back in the saddle

Today I took my French horn out of its case for the first time in more than two years. Since March 2007 it has languished, unplayed, in its case beneath my desk at work. I took it upstairs to a practice room and opened the case. It was not pleasant. The soft case had become damp when my office flooded two weeks ago, and there were patches of mold on the cleaning cloth. There were cobwebs! Nothing to make you feel worse than seeing cobwebs on your horn.

More seriously, the first valve is completely jammed. I’ll need to take a more serious screwdriver to it than I have with me.

But for the meantime, I played for about forty minutes – long notes and arpeggios in the key of C, and it felt pretty good, like meeting an old friend and picking up the conversation.

witts x 2

Last night Richard Witts* gave an entertaining lecture (part of the King’s College London Music Colloquia series) entitled ‘Can Things Only Get Better? – A Government’s Policy on Music’. When we finally got his powerpoint presentation up and running (Richard is Mac-native but we only had a PC to run (almost typed ‘ruin’ – Freudian slip) his show), we were treated to vintage clips of the New Labour victory party (whose D:Ream soundtrack gave the talk its title), as well as then-Heritage Secretary Virginia Bottomley being cornered on the issue of arts education. Richard’s talk covered the difference between policy and law, and sketched out a typology of the ways in which policy can influence musical actions. He’s a very entertaining speaker, and for me the value of his work is in its shrewd disentanglement of the threads of decision-making – he has a journalistic (in the best sense) instinct for finding the real story about money, power and personality, along with a historian’s eye for detail. Here, he revealed the elaborate pas-de-deux between government and the music industries, as committees and industry pressure groups were formed to make the relationship ever cosier.

There were interesting questions at the end; some felt that it was too easy only to criticise government policy without offering a constructive alternative. I thought that perhaps the horror/nostalgia of the video footage perhaps signalled a lazy contempt for the disappointments of the Blair government that wasn’t to be found in the detailed analysis  that followed, and that there is real value in unpicking the knots of political and institutional power. Richard also spoke interestingly about Lord Mandelson’s role, when he was still an EU Commissioner, in the circumvention of the Gowers Review on Intellectual Property which opposed the extension of the copyright term on recordings.

I highly recommend Richard’s book on the Arts Council, Artist Unknown: An Alternative History of the Arts Council, and I also enjoyed his 2003 essay in Musical Times about the fashion in classical music for ‘extending the brand’ of dead composers.

*For the record, Richard is my estranged son*, so it’s always good to see him.

**no, not really.

on fatherhood, or why I haven’t been around

It is almost exactly a year since I wrote anything here – or indeed anywhere else. Between tending my wonderful if demanding baby daughter, and tending the charming if demanding Victorian semi in which we’re attempting to raise her, there hasn’t been a lot of time for anything surplus to the curriculum.

Music has continued to play a part, though in new and different ways. I never thought I’d spend so much time singing show tunes in the middle of the night; I also didn’t know how many songs I didn’t know past the first two lines. S has spent a lot of time being soothed (more or less successfully) by Rodgers and Hammerstein – not wholly through choice, it just turns out that’s what comes up when I’m half asleep and need something to sing. And S does enjoy playing the piano with mummy and daddy (sounds uncannily like high serialism!) But no concerts (save for the KCL Symphony Orchestra bringing the Sibelius to St John’s).

So, my cultural activities have consisted of: obsessing over the writing of John Lanchester, grinning like a loon while listening to the new Trevor Pinnock Brandenburg recordings, admiring the quality of arrangements on 70s Playschool records, and compiling a giant and ongoing wish-list of films that I will see when I have time to see films again, in about twenty years.

we interrupt this programme

Non-music alert. Prompted by the recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, John Lanchester unpacks the issues surrounding climate change and the British government’s non-response to overwhelming scientific evidence in an essay for the London Review of Books. This is the best thing I’ve read on the subject: penetrating, articulate and measured. You can read his piece here, and I urge you to do so.

satyagraha at eno

 To the Coliseum last night for the dress rehearsal of ENO’s new production of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, about the young Ghandi’s formulation of non-violent protest in South Africa.

ENO were canny in appointing Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, the duo behind the hit Shockheaded Peter, to produce and design the show, which looks fantastic. A corrugated-iron backdrop is animated by beautifully projected text, and there is the expected array of fantastical puppetry and imaginatively low-fi stage effects. Musically things were in good shape under Johannes Debus; there were a few ragged moments in the chorus, but I’m sure they’ll be sharpened up for opening night.

In short, I really wanted to like it. I have friends who are so enthralled by Glass that it makes me wonder what I’m missing. They will love this show. But there is something about the ponderous portentousness of Glass’s music that I can’t get past, even when conceptually I can see what it’s all about. The opera deals in ritual and poetry, not narrative, so it is appropriate that the music offers static tableaux rather than the traditional teleology. Past, present and future coexist, so what’s the hurry? I just can’t experience Glass’s music as anything other than banal and inexpressive, repeatedly pushing the same harmonic-melodic buttons .

The staging offers wierd and wonderful visions to complement the music – most strikingly a crowd of gigantic leering puppets emerging from behind cut-out city buildings, and the sudden appearance of a triumvirate of Hindu gods as the apotheosis of act II. However, the third act is terribly thin musically and visually – there is a rather pointless reprisal of the sellotape tricks of Sticky, and the Martin Luther King/civil rights riots stuff doesn’t work at all. Our culture is saturated with these images, often appropriated to serve other ends, and this looks like another snatch-and-grab job to lend gravitas to a stage entertainment.

But last time I went to ENO I said that Gadaffi: The Opera wasn’t all bad, so what do I know? 

Incidentally, this may be the first production by ENO not to be sung in English (it’s in Sanskrit) – does anyone know otherwise?

interference

Life has an irritating habit of getting in the way of important things like writing about music. So: I have changed job (again), moved house (again) and discovered that, all being well, I’m going to be a father in August (a first), but entirely neglected to set down my weighty thoughts on what I’ve seen and heard in the moments between bouts of momentous personal change.

I have, however, kept up the jazz classes, which are immense fun. The tutor, bass maestro Paul Westwood, handles our group of duffers with immense patience and charm, drilling us in scales and chord changes and, increasingly, offering kind and constructive criticism of how we might improve our soloing. It is a luxury to have the regular opportunity to improvise in an encouraging environment, and for the first time in my life jazz harmonic theory makes perfect sense.

I’m under no illusion that I’ll ever be any good – I don’t have the time to devote to it, nor the obsessive self-discipline that woodshedding requires – but it’s a useful corrective to critical omniscience to get the hands dirty again, and remember the phenomenal craft that underlies the improviser’s art.

jazz french horn

I’m listening to this album by Jim Rattigan, which I picked up at Ray’s Jazz a while ago. The idea of playing jazz on my chosen instrument been a small obsession of mine since, at an impressionable age, I was given an LP by the New York horn player, composer and leader Tom Varner. Until then, I’d had no idea that this was even possible, assuming instead that jazz was a party to which I was not invited, and envying the trombonists and trumpet players in the school big band. Even after this revelation, I was too timid to actually do very much until I went to college, where I attended a jazz course and far too few of Keith Tippett’s improvisation classes.

The French horn has never been a common instrument in jazz, mainly because its size and shape, which produce its characteristic rich timbre, mean that most playing is done further up the harmonic series than other brass instruments. As Tom Varner notes,

the French horn is so slippery. For the first two or three years, I had trouble trying to play a line which might be pretty easy to play on the trumpet or saxophone, but on the French horn it sounds like shit. It sort of takes extra to get that flexibility that you need on the horn, just because it’s so much bigger and the overtones are so close.

Nonetheless, there is a distinguished roster of jazz horn players, starting in the ‘fifties, when composers started to use the instrument to fill out the middle register of ensembles and big bands. The third-stream composer Gunther Schuller was one of three to play on The Birth of the Cool; Julius Watkins featured on later Miles/Gil Evans projects, as well as playing with Charles Mingus, Freddie Hubbard, John Coltrane (the Africa sessions), and the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra.

In the US, while Varner has earned most critical plaudits (including placings in several Downbeat critics’ polls), the field also includes the prolific Mark Taylor, Vincent Chancey and John Clark. I’m told by my uncle John Benson that Branford Marsalis paid tribute to Africa/Brass at the recent Chicago Jazz Fest with a ‘wonderful’ band including four horns. In the UK, as well as Rattigan, LPO principal Richard Bissill is a mean arranger and improviser, though one who seems to operate less in the jazz mainstream. (If memory serves, Rattigan contributes a solo to Bissill’s arrangement of ‘Caravan’ on the novelty horn-fest CD The London Horn Sound.) Pianist Gwilym Simcock also plays horn (see Acoustic Triangle’s latest, passim). British-born Martin Mayes has made a career in Italy, performing with Instabile Orchestra and Cecil Taylor as well as investigating the acoustic properties of the instrument in free-improv settings. (Cruelly, I press-ganged him into playing his first Mahler in years at Dartington when we were short two players for the Second Symphony.) Pip Eastop is also an improvising horn player, mainly in a free-improv sense, but interestingly seems to have turned to the trumpet in order to learn to play jazz.

Returning to Jim Rattigan’s Jazz French Horn, what I like about this disc is that Rattigan still sounds like a horn player; there’s that real, rounded warmth to his tone. Hear him cool as a cucumber on Steve Swallow’s ‘Eiderdown’, or cooking on ‘Black Narcissus’ (note the use of ‘hand-stopping’, or muting the sound by covering the bell with the hand). And he takes ‘Autumn Leaves’ on Wagner Tuba, which has to be a first.

Those interested in jazz french horn should consult Harlan Feinstein‘s impressive resource on the subject, and if there are any more players out there, it would be great to hear from you. The reason, finally, for this post is that I start the Jazz Workshop class at Morley College next week, finally scratching that itch. I’ll let you know how I get on.

in a garden

I have an interesting walk to work. From Vauxhall station I can head past the club casualties passed out in the Spring Gardens, along Lambeth Walk (where I turn into a chirpy Cockney for the duration, at least in my head) and past the imposing bulk of the Imperial War Museum. Alternatively, I can head past the comedy MI6 headquarters and along the river to Lambeth Bridge. The advantage of this route (apart from watching the people entering the armoured gates of the kitsch spy palace and wondering what they all do) is passing the Museum of Garden History, housed in the deconsecrated Church of St Mary-at Lambeth, next to Lambeth Palace. Apparently a 19th-century reconstruction of a 14th-century building, it sits quietly on a site home to a succession of churches over a thousand years, giving it a remarkable sense of place. Modern-day pilgrims come to see the lovely garden and the informative exhibitions, and to hear good music at the neat little jazz festival that operations manager Chris has founded there.

Seeing the choice line-up this year, I went along as a volunteer on Friday, and enjoyed a bill including the marvellous Branco Stoysin Trio, whose offbeat, Balkan folk-inflected music enthralled the crowd, as well as the very fine Matt Wates Sextet who played a scorching post-bop set with scintillating home-grown arrangements for the three-horn front line. Something about the richness of those brassy chords makes me giddy with pleasure. The venue is intimate and atmospheric with display cabinets replaced with cabaret seating. Future Friday nights include Acker Bilk (yes! really!) and Latin jazz maestro Alex Wilson, plus Morley College’s own Roland Perrin. And how many venues have their own vegetable lamb? Run, don’t (Lambeth) walk.

Gadaffi

Last night I saw the first dress rehearsal of the most eagerly awaited show in town, Gaddafi: A Living Myth at the Coliseum. Admittedly, much of the curiosity surrounding this collaboration between English National Opera and Asian Dub Foundation involves imagining the fruit of such a strange union, and I can confidentially reveal that this is one odd show.

Neither unqualified success nor the disaster some had predicted, it’s a slice of postmodern agit-prop: postmodern because it presents Gadaffi ultimately as a cypher taking on any number of Western-imposed identities, from ‘mad dog of the middle east’ to valued ally in the war against terror; agit-prop because it gives slightly cartoonish potted history of post-war Libya, complete with evil American oil barons, Ronald Reagan in best John Wayne form, and even a callow and lecherous Tony Blair.

Musically, ADF’s hip-hop beats and soundscapes translate well to the stage; the live musicians in the pit are not over-taxed, but the sound as a whole is well integrated. There is very little actual singing, with most of the principals spitting rhymes over the beats. These lyrics range from the numbingly obvious to the witty; a recurring mantra, ‘This sand is our land’, is met with bafflement by a US oilman, who reassures the Libyans that ‘You can keep the sand’. Ramon Tikaram (Ferdy from This Life!) gives a mesmerising performance as Gaddafi, though the other cast members are a little anonymous.

The staging by David Freeman is creative and engaging, with imaginative use of paper backcloths through which sundry revolutionaries can burst, and onto which are projected excellent visuals. The most difficult moments to swallow are when the chorus in camouflage gear break into their dance routines, when the show comes perilously close to a Mel Brooks parody of itself. The first half sags under the weight of Gaddafi’s revolutionary fervour; the second, more cynical act works far better dramatically.

Politically, it’s a bit of a blunt instrument, though it certainly does no harm to be reminded of who our allies in the war on terror actually are. While the injustices and brutalities of Gaddafi’s rule are not overlooked, the Lockerbie bombing is left as an open question. I must defer to wiser heads than mine to discuss the ethics of the production. You can certainly question whether this is what ENO should really be doing; but it seemed to me that all concerned have just about emerged with credibility intact.

tommaso starace

The National Theatre has a nifty free stage in its courtyard during the summer months, which contributes to the lovely, laid-back feel of the south bank at the moment. I was crossing Waterloo Bridge today at lunchtime when I had the great good fortune to chance upon a gig by the Tommaso Starace Quartet. Tommaso teaches sax classes at Morley College, where I badger him incessantly for paperwork like the faceless bureaucrat I am, but I hadn’t heard him play with his group until now, and it has made my day. Though there was no demand for the complimentary sunscreen, the group’s melodic brand of straight-ahead jazz created a nice summertime vibe.

Starace’s intensely expressive alto lit up ‘Eronel’ and ‘Song for my Father’, complemented by Rob Barron’s witty, dextrous piano. But as well as blowing through standards, the group played original compositions from Starace’s album based on the witty, black-and-white photographs of Eliott Erwitt. The ballad ‘Loving Gloves’ was finely crafted and played with tenderness, and ‘Keep Moving Please!’ segued from uptempo gospel stylings to a soulful spiritual feel.

I was just going to stay for a couple of numbers, but ended up stopping for the whole set. This sort of thing is why I enjoy living in the city. (Well, the commutable zone 4 suburbs, anyway.)

POSTSCRIPT: Tommaso Starace’s album was reviewed by John Fordham in the Guardian on Friday.