Sidblog

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday it was Oscar Peterson night on BBC Channel 4.  My Tina May experience (vide infra) and nice comments from the audience at my regular Thursday lunchtime piano bar engagement meant it was time to be taken down a peg or two, so I tuned in.  What is there to say?  Oscar Peterson was a force of nature.  He just keeps coming at you, like an avalanche.  Some virtuosi make playing look easy, but not OP - he makes it look well nigh impossible.  And it’s meant to make other pianists want to throw their instruments into the harbour and take up something easier, like quantum physics or base-jumping.  But later in the evening there was some respite - Peterson’s Bosendorfer was interlocked with a second instrument played by Count Basie.  They beamed at each other across acres of strings and hammers and played a couple of things together.  The Count (an altogether delightful man) did virtually nothing, as ever.  His fingers stroked the keys, barely moving.  Oscar P calmed down and even showed some restraint himself.  Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and Martin Drew were actually smiling.  It was magical.  More to the point, it restated one of the most humane of jazz principles, namely that you don’t have to be, or at least act like, a virtuoso to make a creatively significant statement.  So yes, Oscar and Art Tatum are up there in the pantheon; but so are Thelonious Monk, John Lewis and the Count.  Frail mortals like your humble and obedient servant may be sustained in their poor fumbling efforts by this thought, even when they have to sit through an evening of Oscar Peterson.

I was once fired from a band because I was struggling to keep up and the leader, a battle-hardened pro, was giving me a hard time.  I finally snapped and (regretting it the instant I said it) muttered “how much do you know about the genetics of chlorophyll catabolism, eh?”  I don’t suppose Oscar could discourse at any length on mutants of phaeophorbide a oxygenase.  Pathetic, isn’t it, the straws we need to grasp at to hold on to any vestige of self-esteem in the presence of genius?

Dear diary entry:

Last night was unexpected and enjoyable.  The phone rang in the morning and it was Derek Morgan, a drummer chum of a few years ago.  He’s having a birthday party in the evening, with special guest vocalist and needs a pianist at short notice.  He says I’m his first choice but, well, I don’t know about that.  Anyway – after a bit of reorganising of the day’s schedules I was able to call him back and say I’d do it.  A round trip of 150 miles, getting back at 2:00 am, but in between it turned out to be fun.  The vocalist was none other than the very excellent (as Sam Christie would say) Tina May.  Since in recent years her pianists have included Dave Newton (!), Nikki Iles (!!) and Ray Bryant (!!!) I had a job on my hands.  But, though I say so myself, it wasn’t bad at all.  Of course it helps to work with a singer who connects warmly with the audience, as my previous experiences with my friends Maggie Nichols and Li Harding taught me.  One or two dicey moments, of course – it took me a couple of choruses to get on top of Tea for two – but some magic (yes, why not use the word) too, like during I got rhythm when, unplanned, we unisoned on Anthropology.

One of my best jazz experiences, and not bad for the music CV either.  Thanks to Tina, Derek and Melt for making it happen.

Afterthought has just struck me: last year I played with Una May.  Now Tina May.  Where will it end?  Mulleted astrophysicist guitar god?   Mathematician and Past President of the Royal Society?  MP for Maidenhead and Shadow Leader of the House of Commons?  There are mysterious forces at work here. 

We’re coming up to the 40th anniversary of the Tet offensive.  And grizzled veterans of Paris, Grosvenor Square and the Sather Gate Peace Garden are all over the printed and broadcast media reminiscing about those teargas-scented good old days.  This is given extra impetus by the bulge of that generation reaching the start of their own seventh decade and life post-retirement (I’m one of these).  With a few notable exceptions the nostalgia has a self-congratulatory air as the public figures take credit for the liberalising consequences of their encounters with truncheons and riot-shields.  We should thank them that life today is so much better than life back then.

I wasn’t at any of the 1968 flashpoints, but I was there, if you know what I mean.  I was a student and even witnessed some activism and protest on our own small, remote campus at the time.  And you know what?  It seemed like rubbish then and it seems like rubbish now.  For most of my classmates, reading the sciences, the whole performance  seemed clearly to be one large practical for Social Studies undergraduates.  As for the culture and the creativity, man, it was posturing silliness largely perpetrated by ninnies.  Admittedly I was more of a beatnik than a flower-child, which meant it naturally looked to me like white boys and white chicks being naughty while mummy and daddy were out of the room.  I couldn’t help thinking of my own father when he was 20 - illuminated by flak, sitting terrified at the back end of a Lancaster bomber over Hamburg.

I won’t be celebrating the spirit of 68.  I’ll be thinking about my dad.

On a visit to my mother at the weekend I heard for the first time about Holborn Evans, her uncle.  He was a professional pianist, playing for the silent movies and various functions around Llanelli in South Wales in the early years of the last century.  He was devilishly handsome, mother recalled, and the most beautifully dressed man in town, with a particularly stylish line in homburg hats.  She then produced a photograph of Great Uncle Holborn and it’s marvellous - so good, in fact, that it now graces the first page of my music website.  It’s my hope that the spirit of Holborn Evans somehow touches my own musical efforts.  Unfortunately, as one of the worst-dressed sentient beings in the Universe, I’m afraid I was a sartorial lost cause long ago.

Respect to Great Uncle Holborn.

I really must get down to using this blog thing regularly now that it’s been set up.  It’s just I’ve been busy piling content into the website, starting up the senescence wiki, writing and editing scientific papers and producing music, which adds up to the time equivalent of writer’s cramp.

I keep reading things which at the time make me think ought to be entered into that mysterious thing referred to in Sherlock Holmes as the “commonplace book”.  Maybe this should be the blog’s function - the Commonplace Blog.

Let’s give it a try by opening the Guardian newspaper for 19i08.  Yes, there are some nuggets here.

A letter from one Ann Aylor includes the line “…America goes to war to learn geography”.

Norman Mailer on reading the work of Tom Wolfe: “…can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred-pound woman.  Once she gets on top, it’s over.”

There’s a review of Nature’s Palette: The Science of Plant Colour by David Lee.  It’s a subject I know a bit about, not just what the reviewer Veronica Horwell calls the “geekish” chemistry bits but also the story of ancient human relationships with colours.  In particular chlorophylia seems to me to be more than just a love of green.  It’s a psychological hunger for the experience of foliage in the environment, without which people can go crazy.  Look at the world’s warzones - the deserts and parched moonscapes of Asia and Africa.  The people who live there aren’t needlessly and incessantly belligerent.  They’re mentally ill.

Incidentally, Lee’s book conforms to the standard format of non-fiction titles in the modern age.  A short attention-grabbing but not very informative phrase, followed by a colon, followed by something a bit less poetic and a bit more to the point.  Actually this edition of the Guardian isn’t a vintage one in this respect - some weeks every new volume follows the title-colon-subtitle pattern - but even so, I find the following:

Children’s World: Growing up in Russia 1890-1991 by Catriona Kelly
The Great Filth: The War Against Disease in Victorian England by Stephen Halliday
Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot by Anna Beer
Blue Sky Thoughts: Colour, Consciousness and Reality by Jamie Carnie
Cleaning Up: How I Gave Up Drinking and Lived by Tania Glyde
Loaded Dice: The Foreign Office and Israel by Neill Lochery
The Monopoly of Violence: Why Europeans Hate Going to War by James Sheehan
The Canon: The Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier
A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder by Eric Abrahamson & David H Freedman
Madeleines in Manhattan: A Memoir with Recipes by Colette Rossant
and even
Despair Has Wings: Selected Poems by Pierre Jean Jouve tr David Gascoyne.

For years I’ve held out against harming yet more trees and inflicting yet another book on the suffering human race, but if my resolve weakens and it does happen, one thing you can be sure of - it will have a title and no colons and no subtitle.  As my Grandmother used to say - for heaven’s sake, give over.

Using MySpace would be much easier than building and maintaining my own music site (like this).  So why not?

A few reasons.  First, I have nothing against Mr Murdoch making as much money as he likes (well, actually, that’s not true – I have deep objections, but this isn’t the place to air them).  But I’m not prepared to help him make even more through my own unpaid efforts.  I can’t help thinking that future generations will look back on this age with disbelief as the time when the human race went collectively soft in the head and handed over the fruits of its creativity gratis to rich people and corporations in the name of “user-generated content”.

Second, looking at MySpace (and often listening to what’s on it) gives me a headache.  My own attitude to acceptable web design is about as primitive as it gets, but I think my site is at least legible, fairly literate and logically organised.  The frantic busy-ness and hucksterism of MySpace makes me feel like I’m trapped in some kind of freakish hybrid between a gigantic four-year-old’s birthday party, a teen girl sleepover and a souk.

Third, who are these people who hang around MySpace?  They seem to be a mixture of shrieking pre-pubescents, middle-aged losers and pederasts.

Finally, “friends” – what’s all that about?  Who are these idiots who post illiterate nonsense on each other’s pages?  Who needs it?  If anybody likes my stuff, they can email me and say so.  Ditto if someone wants me to listen to and comment on his or her stuff.  But don’t come over to my place and yell – it’s just not cool.

So that’s why not MySpace, and why I’ll never be rich and famous.

I should add a post-script.  There’s a possibility I might end up on MySpace (or FaceBook, or both) after all, because I have an album to promote and, well, business is business.  My experiences, if I do find my self selling out like this, will be reported here in due course.

2007 is the centenary of W H Auden’s birth.  2007 is also the year that H5N1 bird flu hit the UK, which makes the sixth stanza of this Auden poem seem strangely prescient…

The Fall of Rome 

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.
 
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.
 
Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.
 
Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.
 
Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.
 
Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.
 
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
 
(1940)

 I’m starting to clean up the website by moving all the rants and mutterings over to here, where they belong.  Here are a couple of items about water and lifespans.

 The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.
Bagpipe Music (Louis MacNeice) 

By all means, let’s worry about what climate change will do to us in the future.  But here’s something to think about that’s with us now. 

It takes about 500 tons of water to make 1 ton of potatoes.  A ton of wheat needs 900 tons, maize 1400 tons, and rice comes in at a mighty 2000 tons. 

The international trade in food is really an international trade in water.  When China became a net importer of wheat for the first time soon after the millennium, in effect it became a net importer of water.

More than 70% of China’s water is used in agriculture, but this figure is going down as irrigation is replaced by diversion of water resources to support industrial expansion and urban growth.  It’s bridging the water gap by importing it in the form of food.

Globally, more than 80% of the land used for growing crops depends entirely on precipitation to support plant production.  The remaining cropland is irrigated and supplies almost 40% of the world’s food and fibre needs.  Ours is a thirsty planet. 

If you, like me, live where the climate is wet, don’t let the jokes of the sun-worshippers get you down.  We will have the last laugh yet.

Sources: Encyclopedia of Water Science. Ed. Stanley W. Trimble (Dekker, NY);
Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations 

My life expectancy is about 10 years less than that of someone born today.  The Good Old Days, eh?  You can keep them.

Incidentally, one explanation for the greater life expectancy of women is that it represents the cumulative beneficial effect of sitting down every time they use the toilet.

Just as the whole world is becoming sick and tired of blogging, I decide to start doing it.  Oh well.

In the first place, I’m going to dump bloggish stuff here from my website as part of a spring- (autumn- actually) clean and relaunch.

Who knows where it will go from there.