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Mo’ Jazzin’

February 23, 2012 //
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Apparently the average age of a Honda Jazz driver is 60-something. As if I care. They’ve got a great reputation for reliability and good fuel consumption, and they look quite nice. If I could, I’d have a 1959 Vauxhall Victor de Luxe, but they’re probably not up to Jazz standard, these days. So – I would recommend a Jazz to anyone, and I did, to Wolf. He’s just passed his driving test. I drive him (in mine) to Shoreham to the Honda dealer, and Andy Honda welcomes him warmly. ‘This is my friend, Michael,’ says Wolf, and I try to look more heterosexual, even blokey. Jeremy Clarkson is on the TV, wearing a peaked cap and his legs inexplicably taped together.

We three blokes go for a test drive in a new Jazz. This new one has lots of features that I could never imagine (or concentrate on while Andy’s going through them). But the roof cover slides back so you’re all under glass, like a 50’s vision of a space-age car, which is fun. It doesn’t have that nice upswept-curved rear window that I like so much in my Jazz though (see fig.), but then I’m a sucker for an upswept curve.

At The Snowdrop, Terry Seabrook’s trio is cookin’ (as they say). Tonight’s guest is the excellent Sam Miles. Barely into his twenties, Sam’s at the Royal Academy of Music, and he’s a terrific sax player. Sometimes he plays with Ska Toons, and we’re really not worthy. From his usual unassuming mien, he’s an explosive force of nature in his solos.

And while I’m on the subject: Wolf’s a really good pianist, (he studied at the Guildhall), and sometimes he plays keyboards with Ska Toons too, and he blows us away with his playing. Another jazzer.

Jazz? I’d recommend it.

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Mundays

February 15, 2012 //
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I’m trying to connect with Sheffieldlive.org at 8.59 on Wednesday morning to hear the first airing of Max Munday’s Mouthpiece. Son and heir promises a programme ‘Full to the wireless gills with politics, interviews and incredible music!’ and he opens with The Cat Empire’s Chariot Song, an inspiring and uplifting Melbourne ska epic about the power of music, friendship and community.

Saturday: Ruskin House, home to Croydon’s Trade Union and Labour Movement, is the setting for my dad’s 90th birthday party. Actually, it’s in the low wooden hall out the back, which is fine once it’s warmed up and we’ve got the bunting up. There’s been lots of gear coming in, as at least three Mundays and friends are determined to honour Jim by inflicting our various musics on him. Whether that’s his idea of a good time is neither here nor there. My mum had been a good pub-style pianist, and dad had (has) a lusty voice, and there’s a family tradition of showing-off, anyway. There are four generations here, from Dad and his sister Elsie through to newly-arrived baby Maddox from Shanghai, (and everyone wants to hold the smiley buddha-boy). Old friends/relatives have come from miles away, and dad is thrilled.

Due to the lack of regular bassist – his car frozen – Max is asked to dep (as if he needed asking), and brother Alan and newly-depped band launch into their brand of Americana, and I can’t resist jumping up and adding my strangled harmonies to ‘Up on Cripple Creek’. Then I stuff my face. More acts follow, each involving at least one Munday, and dad listens indulgently to the other Munday generations. Music, friendship, and community.

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One Man and his Otter (and why there should be more words for snow in English)

February 9, 2012 //
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I’ve got to be really careful with this otter – it would be so easy to drop him in the snow, bang his head on the door frame or, worse, slide on the ice and go flat-on-my-back, broken hip and ottered face…

Sweating after our band’s first set at the Snowdrop, I go outside to watch the flakes whirling down: smokers huddle, but it’s cool on my face, and beautiful, coating South Street and bringing silence to the town. There’s a good turnout, surprisingly, on this coldest night, for the pub is warm, welcoming and, well, rocking. After the gig I drive home at 10mph, snow coming straight at the windscreen.

The next morning we crunch through the streets to the Linklater Pavilion, by the river, to meet up for the Junior Film Club event, which is to culminate in a showing of Ring of Bright Water. Not as many children as we’d hoped though – a film doesn’t have the same pull as a fresh deep coating of snow. We’re meant to have a talk about otters, but our expert is snowed in, so we set off on the path through the railway land, and the children start to pelt each other, then the adults, with snowballs; but they’re on the lower path, and we’re on the upper (and can throw further) so we’re winning. Shrieking and whooping, we arrive at the fire circle: three big logs over the fire support a cauldron of hot sloe-cordial, ladelled out to us all in paper cups, with home-made Swedish cinnamon biscuits. The Junior Film Club patron is Nigel Cole, director of Made In Dagenham, and he gives a talk about film-making, and working with animals in particular. He pitches his talk just right, and the kids ask bright questions, and give thoughtful answers. Then throw more snowballs.

The film is, well, 1969, so a bit dated, brown, and sentimental (a manly tear escapes my cynical eye at one point), but I like the otter, and of course, otters have returned to Sussex after a 30-year absence. Afterwards, we’re clearing up, and I’m strangely drawn to the stuffed creature that has been glassily eyeing the audience throughout the film. I volunteer to carry it back, through the streets of Lewes, to its temporary home, above the High Street.

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Pizza Excess

February 2, 2012 //
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Judy and Lisa have been on a bread-making course, and tonight we’re going to make pizzas. And eat them. At Dixie’s house, we carefully carry in our trays of pizza-dough balls, that are more-or-less round, but nicely natural-looking, as if made by hand (which they are). They look great. Until we see the pizza dough that Giorgio has brought. It’s an unfair comparison, of course: Giorgio is Michelin-starred chef and restaurateur, Giorgio Locatelli, and his dough is beautiful: smooth, round, perfect. The big table is covered with boxes of toppings: mozzarella, artichokes, dried tomatoes, ham, sausage, mushrooms, anchovies, tuna, oil-soaked garlic cloves, basil, onions… and lovely wines.

Giorgio is showing us how to make the pizza shape, by kneading with flat hands, and fingers pressing and turning, on the big wooden butcher’s block, then spooning his smooth tomato paste on, spreading it with the ladle; then it’s away to choose the toppings. The children are drawing and writing their names in the semolina flour, then rush off to dismantle the sofa and build a stack of cushions and themselves, a living sandwich, shouting with joy until joy inevitably turns to tears.

Meanwhile, I make a not-too-misshapen base, and load it simply with artichokes, sausage, tomatoes and garlic (oh and anchovies), and Giorgio slides it into the wood-burning oven in the garden. I hover in hope. But the dough is broken and the pizza becomes a calzoni-shape on shovelling, which would be sort-of fine if it weren’t for the nuggets of raw sausage in it.

Meanwhile, pizzas are being churned out thick and fast and thin, and the crusts are soft, light yet chewy and sweet, and I’m sampling as many as I can. I take a gulp of this gorgeous red, put my glass down, put more toppings on, can’t remember where I put my glass, fill another, more topping, sample this, lost my my glass, fill another… Sofas reassembled, the adults are sitting around, and Giorgio is reminiscing about Lucien Freud, while I just try this one last slice…

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You Gotta Practice!

January 26, 2012 //
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If it’s Monday, 3Score Dance Company at the Pavilion Theatre, 10 – 1pm. Jason, dancer, choreographer and our rehearsal director, has enormous patience with us, clarity, and a good sense of humour. An hour’s warm-up and technique, then the more creative part, building on ideas, associations, memories. We’re working with a Maya Angelou poem, ‘Still I Rise’, and each of us has to interpret the words and meaning into movement. I incorporate facial expression, twists, bends… Then we partner another dancer. And we have to teach each other our moves, then partner another couple, and learn their sequences… Surprisingly, at my age, it’s not so much the body that has the problems, as the memory. It’s only too tempting to watch Jason’s fluid moves and copy them each time round, but that’s not how to do it. You have to internalise the moves, get them in your muscles.

Tuesday evening: Brighton Jazz Co-op, upstairs in the Open House. The great Mark Bassey is working us through the classic minor II-V-1 chord progression. Mark is a top jazz trombonist, but he’s passionate about teaching, too. He’s one of the best teachers I’ve come across: clear, patient, sympathetic and encouraging to the strugglers (me). I’m really ashamed to admit my lack of musical knowledge, even of my instrument, but he spends time with me in the break, filling in the blanks, with great good humour, when he could be at the bar with the others. Once again, the trick is to get this theory into your fingers – to access the flat 5th and the tri-tone substitution – without using your mind.

Two great teachers. But, as the joke says, you gotta practice.

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Charlie Sings The Blues

January 19, 2012 //
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Charles Shaar Murray, legendary music journalist, is in full flow, his reading gaining momentum, rattling along, building, unstoppable. But the content comes over loud and clear, too: how the blues is a healing force, a shared experience between performer and listener. He’s reading from his book about John Lee Hooker, Boogie Man. He’s describing the visceral power of Hooker’s grunts and moans over the stomping beat that transcends language, how hearing the bluesman’s despair touches that of the listener, connects, and uplifts, through.. the boogie! The ‘Black Dog’ whipped by a stinging guitar!

Charlie’s reading is really intense, a synthesis of content and form, and you know it’s reaching its climax… But now, an outburst of clapping from the back! One-man clapping, and a voice heckling. This is extraordinary – heckling a reading? and one that’s so gripping? All heads turn and see a smug-looking, carefully-long-haired middle-aged man, and angry voices are turned on him, not least Charlie’s. He sits there, pleased with himself – he’s broken the spell. Somehow, he remains unpunched.

Charlie recovers, finishes, goes out for a fag. When he returns, he straps on his golden National-style guitar, and hits the strings with a heavy brass slide, and you hear that classic blues sound: brass on steel on brass, slur, whine, crunch. Hunched into his leather jacket, he sings the story of cruel Staggerlee, and his love of Beer, Bourbon and Barbecues. And of the Blues.

http://www.michaelmunday.co.uk

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A Warm Wellcome

January 12, 2012 //
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In from the biting wind along Euston Road, up steps, bags searched, and into a stylish café at the Wellcome Collection. Apart from the café (‘Please relate your wi-fi usage to your intake of food and drink’ – to paraphrase the notice), here’s a bookshop, library, and permanent and temporary exhibitions. The museum aims to explore ‘ideas about the connections between medicine, life and art… The Wellcome Trust is the world’s largest independent charitable foundation funding research into human and animal health’. Great cakes, too.

Downstairs there are two exhibitions. ‘Charmed Life’ features charms and amulets from the Wellcome Collection, beautifully arranged in flowing shapes by artist Felicity Powell, and juxtaposed with her own wax artworks. From tiny wooden shoes to a nail-studded sheep’s heart, a vertebra carved with a face, animal teeth, lockets, stones, they bear witness to the significance of the object in people’s lives.

And here’s an exhibition of Mexican Miracle Paintings. If you were, say, falling to your death from a roof, or about to be shot, you might pray to the Virgen de Zapopan to save you, or to San Francisco de Asis, for instance. Then, if you survived, you would probably want to commission a small painting or ex-voto to dedicate to the Virgen or San Francisco in thanks. So here are walls full of these miraculous paintings, mostly on tin roof tiles, showing the disaster and the deliverer, and the carefully and often beautifully inscribed story.

Upstairs: the Collection – well, some of it. There are a number of prosthetic limbs, from earlier centuries, some exquisitely engineered, with independently movable joints and fingers. Here’s Disraeli’s death mask, a shrunken head, a whole mummified body from Peru, buried with ritual amulets; shelves of lovely glass flasks for various body functions; a shocking Chinese torture chair made almost entirely of edge-mounted sword blades, and Darwin’s walking canes. And this metal rhombus thing? The caption states simply: ‘Guillotine blade, French, 1792-1796’.

And what looks like a spiky jubilee clip with a small cycle clip inside? It’s a Victorian anti-masturbation device. Your Wellcome.

http://www.wellcomecollection.org

http://www.michaelmunday.co.uk

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Dancing In The Air

January 5, 2012 //
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Standing rather nervously outside the Dome, I’m waiting for Duncan to pick me up. Destination: Twineham International Airport. Well, yes, an ironic name, for when we arrive and swing open the rusty gate, and drive around the edge of a muddy field – we find a shed. In which there stands a very pretty little plane – a single-engined high-wing monoplane, cream with burgundy stripes, and chunky spats over the wheels. Duncan unlocks the wire cage gates and we push it out. I really am feeling nervous – I’ve been up with him once in another plane, but this time…

After the pre-flight check (Duncan is reassuringly thorough – he has been for the 47 years I’ve known him) – we’re tightly side-by-side in the little cabin, and we’re soon taxi-ing towards the mown grass strip, then accelerating, and the plane is so light you’re barely conscious of leaving the ground, and we’re up, climbing up over West Sussex then circling round, and it’s really exhilarating and I’m not nervous anymore. But there is only a half-inch of metal between me and 1800 feet of cold air, and a small door-catch (easily caught on your cuff I’d imagine).

I’m trying to snatch photographs and little movie clips between the wing-struts (from inside – this isn’t Flying Down To Rio) and we’re suddenly over Lewes, and – look! there’s the Council office block! – and now we can see the full shape of Chris Drury’s Heart of Reeds, the land sculpture made in the shape of a cross-section through the human heart. We follow the Ouse down towards the sea, the sun is bursting through the clouds and shining on the river, ‘like a National guitar’, to quote Paul Simon. The clouds are piled up in layers coming from the west as we fly over Newhaven and on towards Cuckmere Haven. A glimpse of the Seven Sisters and we turn inland and the meanders and ox-bow lakes are beautiful, with exquisite tiny rivulets contrasting with the wide, dead-straight channel.

The huge storm-cloud is heading towards us, and Duncan decides to put down until it blows over. He radios for a convenient airfield, and here’s one, north of the A27. The owner is also in the air and we see his plane circling too. We land, easily, dancing onto the field, and switch the engine off. I walk away, and my feet slide out from under me, and I’m flat on my back, winded, in the mud, staring at the sky…

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Gotta Dance! Got-ta Dance!

December 8, 2011 //
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Well – how did I get here? I’m auditioning – I’ve never had an audition in my life.

I’m barefoot in the Pavilion Theatre, after three weeks of limping, getting lifts & buses, not walking, foot-up etc after the man/machine mashup (id. A Perfect Day Almost) so I haven’t used this foot for a while, and now I’m about to dance. Jason, the rehearsals director, has asked us to dance our names (a request I’ve not heard before), so I’ve been working out a sequence that, well, dances my name.

So – I’ve got it just about, but now we have to integrate our name with a partner’s name. I choose Chris, and look, we both have an H in the middle. His sequence is more compact than mine (mine sprawls, typically, across about twenty feet). So we can coincide with an angular body-H. I forget the foot problem, and we rehearse our little piece together; our H is perfect each time we run through.

When we perform it, the H’s slip a little – disappointing. We’ll see…

Dance your name! Go on – dance your name!

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Ailments

December 6, 2011 //
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You’ve only got to get a small injury – no, nothing serious, really, thanks for asking – and it calls everything else in your body out on strike. At first, the new injury puts your other little aches and pains into the shade: you don’t notice your shoulder-ache, twinge in your hand, catarrh etc because you’ve got a new complaint. But after a while the foot is a dull ache, and you realise that you’ve now acquired a back-ache, and a hip- and leg-ache, because you’re not walking properly.

But you start to suspect that this was just what your major condition needed, to become full-blown: your hypochondria. Ouch, there’s another twinge – guilt. I’d go to the doctor with my portfolio of (all right, minor) ailments, and go through them, one by one. But then I would be using up at least nine people’s allotted 10 minutes (there’s a sign up saying you’ve got 10 minutes).

Perhaps I’m imagining them all: I’m so in touch with my body I can generate a twinge just by extreme ‘mindfulness’. Outside it, people are slaughtering each other with the usual enthusiasm, public services are being cut and sold so that the Markets can respect UK plc again, and the poor (and not quite poor) are getting poorer.

Ouch – where did that headache come from?

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