Philip Larkin's Jazz

During the last decades of the twentieth century Philip Larkin was a sort of unofficial poet laureate – having turned down the offer of the real post on the death of John Betjeman. What many of his admirers didn’t realise at the time was that he wrote regular reviews of jazz recordings for The Daily Telegraph for a decade between 1961 and 1971 (later published as All What Jazz) and in fact as a youth harboured aspirations to become a drummer... more >>

The Blues - an introduction

Most people imagine that 'the Blues' is a form of musical expression characterised by mournful lamentations about life's hardships or expressions of lost love . Ask any musician, and they will tell you that it's the name of a musical form, moving from the tonic to the sub-dominant fourth, then via a flattened seventh, back to the dominant. And a singer might point out that it is a four-bar 'call' or phrase that is repeated then completed by a four-bar 'answer'. Elijah Wald's strength is to show that it means all these things - and more besides. The blues also a thorough mixture of European and African American musical elements that first became popular via very politically incorrect minstrel shows in the early decades of the twentieth century... more >>

Tal Wilkenfeld - Bass Virtuoso

When it comes to electric bass I'm a big fan of Jaco Pastorius. Unfortunately, he wrecked himself with drugs and a rock & roll lifestyle, so we don't have any more. But last night I discovered his replacement and continuation. It's another case of Infant Prodigy leaves home at sixteen to follow the call of music. First the move from Australia to Los Angeles, then on to New York, playing with jazz pros at eighteen - and she's a girl. I stumbled into this phenomenal talent after watching Son House then Muddy Waters on YouTube, and then for reasons I can't explain I switched to watching Jeff Beck, who I knew had done a stint at Ronnie Scott's not long ago. Tal Wilkenfeld will knock your socks off. She really is the business. There's an astonishing maturity, fluency, and sophistication about her playing which just seems so at odds with someone who looks as if she should just be preparing for her sixteen-plus school exams. What a night. What a great discovery. Watch here.

The Worst Night of the Proms

The BBC Proms is a generally good institution. Sure, it's conservative, stuffy, and Eurocentric - especially under the recent directorship of the smug and self-congratulatory Nicholas Kenyon. But at least there are world-class orchestras and performers delivering music which is broadcast publicly which people can listen to for free,

But there's one down side to this institution - and it occurred tonight - The Last Night of the Proms.

This is an occasion which has become an excuse for:

• excruciating nationalism
• English wimsey
• patriotic self-congratulation
• musical cliche
• lower middle-class smugness
• flag-waving brainlessness
• mindless mob-emotion

These people are the concert-going equivalent of United Vs Spurs supporters, or the spectators at Nuremberg rallies. I feel sorry for the musicians, because they must surely know that all the braying morons in the Albert Hall are not the audience they want to attract.

It's difficult to explain how nauseating this spectacle is. I listen to music just about every moment of my waking life, but this cultural event is the nadir, the pits so far as the UK is concerned.

The Rest is Noise - book review

Alex Ross is the music critic for the New Yorker magazine who blogs prolifically at The Rest is Noise. And even though he doesn't have comments switched on at his site, his postings are required reading for anyone who wants to keep abreast of classical music - especially as seen from New York city. His tastes and references are amazingly eclectic and unstuffy. One minute he's analysing the latest staging of the Ring Cycle and next he's reporting on developments in contemporary rock music or a recently discovered private recording of a John Coltrane radio broadcast. This is his long-awaited first book and major oeuvre as a critic, tracing the development of twentieth century classical music from the first night of Strauss's Salome (no accent) in 1905 to John Adams's Nixon in China in 1987... Read more >>

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Online Radio - Last.fm

I fell in love last weekend - a strange thing to happen at my stage in life. And I'm still in the first flush of its impact on me. Last.fm offers an amazing cornucopia of music - almost all free. It's a site which proves the new web economics notion that the best way to sell things is to give stuff away. I put the system to a fairly severe test by typing in one of my favourite pianists - Michel Petrucciani - who is hardly a household name. But it came up immediately with a biography, pictures, details of all his CDs, video clips, and enough freely playable tracks to keep me distracted the whole of a late January afternoon. The interface offers you the chance to assemble tagged playlists, create your own radio station, and join groups. You can also remove advertising and get all sorts of extra priviledges for the ridiculously small fee of two and a half Euros a month. And whilst we're on the subject of music, I just spotted the new search facility at Musgle. This one I gave an even harder test. Find me (one of my favourite jazz tunes) Nothing Personal (which I used to think was a Joey Alexander composition, but which might be by Don Grolnick). Bam! It came up with two downloadable MP3 files instantly. Good work guys. Keep it up.

Sonny Rollins

This picture of Sonny says everything about him: funny, incredibly hip, and still going strong at seventy-eight. He's one of the few jazz musicians to regularly inject humour into his improvisations - which he does by executing unexpected key changes and making quotations from one tune whilst playing another. He also has a genius for extracting lyrical glories from the most unlikely material. Who else would think of playing Burton Lane's How Are Things in Glocca Morra or Noel Coward's Some Day I'll Find You. But he does, and like other great jazz artists, he takes them seriously, he knows the lyrics, and he plays them as if he means it. You can hear all this on what is still a standout albumn from his middle period - A Night at the Village Vanguard, or you can listen to him next week on BBC Radio 3 on Friday 23 November 2007 22:30-23:30.

Mike Gibbs in Concert

Mike Gibbs started his latest UK tour with a concert at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester tonight. It was a happy event, with a near full house, and he struck up a good rapport with the audience. His selection of material was a mixture of old favourites and new-ish compositions - though I could have done with more standards. The band was heavy on brass and light on reeds - and the only weak point in a good ensemble was a drummer who looked and played like a night-club bouncer. Highlights amongst his players were Gerard Presencer (trumpet, flugelhorn) and Bill Frissell (guitar) who although a bit folksy had the band and audience spellbound on a solo sequence in one of the slower numbers. Although Gibbs admitted to a penchant for cliche in his titles, his beautiful compositions deserve better. He really is at his best on slow, multi-layered pieces which are based on very simple chord sequences and achieve their dramatic effect via shifts of key and subtle modulations of orchestral colour - which is presumably why he has been successful in composing film music. And I noticed that no matter what the mood of the individual selections, the spirit of his native South Africa was audible throughout. It was an event I'm glad I took the trouble to attend, and my only criticism was that apart from a quite glamorous bass trombone player (Sarah Williams) who took the trouble to wear a sparkly top above her jeans, most of the musicians looked as if they had selected their clothes from their local charity shop.

A New History of Jazz

Do we really need yet another weighty 'history of jazz' in what is already a crowded field? When the author (also a bass player) has already produced excellent biographies of (among others) Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Waller, and regularly presents 'Jazz Profiles' on Radio 3, the answer must be in the affirmative. In this expanded version of his award-winning study, Alyn Shipton offers an encyclopaedic account of 'a music created mainly by black Americans in the early twentieth-century through an amalgamation of elements drawn from European-American and tribal African musics.' Throughout, he contends that up-the-river-from-New Orleans 'histories' of jazz distort and oversimplify what was a complex series of accidents, interactions, borrowings and ... Read more >>

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Media Fakes

I welcome the recent exposures related to fakery on TV. Fake phone-ins; fake quiz shows; fake documentaries. But the revelations ought to go further. As a music fan, I get fed up with 'live' performances which are nothing more than a group of people strutting in front of cameras with pre-recorded music playing in the background. The past was bad enough, with pop 'stars' such as Marc Bolan pouting to camera whilst somebody else was playing his guitar in the back room - or the ridiculous Electric Light Orchestra, three 'performers' who were actually over-dubbed session musicians. Recently, I've watched the creepy Jules Holland on his show and felt sorry for those musicians who actually do play live, pitted against nonentities who are clearly miming to 'one I made earlier'. Flush em all out, I say. Let's see what you're made of!

Actually, come to think of it, this could go further. Watch this space.

Jazz on radio - an update

After our brief honeymoon period I'm afraid my relationship with the new programme at www.theJazz.com may be coming to an end. They have introduced adverts - which is fair enough, since they have to make money sonehow. But they've also started using announcers as well, which we don't need, since the tracks currently playing are supposed to be listed on the DAB visual display. These presenters have (with the honourable exception of Mike Chadwick) one thing in common - they clearly know almost nothing about jazz. Then there's the notion that we need themed proramming according to time of day - the logic of which escapes me. And finally, if I hear crap such as Frank Sinatra singing "Fly me to the Moon" or Ella Fitzgerald grinding her way through "Mac the Knife" once more, I'll be throwing the radio through the nearest window. If this is their idea of jazz, it makes me feel like reaching for my gun. Yours sincerely, Victor Meldrew.