He is the Music Proffsky!

Yes? ...or No? Ask Glenn Miller!

2011-07-23T06:52:00.000-07:00

After all these years I guess we ought to be used to it. (I'm talking about fans of prog-rock giants 'Yes', of course.)

In-fighting, personnel changes, in-ings and outings a-plenty...it is par for the course for the band! To my reckoning there have now been at least a dozen 'official members' of Yes. Please correct me if I'm wrong but, in vague order, I think it's something like Squire, Anderson, Banks, Kaye, Bruford, Howe, Wakeman (R), White, Moraz, Downes, Horn, Rabin, Jobson - who only recorded a video...for the group's biggest ever hit that he didn't play on - Sherwood, Khoroshev, Wakeman (O) and Benoit David. The list SHOULD include, IMHO, Tom Brislin for the wonderful work he did on the Yes Symphonic tour but official websites don't include him...also, you might say that if Eddie Jobson counts then so should Vangelis?

Either way its a cracking 'squad' and the band have 43 years of history, they've played thousands of gigs to millions of people and recorded 20+ studio albums - one more if you include the one credited to Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe who played gigs full of Yes music but weren't allowed to use the name!

The reason for that, of course, is that the one constant in all those 'official' Yes concerts and on every recording is 'The Fish', Mr Chris Squire - bassist extraordinaire and much under-used singer and song-writer to boot. In my eyes Squire is a musical genius. NO-ONE can make a bass guitar sound the way he does and, therefore, none has ever been as easily recognisable. His one solo album is an oft-overlooked Progressive Rock gem and even his quirky 'Swiss Choir' album from a couple of years ago took no time at all to firmly cement itself in my all-time top 5 Christmas albums!

However, it seems to me that, despite being a great music-man, Chris is not quite a 'people' man. I might be wrong but why else would the Yes line-up change as often as most of us change our boxer-shorts? Jon Anderson has been in and out three times now, Rick Wakeman has had, I reckon, five stints as keyboardist, Eddie Jobson didn't get beyond rehearsals! (Rumour has it Squire wouldn't let him wear make-up on stage!)

Yes have had enormous success on whatever scale you want to judge them...LP/CD sales, awards, record numbers of successive nights at venues like MSG, number one singles...on and on.

Some LPs/CDs have gone down as 'classics' - to me, 'Close to the Edge' from the early 1970s is one of the top5 pop/rock albums ever made - many Yes fans agree - while others give the 'Best Yes Album' accolade to 'Relayer'. On the other hand there have been some albums that, let's just say, get played less than others :) For me the nadir came with 'Open Your Eyes' but others equally hate 'Union', 'Big Generator' or 'Talk'. When I first discovered Yes (when I was a raw 18 year old music student who hitherto had prided himself on listening to little else but The Beatles, Beach Boys and Harry Nilsson) that particular niche firmly belonged to 1980's 'Drama'.

It seemed that 'real' Yes fans did not (would not?) recognise 'Drama' as a 'proper' Yes album because a) it didn't have Jon Anderson singing and b) it featured what was regarded then as a naff 'pop' group called The Buggles. Talk about snobbery! When Anderson and Rick Wakeman waved goodbye to Yes (Wakeman for the 2nd time) in 1979 Squire invited the 2 'Buggles' on board - Geoff Downes was recognised as a talented and innovative keyboard player, Horn had the 'ability' to sound a bit like Anderson...and singers who could mirror his range well enough to even attempt the Yes back-catalogue are and were then rather a rarity!

Hindsight has been kind to 'Drama' - in fact it is a very fine album, almost (now) universally agreed by Yes fans. Unfortunately, when the Drama-era line-up went on tour it didn't take very long for anyone to notice that Horn's voice, whilst fine in the studio, simply could not cope in the arena! Listening to a bootleg like 'Live in Leicester' is a painful experience apart from in the instrumental sections! Horn's perpetual straining and wildly erratic tuning must have embarrassed the rest of the band, however kind they may have been to him at the time! Of course, Horn went on to become one of the best and most successful record producers ever (the man behind 'Frankie Goes to Hollywood' and 'Art Of Noise' just for starters) while Downes has spent most of the last 30 years with prog-rock supergroup Asia.

I've been listening, this week, to Yes's new CD 'Fly From Here'. It is the group's first new studio CD since 'Magnification' more than a decade ago...and The Buggles are back!

The problem with being a rock band for 43 years is that all our bodies age differently. Rick Wakeman almost died in 1974 after a massive heart attack...again he almost expired while recording 'Return to the Centre of the Earth' after contracting pneumonia. Alcohol and cigarettes would surely also have killed him by now had he not, wisely, given them up decades ago...and most men who have tried to cope with alimony payments like he must have lived with would probably have given up the ghost long before now! Rick must often ask himself why he had such a propensity to attempt to emulate Henry VIII down the '6 Wives' path!

When Squire & co wanted to tour a couple of years ago Wakeman had learned his limits and declined the invitation; Anderson had a near death experience himself and asked for the tour to be be delayed while he recovered. Squire refused his pleas and unceremoniously booted out his old buddy, replacing him with the singer from a Canadian Yes-Tribute band! Most fans thought this would be just for one tour...yet here we are at new album time...and Anderson is, clearly, history. He has not hidden his feelings about this...and nor have some Yes fans - or 'Yuppets' as they have been disparagingly labelled by Geoff Downes! Controversy simply WILL NOT leave Yes alone, it seems.

The new CD is built around a song the 1980 Drama-era Yes performed live '(We Can) Fly From Here', only now it's been extended to a 25 minute 'epic' in 6 sections. Reviews have been mixed...largely dependant on various factors, like:

how one feels about the Anderson situation
what one thought of Drama in the first place
the fact some Yes fans simply don't like Geoff Downes
any number of other factors!

...but mainly it seems to be based on what their Yes loving 'mates' think and what on-line Yes forums they belong to!

I don't belong to any Yes-forums so listened to the CD with no pre-conceptions; I might feel that Anderson has been harshly treated - on the other hand, if the rest of the band want to tour and play concerts more than the twice a week Anderson could manage, surely replacing Benoit David with him just for the CD would be equally unfair on David? Downes was back because he wrote most of the new material and because his fellow ex-Buggle, Horn, was producing. Rick's son Oliver Wakeman, if anyone, actually has been more callously discarded than anyone!

The production is crystal clean and from an audio angle the CD sounds great! Squire's bass chunders and rumbles away as powerfully as ever and his backing vocals (apart from his bass playing probably the most important long-term component of the classic Yes-sound) soar magnificently as ever. Chris even gets a lead vocal on the final song - which also (coincidence?) I feel is the best on the album.

There's a reworking of an old Buggles song, some mathematically intricate, typical Yes-time signature complexity, a classic Steve Howe guitar piece and several other obvious reminders that this IS Yes (not least Steve Howe revisiting the very same 12 string sound/technique from all-time Yes classic song 'And You & I'). Benoit David's voice, casting aside all politics and opinion, is excellent throughout. Indeed, sometimes, he DOES sound so incredibly like Jon Anderson anyone less than a dyed in the wool Yes fan might never notice it wasn't him!

Like all Yes albums, time will be the best judge. I'm not going to say 7/10 or whatever right now, after just a week! Yes albums are marked by their eventual heritage in band-lore (we have already seen how Drama's 'star' has risen since 1981, when I fist became a 'fan') Except...one has to wonder how much longer the Yes story has to go? Another decade from now most will be well into their 70s...could there possibly be a band-full of near-octogenarian Proggers in wheelchairs on the Hammy Apollo stage in 2025?

This is a new problem for rock music that I'm not sure too many have thought that much about yet!

Will a band or artist's music 'die' when they themselves die or retire? We live in an age where the afore-mentioned Tribute Bands keep alive music when the bands themselves can't! Was the Paul Rodgers-fronted band that has been around for the last few years 'REALLY' Queen? Is this new band 'REALLY' Yes? Are Daltrey and Townshend alone enough to call their band 'The Who'? The legal answer may, indeed, be that they all are 'REALLY' who they say they are but...like I asked above...what about in twenty years time?

I can actually see a sort of 'band franchise' scenario developing! I'm very much reminded of the well-known thoughts of WWII band-leader Glenn Miller - who wanted the SOUND and MUSIC of his band to be more important than the musicians themselves. He wanted people to be able to go on enjoying his music many years into the future. Miller died in 1944...yet there is STILL a Glenn Miller Band touring the world today - playing concerts 67 years later. Miller certainly got his wish!

Earlier this year one of my favourite current prog bands, Frost*, was put 'on-hold' or hiatus or disbanded or whatever...Jem Godfrey, the man behind the project, decided this was so! And so it was! He has suggested since on Twitter that he might 'franchise' the band name! Maybe great minds think alike!?! But how could it be same without Jem?

Well, how can Yes be Yes without a or b or c or d? Like I said in the title...ask Glenn Miller!

What 'Dates' a Piece of Music?

2011-07-12T16:48:00.000-07:00

If there is anything likely to wind me up and set me off (like a clockwork toy!) it's being told that a piece of music has 'had its day'.

I mean, what gives any of us the right to judge music in that way? Most Mozart music is 225-250 years old, Bach up to 300. Josquin du Pres wrote down his 'Danserye' around half a millennium ago and I have many friends who like 'Greensleeves' which is of a similar vintage.

It pains me to enlarge on this by admitting that the church is, by far, the biggest sinner in this respect. We worship in an age where, to some, only 'modern worship songs' are deemed worthy of usage...there are many good examples of this genre but, largely speaking, these are tuneless, repetitive dirges of minimal musical value - with 'trendy' accompaniments built on bare fifths...basically, as long as it has a guitar, bass and drum kit it 'will do'.

In my 'church' - The Salvation Army - such an ensemble is known as a 'worship band'. Really? What a gross, unfeeling insult to the thousands of Sally Army bandsmen of the past 130-odd years who have expressed their 'worship' through brass banding! And what an insult to the group of Christian musicians who are asked (or told!) to 'stand aside' on Youth weekends so the 'contemporary ensemble' can take the centre stage!

In the Salvation Army 'The Joystrings' are seen as 'ancient history' - something of a joke to the youth of today...a group of ancients who twanged guitars when The Beatles were in the charts and who our parents (or grandparents!) thought were 'relevant' and 'groovy' way back when! Younger Salvationsist musicians will often admit to having an admiration for Lennon/McCartney...but admiration for Webb/Davidson is far less forthcoming!

Even the wonderful legacy of the Gowans/Larsson musicals is often sneered at. Before our service on Sunday evening I played a sequence of tunes from their first musical "Take Over Bid': fine melodies like 'It Happened to Me', 'Inside, Outside' and 'I Dream of a Day'. A few people came up to me and said thank you...others informed me that, in their opinion, these tunes were best consigned to history! What an insult to our great musical heritage!

On Sunday our Songsters (choir) sang one of the finest compositions ever published by the SA - the sublime 'In The Secret Of Thy Presence' (words by General Albert Orsborn, music by Eric Ball). It was a wonderful performance of a marvellous piece of music and one could feel the Holy Spirit moving in the moments after the piece ended. I have long loved this piece; my young son encountered it when it was sung by the Terrirorial Youth Choir a few years ago and the music and words were able to speak to a new generation. Good music transcends time...

Yet, tonight, our Songster Leader shared with us the response to the song - many had thanked her for its use, some had not been as enthused. I remarked to the person nearest me 'how could anyone not love that piece?' The response I received was one of absolute indifference...'I think it's had its day'.

Had its day? Has Mozart had its day? Have The Beatles? What about Glenn Miller? Hoagy Carmichael? George Gershwin? Is Parry's 'Jerusalem' a melody no longer worthy of our consideration? What about the many, many hits penned and produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman 25 years ago and sung by Kylie, Sinitta and Rick Astley and others? What about ThenRolling Stones? The Beach Boys? Simon & Garfunkel?

Good music is NOT bound or judged by time! 'Shine, Jesus Shine' is still sung today in churches because, despite being a quarter of a century old, it works! Likewise, 'The Lord's My Shepherd' ticks the same boxes despite the melody being hundreds...and the words thousands...of years old!

Like a couple of dozen other Salvation Army discards, 'In The Secret' has, in the last few years, been picked up by quality, non-SA musicians and re-recorded, and treated with respect, reverence and the deference it deserves, by NON-SA musicians (namely the world-renowned 'Kings Singers') and brought to our ears once more. It seems to me that, where the Salvationists' ears have become numbed to its own quality music, the outsiders' ears have lapped up with relish our discards. 'Had its day'? By no means! NO Army music is more than 140 years old! That makes it a century more modern than Mozart, newer than Verdi or Wagner and, at least, contemporary with Puccini, Miller or McCartney!

Give Army music a chance to live before we bury it!!!

Across The Universe

2010-12-08T00:44:00.000-08:00

I wrote this piece many years ago but it's worth reposting on December 8th, any year...

Across the Universe - by Marc Harry

My mum came into my room on Tuesday morning and told me to "prepare myself for a shock". I immediately thought my grandfather had died or been taken more seriously ill. In retrospect, awful though it sounds, I would have taken it better if that was what had happened.

She told me John Lennon had been shot. I replied, "how is he?" and she slowly shook her head and said "he isn't - he's dead."

What? John? The most important man in the world to my life? The Beatle? The Walrus ?? The man whose new LP I had queued around the corner to buy just a few weeks ago? Dead? My head couldn't take it in.

I sat on the floor with my radio and tuned from station to station...why were they all playing Imagine? Ah..7.30 - the news...no, I don't want to hear that, find another station...no...another - and so on as the news began to sink into my reality.

I made a shrine in my bedroom window. I hung up my electric guitar and surrounded it with LP covers. I went out and bought every English newspaper (to my utter regret a few weeks later I cut them up to make a collage for my bedroom wall - each newspaper is now worth a
fortune !). I got to school VERY late.

My friend and I offered to spend Wednesday afternoon (general studies period) in the school Music Room playing John Lennon records for other fans to show their respect. We were told to do two songs live for every record played (I was a singer/pianist/guitarist, he a
pianist). So we booked the room and advertised the event. 15 minutes before the event on Wednesday we had to move to the school hall ! I recall rows of girls in Beatles scarves wearing round John Lennon specs in floods of tears as Colin and I played Across the
Universe, If I Fell, Imagine, Isolation and others. It was my first gig. It helped me grieve yet gave me such a feeling of pride that I could share John's music in this way - and that so many others amongst my school friends felt the same grief.

Of course, I wanted to know the story of what had happened too. There are many versions and conspiracy theories but the one generally accepted as nearest to the truth goes something like this...

Mark David Chapman* was, actually, a very nice young man. A massive Beatles fan and especially of John. To some extent he had even modelled himself on his hero - as so many of us have done over the years. He was a good, clean living young man who taught in his local
Sunday School.

Then (on my birthday !), Oct 9th 1975 Sean was born after a very long struggle by John and Yoko to conceive and carry a baby full term (Yoko had had several miscarriages, of course). John was the proudest parent there could ever be. He knew he had made mistakes in
the fatherhood of Julian and promised himself he would not make the same mistake again this time around. No being away on long tours, coming home and finding his son another couple of inches taller - no missing out on first smiles, first words etc. His EMI contract
almost at an end he felt free - free from contracts, free from expectations and no burden on him to sing or record ever again unless he wanted to. So he didn't.

John stayed at home and looked after the baby while Yoko multiplied the family fortune through careful business investments. John changed the nappies (diapers), John sang Sean to sleep, John danced with him to stop him crying. John cooked the bread...John was doing
what he wanted to do - be a daddy !

And the world missed John. They called him crazy - "dreaming my life away" as he sat there watching the wheels go round. And Mark Chapman missed him too. The story goes that he started to believe he could help fill the gap. He tried to look like John until people in
restaurants asked him to sign autographs...marrying a rather plain, Japanese wife helped maintain the charade...he was even invited on stage to perform as John. And so the 'madness' began...

Chapman started booking into hotels as John Lennon. He booked airline tickets too. As he descended into a form of schizophrenia he was actually starting to believe he was John Lennon. And he was happy...and the world still missed John, the 'loony ex-Beatle locked away in the
austere Dakota buildings near Central Park.' The man who had said (according to the press) "I have made my contribution to society".

Then Sean started school and who needs a full-time househusband? While on holiday in Bermuda John started thinking about making another record. he had listened to the radio playing the New Wave music of 79/80. He knew that if the world could put Lene Lovich in
the charts then they could also listen to Yoko (at last). He sang his new ideas for songs over the phone to Yoko - she had thought the same and sang her songs back...and the world welcomed John Lennon back into the fold and bought his new album Double Fantasy. The single, Starting Over hit the charts too. And Mark Chapman, like any John Lennon fan bought the album.

And they say he liked it...but he knew it wasn't him...and if John Lennon was back in the world - where did he fit in? With his mental decline in freefall he fed its fever by reading and rereading JD Salinger's 'Catcher in the Rye'. Swinging moment by moment between being John Lennon's biggest fan and seeing his oft-time hero as some sort of grotesque impostor he bought another airline ticket to New York. He stood as so many fans had done before him in the shadow of
the Dakota and waited for a glimpse of his idol and was rewarded with a signature on his copy of Double Fantasy. In his own way, John Lennon had signed his own death warrant for, as he got
into the car which would take he and Yoko to their final recording session Chapman proudly clutched his prize...and waited.

Returning home late at night after putting the finishing touches to Yoko's 'Walking on Thin Ice' John got out of the car. His attention was drawn by Chapman's "Excuse me Mr Lennon," and as he turned his head a volley of shots littered the air. John fell, his blood-splattered glasses flew across the pavement (sidewalk), Yoko screamed. A nearby police patrol picked up the latest
crime statistic and bundled him into the back of the car and headed for the hospital. Part way there one of the two police officers looked around and thought he recognised their passenger. As he asked, "Are you John Lennon?" the barely conscious John vaguely nodded and
muttered a final "Yeah".

On arrival at the hospital, emergency crews tried for some time to revive their patient but to no avail. John had crossed his universe, watched his final wheel go round and the man who told us to give peace a chance and that all we needed was love had left this stage for the final time. "Turned out nice again."**

And the whole world mourned. Starting Over hit number one, closely followed by Imagine and Woman. Tributes poured out like New Year's Eve champagne. As so many discovered that month - you don't know what you got - until you lose it.

And I did my concert. And I still miss him. Bless you...

Marc

* There are many who will not speak his name. Rather Voldermortian? MDC applied (yet again) for parole this year (2010). It was denied once more.

** at the end of the Beatles version of Free as a Bird you hear a ukulele. As it fades you hear the words "made by John Lennon." John never said that. The words he recorded were "Turned out nice again", a catchphrase of wartime British comic George Formby. When that was
played backwards for the single.................

Unless You've Been There....

2010-10-12T09:15:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, long before I knew what depression was I remember reading about some of my favourite comedians and the differences between their on-stage (or on-screen) personas and their real-life personalities. It seemed hard to imagine Spike Milligan or Robin Williams as chronic depressives, yet the fact is they both were...and their situation is far from a rarity in the world of entertainment. One of the most common anecdotes about depression tells of the young man who went to his doctor telling of the crippling sadness that was ruining his life. The doctor told him to go out that evening and see a world famous clown who was appearing in that town - "He would cheer anyone up," the doctor continued. The young man burst into tears crying that he WAS that clown...

I used to think depression was just an excuse for some people being miserable and, heaven knows, I've met enough miserable people in my life! There is at least a small part of everyone who has not suffered this illness that would like to see those complaining of depression given a good shake and told to 'pull themselves together'. Again, I know this for a fact because I used to be one of their number!

I have suffered immeasurably in the last 4 months from people who insisted they cared for and were 'concerned' for me - yet, instead of support and encouragement (and, even more lacking - the crucial attempt to understand how I was feeling or what might be best for me) I was cast off from some of the main things that helped my condition, kept me active, gave me a sense of fulfilment in life...or, in a more basic explanation, got me out of the house...for most of the time I would stay here in the safety of my 'castle' where I'm not expected to be anything other than ME and where the other people I meet love me unconditionally and understand me completely.

I felt great over the weekend! It was my birthday on Saturday - 48 but with a mind that feels 18 and a body that feels 68 - and I drove to North Wales with my two younger sons and my wonderful mum. If I was to drive rather than be (God forbid) a passenger I had to promise not to drive too fast and not to play loud rock music on the journey. So, we listened to a random selection from the old Portsmouth Songsters recordings (thanks to Lewis's iPhione shuffle feature) and we sang along to everything from Step Out to Take My Life.

Saturday evening I sang a selection of songs I'd written but finishing up with John Wetton's wonderful 'Battle Lines' as part of an excellent evening's music and on Sunday sang twice more in church services before the drive back home (during which the music ranged a little wider and the speedometer, I confess, twitched over mum's 'acceptable' once or twice! I felt good and fulfilled!

Yesterday, Monday, I was tired but, worse than that, I felt 'low'...one of those 'lows' that comes every few months that makes you not want to breathe, let alone get up or go out! As a single dad I have no option but to 'force it' - to do thing that rankles all depressives more than anything else...to 'pull yourself together', if you wish! Ieuan had to go to the doctor and all four of us had dentist check-ups. Today, I woke to what I hope and pray is the 'epicentre' of the 'low'. In the meantime, the good old doc had once more increased my anti-depression medication.

Yet, this afternoon, I was booked to entertain a group of people in Southsea and there was no way I could or would let them down so near to the event. Even as I forced myself to get ready, walked to the car and drove the few miles to the venue my mind was refusing to connect at all with the idea that, within half an hour, people would be sitting expectantly, waiting for me to entertain, challenge, inspire and have rolling in fits of laughter...what a bizarre concept that someone who felt the way I did could achieve all that?

As I sat at the back of the venue with a lovely, hot cup of tea, several people I have known for years walked past and asked how I was. "Fine," I replied, with a smile! Well, you do - don't you? Believe me, the last thing they would want was the truth or a lengthy explanation to the contrary! And soon, it was time...

I sang, I told a story. Then more...a bit about John Lennon and a much appreciated 'Imagine' then (how bizarre!) they really were guffawing and rolling with laughter to my poem about the Harvest Festival. A few more songs and a couple more poems later and time was almost up. I ended with the song that has become a bit if a 'theme tune' for me in the last few years - Joy Webb's incredible composition 'There Will be God' with my own rhapsodic arrangement with sweeping, complex piano accompaniment building to the massive crescendo of positivity as the eponymous last line is delivered, culminating in a 16 beat, fortissimo top G to emphasise the truth I know...but can't always feel!

As I said in my Facebook status a few minutes later as I sat in my car, "I needed that song today more than my audience did."

The clown had successfully hidden his tears once again. Despite how I had felt before, a combination of my own professionalism and determination, natural adrenaline and God's supernatural power got me through and (not wanting to sound at all big-headed or arrogant) thrilled the audience who went away so clearly happy.

Now, I sit at home a couple of hours after the show ended. There is still enough adrenaline coursing through my veins to have held off the return of the 'low' - so I'm not curled in a (big) ball ignoring the world but enjoying a cuddle and glass of Cream Soda with Ieuan while I type a blog and he watches 'Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs' again! I remember it will be time to prepare tea soon and that reminds me it's Tuesday and that I should be somewhere tonight - but won't be - because, as I wrote at the start of this piece, those who ought to have supported me cast me off.

So...should I watch Wales lose again tonight or is that just 'asking' for the 'low' to return? See, if I can joke about it things must be on the 'up' again! Hope so anyway!

What is Music?

2010-08-21T11:29:00.000-07:00

GCSE Listening Paper 1992:

(Musical extract played on the tape - short excerpt from Mendelssohn's 'Fingal's Cave')

Q. Make one comment about the music you hear

My pupil's actual written answer on the exam paper: "It does my head in"

**********************************************

I had tried - for five years at that point - to persuade the young lady concerned that there was more music worth listening to than just Kylie and New Kids on the Block. In some cases, I learned eventually, you just have to give up!

Sometimes, it's hard even to convince the uneducated teenager that what they are being asked to listen to is describable AS music!

Take Steve Reich's famous 'Clapping Music'. No pitched notes, no instruments (save hands) - two performers clapping an identical rhythm pattern, with one of them getting progressively more and more 'out of phase' with the other until, eventually, enough patterns have been repeated to once again bring the two together in unison. A simple idea...but music? Or is it more like a (rhythm) game?

Skip 18 years into the future and I have just had a very interesting Facebook conversation with a talented young friend. He is a professional military musician, percussionist with several notable brass bands and also works in the rock/pop field - so it's not someone unacquainted with different genres and styles of music I am talking about.

It seems Glen flicked over to tonight's Prom concert part-way through the London Première of Julian Anderson's 'Fantasias'. His comment?

"Just flicked on the Proms, what a load of rubbish! When are they ever going to play a nice melody and not just tune up!"

You might imagine - a bit like a red rag to an old bull like me! I may not have been over-impressed by Mr Anderson's latest opus myself - but I'll defend its right to exist and be described as music to the death!

So...to go back to my title...what IS music?

In the afore-mentioned teaching career I would ask that question of my Year 7 classes and write the responses on my whiteboard:

tunes

instruments

rhythm

sounds

beats

Same answers, every class - every year.

None of the responses are the answer to the question! Music might contain some or all of these but none (except one) are a prerequisite of 'music'! 'Sounds' being that response, of course.*

My next question to the class, therefore, is obvious! Does that mean that all sounds are music?

Discussions ensued! The majority would say "no" but some would say, "Yes, all sounds are music". I ask every person in the room to 'make a single, short noise'. Thirty children enjoy the chance to do so: shy girls tap the desk, Johnny and his five brash mates make fart noises or belch - they think it's original, of course!

I ask if that was music and most agree it wasn't - it was just 'random'. So, I invite Johnny to the front of the class and ask him to point at members of the class in turn and, when he does, for each to make his/her noise. More often than not Johnny returns to the same few friends, in turn, hence introducing repeated, identifiable patterns into the 'performance'. Most of the class now think that Johnny's piece WAS music...sort of!

I open the classroom door and ask everyone to listen to the sounds they can hear outside and we then make another list:

trees rustling

traffic

footsteps

fire alarm/police siren

plane

voices

birds

We agree that wasn't music either - just random noises again - so I play a CD I prepared earlier that places each of the sounds we had just heard and discussed into a defined 'soundscape'.

Same sounds as the random ones but, now, quite a lot think my piece could be described as music...so what had changed?

Here is the crux or aim of the whole lesson - the introduction (never by ME, by the way) of the word ORGANISED. If random sounds are somehow organised we turn them into music - and once that bridge is crossed most of my pupils were ready for more.

Leonard Bernstein once described music as "Sounds that change*** and move along in time." It is the placing of sounds into a context of time that turns them into music - organising them, if you like!

Glen followed up his first comment with:

"come off it - really did sound like they where just tuning up at one point! That's not Music!"

Really? Over two centuries ago Haydn used 'tuning up' as part of his Symphony Number 60 - 'Il Distratto' (The Absent-Minded Man). So did Britten in 'Young Person's Guide'. When The Beatles asked their assembled musical forces to 'make any sounds, getting gradually higher and higher' they created the famous, apocolyptic crescendo you can hear twice in 'A Day In The Life' - not far from 'tuning up', really, is it?

I'm quite sure Julian Anderson's instructions to the National Youth Orchestra this evening were quite clear in their intent - certainly I'd guess, clearer than some of the more outlandish Graphic Scores produced during the last century!

Whether 'Fantasias' is 'good' music or not remains to be debated. The answer will depend on many factors and will always be an individual one - some will love it and many more, surely, will not! Whether it goes on to become part of the popular orchestral repertoire yet to be seen!

But music it most certainly is! ****

********************************

* There might even be some who would argue against even THIS, however. I have seen 'silent' choirs of deaf children 'singing' using signing - together, in time...'performing' a song. Music?

Further, most people who have been music students are aware of John Cage's famous 4'33" - a piece of 'music' in which a pianist sits at a piano silently for the duration of the 'piece'! The argument is always, "Well, OF COURSE, it's not (proper) music!"**

** Oy!!!...read the rest of the blog...THEN read this you impatient person! ****

*** The word 'change' is also important in this description - or else one might be able to describe a resting heartbeat as 'music'. If it is resting (i.e. virtually constant) then the sounds won't usually change, so failing Bernstein's criteria. If one goes for a short run then rests again the sound of the heart will find its tempo increased, then decreased again - in this scenario you have made a conscious decision to run, knowing this will cause the tempo change = arranged/organised the sound...and I'd, therefore, defend it as music!

**** My interpretation of 4'33" is that Cage has been an absolute genius on this occasion, manipulating the audience into becoming the performance! The pianist sits in silence listening tothe discomfort of an audience not knowing how to react to the situation. Uneasy shuffling, embarrassed coughs, hushed whispers ("has he started yet?" "what's going on?"), maybe even unwrapping of boiled sweets! And the pianist/audience, being 'in the know' hears the sounds created from the composer's stimulus - the 'organised sound' of my final definition!

I Got You Covered....

2010-08-12T14:00:00.001-07:00

I wanted to write today...but didn't know what about...so I went for as nice, relaxing bath - putting my BlackBerry on 'shuffle tracks' and settling back.

The bath lasted five tracks...and all five were cover versions! I had members of Yes, The Doors and Styx covering Pink Floyd's 'Don't Leave Me Now', John Wetton covering Genesis's 'Your Own Special Way, Harry Nilsson singing Jimmy Webb's 'Campo De Encino', The Beatles paying their tribute to Chuck Berry and 'Memphis Tennessee' and then a surprise!

I knew the song 'Vine Street' and have done for decades - it is the opening song on Harry Nilsson's 'Nilsson Sings Newman' album (a whole album of cover versions, of course). But this was certainly not the dulcet tones of a young Nilsson's tenor...and it wasn't Randy's unmistakeable tuneful croak either!

So, I had to get out of the bath! Turned out (as many of you more astute readers will have noticed) to be Van Dyke Parks and a CD I'd only recently purchased (but long wanted) and not yet listened to - 'Song Cycle' - on which every song is a VDP original...except for that one which, like Nilsson, opens the album! After that I had to rifle through my archive to see if I actually had a Randy Newman version...and I did, albeit a demo, as part of the 4CD retrospective set 'Guilty'.

I'd already been thinking, during the bath, about the concept of 'covers'. Prior to The Beatles the accepted 'norm' was for professional songwriters to write the songs, a record producer to find them and suggest them to a group or artist and 'away you go'. We all know how George Martin wanted The Beatles to record and release 'How Do You Do It' and managed to prise an unenthusiastic and reluctant studio version from them only for John to successfully argue that 'Please Please Me' was better and even suggest the 'surefire number one' be given to another of Brian Epstein's groups, Gerry & the Pacemakers. (It followed Please Please Me to Number one in the UK charts two months later, by the way!)

The Beatles and many other 1960s artists certainly blurred the lines between songwriter and artist to such an extent that, a decade later, almost all artists and groups wrote the majority of their own material - and that became the new 'norm' and, to some extent, still is today. There were (and are still) professional songwriters - but Tin Pan Alley was never quite the same again.

Cover versions and Nilsson have always made an interesting subject for debate. Harry was, undoubtedly, a marvellous songwriter, yet his career will forever be marked by the fact that his biggest hits were cover versions - most notably Badfinger's Without You and Fred Neil's Everybody's Talkin'. Harry wrote plenty of songs that became hits for other artists including The Monkees, Three Dog Night and David Cassidy - but the irony remained!

Such is the enormity of the number of cover versions associated with the music of Harry Nilsson that my friend Tom Westendorf has managed to put three 'packages ' of songs numbering 580 songs together for a yearly series of internet radio specials called 'Harry All Day'. (Artists featured are as diverse as actors George Segal, Robin Williams and Curtis 'Booger' Armstrong, The Muppets, The Turtles, Brian Wilson and Keith Moon...and even a couple of efforts by yours truly (happy indeed to share such exalted company!)

They say Paul McCartney's Yesterday is the most covered song of all with many thousands of official record and CD releases (goodness only knows how many millions of times it has been sung in bars and clubs and concert halls around the world in the last 45 years!)

Next week Brian Wilson himself releases a whole album of Gershwin 'interpretations' - said to be so much more than mere 'covers' - like Nilsson, I expect Brian to prove he has the genius to 'make other people's songs his own!

The funny thing is, if you'd asked me (before the bath) how many 'cover versions' I had on my BlackBerry I'd have probably guessed at less than ten. For my 'shuffle' function to find five consecutively out of a total of just under 2,000 songs I'm guessing there's a fair few more than that!

************************************************

PS - I can't help but think this post makes for a fine game of '6 Degrees of Separation'. Many of the artists mentioned are barely a degree of one away but I find I can even get from Styx to Brian Wilson in one...so I doubt 6 degrees would be needed anywhere!

Imagine...all the people...

2010-08-10T07:06:00.001-07:00

I was reminded this week of an old pastime I used to enjoy!

Back in the early 80s. when the Sony Walkman was still a pipe dream for most of us and the CD still being shown on Tomorrow's World (still playing after being smeared with raspberry jam I seem to recall) I was a young music student in Colchester, Essex doing my BA (hons) in Music composition and performance.

There was plenty of music at college of course and plenty back at my digs (as my grant became ever more swallowed up by the cash registers of Parrot Records)! The problem was getting to and from the 'Institute' - usually on my trusty bicycle. These days, of course, my sons rarely leave the house without iPod headphones and I have a 16GB microSD card in my BlackBerry that holds nearly 200 CDs...

...And thereby hangs the reason for my 'lost pastime' - the Imaginary Gig!

For I would cycle up and down the chestnut-lined 'Avenue of Remembrance' enjoying the most sublime 'one-off' music concerts in which the (already-late) John Lennon shared a stage with Brian Wilson, the whole series of live gigs by Harry Nilsson (who famously never played live concerts) - one gig per album! I put together my own 'supergroups' with eclectic mixtures of musicians like Phil Collins, Rick Wakeman, Greg Lake and Ritchie Blackmore...and, probably most often, joined Paul, George and Ringo on-stage in John's place for many, many Beatles reunions! (I even had the temerity to Imagine them adding some of my own songs to the set-list...but, I guess, that what dreams are for!)

The reminder came about because of the impending re-release of a novel called 'Glimpses' by American author Lewis Shiner. Without giving too much away a (usually) drunk sound engineer discovers he can not only 'internalise' gigs and sessions in the same way I did...but he could actually record them on tape! And, thus, the world got to hear several 'long-lost masterpieces' and the readers got to 'meet' some long-dead rock stars...a rather bizarre but very enjoyable read, especially for any who, like me, are big fans of The Beatles and Brian Wilson.

As a musician I gradually became aware that not everyone was able to share my pastime - I believe it to be linked to the same part of the psyche that enables me to play any tune I've heard without music, yet others simply cannot. One of my close friends has played with Salvation Army bands for well over 50 years; I dare not even try to imagine the number of times he has played a tune like 'Away In A Manger'? A typical carolling session (of which there are still a dozen or so each year but, in years gone by there might have easily been 30 a year) would yield at least six playings (3x2 verses). Yet Alex assures me he still could not play the tune without the music in front of him - and he is no mean musician, let me assure you!

So I was joyed somewhat when the skill of 'internalising music' became part of the National Curriculum orders for Music during my teaching career - and it was something I always tried to encourage my pupils to do - on whatever level they were able. I never discovered anyone else who could (or at least openly admitted) internalising to the extent I did until I met a friend on the Internet about 12 years ago. Jim Painton (see http://sho-sho-sho-show-offsky.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html ) could...and we spent some time exchanging emails - sending each other lists of musicians to 'imagine' playing together - so it was no surprise that Jim (who wrote the liner notes for my Christmas CD and allowed me to reciprocate for his 'Painton Place') was to the one to send me my copy of 'Glimpses' (not JUST any old copy, of course, it was a signed 1st edition).

I think I might do a bit more 'daydream gigging'...see you when I get back...

Star Wars...Revelation-style!

2010-07-17T14:46:00.000-07:00

When I was a student (a few too many years ago now, sad to say) I picked up a couple of Crusader Comics. These were genuine comic books but written from a very 'fundamentalist Christian' point-of-view. While they were 'sensationalist' (to say the VERY least) they did contain some pointers towards good Christian teaching. They were more anti-Catholic than Ian Paisley, as anti-Freemason as a thrice-blackballed bank manager and made Dan Brown's expose of The Vatican read like Cinderella!

But one comic, entitled 'Angel of Light' told the Biblical story of Lucifer quite well! Lucifer was, of course, God's favourite angel - the leader of all the worshipping angels - who got 'bored' with grovelling at the Almighty's feet and tried to con a third of Heaven's angels into bowing to HIM for a change! The Bible tells us that God, in His wrath, cast Lucifer out of Heaven and not - as is popularly believed - into Hell but down onto the surface of planet Earth (and the atmosphere surrounding it)! I even had to look up the relevant scripture to help me believe this! Yet, there it was in King James's best black and white!

It became a popular topic for me as I regarded myself as a rather radical, young Christian student at the time! I even preached on the subject on one of 'Blood & Fire's' evangelical weekend campaigns...

It was remarked upon, by one of the stalwarts of Pontypool Corps, that it was the first time he had EVER heard the 'fall of Satan' preached from a pulpit/SA platform! Extremely sadly, I have to admit that, in 26 years of subsequent church attendance, I have also never heard the same subject preached upon! Now, "Hellfire and Damnation" are, admittedly, rather out of fashion in the modern church - some might say rightly so - though I doubt the SA's Founder, William Booth, would agree - and, just possibly, the progressive weakness of the church's influence in society, as well as its dwindling membership throughout the 20th century may reflect this!

In fact, the only other time I ever encountered the story of the 'fall of Satan' was in the movie 'Bedazzled', written by and starring the popular comedy duo Peter Cook and Dudley Moore! There, Stanley Moon (Moore) encounters Satan (aka George Spigott, played by Cook) and hears the almost exact Biblical description of Lucifer's fall 'from grace', played out around a pillar box!

Anyway, what on earth (and the atmosphere around it) has this got to do with a music blog, I hear the less patient of you ask?

The answer is: a 50p cassette (without box) that I purchased nearly thirty years ago!

Bill Davidson is a well-known name amongst older Salvationists: he was a founder-member of 'The Joystrings', not only the first Salvation Army 'pop' group but, according to many experts (including the late, great Larry Norman) the first Christian pop-group from any denomination! Certainly the first to have a hit record in the UK charts ('It's an Open Secret' reached number 32 in 1964).

After 'The Joystrings' Bill led another group called 'Good News' and later moved to the USA where he is currently the Senior Pastor at the 'Church of the King', Queensbury, New York. Bill was loved (in the SA, anyway) for his wonderful voice, heard on so many 'Joystrings' favourites - especially on one of Joy Webb's most popular and enduring songs 'There Will Be God' - and, later, his beautiful rendition of Gowans & Larsson's 'Love Never Fails' on the LP recording of their musical 'Spirit'.

In the States Bill also recorded some solo albums - and one of these was the afore-mentioned 50p, boxless bargain I purchased all those years ago!

The title of the album is 'Star Wars of Darkness and Light'. The title track begins with a synthesizer introduction - very nearly, but not quite exactly, a note-for note quotation from what is. surely, John Williams' most famous theme! The song tells the story:

"Long ago and far away

Long before the dawning of our day

In a world that we can only dream of

Though it's described so we can clearly read of it..."

(Can't you see those yellow titles scrolling on a black background?)

...Lucifer turned from his maker's eyes,

Coveting the throne for his own prize.

Star Wars of darkness and light,

Hear words that begin the fight:

"Expel Lucifer from my sight!""

What a bold move for a brave pastor/singer to take the most well-known movie of all time and use it as his own evangelical tool to tell the story, a story (as we have seen) almost taboo in the pulpit!

Of course, in even more modern times - the age of the internet - we can Google 'Star Wars and the Bible' and find over three and a quarter million hits - leading us to numerous scholarly theses exploring the details of the two right down to their absolute pathological minutiae!!!

The same can be said for E.T. (a friend from 'afar' who is misunderstood to the point of being an outcast, heals the sick ("Ouch!") then dies and rises from the dead) and even Harry Potter...gosh, this internet is a wonderful thing!

My own personal circumstances led me to dig out, re-play (and even convert to iTunes compatible mp3) Bill's 1978 album this week (originally because of a different track on the album, I have to admit) but it was good to hear it again after so long - and my Star Wars-loving kids enjoyed it too!

When we, as Christian musicians, offer our music to the Lord we can never know the good He will make of it - even many, many years later! We should not be surprised! Isaiah tells us exactly how God will use our efforts:

" it shall not return to me empty,

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it."

Christian musicians: "Keep singing and playing for Him!" Amen!

Have Mouthpiece...Will Blow!

2010-07-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

I know some brass players who treat their mouthpiece the way some golfers treat their putters - i.e. they change them more often than they do their socks! I remember one cornetist with a mantelpiece full from one end to the other with Denis Wicks, Vincent Bachs, Adams, Blessings, Bessons, Kellys...standing like little ornaments on a shelf! Indeed, that's exactly what they WERE...waiting their turn patiently until my friend split a few too many notes and gave each another chance!

My eldest son, Morgan is a collector of mouthpieces. We found, just the other day an antique French mouthpiece with a triangular aperture! I have never seen anything like that before in my 40+ years as a player! Suffice to say there are mouthpieces to help you get high notes, ones to help you get low ones, some aim to improve your tone, plastic ones that are not too cold when playing Christmas Carols, heavy ones with boosters to help you

play longer by dispersing the vibrations to your lips...

Who would think such a small thing could come in such variations or make such a difference? But then...the amateur golfer probably asks the same about putters! I think it was Sam Torrance I once heard admit he had over 400 of them in his garage!

When I first moved onto euphonium it came about almost by accident: While playing with Camborne SA band I had formed part of a 'stage band' in the musical 'Hosea'. I had played cornet myself back then (aged 10) but our wise bandmaster, Ken Norton (left with Morgan and who, very sadly, passed away just a few months ago) realised such a small instrument was not for me. he moved me onto tenor horn and, within weeks, even I could recognise an improvement. When, a short while later, my parents were appointed across the Tamar to Torquay, the bandleader already had, ready for me, a shiny cornet. Oh-oh!

"But I play horn now," the 12-year old me piped up! He didn't have a horn - but he DID have a blackened 1912 euphonium with a bent 4th valve! If ever an instrument responded to some TLC it was that one...I worked and polished until it shone - the bath still had the marks when we left Torquay two years later - and I played and played and played. Six months later I am told I was playing some of the hardest solos in the euphonium repertoire using the SA manufactured Rangefinder mouthpiece my dad bought for me!

At our next home (Tunstall, Stoke-On-Trent) I played an Imperial euphonium (still with the Rangefinder) - although I looked with not a little envy towards our principal euphonium player's Bright Silver Plate Sovereign! At Bedlington (our next port of call) I played one of those strange design Yamaha euphoniums with the 4th valve 'up top' alongside the other three). This was a slightly larger bore and, therefore, necessitated a change in mouthpiece. Billy Webb, a friend from Newcastle, gave me a Denis Wick 6BM which I played until I left home for college.

At Colchester Institute I studied with one of the best musicians it has ever been my privilege to meet, Michael Clack - for many years the conductor of the world famous Chalk Farm Salvation Army Band. Michael was vice-principal of the college (and was an old friend of my parents) - which may account for the fact he managed to purloin one of the college Sovereigns for me to play (I finally got to play one...5 years after lusting after Kevin's back in Tunstall!)

The 6BM didn't fit the wider bore of the Sovereign, of course, and Michael kindly lent me a Vincent Bach 3G mouthpiece in my first college lesson, September 1981. I used it until Christmas then, using my Christmas money, I bought my own shiny new one from my fellow SA bandsman Dennis Todd's 'Rosehill Instruments' shop in Bedlington High Street. I think, even back in 1981/2 it cost me £30!

When I got back to college something was not quite right...the new mouthpiece didn't 'feel' the same. Michael and I did an A/B comparison and they weren't the same! I have spoken to Bach 'experts' who 'absolutely assure' me that I am wrong - but that 3G has a different internal contour and cup-size! My surprise (and slight disappointment) was somewhat tempered by Michael Clack informing me I'd been silly to buy a new mouthpiece anyway - he was more than happy to let me have his...for a fiver!

Fortunately, Dennis Todd allowed me a refund...I had the 3G I liked AND a £25 bonus into the

bargain (which, undoubtedly, was soon diverted to Parrot Records in Colchester!)

29 years later, I still use that very same mouthpiece! It has been re-plated once and the number of hours of usage it has been employed in practising and performance must be into tens of thousands of hours...best value for a fiver I will ever have in my life!

At this precise moment, due to some (and I choose my description very carefully) particularly

graceless and clumsy man-management I am without a band to play with for the first time in nearly 40 years. As my new Prestige euphonium belongs to the band who have discarded me I will also soon be without an instrument as well. Today, I enjoyed a good long blow, up and down my scales and exercises and through some favourite tunes and solos. I don't know how long it will be before I can do this again and made the most of it!

But when I DO re-begin to play...my Vincent Bach 3G (pictured left complete with my own reflection) will be

waiting - and, boy, I hope that day comes soon!

Are you listening...or just hearing?

2010-07-07T12:00:00.000-07:00

It was one of my favourite questions to GCSE students at the start of their 2 year course! Not worded quite like that, to be honest...I preferred to inject a little bit of fun: "How many of you listen to music while you do your homework?" was more like what I would have asked. Every time, every year, every hand went up. I would shake my head with a wry grin and accuse them all of being liars!

What a great way to provoke a wave of indignation! "But I DO!!!" would come back at me from all corners...and so I would go on to prove my point! Shaking my head, somewhat, I would ask them to 'listen' to a piece of music I had carefully pre-prepared! As soon as they heard the harpsichord arepeggio that led into an operatic recitative I watched the lights go out around the classroom...pupil by pupil the eyes glazed over. Which was something of a shame, really, for the words I sang on the recording included the lines, "Come, touch me on the shoulder and this fiver shall be yours!"

As the music played I took a note from my wallet and placed it, for all to see, in front of me on the desk. I waited for the music to stop, looked around the room in a questioning way for a few moments, then placed it back into my wallet. I never parted with the note in 15 years!

Of course, I would always be asked what I'd been doing with the money and I replie

d each time by writing four questions on the board:

1) Which instrument provides the accompaniment for this song?

2) From which type of work might this excerpt be taken:

a) a symphony

b) an opera

c) a pop song

3) What might have happened had I listened to the words properly first time through?

4) Write a sentence or two about the difference between listening to music and just hearing it.

Of course, second time through, the music was 'listened to' properly, one or two jokers might even try to touch me on the shoulder...but the fiver was staying in my pocket! We would go on to discuss the differences between 'hearing' music (as they now all admitted they did while doing homework) and really listening to it! An important lesson was learned very early on as part of a GCSE course that relies heavily on the ability to listen to music 'properly'

But I have discovered over the years that some people really CAN'T listen to music in the way I do (or the way I might want them to). Listening to music and enjoying it has a pre-requisite requirement* that you 'understand' what you are listening to, at least to some ext

ent. Let me explain:

If I were to play some little known excerpt of 'classical' music** to a brand new class of Year 7 pupils (11 years old) - for example, Bartok's Violin Concerto (see link below) - with the instruction from me to simply 'enjoy it', I may as well give a toothless man a 16 ounce steak with no knife and fork with the same directive! He would choke and they would, at least, feel sick!

On the contrary, if I asked the pupils to listen for the 8 note introduction by the harp, then hear how it is joined by the plucked (pizzicato) bassline played by cellos and basses - with a single French Horn note above - then, at least they will have some chance of 'digesting' at least a part of the musical 'steak'.

(The Bartok - here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJx4KkAzW0 )

Of course, it's this very fact that makes The Beatles easier to 'listen' to than Bartok; why (Glenn) Miller sold more discs than Miles (Davis) and why Cheryl (Cole) gets more downloads than...I dunno...Sade!

It's instant palatability - the same reason more people eat bubble-gum than broccoli or drink Ribena rather than rootbeer! And***, if we never venture beyond the instantly appeasing we may go our whole lives without experiencing Elgar, reading beyond Seuss to, say, Salinger...or even doing something as basic as enjoying olives and anchovies on a pizza!

I'll happily admit that when my friend Alvin first played me the music of Yes I 'didn't get it'! When I first played the music of Eric Ball it went over my head! Just like my first month of doing the Telegraph crossword saw one or two clues a day filled in! Fortunately, most of us can continue to LEARN all the way through our lives...and thank God for that!

So...next time you do your homework or have the radio on while you do your housework why not sit down quietly for five minutes and REALLY LISTEN. There's a whole new world out there!

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*at this point I have a vision of my old English teacher, Trish Gilbert, admonishing me for a) starting a sentence with an adjective and b) breaking another rule whose name escapes me 31 years later about using two words with the same meaning...like saying, "Personally, I...". Sorry Mrs G!

** definitely a blog subject for another day: "What is Classical Music?"

***Oh-oh...he's at it again Trish!

Heavenly Minded

2010-07-05T13:43:00.001-07:00

When I first went to Music College I stayed with a dear, elderly lady called Mrs Hurnard. She was a widow and her husband had been a leading Quaker. She was already into her eighties but was as sprightly as most half her age. It was porridge or cornflakes for breakfast followed by an extensive Bible and prayers session...I had to be up at 7 in order to get to college by lunchtime! Seriously, one morning she read the entire book of Jonah before I could leave the house. After a month I had memorised the back of the cornflakes packet!

She ate (and expected me to) apples fresh from the trees in her garden, complete with bruises and copious amounts of maggots and expected a lengthy explanation of the sermon when I got home from the Salvation Army on a Sunday. I stayed at her house exactly one half term (and that was only because I'd paid rent up front!!)

Mrs Hurnard was one of those people my dad would have described as "too Heavenly minded to be of any Earthly use!" Bless her!

Well, this evening we've had a death in the family...and hence our thoughts turned Heavenward. Lewis, my middle son, and I had just enjoyed a couple of hours of great music by Randy Newman, ending with his concert for BBC4 last year, Ieuan (my youngest) had been inspired to go to bed watching Toy Story and we turned our attentions to one of our favourite albums "A Trick of the Tail" by Genesis. We put the disc in the machine, selected DTS (which we prefer to Dolby Digital), balanced the surround speaker levels and had just watched the video to "Robbery Assault and Battery". "Ripples" came next and as Phil Collins soared up to the opening notes of the final chorus Lewis saw a streak of white light emanate from our trusty DENON AVR-1601. The room was filled with silence for a moment then filled with hot, electronic smoke as Denon's spirit ascended to Silicon Heaven! Well, it was a good way to go.

As is our wont these days, Lewis and I immediately turned to Facebook where I announced the bereavement to some wonderfully sympathetic friends. Lewis did the same, announcing that we'd been watching Genesis at the time!

Now, if Mrs Hurnard were still alive and on Facebook, I could have expected this reply from her - but thank you Sandy for inspiring this blog entry and giving me the best belly-laugh I've had in days.

For Sandy replied to Lewis with, "At least you were watching something biblical."

...And lines like that one, intentional or not, make dealing with a death in the family so much more manageable!

...And Now You Find Yourself in 2010...

2010-04-23T11:46:00.000-07:00

ASIA - Omega (2010

It was a very pleasant surprise to find this album delivered 3 days early when the postman brought it this morning! I first fell in love with rock music back in 1982 when I played Asia's debut album over and over in my student room! I was at Wembley that October where the band were distant heroes...tiny figures making a massive soundscape of noise. Asia, with other bands like Yes, Genesis and It Bites have been the soundtrack to my life ever since.

I knew the opening track from Icon II (Rubicon) and hadn't expected Steve's guitar to dominate this version...yet it did. In fact I was barely aware of keyboards at first. Holy War really catches the attention - a great prog track and again a very 'big' sound but each instrumental part is well-defined (at least throguh a good system) and, in this song (like the 2nd as well) the backing vocals are towering! John, in likening this new album to Alpha hints for us to find links...and Ever Yours is, clearly, The Smile has Left Your Eyes' counterpart. It was always my opinion that Geoff was a little out of place in Yes...but his perfect musical match is Mr Wetton...and thank God they found each other! What a team!

An earlier reviewer stated that John's voice was as strong as ever here and I have to agree...my teenage son (a fellow prog-head!) remarked that he looks younger with every album. When I stood with John at an It Bites gig last year I said the same to him and it is clear he is enjoying the new lease of life that sobriety and heart surgery has given him...long may it continue! (I find myself hearing his 'testimony' at the start of Icon I: "Stone cold sober - so glad it's over" as I write this...and reflecting on our conversation that day - the day heavy-drinking chef Keith Floyd died - that 'there but for the grace of God' he could have gone himself))

There is a great posititvity in the lyrics and feel of End of the World and the listener is reminded, yet again, of the high standards of musicianship these four men share. As is usual, I find, minor keys dominate this new recording...something that has been a common thread throughout Wetton's entire oeuvre. Light the Way is one of just two Steve Howe compositions here and his guitar leads into another bright song...Howe employing his 'Yes-sounds' more here (compare this to the Asia/Alpha albums back when these sounds were about all he had...I'm delighted he has found some good 'power-guitar' sounds in more recent years...he even makes a pretty good crack at Owner of a Lonely Heart these days :) )

Emily is more of a pop song - but that doesn't mean it is not very welcome at this point in quite a deep sequence of songs! Welcome, Emily, to that seemingly endless list of girls' names to become the theme of a Wettonsong! (Emma, Jane, Josephine, Shannon, Carol-Ann/Kari-Anne, Christina, Suzanne...have I missed any??) I like this song!

And I like the next too...the 6/8 rhythm making a change in I'm Still The same. Was it to make producer Mike Paxman (Status Quo) feel at home? ;) Some great chord sequences and harmonies in here...making me think of ELO at their best. Definitely one of the highlights!

There is a Renaissance - almost operatic? - sound to the next song There Was a Time. Songs like this one seem to suggest a blurring of the lines between Asia and Icon (maybe I can't help thinking along those lines with 'Trigger' kicking off this set?) but I kind of feel easier linking this song with the likes of The Hanging Tree and even Shannon than 'Asia'. However it does feature some beautiful piano playing from Geoff and Steve picks meanderingly in a style reminiscent of what he did on Queen's Innuendo. By the end the 'Asia' feel is more pronounced, however.

I Believe is the song most obviously in the style of Alpha, 27 years ago. It is the one of the tracks that would say 'Asia' to a casual listener acquainted, these days, with little but memories of the early hits...nice to revisit the past and, with tongue just, surely, a little in cheek, say "yeah...we can still do it!"

The final track...already! This must be the one John referred to as Beatle-y, the opening chords a heavier Day in the Life...chord patterns to remind us of Here, There & Everywhere, Beatle-y harmonies...ha-ha, there is even a rhythmic nod to I Am the Walrus (and, to save later additions, Penny Lane trumpet and overtones of Hey Jude). Yet - this is definite Asia product and a very nice way to end an excellent listen. This may turn out to be a 5 star album...I just don't want to say so now on first listen - nearly every album I've ever listened to has grown on me - and if this one does then those stars will be deserved indeed!

He's a Pretty Nifty Guy...

2010-01-15T01:00:00.000-08:00

"..Always looks you in the eye.

Everybody passing by will sigh...

...For Harry!"

Those were the opening lines of a little song composed in tribute to Harry Nilsson by his very good friend, and Monty Python star, Eric Idle. Having recorded it, with singer Charlie Dore, Eric sent it to Harry...only to have it used as the opening track...on Harry's next (and final) LP!

That album, 'Flash Harry' was released in 1980 - the same year, of course, as the last album from another of Harry's great friends, John Lennon...yet Harry was to outlive his Beatle-buddy by 14 years.

Despite that it was sixteen years ago today that Harry Nilsson passed away - his death virtually coinciding with the Northridge earthquake in LA (and I tried very hard not to mention Marianne Faithfull at this point...). That voice - that lent its youthful tenor to "Everybody's Talkin'", reached its mature peak in the Schmilsson era with "Without You", "Remember" and the wonderful, Gordon Jenkins arranged, "A Little Touch..." album of standards and then suffered the ravages of sharing Lennon's 'Lost Weekend' and never fully recovered - was silenced by a massive heart attack just as he finished work on a comeback recording...still (to the shame of his estate) unreleased and, largely, unheard.

Harry had recorded in the intervening years, of course...a Beatlefest single to raise funds for the 'Campaign to End Handgun Violence' in honour of John, a whole (unreleased) album of covers of songs by Yoko, three of which appeared on her "Every man Has a Woman..." album, various film themes and songs (including a new recording for 'The Fisher King"), contributions to various Disney compilations...quite a lot, in fact...but never a new, complete album.

Harry was never a 'fashionable' pop star...he'd have thought the very idea preposterous! Even the millions who, still today, hum along (out of tune?*) to his best known 'hits' don't, in the main, know who they are humming with! But those who DO know...and there are more than a few...are the most knowledgeable, loving fans on this earth! It was lonely, growing up a Nilsson fan in England and it was not until I discovered the internet that I was finally able to find all the others who felt like me! An internet group known, informally, as Nilssonweb centred on Roger Smith's wonderful Nilsson web pages (originally on jadebox.com but now at http://www.harrynilsson.com/ ) gradually grew to be the ultimate Harry resource. An email mailing list brought together fans who over the past 15 years have become friends and where all the stories you ever wanted to hear about Nilsson and his music spread and grew like a wildfire...until all the stories were told and the emails dwindled to a meagre trickle. But, by then, we had met anyway at 'Harryfests' - gatherings of fans at Harry Nilsson conventions in LA, Ohio, Florida and London (but none since 2002...come on, somebody!)

At Harryfest 2001 (which I helped organise at London's prestigious Hotel Russell) I finally met Roger, Harry's son Zak, his discographer Andrea T Sheridan and, of course, the leading Nilsson scholar of our age, Curtis Armstrong (yes, he of 'Booger' and 'Moonlighting' fame), without whom so many of the wonderful re-releases and remasters of the last 2 decades would never have happened. When I went to LA later I was welcomed into Zak's home (where I even played Harry's own piano - see left!), Curtis took me for a ride in his car just to play me a new track he'd found in the vaults. Ted Parkinson came to my home, I spent a holiday in Yorkshire with Pam Murphy...and many others I met on Nilssonweb have become (or became...RIP Dzhimmm Painton) close friends although we've moved onto other forums these days (like Facebook).

Others, like Rinus from Holland, I've now lost touch with...but I guess we'll all be spinning some Nilsson today and raising a glass or two in memory of the greatest voice of all.

Thank you, Harry!

My own Nilsson pages (including the fullest reviews of the albums etc you'll find) are found at www.marcharry.com/nilssonmenu.htm

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* just a reference to a Harry song (an in-joke for a few readers!) 'They always hum along, out of tune" from 'I'll Take a Tango'

Blowing My Cover!

2009-11-06T14:26:00.000-08:00

Thirty years or so ago...when I first 'properly discovered' The Beatles I recall being rather amazed to hear (or read, I forget which) that 'Yesterday' was the most covered song in history with, at that time, over 1,500 versions recorded.

With an exponential increase in the number of recordings the last three decades have spawned I'd probably be correct in guessing that number would now be well into the tens of thousands...maybe that figure could be accounted for just in the sleazy...yes...yucky...world of muzak - 'Music For Relaxation', 'Panpipe Moods', 'Theo Papadopoulos's Zither Zeniths'...you get the idea, I'm sure (actually, I own the accursed 'Panpipe Moods'...have done for 15 years...still in shrink wrap - and 'NO' I didn't pay for it!)

The age of CD and mp3 downloads has heralded this sharp increase in available 'music'...and, for me, nothing sums up the disposabilty of the majority of new pop music than the necessity of more and more cover versions released week after week!

To be fair, it's not just the music world that reaches back to halcyon days of yore...have you noticed the number of remade movies in the last few years? Why did they need to remake 'Alfie' or 'The Italian Job', for instance? It's not as if Michael Caine has even gone out of fashion, is it? Staggeringly, they even remade 'The Taking of Pelham 123' this year! Why? I've seen both and there's only one of them I'd want to watch again! Disney are even going to remake 'Yellow Submarine', I see...which brings me back, yet again, to the Fabs!

The very first LP of Beatles cover versions I bought I probably owned before I had even completed my collection of originals: the album 'Northern Songs' by Revolver was a collection of songs the Beatles 'gave away', performed (roughly) in the style the group may have used themselves had they recorded them. Filled with titles like 'Bad To Me', 'One and One is Two, 'Hello Little Girl' and 'From a Window' I remember listening over and over...imagining that there might, somewhere, be 'real' versions yet to be discovered...without ever seriously believing there were! I was wrong, of course - and from the mid-1990s, as I began to explore this new wonder called the Internet, I even found a few very lo-fi real audio files of a few of these tracks. 15 years later we OWN legitimate copies of most of them thanks to the Anthology series! A few remain elusive and will probably remain so (most notably Paul's demo of 'World Without Love') but every so often I still get a little surprise...good things come to those who wait...and surf!

A friend recently sent me a CD containing two BBC Radio specials, the latest incarnation of 'Beatles at the Beeb', this time introduced by Bill Kenwright and the second, a programme about Beatles cover versions hosted by former Cavern Club cloakroom attendant Cilla Black.

The former was another good trawl through the archives - not as exciting these days as when the original (Andy Peebles?) show was transmitted, opening our ears to recordings us mere fans never knew existed! We now have the 2-CD BBC set in our collections...have had for several years now...but I still cherish those Chrome Dioxide C-120s that repeated playing of once confirmed to me that The Beatles really did play songs like 'Oh Carol', 'Johnny Be Goode' and 'Cryin', Waitin', Hopin''

Yet the latter show has given me quite a bit more 'happy car moments' over the last few weeks - Sandie Shaw, Ella Fitzgerald, Dollar...my fellow Beatlemaniac 2nd son, Lewis, commented (very astutely, I thought) that there probably was no other group whose catalogue could be played in so many different styles and sound as if they were written for that genre...and I have to agree!

So...which Beatles covers stand out in my mind? Like most people I would have to include both the best and the worst in order to answer that one! Anyone remember the 'Sergeant Pepper' movie starring 'The Bee Gees'? It's VERY hard to find these days and it sums up all camps...the good, the not so good and the downright awful! The version of 'Got To Get You Into My Life' by 'Earth, Wind & Fire' (with the Phoenix Horns very much to the fore) is a much underplayed masterpiece...one of VERY few covers I might even prefer to the original! The same might not be said for Frankie Howerd's take on 'Mean Mr Mustard'!

I was very impressed, generally, by the musical versions found in the movie 'Across The Universe'. 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)', Bono's 'I Am Tne Walrus' and the title track are particularly effective, I think. The same cannot be said for George Martin's retirement offering, 'In My Life', made up of various celebrities 'doing' Beatles songs, which I find ponderous and somewhat pretentious. Most people love Joe Cocker's classic version of 'With a Little Help From My Friends' and it certainly lifts what could have been a throwaway 'Ringo' number were it not on 'Pepper' - did you know the original first lines were 'What would you do if I sang out of tune? Would you throw tomatoes at me?' Apparently Ringo refused to record that as he was unsure the days of concerts were over!

Beatles covers have been recorded successfully all around the world - and in most languages. The group themselves recorded 'Sie Liebt Dich' and 'Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand' for their own German fans - Del Shannon had a US hit with 'From Me To You' 6 months BEFORE the band themselves had a US hit! It seems that, whatever the group, if they've done any covers, they've probably done Beatles ones - even prog giants like 'Yes' featured 'Every Little Thing' on their first album, Deep Purple did 'Help' on theirs...Rick Wakeman did a whole tribute album...as have many others.

I hated the 'Dollar' hit version of 'She Loves You' when it came out and remember decrying it as some sort of sacrilege...I was pleasantly surprised that when I heard it on the Cilla show that not only did I quite enjoy it...I was actually somewhat impressed by the effective contrast that was Thereza's middle 8! Time can be forgiving, obviously!

Jazz has been good to Beatles music - I mentioned Ella earlier but many other singers, big bands and even modern jazz ensembles have taken Lennon/McCartney into new realms...I might not like all I've heard but that is not necessarily an indication of value, of course. Sinatra, of course, was another who covered several Beatles songs, once proudly announcing in concert that 'Something' was his "favourite Lennon-McCartney number"...OOPS!! (I hardly need to explain to educated folks like yourselves that George wrote that one!)

One of the strangest CDs of Beatles music I own is 'The Beatles Collection' by British vocal group 'The King's Singers'. I love this group anyway (they have recently released two sublime CDs of Salvation Army classics which are amongst the most played of all my vast collection).
'The King's Singers' are many groups in one: they can be hilariously funny - some wonderful, inventive arrangements of Noel Coward songs, a capella mediaeval madrigals, modern, self-commissioned classical and experimental works and many easy-listening (but far from muzak) pop covers (their singing of Neil Sedaka's 'God Bless Joanna' is one of the loveliest things I've ever heard) make up just part of their oeuvre... 'The Beatles Collection' visits many of these styles (all a capella) and includes some excellent versions of songs including 'Michelle', 'Eleanor Rigby' and 'And I Love Her'.

Another album I picked up on LP back in 1987 was 'Sergeant Pepper Knew My Father' - a collection of Beatles covers by bands of...1987 and released as part of the 'It was twenty years ago today' celebrations. When I pulled it out for this article I was pleased to see that the songs have outlasted all the featured artists! While I recall most of the NAMES of the artists featured the only ones I really KNOW are 'Wet, Wet, Wet' (who, of course, had the big hit with 'With a Little Help') and Frank Sidebottom, a cartoon-esque comic character with a spherical, fibreglass head! Let no-one claim that The Beatles are the sole property of the highbrow!

And, while talking of anniversaries, Google will no doubt have already brought to your attention the 40th birthday of the redoubtable 'Sesame Street' - a show which, as its viewers will know, features its own 'Sesame Beatles', well known for wonderful pastiches like 'Letter B' (Let It Be) and 'Hey Food'...they deserve a mention here!

It's OK...I know what you've been waiting for...and your 'proff' won't let you down! I can't complete this blog entry without going 'trekkie', can I? Love them or loathe them, the Beatles covers of Captain Kirk and Mr Spock simply cannot go unmentioned! William Shatner's dramatic, spoken interpretation of 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds' was voted the 'Worst Beatles Cover Version Ever' in a 2203 poll - beating Pinky & Perky's 'All My Loving' and Damon Hill's 'Drive My Car'...Yet Shatner's rendition has a cult appreciation too...it is SO bad it's actually quite good...if you get what I mean - either way it has to be heard to be believed (check it out on YouTube!). Leonard Nimoy's covers are barely better, sad to say!

And the number of Beatles covers will continue to grow, of that I am certain, for many years to come. The best music never dies (even when someone tries to kill it!) - the songs have survived the best efforts of Candy Flip, Will Young and Mrs Miller - just as Mozart's Piano Sonatas survived my clumsy efforts!

Let it be!

Blowing my own trumpet...well...euphonium!

2009-10-29T08:12:00.000-07:00

I am blessed!

No...seriously, I am...and what's more...I know it and appreciate it!

It's been a while since the last blog...I've been a bit 'down' with the depression, busy at times but not at others and, this week I've spent 'home alone' with 2 sons at their mum's for a few days and the other on a church youth holiday in Belgium.

Last week was dominated by the recording of another CD...and I'm amazed how 'blasé' that must come across; so I've taken stock of such physical achievements - and hence the profession of my 'blessedness' apparent above! This blog piece is NOT intended as a piece of shameless self-promotion or big-headedness - merely a reflection of how blessed I really consider myself to have been in this life!

I'm no household name...but I've had opportunities I know a lot of other people would love to have had! I have been playing concerts as a euphonium soloist since I was 12...back in 1974 (which, honestly, doesn't feel as long ago as it clearly is!). If I had a pound for every time I've played 'Song of the Brother', 'Ransomed', 'La Belle Americaine', 'Euphony' and 'The Better World' I guess I'd have a healthy savings account balance today! I gave up counting at 125 towns and cities in England, Scotland and Wales...and can add more in France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Norway and at least 5 cities in California to the list!

I held the record high mark for the Associated Board Grade 8 examination when I passed it, aged 15, back in 1978...I was told at music college that had I been as proficient on a more 'fashionable' instrument I could have made a career of it: suffice to say that 3 decades later I have never made one penny from blowing my euphonium!!! I have had compliments a-plenty, featured solos on two CDs and a review of my playing in a very highly-regarded online publication which resulted from a guest performance I made with a band a few years ago.

( http://www.4barsrest.com/reviews/concerts/con202.asp?l=uk )

Last week's CD was the latest (and I reckon it will be best so far) by Portsmouth Citadel Band. Recorded in four sessions over three days in Warsash Church it will be titled 'Deep Harmony' and features music by composers as varied as Ravel (Bolero), Gullidge (The Fount) and Peter Graham (The Last Amen). It will also mark a considerable step-up in quality by the band in terms of playing, reflecting their recent improvements under the baton and leadership of my good friend John Hanchett.

It should have been enough if I'd only played the euphonium...

...But I have also been able to perform in many other ways: I have sung for as long as I can remember - I made my stage debut in the musical 'Take Over Bid' when aged just 5 and a couple of years later remember being made aware that, in singing the hymn 'Now I Belong to Jesus' in a church service, I had raised a few smiles in the congregation by innocently claiming to have once been 'lost in sin's degradation'. (I was not such an evil child, I promise!)

After college I travelled Britain and Europe with the rock band 'Blood & Fire'. I was NOT as proficient on the electric guitar but I think I did an adequate job there, also featuring as a singer, trombonist and part-time additional keyboardist on their first two albums (then only released on cassette but now on CD!) Since then my 'rock' career went through 'Cross Purposes' and prog-rock band 'The Big Picture'...the latter band has still not officially split but it is 5 years since our last gig...it is a problem when the guitarist lives in Leeds, the drummer in Norfolk, our bassist is in the RAF - even if Alvin and I are only 25 miles or so apart in Haslemere and Portsmouth!

Yet I've done plenty of singing on my own, written 286 songs (to date) and have had my own solo CD of Christmas songs on sale for the last 7 or 8 years. In fact, I've been singing ever since childhood and featured as a vocal soloist on three more CDs that I know are listened to all around the world - those made by Portsmouth Citadel's Songsters. Although I have not sung on the last few PCS CDs I have been the main pianist/accompanist on two of the last three (including 'Take My Life' released earlier this year: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Take-My-Life-Let-Be/dp/B001WO9QOO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1256831625&sr=1-1 )

So...I AM BLESSED! Not just in terms of the talents God gave me but to have been able to offer those gifts back to Him in so many varied ways! It's been a heck of a life to experience ( I managed to fit in over 20 years music teaching in secondary schools) and I've loved every minute of the performing opportunities God has given me...and I hope it continues for many years to come!

I hope it doesn't go too far on my part to add a little even to the thespian theme I hinted at above too. That I've been able to sing and appear in 2 movies (one in the lead role!) and on stage, TV and radio has been a great added bonus! I've played on Ruth Rendell's 'Inspector Wexford', TV Drama 'The Blind Date' (starring Zara Turner) and, of course sung outside the Queen Vic in 'Eastenders'! On stage I've played Herr Schultz in 'Cabaret', Frank Strang in 'Equus', Mr Bumble in 'Oliver!', Henry VIII in 'Kings & Queens', Peter in 'The Witness', Father Christmas in 'Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' (for which I also wrote the incidental music) and several more...I even have my own page and video clip on IMDb ( http://uk.imdb.com/name/nm2218461/ )

Enough,then, for now...that's all about me, your 'proffsky' (show-offsky!)...and, as you will have seen - I am blessed!

The Screechy Music!!!!!

2009-10-12T07:47:00.000-07:00

One of my lovely readers recently commented on her Facebook status that she wished her college teacher had not played "the screechy music" on the day she had a headache! I couldn't help but smile and ask the source of the accused quasi-musical screams! I suspected the most screechy* of all screechy pieces I have ever encountered - in fact I could hear it in my head as soon as I recalled it.

I speak of Penderecki's extra-ordinary 'Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima' no less! I first heard this in a composition workshop session at Music College back in 1981 and found it disturbing, challenging, riveting, thrilling and horrendous...all at the same time! The piece (written for 52 string instruments) requires its performers to interpret symbols, play on the 'wrong' side of the bridge, deliberately use 'quarter tones', slap the instruments and create textures and tone clusters.

(I had already encountered tone clusters by that time through my brass band experiences. Composer Paul Patterson made quite a 'splash' in 1974 with the highly controversial 'Chromascope'. When he wrote this work for 'Besses o'the Barn' band it was certainly unlike anything ever heard before in the brass band world! Even more reactionary was 'Cataclysm' a year or so later. I had played 'Cataclysm' myself and was intrigued by instructions on my euphonium part to 'play as high/low a note as possible' - and to improvise a 'triple forte' ending! No two performances could ever be the same (shades of the Indian music I wrote about a few weeks ago). I was even 'inspired' to compose my own piece in a similar vein - a massive work for large brass band with 8 timpani, tuned a semitone apart, and a synthesizer! Called 'Creation and Destruction', I wrote it for a college composition competition - only to be disctinctly embarrassed when Patterson himself was invited to 'judge' the contest!!!!)

I'd guess that fewer than one in a thousand music afficionados have heard even a portion of 'Threnody' but an attempt should, perhaps, be made to experience it at least once...even if 'just to see'! I don't think its the type of piece you would ever sit down to enjoy, it would not aid relaxation...and certainly is not the choice to accompany a romantic dinner!**

I was wrong in my guesswork anyway! The (as yet unidentified) piece in question was composed by the great 20th Century French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-92). I have studied and enjoyed several of Messiaen's works (though I would still consider myself some way below an 'expert'!)

The two things I mostly associate with Messiaen are birdsong and colour:

Birdsong in music is another of those recurring themes. As long ago as Haydn and Mozart, then later Beethoven (in the Pastoral Symphony) composers had written music intended to represent birdsong - followed by Mahler (most notably in Symphony 7) and many other composers - but Messiaen took its use to new levels. An extremely keen ornithologist himself, he encouraged his students to listen intently to the songs of the birds. His 1952 audition piece for flautists wishing to enter the Paris Conservatoire was based entirely on the actual song of the blackbird. Later works such as 'Reveil des Oiseaux' (1953) and (the piece I first encountered of his) 'Couleurs de la Cite Celeste' (1963) feature 'actual' birdsong quite extensively as does, in fact, most of his work from the 1950s onward. (Many tapes of recorded birdsong were found in Messiaen's paraphernalia along with manuscript representations of them in standard notation).

Colour, of course, is another vital ingredient in both Patterson's 'Chromascope' and much of Messiaen's work - indeed it is implied in the very title of 'Cite Celeste'... I was impressed as a young musician with the compositional techniques Messiaen used to 'recreate' the depths of a cave and the way sounds passed through it...I remember him using deep, loud notes or chords, with very quiet 'overtones' or fake-harmonics high above it - almost imperceptible in the soundscape, yet just enough to manage completely to provide that 'depth' and send a shiver down the spine!

In 'Couleurs' and other works, such as 'Des Canyons aux Etoiles' Messiaen actually wrote the colours he was trying to represent onto the conductor's score - to aid the interpretation, however, not to influence the listener... I relate this to the way Debussy put the titles of his, often programmatic, Preludes (e.g. Voiles, La Cathedrale Engloutie, Minstrels etc) in brackets UNDERNEATH the piece...as if to encourage the listener to imagine for themselves before referring to the original intention.

And that brings me back to the brass band again. I'm not sure if it was on the same of my father's brass band LPs (although I'd like to think I am right in recalling that it may have been) on which I first encountered 'Chromascope' sat another piece that tried to represent colour: 'Spectrum' by Gilbert Vinter. This has always been one of my favourite pieces of band music and, in contrast with much of the music I have written about today, it is largely melodic and conventional in its harmonies and structure - and, like the others, well worth a listen!

Like Kate's teacher, when I was teaching I loved to present music to my students that would challenge their accepted ideals, widen their horizons...make them ask questions! I once went too far, I seem to recall...'8 Songs for a Mad King' by Peter Maxwell-Davies was too much for any GCSE group and I learned a lesson myself in class that day!!!

So, the only shame, as far as I'm concerned, was that Kate had a headache on the day in question...maybe she will listen again with a clear head (couple of paracetamol??) and an open mind...and she will, as we all will, find that music can usually find a way to speak to us in that very special way.

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*I have to acknowledge there is no such word as 'screechy' but...you know what it means nevertheless!

**fans of the 'Manic Street Prechers' may prove the exception - the Welsh rockers used an excerpt from the piece as an introduction to their track 'You Love Us' back in 1991.

October the Ninth

2009-10-08T13:23:00.000-07:00

9th October, 1909 - Gwendoline Maud Brinkworth (my paternal grandmother) was born in Cardiff.

9th October, 1940 - John Winston Lennon was born in Liverpool. Gwen was 30.

9th October, 1962 - Marc Owen Harry was born in Wrexham. Gwen was 52 and John was 22.

9th October, 1975 - Sean Ono Lennon was born in New York. Gwen had died earlier that year, John was 35, Marc became a teenager.

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Thus is my own family and the Lennon family forever linked. I so much wanted one of my own children to have been born on 9th October...but was not even close! Is it too late? It's my turn, after all! Maybe my (soon to be ex) wife and I never had enough early nights in January...

Nevertheless, the 9/10 date each year, having imposed itself four times in sixty-five years (against odds of 'goodness knows how many' to 1*) it is little wonder the number 9 held such a fascination for either John or I, is it? (#9 Dream, One After 909, "Revolution 9/Number Nine" etc.)

In fact, the number 9 crops up very often throughout the world of music - look at the number of composers who stopped (for one reason or another!) at 9 symphonies? 9/8 time (compound triple), nonet, the interval, several pop and rock band names (e.g. Nine Inch Nails, 999) and album titles (e.g. Public Image Ltd, Fairport Convention)...even John's fellow Beatle had an album called 'Cloud Nine'...

John would have been 69 today, my Nana Harry 'one after 99' - telegram from the Queen time...alas she has been returned to her Maker for some 34 years. But John is forever 40.

My mum woke me on that Tuesday morning in December 1980 with the words 'prepare yourself for a shock'...but nothing could have prepared me for her news...I sat on my bedroom floor tuning my radio from station to station trying to find one that would tell me John Lennon was NOT dead - but they all did the opposite! I made a 'shrine' in my bedroom window with album covers and my guitar before heading off to school. At school, my friend Colin Nicholson and I asked permission to hold a gathering during the next day's General Study period to play John's music...

...Permission was granted - on condition that for every record we played we performed 2 songs live! So, the next day, we prepared our little concert - expecting two or three others to attend. So many wanted to pay their respects to the murdered ex-Beatle we had to move out of the room into a bigger hall and Colin and I performed in front of rows of crying girls wearing glassless, round spectacles, Beatles scarves and wigs. It was the first time I ever sang while accompanying myself on guitar!

A few weeks before I had taken my place in the queue for one of the first ever 'midnight openings' in Newcastle City centre...to purchase the first new LP by John Lennon since 1975. 'Double Fantasy' had sat on my turntable ever since. The album has been unfairly criticised since its release but, for me, it's a gem of a record! I think much of the negativity is connected with the tired and ridiculous Yoko-bashing that still goes on in Beatles forums today. I've always found Yoko an intriguing, innovative artist - both in the musical and 'art' sense: one of the things that led John back to recording in 1980 was hearing female 'new-wave' singers like Lene Lovich whose 'new' sound was an old one to people who'd heard Yoko's output for the last ten years!

Yoko shared 'Double Fantasy' with John, alternating tracks (almost) throughout. Her first song on the album, 'Kiss, Kiss, Kiss', was one of those that, while living at home, I had to turn the volume down or quickly plug headphones in (along with tracks like 'You're Breaking My Heart' by Nilsson) for Yoko loudly and enthusiastically fakes a prolonged multiple orgasm as part of it...I wonder if that had ever been done on record before???

John's songs on the record I grew to love very quickly - '(Just Like) Starting Over', 'Woman', 'Watching The Wheels' and 'Beautiful Boy' in particular. The last of these became even more poignant in the weeks ahead - a wonderful love song to his 5 year-old son, Sean. "I can hardly wait to see you come of age," John sang. Of course, he never saw that day...

...But it does bring us round to where we started, doesn't it. 'Little' Sean, John's 'beautiful boy' is 34 today...just 6 years younger than his dad was when his life was stolen. So HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Sean...and John...and Nana Harry...oh and me too!

*I have several friends who are Maths fiends - none of whom I've been able to contact in the last 24 hours to calculate this one for me...if anyone comes up with a figure I'll re-edit the post!!!!

Oh good...National Poetry Day!!!

2009-10-08T04:58:00.000-07:00

I used to love this day when I was teaching! Quite often I would entertain my classes with a newly written ode for the day...but more often it was the staff room who got the benefit - I once remember struggling my way through about 25 staff members at St Luke's with a limerick composed for each!

I started writing poems when very young - I recently found an old exercise book from 'Millbridge Upper', my primary school in Liversedge (Nr Heckmondwike), Yorkshire. Amongst imaginative stories about Aladdin's Lamp (no boring 'rubbing it' for me... the inscription on my lamp read: 'stuff stinkbombs down the spout and you will get a surprise!' In the margin - in red - Mrs Ingham's reply read clearly, 'so will you if you write this sort of thing again!') and King Xerxes sits a poem, complete with pencil drawing carefully coloured in: it's title was 'The Ustranoch'. It begins thus:

"The Ustranoch comes from Uranus

It's body is made from jellyus"

Maybe an inauspicious start - but I was only 7 at the time!

Poetry began to flow on a family holiday in 1981. We used to spend a couple of weeks each summer in one of the Salvation Army's holiday homes - alternating between Broadstairs, Folkestone, Westgate and Cliff House near Bournemouth. In retrospect, I'd say we were at Cliff House the most but that 1981 holiday was remarkable for many reasons... For a start it coincided with probably the most exciting Test Match of all time - the one that led to the England v Australia cricket series becoming known forever as 'Botham's Ashes'. The first item I wanted to take to the beach each day was my transistor radio...and I sat on the sand listening to Johnners, Boilers, Sir Fred, The Bearded Wonder etc. day after day as England toiled...*

My dad had turned his radio off in disgust as England lapsed to 135 for 7 in their 2nd Innings - following on and still nearly a hundred behind...history goes on to aver that at least two Aussies placed bets at 500 to 1 on an England win, never believing for a second that there was the remotest chance...But Sir Ian had other ideas and blasted 149, ably assisted in building a lead by the unlikely duo of Chris Old and Graham Dilley.

By midday the next day (it was Tuesday, July 21st, by the way) nobody had even ventured onto the beach - the tiny TV room was so overcrowded they had to move the TV into the lounge...and then even into the dining room as Bob Willis skittled the Australians out to take 8 for 43 and led the troops to the unlikeliest of all wins and the start of an irrepressable run of form that lasted the rest of the summer!

Please excuse that massive digression as I veer off-piste...it's the Ronnie Corbett syndrome again! Blame it on my passion for writing, for cricket and this absurd memory I was blessed with (I don't have to Google these facts and figures - they just sit waiting for the chance to leap out of my head!!!) Eight days later Charles and Diana were married at St Paul's and we crowded round the TV again in Westgate...but the excitement even of that Royal Wedding Day could not match the Test Match!**

Back to poetry...it was on that holiday that I also took a blue school exercise book and, inspired by an Edward Lear and Monty Python kick I'd been on, I began to write nonsense poems. Every evening I would be summoned by other guests to entertain them with the fruits of my day's labour - and they fed my writing habit with copious laughter and merriment - particularly one dear lady, Olive Daws, who laughed hysterically poem after poem! (Olive is the mother of David - now famous as one of the best cornet players in the world, of course!)

...And I've written poems ever since. I remember that once, while part of an entertainment team at Butlins in Bognor Regis I was challenged to write three poems in an hour on subjects nominated by the audience - I just found them today before I started writing this piece! Around 1990 I was persuaded by friends and family to assemble an official collection of poems and this I did, paying to publish it myself on school equipment. It was half a book of funny and nonsense poems and half of profound or reflective poetry. The first run of 100 copies sold out very quickly, as did a second run and I even made more after that...one or two tattered copies might still be knocking around somewhere. It was called 'Cortina Biriani' in deference to 'Carmina Burana', the famous piece of music by Karl Orff - the cover featured a plate of curry...sans meat but littered with rusting Ford cars, of course!

If I had to pick one poem to mark today, though, it would not be one from 'Cortina Biriani' but one that would bring me back to music (once again...all roads lead to music...) I wrote this poem while waiting for the last few finishers to leave a very boring Geography Exam I was 'invigilating' in 1994. Harry Nilsson had recently died and I wrote the poem to mark the passing of the singer/songwriter I still acknowledge today to have been my favourite pop/rock musician ever and also the most inspiring influence on my own songwriting.

It was later published in the Nilsson Fanzine 'Everybody's Talkin'' and, when we met in 2001, Curtis Armstrong (noted Nilsson historian and, of course, famous actor) told me it was his favourite poem ever. Most John Lennon/Beatles fans will be aware of John Lennon's 'Lost Weekend' - a period of some 18 months when he and Yoko went through a separation in the mid 1970s. John spent some of that time living in a drug and booze filled house with fellow hell-raisers including Harry, Ringo and Keith Moon (drummer from 'The Who').

John agreed (while drunk, he later claimed) to produce Nilsson's next LP - unfortunately for all concerned, by the time the sessions were underway Harry had raised hell to such an extent that he had ruptured a vocal cord and was coughing up blood whenever he tried to sing! His famously smooth, gliding baritone was reduced to a croaky rasp...yet he tried to hide the truth from Lennon and an LP was, finally, released - Lennon crediting his contributions to a pseudonym 'Dr Winston O'Boogie' - even the seemingly innocent cover of the LP (above) features toy letter-blocks...a D and an S...with a 'rug' inbetween...you get it?

I'm glad they made the album - 'Pussy Cats' - two of my favourites working together...it's not my favourite Nilsson album...but it's Harry and John, you know??? To other fans it obviously IS a favourite - American band 'The Walkmen' re-recorded the entire project as a tribute a few years ago! You can find out lots more about the album if you follow the Nilsson links from http://www.marcharry.com/ but...for now, here is the poem in honour of Harry, John and National Poetry Day 2009:

Pussy Cats

Sing a song of Schmilsson

A bottle full of rye,

O'Boogie, Moon and Starkey

Soon drank the bottle dry

So they opened up another

As the tapes began to roll

And, while Harry 'laughed his ass off',

The bottle took its toll.

And they 'had their share of good times'

And their 'spirits' kept them high

And they left us with an album -

And they left us wondering why

The Almighty, in His wisdom,

When He said 'My will be done'

Deemed 'pussy cats' get nine lives...

But our heroes only one?

*these were the affectionate names beloved by all England cricket supporters who listened to the national institution known as Test Match Special on Radio 4 each summer - in turn the names referring to the wonderful Brian Johnston, Trevor Bailey, Fred Trueman and Bill Frindall...

**unbeknownst to either of us at the time, it later transpired that between these two momentous events my future wife and I had met for the very first time...or at least been present in the same Salvation Army service in Ramsgate...we realized many years later this was the case when we recalled the item for young people in the meeting involved a game of Chinese Whispers with the message to be passed along being "if it rains on Wednesday a lot of people will be very disappointed".

2009-10-06T06:35:00.000-07:00

Whew!!!! It's not that I don't want to write this...but the last few days have been a whirlwind! Before I even approach the subject of music a few other bits...I've had the AA out twice to sort the car, youngest son Ieuan (5) has been ill, I had a freezer break down and lost all its contents, replaced it thanks to eBay (involving picking it up in Bognor), 2 trips to the dump with said broken freezer, old armchair and sacks of rotting meat...

...You getting the idea...? I know...we all have weeks like that! My saving grace was the weekend I just enjoyed...5 music events in 48 hours - whoop!

Lewis, Ieuan and I left Portsmouth on Friday afternoon and drove up the A3 listening to Jim Painton's 2 CDs (see my last posting...). Both Ieuan and Lewis gained new favourite songs in the process - Ieuan asked for 4 replays for 'The Girls From High School' while Lewis joined me as a BIG fan of 'Last Night I Saw Lennon'. We paid our respects to Jim from afar then...it was his funeral over in New Jersey last Friday...

Then we paid our respects to Lucy by listening to the song she inspired - if you hadn't seen the news, Lucy Vodden (the former nursery-mate of Julian Lennon who was painted 'in the sky with diamonds') died last week too.

The first concert was in Orpington...a fund-raiser for the local Rotary Club in a large, very full Crofton Hall. Most of the concert was performed by the "Force 10 Big Band". I have listened to big bands a fair bit (mainly Glenn Miller) but had never seen one play live before. This outfit was well-drilled and very competent with a very good male vocalist and 2 extraordinarily good saxophonists! I am far from a big fan of the saxophone and I have gone on record in the past to say so - but these 2 guys could probably convert me...a couple of their solos gave me the same 'tingle of wonder' I feel when Wakeman solos in 'Starship Trooper' or Dunnery in 'You'll Never Go To Heaven' - they are special, rare moments!

I sat at a nice Technics electric piano and made my contributions to the 'Songs From the Shows' evening performing, amongst others, 'Maria' (West Side Story), Edelweiss (Sound of Music - that one accompanied by my son Lewis on guitar!), and 'Love Changes Everything' (Aspects of Love). It all seemed to go down OK and several members of the audience informed me they thought my bits were the best bits...I'll take any praise :)

On Saturday evening I performed a 90 minute 'one man cabaret' for my cousin Andrea's church in St Mary Cray. A nice fish and chip supper washed down with a good old 'Army Cup of Tea' went down well and I entertained with songs, piano solos, poems and stand-up comedy! I extemporised a nice new solo based on Hoagy Carmichael's 'Stardust' and remarked on both that piece and my Beatles Medley that good music will always pass the test of time!

I even managed to grab a mid-cabaret cuppa while Lewis took over the entertainment performing Edelweiss by himself this time and following it with an impeccable rendition of Paul McCartney's 'Blackbird' - he never inherited those long fingers from me (and that's my excuse for not ever having been able to play guitar parts like that!!!) Well done, Looby...a true chip off this old block!

On Sunday morning we had a short drive across London to Camberwell where Portsmouth Citadel Salvation Army Band were the guests for two very high profile services at the William Booth College. The rest of the band (including my eldest son, Morgan) had left at some unearthly hour to arrive by 9.30. The band played pre-service music as the congregation and assorted dignitaries (including the General himself!) took their seats and played well during the service - a beautiful arrangement called 'A Gift of Love'. The acoustic of the hall, while a little 'boomy' for the spoken word, was ideal for transmitting 'The Portsmouth Sound'...this band has a special sound of its own, almost magically passed from generation to generation and it has been my privilege to have played with them now for over a quarter of a century (and 23 years as principal euphonium).

After lunch a pre-meeting concert included 'Prelude on Finlandia', Evelyn Glennie's beautiful 'A Little Prayer', 'Hymns of Praise' and 'To Regions Fair' (at quick-march tempo!) In the service the Gullidge march - 'The Fount' was very well-received. It is quite a thrill for me to realise that there are some 20 others in the band now who are younger than me - including 10 teenagers! The band is certainly playing better right now than at any time since 1987 and I'm sure PCB has a bright future ahead of it (as well as almost 130 years of history behind)!

So...having been a player/performer at four events it was finally time to sit back and enjoy someone else...

Francis (Frank) Dunnery explained the concept behind his House Concerts as his way of falling back in love with performing music. Having fronted 'It Bites' from 1984 until he left in 1990 and then launched a successful Stateside solo career he tells us he had 'been there and done it all'...Letterman, stadiums, drugs, alcoholism...the rock and roll life. But he reached the point where he'd had enough...so much so he withdrew to Vermont to train horses!

It was at this point that he wondered what it would be like to play small, intimate concerts in friends'/fans' front rooms! A notice on his website generated 3000 expressions of interest...and Sunday night's 'House Concert' was held in Geoff Banks's kitchen in Surbiton. About 32 people I counted crammed into the kitchen (complete with oven cooking spicy vegetable cous-cous for the after-show barbecue), some on chairs, some on floor cushions and others standing. Frank was nearer to me than I am now to my PC monitor - even closer than my first House Concert experience in Southampton a couple of years ago. Tonight was the 'It Bites and Ego' concert, Frank taking the opportunity to expound some of his philosophical views between the songs (he is studying philosophy and is also a confirmed devotee of astrology*).

His renewed interest in larger-scale concerts is about to be rubber-stamped with a band he calls 'The New Progressives' and a tour/album follow later this month. He has revisited many old It Bites songs for this tour and we heard very different acoustic versions of some of them in Geoff's kitchen on Sunday. With the added bonus of Frank's driver/merchandise seller being the lovely Dorrie Jackson - and hence she was able to lend us her gorgeous backing vocals - Frank sang us an almost unrecognisable 'Kiss Like Judas', 'Yellow Christian', 'Whole New World', the unreleased 'Holiday', 'Sister Sarah' and 'Underneath Your Pillow' as well as 'Back in NYC' from 'Lamb Lies Down' and finishing with 'Still Too Young To Remember'. We all sang along, Lewis and I adding harmony vocals, of course (Frank certainly noticed and appreciated this - actually taking hold of my arm and grinning appreciativelyat the end of one song ...wow!)

Afterwards, a 'meet and greet' where we were all treated as old friends and I learned the identity of the lady opposite me who I had noticed had sang every word of every song all evening - it was Frank's sister Fay - and she was very friendly and encouraging especially to Lewis, the budding guitarist! What a lovely evening and, yes, very much a surreal feeling to have been so very close to someone whose music has brought me so much joy and inspiration for so long!

The epilogue...back to Sidcup to pick up Ieuan and once more round the M25 and down theA3...arriving home well after 1am on Monday morning - It Bites music on shuffle keeping us awake and still singing on the journey, of course!

He shall have music wherever he goes!

*as I said to Lewis on the way home..."fantastic musician, great songs, lovely guy...mad as a fish!"

There's only one Jimbarino...

2009-09-28T10:14:00.000-07:00

It was supposed to be the big one today - the long-promised 'What is Classical Music?' post...but, sometimes, things happen that change our plans... What did John Lennon sing on his last album? "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

Today I lost one of the best friends I never met! I have been a fan of the American singer/songwriter Harry Nilsson since 1976 (the story of how this Harry met THE Harry is told on my website at www.marcharry.com/harrymetharry.htm ). Harry was the sort of artist who doesn't get books written about him...although he won Grammys and had number one singles and albums - and counted 'The Beatles' themselves amongst his closest friends and biggest fans. Harry was not the sort of star who gets biographies written about him...in fact there was not even a documentary until David Leaf's company made one a couple of years ago ( www.whoisharrynilsson.com ) - and for which I'm proud to boast an IMDb credit - but have still not seen!

I only started to learn more about Harry's life and music, having adored it for years, when I 'joined' the internet towards the end of the 1990's. I discovered a wonderful site run by Roger Smith (another big Nilsson fan from Florida) and found that there were actually a couple of hundred kindred spirits with me 'on-line'. Friends of Harry's, including his official discographer Andrea T Sheridan, long-time admirer and everyone's favourite 'Booger', actor Curtis Armstrong (Nerds/Moonlighting) and even Harry's eldest son, Zak were members of Roger's 'Jadebox Nilsson Fellowship'. We learned together some of the long-sought biographical details, gained a wonderful, ongoing insight into some of his recordings, contributed to a great fanzine and even got to meet each other at yearly fan conventions - or International Harryfests - one of which I was privileged to help organise at the luxurious Hotel Russell, London in May 2001.

One Nilsson pal I never got to meet in person - but in some ways felt I knew better than most others - was a very funny and talented man from New Jersey - Jim Painton. Jim contributed to Nilssonweb (and also to Beatles and Beach Boys lists I also 'inhabited') in a unique, and not always appreciated, way!

For Jim had what I now term a 'British' sense of humour, learned and honed at the feet of Monty Python...and, like mine, his was a pretty warped one...the kind that no doubt has got us both in a bit of trouble over the years! It is a humour many in the USA completely fail to understand. Let me give you an example: my sister made a lovely, supportive American friend on Facebook recently...around the same time as her cat Bobbisox was shot by a neighbour's rifle. After much prayer, 3 hours of surgery and copious amounts of antibiotics, Bobbisox survived. An English friend posted on Ruth's wall that he was rather tired of hearing about the troubles of the said cat..and joked that 'it ought to be shot!' Our lovely, American friend was utterly disgusted and horrified - totally failing to get the 'joke' and posted to that effect! It's all sorted now and that lady is now a good friend to my whole family! Jim would have got the joke...this was the guy who, after having had his cancerous bowel removed a few years ago joked about bringing it home to drape around the family Christmas tree as a decoration!

He was the guy who wrote songs about the tapeworm that lived (allegedly!) in Thomas Edison's intestines...another one about a newspaper reported accident that befell a giant 'Cat in the Hat' in an American parade ('The Cat in the Hat went Splat'). But, amongst this 'bizzaro' sat some fantastic pop tunes: 'The Moon is You', 'Last Night I Saw Lennon' and 'The Girls From High School' to name just three.

Jim and I swapped music files via email and snail mail in those early days: he sent me a copy of his 1st CD 'Painton A Picture' to love and cherish, introduced me to The Barenaked Ladies..and then I got some wonderful demos for his 2nd album which was eventually to be 'Painton Place'. Amongst them was a still unissued response from 'John Lennon's ghost' on the news that the 3 surviving Fabs were releasing 'Free As A Bird'...it's title was 'Please Don't Put Out This Turd'!

Jim encouraged me to finish and issue my own CD - and he championed it tirelessly in the States (where it was far more successful than here at home!) He got a track played by Dr Demento...and all this NOT JUST because he wrote the liner note/salutation and made the artwork at his 'day job' Painton Studios - but he genuinely loved the songs.

It was more than an honour when he asked me in return to write the liner notes for 'Painton Place' and it was such a thrill to see my little cartoon self on the CD artwork reviewing, sat on the floor, complete with headphones!

Jim's music never made him a fortune - though it deserved to! There is more good music on his two discs than in this weeks Billboard chart...or I'll eat the Cat in the Hat's hat!!! The world is full of unsung musical heroes - people who strive day by day to write and record beautiful, inventive, challenging, inspiring and, yes, at times even funny music and lyrics that all deserve a FAR wider audience than they will ever receive in these over-hyped, celebrity-dominated days full of disposable, forgettable songs and artists.

Sir George Martin once claimed that, had he not 'discovered' The Beatles in 1962, someone else UNDOUBTEDLY would have...for cream always rises to the top. Well, Sir George, that may indeed have been the case in 1962 - I hope so anyway...but it certainly wasn't the case in 2002...and, sadly, I doubt it ever will be again. Stars these days are MADE...invented by awful, fake TV 'talent' shows - and the cream today is almost always ignored...cream is bad for you, after all!

Another unsung musical hero of mine, John Young would agree: he astutely announced in a concert once (a small pub in a country village in front of about thirty people) that the wonderful Eva Cassidy would have never have been heard by any of us...had she not died so tragically and, of all people, Terry Wogan gave her a posthumous and incredible lift from obscurity to international superstardom.

My friend Jim died today.

I will be playing his CDs tonight...and all week probably. Unless Terry Wogan also hears them over the coming months I guess the only place you will be able to hear them will remain at www.cdbaby.com/Artist/JimPainton - go on...do it - there are even some free samples!

Do your ears a favour, smile and raise a silent one to my pal Jimbarino!

Only One Leonard Bernstein!

2009-09-24T12:45:00.000-07:00

If ever a word was over-used in the musical world then it has to be 'genius'. I've lost count of the number of 'Joe Average' strummers, pluckers, blowers and mike-lickers who have been tagged with this precious word over the years. I'm not going to name and shame anyone...after all, they probably have never crowned themselves with that particular epitaph...and it would probably be very unfair for me to crown anyone myself...wouldn't it?

Well, what a boring blog that would make for you all to read! OK....I could stick to the 'no surprises' genius list: Mozart (was he the greatest natural musician ever?), JS Bach (I wouldn't nominate him 'cos I'm yet to become a fan!), John Lennon (a biased choice, of course!)...in fact the only choice I could make that might possibly be unarguable would be Brian Wilson...if I had a quarter of his musical brain I know I would be a far greater musician today than I am!

In case you're wondering, (ha-ha!) the word has even been applied to me on several occasions. In the words of Victor Meldrew, "I don't believe it!" Not even for a minute! But being a recipient still instils a very nice feeling of self-worth - especially when I have it in writing from no less than John Gowans, retired General of the Salvation Army!

So...who am I going to officially crown with the genius hat tonight?

Someone whose knowledge of music, understanding of it and ability to share his own love with countless millions of others has made him a part of almost all our lives, whether we know it or not: I speak of the great, late Leonard Bernstein!

Bernstein was not only a great composer - if 'West Side Story' was all he'd ever composed it would be enough, I guess, to earn him an place in 'Composer's Heaven'. Without doubt one of the best musicals ever written WSS deserves (even in the opinion of the snobbiest critic) equal footing with any opera of the 20th Century. Tunes like 'Tonight', 'Maria' and 'Somewhere' have earned their place in public consciousness and rightly so. What has always surprised me is that music lovers have not necessarily gone out of their way to discover Bernstein's other work...'Candide', the glorious 'Chichester Psalms' and his most unusual and innovative 'Mass' come straight to mind...it just seems that the public only want to remember WSS in association with Bernstein. So be it...

Even so, composing was, ultimately, a small part of the Bernstein legacy - he was a massively respected conductor - his interpretations of Mahler's Symphonies are the be all and end all for Mahler afficionados. He was never afraid to go against the accepted 'norm' in terms of interpretation of a piece...sometimes deviating so far from that norm that he managed to alienate even his own supporters...remonding us that no-one is infallible! I remember a disastrous interpretation of Elgar's 'Nimrod' (from the Enigma Variations) on live UK TV...it was so slow I swear the next day's scheduling had already begun by the time the piece ended!

But, for me, Bernstein's ultimate genius was his ability to share music with the masses through his wonderful lectures to young people. I've seen far too few of them (so far...I do hope more surface on TV/DVD) but they are an amazing insight into both a great musician's mind and also some wonderful music - opening doors to us lesser mortals in terms of musical understanding and interpretation.

The first one I ever saw concerned his own 'magnum opus', 'West Side Story' and Leonard described how he had built so much of that entire score on just three notes....(alarm!!! Muso alert!) He described them as C, F and B (natural...but sometimes flat!). If you play one after the other you will hear the opening (whistled) motif from the score (go on...make the C short, the F very long and the B short). Next, try C, F, B, C1, B, F, C, F, B, C1, B - getting there? The overture continues with C, C1, A, F, B0....

Maria starts...yes you guessed it: F, B, C (then FBCDBCDBC). Tunes based around C, F and B flat include 'I Feel Pretty', 'America' and 'Somewhere'...but they all do follow the rule!*

And the more you listen to the wonderful music of WSS the more you will acknowledge Bernstein's genius to do all this without making the whole thing sound contrived!

So check out some Bernstein...maybe stick the VHS or DVD in and have a good watch...enjoy his genius - I just checked, you can get it on DVD new for a fiver on Amazon (or £2.03 'as new' from marketplace)...so no excuses!

And I'll be using another of Bernstein's ideas to finally answer that question 'What is Classical Music?' tomorrow...so please come back...and keep the encouraging feedback flowing. I'm enjoying this, I hope you are too!

*allowing, of course, for transposition - it is the intervals that are common rather than the actual notes, of course - a whole musical in one key would be very irksome indeed!

The Curate's Egg is Out of Fashion!

2009-09-23T13:39:00.000-07:00

I'm sure some readers will remember the quaint English tale of a young curate invited to tea with the vicar and his good lady wife. Given a boiled egg for tea he cracked open the top only to discover that the egg inside it had gone bad. Nevertheless, it being his prime duty that teatime to impress the vicar's wife and come over as the epitome of good manners, he somehow managed to eat the offending ovum and, when asked, "How was your tea?" he drew upon all the resources of grace God had given him by smiling and replying politely, "It was good...in parts!"

'Good in parts' is an opinion rarely experienced in the musical world today. I have found that most people are fiercely loyal to their musical favourites...with the possible exception of Genesis fans! Genesis fans fall into three very distinct groupings: the Gabriel-era fans, the Phil Collins-era fans...and the Gabriel-era fans who are brave enough to claim that the first three or four albums after he left are still worthy of the band's name! I think I fall into the latter group (probably the least inhabited group of the three I have found!) While I love the early pure-prog of 'Foxtrot', 'Selling England' and 'The Lamb...' I am persuaded to admit that 'A Trick of the Tail', 'Wind & Wuthering' and ''Duke' contain, at least some of, my favourite Genesis music.

However, 'Abacab' and 'Genesis' (ugh...'Mama') have not been heard in their entirety by me for at least two decades! That, as a Gabriel-era sympathiser, I am somewhat compelled to add!

And I digress again...Genesis not being the intended subject for tonight's outpourings! If I am honest there is something from almost all my musical heroes that leaves me a bit cold: For 'Yes' it would include 'Relayer', 'Talk', and 'Open Your Eyes', for Rachmaninov it's the 3rd Piano Concerto...love the 2nd more than almost any other single piece, enjoy the first...I KNOW some perfectly sound opinion rates the 3rd as the best of all...but it just won't do it for me!

I love the Mahler symphonies...but the 7th leaves me, for the main part, cold - and it's not just the Castrol GTX association! John Wetton = Jack Knife. Beethoven = Fidelio. Mozart = La Clemenza Di Tito. Pink Floyd = Animals. I could go on all night...all my personal opinion, of course!

Yet, when I enter a conversation with some people it seems I am defied to argue against opinions like, "Eminem has never made a bad song," or "I adore every note James Blunt has ever sung" or even "Wagner never had an off-day - it is all sublime!"

These are the music fans who have never tasted "The Curate's Egg". Of course, it may be that our eponymous curate is, in himself, a thing of the past...gone are the days when his whole perception of acceptance into a local community might depend on a spotless reference from the vicar's wife!!! For crying out loud, in half the parishes up and down the country the vicar himself is probably as gay as rainbow socks and, from my experience of twenty years working with vicars associated with a C of E school, it would probably more the case today that, should he be given a 'bad egg' to eat at teatime, a modern curate would stand up, put on his coat and exhort the vicar to come out for a pint, a smoke and a take-away!

It is 'the curate's egg' that allows us to clearly differentiate between the good and the mundane. I am a massive fan of Rick Wakeman - and in recent years have been privileged enough to even be able to count him a friend...but even I could never try to convince anyone that all Rick's output is wonderful...maybe I'd struggle even to say it's all good...in fact I hope even Rick could admit now that some of the stuff he has released (amongst the 100+ albums released in his name) are pretty darned awful!

So...a challenge for you all! In the comments box below I want you to show your good taste and balanced opinion by 'outing' a song or album by one of your own favourites that leaves you less in awe of their genius that most of the rest of their oeuvre! I look forward to seeing your choices and, maybe, I will even disagree...oooh, debate!

The Critic!

2009-09-21T14:53:00.000-07:00

It was mum reminded me! Having started reading my blog she wondered if I might find a new career as a writer/reviewer/critic...and the word 'critic' opened up another dark and dusty corner of my memory!

When I was but a kid my crazy memory had already started to develop its retention skills...and one particular poem...or recitation....had a defining part to play in my upbringing...

I stood up, throughout my childhood, to participate in a great many Salvation Army festivals...sometimes as a singer, most often as a euphonium soloist...but I also got asked, from time to time, to recite poems! One about two frogs in danger of drowning in a milk churn comes to mind (but they kept on paddling and eventually turned it to butter and climbed out - the moral, never give up!), another about a lady in church who sat amongst the 'bad boys' on the back row...and one poem, in particular, came to mind this evening. Called 'The Critic' I must have recited it dozens of times...I even recall once singing it to the tune of 'Paddy McGinty's Goat'!

I'd guess it's out of copyright by now so here it is:

"He was sitting in the gallery, a-listening to the band

He thought himself a crictic and was feeling mighty grand,

As he loudly made his comments, so that all around could hear,

He made himself a 'perfect pest' to people sitting near:

"The cornets, they were terrible, their tone was really rough.

The basses couldn't do a thing, there wasn't half enough!

The trombones and euphoniums were ragged as can be,
The drums were poor, the flugel worse -

The horns played horribly!

The baritones were dreadful; the BM didn't seem

To get the men to follow like a good and balanced team."

Well, he counted up the errors and he didn't miss a fault

And so he carried on until a small boy called a halt.

"Excuse me, guv," the boy remarked, "You seem to 'ave it wrong!

This meeting ain't a contest - that ain't why they've come along.

These men 'ave got a message - it's an old 'un but it's true -

There ain't a band wot's playin' that could please the likes of you!

"That man what plays the monstre*, he's me father, do you 'ear?

He used to come 'ome sozzled and would sell me boots for beer

But 'The Army' went and found 'im, 'e got saved! I'm proud to say

'E's now the finest father - and I likes to 'ear 'im play!

"Now others in the band are 'toffs' and never 'ave been poor,

They love to play the music and they no what bands are for!

So don't sit criticising the good old Army band -

Just fink of all the good they do - My! Ain't that playin' grand?"

It's the difference between an 'Army' band existing for the reasons it does and the raison d'etre of an 'outside' band (as they are still referred today by Salvationists) that perhaps is highlighted most in the poem. 'Outside' - or contesting - bands compete frequently against each other...you only have to watch 'Brassed Off' to experience some of the competitive nature! I don't know if they still do this but the adjudicators used to sit behind a curtain and listen to each band's rendition of the 'test piece', making their comments - their critical appraisals - and, ultimately, deciding the order in which the bands would finish in the contest.

I only ever went to the Royal Albert Hall once for a contest - the testpiece was the 'easy listening' favourite 'Blitz' by Derek Bourgeois. I sat and listened to this atonal piece of programme music some twenty-odd times and vowed never to do it again! (I quite like the piece now but it was not my cup of tea as a teenager and it took a long time for me to forgive it!)

Yet the pretence of the curtain I found the most ridiculous thing...could the experienced adjudicator really not tell it was Black Dyke playing when the cornet solo was played by the familiar tone of Philip McCann? Even I could tell his sound a mile off! I remember the first time we watched the wonderful Patricia Routledge detective series 'Hetty Wainthropp Investigates' on TV for the first time - the theme music started and my dad and I both said 'That's Philip McCann' within a couple of notes. Surely the 'professional' could recognise all the bands without seeing them!

That's where criticism has its place, of course - and very much rightly so. 'Army' bands don't compete (and, as mentioned above) exist for an entirely different reason..but we like to do the best we can. Having played in a Salvation Army band now for some 37 years (man and boy) I like to think that the best of SA bands could hold their own with the best of the contesting bands - but I have no desire to ever see them have that opportunity...and neither would they!

So sit up in the gallery a-listening to the band...but enjoy the music - thank God for it if that's your 'thing' - but criticise at your peril! That young boy might be in the row in front...and you wouldn't want his sozzled dad to still be selling his boots, would you?

*the 'monstre' is the monster-bass - a BBb tuba some 5' or more high

Back to Reality

2009-09-20T09:37:00.000-07:00

Back to Reality...is the title of my favourite episode of (one of) my favourite TV Series of all time! I speak of the wonderful 'Red Dwarf', of course - a true rarity in TV history being a science-fiction comedy series. I would find it an impossible choice to make if asked to narrow my preference down to just one series (or one album, or one song even...impossible!) yet I admit that most of my TV favourites, at least, have a link...

...The other two contenders would be 'Inspector Morse' and 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet'...and the most eagle-eyed reader might have already spotted that link...a link of 'well-loved' that extends as far wide as the films 'Still Crazy' 'Sweeny Todd', and 'Lucky Break', as well as the Harry Potter films and the 1989 'Batman', Morse spin-off 'Lewis', and other TV drama series including 'Spender', 'Heartbreak Hotel' and 'Waterloo Road'...yes...all roads lead back to 'Auf Wiedersehen Pet'!

The 'Red Dwarf' episode I mentioned (featuring AWP's Tim Spall - aka Peter Pettigrew/Wormtail) sees the crew of the spaceship coming back down to Earth with a bang when they (mistakenly) come to realise they have only been playing a 'communal video game' for the entire duration of series one to five! In a similar way I have come 'back to reality' today after a week or so of such hectic musical activity it seems like Iwas caught in a (most enjoyable) whirlwind!

First, we had the much-hyped and previously discussed Beatles remasters and a 'Beatley' week par none - interrupted only by 'Last Night Of The Proms' - and this week has been a kind of personal Prog Heaven for me! 'Genesis' on the radio, 'IQ' in the car and both 'It Bites' AND 'Touchstone' live in concert! I don't manage to get to as many gigs as I'd like to these days (can't afford it!!!) but these two were very reasonably priced and with the added bonus of each band being the favourite of one of my 2 older sons (Lewis is the 'It Bites' maniac and Morgan loves 'Touchstone') - so they got a night out each...and I got two (har har!)

What a privilege I have as a dad to share so many musical tastes with my teenage sons! Neither of them are remotely interested in 'RnB' or 'DnB' or 'RaP'...if they were they might be invited to 'RiP'!!! When they 'discover' something I might like they are keen to share with me too...I struggle a little to appreciate 'Muse' as much as Morgan does, or 'McFly' as Lewis did but I do try - and we all listen happily together for the majority of the time!

'Touchstone' ( http://www.touchstonemusic.co.uk/ ) played last night at 'The Peel' in Kingston, Surrey (we arrived early, despite my playing organ for a wedding at 4pm back in Portsmouth) so spent a nice hour with my aunt and 93 year old Nana who still looks a picture of health!). I first encountered 'Touchstone' as a support band...Now, I've seen and heard some BAD support bands/acts in my time - some have been completely the wrong type of music for the audience, some have been so cocky they thought they were there to 'blow the main act offstage'...forgetting it was the main act we'd paid to see and not them! Others have been miles out of tune, boring or FAR TOO LOUD (I was deafened for the night in Brighton before 'Meat Loaf' even got on stage!)

So impressed was I with 'Touchstone' as a support slot that I felt I had to go seek them out by the merchandise stall and tell them/thank them...and a very friendly bunch they are too! Last night I saw them as 'headliners' for the first time in Kingston and a good time was had by all! The five-piece produce a very 'big' sound which would justify their performing in a far larger arena than 'The Peel' but the grandeur lost by playing a small venue is more than made up for by the real intamacy one is able to feel with the performers in venues like last night's!

Like the best of Rick Wakeman-era 'Yes', 'Touchstone's music is dominated by a vast keyboard back-drop courtesy of Rob Cottingham and his trusty Kurzweil (and expansion boards - hey! - the same 3 I use!). The rhythm section of Al (drums) and Moo (bass) are as tight as you could wish to hear; Moo's innovative work on a 5-string fretless bass is, I think, quite unique - and, at times, lightning quick - while Al, complete with new cymbals thanks to a well-deserved Sabian sponsorship, lends plenty of energy as well as thundering fills to the ensemble (though the less said about his flying underpants the better!)

Adam's guitar 'solo-swaps' effectively with Rob's keyboards while his general song playing ranges from power-chords through melodious counter-melody and numerous other styles...and over all this soar the lead vocals of Kim 'Elkie' Seviour. 24 year old Kim joined Touchstone in 2006 having answered an advertisement. In her early days with the band she shared the lead vocal duties with Rob but the latter's share quickly diminished as both the power of Kim's voice was recognised and also as her powerful stage-presence began to exert its sway over a legion of red-blooded proggers! And she's not shy...happy to describe herself as 'pen pusher by day - rock goddess by night!'

Even in these days of 'equal-ops' it is rare for a rock band to be fronted by a female - but as groups like 'Magenta' discovered...and as Touchstone now aver...the idea works...especially in the prog-rock genre - the higher pitch of the natural vocal sits very comfortably in an inevitably 'crowded' arrangement without further clouding that sub-middle C octave, giving the instruments more room to breathe and express themselves. (This is, in reality, also a secret of 'Yes' - Jon Anderson's counter-tenor occupies a similar space in the soundscape.)

Last night we heard most of the band's 2nd full CD 'Wintercoast': highlights, for me, being the title track, 'Voices' and 'Solace', Kim's emotional tour de force. The enthusiastic and noisy audience loved the 'audience participation' number 'Strange Days' while the surprise inclusion of 'Thriller' (yes, THAT 'Thriller'!) as an encore went down well.

There is no pretention with 'Touchstone' - barely going off-stage at all pre-encore (any pretence was merely to give Kim an excuse to tell herself off for succumbing to the tiniest ego-trip) - then, after the 2nd encore, it was straight off the stage and into the audience to thank and chat with their fan-friends! That's not rock and roll...but Touchstone are!

So...I'm a bit of the 'deflated Dwarfer'...'back to reality' today. Tonight, as I type, it's musical edification provided once more by an enjoyable but more mundane family life (watching 'Alvin and the Chipmunks' with youngest son, Ieuan - at just 5 not - yet - weaned onto prog!). When he goes to bed I might watch one of the new series of 'Lewis' that have been waiting patiently in their DVD cases for me...all roads lead to AWP, after all!

Mr Richland...I Know What You Meant!

2009-09-17T17:05:00.000-07:00

Prog Rock, Beatles, Brass Bands, Brian Wilson? Just what is my favourite music? Who is my all-time favourite artist? If I had to choose just one???

I could beg (literally!) not to have to make that choice..but you readers won't let me out of it that easily, will you?

Ok...this will come as no surprise to my closest friends and family but that place of particular honour would go to an artist most music-lovers would claim not to know...yet you sing them one line and they say 'Oh! HIM!'

I speak of the great, late Harry Nilsson...and that's where the title of this blog entry finds its author. Nilsson (for those of you who still might say 'who?' I sing 'Can't live...if living is without you...' - and that's enough for now - you know at least one of his recordings*) wrote a song for his 2nd LP, 'Aerial Ballet' with the title 'Mr Richland's Favorite Song'. It told of a singer, once an 'untouchable hero'...up there on a stage, seemingly a million miles from his fans but, ultimately, a one-hit wonder! As the years passed by his loyal fans stayed for the third show, the second show and, many years later, he became 'the fallen star who works in a bar where yesterday is king' and where he 'calls his fans by name'.

In October 1982 I sat in a full to bursting Wembley Arena to watch the 'supergroup' Asia perform their first ever UK gig. What anticipation! What a thrill! There, tiny figures on the stage in front of me and my friends stood John Wetton (King Crimson, Family, Uriah Heep, Roxy Music UK etc.), Steve Howe and Geoff Downes (once of the great 'Yes'...and 'The Buggles'!) and Carl Palmer (exactly one third of the mighty ELP). They were untouchable, unreachable...like musicians from another realm, another planet even...a lifetime away from mere mortals like us in the audience! They sang and strummed their way through 'Heat of the Moment', 'Only Time Will Tell', 'Sole Survivor' and more of the songs I had already grown to love on the first 'prog' LP I ever bought. The night is as fresh in my memory tonight as it was then. I even recall the support act, a juggler of all things, called Chris Bliss - and he juggled with fluorescent balls and white gloves under an ultra-violet light. Bliss had a particularly blunt and effective way of dealing with hecklers (no doubt well-practised if you juggle habitually as support to rock legends!)...I dare not repeat his 'put down' on here (my mum reads this!) but, suffice to say, the same heckler did not transgess twice!

So, where is this going? Tonight I went with my 2nd son, Lewis, to see one of our favourite bands, 'It Bites' play a gig at Mr Kyps, Poole. I had never visited the venue before but it is a nice, intimate venue for a medium-sized gig (no doubt infinitely better these days as a result of the smoking ban!)

'It Bites' formed in Egremont, Cumbria in 1984. Four boys who went to school with each other, made a name for themselves then earned a record contract with Richard Branson's 'Virgin' Empire - and made the most of it by getting the early career 'hit' so eagerly sought by all new bands (see last night's blog for more info).

I saw 'It Bites' in 1990 in Portsmouth, I'd been a fan from their earliest days...but becoming a member of the band one day never even crossed my mind... Yet it must have been a dream for John Mitchell! John was a fan too...he recalls sneaking out of the house to go to gigs having raided a liquor cabinet to lubricate his enjoyment cells...and, no doubt, he honed his budding guitar skills by sitting - hour after hour, night after night - trying to emulate his hero, Francis Dunnery - lead guitarist and singer with his favourite band!

Tonight, John stood on stage as the front man of 'It Bites' - what a dream come true! John shared with some friends and I a year ago about the surreal situation he now finds himself in! When Dunnery quit the embryo reunion Mitchell took his place...what boots to fill!! Tonight he dominated the stage like 'Asia' did for me in 1982! A fairly small, though vociferous, audience lent him their support as they sang their hearts out through old faves like 'All In Red' and 'Still Too Young To Remember' - but the first half of tonight's show was dominated by a towering tour de force in 'The Wind That Shakes the Barley' - a new anthem to stand alongside the old favourites (and from the latest album).

When they retook the stage after a short interval 'It Bites' played the whole of what was almost universally acclaimed as their best album, 'Once Around the World'. Four stonking rockers launched the set in 'Midnight', 'Kiss Like Judas' (what a great track that is!),'Yellow Christian' (anyone out there tried playing in 14/8 time?) and 'Rose Marie'....and, later, the album ends with the band's 'magnum opus' - the epic title track of the CD which has elements of pop, rock, jazz, vaudeville and much, much more! 'Once Around the World', A Day In A Life...A cornucopia of genres that takes you from Caesar to Willie Carson in a quarter of an hour!

We sang our hearts out! We watched wide-eyed as John Mitchell's fingers flew like lightning over his frets, we marvelled at the solid and steady (and oft-times spectacular) drumming of Bob Dalton and wowed in appreciation at how the nimble fingers of keyboard genius John Beck held the sound together with his own personal orchestra of samples and patches...and, perhaps more than all, we wondered how bassist Lee Pomeroy was able to switch with such seemingly effortless ease from the steady 4/4 simplicity of being bassist for 'Take That' to nailing this music of infintely more complexity in his 'day job'!

I came away thrilled and entertained...my son, Lewis, came away inspired to practice and improve!

And what of Mr Richland?

Well, before the gig started tonight, I had the privilege to stand and chat once more with John Wetton...in 1982 that dot on a stage - tonight a friend and fellow 'fan'! Harry Nilsson's song personified...especially for me! If ever I could have wished for a bonus to make my evening this had to be it. This man has sold more records than anyone in this month's pop charts - quite possibly all of them added together!...and I have most of them in my collection! Recordings with 'Mogul Thrash', 'Family', 'Uriah Heep', 'Roxy Music', 'King Crimson', 'UK', 'Asia' as well as his fabulous solo albums have all given me endless hours of joy...and he stoood chatting with me again tonight! John is in better health now than last time we chatted socially! On my web pages at http://www.marcharry.com/ you will find a review of the night we met first of all...a night when John was in the grip of a serious and life-threatening alcohol addiction. That is now behind him...as he told me tonight 'but for the grace of God' he could have gone the way of Keith Floyd..but John still has much more music to make!

What a gift to us all music is! 'Johns' Mitchell and Wetton...I thank you from the depths of my heart! May it continue to flow for a long time to come!

*Note I say 'recordings' NOT compositions! Harry wrote the vast majority of the songs he recorded yet, strangely, his two biggest hits 'Everybody's Talkin' (Fred Neil) and 'Without You' (Pete Ham/Tom Evans) were composed by others. Ham & Evans were from British Beatles acolyte band 'Badfinger' and their sad, story (partly revolving around their battle for recognition as authors of the song) may well be told another day...

Once More Around the World...my proggy friends!

2009-09-16T14:55:00.000-07:00

I have to concentrate!!! Seriously, I do! One of my very rare 'prog free' listening periods must come to an end tomorrow...Lewis and I drive to Poole for the 1st night of the wonderful 'It Bites' latest tour...the tour on which they will perform the entire 'Once Around the World' album - including the epic 14 minute and 48 second title track!

Not enough people even know It Bites exist(ed). My son Lewis started college today and his Music tutor was delighted to discover that he had a 'prog' fan in his group. As he briefly shared with Lewis about his love for Yes, Genesis and ELP Lewis mentioned that we were seeing It Bites tomorrow! The prog loving tutor had never heard of them!! Aaaaaaaargh!

It Bites were formed in Cumbria in 1984 and and their Warhol-ian 'five minutes of fame' came when their 2nd single 'Calling All The Heroes' reached number 6 in the UK singles charts. On the back of this success the group attracted many TV appearances and built a strong and loyal audience. Whilst, unashamedly, in those days It Bites were a pop/rock band I saw enough in a Saturday Morning kids TV appearance (in which they also played debut single 'All In Red') to catch my attention in a BIG way. Next time I met my musical 'oppo' Alvin, with whom I had shared 4 years membership of our own band 'Blood and Fire' and the man who first introduced me to prog I HAD to tell him about the band I'd 'discovered'...but, of course, he had also found them and had already bought the album!

This band was no Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet or Culture Club...here was a group of very fine musicians, led by the wonderful Francis Dunnery (who not only coped with being front man and lead vocalist but is amongst the best 2 or 3 guitarists I have ever heard!).

It Bites never repeated the success of their 2nd single. However, their 2nd album - the afore-mentioned 'Once Around the World' would still today head my personal list of 'best prog-rock albums EVER'...and with 'Close to the Edge', 'Foxtrot', and 'Brain Salad Surgery' amongst the opposition that is no faint praise indeed from this particular prog-head!

Picking up Lewis from college today I got my escape route from the ******** dominated listening of the last week (for stars substitute that group from Liverpool whom Kate seems to think I can't write a blog WITHOUT MENTIONING!)

Simon Mayo was interviewing Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks from Genesis as I drove...and my ears became attuned to a live version of 'I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)' from the box-set of live albums about to be released by the biblically-named proggers. Whilst the interview was highlighted by the live excerpt played (rare music on Radio 5!) and a funny debate about Pan's People's literal interpretation of the song on Top Of The Pops (including a real wardrobe!) at least my mind was turned towards prog at last!

What is prog, I hear some of you ask?

Hmmmmmm....I guess I see prog as a sort of middle-ground between the pop world and the classical/orchestral world (that blog on 'what is classical music' bubbles ever closer I feel...). It is rock music played by musicians who were probably good enough at their instruments to have 'made it' in any field...but chose rock! Prog 'songs' tend to be of 'epic' length...7, 10, 15 minutes rather than the usual 2.5 to 3 minutes that account for 99% of all hits in all pop charts. These songs probably do not limit themselves to one (or even 4) keys, change time signature more often than their composers change socks and have extended instrumental passages that allow the virtuosity of the players to come very much to the fore.

When It Bites split after their third album 'Eat Me In St Louis' I was devastated. Another fan in a similar catatonic state at that time must have been John Mitchell. John is younger than me but he had been to the gigs, been captivated by the music and, no doubt, longed for the day he might get to see his heroes take the stage one more time. Frank Dunnery went on to launch a successful solo career and hopes were raised after a solo concert at the Union Chapel in 2003 when the 4 members of It Bites took the stage together once more...talk on the forums later confirmed that a reunion was finally being attempted.

The biggest hurdle to the reunion was always going to be a Continental one. With Francis living in the USA and the other three still 'at home' in the UK rehearsal and writing time was always an impossible dream...and after several abortive attempts at getting the new project off the ground defeat was admitted to understanding but realistic fans...and that's the point at which all John Mitchell's dreams came true!

Sitting in front of amplifiers at home, fingers ever-growing in skill and dexterity, mastering intricate Dunnery riffs and solos...there must have been dozens or more who attempted it! Mitchell's effort seemed rewarded when he found success himself with his own band 'The Urbane', who produced two fine albums 'Neon' and 'Glitter', 1990's prog greats 'Arena' in which he was 'merely' guitarist...and then his next band 'Kino' arrived on the scene...

Kino's keyboard-player was John Beck...keyboard wizard with his own heroes, It Bites! The Kino debut album 'Picture' is a masterpiece in many ways and Mitchell richly deserved the plaudits the album attracted amongst prog-fans! Then, when Kino needed a new drummer for live dates, who should step in but Bob Dalton...yes, you guessed it, ex-drummer of It Bites! With Mitchell's fandom coming evermore to the fore it was natural indeed that It Bites songs like 'Plastic Dreamer' and 'Kiss Like Judas' made it to Kino's live set...

...and when It Bites' reunion hit the rocks - who better to bail the others out than a fan who could stand on stage and admit that years of Latin education at school meant nothing until he could translate the lyrics of 'Old Man and the Angel'? Mitchell became the new lead singer/guitarist of the reformed It Bites! Talk about childhood dreams coming true!!!!

Mitchell and Beck found that they wrote the same way as Dunnery/Beck once had done - the majority/main idea coming from Dunnery/Mitchell and the middle by Beck! A new album followed a successful re-debut tour...unfortunately (in some respects) they lost original bassist Dick Malone along the way...and WHAT an album it is!

I was privileged to attend a private listening party for 'The Tall Ships' with John and some friends last summer...what a wonderful night for Andre, Alvin and I - gaining insight at first hand to an album we all saw as the 'true' successor to 'Once Around the World'.

Tomorrow night we hear 'Once Around the World' again...live! I missed it first time around...it starts at 8pm in Poole...but I'll be driving away from Portsmouth soon after lunch! No Ringwood traffic jam is going to deprive me of this pleasure twice!

Ey Oop!!...It's a Brass Band!!!

2009-09-15T15:43:00.000-07:00

Glamorgan and Yorkshire! What have they got in common?

Surely not much, must be the answer! Both parts of the UK, though in separate countries, the inhabitants of both would undoubtedly tell you! One is epitomised by the windswept moors of 'Wuthering Heights', the other by the tight, ever-loyal communities of 'How Green Was My Valley'.

The antipathy between the two is, at times legendary! Ask a proud Glamorgan man and a Yorkshireman to debate which is the better comestible delicacy between Yorkshire Pudding and Laverbread and a British civil war may erupt! Professional Yorkshireman 'Sir' Geoffrey Boycott, that legend of England's cricketing heritage, once famously refused to tour with the England winter team...because a 'Welshman' was captain! Yet there are links between the two areas that make them indisputable cousins...and bind the two proud heritages together as clearly as Cheddar is linked to cheese: coal mines and brass bands!

Even as recently as this past weekend the rivalry between the Cory Band of Wales and Black Dyke of Yorkshire was bitter and keen...the Brass Band Contest went to Cory...but many (even from other bands) went home to Yorkshire disappointed in the adjudication result! Such is the brass band world! If you ever need to know what brass bands mean to the people of Wales or Yorkshire one has only to watch the marvellous film 'Brassed Off'. If the great footballing philosopher Bill Shankley (the legendary manager of the great Liverpool team of the mid 1970s) was once quoted as saying that "football was not a matter of life and death...it's far more important than that!" - then, certainly in Glamorgan and Yorkshire, the same is as true - if not more so - of brass bands!

Yet where do brass bands 'fit' in the musical realm? They are not really taken seriously by the 'orchestral/classical' realm. And, although the Brighouse & Rastrick Band reached number two in the British pop charts with 'The Floral Dance' in 1977 they hardly belong in the world of 'popular music' either! In fact, outside of the mining communities, where their presence was so steeped in folk-lore and community spirit that they have outlasted the pits by far, there is only really one other bastion of brass banding that still thrives today - and that is, undoubtedly, The Salvation Army!

This branch of social protestantism, founded in Whitechapel, London by William Booth in 1865 is now a multinational church with activity in well over 100 countries. The 'Army' or the 'Salvos' are intrinsicly linked with lassies in bonnets with tambourines, amazing social work (in the UK today the SA is still the largest provider of social help apart from the governement itself)...and BRASS BANDS!

I have been a Salvation Army bandsman for 33 years this Autumn - but if you include service given while still in short pants - you can make that over 40! I started to play aged 5 when living in Bargoed - one of those coal pit villages in the Rhymney Valley, South Wales. My dad wrote out 'Onward Christian Soldiers' on staves ruled on the back of a cornflake packet and I marched around the front room learning, then playing it until he regretted it!

Tonight I shared with 32 others in a Salvation Army band rehearsal here in Portsmouth. There are not many rehearsals remaining now until the recording sessions for the band's next CD - their 3rd and the 11th album in total since 1968, which marked the band's first excursion onto vinyl. (There is a very rare recording of a 1956 radio braodcast which exists on coated metal discs that predates these but I only know of one copy that still exists...quite amazingly, Alex Manning, who played on that recording, is still the band's flugel-horn player today! He also owns the discs!)

Brass banding and coal-mining both instil into its participants an unbreakable bond of cameraderie...a deep friendship that transcends Yorkshire v Glamorgan or Cory v Black Dyke. At the end of a concert or contest the bandsmen will put sweaty arms around each others' shoulders and share a pint (or in the Salvation Army's case a steaming hot cup of tea!) and life will go on!

Bill Shankley's football could learn something from brass bands, I think!

What's your favourite???

2009-09-14T11:44:00.000-07:00

I don't think there'll be a lot today...but we'll see...

I LOVE being a dad! I've had three sons who have all filled my life with much more joy than stress and hassle for the last 18 years! Today, my youngest son, Ieuan (pronounced Y-eye-un for those who've never even heard of a country called Wales!), came home from school singing a song he'd been enjoying in class today...and which brought back some very fond memories from a long time ago (doesn't music do that to us all the time?)

My parents moved to Bedlington in 1979 to be the ministers of the Salvation Army Corps in that lovely, Northumberland town. I was just 16 so, naturally, went with them and lived there for 2 years before leaving home for college, going back for holidays until they moved on themselves in 1982. One of the great joys I know my father had in that time was meeting a lovely-natured, little, red-haired girl who came to the Sunday School there.

I remember dad lined up quite a number of the youngsters on the platform one Sunday and went along the line asking them what their favourite Sunday School song was. Little Joanne not only told him - but offered to sing it for us as well - so she did:

"If I Were a Butterfly" lists all the things a child might do if they were that creature - thanking God for butterfly wings, elephant's trunks, fishes wiggling tails and giggling with glee, jumping like a kangaroo, etc. Joanne punctuated her solo by making each movement she could - especially the kangaroo hop - and this was so memorable because she was born severely disabled. She was able to stand with calipers as a child but has subsequently spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair - yet she has maintained that happy disposition ever since and still 'thanks God for making me me!"

She finished her song, then asked my father, quite spontaneously, what his own favourite Sunday School song was, Unprepared for the question he thought as quickly as he could and replied "I'd Rather Be A Little Thing Climbing Up Than A Big Thing Tumbling Down!" As my dad spent the vast majority of his adult life - like me - at well over 20 stones (300lbs) you might imagine the laughter his 'favourite' brought to the congregation!

Ieuan and I sat after school today and sang the song together and these memories came flooding back! Now he's on the floor playing with his pirate ships and singing again, "a bottle of rum to warm my tum and that's the life for me!" What DO they teach 5 year olds in school these days???

Within You and Without Understanding

2009-09-13T12:42:00.000-07:00

I woke up today to tend a pukey son...and (both things are, I assure you, completely unrelated!) to Dauber's Facebook status about The Beatles song 'Baby You're a Rich Man'...surely one of their least known (and therefore amongst the least 'loved') songs. In fact I had to play it to remember exactly how it went (I can internalise most of the group's work without actually playing it).

Like 'Hey Bulldog' (prior to the reissue of Yellow Submarine a few years ago when it was restored to the movie), 'Bad Boy', 'Old Brown Shoe' and a few other B-sides it is one of the tracks that just don't get played too often by most fans...

...But they are still not the LEAST played, nor the least understood...those honours go, undoubtedly, to George's 'Indian' tracks. I know that many 'fans' skip those whenever they encounter them! There's 'Love You To' from Revolver, 'The Inner Light' (B-side of Lady Madonna) and, of course 'Within You, Without You' now track 8 of 'Pepper' but, for so long, the first song on side two and easy to skip even on LP!

When I first discovered The Beatles I thought these were 'funny' songs...I used to listen to them all together after dressing up in robes, wearing a wig and beads, lighting joss-sticks and sometimes even cooking a curry! But there is a serious parallel here with a problem I encountered many times later in life when I became a teacher...most people (and it is especially true for young ones) LIKE what they UNDERSTAND and tend to shun or mock what they don't!

My ambivalence towards these songs (I neither particularly liked them nor dislliked them...they just were...) was not helped by the reference book I trusted in those days to teach me about The Beatles: I had (on almost permanent loan from the library, then my own copy) a rather useful LP sized tome called 'An Illustrated Record' by Roy Carr and Tony Tyler. This book told the group's story in chronlogical order, listed the recordings (including who sang what - useful until I was able to tell by myself every time!) and it reviewed the albums song by song. Carr and Tyler's bias against George Harrison was evident to me even when I was a lad...but, in retrospect, it truly is appalling! Having given half a page to A-side 'Lady Madoona' they dismiss George's flip-side with a single line - the highlight of which is made up of three words: 'feeble, trancendental tune'. Their treatment of George throughout the rest of the book is rarely much better!

I had to teach Indian Music as part of the National Curriculum (the proscribed set of orders given by the British Parliament to its schoolteachers) and, of course, it was only when I studied it myself in order to teach it that I began to UNDERSTAND it...and George's three songs began to make musical sense to me!

In brief (and this is a very simplified precis, so don't jump down my throat!) Indian music consists of four elements:

a drone - much the same as in bagpipes or hurdy-gurdy. The drone is played on an instrument called the tambura (or tanpura, depending on which book you read). The tambura is very similar to a sitar (the main melodic instrument in much Indian music). The main difference between the two is that, because the tambura only plays the drone, it is not decorated and made an ornate object of beauty as its more illustrious sister is! The drone usually consists of three alternating notes - in our parlance the key-note (tonic), the fifth above it and the next tonic a fourth above that...back to the fifth and then the first note again to repeat the pattern (so, in C it would be C-G-C1-G-C-G-C1-G etc). Well, that's a rough idea anyway!

(TRY IT - if you have an instrument handy try playing that pattern - letting the notes 'ring' so they overlap works best)

a raga - this roughly equates to our scale but, in reality, is so much more. Whereas we have major, harmonic minor and melodic minor (and modes from a bygone era) there are some 350 different ragas in Indian Music - each related to a time of day, mood, colour or feeling. You would not play a morning raga in the evening, for instance - it just wouldn't happen traditionally! Indian melodies are made up of the notes in the chosen raga, usually beginning with a straght series (scale) up and down and getting more and more complex as the peice develops.

(TRY IT - if you have that instrument handy try playing an afternoon raga - marwa:

C Db E F# A B C then down C B A F# E Db C (put it with the drone!)

a tala (or tal) - tala is made up from 2 Indian words meaning clap and dance...and there are some 280 or so talas you can choose from. Each is a rhythm pattern (or cycle) of different lengths and with accented 'beats' and 'silent' ones. The most cmmonly used tala by far is Tintal - a 16 beat tala with accents on 1st, 5th and 13th beats and a 'wave' or silent beat on the 9th. Although the tala traditionally stays the same throughout a single piece the music does get faster and faster!
improvisation - yes, all Indian music is traditionally improvised! You choose an appropriate raga, choose a rhythm cycle, add a drone and...off you go (within 'form advising' guidelines). So, no two performances should ever be identical! (In these days of worldwide recording it is hard for artists to adhere to this tradition - if an audience wants to hear something they are familiar with through previous listening then 'the audience knows best' is the oft-followed maxim!)

Listen for these elements not just in the next Indian Music you hear (probably over a Lamb Bhoona in the local Tandoori House) but also in George's songs - they are there to some extent! We had 'Pepper' on in the car today and 'Within You, Without You' is a good example in which to hear some, if not all, of these elements.

(If you still have that instrument handy use the same drone as before while improvising with a 'scale' of E F G A Bb C D Eb. I have no idea if this is a 'real' raga...but most of our 'modes' are also ragas and there are 350 of them so it's 'quite likely' it is! Oh look...you're playing 'Within You, Without You'!!!)

I sincerely hope I haven't gone over the heads of 'non-muso' readers today, that was not my intention. My original aim in writing this blog is not just to entertain and edify but also to educate - something my general health now prevents me from doing as I once did. So, if I lost you somewhere above, please forgive me...and do come back again! If you had that instrument handy I hope you had fun - bet you never thought you'd be improvising authentic Indian music in about 5 minutes! But there you are.

Maybe Roy Carr and Tony Tyler should have tried it - they may understood poor George a bit better - or maybe they could have created something a little better than his 'feeble, trancendental tune'!

Friday Night May Be Music Night...but Saturday?

2009-09-12T13:16:00.000-07:00

Saturdays are for sport! Today we've had a one-day cricket international (or - another chance for England to show how inept they are), a full football programme plus golf and US Open tennis! I didn't even get to catch a minute of the last two...so where the opportunities for music?

It just happens to be that there always is time! A day without music at all would be unthinkable! Lewis and I (still on the inevitable Beatles kick) found the time to watch an old 1965 Tv special I've had on DVD for a while... The Music of Lennon & McCartney. Essentially, this was a showcase for the group's new double A-side single, Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out - and that such a pristine condition copy still exists nearly half a century later is somewhat amazing (especially coming from an era in which tapes were routinely wiped for re-use).

An unusual and very diverse set of artists appeared to perform their own cover versions of Beatles songs - some good, some not so...and one or two were nauseatingly toe-curling! The execrable Flamenco annihilation of 'She Loves You' really had to be heard to be...suffered - and the dual manual jazz electric organist with St Vitas' dance may have sounded interesting...but to watch his twisted gyrations almost made me laugh uncontrollably...and reminded me that I suppose a donation to SCOPE is probably overdue! Peter Sellers, as Richard III, was very funny, of course!

Now it's time for a great British tradition - The Last Night of the Proms...so more music! The first item in the finale was an overture for orchestra and...hoovers! Composed by Sir Malcolm Arnold in 1956 the 'Grand, Grand Overture' is surely one of the great musical jokes! Lewis reckoned is was meant to depict someone trying to listen to music while another (maybe his wife?) did the cleaning...it ends with the errant vacuumers being shot by four handily-placed riflemen! I was reminded at once of that awful 'anti-programme-music' quote by Stravinsky that music does not have the quality in it to be able to speak for itself...I thought it was nonsense when I first read it and still do! Igor wrote some extraordinary music...but should have left philosophy to his betters in that field!

'In A Monestary Garden' came next...I haven't heard that 'nightingale-soaked piece of cheese' for decades. I was playing it at college back in 1982 when dear Eric Stanley (an elderly professor from Dagenham who regaled us week by week with wonderful tales from the days when he taught Dudley Moore at Trinity College) came in and shouted me down. "What are you doing with THAT old chestnut?" he demanded before advising me that it might make a better piece of music if I turned the sheet music upside down! I did...and won a prize for my piano piece in the next composer's competition! Thanks Eric!

A trumpet tango and some Gershwin followed and, as I type, we're on the first of 5 newly-composed fanfares...if the other 4 are as bad as the first I might go have a bath before the real fun starts! Really...it's horrible!

LNOTP is the one night of the year, it seems, when it's OK to 'like' classical music (don't get me started on what 'classical music' is...that's another blog topic waiting its chance to burst from my fingers!). Tens of thousands of stable-minded Brits who spend the other 364 days of the year making sure that Lady Gaga and Pixie Lott clog up the charts suddenly acquire temporary taste-chips and crowd into parks, castles and City Squares to listen to Handel, Beethoven ("didn't he go blind?") and the rest without losing their 'cool'. The reason? Well, LNOTP ends with some good old-fashioned jingoism! 'Rule Britannia', 'Fantasy on British Sea Songs' and Elgar's 'Pomp & Circumstance' are being joined tonight by 'Jerusalem', fresh from its Ashes series overkill* and, surely the best English patriotic tune ever to have been composed by a WELSHMAN!

So there we have it...plenty of music on Sporturday and still finished in time for Match of the Day! Life is good!

*Jerusalem was played and sung loudly before the start of play on all 25 days of the test series between England and Australia this summer...we were actually quite good for some of that and won the series...its just the one-day stuff we're so bad at, obviously!

A Day In The Life

2009-09-11T09:19:00.000-07:00

Despite the title...I've had a day off from The Beatles today!

Lewis didn't...he ripped the new remasters to 320kbps and filled up his iPod - but I have been listening to and talking about other music today...I thought it might paint a picture of the part music plays in my life wherever I am and whatever I do if I shared it...so here goes!

I have my phone alarm set to the opening bars of a nice and mellow Francis Dunnery song at the moment...so it's Frank who wakes me up each morning...and, therefore, Frank who gets rudely shut up a few notes later by the 'snooze' button! However, he tries again 10 minutes or so later and usually succeeds in waking me this time...and I rise from the pit to raise the boys! It's cartoon music for the next half hour or so - recently Ben 10 or Chowder or...if I can persuade...the more tolerable iCarly - until the 8.30 shut-off when Breakfast News goes on and so do shoes and school uniforms!

Later this morning I received the tickets for next weekend's Touchstone gig, so it was an obvious choice to put their newest album, 'Wintercoast' on in the car. Introduced by a spoken prologue from the dungeon-voiced Jeremy Irons (is he the only actor with a deeper voice than James Earl-Jones and Alan Rickman?) this CD fuses just about all I love about prog-rock: multi-layered, rich keyboard textures (and enough twiddly bits to keep me smiling!), solid rhythm section with melodic bass lines and inventive, contributive guitar work...and the whole thing is topped off by the exquisite voice of Kim who...as an added bonus for live shows, looks as good as she sounds (I mean...a Genesis gig is still good today...but do you REALLY want to look at Phil Collins for 3 hours?). When listening to Touchstone I find that one minute I'm reminded of Peter Gabriel, the next early Marillion, then the best of Rick Wakeman...and so on through my entire library of proggy faves. I was also reminded, while listening, today to drag out my copy of the first Esquire album - it was recorded when Nikki was still married to Chris Squire and his influence and voice elevate this good debut album to an excellent one!

I've been to Petersfield Hospital this afternoon to visit an elderly friend who plays in the Salvation Army brass band with me. Of course we share a love for old SA music (a legacy of all those old Regal Zonophone 78s I wrote about on Day 1, I guess!) A couple of years ago I transferred the whole set from 78 onto CD/mp3 and gave a set of discs to Bill which I know he played through his DVD. We talked about them today - and about my frustration that I now have a much better deck with a proper, dedicated, deep groove 78 stylus...so I really ought to do them all again (aaaaaaargh!)!! He's got a selection of CDs in hospital with him, fortunately, so won't get too bored as he recovers...and his tastes appear as varied as mine: today we discussed both SA and non-SA brass (although my expertise on the latter is a little limited), jazz greats like Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa and Glenn Miller before venturing into orchestral music and some modern 'oddities'.

Bill has been enjoying 'The Armed Man' by Karl Jenkins recently and recommended it to me before the summer. I picked up a copy on eBay for 99p the next week but, sadly, I had to admit to Bill today that it remained unlistened to so far...I promised him I'd remedy that shortly so...watch this space...and THEN...we ended up talking about minimalism of all things!

I used to describe minimalism to my students as a composing technique in which the composer takes a simple idea and develops it...then develops it some more...and then takes it "to infinity and beyond"! My first minimalist favourite was the American composer Philip Glass. Most of his music is underpinned by his minimalist signaure of alternating, undulating quavers (8th notes)...but today we discussed Gavin Bryars and his wonderful 'Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet'. Released (in its completed form) in 1993 this 'love it or hate it' work consists entirely of a 27 second soundbite recorded when Bryars was a young technician working on a TV documentary about London's homeless. A tramp who wandered around Elephant & Castle in the late 1960's apparently sang this excerpt from an old Sunday School chorus all day as he walked aimlessly around the vicinity.

Bryars kept the recording and developed this extremely minimalist album over the next 25 years. I believe it is recorded in the liner notes (although I don't have them at hand to check as I write) that Bryars eventually made a loop of the tramp's singing and played it while working at a university, trying to improvise on a keyboard beneath (or over) it. Having been called away for a time he returned to find students nearby both stunned into silence and moved to tears by the irony of the tramp's endless repetition - he had inadvertently left the door to his study open when he left!

On the recording the voice remains the same throughout*...it is the accompaniment that changes minimally, almost infinitessimally, with each repeat - so that when you listen you suddenly realise that the string quartet that began as the accompaniment has now disappeared completely and been replaced by winds and percussions you had barely even noticed arriving! 72 minutes it lasts altogether...and I'm definitely a 'love it' person!

So...from Dunnery to cartoon music, Touchstone to brass bands, jazz to minimalism - and I came home to the dulcet tones of Carl Wilson...not a bad mix of music for what could have been a pretty mundane Friday! GOD!...I LOVE music...and thank Him for it!

*OK...to be completely honest it fades in a bit at the start then fades out near the end to be replaced by Tom Waits...I believe this is meant to imply that the original 'tramp' has gone to heaven!

Through a Glass Darkly (part 2)

2009-09-10T08:01:00.000-07:00

Now, where was I? Oh yes...please don't think for one minute while reading this that I'm a musical perfectionist! I will always want musicians to be heard performing to their potential but sheer, clinical perfection leaves me a little cold.

I recall as a young boy being astonished by how fast a cornet soloist with a band moved his valves up and down, in seemingly perfect synchronisation with his breathing, tongueing and blowing - THAT much inspired me! At the end, when the audience's prolonged applause had died down and the soloist, having politely acknowledged the reception with neither a flushed cheek nor a hair out of place, had returned to his seat - the compere spoke:

"Wow! Didn't he make it look easy?"

My thoughts exactly! The compere meant it as a compliment, of course, yet I wanted to know how much better the performance might have been had the solost given a bit more of himself in the performance! I vowed secretly to myself that, if I were ever in a similar position I would not want to retake my seat unless I were a sweating, drippy heap...and both mentally and emotionally exhausted! Anyone who has seen me play in the 34 years I've now been a euphonium soloist would smile, realising why their applause at the end of my efforts was warmed by their relief I hadn't actually dropped dead in front of them mid-variation!

But, I digress...and realise (even at this early point in my blogging career) that typing my thoughts is going to a like a Ronnie Corbett monologue...we WILL get to the point eventually! What I guess I was trying to say above is that while clinical perfection is something to be aspired to it is rarely attained and, if so, surely at the price of a little 'soul'? Maybe that's why, when I first bought a vinyl copy of the 'Beatles Live in Hamburg' (my bizarre mind reminds me that it was bought in Newcastle with birthday money from Grandad Hedges circa October 1981!) I was intrigued by the liner comment that 'bum notes flew like beer bottles'. They did indeed...and the hissy, imperfect recording - made on a cheap reel-to-reel tape recorder with, no doubt, even cheaper microphone and NEVER intended for commercial release - was hard to listen to at all, to be honest. Yet, buried beneath the vinyl noise, recording imperfections and audience interference it was THE BEATLES - as I'd never heard them before...which made it all worthwhile. The skill, energy and enthusiasm they put into their, surely, routine work showed why the had become the superstars I'd grown to love within a couple of years of the show in a dingy, German nightclub.

All Beatles fans will know the official releases like the backs of our hands. When I would play Beatles to classes full of seemingly uninterested schoolchildren for 20 years they were always surprised how many of the 'sample tunes' I carefully chose they already knew! "Oh, THAT's The Beatles! I know that song...didn't know it was them though!" came back at me class after class, year after year (as I smiled, knowingly, back at them!) I bought the whole lot on vinyl back in the 1980s (plus bootlegs in Portobello Road), made copies onto cassette, assembled my own compilations, got the Red and Blue sets and the Rarities LP (wow, what a thrill it was to have THAT!). I got some official cassettes as well if they were going cheap in a sale or 2nd hand shop...and then, in 1987, 'the Holy Grail'...The Beatles arrived on CD.

I took it as gospel that these were definitive. It was, after all, the 3rd time I'd bought the same songs...but now without surface crackle and scratches or cassette tape hiss (or even worse - the beheaded abomination your ears suffered with a Dolby circuit switched on!!) I had no real reason to question whether what I heard on my decent home hi-fi was as close as one could get to 'what it sounded like in the studio'. The 'industry' had, after all, sold us the concept of 'CD' under that premise! Only in hindsight, and with 22 years of reading, listening and (in recent years) internet fan-groups and mailing-lists, do I know the truth: when dear George Martin made the new masters in 1987 his once pristine ears were not what they once were! Nor could he (or, to be fair, we) have envisaged the advances in remastering techniques that would later evolve during the 1990's and 2000's. As more and more 'classic' albums received the 'digitally remastered' re-release ('Dark Side of the Moon' and 'Pet Sounds' come to mind...HOW MANY TIMES???) I began to wonder if The Beatles oeuvre was being 'left behind'.

Then, I heard on the internet about Dr Ebbett! Here was a Beatles fan, so disturbed by the poor quality perceived to be the group's legacy on CD that he developed his own technique to drop stylus onto pristine vinyl and produce CDs that (it was claimed) sounded much better than the official releases? Of course I was sceptical! If they were that good, why hadn't EMI done something about it...after all they had the original tapes?

So, I still listened to my CDs...even mp3's ripped from them! I used to persuade myself I couldn't hear a difference between the CDs and an mp3...even when ripped as low as 128kbps...then someone demonstrated to me how I was wrong! I still rip mp3's but now never lower than 192kbps (and my favourite music at 320) and it is to my regret that I admit that I only acquired a set of Dr Ebbett's needledrops earlier this year...

Bluntly, I was ASTONISHED by what I heard! I was hearing things I'd never heard before: clarity between instruments - almost a defined 'space' between the musicians and elements of the sound. The bass punched and the high-frequencies rang out without jarring my ears and setting off my tinnitus! I took the set with me into a professional studio when recording keyboard overdubs for a CD and asked the engineer (another Beatles fan) if we could listen to a bit on the studio equipment: half-way through the 2nd song he took my discs into his office and copied the lot before we finished the session!!!

So, when I read recently that Dr Ebbett had 'thrown in the towel' after hearing the new, official Beatles remasters I had to expect great things. He always maintained that he had not worked tirelessly (as he undoubtedly had over the last few years) to make money out of The Beatles but to provide fans with recordings the group's legacy deserved. He now acknowledges that there is no need for him to continue - EMI have done the right thing at last!

When I did an A-B-C test yesterday with my son (and fellow-Beatlemaniac) Lewis between the 1987 CDs, Dr Ebbetts and the new stereo releases the reslults were everything I could have expected...and more! Like I said yesterday it was "as if someone had removed several layers of curtain from in front of my speakers". (The differences between 1987 and 2009 especially I would defy anyone to not hear!) We Beatles fans have entered a new world...and with games and iTunes to follow I guess we'll be picking up a few new members too!

'Through a glass darkly' is, of course, taken from Paul's letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13. To quote Wikipedia, "the phrase is interpreted to mean that humans have an imperfect perception of reality." In that case, and to continue the allegory, yesterday I met the music "Face to Face".

...And they tell me the 'Monos' are even better...........

Through a Glass Darkly...

2009-09-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

Well here it is...my first post on my very first blog!

It's about music, of course...it would have to be...music has been, is today and will continue to be my life! Beethoven to Beatles, Palestrina to Prog-Rock and Schoenberg to Shankar they are all present in my extensive listening library.

I began buying records at the age of 12 but collecting them much earlier...my mother regales me with tales of my tears as my sister sat on my 78 of 'The Harry Lime Theme' and how I would sit for countless hours , aged 3 and above, with my trusty wind-up gramophone. Some of those tunes are deeply engrained into my musical memory even though 40 years or more have passed since those halcyon days of early childhood under the skies of Gwent and Glamorgan: Cocktails For Two (Spike Jones), Marche Lorraine, Blow the Wind Southerly (Kathleen Ferrier), By The Wishing Well (The Singing Cowboy) and many others (including various 'doubles' from my dad's extensive collection of Salvation Army 'Regal Zonophone' recordings!)

A visit back to Clapham (where I, apparently, lived from 7 months old to age 2) with dad in 1970 saw me offered my first 'single' - 45rpm, vinyl not shellac, and NOT for playing on the wind-up! With dad thinking I'd be bound to go for 'Back Home' by the England World Cup Squad I surprised him with the more eclectic choice of Lee Marvin singing 'Wanderin' Star' from Paint Your Wagon. I like to think I had an eye for a bargain even then for, on the said single's B-side sat a track called 'I Talk to the Trees', to my knowledge still the only recording ever to feature the singing of one Clint Eastwood - then a barely known, young, American actor. I laughed again a few months later when I was given a free copy of 'Back Home' by a friend in Cardiff.

I began to develop my memory for minutiae...that's why I know the afore-mentioned England song was written by Bill Martin & Phil Coulter (a Scotsman and an Irishman who wrote no less than three Eurovision Song-Contest winning songs!*) and even that its B-side was 'Cinnamon Stick' featuring West Brom's hard-heading Centre Forward Jeff Astle on lead vocals.**

Anyway, I'm sure I'll come back to some of those musical nuggets again as this blog develops...PLEASE feel free to message me and agree or disagree with my opinions...I cannot promise much use of IMHO around here - I DO have opinions but I offer them from MY heart and MY (big?) head...so there's not so much of the 'H' for humble on offer, I'm afraid. I mean...just look at the web address: I've been teaching music now for 30 years both privately and in Secondary Schools - my teaching heroes being Bertram Capey, my old music master from my own school days in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent and Mr Benjamin Shorofsky, erstwhile and displaced German-Jew music-meister in New York from the film and (especially) the TV series 'Fame'.

Why this particular article's title? Well, it's a taster for the next instalment really...today is 09/09/09 - BEATLES day in our house...we don't have much money right now or else I'd have spent at least £600 on Beatle-product today: the day has seen the release of box-sets of both Mono and Stereo albums as well as the 'Beatles Rock Band' game...not to mention the latter's accompanying replica Gretsch and Rickenbacker guitars at £90 or so a piece! Because of my contacts in the music world I have been privileged to be able to hear some of the stereo remasters today - and that's where the title comes in...listening to 'Rubber Soul' this morning was truly amazing - as if someone had removed several layers of curtain from in front of my speakers. A quick A-B test (even using Dr Ebbett's as the B-sample) sounded like a wall had been torn down between me and the music...

MUCH more on that to come!

Thanks for reading this, I hope I've either made you smile or shake your head - inspired you to go listen to some long-forgotten tune I mentioned, search on eBay for a Clint Eastwood single or...maybe, in my wildest dreams, you might even post a reply, an encouragement to continue or even subscribe to this blog.

Marc

* 'Puppet on a String' (Sandie Shaw), 'Congratulations' (Cliff Richard) and 'All Kinds Of Everything' (Dana)...see I told you my head was full of c**p!
** Jeff, of course, found fame again after his playing career by resurrecting his singing talent on the TV Show 'Fantasy Football' with Frank Skinner and David Baddiel before, sadly, dying from brain damage caused, allegedly, by too much 'hard-heading' footballs.