Liverpool Kiss

Inevitably, interviewing George Melly was an unforgettable encounter. That’s why I suggested it to the Listener. We met at 10.00am, he ordered a gin and tonic, and he was away. His 1965 memoir Owning Up about his days in a 1950s UK jazz band is one of the great music memoirs, about the days of touring before the M1 was built, staying in dodgy B&Bs with Carry On landladies, pints and pints of beer, and apres-gig knees-ups beneath the canal bridge. The article below was written in 1990, when Melly was one of many unfashionable musical guests of the “International” Wellington festival of the arts. I mean, were they serious about inviting Max Bygraves? But Melly’s talents went beyond the trad jazz they hired hiim for.

Fifteen years later, in 2005, I saw Melly wandering through a leafy street in St John’s Wood, London, very near Abbey Road. Two years before his death, he was still in his pyjama suit, but seemed decrepit with his stick and eye patch. All his memoirs are great reading, evening the final one about his physical decline, Slowing Down. He was trisexual – try anything – and he certainly tried. Was the Daily Mail pic serious when it captioned this picture, “Despite his bed-hopping, George Melly was loved by jazz fans across the world.”?

BEING BORN in Liverpool, claimed one celebrated citizen, carries with it certain responsibilities. It also makes one a member of the Liverpool mafia, says George Melly. “You give a few signs, says ‘ ’ello thur wack!’ and you’re away at once. It’s a sort of Freemasonry by birth.”

Melly, jazz singer and scholar, art critic and popular culture essayist, raconteur and bon vivant, still feels the pull of his birthplace. Immediately after his appearance at the 1990 International Festival of the Arts in Wellington he was going back to judge an art competition in a brewery. And the Liverpool Polytechnic have just awarded him an honorary degree.

Are they trying to make the man in the pyjama-striped suit and fruit-salad tie respectable? He hopes not. “It’s a great difficulty not to slip into being embraced by the establishment as one gets older. However the recent scandal about one’s seduction of Peregrine Worsthorne helps keep respectability from the door!”

Melly chuckles with saucy delight. The revelations in the defamation case between London Newspaper editors were in fact old news. Both Melly and the Sunday Telegraph editor had already written about their teenage liaison in their autobiographies. “But it was useful evidence in [Sunday Times editor Andrew] Neil’s trial of Worsthorne. Because Neil could say, ‘How dare this man say I shouldn’t go out with a perfectly respectable call-girl, and give her a Magimix, when he himself has admitted in print that he was seduced by a jazz singer!?’”

Surely Melly’s confessional memoir Owning Up makes it harder to be a victim of the tabloids? “I daresay they could find things that would embarrass me,” he says. “But it’s much harder. It’s not like I always pretended to be a pillar of the church and the establishment. You can’t accuse somebody of something they’ve already admitted to themselves.”

Melly arrived in London in the early 1950s, after a stint in the navy (detailed in Rum, Bum and Concertina). Although this was before it became a “positive bonus” to come from the provinces, he didn’t have any trouble infiltrating the London art world and music scene. “Liverpudlians take it for granted that they’re going to amuse and charm everyone, even if they’re not.”

An ideological battle was going on between jazz fans at the time. One was either a revivalist or a trad jazzer, and one didn’t fraternise with the opposition. They argued over the cut-off point when jazz lost its “purity” – after it left New Orleans, or when big-band-swing came along? Meanwhile the UK beboppers, led by Ronnie Scott and Johnny Dankworth, and better musicians, according to Melly, interpreted the jazz of their own era.

“i was a revivalist, totally,” he says. “I thought bebop was the work of the devil. Ridiculous nonsense. Nowadays one hears it as just a development, it came out of what came before it.” In the mid-1950s with the arrival of Elvis, it looked as though jazz was doomed. “But somehow it staggered to its feet and produced its most banal and boring period, the trad boom of the late ’50s, which in turn was swept out of the way by the Beatles: beat music, as we called rock’n’roll.”

Melly is adept at giving a potted history of post-war British jazz, having witness its “death”, and revival, several times over. For the moment, he says, jazz is “extraordinarily chick” in London, even if it sounds like an accessory to fashion photography. Young black musicians like Courtenay Pine are stars, jazz has replaced rock on film soundtracks, and is used to advertise clothes and scent. “You see people in pseudo-Armani black clothes and pale expressionless faces listening to that form of jazz. I don’t know them very well, these types of people. I’m more likely to see them at art galleries than at a jazz concert.”

In the 1960s, Melly retired from singing and started to write. Revolt Into Style, his 1970 collection of essays on British popular culture, still reads well, relying on sober, informed analysis rather than dated hipness. The book almost predicts punk rock with its conclusion that pop was “temporarily done for”, having turned “pretentious and sour”.

For a recent new edition. all Melly added was an afterword saying that punk was the only exciting thing to have happened since. “But I said I was letting the book stand. As a consequence there are now what appear archaic references, and the word negro throughout, which now gives one a shock to read. But the word was respectable then – if I’d used black I would have been very unpopular. And now I believe ‘black’ is dying out and one has to say something cumbersome like Afro-American.”

Melly returned to performing in the mid-1970s, with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers. “I still did it when people asked me, but they very infrequently did during the Beatles.” Ronnie Scott’s club gave them a residency because, he suspects, they attracted a crowd of young heavy drinkers, and the act became a cult. It was time to give up the day job. “We decided to go back on the road, we’d had a taste of it again. And it promised to be in rather more luxurious circumstances than hitherto. in the ’50s one led a very squalid life, which appeals to you when you’re young, but less so when you're middle-aged.”

Is performing still, as he once suggested, like seduction? “Yes, but I’m rather better at performing than seduction, I have to add. But it’s a similar process. I have an audience there who is a virgin every night, willing or unwilling. You come on stage and have to get them into a state where they’re saying ‘yes’ by the end. The similar may appal some people but I think it’s an accurate one – and for every performer, in whatever sphere. Playing the cello with an orchestra, acting Richard III, the audience has to be seduced.”

Though Melly’s blackface vocals can make Al Jolson seem like Ray Charles, his sincerity is unimpeachable. he is more an educator than interpreter, leading people to on to the originals. “I hope so,” he says. “Yesterday in this town somebody said, ‘I saw a concert you gave in England years ago and I went out and bought a Bessie Smith record, and I’ve still got it.’ If I’ve done that one in a thousand times …

“Of course, right from the start one questioned one’s right in black music. I did it at first because I so believed in it, and I’ve done it for so long I can’t give it up. And I must say what criticism I’ve had has always been from white critics. And I’ve sung with many black artists, none of whom have been anything but … kind.”

Melly’s love of 1920s jazz began at school, when he heard Muggsy Spanier’s ‘I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate’. “In between seducing Peregrine Worsthorne I was listening to this music,” he says. Then, the musicians were still in the entertainment business and consequently “produced a great deal of marvellous music because they weren’t self-consciously in pursuit of great art. There is high art, there is low art, and there is an awful lot of art which is pretentious, takes itself terribly seriously and produces nothing of lasting value.”

Bessie Smith is till his number-one singer. Next, he’d put “a whole lot of people in a row”: Ma Rainey, Jimmy Rushing, Joe Turner, Fats Waller, the “underrated” Ethel Waters, Bill Holiday. “There’s a big spectrum there, but Bessie – not even Billie has the same effect on me.”

However Melly no longer sings ‘Frankie and Johnny’ – the seduction requires too much energy. “One has to pretend to be shot – if possible fall off the stage, which is sometimes several feet high – leap to one’s feet and continue to sing, and so on. I don’t think I’d be able to do it more than once, and then with luck. So I dropped that many years ago.”

Another singer who made ‘Frankie and Johnny’ his own was Sam Cooke, who was shot in circumstances uncannily similar to those in the song Melly the scholar hasn’t considered this example of life following art. But if that’s the case, he say’s, “I’d prefer ‘Do You Want a Hot Dog in Your Roll’, which is a song I sing now, to come true than ‘Frankie and Johnny’.”

Waiting On a Friend

1. Making Baby Float

With minutes to spare, the IIML twitter alerts me to a concert taking place nearby at the grandly named New Zealand School of Music. The Spaces In Between is another collaboration between pianist and composer Norman Meehan, poet Bill Manhire and singer Hannah Griffin. It’s been a couple of years since I saw them at St Andrews on the Terrace, and in that time the careful treatments have gelled into compelling art songs, and Griffin’s performance has an added depth and assuredness. The poems given musical settings include David Mitchell’s witty ‘Aesthetics’ (I last saw Wellington’s leading Beat down the road nearby in John Street), Baxter’s ‘High Country Weather’ (appropriately spare), Manhire’s ‘Buddhist Rain’ and – with a gospel vocal trio - David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’. Meehan introduced Hone Tuwhare’s ‘To Elespie, Ian & their Holy Whanau’ as “curiously named”, which would be news to the peace-loving Prior family. But he has a lovely touch on the Steinway, his arrangements having a gentle humour, and at one point guest Colin Hemmingsen’s clarinet provides an oxymoron: a joyful lament. Keith Hill’s recent documentary on this troupe is called Persuading the Baby to Float.

2. Laus Tibi Domine

Art, Keith Richards once said, is just short for Arthur. Turning poetry into songs is a risky endeavour, the results are often so arch. Denis Glover apparently grumbled at Douglas Lilburn’s 1954 settings of his ‘Sings Harry’ poems, and it has to be said something more earthy would have been more suitable. Meehan’s success reminded me of Dave Dobbyn’s deeply moving treatment of James K Baxter’s ‘Song of the Years’, which opens, “When from my mother’s womb I came / Disputandum was my name …” It was a match made in heaven, so perhaps Dobbyn should look to updating ‘Sings Harry’: like Baxter, Glover is a kindred spirit. Charlotte Yates, who commissioned Dobbyn’s song for the Baxter album, wrote that his use of repetition “turned the somewhat lad-least-likely last line of the poem ‘Laus tibi, Domine!’ into an utterly joyful and triumphant outro.”

3. True Adventures

After a gap of 27 years, I’ve been re-reading the one book about rock music that approaches literature: Stanley Booth’s classic The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, about the 1969 US tour and so much more. First published in 1984, and recently reissued by Canongate, and I’m looking forward to reviewing it soon. It’s meant a revisit to the canon, especially Let it Bleed and Sticky Fingers (Exile got a workover at the time of its reissue in 2010). One of the standout moments is his observation, “There were no grownups among us.” I wish I could find the actual line again, but at a time when books fight to justify their space, this one has returned like a prodigal son.

4. Someone to protect

Which makes me think of a new earworm for the day, written circa 1973, released in 1981. Sax solo by Sonny Rollins.

5. Diversions

The IIML twitter also provides “A website that some folk might find handy.”

Here Comes the Sun

My encounter with Sun Ra was so fleeting it was like a shooting star crossed my path. He had just finished a stunning set at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage festival in 1989. It was like experiencing a psychedelic Fletcher Henderson big band, with Ra’s Arkestra dressed in luridly coloured, sequinned KKK hooded caftans. But it had its own irresistible, mad groove, and turned into a parade that was the highlight of the day. Afterwards I ran into Ra backstage and he obliged with this picture; note the way his pet cobra is captured by his symbolic baton.

I was reminded of this while watching the 1974 documentary Space is the Place. It can be injested in several excerpts on YouTube. A newish site called The Documentarian provides a one-stop noticeboard for documentaries streaming on the web, many of them on roots music by people such as Les Blank. Included is the hour-long Sun Ra – a Joyful Noise by Robert Mugge. Space is the Place shows Ra had at least one foot on terra firma: watch him patiently parrying the ripostes of these sceptical soul sistahs.  The clip below shows the Arkestra at its most accessible.

God's empty chair

George Shearing, the great jazz pianist, has just passed away, aged 91. He was born British and born blind; from 1947 he was based in the United States. His New Zealand connection came through Julian Lee, the blind multi-instrumentalist born in Dunedin and now living in Australia. In the 1960s Shearing – along with another music legend – was instrumental in getting work for Lee in Los Angeles. Lee took quite a bit of persuading, he recalled in a 2000 interview with Radio New Zealand’s Haydn Sherley:

In 1960 George Shearing came over [to Sydney], and he worked at Channel 7 where I was staff arranger. And he being in a similar position – he doesn’t look where he’s going either – we got talking, went to lunch, and I played him a few of my arrangements. He said, ‘You gotta come over to the States man, you’re wasting your time.’ I said, ‘Not on your life, thanks, I’m doing fine.’ So I didn’t do anything about it.

But in ’62 Sinatra came over and I went to a cocktail party because I was doing some writing for what was then Coronet Records, the Australian record company, which later on became CBS. Frank said, I’d like to have a chat with you, so if you could come back stage this evening before the show, while the support act is we can spend the first hour having a talk.

So I did. I had to borrow Alan Nash’s trumpet – he was the lead trumpet player – so I could get into the place, into the back door, through the security. And Frank says, ‘I’ve heard some of your things, I want you to come over to the States, in fact you have to do that because you’re a talent we want to foster.’ So I said, Well, what senor commands I must do – so I did, in ’63, I went over.

Once in the US, Shearing sponsored Lee with the immigration department, and got him to write arrangements and Braille his parts. “Nobody else could do that, and it was easily proved.” Lee arranged tracks on the 1960s Shearing albums Deep Velvet and Here & Now! Shearing also helped Lee into production work. “And Frank opened the door to all sorts of people for me,” said Lee. “I didn’t do any actual work for him but I met a lot of very influential people, like Johnny Burke and oh Nelson Riddle.”

Here, Lee is pictured in 1976 with a stellar New Zealand rhythm section, Frank Gibson Jr and Andy Brown. In 2000 he was asked what the standard of LA session musicians was like. “Frightening,” he replied. “I can remember the first session I did for George. I thought I’d go down early to do this session, because I’m a new chum. And when I got down to the studio at 9.15am for a 10.00am recording session, the whole band was there warming up. What is this? … Then, we did the first 3 hours, and they all applauded me. Then they left, before I could say goodbye: the string players had gone to another!”

George Shearing’s biggest hit was probably ‘Lullaby of Birdland’ (1952), a swing tune so perfect it seems to have written itself. On paper it looks quite challenging, with plenty of 9ths, but playing it on the piano in E minor, your hands just seem to fall into the right chords and voicings: just as they must have when Shearing wrote it. Singers also relish the song, as this clip of Ella Fitzgerald performing it shows.

Another who celebrated George Shearing’s delicate mastery was Jack Kerouac in On the Road (written in the late 40s, published 1957). His famous description of Shearing playing in a nightclub is a classic piece of bop prosody:

Dean and I went to see Shearing at Birdland in the midst of the long, mad weekend. The place was deserted, we were the first customers, ten o'clock. Shearing came out, blind, led by the hand to his keyboard. He was a distinguished-looking Englishman with a stiff white collar, slightly beefy, blond, with a delicate English-summer's-night air about him that came out in the first rippling sweet number he played as the bass-player leaned to him reverently and thrummed the beat. The drummer, Denzil Best, sat motionless except for his wrists snapping the brushes. And Shearing began to rock; a smile broke over his ecstatic face; he began to rock in the piano seat, back and forth, slowly at first, then the beat went up, and he began rocking fast, his left foot jumped up with every beat, his neck began to rock crookedly, he brought his face down to the keys, he pushed his hair back, his combed hair dissolved, he began to sweat. The music picked up. The bass-player hunched over and socked it in, faster and faster, it seemed faster and faster, that's all. Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers, you'd think the man wouldn't have time to line them up. They rolled and rolled like the sea. Folks yelled for him to "Go!" Dean was sweating; the sweat poured down his collar. "There he is! That's him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!" And Shearing was conscious of the madman behind him, he could hear every one of Dean's gasps and imprecations, he could sense it though he couldn't see. "That's right!" Dean said. "Yes!" Shearing smiled, he rocked. Shearing rose from the piano, dripping with sweat; these were his great 1949 days before he became cool and commercial. When he was gone Dean pointed to the empty piano seat. "God's empty chair," he said. On the piano a horn sat; its golden shadow made a strange reflection along the desert caravan painted on the wall behind the drums. God was gone; it was the silence of his departure. It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night. Dean was popeyed with awe. This madness would lead nowhere.

High Priest on Queen

Stephen Stratford, the “literary gossip” who creates mischief over at Quote Unquote, reflects on a childhood epiphany: seeing Thelonious Monk live in concert in Tauranga. It reminded me of an anecdote I heard that, combined with a great photo that once seen is never forgotten, made the history books.

The story is twice removed but I can claim some ownership as it appears in Redmer Yska’s marijuana history because I told it to him on Lambton Quay (and also about the picture which he then used on p79 of his 1990 book New Zealand Green). He credited a mutual friend, though that kind of suited, also …

Monk’s New Zealand visit happened in 1965, and one of the curiosities about it is that it happened under the auspices of what is now called Chamber Music NZ. So the beatniks of Tauranga would have been well outnumbered by Brahms loving farmers’ wives and their bemused husbands. Bob Owens probably heckled.

More beatniks were at an apres-gig Auckland party (perhaps that one in Parnell mentioned by Stratford). Monk was sitting down, surrounded by acolytes. He said, "Anyone got a cigarette?"

Instantly, the gaggle of Abe Lincoln-bearded young jazzers and hipsters around him flicked out their Rothmans. Monk was surrounded by a circle of erect filters.

Monk looked around them all, then said, "No. I mean a special cigarette..."

The person who was present and later told this story - artist Pat Hanly - said that almost no one there knew what Monk was referring to. But someone did, and sorted him out.

After another function pianist Mike Perjanik gave Monk a lift in his (I think) Ford Prefect back to the Montmartre or some club near Queen Street. But that's another story.

Instead, here is a link to Time magazine’s 28 February 1964 cover story on Monk. The image is by the Russian artist Boris Chaliapin, who painted so many Time covers when it gave the subject instant worldwide status. At the time, the Beatles had just conquered the US, but it would be three years before they received a cover. Monk’s cover had been planned for the last week of November 1963, but it was naturally bumped for the JFK assassination.

Which reminds me of another story. Janis Joplin was lined up for a cover of Newsweek in 1970, then almost as important as Time. Rock musicians were almost never on the cover of the two newsweeklies then, and the music press had yet to enter the mainstream. Joplin’s cover was pulled at the last minute because former president Dwight Eisenhower died after many years of illness.

Joplin shrieked, “Fourteen fucking heart attacks and he has to die in my fucking week?!”

Dancing Gershwin's blues

In the 1920s, if New Zealand newspapers reviewed records they were usually opera, classical or the light classics. I'm surprised the New Zealand Herald covered Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue at all, so can forgive the reviewer for hedging his bets:

Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue is almost a new art form - a sort of symphonic jazz. Stravinsky and some of the French "six" have attempted something of the kind; but their compositions are far too self-conscious to be successful, and their knowledge of the peculiar kind of scoring needed, inadequate. The medium is of far greater interest than Mr Gershwin's music, which is extremely derivative. Rimsky-Korsakoff is drawn upon in the opening section, Debussy and Grieg toward the end. There are also many pure and captandum* effects. But something undoubtedly individual emerges. The composer plays the piano brilliantly; the whole thing has the air of an improvisation. The saxophones would prove useful as ordinary members of the orchestra. The tenor instrument is very similar in tone to a clarinet, only more supple; the baritone to a cello, but full and rounder. However, the orchestra of the future will perhaps be no settled body. Instead, we shall have chamber orchestras of varying content. This example may well be a portent. It is well recorded and of peculiar interest.

- New Zealand Herald, 24 July 1926. * captandum: 'a specious argument "for capturing" the gullibility of the naive among the listeners"

Here is what the New York Times' reviewer said of Rhapsody in Blue the day after its premiere, performed by Gershwin at the piano, with Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra on 12 February 1924:

This composition shows extraordinary talent, as it shows a young composer with aims that go far beyond those of his ilk, struggling with a form of which he is far from being master ... His first theme ... is no mere dance-tune ... it is an idea, or several ideas, correlated and combined in varying and contrasting rhythms that immediately intrigue the listener. The second theme is more after the manner of some of Mr Gershwin's colleagues. Tuttis are too long, cadenzas are too long, the peroration at the end loses a large measure of the wildness and magnificence it could easily have had if it were more broadly prepared, and, for all that, the audience was stirred and many a hardened concertgoer excited with the sensation of a new talent finding its voice ... There was tumultuous applause for Gershwin's composition. [the edits are Wikipedia's]

Right-click to hear Gershwin performing it with an orchestra or, for better audio, on a piano roll. Above right: an advertisement for Whiteman's records from the New Zealand Herald in September 1928.

 

Village person

Legendary journalist Nat Hentoff has been sacked by the Village Voice after 50 years. He doesn't seem bothered; he'll keep on writing. "See you somewhere else," he says. Hentoff is 83.

For decades Hentoff's writing has concentrated on his passion for civil rights and the freedom of speech. But he first became known as a music journalist in the 1950s. When I started reading about rock'n'roll, there were hardly any books in the libraries, just Hunter Davies' book on the Beatles, Nik Cohn's Awopbopaloobop (one of the first pop histories, written in six weeks in 1969 and still brilliant). But there were plenty of books on jazz and blues, and many of them had Hentoff's name on them. Oral histories, straight reportage: Hentoff's music writing was about the musicians themselves, rather than what went on in the listener's head. He sat in on sessions by Ellington, Armstrong, Mingus and Davis. Later, he wrote the liner notes for Bob Dylan's first albums, and conducted the myth-making 1966 Playboy interview with him ("A candid conversation with the iconoclastic idol of the folk-rock set").

Hentoff approached his advocacy journalism with courage and an intellectual rigour; he has never been afraid to challenge the left as well as the right, and to take unfashionable positions. He doesn't overburden his music writing with the cerebal analysis of his political work, but the connection is the concern for humanity that comes through both. You don't always get that in music writing.

The Voice at least did the right thing by not just showing him the door with a security guard, struggling with cardboard boxes. (Looking at his desk in the above NY Times pic, I'm pleased to see that it is messier than mine at its worst.) He got the chance to write a gracious farewell column, and the paper printed a lengthy selection of his "greatest hits". Voice colleague Alan Barra penned a tribute, "50 Years of Pissing People Off." As Hentoff himself says, "I'll be putting on my skunk suit at other garden parties, now that I've been excessed from the Voice."

The Voice has a long, distinguished and disreputable history, which Louis Menand details - in a flat-footed kind of way - in the January 5 New Yorker (not on-line). He doesn't concentrate too much on the present but - like so many other inkies - the Voice is in trouble. However pointing the finger at the internet as the sole cause is just publishers shifting the blame; in case after case, proprietors have bought venerable titles and saddled them with debt. They saw golden geese, bought them, then killed them. Marc Cooper's lengthy report behind-the-scenes at the LA Weekly - a recent stable mate of the Voice - indicates some of the problems. At the Voice there has been a revolving door for several years, with long serving staffers either sacked or walking. The magazine survived Rupert Murdoch's ownership, but perhaps won't survive its purchase by New Times Media (which promptly changed its name to Village Voice Media: it liked the cachet of the name, if not the paper). Almost three years ago the New York Observer wrote:

As the dissident Voice staff tells it, the new management is a bunch of out-of-town bean counters bent on dismantling a precious 50-year-old journalistic institution. The new management, in turn, depicts the paper as a haven for thumb-suckers, with a staff so self-satisfied that it refuses to stop writing left-leaning commentary and go out and do some reporting.

The Voice isn't without its faults: its partisanship can be as wrong-headed as the New York Post's, just from the other side. But its influence has been enormous. It created the template for a feisty, useful "city mag" now seen in every city. Its arts criticism could be among the best anywhere, and some of the worst: pretentious and incoherent. Its "Press Clippings" column has been widely copied, as has former music editor Robert Christgau's long-running "Consumer Guide" and his annual critics' poll. The Voice's "Rock Music Quarterly" is the father of the (London) Observer's excellent Observer Music Monthly.

Although Menand concentrates on the Voice's far-distant past - its 1950s beginnings with Norman Mailer and cartoonist Jules Feiffer - in his stolid way, he summed up the issues:

Of course, the paper will share the fate of every other print medium in the digital age, whatever fate that is. Still, more than other magazines and newspapers, the Voice was doing what the Internet does now long before there was an Internet. The Voice was the blogosphere - whose motto might be "Every man his own Norman Mailer" - and Craigslist fifty years before their time. The Voice also helped to create the romance of the journalistic vocation by making journalism seem a calling, a means of self-expression, a creative medium. It opened up an insecure and defensively self-important profession. Until its own success made it irresistible to buyers who imagined that they could do better with a business plan than its founders had done from desperation and instinct, it had the courage to live by its wits.

Talking Blues

1. New Zild Spoke Here

The Dominion Post's official curmudgeon Karl Du Fresne recently wrote an impassioned post about the decline of the New Zealand accent. Apparently it is happening very quickly - too fast - and being driven mostly by young women. A few years ago TVNZ made one of those cheap, quickie compilation programmes looking at "The 80s". The most surprising thing about it was the over-elocuted way of speaking used by our public broadcasters such a short time ago. They sounded like aliens from another planet, their speech completely at odds with the population at the time. Much of what Du Fresne says is hard to argue with - TV sports broadcasters in particular make me grimace - but I have a problem with the phrase "misguided egalitarianism". I think I prefer that to the spurious elitism conveyed by those of a previous generation, often from the so-called "better schools". As Du Fresne and I both attended the same Dickensian asylum, 10 years apart, there is no class struggle in my comments. But the argument that broadcasters should reflect their community has been kicked around for a while, as this 1954 piece from Truth shows. It was written just after the first QE2 roadshow; obviously there weren't too many Irish accents on air back then.

This last comment [Truth continues] is usually based upon the choice of YA announcers' accents (all emphatically, but not always authentic, BBC). The BBC is a well-regarded institution in New Zealand and, as it has already demonstrated most convincingly during the Coronation, it records and describes British national spectacles most convincingly.
     Critics of NBS announcing accents want to know why more typically New Zealand voices cannot be used when the setting of the spectacle is in New Zealand. The typical New Zealand voice - if there is such a thing - is most definitely not that of most YA announcers.
     If the pronounced New Zealand accent does not come well over the air, there are many varieties of it that do.
     Another criticism is that too many ecstatic adjective were used by some of the NBS announcers. There is no doubt whatever about the enthusiasm of New Zealand crowds and their admiration for her Majesty and the Duke.
     Critics think that fewer adjectives and a more factual description of the scenes of enthusiasm would have emphasised this point instead of conveying a faint suggestion of being forced and overdone.
     For instance, it is argued, the best way to demonstrate the enthusiasm of a crowd is not merely to keep on repeating that it is enthusiastic in tones of mounting frenzy, but to describe some of the examples immediately in front of the observer.
     This is a recognised BBC technique and the NBS could copy this, possibly with more effect than by copying the BBC accent.
     But, on the whole, the consensus of opinion is that the NBS is doing well, if according to an orthodox pattern.

2. Having a blow

A three-day jazz festival in Wellington next March offers a very approachable but credible line-up, with recent stars the Brad Mehldau Quartet and the acclaimed 14-piece Mingus Big Band from New York, along with bluesmen Otis Taylor and Eric Bibb, vibraphonist Roy Ayers, and some chap called Tomasz Stanko, who is known as the Polish Miles Davis.
     It seemed odd that they are billing this as Wellington's inaugural jazz festival, after the very successful 11-year run of the Wellington International Jazz Festival (I can understand they are unaware of the groundbreaking 1950s jazz festivals). What's in a word? Meanwhile, this crossed my desk, from Wellington's Evening Post in 1966:

The wail of a sad blue note would be the true Wellington jazzman's reply to thoughts on the tenor of the trade here today.
     The city's sound of '66 is the roaring whang of the hirsute breed in their Carnaby-offshoot clothing. Gear that's fab, mod, and the electronic oomph hold domination of the scene.
     Jazz, or what there is of it, has been driven off Main Street. It has slipped itself into the coffee-and-cream costume for the candle-lit environs of the wine and dine, where white-cloaked waiters hover in the background ...
     True jazz, then, in the Capital is currently down. But it's not out. It will come again. This is the way it has always been, for Wellington jazz is one long chapter of rise and decline.

Singing! Shooting! Hypnotism!

1. Anzac Country

Tex Morton had more lives than a cat, and was about as cunning. You couldn't make it up: the godfather of country music in New Zealand and Australia was also a sharp-shooter and hypnotist, and would combine all three skills in his stage shows. Born Robert Lane in Nelson, he wandered the backroads of New Zealand in the early 1930s - finding his name on the side of a shed in Waihi - before shifting to Australia. He became a hobo and busker who reached Darwin before getting in trouble with the law. During his decade in the US, he befriended Errol Flynn and Gene Autry, went on tour with Hank Williams and got a PhD (possibly mail-order). Gordon Spittle has been researching the life of Tex for years, and has just published the results in The Tex Morton Songbook. It's actually more biography than songbook, with splendid archive photos that capture - along with the wry, colourful text - what a rich life Morton led. You can read the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography entry on Morton, and order The Tex Morton Songbook here. While there grab a copy of Spittle's 1997 book Counting the Beat: the stories behind New Zealand's most loved popular songs, going from 'On the Ball' all the way to the Muttonbirds. It even includes the chord charts. It's one of the best written and useful books on New Zealand music.

2. Paeroa's other export

A friend wrote this week to tell me of the death in May of Lew Campbell, one of New Zealand's most respected jazz musicians. A trumpeter and pianist, he was the kind of unsung hero that remained beneath the radar, probably because he was based in Sydney since the early 1960s. Campbell was one of three Maori brothers from Paeroa who were regarded with awe by their peers and audiences. Phil, the oldest, was regarded as the finest jazz trumpeter we ever produced, and George, a double-bass player, is probably best known for his part in the famous 'Geddes the Dentist' advert. Both George and Lew played behind Dizzy Gillespie when he came to New Zealand in the early 1960s, not a happy experience as there were no real rehearsals and no charts. All three Campbells were in the band of the Kiwi Concert Party, a stellar outfit that entertained the frontline troops in World War II, but tragically Phil was killed by a German shell in Italy towards the end of the war. Afterwards, Lew played in and wrote arrangements for radio bands, on tour with international visitors and in cabarets; he was briefly in the NZSO and spent more than two decades teaching at the Sydney Conservatorium. George and Lew Campbell were profiled, along with other 1950s Maori musicians in Auckland, in an evocative piece by John Berry in the January 1959 Te Ao Hou. (This photo is from there; every issue of Te Ao Hou has been put on-line by the National Library).

3. Bible basher

Auckland, 1 October - MP George Hawkins has a bruised hand after fending off a large Bible which was hurled at him by a man in the audience at a church-run election meeting on Sunday night. The incident shocked about 160 people at the meet-the-candidates event organised by Manurewa Baptist Church. A local man in his 60s was quickly wrestled off the stage by two church members, who escorted him outside ... Mr Hawkins said his assailant's Bible was an 1860s edition and weighed 5kg.

Reading the above story today I couldn't help think of Woody Allen's routine "Bullet in my breast pocket" from his mid-1960s album Woody Allen: Standup Comic. The whole album is on YouTube, in several chunks. Or you can read the text of each piece on-line. In its entirety, "Bullet in my breast pocket" goes:

Years ago, my mother gave me a bullet...a bullet, and I put it in my breast pocket. Two years after that, I was walking down the street, when a berserk evangelist heaved a Gideon bible out a hotel room window, hitting me in the chest. That Bible would have gone through my heart if it wasn't for the bullet.

4. Subterranean blues

This week between 60 and 70 jobs were cut from the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age, many of them sub-editors due to the new fashion for out-sourcing. Recently Evolving Newsroom's Julie Starr linked to a "survival guide for sub-editors," originally in the Telegraph. It's full of smart ideas of how to keep the role relevant and your job necessary in the e-news era. Coincidentally a well-known US daily comic strip is dealing with this issue right now, and the lost, betrayed look of the senior journalist made redundant while banalities bombard him is very believable. You can subscribe to this and many other daily comic-strips through your email using the free ArcaMax service; it comes in handy when your local paper doesn't carry a personal favourite. Speaking of beleaguered subs, the punch-drunk look of these subs down in the bunker hiding from Giles Coren also rings true.

5. Grease and oil

Who would have thought: Sha Na Na re-wrote history. I hadn't thought about the late-60s doo-wop parodists for, oh, several decades until a certain broadcaster turned up talking sport with his mouth open. Then a friend sent me this recent think-piece from the Columbia University alumnae mag: "Sha Na Na and the Invention of the Fifties". The group were students from Columbia who just happened to get their act together in time for the Woodstock festival. But wait, there's more: Sha Na Na were actually "meta-historians, theoreticians of cultural history itself". Who would have thought? (Certainly it took the pointy-headed ex-Sha Na Na member who wrote the essay by surprise.) Before them, it was referred to as "the haunted 50s", all McCarthyism and grey-flannel-suits. After them, American Graffiti and Happy Days. Eric Hobsbawm named the concept "the invention of tradition" - it says here - and apparently the Scottish kilt was invented by a fellow who just wanted to sell tartans, and Sir Walter Scott was his ad-man. Next thing they'll be telling me Santa Claus was invented by Coca-Cola.

Bird Brain

There are music fans, and there are music fans. There are some who, when you see them coming, you cross the street. The latest New Yorker has an extraordinary profile of a compulsive jazz broadcaster.

It’s written by the editor, David Remnick, who is so prolific he makes me want to have a lie-down. Besides editing the actual magazine – brilliantly – Remnick is quite capable of knocking out definitive pieces on Russia since glasnost, or the history of Israel, or a book on Muhammad Ali.

In the May 19 issue he profiles Phil Schaap, who is now 57 but has been a jazz aficionado since he was just out of naps. He shares his love for the form on radio:

Every weekday for the past 27 years, a long-in-the-tooth history major named Phil Schaap has hosted a morning program on WKCR, Columbia University’s radio station, called Bird Flight, which places a degree of attention on the music of the bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker that is so obsessive, so ardent and detailed, that Schaap frequently sounds like a mad Talmudic scholar who has decided that the laws of humankind reside not in the ancient Babylonian tractates but in alternate takes of ‘Moose the Mooche’ and ‘Swedish Schnapps’.

I had to keep re-checking that opening clause. Every weekday, just on Charlie Parker? Once a week, surely. No. Every weekday: that’s over 9000 hours of Parker. And this is at breakfast time; the programme is supposed to start at 8.20am and finish at 9.40am, but he always keeps the next DJ waiting. Schaap has information he wants to share. As Remnick continues:

… through his live soliloquies and his illustrative recordings, commercial and bootlegged, [Schaap] has provided an invaluable service to a dwindling art form: in the capital of jazz, he is its most passionate and voluble fan. He is … a master of history, hierarchies, personalities, anecdote, relics, dates, and events; but he is also a guardian, for, unlike baseball, jazz and the musicians who play it are endangered. Jazz today is responsible for only around three percent of music sales in the United States, and what even that small slice contains is highly questionable. Among the current top sellers on Amazon in the jazz category are easy-listening acts like Kenny G and Michael Bublé.

To his critics, Remnick admits, Schaap can be irritating and extreme. This is a man who compiles 10-CD boxsets and includes everything, even the sounds the stage crew make while shifting the chairs between songs. The great jazz critic Gary Giddins, formerly with the Village Voice, called Schapp “that most obsessive of anal obsessives”.

Schaap has one of those phenomenal memories that can seem pointless. As a child, he could name all the presidents of the US, in order. This was before he even attended school. “The precocious obsessive is a familiar high-school type, particularly among boys,” writes Remnick, “but the object of Schaap’s obsession was a peculiar one among his classmates. ‘The lonely days were adolescence,’ he admitted. ‘My peer group thought I was out of my mind.’ ”

But here is the difference: at the same freakishly young age Schaap was beginning to befriend the legendary musicians of jazz, and bring them home to meet his bohemian, academic parents. He knew their careers better than they did. Sun Ra once “kidnapped” him before Ra had to give a speech. He wanted Schaap to fill in the details of what Ra had done in his existence on Earth (as opposed to his life on Saturn).

I won’t give it all away. It has a lovely ending, and a link to some weirdly compelling audio of Schaap’s show.

(New Yorker illustration above by Robert Risko: Phil Schaap with, clockwise from bottom, Dizzy Gillespie, Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, and Billie Holiday.)