On the Beat

Back in September, I went across to Glasgow for the first time in over a year. It was "Doors Open" day (conveniently, they hold Doors Open days on different weekends for Glasgow and Edinburgh - a lot of people visit both cities, I think).

A friend had booked several tickets for the Tennents' Wellpark Brewery, and a group of us went across for it.

But we started off - after we'd left the first bar we visited, of course - at Barrowland. Or Barrowlands. Officially the former, but everybody adds an "S". Barrowlands is a dancehall, which nowadays means it's a rock venue. Possibly the most famous venue in Scotland. It is a standing - dancing, even - venue; a London equivalent might be the T&C, the Lyceum, or the Hammersmith Palais.

I have been several times - though not recently. I've seen Elvis Costello there, PJ Harvey, Tricky, and Portishead; maybe more. I'll be back there to see the Waterboys next month.

It is set in the east end of Glasgow, and houses "the Barras" market underneath the dancehall. It isn't a salubrious area. When I mentioned to (a Glaswegian friend) that I'd be going to Barrowlands in December, he told me not to take my car because it might not make it through the night... He is of course exaggerating. It is perfectly safe. As long as it's green.

Anyhow, Barrowlands is the major Scottish rock venue, and has been for decades. A place of legend.

We wandered around for Doors Open. It was a bit odd, frankly, being there and there not being any music. But I got to go backstage. Where I saw the stars.

The dressing rooms are decorated with stars. A lot of stars take the stars off the wall, which is why there are blank patches of plaster.

A little further east is the Wellpark Brewery, a large site near the Necropolis (itself a great place to visit) and cathedral. Wellpark is brewing on a truly industrial scale. It is huge. Vast tanks hold hundreds of thousands of gallons of beers; towering hoppers contains hundreds of tons of grain. During the week, it runs around the clock, with downtime at the weekend for repairs and maintenance. The whole site is computerised, and fewer than 100 people are needed to run it.

It was a fascinating tour.

The tour ended in their sampling room. Free beer. Whoo hoo! Except that frankly the beer was tasteless. I don't wish to sound ungrateful - it was a great tour, a fascinating place - but I don't like the beer they make. We left to have supper (at another brewery) without finishing our pints.

I am working on a new project for a jazz promoter - project managing some stuff around their website.

As clients are wont to, they have change the spec of what they want me to do.

So basically it sounds like I'm about to become a record producer.

Nice.

My last night of the Proms came a few days earlier than the last night of the Proms. I went to several Proms this year, and listened to several more on wonderful Radio3. Many years ago, I actually used to prom – when I was at school and an undergraduate (and when I was much less inclined to listen to orchestral music than I now am), I prommed a few times in the arena; later, when I was first working in London, I used to prom in the balcony, where it was possible to sit on the floor.

But for several years when I have been to the Proms, I have sat in the circle. The seats generally have a good view, and many times this year I was lucky enough to have empty seats beside me, which meant I didn’t feel as cramped as I otherwise might. One of the potential benefits of going by myself!

I made it to eleven proms this year, and heard some excellent music; there were several surprises, and a few disappointments.

The performance I most enjoyed was, by a slender margin, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s rendition of Mahler’s Symphony No 3. I knew I liked Mahler, and I was lucky in that there were several Mahler symphonies in this year’s Proms – I think they had the whole cycle, in celebration of the 150th anniversary of his birth and the centenary of his death. The BBC SSO Prom had just one piece, the Mahler, and it benefited from this focus. It was glorious and majestic; the orchestra and its conductor, Donald Runnicles, created marvellous music. I thought it was brilliant.

A very close second was the Australian Youth Orchestra, one of the surprises of season for me. I chose the Proms I want to go to on the basis of the music being played, rather than the orchestra, and when booking I hadn’t noticed that it was a youth orchestra playing Shostakovich’s Symphony No 10. Others weren’t so unobservant: the Royal Albert Hall was only half full. Despite their youth, the orchestra didn’t lack maturity: their performance, under Mark Elder, was excellent – really very impressive. They opened with a premiere, which I was particularly surprised I enjoyed - Brett Dean’s Amphitheatre. Whilst I am really very pleased the Proms and the BBC supports new work, it is not often that I enjoy it. I thought this piece was lovely – it would bear listening to again. But it was the Shostakovich which really impressed. It made me think that the music was in good hands if players such as these were keeping it alive.

Shostakovich was another of the Proms’ themes for me:: I saw three of his symphonies (including the No 10). The BBC SO gave a fine performance of his famous Symphony No 5. This was one of the pieces I liked when I was first getting to grips with classical music, after hearing a Shostakovich suite at a Prom in the 1980s (I bought a CD of the suite, which also featured Symphony No 5), so I know it well. I really enjoyed the BBC SO’s performance. They opened with Arvo Part’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, immediately followed by Britten’s Four Sea Interludes, both of which I love. I didn’t warm to Huw Watkin’s Violin Concerto which they premiered – I found it squeaky and jerky, and I would happily have sat that one out in the bar…

The other Shostakovich I heard was Symphony No 7, “Leningrad”. I think this is a brilliant piece of music, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales gave a very good performance under Thierry Fischer. It was full of dynamics, the percussion working really hard. The first movement features a lot of snare drum work, a crescendo of tapping, and this started barely audibly, a slender tapping, and built and built and built as the rest of the orchestra came in until it thunder to a climax. It was only broken when, early on, the gentle snare was joined by someone’s mobile phone going off. There is a reason they ask you to switch your phone off, you know…

I saw more music by Part, too. The Proms likes anniversaries – this year was Part’s 75th birthday, and they premiered his Symphony No 4. I enjoyed this premiere a lot! I like Part, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. Part was in the audience, too, and was given a truly rousing reception – it made it a very special event. I think he was being applauded for his lifetime work as much as the premiere, but it was good to see him honoured. He looked humbled by the crowd’s adoration, too.

I saw two Bruckner symphonies – another youth orchestra, the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, playing No 9, and the BBC SO playing No 8. The No 9 (confusingly before the No 8 in the programme) was very good. This time, the youths got a good audience, and the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester acquitted themselves well. They played some Mahler, too – some lieder (not a great fan…) – and so did the BBC SO, who opened with the prelude to act 3 of Lohengrin. Their premiere of Tansy Davies’ Wild Card I could have done without, but I thought their performance of Bruckner Symphony No 8 was excellent – the brass sounded really powerful, a glorious sound – a fitting end to my Proms’ season!

The major disappointment for me was the Orchestra for World Peace under Valery Gergiev playing two Mahler symphonies – No 4 and No 5. After the marvellous No 3 from BBC SSO, the No 4 seemed insipid, and No 5, which I like, little better. I had expected great things from Gergiev and an orchestra comprising the best musicians (allegedly), but I would have preferred the youth of Australia or Europe, I think.

Back in – I think – November, Andrew Dubber decided to start a new project. He wanted to twin towns – and make a mixtape, one side for each town.

Recently moved south, I asked for Edinburgh – twinned with Dunedin (a city in New Zealand, settled, I believe, by immigrants from Edinburgh who named their new home after the Scots for their old one).

Andrew’s tape arrived in February; but in between, I had moved flats; and I hadn’t set up my cassette player for my hifi (nor, I should point out, my CD player or record player – just my ipod and the radio, for now).

So I haven’t played Andrew’s tape, which I felt very bad about: he had gone to the trouble of making it, and I hadn’t listened to it.

Until today. I’m visiting friends in the country, and, knowing they had a hifi with cassette player, I brought the tape along.

It is a great piece of music programming. There is an art to making a mixtape – a dying art (viz my lack of cassette player). You can create playlists to share on Spotify or last.fm, but somehow that doesn’t feel the same. I used to make a lot of mixtapes – mostly but not exclusively for myself. Before we had CDs – yes, there was a time (and there’ll be kids growing up who will know neither cassettes nor CDs…) – cassettes were the most transportable form of music. We’d all make cassettes of party music, and fight over whose tape would provide the dance music (we didn’t have DJs back then, either!).

When I first got a car, I had a portable cassette player which would sit on the front seat. Road music got added to the mix.

And making a mixtape was part of the wooing process – a mating ritual, sharing something with a prospective mate.

Online playlists don’t quite do it.

Andrew’s Edinburgh/Dunedin tape is great. A lot of thought has gone into the programming – the order of the tracks. A range of genres from Tom Waits to the Fall via a range of Scottish bands and Scottish jazz on the Edinburgh side. I don’t quite get all the connections, but most I can see the link to Edinburgh. (The Blue Nile might not agree…)

The Dunedin side is full of artists unknown to me. I presume they are largely from New Zealand, though they don’t include any of the New Zealand bands I know (and – I’m feeling smug here – he missed a trick: Edinburgh drummer John Rae now lives in New Zealand, apparently).

It is great fun: not random, but not in my control or experience. There is a story within the music and the choices. And I get to hear new things!

And it makes me think I really must get by cassette player out of the loft and explore all those old cassettes I made twenty five years ago…

ETA: Andrew sent me an email saying "I think yours was one of the easiest tapes for me to compile though - because of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunedin_Sound"

The track listing for the Dunedin side was...

1. Pink Frost - The Chills
2. Husband House (?) - Sneaky Feelings
3. Little Things - Trinity Roots
4. Block of Wood - The Bats
5. Mary Tyler Moore - Able Tasmans
6. Touch Me - Superette
7. Nova Scotia - The Stereo Bus
8. My Electric Husband - Bachelorette
9. Raukatauri - SJD
10. I Will Not Let You Down - Don McGlashan (?)

I was looking for the Bunnymen's Over the Wall to share with someone on www.last.fm - but they don't have a playable version.

Instead I found this video from 1983 on YouTube to share with all of you...



And whilst I'm at, here's a version of Do It Clean...

I have spent much of the day listening to old albums, courtesy of the internet. I went to Amazon to download a couple of tracks – which I couldn’t. I was after a tune by Prince with the enigmatic title “It” – on the Sing O’ The Times album (a great single album; pity he made it a double!). Instead, I looked for it on Last.fm (not available to listen) and so I went to Spotify.

Where of course I listened to it. It is wonderful – a very sparse sound, mostly just a drum beat with some moody twiddly bits in the background. I can’t think when I last heard It – not for fifteen years, I would guess. It is one of the best tracks on Sign O’ The Times – It, (the ungrammatical) If I Was Your Girlfriend (and, yay! the unexpurgated version) and the title track make a brilliant trio of songs, and I listened to them all.
( Read more... )

I wrote the other day about how my iPod was obsessing about John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, and yesterday I had a text from a friend who I think was listening – not hearing, because I know I’ve played it to her before, but listening - to A Love Supreme for the first time, and she was bowled over by it.

It is music that demands listening to.

This got me thinking about what it is in the music that I – and many others - find so compelling.

There is something about Coltrane. I remember an article in The Wire when it was still a jazz magazine. It was about Coltrane on, I think, the twentieth anniversary of his death (which means it is more than twenty years ago now) (actually, I got that wrong – I think it must have been April 1991…). The article – by Richard Cook, I think – started with words that went a bit like this…

There are crazy jazz fans out there for whom John Coltrane is a kind of messiah, a god-like figure to be worshiped with awe. Thing is, they are right…

(If anyone has a copy of this article – and if you do, you’ll know the one I mean – I’d love to see it. Here’s looking at you, bro’…)

Coltrane really does inspire that kind of devotion. ( Read more... )

The shuffle on my iPod is determined to make me listen to Coltrane. In 105 tracks, it has thrown up four tracks from A Love Supreme (live and studio recordings), plus Ascension, something off Blue Trane and something unlistenable from the Olatunji Concert. (And this is on top of me playing Transition on CD on Friday night.)

But then, it also seems to have discovered an inordinate fondness for the sitar, selecting two tracks from Indo-Jazz Fusions as well as a track heavily featuring sitar by Courtney Pine.

I have no idea what it means, but it does seem to get its way.

Edit: ...and just for good measure, it is now playing Alice Coltrane, too!

I have been playing jazz on the iPod through the hifi.

I just recognised a tune from the first note: a cymbal crash. I heard the sound and started singing (well, I call it singing…) the theme as it came in.

From that simple sound, I knew the tune and all its parts – the tempo, mostly – and knew all the rest.

It was of course a tune I knew well, and particularly like: Spiritual, by John Coltrane, from the Afro Blue Impressions album (which you can listen to for free on Last.fm: all of it. If you don’t know it, it is a brilliant album, full of exciting, life-affirming music. Go listen!)

I am pretty good at recognising artists from tunes, and often early on into a tune: a couple of notes in to what is playing now I knew it was Colin Steele – a trumpeter.

But I am still surprised that I recognised Spiritual from the first cymbal beat.

My last partner used to quiz me repeatedly on how I recognised pieces of music. I could never say; it annoyed the hell out of her. How do I know Coltrane when I hear him? How do I know that the saxophonist I’m listening to now is Andy Sheppard? (The really interesting thing is that I have just realised it is Andy Sheppard; but it is not an Andy Sheppard CD, which I had thought it was – it is a Gil Evans’ big band CD.)

Part of it is down to recognising the tune; a lot of it is down to recognising the style - but I don’t know how I recognise a musicians’ style: I know it’s Sheppard, but I can’t say why. Yesterday, shuffle threw up a piano trio piece, and I knew the bassist was Charlie Mingus. But I couldn’t say how I knew. Miles stands out on trumpet.

Part of it is in the music, too. I have little early jazz, so it is either going to be Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington – easy to tell apart. Small group 1940s jazz – either Lester Young (Count Basie) or Ellington again. The main practitioners of bebop are pretty easy to identify, too. Jazzrock? I have only a handful of jazzrock CDs, and they are ok to tell apart.

I suppose I should be good at recognising drummers, anyway. Art Blakey is a dead giveaway – something in the way he did his fills: there is something instantly recognisable about Blakey. Elvin Jones – the drummer most associated with Coltrane – had a unique style, too.

But I am still surprised to identify him off a single cymbal beat.

The human brain is really rather remarkable.