up on the Paul Simon album "Still Crazy after All These Years" as the featured soloist on "I Do It For Your Love", but it was not until I went Brazil for the first time that I was able to seriously expand my collection of his work.

In the meantime, the next accordion revelation was Jack Emblow. By the early 80's I was running a jazz club. I had a resident trio and would book a different soloist every week. The bass chair was shared by the late John McCartney, John Rees Jones (until very recently Humphrey Lytletton's bassist) and Peter Morgan (a fine player who has disappeared off my radar, and whom I would love to catch up with again). Pete was always suggesting soloists to me and one day persuaded me to book the duo of Jack Emblow and trumpeter / flugelhornist Johny McLevey. All I knew about Emblow (or Jack Elbow as he was known in the trade) was that for years he had provided the accompaniment for The Cliff Adams Singers on BBC Radio's horrendous 'Sing Something Simple' programme. As you can imagine, I took a hell of a lot of persuading over that one. Needless to say, the gig itself was a revelation to me and I continued to book Jack on a regular basis until the club closed a few years later. He subsequently became a regular member of Martin Taylor's 'Spirit of Django' group for many years. These days I believe he is in semi-retirement but still doing the odd gig here and there, although I did find this clip of him playing with another regular at my jazz club - Harry Pitch -when I was trawling the internet. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt2kGY3lmSE

In recent years I have been introduced to the music of the great French / Italian accordionist Richard Galliano, Marc Berthoumieux (another French wizard) and a whole host of Brazilians, most notably Toninho Ferraguti, who I was lucky enough to meet in Brazil last year. You can find examples of all of these on Youtube:-
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIuGCZGfaBY
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VhuvkFZ1Hk
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vrFFMWTSNI

So - I rest my case for the accordion - and I haven't even touched on the concertina or the Melodeon as yet. Tomorrow maybe...

Sivuca links:-

www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1As5WXlTkI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sivuca

(My apologies for stealing the title of Annie Proulx's excellent novel for this piece.)

Gilberto Gil -The cultured Culture Minister

One morning a couple of weeks ago I was listening to The Today Programme on BBC Radio Four as I took my morning shower. The usual bunch of evasive politicians were busy ducking questions whilst simultaneously blowing their own trumpets and I had, as usual, stopped paying heed to them. Suddenly my attention was once again grabbed in a fine demonstration of that well known phenomenon known as 'cocktail party syndrome'. You know the one -you are in a room full of chattering people and all you are hearing is the general rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb of the crowd, when someone on the other side of the room whispers your name and you hear it immediately. Or, as in this case, someone mentions something that you are extremely interested in and the same thing happens. (Incidentally, to digress for a moment: I read somewhere that actors doing crowd scenes always use rhubarb rhubarb for working class crowds and sodawaterbottle sodawaterbottle for upper class crowds. So, given that we're talking about a cocktail party here - which is, let's face it, not the commonest form of working class entertainment - I suppose that should have read "...all you are hearing is the general sodawaterbottle sodawaterbottle sodawaterbottle of the crowd...")

The name that drew me back from my watery reverie was Gilberto Gil: currently Brazil's Minister of Culture and, since his emergence in the early sixties, one of that country's greatest singer / songwriter/ performers. He was being interviewed in his political capacity and was giving a most convincing performance. The interview was concluded with a reference to his music and they played part of a track from his most recent CD - 'Gil Luminoso' (http://www.drgrecords.com/). I had passed on tickets for his concert at The Barbican on the grounds that it was just Gil and his guitar and - much as I love his music - I really love the bands that he usually has with him. The cost of the tickets combined with the cost of travelling to London and back and the cost of overnight accommodation had made Mrs Voltarol and I decide against it. One brief scrap of song on the radio had me cursing for the rest of the week. I think that I had ordered the disc on line within two minutes of emerging from the shower. It has been played in this house at least once just about everyday since.

Gil is a fine example of what I was talking about in my last posting. He is nominally an MPB artist (Música Popular Brasileira) or 'pop' musician, yet his music is far from simplistic and his lyrics are frequently profound. He is as at home playing Reggae (he recorded with Bob Marley) as he is playing Forró (an accordion based musical form from North East Brazil) or Bob Dylan. He is great arranger who is constantly revamping his own back catalogue and he always has the absolute cream of the Brazilian musicians in his bands. But pare it all down to just Gil, his acoustic guitar and his own material and the result is sublime. It transcends all the categories and pigeon-holes. It's just music.

http://www.gilbertogil.com.br/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BAsica_Popular_Brasileira
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forr%C3%B3

Blue two and a half.

Speaking of Leigh Heggarty (as I was yesterday), he and I formed an acoustic guitar duo some twenty - odd years ago called 'The Blue Five'. How we ended up with this name escapes me now as not only were there not five of us but we didn't play blues either. We worked around West London and Buckinghamshire and confused many a folk club audience...and there was another anomaly: Leigh is essentialy a rock musician, I come from the jazz world and what we played definitely wasn't folk music. Our reportoire consisted of a mixture of standards, pop tunes and original compositions (all right -unoriginal compositions) although there was, come to think of it, one nominal blues in the set. This was the Spencer Williams composition 'Basin Street Blues', which was first made famous by the great Louis Armstrong on a 1927 recording. It goes without saying that our version bore no resemblance to Louis'. Our approach to all that we played was to try and forget about the theoretical classifications of 'rock', 'jazz', 'pop', 'folk' etcetera, but to treat it all simply as 'music'. (Mind you, Leigh came to visit me a few years after I had moved to the West Country and one evening we decided to revive the Blue Five in the saloon bar of my local pub. Present that evening was one of my neighbours who had recently been a dinner guest at our cottage. At the end of the evening he drew me to one side and said "I'd rather have your cooking than your music". Ho Hum. Incidentally the main difference between the Saloon bar and the Public bar of my local is defined by card games. In the Public they play Cribbage and in the Saloon they play Euchre.)

One of the things that attracts me to Brazilian music is a natural tendency amongst most Brazilian musicians to ignore the 'pigeon holes' of musical category and to play across the boundaries. Although Brazil has spawned a mass of musical genres it is not at all uncommon for a musician that is noted for one particular musical form to perform equally well in others. But I think that's the subject for my next posting.

"The time has come", the Walrus said...

Well, having set this thing up I now need to think about its contents. There is a certain feeling of "Who put you on the thing in the first place?", to quote from an old Bill Cosby routine. I have tended to the opinion that Blogs were, by and large, somewhat self-indulgent and pointless things, but then it occurred to me that although that may well be the case about this Blog, the only people who are going to follow it regularly are the ones that are interested. So I'm only wasting my own time.

I have been closely involved with music for most of my life, both as a practitioner and as an enthusiast. Along the way I've met and/or been involved with a whole raft of interesting and -occasionally - famous people. One of those was the late - and to my mind great -George Melly, whose wonderful book 'Owning Up' has been something of an inspiration for these pages. I should hasten to add that I was never particularly a fan of Melly's music : it's his abilities as a writer that impressed me. I have never read anything so funny or so true as the aforementioned volume. Having said that, the real culprit here is probably my friend and one time musical cohort, Leigh Heggarty, whose excellent Blog - Leigh's mad world of guitars - has persuaded me that this is a worthwhile thing to do. So there you are - it's his fault.

Along the way you may expect the odd musical recommendation. I'm an habitual proselytiser and this is the perfect medium for that habit. You may also expect the occasional burst of enthusiasm for a book (see above), concert reviews, food talk, wine waffling and general observations about Life, the Universe and Everything (aka '42'). Who gives a stuff about what I think? Well - nobody, probably. But if there's anybody out there that does, then you'll come back to these pages. And if you don't come back to these pages, well - no harm done.

Small beginings

Well - I've made a start. Just setting this thing up as taken all my spare time for today. I'll rest on my laurels happy in the knowledge that tomorrow I can just start writing.