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.