At The Top

In a busy week I've struggled for time to read, outside of the reading required to do the job, but I have managed to get close to finishing David Hare's play The Absence of War. I'm developing quite a taste for his work. This one's a little bit of its time, being first performed in 1993 - about attempts by the Labour Party to win an election, which, being of its time, fail. But I think it still has resonance in its exploration of the sacrifices that need to be made to function politically. It's something of a thrill to feel you've got the inside version of what its like at the top. If it's like this, and the play rings true, then I'm glad I'm not there. But, then, I've always known that.

Kind Of Great

So why are books about jazz pound for pound superior to their rock brethren? Better writers, who are better informed, with a better sense of audience? A better subject to write about? The advantage of a distancing in time enabling more definitive judgments to be made? I think it's a little of all the above. I think jazz is inherently a better subject because it's more clearly defined than rock, with a more obvious, and possibly more interesting, cultural history. Rock is amorphous, lacking in definition, leading to a nagging sense of uncertainty regarding its authenticity. Jazz slips easily into the authentic, particularly in the modern era, because you wouldn't make it if you weren't. Its gravitas is inherent.

And gravitas is what Ashley Kahn's Kind of Blue: The Making Of The Miles Davis Masterpiece has in bucketfuls. I don't mean it’s a heavy, pretentious work. Quite the opposite. It's highly readable, its enthusiasm and desire to communicate that enthusiasm as clearly as possible making it so. There's a lot of extremely informative musicological analysis which is so well done that even a non-musician like myself can end up feeling he understands what modal jazz is, how the musicians involved both created and approached it and why it was a breakthrough. The audience it has been written for is not simply the numerous fans of the album but an audience of potential fans - and with music as accessible as this that's practically anyone with ears.

It's also a pleasant book to handle, with brilliant black and white pictures throughout. (Why are jazzers more photogenic than rockers?) I've already been listening to Kind Of Blue with the book in my hands, reading along to the music. That sounds a bit silly, after all, isn't it enough to let the music speak? Well all I can say is that I was able to hear tracks I thought I knew very well in a new, and better, way. Wonderful stuff.

And, talking of wonders, I've just been on the phone to Mum who felt the earthquake last night in England, lived to tell the tale, and won a hundred and ten quid at bingo on Sunday and another thirty big ones on Tuesday. Not a bad haul for two nights' work

Transports of Delight

Normally I'm wary of naming names, but backed into a corner, with a gun at my head and my assailant demanding my nomination for the greatest singer of the twentieth century (female) I'd say Ella Fitzgerald. In fact, I'd say Ella under pretty much any circumstances, it just seems so obvious to me.

I say this by way of introduction to a brief tale of background music encountered in one of the supermarkets in Parade Parade last weekend. Normally I abhor the stuff, but this time it was Ms Fitzgerald singing Every Time You Say Goodbye from her Cole Porter Songbook album. The delight of hearing a female voice working the middle range (a forgotten art in this age of keening harridans) could only be surpassed by the greater delight of hearing a female voice actually singing the melody and drawing attention to the song rather than itself.

It transported me from the skimmed milk to a better place. Would I had stayed.

Still On The Tracks

Okay, a bit more on A Simple Twist Of Fate. The strength of the book lies in its evocation of the work of the session players on Blood On The Tracks. If nothing else it makes it clear how musically gifted these guys were, and how they bought something of themselves to Dylan's work. But the problem is that the book is first and foremost about Dylan's work and it doesn't really say anything new. It's interesting to be made aware of the extraordinary trouble Dylan goes to, and causes for others, in order to create edgy, improvisational situations in the recording studio, presumably to infuse his work with a sense of spontaneity, evoking the danger and on-the-spot creativity of live performance, but anyone who's read just one or two of the better known books on the shelves prior to the publication of A Simple Twist Of Fate would be perfectly aware of this, and Paul Williams, for one, deals with this aspect of the work in more detail and with greater conviction.

Unfortunately Messers Gill & Odegard take it for granted that Blood On The Tracks is a masterpiece and give the most perfunctory treatment to dealing with its music and lyrics head-on. They do some justice to Tangled Up In Blue, but barely touch the surface of great songs like You're Going To Make Me Lonesome When You Go - possibly the best crafted lyric on the album - and they don't bother to try and convince the reader as to why they consider Lily, Rosemary And The Jack of Hearts an integral part of the song suite and, indeed, a good song at all. (I think it's awful - not even close in stature to the great story songs on Desire.) An examination of the unevenness of even Dylan's finest work never seems to strike them as a viable approach to the album since they've convinced themselves it's a 'classic' in every sense, and give a lot of tiresome critics' lists at the end of the text to 'prove' it.

Another weakly journalistic part of the book is the filling out of the historical context of the album in terms of both the musical background and international political developments. This is risibly thin. I was there and it didn't feel like that at all.

But enough of carping. Maybe in expecting more I was being unfair. But having said that, the other 'musical' book I read over the weekend, Ashley Kahn's Kind Of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece delivered in considerably more depth, and I need yet another entry to do it at least some justice, and to consider why books on jazz are generally more satisfying than those related purely to rock So more soon.

It's Only Rock 'n' Roll

Just lately I've been making use of the library at the Esplanade rather than the one at Marine Parade as the Esplanade version focuses on the performing arts so there's a good collection of plays and a wide range of lively material on music and film. On Saturday I came away with a couple of books on the making of what are now regarded as classic albums (Miles's Kind Of Blue and Dylan's Blood On The Tracks, since you ask) and they proved very readable, as evidenced by the fact that I've now read them.

Over the last fifteen years or so I've noticed an increasing amount of material in this sort of genre, not the classic albums thing, which is a fairly new development, but simply books in some sense about the world of rock music, written by reasonably well-informed, literate sort of chaps (the authors are nearly always male. Chaps rather like me, I suppose.) It's a bit odd then that, as far as I know, there's not a lot that's outstanding in this line, in terms of literary quality or musical insight. Mind you, I have to be a bit wary here as I'm not particularly well-versed in the field. But having said that I'm not aware of having particular works of great merit drawn to my attention - so I suppose they are not so thick on the ground, if they exist at all.

I say it's a bit odd since, given the sheer breadth of music on offer, from quite a span of time, and the passionate interest it naturally evokes, you'd expect something special from someone. But what you get tends, in my experience, simply to be a kind of extended journalism rarely rising above the obvious limitations of its subject.

I suppose this all sounds a bit jaundiced and maybe I can put that down to my disappointment over the book on the Dylan album, despite its readability. I'd heard of the book a few months ago and felt vaguely excited, I suppose because the concept seemed appealing and a review I read assured me that the book had been excellently researched. And so it proved to have been, but rather like a good feature article than something worthy of a full volume. That's the way I read it, I suppose, like a good feature article, worth glancing through but nothing to go back to. The tome in question: A Simple Twist of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of Blood on the Tracks by Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard.

More anon.

Boyhood

Reading a novel you know you are going to teach is always a slightly odd experience. As well as having part of yourself respond to the text there's another irritating bit of you thinking and what exactly am I going to do about this, say about this, ignore about this? And reading Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha over the last three weeks I've found yet another bit of me reacting very strongly to the text in another way. I suppose the novel comes closest of any text I've ever taught to the circumstances of my own boyhood. The time period is an almost exact match - I'd be two years senior to Patrick. The social and cultural backgrounds are, again, an almost exact match, if you were to switch Dublin with Manchester (and as far as Catholic Manchester is concerned that would not be so terribly difficult.) So I've found myself pushed into remembering a lot of stuff that went on in my life in those boyhood years, at the same time wondering if Doyle has really got it right.

I think, for the most part, he has, especially the awful innocence of those years. Paddy strikes me as trying a bit too hard to be 'hard' - I didn't feel the pressures of needing to be so in quite such an intense fashion, but there was never a question of my parents getting a divorce and there are constant suggestions in the novel that much of our hero's behaviour is connected with the conflict between his ma and da. I also suspect the power of a Catholic upbringing for most kids is a greater moderating factor on 'bad' behaviour than Doyle lets onto, but when he gets it right (which he does most of the time in the book) it's spectacularly true to the texture of things. Most of all I think he's spot on about just how intimately connected with matters of violence a childhood of that period, in those circumstances, was. I wonder if the same is true today when kids seem so protected somehow?

And onto other matters entirely: I neglected to mention in my comments yesterday on the SSO concert that they played Kelly Tang's Apocalypso, a modern piece written by a local composer. So it was a touch unfair to complain of conservative programming. But only a touch - you only need to look at the repertoire to be covered in forthcoming concerts to see what I mean. Such a pity - the SSO did a great job with the Tang piece, dramatic and cinematic as it was. Surely the local audience could be excited by music of this nature?

Guilt Trip

There are a few features of my life that make me feel more than a little bit of a hypocrite, but I've learnt to live with the guilt, as I suppose we all do. But it bites particularly deeply that, despite being someone who occasionally extols the virtues of the arts, and especially the need to keep music live, I just don't get myself to enough concerts and such events.

So I was pleased with myself today for making the effort to hear the Singapore Symphony Orchestra in concert. It was all a bit unexpected. We'd decided to go down to the Esplanade in order to use the library and, realising the SSO were playing some Schubert (the Unfinished) and Brahms (the 2nd Piano Concerto) we bought tickets. It was the first time we'd been to the main concert hall to hear an orchestral concert. The acoustic was good, but generally I felt the space was a bit cavernous. The SSO were typically smooth, occasionally heartfelt, but I wish they'd programme a bit more adventurously.

After the serious stuff we had a bite at the nearby hawker centre and then caught some free music down at the waterfront - a young local band called B Quartet, I think. Sort of alternative rock, with an excellently manic frontman who sang well with a nice falsetto. Very Radiohead. Which is by no means a bad thing.

Well at least I've done my bit for art.

Just Idoling

Noi and I enjoy watching American Idol, and have been regular viewers since the back end of Season 2, when Reuben won. I can't say I'm a massive fan of the programme in terms of the kind of mainstream music involved but I find it generally entertaining and it's good to hear live music on tv for a change. I know there's a specie of music puritan who condemns the show for its commercial nature and yucky showbiz factor, but as popular viewing goes it's generally engaging stuff and, if nothing else, you can always try to figure out what kind of medication Paula might be on. Sadly the vastly superior musically, but similarly cheesy, Rock Star seems to have lasted only for 2 seasons, but for now Idol will do for relaxation.

Anyway what I wanted to get on to was that this week a couple of contestants essayed Happy Together, a song that was a hit in the sixties for The Turtles. I couldn't help but play for Noi (in the middle of the progrmme, as part of her on-going musical education) the out and out best version ever of the song which appears in the unlikeliest of places. I imagine that all Zappa fans know of the extraordinary live version on Frank Zappa and the Mothers Live at the Filmore East, but, just in case they don't, they need to get to listen to it. It's the closing number of the night, constantly referred to earlier as the 'monster hit single with a bullet', in an appallingly salacious, and equally funny sprawling dialogue I think the band referred to as the 'groupie' routine for reasons that will be quickly apparent to any listener. When they finally perform said monster we get two minutes of soaring, ecstatic musical heaven, proof that on a good night The Mothers (any line-up) were the greatest band ever.

And this leads me to wonder: would Zappa have cut it on American Idol? I'm fairly sure that had he ever auditioned (and, of course, he wouldn't) he would have featured as one of the characters we are meant to laugh at in an audition show.

The world is a smaller place since he left us.

Over The Bridge

This morning, when I was crossing the Benjamin Sheares Bridge, around 6.20: an astonishing moon, hanging uncritically over the city. Full, white, closely distant. Someone looking for a sign might have been impressed.

This kind of thing helps one keep one's sense of proportion.

The Spice of Life

There's a little bit of the fascist in all of us. The desire that everyone should do it the same way - the way that I do it - is a human constant. I imagine that anyone who becomes a teacher has more than a small dose of the dictator about them. And that's why I'm pleased to say that I generally and genuinely do like the idea of people doing things differently. I suppose the only real idea I have about education and schools is that it would be a good thing if pupils came across teachers of a wide range of character types pushing an even wider range of ideas. The virtues of variety.

This seemingly reasonable notion appears to be so much at odds with the philosophy of pretty much every school I've ever worked in that it's quite comical. At one time I would have found this irritating, but that was the fascist in me talking. In the meantime, the fascist in me remains thrilled by a neat pile of well-organised files and a tidy classroom, which is more than a little worrying.