100 Years of Jazz in 99 Minutes - Tomorrow's Concert

An occasional  peregrination through the programme

Lover Man by Billie Holiday

Tomorrow is the big day for our 100 Years of Jazz concert at Cadogan Hall  (tickets here!).  We begin the show in 1899 and in 1937 we finally bring out the sixth member of the ensemble. She's been waiting in the wings for thirty eight years and has had to hang about until the swing era before she joins the old geezers who've been hogging the stage up till now.  

Lover Man - Billy Holiday

The tom toms beat off in Sing Sing Sing and we've stepped up a gear as there's now two trumpets as Enrico has been joined by the Wigan Wonder, Miss Georgina Jackson. 

Multi-taskng; Georgina Jackson

After her dazzling entry the mood changes as she puts her trumpet down and now takes the mic and cripes, she sings as well as she plays.  Multi-tasking is required of every member of the ensemble and as all us chaps know the women do it best of all.

Georgina has recently released her second album called Watch What Happens, some of it recorded with full orchestra and some with a terrific trio accompanying her.  It's so good that some enterprising chap has licensed it to be released throughout the Far East.  

Through the miracle of modern technology we were able to translate the Taiwanese sleeve notes for her CD through Google Translate and we hope you enjoy the results...

"Watch What Happens" more skilled her second jazz album, perhaps play the trumpet develop long-term, Qiao Jina bass domain anthem thick penetrating her to use their own interpretation of advantages such as drinking nectar the slippery mouth delicate works. 

I Only Have Eyes For You - Ella Fitzgerald

Album "Change Partners, to create such as elegant and graceful dance in the middle of the dance floor; the 1930s romantic love song "I Only Have Eyes For You" has also been Frank Sinatra, Ailafeizi Salo (Ella Fitzgerald) made  famous, downtempo melody to pour not know the song by the body in the garden or in the clouds, his eyes can not see anything, only to see each other's romantic. 

I Only Have Eyes For You - Frank Sinatra

This album is in the well-known British the Lun Duiyi than the studio to record, maybe you first met Qiao Jina, but heard her voice for a long time cannot make you forget, is not greasy sheets one hundred fever album."

It seems, where words fail, music really is an international language.

Baz Luhrmann's Great Gatsby

                           The Rio Trio at the Brooks Brothers Great Gatsby party

Last week my band the Rio Trio, (a confusingly named five piece), played for a party at Brooks Brothers clothing store in RegentStreet. Their rather splendid clothes were featured in the new Gatsby movie (500 gentlemen's costumes apparently). Two of the chaps in the band are also in the movie providing the music from within the ranks of the excellent BryanFerry Orchestra - you can hear them on the official movie sound track here:

                              
                           Great Gatsby movie soundtrack

Late last year the Bryan Ferry Orchestra brought out a splendid CD called The Jazz Age which featured covers of Mr Ferry's numerous hits done in a 1920's/30's style.

                           Bryan Ferry's The Jazz Age     

The presiding genius in this project was arranger/pianist/musical director ColinGood who did a magnificent job of creating the period musical style to a tee. Rather a shame Stephen Poliakoff didn't use Colin to do the music for the recent Dancing on the Edge drama as I thought the music for that was.... well let's move on.

                           BBC Two's Dancing On The Edge - Dead Of Night Express - Angel Coulby    

Baz's decision to use Jay Z to provide the music for a film set in the 20s seems an odd choice but I think he justified it very well when he said he wanted modern day audiences to appreciate how radical and dangerously subversive the jazz of the 20's was.  A story that always sticks with me was told by the veteran journalist and broadcaster Alistair Cooke.  When he was an Oxford student in the 1920's he purchased Louis Armstrong's West End Blues and played it on the family gramophone and he then discovered his mother weeping in the adjoining room.  When he asked her why she was crying she said the music had terrified her.  

                           West End Blues - Louis Armstrong    

When we watch movies and TV series set in the 20's such as Downton Abbey we all ogle the clothes and the style and then happily go back to our ripped jeans and track suit bottoms (uh-oh rant alert, rant alert) rather like we watch Nigella in the kitchen knocking up glorious food and then head to the cupboard for a mid evening two bowls of coco pops (or maybe that's just me).   So I was delighted to see the fabulous new "Gatsby Collection" on the racks of Brooks Brothers last night - then I looked at the prices and decided to await their 2014 "skintjazz musician" range.

 

    

The Gatsby Collection by Brook Brothers

Nigella Lawson and cup cakes

The Rio Trio at the Brooks Brothers Great Gatsby party in Regents Street

Keeping old music live. Keeping old musicians employed.

In anticipation of the 100 Years of Jazz in 99 Minutes concert at the Cadogan Hall on June 7th I thought I'd look at a few interesting aspects of the music included in the programme. So starting at the start:

Livery Stable Blues by The Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

This recording from 1917 is now universally considered the first ever jazz recording.  It's odd that white musicians should have pipped African Americans to the post for this accolade but it came about because the black New Orleans trumpet player FreddieKeppard  turned down the offer to record in that year. His reason for refusing was that he didn't want other musicians listening and stealing his licks!

The recording is pretty wild and we should be grateful that 78 rpm records could only hold about two and a half minutes of music.  We recreate the rough and ready nature of the music by having four fifths of the band play instruments that they don't really play (they like to think they do but they don't really).  

As we are mindful of our audiences we have actually edited the performance down to under two minutes but we have kept all the barnyard effects in as these are by far the most amusing and interesting part of the original record.

So what do you think of the original and very first jazz recording?

How Jazz Cruised the '60s; LSD, Elevators & Love Beads

100 years of Jazz in 99 minutes.  Some meandering trivia about some of the splendid music featured in the show.

Dindi  by Antonio Carlos Jobim 1961.

By around 9:30pm when the show is heading for the home straight and the people who came for the Dixieland in the first half are thinking wistfully of the bus home we come to the decade in which we either, depending on your point of view,  let it all hang out to our great advantage or went to hell in a handcart - the 1960s.  However, statistics have now proven that outside of London during this decade only about 120 people were living it up in a psychedelic haze - the rest of Britain went on with its short back and sides, Capstan Full Strengths, Double Diamond and other pleasures and were not about to swop them for LSD and love beads.

The jazz gets pretty far out by now - Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy and all  ("fire in a pet shop" music as George Melly memorably called it).   I decided to go for the rather more sexy and delightful sounds of Brazilian jazz which went from Brazil to worldwide jazz sensation to background music in supermarkets in around six months flat.   Having played Girl From Ipanema far, far too many times Rico went for a lovely tune called Dindi which reeks of Brazilian loveliness when played on his flugelhorn.   Dave Chamberlain swops the bass for his bossa nova guitar, as long as he remembers to pack the bloody thing in his boot, Georgina strokes the conga drum as if it was her favourite racing pigeon and these three hardy northerners raised on tripe and frostbite sound like they grew up in the favelas.   If you grow up in the favelas now all you listen to is rap like 99% of the rest of the world. 

And talking of muzak - once upon a time most stuff you heard in hotels, lifts, supermarkets and airports was either Burt Bacharach or Bossa Nova or both at the same time or something that sounded like the George Shearing Quintet (we'll talk about him another time).  That's all gone now except for Athens airport where thankfully they're still playing the muzak they purchased forty years ago.   Now it's pop music everywhere which when you play it quietly just becomes a bass line and mainly a bass drum - the melody is lost in the bottom heavy sludge.   

Nobody seems to mind that in every public space  we're all  listening to the same electronically processed bass drum playing a never ending solo and sometimes accompanied by a gentleman reciting doggerel in a slightly menacing way in the background - it's mental torture for me -  how are you getting on with it?

I think that's quite enough ranting for now.  More fascinating fact filled jazz history to come.

Harry Potter & Benny Goodman

An occasional series in which various parts of the 100 Years of Jazz In 99 Minutes show are ruminated on.

How did Harry Potter ever meet Benny Goodman's - Sing Sing Sing?

One of the nicest compliments I've had was from Pete Long when he called me "the bastard love child of Gene Krupa and Ringo Starr" (however he could have been referring to the fact that I have the same drum kit as Gene Krupa and the same nose as Ringo Starr - damn it, it was an insult after all). 

 Sing Sing Sing   Benny Goodman and his Orchestra 1937, Carnegie Hall.

Sing Sing Sing was the first time an extended drum solo was released on a 78 rpm.  Before then drummers got four bars (or three and a half seconds) to show their stuff or eight bars  (or 7 seconds) if they were lucky - this was a jolly good thing as most drum solos get rather tedious after the first seven seconds - that is unless you're watching one (but even that is tedious now as most drummers have developed stupendous techniques where they barely move a muscle to play everything on their kit at astonishing speed - I seem to have developed exactly the opposite approach).  

Drum solos should be theatrical experiences and no one understood this better than Gene Krupa.  Having Hollywood idol good looks and more charisma than is fair helped a bit too.  Oh and creating drum solos that people can dance to as well is also a popular move and probably explains why the record sold 100000000000000 copies.

Have we found Richard's missing music?  Check out the sound track in this clip of Prof. Lupin's Boggart Class... 

A while ago I recorded a pastiche of Sing Sing Sing for a Harry Potter movie (I think it was the nineteenth in the series called the Transgender Niblets of Tharg or some such thing).  I took my son to see it and in a desperate attempt to impress him with how cool his dad was I kept banging on about how I would be featured in the magic shop scene.  When it finally came to the scene the music I'd recorded had been edited out - cue bemused look from son and cool rating back to its regular zero.

Here in the movie "Hollywood Hotel", 1937

Is Sing Sing Sing the best drum solo of all time?  The readers of Modern Drummer voted it so.  What do you think?   I like the solo by Ringo on Abbey Road - I can play it note for note or bash for bash or whatever the technical term is...