A Conversation with Carrie Mann - part one

Picture by Mike Norfolk

Carrie Mann is a Cornwall-based singer whose Carrie Mann Jazz Quartet has been playing successfully around the South West for the last six or seven years. I have known her since she sat in with my band one night, not long before she started her own group, and thought she would make for an interesting interview. In fact, our conversation went on far longer than I’d expected but for the best possible reasons. Once we got started we just couldn’t stop. The results appear below and in the next posting


Voltarol: What is the very first music you can remember hearing?

Carrie: Oh gosh…I was brought up going to church so that must have been a big influence…It was a Catholic church – fairly boring hymns, mostly in the minor key…never thrilled me unless it was done beautifully, frankly. But we went to a fairly modern church and they started bringing in some good ‘sing along’ songs and I remember that being an influence….I remember that feeling of everybody in the room singing all together and I loved it. I still do. I love that element, and it’s the only part of the whole ‘church’ thing that I would stand by and enjoy. If I could go to church and just sing all the time for the whole hour and then come out again I’d be quite happy. As for other styles of music…ah, dear me… um… musical films?...definitely musical films that stand out as a child, even the Elvis Presley movies that were being re-run constantly…and Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin…and Gene Kelly! All those musicals. I remember a rainy Saturday afternoon – loving it if one of those films was on. That would be one of the favourite moments of my childhood.

V: But you pin down the very first things to make you go “Ooh! What’s this?” That would be the church music?

C: Yeah…I think so…I guess that’s the first music I was actually involved in making. I was…

V: (interrupts) um…All right, I’ll give you my guilty secret. The first thing I remember - and I’m told I cried when it wouldn’t come back on the radio again - is ‘The Teddy Bears Picnic’…

C: (laughs)

V: …So I’m talking about the real fundamental…

C: Well we did have…we didn’t play music much at home. My Mum and Dad didn’t listen to records. Mum occasionally had the radio on when she was cooking the Sunday lunch and that was the only time we had music on in the house. So I wasn’t exposed to it from any other angle except going to church on Sunday morning…and what the television threw at us…and then I had older brothers and sisters listening to David Bowie and Thin Lizzy.

V. So what age were you then, when you first thought “Ooh, this is good – this sound around me” – that sort of thing?

C: ……I don’t think so much that it was the music. I think it was the being involved in the…

V: (interrupts) well…your connection with music…that sort of thing.

C: Four or five…something like that.

V: So what did you listen to when you got into your teens then?

C: Hmmm…I was a bit of an odd one…all my friends were listening to Duran Duran and Madonna …and Wet Wet Wet and all those bands that were around, and I had a Sony Walkman and I’d disappear off and wouldn’t tell anybody what tape I had in it ‘cause it was actually The Everly Brothers! It’s not something I’m particularly proud of but at the time – and I remember - I was twelve years old, and I know that because I can picture where I was living at the time and what school I was going to – and I loved the harmonies. They had a different style to the other harmony work that I had heard in the past – which I now recognise as the usual third / fifth…you know…

V: Yeah, but that was actually part of a tradition which came out of ‘Old Timey’ music, of American Country music…the ‘high lonesome’ sound. I think they got that from The Louvin Brothers…if you check that out…You know, there’s a thread there, of music which is not nearly as commercial as it appears on the surface. If you like, it’s a polished version of something that is much more heartfelt.

C: Yeah…and I liked the lyrics as well, well – some of the lyrics – some of them are a bit twee – but I think I quite liked the simplicity of the lyrics. I didn’t like…’cause I was a teenager in the eighties…I spent all my teenage years in the eighties, so if you think of what I had exposed to me from a Pop point of view…

V: Yep!...(laughs)…You were bucking the trend more than somewhat!

C: The other one was I was a secret fan of Karen Carpenter…um…and also Elvis, and this was at a time when Elvis had stopped being cool…very much so…in the seventies – he died in 1976?

V: Something like that.

C: Seventy six, seventy seven…but of course it was the fat, Vegas, burger eating Elvis that everyone remembered…and he was no longer…he went through the uncool phase. And then later, in the nineties, with the re release of his ‘A Little Less Conversation’, people started admitting – “Oh, you know I’ve always liked Elvis. But I was listening to – particularly his ballads and I remember – and I’ve recently found out – one of my favourite tunes when I was twelve years old was a song called ‘You Don’t Know Me’ –which was written by Ray Charles. And I was only aware of it because Elvis Presley recorded it as a beautiful blues ballad. And I loved it and I think, really, for a twelve or thirteen year old I had quite unusual tastes.

V: I’ll go along with that! So – who or what first inspired you to make music – to actually have a go at it yourself?

C: I’m really not sure where that came from…um…’cause no one in my family…that I was aware of…There was no music in the house…just occasionally, teenage brothers or sisters would play David Bowie records or that sort of thing, but there was nobody having a go at doing it for themselves…um…except my mum was in the amateur dramatics…the local amateur dramatics. Seeing her up on stage acting, so being the centre of attention and making a show of herself, didn’t seem unusual to me because my mum was always doing it…and I also found out that she used to sing…in a kind of Beverly Sisters style band when she was training as a nurse when she was very young, when she was about sixteen. Ah…but I got a guitar when I was about seven years old and I don’t remember asking for one. Actually, I think it was my brother’s cast-off – just a little old cheap guitar and I started learning how to play D chords and C chords and G chords…and the amount of songs you can get through and sing along to just knowing four chords is quite astounding. So that’s what I was doing at the age of seven, eight, nine. You know, my guitar playing hasn’t improved since then. (Laughs) It’s got stuck!

V: I was going to ask you if you’d tried your hand at any instruments before you started singing but er…

C: My parents got sick of me picking up instruments, begging them to buy me a certain instrument…and I’d stick with it for about four months and then get bored and want something else.

V: So you were kind of looking for a voice or…or…any means of expression, without realising that you’d got it all the time.

C: Yes…and also my passion…the one instrument that I really wanted to play – but I think my problem is: I started – I was in a recorder ensemble at school – I think most young girls were – and I went through the normal descant, treble, tenor – and bass recorder, which is quite unusual – probably because I was tall and I could actually hold it…um…and then I went on to the flute and then on to saxophone, all the time I had guitar as well, and all the time I was saying “ Can I play piano please Mum?”. And they bought me the recorders and they bought me the flute and the saxophone and they bought me a guitar. And each one – I’d pick it up, put it back down after six months –frustrated and bored and not really dedicated enough to get stuck in. So I don’t blame them for saying ‘no’ to the piano(!) which is a huge piece of furniture in a small house when you’ve got loads of kids running around…so they drew the line at the piano…but that’s still the instrument that I’ve always wanted – and I’ve got one now, and I do sit and play it and I should get better at it but at least I can now accompany myself and sing…and I’m quite enjoying that.

V: So…when was it that you first thought – “Actually, I wanna sing”?

C: I’d always wanted to sing but no one wanted to listen!

V: Right…

C: Honestly…(laughs) I had people tell me to…my Mum says that she remembers – at bedtime, you know kids like to leave their door slightly open? And – “Good night”, put the light out – the normal night time routines and…when she went to bed a couple of hours later she would walk past my door and I was not asleep. I was lying in bed at the age of six, singing away to myself…um…there aren’t many six year old children that have nice voices…if you think about it…except for the odd one or two that you see on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, and it’s still a bit…not a proper voice.

V: No. And it’s mostly mimicry as well, isn’t it?

C: Yeah

V: Whatever song that they’ve learnt from something they like, they sing all the inflections and the accent of the singer, and they don’t sing in their own voice at that stage.

C: No, and I didn’t. And…um…and also I was dancing as well. I did normal ballet, modern, jazz and tap dancing so three or four nights a week I was doing that after school…and we would have annual shows – where one of us would audition to try and get one of the leads…and I auditioned every year and never got given a lead! (Laughs) um…So - obviously...I don’t know whether it was just the nerves, where nothing came out or whether it took for me to mature physically for my voice to mature as well. But eventually, when I was about seventeen years old, someone said “You’ve got quite a nice voice, haven’t you.” And that was the first time anyone had ever said it to me. But I had been singing to myself, thinking “Well, no one else is gonna listen. I’ll just sing along and keep myself happy”. (Laughs)

V: So, you had the drive to do it…

C: Yeah, but no one wanted to hear it…

V: Well – I see parallels with myself here – wanting to be a performer at that stage, before wanting to be a musician. You know. It didn’t matter as long as I was up there in front of an audience - that was great. And then there came a point at which it suddenly went the other way and I just wanted to make music, and the performance side of it…I lost me bottle!

C: Yeah! Yeah!...There’s a fine line…When you’re a child there is no fear. But when you get older…of course…Every adult fears humiliation. Nobody wants to put themselves on a stage. And every time we do it we are opening ourselves up to that ultimate rejection – the Boo!

V: Well, I actually experienced that at the age of about thirteen. You can read about it on the blog. (See: The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd... )

C: Thirteen! That’s such an impressionable age!

V: And…um…It wasn’t me playing. I was miming playing the piano. It was a sketch I’d worked out and auditioned for the school concert, but by the time I was half way through the audition I suddenly thought – “This ain’t gonna work”. But by then it was too late. It was – “No Lad. You’ll do it”.

C: Oh no!

V: But I learnt quite early on that you can actually come out the other side of the rejection and you don’t actually die or anything…

C: (Laughs)

V: …and I was bomb proof as a performer until I was in my early twenties.

C: Yeah! That’s good…I mean…What’s the worse that can happen? Where do you go from there? It can only get better, surely?

V: But it wasn’t until I had finished in the first band, the Jug band…for me…I wasn’t the greatest musician in the world but I was the front man, the performer…and it was only when I came out of that that I started thinking…you know…I think I could be a musician if I worked at it. And my character changed. As you say, you find your voice, because at that point I was playing guitar and penny whistle and harmonica and kazoo and swanee whistle and all sorts of rubbish.

C: Yes, but you’re searching…something in here is for me…something in this whole array of things that you can do is gonna suit me – is gonna click!

V: Yeah…and when you get it, it all kind of focuses…All right then! Next Question. Did you have any kind of flirtation with the Pop or commercial world?

C: I did actually…It’s funny…I don’t often think about this…um…I had a boy friend when I was nineteen years old and he was desperate to be…well…he wanted to be what ‘Coldplay’ is now…that very, very commercial, also cutting edge, cool, cool kind of…Oh…Oasis! I knew I’d get there. Yeah, my boyfriend at the time wrote songs, played the guitar and – I don’t know if I should say this – Oh, I won’t give his name(!) – sung badly. Didn’t have a natural voice but he was a great front man. \some of the songs he was writing were pretty good and he put a band together and I kind of came in as a -not quite backing vocalist but…female vocal alongside – I don’t know if you remember, Deacon Blue had two vocalists? Female vocal wasn’t lead and she wasn’t backing. She was somewhere in the middle there…like, second vocalist I suppose…um…and we really enjoyed that and we had some good stuff. We had some good music –and we had some fun recording in the studio. Once it got out to the ‘doing a gig’ stage, those sorts of gigs are not my cup of tea at all. You know, the typical grungy, student, kind of ‘pay to play’ gigs that there were at the time. They were in Birmingham…there were a couple of trips to London. We played The Orange club – you know, where you actually pay to play. You pay your forty quid or something…and when you’re nineteen years old, forty quid is pretty much a week’s wages if you’re working then. That was a lot of money and it was a big commitment…and you had to do all your own publicity too, you know, get your own ‘rent-a-crowd’ to come along and pay to come in. It was hard! But my heart wasn’t really in it. It certainly wasn’t the direction I wanted to go. Not at all…um…and just naturally the relationship broke up and he continued with the band. I don’t believe anything ever happened…but they changed their style very much after I left. They went more ‘punk rock’ than they were when I was with them…It was still melodic but…No. Yes. But that’s kind of on the Pop…kind of ‘trying to get a record contract’ side of things…um… And then the very next thing I did was…I answered an advert in The Stage newspaper. Somebody wanting a singer to go and work on one of the ships sailing out of Hull – with a piano player –and I answered the advert, sent in a tape of my voice – me singing a song – and I was invited to go and meet up with him and run through a few songs to see how we clicked as people, because we’d be spending a lot of time together…um…and I got that contract with him and that was good fun. So – we did six months in total –two months on and one month off, two months on and one month off. And that was working on North Sea Ferries in the piano lounge, so that was my first commercial booking…And that was with Dave Meadowcroft Junior – he was on piano…Some musicians that you meet in all these walks of life…I worked with him, I think it was about six months I worked with him every single night and we were staying in the boat and sharing accommodation. We were like brother and sister and we got on really well – we were a great team. And I think it was the fifth month in – you know what it’s like when you’re with someone 24/7 and you think you know somebody really well? I found out piano wasn’t his first instrument. And I remember, I said “What’s your first instrument?” “Well, it’s not piano. I play a bit of bass guitar. I’m better on bass guitar than piano, but that’s not my first instrument either. Clarinet and saxophone would be my first.” And it turned out that I’d been working alongside this guy who, whatever he turned his hand to, he was a fantastic musician. And I was very lucky. I learnt quite a lot from him. He taught me how to understand chord charts and work through an arrangement, and read an A/ B/AA/B and actually follow it all, you know, so I wasn’t standing there waiting for someone to give me the nod to come back in. I knew when to come back in. He showed me that sort of thing…but…yeah, that was my first experience of meeting and working with what I call a real professional musician. Before then it had been other students just having a go like I had been.

Continued in the next posting...

Carrie's Windows Live Space is at http://carriemannjazz.spaces.live.com/default.aspx

Woke up this morning…part two

I’ve delayed this section for so long now that, before you read any further, I suggest that you go back to Woke up this morning…part 1 to get up to speed! All done? OK. Now read on –

Having renewed my friendship with Paul Marsden since writing part one, I can tell you that the recording of black Southern convicts that had such an impact on us was Angola Prisoner’s Blues. We were completely blown away by Robert Pete Williams and Hogman Maxey, and began to realise that the blues was very much a living thing. Hitherto I think we had looked on it as form of music that had run its course and had been absorbed into jazz – after all, most of the stuff that we had been listening too so far was from the twenties and thirties. Yet here was the absolute and undeniable real thing and the recordings were made between 1952 and 1960! Here's Robert Pete Williams performing 'Old Girl at my Door' from a 1971 documentary film about him.

When Muff and I met Max Emmons a few years later we were much taken with the fact that he could (and in fact still can) perform a version of ‘Stagolee’ that was strongly influenced by Hogman Maxey. It was to become a featured solo in Jugular Vein performances.

Muff was by now working for BEA and as a consequence was able to get cheap flights. He would frequently fly up to Glasgow, where he had discovered a second hand record store that he thought worth the 700 or so miles round trip on his day off. We thought so too when he came back with treasures like a Blind Lemon Jefferson collection or Preachers and Congregations. We were (and remain) avowed atheists, but found the religious material deeply fascinating. It seemed to shed some light on the passion that we found in much black music, and the narrow divide between the sacred and the secular.

By the beginning of 1962 Muff, Paul and I were all working for a living and were beginning to attend jazz gigs and folk clubs. The blues strayed into both of these areas, with the folkies tending to favour the original country blues whilst the jazzers were showing interest in a more recent phenomenon – electric blues. The brief Trad boom was drawing to a close and the hipper youths were beginning to gravitate towards modern jazz. This divide was reflected in clothing. The traddies still tended to favour ‘rave’ gear – tight jeans, baggy sweaters and eccentric headgear, any or all of which could be decorated with the CND symbol, whilst those who favoured modern jazz (or ‘mods’, as they were called) went for a much sharper look -Italianate suits and chisel toed shoes with big heels. Those of us that strayed into both camps tended to wear denim shirts with button down collars over thin black roll necks, cord or denim jeans, and donkey jackets, reefer jackets or duffle coats. The CND symbol was present in the more discreet form of a lapel badge (as opposed to the 'whitewash on a bowler hat' with optional arrow piercing' approach of some of the traddies).

These prototype mods already tended to favour black music, particularly soul jazz (not to be confused with the soul and Tamla music scene that was to emerge a year or so later). They also favoured what was beginning to be referred to as Rhythm and Blues or ‘R and B’. The Pye record company was shrewd enough to pick up on this trend and started its own R and B label which issued many great albums and singles by artists such as Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley. We were immediately grabbed by Muddy Waters, and totally blown away by Muddy Waters at Newport, 1960 when it was released here. Here's a clip from that performance.



I abandoned my nylon strung guitar in favour of a cello-bodied model with steel strings that to my mind looked a lot like the one that Muddy was playing in the sleeve photo. It was at this time that I first got into blues harmonica seriously, and heard James Cotton, Sonny Boy Williamson and the great Little Walter. Here are some clips - first James Cotton performing 'Rocket 88' -


and here's Sonny Boy Williamson. I'm pretty sure that this clip was recorded at The Fairfield Hall, Croydon in 1964, during one of the American Folk Blues tours organised in this country by Giorgio Gomelsky, first manager of The Rolling Stones.If this is the case then I was in the audience!

Finally here's Little Walter playing a classic harmonica blues that will be familiar to anyone who listened regularly to John Peel's radio show -


I bought a Hohner diatonic harp (or ‘gob iron’ as it was charmingly named) and had soon added to the number of things that I did which irritated my father. As I was flatly forbidden to play the thing at home I took to carrying it with me wherever I went, and pulling it out for a quick tootle whenever I had a moment. I could pick out simple tunes without too much problem but, try as I might, I just couldn’t make that wonderful blues noise…

Then we got wind of a new place in Ealing and the world tilted on its axis.

I don’t remember how we found out about The Ealing Club. It might have been an ad in Melody Maker or a review in Jazz News, or it might have been word of mouth from one of our hipper acquaintances, but however it happened we were all eager to go and check it out at the first opportunity. ‘We’ was the usual suspects – Muff, Paul and myself plus one Ian Fenwick (known as ‘Fen’), who was an ex-school friend of mine who wasn’t quite such a music nut as the rest of us but did share our sense of humour. He was also something of a mechanical whizz, as well as having been my fellow enthusiast in the manufacture of a variety of amateur explosives and model aeroplanes a few years previously. Fen was the proud owner of an ancient car and what’s more was happy to drive us all down the Uxbridge Road to Ealing Broadway most Saturday nights for many months to come (There was only one other thing that competed for our Saturday night affections at this time and that was a television programme called That Was the Week That Was - or TW3 as it soon became known. I can’t remember another TV programme that ever held such sway over teenagers as to actually keep them in on a Saturday night, but it was required viewing and as well as being satirical and irreverent, also had a damn fine house band.)

The Ealing Club was located beneath an ABC (Aerated Bread Company) tea rooms, opposite Ealing Broadway Station. It was a most unpromising location for what was to become the birthplace of British Rock and I can remember being vaguely dismayed to think that some English people were going to attempt to recreate something as quintessentially American as THE BLUES in a place as quintessentially English as a tearoom! However, my fears were soon put to rest as we descended into the vaulted cellar and shoved our way to the bar through the heaving, sweaty, Twisting hordes as Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated belted out “I’ll Put a Tiger in Your Tank” at what seemed then to be an earth-shattering volume. It was…fantastic!

I can’t remember what the exact line-up was that night, other than Alexis (known as ‘The Benevolent Gaucho’ because of his Zapata moustache and Mediterranean complexion combined with a more or less permanent amiable grin) on guitar and vocals and Cyril (Squirrel) Davies on harmonica and vocals, but over the coming months we were to see a whole hoard of soon-to-be legendary musicians grace that dank stage. We saw drummers Charlie Watts and Ginger Baker, bassist Jack Bruce, saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith (christened ‘The Benevolent Egg’ by us because of his bald head and to match Alexis’ moniker) and organist/saxophonist Graham Bond. Once or twice we saw Chris Barber's (see It's Trad, dad) long-time trumpeter Pat Halcox making an unlikely but excellent appearance with the group. A certain Brian Jones was also to be seen occasionally, sitting in with the band on slide guitar. Here's a taste of Alexis and Co in full flight, taken from a Studio recording from 1962 (although it purported to be from the Marquee Club, where the band had also acquired a residency)

and heres another from the same album -


In fact, a whole roster of the great and the good (or should that be ‘bad’) of the British rock scene passed through that club, including Paul Jones, Eric Clapton, Eric Burdon and Rod Stewart but I can’t honestly say that I remember seeing them. There were, however, two guys that we saw on a regular basis who would often take to the stage during the interval break. They were Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. It has to be said that at first, the audiences could hardly contain their indifference for these putative Rolling Stones, but as the weeks went by they began to command more attention. Soon they were being invited up to sit in with the band. I was ostentatiously fiddling with my ever-present harmonica during one interval break when I felt a tap on the shoulder. I looked round to see Mr Jagger, who asked me if he could borrow the gob iron as he was going to sit in with the band in the second set. (I think that Cyril must have left the band by this time as I’m sure that Mick wouldn’t have had the brass neck to play blues harp with Cyril on the same stage.) I duly handed over the harmonica – and that was the last I saw of it. I didn’t manage to connect with him after the set had finished and I never saw him at the Ealing Club again. So – if you’re reading this Mick – please can I have my harmonica back? I think it was an ‘A’.

A slight change of plan...

The Tony Oreshko Trio

Left to right: Tony Oreshko, James Goodwin, Doug Kyle

The next phase of autobiographical burblings has been temporarily postponed due to unforeseen circumstances. I was due to deal with the second blues phase next (for the first phase see Woke up this morning... ) but my newly rediscovered buddy, Paul, whom I have been checking details and confirming dates with, has just done his knee a severe mischief and is, at the time of writing, in hospital. As a result I shall pick up the story again in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I went to see my old friend Tony Oreshko playing with his new trio the other night and thoroughly enjoyed both sets. I have known Tony for about ten years now and had the pleasure of recording him when he was playing regularly with fellow guitarist Dave Lunnis under the name of Boulevard Django. The new trio features James Goodwin on second guitar(s) and luthier Doug Kyle on double bass. Tony is a fine musician whose starting point is the influence of Django Rheinhardt, but his personal musical tastes are much wider than than the world of gypsy jazz and this is reflected in his playing. His formidable technique is deployed with wit and style and his solos produce a - seemingly - effortless flow of ideas. I say 'seemingly' because his is the art that conceals art and I know just how much dedication is required to achieve that kind of standard.

James Goodwin provides a solid rhythmic back drop for the unit and is also no mean soloist himself. He alternates between steel and nylon string guitars and provides a constantly changing texture to the music. Doug Kyle's double bass supplies the bedrock of the trio and his warm sound and excellent intonation give it great stability. Doug is actually better known in the South West as an instrument builder. He built three out of the four instruments used by the group (the exception being James' nylon stringed instrument). It might just be my imagination but I'm sure this gives an extra degree of cohesion to the sound.

The group perform at festivals all over Europe but can also be heard fairly frequently in the South West (all three musicians are based in Devon), and if you want to keep up with their activities you can visit Tony's web site for further details. The site has a number of MP3 soundclips of his work, playing both jazz and classical guitar. He has also written several interesting essays about some of the lesser known guitarists whom he feels should be more widely appreciated. Go and have a look. It's well worth a visit.

I'm taking a short break now, so the next posting will be in about ten days time, when you will learn why Mick Jagger still owes me a harmonica!

Folk me sideways part 2

Folk at the Angel, 1962. The guitarist on the left is Voltarol (long before he needed to use it). The guitarist on the right is Paul Marsden

It occurred to me when I was jotting down some notes for this posting that war toys do not necessarily lead to jingoistic bellicosity. The general ‘p.c.’ position is that if you give children guns to play with then they will inevitably lean towards violence as they grow up. As a child I was the proud possessor of hundreds of toy soldiers, tanks and artillery, as well as model war planes and a toy fort. With my younger brother, G the D, we staged endless elaborate battles that would last for hours at a time, yet when I hit fifteen I joined the CND and adopted a pacifistic stance and when G the D hit fifteen he put a brick through the window of an army recruiting office. (With hindsight he agrees that this was not the most apposite way to protest against violence but it had seemed like a good idea at the time.)

Meanwhile, back at the Hayes Young Socialists, I had been delighted to learn of the impending Hayes and Harlington Centre 42 Festival of the Arts. Of particular interest to me was the array of folk musicians, who were to perform in some of the local pubs including The Angel at Hayes End, which was just within walking distance for me. I saw Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl, A.L. (Bert) Lloyd, The Haverim Trio and Bob Davenport all in the course of one week. Better still, because I was running the door it cost me nothing, a fact which set me thinking…

Here’s McColl and Seeger performing ‘Van Deimen’s Land.


McColl and Seeger were hugely influential and dominated the folk music scene at this time. Their series of ‘Radio Ballads’ which began in 1958 had had a great impact, although McColl’s insistence that people should only perform songs relevant to their own culture was ultimately to have a fairly destructive effect on the clubs. It’s interesting that, at the time, we thought MacColl to be far more ‘authentic’ a performer than Bert Lloyd, not knowing that he was actually an actor called James Miller who had reinvented himself and had taken up song writing. Bert, who we thought to be far more of a middle class figure, had actually been a sheep shearer in Australia and had worked aboard whalers. Here he is revisiting his shearing days…

And here he is singing ‘Two Magicians’, a song which was subsequently to become a much requested part of Martin Carthy’s repertoire.


Bob Davenport is an ex-pat Geordie who has lived for many years in north London but has always mostly sung material from the North East. There seems to be very little information about him on the web and hardly any performances. I did find this however, which I have posted before as an example of the singer Lal Waterson (see Little Jazz Birds and other related species). Bob’s is (fairly obviously) the second voice. Contrary to the notes that accompany the clip I’m pretty sure that Bob is not playing guitar as I saw him many times and he always performed a Capella when not performing with his band, The Rakes.


As for the The Haverim Trio, they were three Jewish musicians who performed traditional Jewish songs and had a distinctly Klezmerish feel to their playing. Alas, I can find no reference to them on line.

When the Festival finished it left a bit of a gap in our lives and we soon started an informal gathering at The Angel once a week, where we would take it in turns to get up and perform songs.(see photograph at top of page. See also 5th paragraph of It's trad dad) ‘We’ was my friend Paul and I, along with various other CNDers, Young Socialists and the like. Unfortunately we (a) soon wore out our welcome and (b) rapidly became bored with our somewhat limited repertoire (which, let’s face it, probably had a lot to do with the fact that we (a)).

A plan was formulated and we decided to try and run a proper folk club. We eventually found premises at The Hillingdon Arms, named the enterprise ‘The Peasants Folk Club’ and booked our first act. I can’t now remember who actually performed there on the first night, but Paul and I were the resident ‘artists’ and the usual suspects from The Angel reprised their performances, this time under the grand heading of ‘floor singers’. I do know that during its relatively brief life, the club was host to Bob Davenport, The Friends of Old Timey Music, The Haverim Trio, as well as Dave Cousins and Tony Hooper -later the basis of The Strawberry Hill Boys who in turn became The Strawbs. A ‘name’ act appeared once a month and the rest of the time it was ‘singer’s night’.

We had heard, liked and got the contact details of Bob Davenport and The Haverim Trio during the Centre 42 week. I don’t remember how we located the other acts but it could well have been through the Melody Maker Folk Forum. As it happened, The Friends of Old Timey Music were locally based. At the time the group consisted of husband and wife Tam and Di Murrel plus one Bill Boot on mandolin. Di sang lead and Tam played guitar - and also banjo, if my memory serves me. They played – as the name implies – American ‘old timey’ music. The Murrels lived on a narrow boat on the Grand Union canal at nearby Cowley. (Whilst I was working on this posting I used the web to track down the Murrels. They have not made music for many years but retained their interest in canal life. They built up and ran a fleet of canal craft, subsequently selling up and moving their business to France, where they now spend much of their time, running instructional courses in canal boat handling, as well as marketing a range of ‘how to’ books and DVDs. You can find them at http://web.mac.com/tamanddi/iWeb/bargehandling.com/T%20%26%20D.Murrell%27s%20bargehandling.com.html).

‘The Peasants’ didn’t run for very long but it became the model for many other music club ventures. Once I’d got to grips with the ‘mountain and Mohamed’ principle there was no looking back, and until very recently my default position has been – ‘is there anywhere near me where I can regularly hear the music that I want to hear? No? Then I’d better start a club or organise a concert’. These ventures have always been for pleasure and never for profit and in fact over the years they’ve cost me quite a bit of money, but I’ve never once regretted any of them. However, I have to admit that Mrs Voltarol did breathe a sigh of relief when I finally hung up my promoter’s hat.

Incidentally, the ‘Paul’ that I frequently refer to is Paul Marsden. I hadn’t been in contact with him since the early seventies but thanks to the wonder of the web we have been back in contact in recent weeks. These days he is a professional website designer on the brink of retirement, whose personal web site covers (inevitably) some of the same material as this one. You can find him here. Look under 'Paul who?' for music stuff.

In the next posting I'm going to double back on the story and pick up the thread of the Blues.

Folk me sideways part 1

In September of 1961 I left school. I had returned after the summer holidays for my GCE ‘O’ level year and had been summoned to the headmaster’s office. I was by now an active CND member and Committee of 100 supporter and this fact had come to his attention. Furthermore, I was now wearing a CND badge to school, which was guaranteed to cause grief. It did. There was a short discussion during which the headmaster suggested that I remove the badge without further ado and I suggested that this was unlikely to happen and he suggested that if I didn’t remove it I should go home and I said “Goodbye” and walked out of school, never to return.

To say that my father was not pleased would be something of an understatement. After much shouting and threatening I was duly despatched to the local careers advice officer, who frowned at my CND badge and asked me about my hobbies and interests. “Music” I said, “art, literature and drama”. He pondered this for a minute or two, jotted a couple of notes on a pad, pushed said pad to one side, folded his hands and pronounced sentence. “Tell me” he enquired, “have you ever thought about the army?” I got up and left without bothering to reply.

By the Wednesday of the following week I had found myself a job with a literary...ish connection. I was due to start work the following Monday for W. H. Smith’s as a trainee assistant manager on their Uxbridge Underground Station book and paper stall, at the princely wage of £4. 10 shillings per week. Of this I would pay £3 a week for my keep and the rest was mine to forge a life with. On the Thursday I learnt that the film Jazz on a Summer's Day was showing at a nearby cinema and managed to persuade my mother to advance me some of the wages that would be mine at the end of the following week. I spent the money on three consecutive nights watching the movie and came to the conclusion that life might not be so bad…The downside to this jazz feast was that it involved first sitting through Raising the Wind, an appalling sub -‘Carry On’ type British film comedy set in a music school and starring Kenneth Williams and James Robertson Justice. The upside was that I got to hear and see the likes of Jimmy Giuffre, Jim Hall, Bob Brookmeyer, Chico Hamilton, Anita O'Day and Thelonious Monk every night for three days. (It never occurred to me at the time that I should not bother with the second feature – however bad it was. I had, after all, paid for it.) Here are some clips (from the main feature!)

Here's the opening sequence with the Jimmy Giuffre Three - Giuffre, Jim Hall and Bob Brookmeyer - playing 'The Train and the River'


Here's Thelonious Monk with 'Blue Monk'


and here's The Chico Hamilton Quintet playing 'Blue Sands'



By way of contrast I had also become a firm fan of The Temperance Seven (see Pop and me). I think that it was the Hayes branch of the YCND who promoted a concert featuring them at a local school. It was certainly through fellow members that I heard about it. With my friend Paul I had founded the Hillingdon branch of the YCND but its membership had been small. We had amalgamated with the Hayes branch having met up with a lot of them on that year’s Aldermaston March and I had made a lot of new friends, many of whom were into both ‘trad’ and folk music. One or two of the hipper ones were also into modern jazz. Suddenly I was mixing with people of my own age who shared my musical interest and my politics.

I think that the ‘Temps’ gig was the first proper music concert (we had not yet learnt to call them ‘gigs’) that I ever attended. I had, by this time, joined the Jazz Book Club and I remember somewhat pretentiously taking my latest purchase along (I think it might have been Barry Ulanov’s ‘The Jazz Handbook’) and getting the band to sign it for me. The uniform cover design for the series consisted of the title of the book printed over a collage of cartoon instruments – saxophone, trumpet, trombone, drums etc. - and each member of the band signed over the appropriate instrument. It makes me squirm more than some what to think of it now, but I was delighted at the time. The novelty must have worn off a long time ago because I can’t for the life of me remember what I did with it. My remaining Jazz Book Club books went to the charity shop about three years ago and that one wasn’t among them.

My interest in folk music continued to grow, spurred on by a combination of my regular dips into the Topic Records catalogue and my newfound friendships. There was also a growing ‘can-do’ attitude, born initially from the idea of promoting fund-raising concerts for the cause. I attended a number of CND benefit concerts around this time at venues ranging from The Albert Hall, Kensington Gore (home of the Promenade Concerts) to The Albert Hall, Hayes (home of the Hayes and Harlington Spiritualist Society). It was at the latter venue that I first heard Louis Killen in person, having previously bought some of his EPs of Tyneside and Northumbrian songs. At the former I got my first taste of George Melly and also of ‘Professor' Bruce Lacey and The Alberts (more of them later).

Around about this time I also joined the Hayes Young Socialists and started to attend meetings. It was through the YS connection that I was elected as a representative to Southall Trades Council to help in the setting up of Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42 Festival in Hayes. This in turn would shunt me sideways into setting up my first folk club…

To be continued...

Dorival Caymmi 1914 - 2008

I got an email from my son in Brazil on Saturday, telling me that the legendary Brazilian singer and composer Dorivall Caymmi had died that morning. Given that he was 94 I suppose it was not exactly an unexpected passing but it was certainly a significant one. He was a hugely influential figure who apart from creating some wonderful music was to a large degree responsible for shaping the image of his native state of Bahia. He even appears as a character in some of the novels by his great friend, the writer Jorge Amado, notably in 'Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands'

Caymii was responsible for some of my favourite music. His 'Promessa de Pescador' (Promise of a Fisherman) was a cornerstone of Sergio Mendes' groundbreaking and innovative 1971 album 'Primal Roots'. João Gilberto (see previous posting) also recorded many of his songs, notably 'O Samba de Minha Terra', 'Doralice' and 'Rosa Morena', thus introducing them to a wider audience. However, most people probably became acquainted with his work originally because Carmen Miranda sang one of his songs in a 1939 Brazilian film 'Banana da Terra'. Here she is performing 'O Que É Que A Baiana Tem?'


Here by contrast is 'Doralice' performed by the singer and pianist Eliane Elias in 2005



and here is João Gilberto performing 'Rosa Moreno' in Argentina in 2000



Dorival Caymmi could also have featured in my May posting, Keeping it in the family, as his three children all became musicians and have achieved fame in their own right. Daughter Nana Caymmi has had a long career as a singer, including a period of involvement with the Tropicalia movement of the sixties. Here is a video of her performing Milton Nascimento's beautiful song 'Ponto de Areia' in 1985


Danilo Caymmi is a singer, guitarist, flautist and arranger who is perhaps less well known than his sister and his other brother but never the less worked with some of the best in the business. Here he is singing 'Felicidade' with its composer Tom Jobim at the Montreal Jazz Festival, I would guess, some time in the eighties.



Dori Caymmi is probably the most well known member of the family outside of Brazil, having translocated to Los Angeles at the end of the eighties, where he has worked with Dionne Warwick, Branford Marsalis, John Patitucci, Herbie Mann, Larry Coryell and Toots Thielmans, as well as almost every Brazilian artist you can think of! He is a fine singer and guitarist as well as being a first rate arranger. Here he is playing one of his father's compositions, 'É Doce Morrer do Mar' .Unfortunately the video footage is someone's 'visual interpretation'...



Finally, Here's a clip of Dorival himself performing 'O que é que a Bahiana tem', the song that helped launch his - and Carmen Miranda's career.


Well, this is a rather poor tribute to a great artist, but I hope it will inspire you to go and find out a bit more about his music, as well as that of his family. I hope you get as much pleasure from the experience as I've had over the years.

Bossa Nova - the new way

It's generally agreed that the first true bossa nova record was João Gilberto's recording of Antonio Carlos "Tom" Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes' 'Chega de Saudade which was released in July 1958. (The version you see here is a much later performance). However, as is so often the case, this 'new thing' or 'new way' didn't just emerge fully formed from nowhere. As I observed in my last posting, there were strong elements of it in the work of Laurindo Almeida and Bud Shank in 1953, but the true early stirrings of it can be traced back to Noel Rosa and his fellow musicians of Bando de Tangarás, who were probably the first to bring a more progressive approach to the form known as Samba-canção. I include this extremely rare clip, not because it sounds much like bossa nova, but because it illustrates a factor in the development of the music. The essentially Afro Brazilian samba was beginning to acquire white middle-class practitioners that were taking it in a new direction, in much the same way that the 'cool school' jazz had developed in the U.S.A.

A figure often mentioned in the same breath as the more famous bossa nova practicioners is Dick Farney, and his 1946 recording of 'Copacabana' (a composition by Bando de Tangarás member - Braguinha) was another recognisable step along the route. Here is Farney performing the song sometime in the seventies, accompanied, I thought, by the great Brazilian pianist, Cesar Camargo Mariano. I now know that it is in fact Hilton Valente, and I thank the correspondents that put me right on this (see comments below). The song may well be familiar to you bossa enthusiasts out there, but how many of you realised that it predates the official birth by 12 years? I certainly didn't until I started digging!

Another significant figure is the guitarist Garoto, who was experimenting with more complex harmonies, using many of the altered and extended chords (although in the context of Samba and Choro) that were to become such a part of the bossa sound and would influence so many guitarists. I could find no clips of Garoto himself but here are two of his compositions performed by another great Brazilian guitarist, Paulo Belinatti.

Meanwhile, the Rio based singer and pianist Johnny Alf (real name Alfredo José da Silva - he had been advised to change it when he joined an artistic group at the Brazil-United States Institute) was beginning to evolve his own style, mixing Brazilian songs by the likes of Dorival Caymmi with North American influences that undoubtedly included Bebop. He played regularly in the clubs and bars that were frequented by many of the soon-to-emerge new breed of bossa nova musicians. His 1955 recording of Rapaz de Bem was another distinct milestone along the way. This performance of it recorded in 2005 shows that he continues to deliver the goods!

The stage was more or less set and the artists that would put the final elements of bossa nova in place were now beginning to emerge - Louis Bonfa, João Donato, Tom Jobim, Carlos Lyra and Roberto Menescal started to produce a string of compositions that were quickly taken up by the public in Brazil. By the time that Marcel Camus' multi-award winning film Orpheo Negro ('Black Orpheus'), with it's sound track of Bonfa and Jobim compositions, was released, the world seemed ready for this new sound. That the North American 'cool school' jazz musicians took such an interest in it is not surprising, given that the harmonic approach that drove bossa nova owed a lot to jazz in the first place: what was more surprising was the enthusiasm with which it was taken up generally. By 1963, the phrase 'Bossa Nova' had become thoroughly mainstream and was being used indiscriminately to promote all manner of things. Unfortunately, the music itself often got forgotten along the way, witness this dreadful Elvis Presley clip - 'Bossa Nova Baby" (Don't worry. It's mercifully short).

I have a few theories of my own about the development of this music and the influence of North American jazz upon it. There is no doubt that Messrs Farney and Alf were influenced by jazz, or that Garoto had visited the United States and met jazz musicians there. Laurindo Almeida was consciously trying to blend the two elements of Brazilian music and jazz together. Jobim cites J.S.Bach and Hector Villa Lobos as influences, but was also an enthusiastic admirer of many of the composers responsible for The great American songbook. The idea of taking the samba and some how 'cooling it down' was at the heart of the groove, the trick being to retain the fire of the 2/4 samba in a laid back 4/4 beat. This was achieved by stretching the basic rhythmic phrase over two bars and the addition of the kind of harmonies that were more often associated with 'cool' jazz went a long way towards completing the picture. But there was also Rio de Janeiro itself. All of those ingredients could have come together in São Paulo or Salvador and the results would have been very different.

One last element: we associate Bossa Nova with a very laid back style of singing - undersinging even - and my theory is that Chet Baker's vocal style was an influence on this. I have some recordings of João Gilberto that predate 'Chega do Saudade' and he is much more of a 'sambista' in style. We know by their own testament that many of these innovators were listening to West Coast musicians, and Gerry Mulligan is often mentioned. Could it be that Gilberto heard the 1956 'Chet Baker Sings' album and was inspired?*

If you want to know more about this subject I can recommend a book - 'The Brazilian Sound. Samba, Bossa Nova and the Popular Music of Brazil' by Chris McGowan and Ricardo Pessanha. (ISBN 1-56639-545-3) and a new DVD -'Bossa Brazil: Stories of Love. The Birth of Bossa Nova' narrated by Carlos Lyra and Roberto Menescal. (Warner DVD 5 051442 806328).

I'll conclude this post by including a little clip from the end of Orpheo Negro, not because it's a bossa nova milestone but because it invokes the spirit of the music for me - and the spirit of an innocence that is, alas not so easy to find in Rio these days. The tune is Louis Bonfa's 'Samba Do Orpheo'. I have taken the liberty of including a comment on this video from the YouTube site that I thought was particularly pertinent:-

MP S Shanahan writes -"By itself this scene can seem too sweet. But in the film it immediately follows the death of Orfeu, Euridice in his arms. This moment of hope in the wake of tragedy, with its sense of an ancient tradition being carried forward by the children, is one of the most bittersweet endings in all of cinema. It is, to me, a much more satisfactory ending than most other retellings of the Orpheus myth (while several great operas tell this story, for example, none of them have particularly good endings)."

- and if that whets your appetite to see the film then so much the better!

* The answer to my speculation would seem to be -probably not. I have just (12/8/08) found this excellent and informative piece about him by the splendid Daniella Thompson:-

http://daniellathompson.com/Texts/Brazzil/Plain_Joao.htm