KITV4 Honolulu and the tsunami that never showed up….

“They didn’t think much to the ocean
The waves, they was fiddlin’ and small
There was no wrecks… nobody drownded
‘Fact, nothing to laugh at, at all.”

(Marriott Edgar – ‘The Lion & Young Albert’)

The internet never ceases to amaze me in terms of the way it shrinks our planet,  making yesterday’s exotica seem like tomorrow’s commonplaces, though this, I think,  kills the romance of travel and turns everything into an excursion.  My mate Ade’s eldest is now in Laos and communicating via Facebook as though she was in Leicester.  I was talking to someone the other day about the thrill of ‘Poste Restante’ mail pick-ups, where you’d arrive at some shabby backwater town in the wilds of Whereverland, turn up at the ‘Poste Restante’ desk at the local Post Office and discover one or maybe more letters from home.  There were no cellphones and calls from local landlines were insanely expensive and technically dodgy.  You really felt cut off from your friends and family – OK, so it wasn’t as edgy as Lewis & Clark traversing America to find the Pacific coast, but getting hold of those letters felt like a real treasure trove even though they were inevitably full of parish pump affairs and news of sprained ankles and cricket matches, of  maiden aunts and the British rain in the soft summer afternoons…..

Not for the Facebook kids, who are uploading their photos from internet caffs from here to Mandalay so that you know what they’ve been up to the night before even before their hangover wears off the following day.  Reassuring in these days of Somalian pirates and terrorist lunatics, but it does somehow diminish the romance of it all.

Look out, there’s a senior Superintendent about……

Anyway, I read about the Chilean earthquake on the BBC website just three hours after it had happened and after digesting the fact that the death toll seemed amazingly low,  my next thought was of a potential tsunami.  I saw a show on TV here a few years back where some guy went out to one of the westernmost islands in the Canary Islands archipelago – one of the non-touristy ones – where, due to a geological fault line, half of the island is on the brink of breaking off and dropping into the Atlantic, thereby setting off massive tsunamis.  As there is no land between this island and the eastern seaboard of the USA, the presenter was painting a rather ghoulish picture of cities from Miami to Boston being washed away by a series of 250-foot high waves.

Anyway, it seemed to me that the Chilean earthquake could set off a similar pattern of waves spreading outwards across the Pacific.  I soon discovered that Hawaii was only 15 hours away and that there was no intervening land mass to diminish the waves.  A real-life blockbuster began to take shape in my head – I could almost see the skyscrapers collapsing like dominoes into the boiling surf, the ships tossed like empty boxes, the people engulfed like ants in a flood….what a movie this would be.  I had Kevin Costner pegged for the hard-bitten geologist who tries to warn the islanders to take to the hills, with Michelle Rodriguez from ‘Avatar’ as his pouting succulent…. anyway, I digress.

A gratuitous shot of Michelle Rodriguez, who has nothing to do with this story.

To my delight I discovered the website for KITV4 of Honolulu, an ABC affiliate, which was running a live feed from their rolling news coverage of how Hawaii was gearing up for a potential watery Armagedddon still speeding across the Pacific towards them.  For hours, this noble band of journalists – about 4 studio anchors and maybe 6 ‘roving’ reporters kept all the balls in the air, repeating the Tsunami Warning that required evacuation of some of the lowland areas of Oahu and the outer islands, reporting on the good-natured way that the local populace was dealing with all this and trying to make sense of some of the scientific gobbledygook that the experts from the ‘Pacific Institute for Something Terribly Important to do with the Ocean’ were spouting.  Apparently, so we were told, the bays were at a greater risk than the open coastline because of ‘resonance issues’.  OK, fella, so my expensive tropical paradise lodge at Hilo Bay is about to be turned into matchwood by the Pacific, so could you at least try to explain why ‘resonance’ is such an issue?  The scientists, all in loud floral Hawaiian shirts, all looking like members of an unsuccessful Loggins and Messina tribute band,  were all uniformly hopeless in front of the TV cameras, and they were all very careful not to make any statements that would come back and bite them in the ass – phrases like ‘We are confident that….’ or ‘I think we can now say with some certainty…’  were as rare as hen’s teeth.

The TV station people were a mix of indigenous Hawaiians and ‘off-islanders’ and they were trying to project a strong belief in the ability of the population to maintain their cool and do the right thing.  The subtext for them was that there was a community here with the necessary skills to pull Hawaii through any forthcoming crisis.  Inevitably, there were moments where the pace flagged and we were treated to a revolving travelogue from some of Honolulu’s CCTV cameras – well, those close to the coast anyway. and though the horizon was duly scanned, it all seemed totally blameless.  Let’s face it; it was a gorgeous day, cloudless and with temperatures in the low 80’s – and yet the beaches were largely deserted apart from the odd refusenik who just wouldn’t be moved by the police, the media or anyone else.

The names were great, too, in a kind of  ‘Bama-lama-a wop-bam-boom-shang-a-lang’  kind of way.  All the journalistic gravitas these journalists had was somehow punctured when they were introduced as ‘Mahialeohea’ or something similar – and all the local information they gave out all sounded made up.  ‘Kahialeva Bay and Amalapeya Avenue are closed, as is the Rahoriponeya Expressway and the Wahikiwonna Marina.  Just brought back memories of that Spike Jones version of  the ‘Hawaiian War Chant’….

Anyway, the Beardy Loggins & Messina Boys were back on having no doubt mellowed out with a couple of big fat ones full of home-grown and they were confidently predicting that the New Riders of the Purple Sage were going to make a big comeback this year.  Oh, and they also said that the first waves would reach south-east facing (i.e. Chile-facing) Hilo Bay at about 9 pm last night (UK time).  The anchors picked up on this and we started to get some weird pronunciations – Chile became ‘Chill-ay’   (emphasis on the ‘ay’) – making it sound unbearably camp and Hawaii became ‘Har- vy-ee’  (emphasis on the ‘vy’) as you would expect a German to pronounce it.  Maybe they’d just been on air too long…..

An artists’ impression of a Beardy Hawaiian Scientist….

So, I tuned back in for the big Hollywood finale about 8:45.  By now the Beardy Boys were red-eyed and babbling about 6-7  foot waves; not a cataclysm but capable of serious destruction. But for once, nature refused to co-operate.  9 pm came and went and the waves rolled in at a deserted Waikiki Beach, but no bigger than usual.  Most of what activity there was seemed to be happening in one of the rivers – maybe the Wailuku – that flows into Hilo Bay.  Water here seemed to be surging in and out, with large-scale disturbance of silt and sediment and big rises & falls in the water levels within the river.

The Beardy Boys were still being exasive – ‘Does what has – or hasn’t – happened here means that the Japanese can relax?’ asked one reporter  ‘Well, I think I’d have to leave that to the Japanese to decide….’ came the usual shifty answer.  Nothing like Richard Dreyfus in ‘Jaws‘…now there was a beardy scientist who said what he thought and screw the consequences.  The Beardy Boys have clearly had a few lectures on accountability.  As for the TV folks, they did a sterling job and thankfully failed to observe that staple of US television, where, in a discussion, the speaker looks into the camera as though they are addressing their comments to you rather than to a colleague.  So well done KITV4 for keeping us going on the Tsunami that Never Was for upwards of 12 hours….a sterling effort…

Nils Petter Molvær /Hare & Hounds/Birmingham 26 Feb 2010

Longtime Kings Heath residents like yours truly are still struggling to come to terms with the way in which former grothole  boozer ‘The Hare & Hounds’  has reinvented itself as the ‘pub du jour’  for all those bright young things who totter about on high heels (and that’s just the boys) on your average Birmingham Friday night – and let’s face it, most of them are….

The music booking policy also seems to have had a few shots of steroids as well, because whereas a couple of years back, the best we could hope for was a band where the bass player’s brother had once stood  next to Steve Gibbons in a queue in Asda, we are now getting a slightly more elevated calibre of artiste, darlings.  To be fair to the ‘H&H’, the main upstairs venue has always been a good room; an elevated stage so that everyone can see and decent sound, as well.

Even so, and despite this aspirational booking policy, I was somewhat gobsmacked to see that Birmingham Jazz had elected to put on Nils Petter Molvær’s latest trio in a venue more normally associated with folk & rock acts. 

These days, Nils Petter Molvær  has become almost an elder statesman of ‘nu-jazz’ or whatever you want to call it.  He has been around for quite a while – indeed the last time I saw him on stage was in Norway back in the late 80’s , when he was an integral part of Arild Andersen’s ‘Masqualero’ band.    Masqualero were fairly straight jazz , but it was the two solo albums  NPM made for ECM after Masqualero broke up that really created a stir. 

‘ Khmer’  & ‘Solid Ether’  both featured a revolutionary  mixture of  jazz, trip-hop and Scandinavian folk influences, delivered by an ensemble  that also first introduced the world to the considerable talents of  guitarist Eivind Aarset.  In a way, for ECM, these two albums were as ground-breaking as Keith Jarrett’s  ‘Köln Concert’  from some twenty-odd years earlier.  But Molvær soon grew discontented with the meagre pickings his ECM albums were bringing in – “I got tired of working hard just to give my music away, in exchange for a fairly low percentage cut. So I set up my own label, Sula records, which in effect was just a device to retain control of my own music. Since 2001 I have licensed my records to Universal. I am very content with this system as I am basically free to do whatever I want.” (Mic, Norway)

So far so good and through the 00’s NPM kept up a steady stream of releases that incorporated work with a new generation of Norwegian tyro musical prodigies (like Aarset) and dipped into remixing, soundtrack work and even live recording.  Throughout this process, the press have been generally supportive all over the world, but his 2010 release ‘Hamada’  has divided opinion.  Most people see it as a very ‘dark’ piece of work, even by Molvær’s standards.  After all ‘Hamada’ is Arabic for ‘death’ or the most inhospitable part of a desert.  Not one for the office party, then…..

Nils Petter Molvær; in a certain light, he looks just like Bryan Robson…..

Molvær is touring behind the new album with a stripped-down band comprising himself on trumpet and effects-heavy wordless (well, incomprehensible anyway)vocals, Stian Westerhus on guitar (sounding like a bass one minute and a harp the next) and Audun Kleive on drums and percussion.  Eivind Aarset is missed, but it is more the fact that a trio puts a bit of a strain on the available resources.  In previous bands, much of the sampling work was handled by Jan Bang, but now Molvær seems to be handling it himself in cahoots with the sound man, who was  effectively a  fourth member and whose name I didn’t catch. 

Unless my ears are deceiving me, much of the material seems to come from the ‘Hamada’ album, but it has all been welded into a continuous 90-minute set which I think was a bit of a mistake.  I think everyone; band and audience alike, would have profited from a few pauses to draw breath along the way.  As it is the music hovers like some strange dark bird over the room, vaguely menacing for much of its duration with only the occasional lighter moment.  Creatively and  technically it’s a tour-de-force but emotionally it’s unlikely to win hearts and minds.  NPM is on a journey and we are welcome to observe proceedings but this is a music where the audience is entirely a passive recipient; there is no banter and no acknowledgement until the end when a wave of applause stumbles a bit half-heartedly out into the light. 

It feels weird; a bit like applauding a piece of monumental sculpture or architecture.

I wrote a while back on here about another Norwegian trio (Tord Gustavsen’s) and how they had given a ‘recital’ which was more like a chamber music concert than a jazz gig.  In a strange way, there are parallels here, though instead of the Gustavsen Trio’s tinkling formality, here the audience are dazzled by the technology and the way the band deploys it.  The effect though, is not dissimilar – perhaps rather than a recital we should use the word ‘viewing’, because in some ways, the 90-minutes unveiled by Molvær and his three ‘assistants’  resembles nothing more or less than a huge Jackson Pollock-esque canvas of sound.

It’s jazz, Jim, just not as we know it…..

Listening to Jah Wobble…….

I reckon that I must first have encountered Jah Wobble when I saw Public Image Ltd at Hulme’s Russell Club/ The Factory in about 1979.  By and large, this would, as well,  have been the first time that many Mancunians actually caught sight of John Lydon.  The Sex Pistols only played Manchester a handful of times in their short lifespan and often to meagre crowds, so the Russell Club was out in force to eyeball Lydon and he was assuredly there to eyeball them right back.  Monsieur Wobble, however, stood at the rear of the stage, largely unnoticed and thundering out dub-style bass lines behind Keith Levine’s sheet-metal guitar and Lydon’s sneering vocals.  I thought they were a huge improvement on the Pistols who I never really took to anyway.

Wobble got his name from Lydon apparently.  As John Wardle, 18, from Stepney (or was it Poplar?  Somewhere down that way, anyway) he was well aware of the lazy shortcuts that ‘Estuary English’ takes with pronunciation, so ‘John Wardle’ as rendered by someone from the Greater London area on the receiving end of too much Holsten Pils or other mind-altering substances could (and did) rapidly become ‘Jah Wobble’.  Still it was a good stage name – sounded like a fat Rastafarian geezer when JW was actually a  skinny white guy.  Postmodernism, eh?  These pop stars just don’t know when to stop, do they…..

Early days with Public Image Ltd – l-r, Keith Levene, Jah Wobble, John Lydon

I never really followed Wobble’s career too closely thereafter .  His first solo venture was an album called ‘Betrayal’ – aptly named as it precipitated his departure from PIL. – they reckoned he’d stolen some of their material to use on this solo project.  The album sold poorly anyway and Wobble then formed a  band called The Human Condition.  They released a couple of interesting cassettes, which were pretty lo-fi recordings of gigs in Europe and elsewhere.  Although the compositions are basic and the playing likewise, it’s easy to see that Wobble was already looking to stretch out with the kind of dub-based jams which borrowed liberally from punk, reggae, world music and Miles Davis-style jazz-funk.

Jah Wobble has been making records/tapes/cd’s ever since that first ‘Betrayal’ album and what I have been trying to do is to pull stuff from existing cd’s , some old cassettes and old hard drives in order to put together a coherent and chronological collection that covers the best of his work in the intervening 30 years. 

Guess what?  It’s tantamount to impossible!  The guy is so prolific and has recorded so much stuff on 7 & 12-inch vinyl, on cassette, on albums and on cd’s.  He’s recorded for major labels like Virgin, Warners and Island but has always maintained a steady flow of collaborations released on his own and other small indie label(s). 

As well as PIL, Wobble has recorded with a cornucopia of left-field stars from Brian Eno, through Jaki Liebzeit and Holger Czukay of Can to U2 guitarist The Edge, free-jazz saxophonist Evan Parker and faux-Moroccan chanteuse, Natascha Atlas.

The marvellous Invaders of the Heart on stage with Wobble and trombonist Annie Whitehead to the fore

Fast-forward to 1984 and a friend introduced me to two 12-inch EP’s featuring Wobble’s unmistakable signature.  The first was the original ‘Invaders of the Heart’ (1983) EP (which gave its name to one of Wobble’s working ensembles of the time – and one of his best) and a 1984 collaboration with Ollie Marland and Polly Eltes  (who had sung on Brian Eno’s ‘Taking Tiger Mountain’ album) featuring on one side a splendid and lengthy instrumental called ‘East’.  What was clear from these two releases was that Jah Wobble had been bitten by the World Music bug in a major way and from this point onwards I became much more interested in the stuff he was doing, which whilst it wasn’t always brilliant, was never less than interesting.

After that, Wobble seemed to disappear, apparently because, for Wobble, the late 1980’s were largely ‘wilderness years’ where the proverbial ‘personal demons’ led to him abandoning his career as a musician altogether in favour of various menial jobs, including one with London Underground. 

Once again, scattergun recordings with people like Primal Scream and Sinead O’Connor and an excellent 1989 live ‘Invaders’ album (‘Without Judgement’) heralded a return to the field of play in the early 90’s and the re-convened ‘Invaders’  entered the studio to record the marvellous ‘Rising above Bedlam’ which was released in 1991.  This is definitely one of JW’s finest hours with great tracks like ‘Bomba’, ‘Erzulie’ and ‘Soledad’.  Marvellous stuff.

Almost as good was 1994’s ‘Take me to God’ which cemented the World Music collisions of Spanish, Middle Eastern, African and Jamaican themes and showed Wobble really hitting his stride.  1995 saw the release of ‘Spinner’, a collaboration with Brian Eno as well as another solo album, ‘Heaven & Earth’, which broadened JW’s musical palette to incorporate themes drawn from Far Eastern music.  This  new interest could also be connected with his marriage to the Chinese-born guzheng player, Zi Lan Liao, though I am speculating here and may be doing both Mr and Mrs Wobble a disservice…

Latter-day Wobble  

More recently, JW seems to have broadened out in terms of working with a number of different ensembles who may remain dormant for many years before bursting into life again.  There was the dub/ambient ‘supergroup’ Solaris, fronted by Wobble but majoring on compositions by pianist Harold Budd and with Bill Laswell, Jaki Liebzeit and trumpeter Graham Haynes on board.  Then there was ‘Deep Space’, once again with Laswell, but also with French bagpiper Jean Rassle in the band.

More recently JW has fronted The English Roots Band and the Chinese Dub Orchestra, but could not apparently be tempted to rejoin John Lydon for a Public Image Limited reunion tour.  I’m not surprised; he just doesn’t have time!

For anyone trying to grasp the diversity and prolific output of Jah Wobble, all I can do is to wish them well.  There has been so much stuff that has been released in a variety of versions, stuff from the 1980’s that never made it on to CD, collaborations recorded for small and now defunct labels and so on…..  In truth, he is probably a nightmare proposition for a major record company – I mean, how would you promote him?  World Music? Post-punk?  Ambient dubmaster?  Jazz fellow-traveller?  he is all of these and more….autobiographer, too, after last year’s ‘Memoirs of a Geezer’  (ho, ho….). He’s even been known to review books for ‘The Independent’ newspaper.  Does he ever stop?

Anyway, my attempt to pull together all my scattered Wobble-iana into a coherent collection has left me with no less than 9 CD’s of material from 1980 through to last year’s marvellous re-working of the ‘Get Carter’ theme music.

Oh well, I tried….

Goodbye Oscar (1995-2010)…..

A very sad day today as our much-loved cat, Oscar, succumbed to the kidney problems that have been plaguing him for the last few months.  In the end, this handsome cat (see below) was reduced to a helpless shrunken shadow of his former self.  Death is rarely kind, but at least his suffering is over.  For myself, I feel sad and inevitably diminished by this loss – we have two other cats, but Oscar was special….

A prince among cats……Oscar in happier days…..

Of course, the British are notorious for sentimentalising and anthropomorphising their pets and whilst I don’t think we are as guilty of that as some people I have known, it is true that we make a fuss of our cats – wouldn’t be much point in keeping pets if you didn’t.  Oscar has been part of our lives for the last 15 years and I have to say that I have never known a cat so fond of human company.  Oscar was like a bendy toy; he would allow people to pick him up, maul him around and generally behaved with a total absence of traditional feline hauteur.  He forged a special bond with my Dad and would spend hours sprawled across his lap whenever he visited.  There seemed to be no limit to the amount of fuss he would accept from us – in fact, we could never give him enough, so Dad’s regular visits were a real boon.

The story has been told over the last 24 hours or so about how Oscar actually chose us.  We have bought all three of our cats from a woman who lives over in Quinton in the west of the city.  We heard that she ran a refuge for strays at her house and were stunned to find that her council house had basically been taken over by cats.  On our first visit, she apparently had 118 cats on her books and we relieved her of two of them.  She was very keen for us to have a skinny white & ginger kitten (who we renamed Eric) and he has proven to be a great cat as well, albeit in a totally different way to Oscar.  Eric is a ‘cat’s cat’ and still goes out scrapping with the local toms, returning with ragged ears and scratches across his nose.  He grants his attentions to humans only sparingly, unlike Oscar, who was just a complete tart.

However, back in Quinton, this lady has had her garage and her back garden transformed into an elaborate series of pens and runs  that were positively swarming with cats.  Oscar was this fluffy ginger thing with bright blue eyes who was climbing the outer fence of his run, meowing furiously for our attention.  As soon as we gave him some fuss he began to purr furiously; we had been interviewed and he had made his decision.  We would do. 

Amazingly, the Quinton cat lady had names for all her guests and Oscar was a name we liked anyway, but Eric was originally called ‘Simon’…..sorry, but all my cats have to be named after jazz musicians or United players – thus Oscar for Oscar Peterson and Eric who could be Cantona or Dolphy, depending on your preferences.  ‘Simon’? I don’t think so…

At a time like this when everyone in the house is very sad, you can only console yourself with the thought that Oscar had a nice life, spent entirely under one roof and with a traffic-free green network of gardens to explore out the back of the house.  I hope that he felt that his decision to choose us was a good one…..farewell Oscar; you were much loved and you will be much missed……

Album Cover of the Week

 

The tank tops, the checked trousers, the glazed, manic expressions and more than anything else, yes,  oh YES…it’s the Hairstyle from Hell on the extreme right, the one who looks like David Crosby would have looked if he’d been kidnapped by Christian fundamentalists as an 8-year old…..

Apparently, this lot did a kickass version of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Sister Ray’………

OK, so I made that last bit up….but really, have you ever seen such a cheerfully terrified bunch in your life?

Listening to Dan Penn & Spooner Oldham……

Penn and Oldham are a couple of that rare and select breed of musician who, at one time or another and in one situation or another had a ‘day job’ that involved writing hit songs in large numbers.  The best known of these ‘ensembles’ have been based in the USA and we immediately think of New York’s ‘Tin Pan Alley’ and the Brill Building where the likes of Carole King, Gerry Goffin and Neil Sedaka plied their trade in the 1950’s – because that’s very much what it was; a trade.  Just like the executives in the BBC’s excellent ‘Mad Men’ travel into the heart of Manhattan to produce inane but powerful jingles and slogans, so King, Goffin, et al would hammer away at their pianos, concocting the dreams of ‘Young America’….under the boardwalk, up on the roof, whether they’d lost that lovin’ feelin’ or just discovered the ‘Chapel of Love’….

The frontage of the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway

Tin Pan Alley had of course existed in some form or another on W.28th Street between Sixth and Broadway since the 19th century as home to the publishers of sheet music and because of its proximity to the vaudeville theatres of Broadway.   What many found fascinating was the  ‘industrial’ nature of the songwriting that went on here.  There was talk of ‘hit factories’ and owners would strive to pair or group combinations that could generate the particular chemistry needed to write a hit song.  In those days, things were seen in terms of the classic combinations of history such as George & Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart and so on. This was something that persisted into the classic 50’s combinations of Lieber & Stoller, Goffin & King et al.

It was also something that Motown founder Berry Gordy picked up on when he founded his own ‘Hit Factory’ out in Detroit in the late 1950’s.  In assembling talent to fuel his new roster of labels, Gordy was looking not just at the stars like The Supremes or The Temptations who would provide the window dressing for the enterprise but also the backroom technicians, musicians, producers and writing teams who would produce, record and package the material that Motown would sell so successfully throughout the 1960’s.  Motown had its crop of producer/songwriters like Holland-Dozier-Holland, Norman Whitfield & Barrett Strong , ‘Mickey’ Stevenson & Smokey Robinson and so on – their style and techniques were hugely influential….

Another day at the office for Holland, Dozier and Holland….

Down in Memphis, a similar phenomenon was occurring, albeit on a smaller scale, at Stax Records.  Stax could boast Booker T and the M.G.’s as a house band and could also draw on the songwriting talents of Isaac Hayes and David Porter.  There is strong evidence that Porter in particular cold-bloodedly dissected some of the classic Motown songs, applying what he’d learned to his own writing.

The success of Stax Records brought something of a renaissance in the music business in Memphis.  Dan  Penn had worked at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals but had failed to really make it as a performer.  Having written ‘I’m your puppet’, successfully recorded by James & Bobby Purify in 1966, Penn relocated to Memphis, intent on reinventing himself as a songwriter/producer.  He quickly hooked up with Chips Moman at American Studios. 

Their first collaboration was the extraordinary soul classic ‘The Dark End of the Street’, recorded initially by James Carr, but propelled to international success when it was covered by Percy Sledge (with Spooner Oldham on sepulchral Hammond Organ).  Rock artists like Ry Cooder and Richard & Linda Thompson have since covered the song to great effect.  Moman & Penn subsequently produced ‘Do right woman, do right man’ for Aretha Franklin’s 1967  Muscle Shoals sessions, whilst Penn was also collaborating with Spooner Oldham in writing and producing hits for a new pop/soul group from Memphis called The Box Tops.  Led by future Big Star guitarist Alex Chilton, the Box Tops would register massive international hits with songs like ‘The Letter’ and ‘Cry like  a baby’.  Like Penn & Oldham themselves, The Box Tops were exponents of what is often termed ‘blue-eyed soul’, which is a polite term for black music made by white people.  The degree to which this term is derogatory probably depends on the company you’re keeping, but some record companies – notably Island with Robert Palmer and Columbia with Boz Scaggs – have used it freely in promoting white artists since the 1960’s.

Aretha Franklin with Jerry Wexler at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, 1967

Dan Penn freely admits that whilst he grew up with an awareness of what white artists (most notably Elvis Presley) could do in harnessing the drive and sexual energy of black rhythm and blues and repackaging it for an affluent white audience, it was the original black artists like Ray Charles and James Brown that he always turned to for inspiration.

All of this might have gone on indefinitely, but history took a hand once Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.  Suddenly, with race riots and a city in flames, the flow of black performers that had been working with Penn & Oldham on a regular basis just dried up and disappeared.  Since then, both have had their ‘wilderness years’ , as Penn freely acknowledges :- “In the Seventies, there were a lot of parties, but not a lot of songs. Whole lot of first lines, and no verses. I lost my studio – stayed pretty intoxicated for eight years.”

In time-honoured fashion, Penn was ‘saved’ by that old-time Southern religion in the 1980’s and now he and Oldham tour as a duo when time permits, playing the old songs; whilst the James Taylors and Bob Dylans of this world became singer/songwriters, Penn & Oldham, coming the other way, can perhaps be described as songwriter/singers.

Dan Penn on guitar and Spooner Oldham at the piano

Anyway, new listeners need look no further than ‘Moments from this theatre’, a recording of a gig they did in Dublin in 1998 or thereabouts and available on Proper Records.  All those hit songs are there, delivered (mainly ) by Penn’s warm baritone – he sounds very akin to another famous Memphis singer; Russell Smith from The Amazing Rhythm Aces.  The backing is Penn’s uncluttered acoustic guitar and Oldham’s warm electric piano.  It’s a record for a certain mood; maybe one of those delicate Sunday mornings…but for a couple of guys from the factory floor, it’s pretty impressive stuff…..

Reading Gitta Sereny…………

Gitta Sereny is an Austrian-born writer who is now in her late 80’s.  She has written a number of high-profile biographies of some of the most morally compromised personalities of our times and specialises in books on Nazi Germany and abused children.  All of this merely reflects her own personal history; as a teenager travelling to boarding school in the UK from Austria, her train was delayed in Nuremburg and she ended up attending one of Hitler’s Nazi rallies there.  After spending most of World War 2 in the USA, she returned to Europe after the war,  working for the United Nations in Germany on a programme designed to reunite children (some of whom had been kidnapped by the Nazis as potential ‘Aryan’  breeding stock) with their biological families, even though many of the children could not recall their original families.  Sereny attended the Nuremburg War Trials as a journalist where she first encountered the Nazi armaments minister, Albert Speer, who would form the subject of one of her later books.

Gitta Sereny

Sereny’s notoriety in the UK stems from the two books she has published about Mary Bell, the Tyneside girl who was responsible for the murder of two young boys in the Scotswood area of Newcastle in 1968.  Like the late Myra Hindley,  Bell has usually been demonised by the British tabloid press as a figure of pure evil.  Sereny’s attempts to understand Mary Bell’s behaviour in the context of her own traumatic childhood have not always played well with the British media who at the time of Bell’s trial had her pigeonholed as a manipulative figure of ‘pure evil’, as though this was some naturally occurring phenomenon rather than the product of Bell’s own experiences with her psychotic mother.

Penn Street, Scotswood in 1957, the year Mary Bell was born.  Photo by the late, great Jimmy Forsyth

Sereny’s initial book about the trial and its aftermath was published as ‘The Case of Mary Bell’ in 1972.  When I lived in Newcastle in the 1980’s the city was still scarred by the case and Bell’s name would be mentioned in hushed tones.  My girlfriend of the time tried to borrow a copy of Sereny’s book from the local Public Library and was virtually compelled to sign over her soul before a copy was released to her – apparently dozens of copies of the book had been issued and had promptly been stolen from libraries across Tyneside in the years since its publication.  Civic shame or grim prurience?

Whatever the case, my first encounter with Gitta Sereny came in the late 1970’s when I read ‘Into that darkness’, her biography of Franz Stangl, the Austrian who had risen through the Nazi ranks to become the Commandant of the Death Camp at Treblinka in Poland, before escaping at the war’s end and ultimately starting a new life in Brazil, where (a shade ironically) he worked for Volkswagen.  Having been tracked down by Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, Stangl was arrested and extradited to West Germany in the late 1960’s.  He was tried as being responsible for the death of 900,000 people and whilst admitting his guilt, maintained that he had just been following orders.  ‘Into that darkness’ is one of the more extraordinary books that I’ve read in my life.  Sereny was able to gain unique access to Stangl in prison and slowly built a relationship of trust with him.  She took the view that he knew that he was guilty and really just wanted to confess.  Over a lengthy period, Sereny managed to unearth Stangl’s life story and revealed him to be just a cog in the Nazi machine.  He was a deeply ordinary man and the most shocking thing about the evil he personified was in fact what Hannah Arendt has termed its very banality.   Perhaps the most amazing aspect of Stangl’s relationship with Sereny is that he died of a heart attack in his prison cell some 19 hours after completing his final interview with her.

 Stangl, to the left, at Treblinka.

So, for Sereny, the evil deeds committed by Mary Bell or Franz Stangl are issues of nurture rather than nature.  Stangl’s rise through the ranks of the Nazi hierarchy was connected to his ability to detach himself from the terrible deeds for which he was responsible.  According to Sereny,  Mary Bell was corrupted by her mother who tried on several occasions to kill her and inflicted horrendous sexual abuse on her from the age of 4.  Her book about Albert Speer(‘Albert Speer : His Battle with Truth ‘-1995) is most notable for the fact that Sereny apparently persuades Speer to finally admit that he knew about Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’.

Currently, I’ve just started reading Sereny’s second book about Mary Bell, ‘Cries Unheard’, published in 1998, by which time Bell, living in anonymity and trying to stay a step ahead of the tabloid hacks who wanted to expose her, had herself become a mother and a woman on the threshold of middle age.  This book drew a lot of adverse publicity, mainly because Gitta Sereny revealed that she would be sharing her ‘fee’ with Mary Bell, outraging those who feel that Bell should not be allowed to ‘profit’  from her crimes in this way.  Unlike ‘loveable’ Ronnie Biggs of Great Train Robbery fame who exploited his notoriety via numerous books and records over the years……

Still, let’s not expect consistency from the tabloids….

‘Cries Unheard’ seeks to generate discussion aimed at reform of the legal system as it applies to young children in this country.  By the time it was published, Mary Bell’s crimes had been mirrored by the two Liverpudlian boys responsible for the murder of James Bulger.  Interesting that their case is known by the name of its victim rather than its perpetrator(s)…

‘Cries Unheard’ is nowadays viewed as a standard text for social workers, child welfare staff and anyone dealing with children and the Law.

One can only speculate on the motivation of Sereny, who has spent her life,  in the words of one observer, ‘staring into the abyss.’  She is seemingly a remarkable woman and clearly a gifted author who has broadened our understanding of what evil is and how it manifests itself.

Post-script:  Gitta Sereny died on 14/6/12. 

Vaya con dios……

From ‘The Guardian’ website, a good piece by Giles Fraser…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/jun/19/gitta-sereny-led-through-darkness?INTCMP=SRCH

and ‘The Guardian’s’ obituary of an extraordinary human being….

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/19/gitta-sereny?intcmp=239

Writer’s block or just feeling S.A.D.?

For the first time since I started this blog last autumn, the compulsion to post has eluded me this week.  Those who have been around since the beginning will know that I started this as a way of keeping idle fingers and a restless mind busy whilst I tried to quit smoking.  That seems a long time ago now and the blog soon acquired a purpose of its own. I seemed to have no shortage of verbiage to inflict on you all.  Since then, everything has just sailed along swimmingly until the last few days where I have suddenly found other things to do when normally I would be blogging.

Actually, there’s another aspect to this which may be having an effect and that is Seasonal Affective Disorder, which I reckon has been something that has afflicted me for some years now.  For me, February is quite definitely the winter equivalent of August’s ‘Dog Days’; it can be cold, yes, but I think it’s more the lack of daylight and the fact that the natural world seems devoid of life.  This is the feeling that sends thousands of Scandinavians scuttling off ’til syden’ (to the South – and, by implication, to daylight, warmth and life).  This is also the feeling that winter has just been going on for far too long and  – enough already!  Could we please have some warmth, some sense of renewal…in other words; Spring!

I can’t claim any particular insights into all of this – I’m just grumpy and fed up with the cold weather.  Life seems dull,frozen and uninspiring; something that perhaps explains the lack of jolly posts here on the late winter blogscape.  It should pass – it always has before.  Abnormal service will be resumed ASAP……..

Yes, very beautiful, but enough, already……

Album Cover of the Week…..

Yes, Ira?  What would that do for you?  All those accessories and make-up…..those fine silks and colourful prints that are denied you in your current monochrome state…

Would it make you abandon that book you’re holding?  We might like to believe that you’ve been dipping into ‘A Child’s Illustrated Treasury of Cross-Dressing’, but I think we know better from that grim and sanctimonious expression on your sourpuss Presbyterian face.

Not sure what your advice for women would be, but I kinda doubt that it would involve Salsa dancing, shopping binges and alcohol-fuelled hen nights in Dublin….

So, farewell then……Johnny Dankworth

Sir John Dankworth has died after a short illness aged 82. 

If anyone can claim to be the ‘Godfather of British Jazz’, it would be Dankworth, who, in the postwar years gave British Jazz a respectability and status it had never enjoyed previously, sharing the stage with the likes of Charlie Parker, Sidney Bechet and Duke Ellington and leading a series of British-based ensembles that acted as a tremendous nursery for local talent, nurturing  the likes of Kenny Wheeler, John Taylor, Dudley Moore, Mike Gibbs and Tony Coe, to name but a few.  He was a deft and skilful player on both clarinet and alto sax, where the influence of Johnny Hodges could often be heard in his playing.

Dankworth was, famously, married to the singer Cleo Laine, with whom he had a long and happy association.  They had two children, Alec and Jacqui, both of whom became  accomplished jazz musicians themselves. Dankworth wrote extensively for his own Big Band, formed initially in 1953.  They appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival and toured regularly in the UK , often backing big American stars such as Nat ‘King’ Cole and Sarah Vaughan.  He also found time to compose for TV and cinema as well, notably writing the theme tunes for ‘The Avengers’ and the BBC Popular Science programme, ‘Tomorrow’s World.’

John Dankworth leads his band at London’s  Marquee Club in 1960.  Dudley Moore is the piano player to the extreme left.

The Dankworths set up home in Wavendon, Buckinghamshire  and for many years ran successful concerts from the converted stables (‘The Stables’) at their own home.  Organising and promoting the Wavendon Stables events tended to occupy much of Dankworth’s time and ironically kept him out of the public  eye in the broader sense.  Meanwhile, Dankworth alumni like John Taylor, Kenny Wheeler, Dave Holland and John McLaughlin – to say nothing of Dudley Moore – were going on to world renown.

One only has to listen to large ensemble pieces such as those produced by the likes of Wheeler on his 1992 ‘Kayak’ album or to Holland’s Big Band Albums (2002’s ‘What goes around’ is a good example)  to hear the influence of  Dankworth in the cool, swinging arrangements.

It does seem a little odd that having been at the forefront of the growth of British jazz in the 50’s, Dankworth should end up as a rather remote figure, always honoured for his work, but never seeming to appear on many albums by his former sidemen; possibly that was his choice and he opted to remain focussed on the busy programme at Wavendon.

It is to be hoped that British Jazz finds a suitable way of honouring his profound contributions to the cause over the years.  Without his ground-breaking efforts back in the 1950’s, British Jazz would undoubtedly have struggled to achieve the relatively influential perch it currently occupies on the international jazz scene and a whole generation of British musicians might well have struggled to break through and establish careers of their own.