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David
McGuinness's diary Saturday 20 December 2003 I mentioned to a journalist the other day that the Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch was an important milestone in the history of British music, and he laughed. 'No I'm serious' - punk wasn't really about safety pins, gobbing and the pogo, it was about do-it-yourself music, and the Buzzcocks started out as do-it-yourself as it got - packing the records into the sleeves themselves, and with the cover photo being the only one of the two Polaroid snaps they had, in which none of them blinked. It's not as ludicrous as claiming, like Frank Zappa did, that one of the most radical departures of 20th century music was Brian Wilson following chord V with chord II in the Beach Boys' Little Deuce Coupe. Saturday 13 December 2003 At long last I’ve got rid of
most of the backlog of admin from recent events and I’m able to start planning
ahead to March’s projects. I
spent a few hours this week in libraries looking at the original published
material for the Kellie symphonies that we’ll be recording then. Those will
start finding their way onto my computer soon. It’s tempting to delegate this
work to someone else, but actually inputting every note onto the screen is quite
a good way to get the measure of at least one aspect of the music. Both pieces
exist in more than one contemporary keyboard arrangement too, which will be
useful for clarification of those passages where publisher Robert Bremner was
obviously working from a very messy score. I still haven’t confirmed the
venues and dates for the tour, but I’m very close to doing so – with just
less than three months to go I’d better nail those quick. On Thursday Emmanuelle
Haïm invited me across to Edinburgh to hear the last performance of the
touring Glyndebourne
Theodora. I think I’d prefer to have seen the Peter Sellars
production with its original starry cast – only Christine Rice was really in
control of the stage – but there were some wonderful things in it, and anyway
I found myself feeling immensely grateful for the chance to sit for four and a
half hours listening to Handel’s sublime music. Sitting still for five minutes
usually stretches me. Emmanuelle is a remarkable
conductor: in almost every number, you were already drawn in to its specific
emotion by the second bar. Whenever
a song started I thought ‘oh I remember this one, it’s great’.
When she conducted Poro with the SCO in the summer, there was a
memorable moment in the rehearsal when someone (no names) asked of the intro to
an aria ‘Is this forte?’, i.e. ‘Should this be loud?’ Emmanuelle
explained in lucid detail and with great enthusiasm what the aria was about, the
different feelings the singer was conveying, and why. ‘But is it forte?’
came the inevitable reply, to which Emmanuelle responded with another careful
circumlocution. ‘I’m on your side here,’ I thought. And the result of this refusal to deal with bland
technicalities is, that rather than ending up with an orchestra that just plays
loud or soft, you get an orchestra that plays music that means something.
And the Glyndebourne touring band (on modern instruments) sounded great,
and played music that moved, breathed and meant something.
An old friend from student days who I hadn’t seen for 15 years and
more, Malu Lin Swayne was leading the second violins, so I leant over the
orchestra pit in the second interval and we grinned inanely at each other for a
while – joyous. It wasn’t until I was on my way home that I remembered how in the Easter holidays I’d listened in the car to Paul McCreesh’s recent recording of Theodora all the way through, and hadn’t recognised a single note. Now what does that tell you about Mr McCreesh and his affinity for Handel? To town yesterday for a very useful meeting with Ben Twist and Catherine Murtagh about marketing for the March tour, and Ben and I drew up a job description for a marketing assistant – i.e. someone to make my life possible for the next three months. I’ve had a few bites of interest for possible candidates already. To balance out the shock of me actually attending an opera (well, an operatic production of an oratorio really, I’ve still never sat in the audience for an opera) I watched a marvellous piece of television with my daughter this morning – Dick & Dom in da Bungalow. The spirit of Tiswas lives on in this anarchic low-budget burst of exhilarating energy – watch it while you can, I laughed my socks off. Not quite such laughing matter is the King Crimson Eyes Wide Open DVD, which my son has taken a great interest in. His first comment was ‘Is this rock music?’ Me: ‘Well, it’s got two guitars, bass and drums, and it’s loud, so yes, it probably is.’ ‘Hmm, unusual.’ I bought it, because for most music I can tell pretty well from listening to it what making it looks like, but King Crimson have me flummoxed. And it’s riveting to watch: I’d always assumed that Adrian Belew used electronics to get the notes he does on the guitar, but of course he does it all with his fingers, which is astonishing. And watching Trey Gunn, I still can’t figure out which notes happen where on his Warr guitars. You have to be thankful that someone somewhere is making music like this and somehow making the numbers add up for it to pay the bills – and the next incarnation of the group will have Tony Levin in it as well. My admiration for Mr Fripp grows: if I tried to make music with a bunch of players like that, my brain would explode. And the look of serene enjoyment on his face as screamingly beautiful musical obscenity happens all around him is alone worth the price of the discs. Sunday 30 November 2003 A very nice review of SADN has appeared at BBCi. Saturday 29 November 2003 Travelling through the deluge on the train, for the second performance of Handel's Israel in Egypt with the SCO and Nicholas McGegan. Could be the Red Sea crashing down between Glasgow and Edinburgh. First things first: we've had confirmation of a live broadcast next March on Radio 3's Early Music Show, presented by none other than our friend of old, Catherine Bott. SADN got a welcoming 5 star review in the Scotsman last week, and there's been a steady stream of online CD orders after our being featured on Late Junction. Yesterday was a full day of musical encounters of one sort or another. In the morning a BBC colleague played me a tape of Julie Andrews singing coloratura on some 50s variety show, aged 12. It's some of the most technically stunning singing I have ever heard, really arresting and quite flawless. Apparently she couldn't go into opera at the time because her voice was too white, but she could clearly had no trouble doing it. If the early music movement had happened earlier she might have been one of its huge stars. But let's face it, she was better off in Hollywood: I think if I had to choose between the Handel opera revival and Mary Poppins, Mary Poppins would win hands down on pretty much every level (not withstanding Vivian Stanshall's line 'I hate each Julie Andrews film they've made, I'm just a sad old narrow-minded jade'). Listen out for the tape on Christmas Day on Radio 3, you won't forget hearing it. I just had time to dash into town and the RSAMD, to catch the end of the Palladian Ensemble's lunchtime concert, and say hello to Bill Carter. Four great musicians playing wonderfully, but I'm not sure they really sounded like a group. That's Glasgow winter rainy days for you. And thence back to Handel - playing for Nic McGegan is always fun, as he stands on the podium and prepares to be delighted, and it's our job to delight him as much as possible. He also has a valuable knack of getting what he wants from people without talking about it much, if at all. His endless stream of quick witty remarks belies the serious intentions underneath. Thanks to my general state of exhaustion, I have to confess to spending a lot of the performance trying to calculate how much of it was still to go, but I also felt free and confident enough to improvise in the general direction of Handel, rather than concentrating on playing every note strictly as notated. To the music's benefit I hope. Special mention goes to the excellent James Gilchrist for an air which had me grinning helplessly with its sheer joyous musicality - a singer of rare skill. Well, over the last couple of months I've been trying to make sense of my recent failure to enjoy what should have been good musical experiences. Some of the answers are obvious: I've been working too much; bearing financial and musical responsibilities together makes it difficult to fulfil your obligations to either; and I'm increasingly uncomfortable with playing music that I wouldn't necessarily choose to listen to. The things I've enjoyed the most recently are those when I'm not in a familiar environment: playing in a fiddle festival when I'm not really a folkie, playing the Saint-Saëns organ symphony when I'm not really an organist, playing the melodica when it's not really a musical instrument, that sort of thing. Basically I like being an amateur, in the sense of employing a skill that I'm developing, rather than one which I've mastered. For example, I can play the harpsichord now about as well as I want to, so I have little further use for it in terms of personal satisfaction, and my interest in it as an activity is definitely in decline. I mentioned this propensity to amateurism to Ursula Leveaux yesterday - she's usually a good source for unexpectedly profound rejoinders to ill-thought-out conversational gambits - and her response was 'well yes David, but you always make sure you surround yourself with consummate professionals'. Good point: please have pity on the poor sods who have to try to make music with the presence of a rank amateur in their midst (sarcasm optional). This is of course one possible function of a conductor: to be an amateur surrounded by consummate professionals. Certain early music names spring to mind. I have to admit to being a bit hung over this morning, after some nice wine and seriously good chocolate from Göttingen, at a post-performance gathering in Mr McGegan's Glasgow flat ... uh. [later, on the train home] Ursula also played me some of Karen Tweed's album with Timo Alakotila: there's a very striking tune on it, with Timo's characteristic harmonies, that made me realise that the reason I'd abandoned a piece for the quartet that I started writing last summer, was because its harmonic structure was emotionally bogus: that's not something you can say about Timo's tunes. So sometime I might have another look at it. I have no gigs at all now for nearly two months: the sense of relief is immense, and will no doubt be even nicer tomorrow. No wait a minute, I forgot I'm going to New York at the beginning of January with Chris Norman. He's promised that one will be fun though ... Wednesday 26 November 2003 Time for a bit of catching up. David G arrived on Friday and we played through a few baroque bits and pieces that we haven't played before, interrupted at one point by the CBSO on the phone asking me to play for a project with Emmanuelle Haïm - so that's why she wanted my phone number (I'm not free to do it, unfortunately). Then I packed David off to chez McGillivray for the evening. Alison was up in Glasgow for the day teaching at the RSAMD, so she joined us on the Saturday trip to Edinburgh for the Scots Fiddle Festival. We arrived there in time to catch a bit of Paul Anderson's solo set, before going to David Johnson's talk about, well, I'm not sure what it was really about, but it was pretty interesting stuff, and he was selling copies of his essential "Music and Society in Lowland Scotland in the 18th century" book. By lunchtime Lisa Milne had bought me a beer and the day was going well. A friend of David's had given us the use of a big flat with a piano at the top of Leith Walk, so with our carry-out lunch from Valvona's, we were living. David gave a masterclass in the afternoon, which included his fascinating demonstration of some of the possible degrees between silence and tone on the violin, then there was just time for a bit of further relaxation before heading off for our spot in the Open Stage night. I met Paul in the bar and we sneaked off to practise (well, for me to try to remember the chords to some of the tunes we'd played at the Edinburgh Festival in the summer). I introduced him to David, and within half an hour the two of them were on stage together playing Niel Gow's Lament on the Death of his Second Wife - and very good it was too. There was just time for two short sets and then we ran for the last train to Glasgow. So there was no time left for rehearsal, but we had a fun concert in the unexpectedly cosy surroundings of St Columba's Church. Afterwards, as we sat down at Harriet and Rob's to a sumptuous meal in good company, we put the radio on just in time to hear Fiona T playing Spring Any Day Now on Late Junction, which was a satisfying way to end a rather bizarre day.
Thursday 20 November 2003 I was lecturing at the RSAMD this morning, teaching at Glasgow University this afternoon, and practising like crazy inbetween, in preparation for David G arriving from Canada tomorrow. It serves me right for suggesting that we play a Geminiani chaconne in Monday night's concert. It starts off innocently enough, only just as bizarre as you expect any Geminiani piece to be, and then two-thirds of the way through, an obbligato harpsichord part pops up, hundreds of notes appear from nowhere, and as it's by Geminiani, few of them are quite what you would expect. I realised some time ago from playing his continuo realisations that he must have had bigger hands than mine. But by the end of the afternoon it's starting to come together, and now I'm in that strange 'all fired up and nowhere to go' mood, where you've just worked your technique up into a frenzy and don't have anyone to play to (or with). Tuesday 18 November 2003 Well, I took the plunge and re-installed Windows, so the last 24 hours have been a bit chaotic as a result. I'm gradually coming to the surface again now. Today I had a brief meeting with Philip Hobbs at Linn Records, about the completion of the Kellie CD. We're now looking at March 2004 for the orchestral recording, with a Feb 2005 release date in mind to coincide with a possible US tour and some UK dates as well. To more pressing matters (excuse the pun): just in time for our concerts and airplay next week, Marquis have run out of copies of SADN, so David is bringing the last 14 over from Canada with him on Friday. Fortunately Alison had some sent to her in Chicago a couple of weeks ago, so she's bringing those up to Glasgow from London on Friday too ... But between software maintenance, I've been sticking together all the music for next week and starting to learn the notes I don't know already. Thursday 13 November 2003 Most of this week is going past in an exhaustion-fuelled daze. On Tuesday I dropped in on the Kellie quartet rehearsal in the morning, and then called Fiona Talkington to check whether she was going to play bits of SADN on Late Junction in a couple of weeks - she answered the phone with 'I'm holding your CD in my hand'. So I wrote a quick email shot detailing the upcoming gigs with David G, and the broadcasts, and had that sent out by the end of the day. There are generally two ways to make a record. The first and preferable one is that you get some good music to happen in the room (or studio). You record this, using the technology to present it in its best possible light, and then with some judicious retakes you fix any distracting imperfections that would annoy the listener on repeated hearings. Terrific. The second way, when the music in the room is less good, is to painstakingly amass a collection of acceptable bits, with the intention of editing them together afterwards to make a complete but rather fake performance. This happens more often than you might think. And, my friends, I'm sorry to admit that this second procedure held sway yesterday at Crichton when we were recording the Kellie chamber music. There were some really wonderful moments and some great playing, but sadly the imperfect 'human element' tended to dominate. So in a sense I'm quite relieved that after this CD is completed, I have no more plans to organise recordings or performances of baroque chamber music. But given my recent musings on how good things have sounded afterwards when I've been miserable in the sessions, perhaps this is all pointless carping. I'm working up the courage to reinstall Windows on my PC. Managed to put it off for another week or so. [the next section of diary was written for the BBC's Celtic Roots website at www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/musicscotland/celticroots/on_the_road/] Sunday
9 November 2003 All
partied out, my hotel coffee machine is making me peppermint tea (having
forsworn caffeine for the duration of the trip to aid with jetlag), I've got
breakfast from the French bakery across the street, and I'm just going to slowly
pack my case, have a swim, and then head for the airport. New Orleans is so
full-on, that sometimes a bit of time in an anonymous, characterless but
efficient hotel room can be welcome. But I hope I come back again sometime. Saturday
8 November 2003 To get an affordable flight to New Orleans I needed to include a Saturday night stopover, so I had a free day today. After a couple of hours' sleep, I took the bus to the French Quarter for shopping and hanging out, buying presents for my family, watching the Mississippi Riverboat, listening to music on the street, that sort of thing. Bourbon St looks much less appealing by day, and the music was better up on Frenchmen St too! I had eyelids like lead all day, and rounded off my tourist experience with gumbo in a friendly corner cafe. Made it back to the hotel just in time to watch the spectacular lunar eclipse in a clear sky from the side of the hotel pool. Now to start catching up on a lot of lost sleep. Friday
7 November 2003 This
morning we said our fond farewells to the fine Mobilians of Alabama (apart from
all the flute players who are coming tonight of course) and hit the road, Andy
and Chris setting off early to do a radio show. The rest of us got to New
Orleans at about 12 and headed for the French Quarter. Within half an hour or
so, I'd successfully bought myself two hats in Kabuki on Royal St (I've been
looking for a hat for months), and while Jamie went off to meet a friend, the
rest of us had a very nice meal indeed in the courtyard of Bayona.
Time
wore on, with still no sign of Chris and Jamie, partly because the main highway
to the airport was closed for repairs all weekend. Meanwhile I'd found a beat-up
looking but marvellous-sounding Steinway D hiding behind the curtain on the
stage, so when Chris phoned he suggested I take a piano solo at some point. I
dusted off Nathaniel Gow's wonderful Coilsfield House, which has a
certain gospel piano character (if you have a twisted musical imagination): it's
one of the few fiddle tunes that doesn't sound stupid played on the piano.
The
frantic dashing around left our playing a bit ragged around the edges, but we
still put on a good show, At one
point between numbers Jamie turned to me and said 'you look wrecked'. I was.
Getting 2 or 3 hours sleep a night in a different time zone catches up with you
eventually, and by the time we were packed up and ready to leave, I was
completely exhausted. And the
band were absolutely fantastic, no PA system or any of that crap, just great
swing and good vibes (man), sitting in a corner of the room. The bass sax player
took such beautiful solos, you would have sworn he was playing a tenor until he
went down to the bottom octave, and all of them were astonishingly virtuosic
without any hint of showing off, or for that matter any showmanship. Just
sitting in a room playing for enjoyment. It was wonderful to see such
unassailably good music in the raw, untouched by the business of the music
business. It's
quite a place: you can walk up and down the street, pausing outside the various
bars to hear the variety of sounds coming from each. It's also very civilised,
in that they only let enough people into each bar to still allow for some room
to dance, but you can hang around and listen outside on the pavement, and still
have a good time. As our rotten luck would have it, the only bar where we could
find any food at midnight (we hadn't eaten since about 3pm) had a young but
execrably bad electric band setting up in it, so we tried not to laugh too
openly at their efforts while we ate our burgers, and then went back to Ben's
place. Life is too short for bad music. By the
time Chris got back from unloading the gear at the hotel, it was well past 1am
and I could barely stand up, so I got the keys off him to go and sit in the car
for a doze, with the intention of joining them again later, refreshed. After a
bit of a snooze I went back at about 3.15 to find the bar much quieter, and all
musicians gone. Hmm. I wandered up and down for a bit, looking into other bars
(and making it clear to one or two people that although I was here on my own in
Frenchmen St and looking to have a good time, I didn't necessary want to get
laid, thank you very much), and then went back to the car to ring Chris's mobile
and find out where they'd gone. It rang right back at me, as he'd left it in the
car. OK, so
at this point I didn't know where they were and had no way of finding out. I
didn't fancy sleeping in the car any more, in case they'd gone back to the hotel
(21 miles away at the airport), so I figured the best thing to do is go back to
the hotel myself, and they could always get a cab if they were still in town.
The only slight flaws in this plan were that I'd never driven a car in the US
before, and I didn't really know where the hotel was. But New Orleans is a great
place to develop new-found confidence, so off I set for the airport with a map
(the main highway was closed, remember) and almost immediately got lost,
periodically looking for well-lit spots away from threatening looking guys on
the street, to look at the map. Eventually after about 75 minutes of intense
exhaustion-fuelled concentration I found the airport, but couldn't find the
Radisson hotel anywhere. Picking a hotel at random, I went in to ask for
directions, and got the reply 'there ain't no Radisson hotel, honey'. OK. So,
it's the middle of the night, I'm driving a vehicle with questionable legality
(ahem), and my luggage is in another hotel, but not the one I thought, and I've
no way of finding out which. As I was coming to terms with this, she said 'It's
now called the New Orleans Plaza, it's on Veterans' and gave me perfectly clear
directions. I was off again. So,
driving along Veterans Blvd (actually I'd driven past the hotel, but I didn't
notice because it's the only one that doesn't have its sign lit up) my phone
rang. Chris: 'Where are ya? We're where the car was.' By this time it was about
5.15. 'I'm at the hotel, nearly.' 'Can you come and get us?' 'Yeah, alright.'
I figured if I picked them up, at least Chris knew where the hotel was
and could get all of us there. So after
a bit more getting lost I found them on Esplanade, where they looked pale and
worse for wear having spent a few hours on Bourbon St on a Friday night. At
least I learnt how to drive in the US. Jamie's only comment was 'this had better
make a f***ing good story in your diary'. When we finally got back to the hotel, it was already time for Sim to leave for his flight, and the others had a total of 45 minutes before they had to go too. I watched them pack the car from my window and went to bed at about 7.15am. Thursday
6 November 2003 Well,
any hopes I had about beating jetlag by being so exhausted that I'd sleep for
hours, were dashed when I woke up at about 4am.
After a bit of dozing I put Robert Wyatt on the stereo to induce a
dream-like state and lay in bed for another couple of hours. Jamie's
been practising his French (he's had one lesson so far), so when I finally
emerged from the bedroom I could hear what sounded like a conversation between
our host Terri, who was downstairs on the phone, and Jamie upstairs reciting the
French alphabet: a bit disorientating first thing in the morning. After a
comprehensive introduction to US breakfast cereal (and more besides) we headed
for rehearsal back at the USA. The University of South Alabama's acronym makes
for some imposing group titles: the USA Flute Choir sounds even more impressive
than it is already. After
rehearsal, while Chris Andy and Jamie were rehearsing with said Flute Choir, Sim
and I went off in the sunshine to search for some WD40 for a bit of harmonium
maintenance. In a locksmiths’ in the strip mall across the street, I got an
experience of what it must be like for many visitors to Glasgow for the first
time. The guys behind the counter were very helpful, y'all, but I just couldn't
understand a word of what they said. If Sim hadn't been there to translate, I'd
just have stood there slack-jawed going 'Wha ...?' The one bit I did make out
was '$6.12'. As the
afternoon progressed Jamie found out that his bass had never left JFK airport,
where it had sat on a sub-contractor's cart. When he asked them just to leave it
there, they told him it had already come as far as Cleveland on its way to New
Orleans ... I had a
spare hour or so to play some exercises on a stray Steinway to keep the finger
muscles going, take the harmonium apart and put it back together (without
managing to fix any of the dodgy notes unfortunately) and then we went back to
Keith and Andra's for some monumental pizzas and optional beer. There's a fridge
in our green room backstage, so we picked up some beers on the way, to stock it
up for that all-important post-gig nectar-of-the-gods moment. As for
the gig itself, the general consensus is that it was one of our best. Andra had
primed the flute choir and other students to give us a bit of a welcome, so we
hit the stage to screams, whoops and general enthusiasm. Which isn't what you
normally get for baroque chamber music, but it certainly puts you in the frame
of mind to make sure that you're entertaining as well as musical. Over our pizza
earlier, we had challenged Chris to include the word 're-reaming' (what new
wooden flutes need when they've been played for about 6 months) in his spiel,
and he failed miserably, but I successfully incorporated the word 'fetus' as
requested, into my introduction of a chaconne by Georg Muffat. Anyway, We had a
good hour of talking to the audience and selling CDs: at one point Dan from the
chamber music society said to me 'hey, we really wanted to get Concerto
Caledonia, shame your tour got cancelled.' 'Yeah (thinking: what tour?
cancelled?).' It all came back to me eventually... sort of. Before
we left the building, I'd had my eye on the rather cool USA Music Dept
T-shirts some of the students were wearing, so I asked Andra if I could swap one
for a CD. We ended up getting the display model off the wall: sometimes you
enter a peculiar state of grace when you've just played a good gig, when you can
point at something in a glass case on the wall, say 'can I have that?' and
rather than telling you to get lost as they should, someone goes and looks for a
key to open it up.
When Jamie and I got back here, we were still so adrenalised that we stood chatting animatedly with Terri in the kitchen for far longer than was sensible, given our early morning start. But some nights just need to keep going till they're finished. Wednesday
5 November 2003 Well, we
finally arrived at our hosts' place at 4.20am after my navigation skills left a
bit to be desired, and I went straight to bed after 27 hours of travel. Jamie
wanted to get to the end of his chapter of Ulysses (light reading?), but
unfortunately he fell asleep on the sofa before finishing the necessary two
pages, and was greeted a few hours later by our host Keith saying 'I don't know
who you are but this is my house.' At least Jamie didn't have to do his usual
'don't worry, your daughter isn't going to be pregnant' routine. The two
of us were excused the 9am school show this morning, so I didn't surface until
just before we went out for a suitably Southern catfish lunch. Tomorrow's
gig is part-promoted by the local chamber music society, so for the first half
we're in 'early music' mode, with me playing the university's luridly mauve
harpsichord, which its donor had painted to match his carpets or something, and
with Jamie playing viola da gamba. Unfortunately
in a relatively small town like this, this means I have to tune the harpsichord
myself for the rehearsal, so I began to set about this rather dismal task in the
hall while the other guys gave lessons to assorted music students. Then for the
rest of the afternoon we rehearsed the classical bits, with our guest second
flute, Andra Bohnet, who's on the staff of the music faculty here. A
footnote to my 'I play best when I'm pissed off' thought from yesterday: I
played by far the best today when I stopped trying to be smart, and just played
as simply as possible. This meant that I often found what I was doing pretty
boring, but the overall effect of this when blended with everyone else was just
fine. Time I learnt to be self-effacing or something. There
was just time to nip across to the Middle Eastern restaurant across the street
for another substantial meal before we had a social-cum-session back at the
university: basically a free-for-all with some students and others playing tunes
for a couple of hours. I ended up playing bass (for the first time since I was
at school), and now I have a big fat blister on my right index finger to prove
it.
Meanwhile,
Chris has brought with him a portable Estey harmonium (OK, strictly speaking
it's a reed organ) for me to play, that he got from a 'missionary suppliers' for
a few hundred bucks. Cue for the inevitable jokes about 'I've been practising
your position for many years.' It's not in bad shape, most of it works, although
the pitch is a bit high at around A444. As I now know from the book I bought in
Marylebone High St last week, Estey made them for use in World War 2. Don't know
who played them then though. There's
just time before bed to sleepily pick up some email and reply to Nancy at MCM
about programmes and dates for a ConCal US tour in 2004/5. I'm still adjusting to the fact that it always gets warmer when you go outdoors. Even at night it's still about 20°C and very humid. But not at all unpleasant - shorts and sandals in November is just fine. Tuesday
4 November 2003 Well, I
left the house at 7.10 this morning, 15 hours ago, to set off for a few days
playing as a guest with the Chris Norman
Ensemble. I'm now in Chicago O'Hare
airport, with only 9 or 10 hours' travel to go. Entering the US as an 'alien' is
a tedious business, and finally getting through immigration, agriculture
(agriculture!?) customs and security is always a great relief.
Every time I get out the other end, I always think 'ha ha, they let me in
again' with a sense of triumph over bureaucracy. They're very businesslike and
polite, but I fail to see how having a nail file in your bag is going to cause a
terrorist incident. As a
precaution against my luggage going AWOL, I'm carrying my melodica as hand
baggage. It's probably the least
convincing looking musical instrument ever, as both it and its flimsy case with
broken clasps held together with Blu-tack, are made of lurid green plastic,
prompting every uniformed official to ask 'what is that?' It certainly
lets down the 'sophisticated international traveller' image that I try vainly to
portray when wandering around airports in search of peace and quiet.
I'd love
to go to sleep right now, but I can't risk missing the flight to New Orleans,
where the other guys will just have arrived when I get there. Then we're going
to drive the 3 hours or so to Mobile, Alabama. I hope my eyes last out: the last
time I came over here to play with Chris & co., my eyes were so tired that I
got iritis and had to go to E.R. on the afternoon before the last gig. The
lesson learned is: always have travel insurance - 3 hours sitting around in a
hospital for two bottles of eye drops came to about £1100. I've
brought some session tapes to listen to, so I'm going to find a quieter spot
away from the blaring CNN (which is unaccountably showing footage of the Beatles
arriving in the US in 1964), get a sandwich, set my alarm so I don't forget the
flight, and also eat the solitary apple with which I risked the entire integrity
of US farming smuggling it through the agriculture check. Hope they don't find
the oatcakes in my suitcase. I’ve
been reading my long-lost copy of Graham Chapman's 'A Liar's Autobiography' on
the way here. Much of the book is coloured by accounts of his sexual exploits
and chronic alcoholism, so the book makes much more sense if you read it when
you've had a drink. Then it puts you right off having another one. Later:
It's
very interesting listening at long last to the first part of the sessions from
22 September. For the first couple of hours of recording, I really didn't want
to be there: there are places where I stop playing (or even stop the whole take)
for no obvious reason other than that I didn't particularly want to play any
more, and it was one step closer to leaving the room and going for a walk.
Listening back to it now, I can hear that I was playing really rather well.
Perhaps I should only record when I don't want to. I think David G had a similar
experience when we recorded Lachlann Dubh for SADN: come to think of it,
we were both miserable as sin when we recorded Swingin' Jim Johnson etc.,
and those sound pretty convincingly cheery. There's
a wild thunderstorm outside now, I'm getting wet even though the windows are
closed. No planes are getting in,
hope my flight takes off ... Much
later: I finally made it as far as New Orleans, the plane was 2½ hours late, so I've just hit the 24 hours non-stop travel barrier, and there's at least 2 more to go. Jamie's driving (his bass went AWOL in transit too), and Spring Any Day Now is on the CD player - his choice ... Saturday 1 November 2003 Just back from a week in London studying radio technique with the great Piers Plowright, who I've always held in awe for having produced Ivor Cutler's first radio plays. I didn't get any music written in my hotel room, but I did go and see Jerry Springer - the Opera with Nye, which gave me an excuse to laugh a lot in a public place, and I have three items of good news to report. 1) Fiona Talkington is going to be featuring SADN
all week from the 24th November on Radio 3's Late
Junction. But now I'm catching up on email and assorted bits of business, and preparing to pack for Alabama and New Orleans. © 2003 David
McGuinness |
concerto caledonia
Sunday was our rehearsal day and then
we were off
to the Isle of Skye and Portree on Monday morning. It's a 5 hour drive, and about 3
miles south of our destination we were just
congratulating ourselves on not being late despite the horizontal rain, when a queue of traffic appeared from nowhere at
a narrow bridge, and once we'd stopped, a white pest control van ploughed right
into the back of our car. Not
ideal. As you can see, there was no way we could open the boot, so I had no idea
whether my harpsichord had survived, or if the keyboard was now a mess of
splinters. After a tense 90 minutes or so, during which Mickey and co. at Portree Coachworks
applied various bits of heavy machinery with great expertise, they opened it up and I gingerly
looked in - it seemed OK.
Harriet and Rob Forrest, our hosts in Portree appeared, to
make soothing noises and apply hot tea and a picnic while we unpacked
everything into the church, and I worked up the courage to take the cover off the
harpsichord. By some miracle, it had survived without a scratch: the only damage was
some distortion of the front part of the stand. Here you can see Rob applying
gentle persuasion with a mallet and some PVA to get it back into shape - there
are advantages to staying with a keen sailor when on tour (he's a great cook
too).
We started the next morning
(after I'd looked out of my bedroom window at the view on the left) with an expanse of
plastic sheeting and some gaffa tape, trying to make what was left of the back
end of the car waterproof. Then it was time to hit the road for the
long drive back to Glasgow and last night's gig. At least this time we had our
keyboard tech Roy O'Neil on hand with a large van for the harpsichord and the
digital piano. By the time it was 8pm, I'd decided I didn't really feel like
playing Bach or Geminiani (too many notes) so we ditched them in favour of a
load of fiddle tunes instead. Dumbing down? Certainly not.
Sim
and I then took the St Charles Avenue streetcar to Loyola University, and with
Andy we loaded the gear, set up the hall a bit, and waited for Chris and Jamie
to get back from the hotel with the bass. Sim found time to experiment with the
matchbook he'd picked up in Bayona and the can of Houdini lubricant we'd bought
in Mobile the day before (don't try this at home, it's not big and it's not
clever). 
They
got back with about half an hour to spare, so we had time for a 2 minute
soundcheck, and ended up writing the set list 5 minutes after the gig was
supposed to start. Fortunately the Nunemaker Hall at Loyola University isn't
exactly easy to find, so the audience was still arriving in dribs and drabs,
sometimes on the wrong floor of the building. Still, New Orleans time is more
flexible than most anyway.
joined
by massed ranks of flute players at the end, and got a rousing reception. In
between numbers in the second half, Chris gradually talked to me into playing
the Muffat chaconne on the piano, which as I described it to the audience, was a
bit of a 'musical voyage of discovery', as I'd never done it before. Still, as
I've written here previously, sometimes the best time to choose the repertoire
for a concert is halfway through it once it's started. I’m not sure if
that’s the best time to learn the music as well though.
Chris
volunteered to drive all the gear to the hotel and meet us later (having
inexplicably given the other hire car back earlier in the day) so Jamie's friend
Ben gave us a lift in his pickup to Frenchmen St in Faubourg Marigny, where he
was going to be sitting in with an acoustic jazz band. No matter how tired you
are, there's something genuinely exhilarating about being driven along a highway
at high speed, and then more slowly through crowds of people, while hanging out
the back of a pickup truck on a balmy evening.
a
great gig, with a nice transition from the classical stuff into the traditional
half, great fun on stage, a standing ovation from the entire audience, and
Chris, Sim and Jamie felt at ease enough to do handstands on stage at the final
call after the encores. I bet that doesn't happen very often at the Mobile
Chamber Music Society. I was wearing my kilt in the second half so no way was I
joining in.
Then
off we went to TGI Friday's with Andra and what's become our entourage of the
USA Flute Choir, now
christened our ‘floupies’, to drink beer and margaritas and generally feel
pleased with ourselves. Perfect. What's more, ten of them are coming with us to
New Orleans to join us on stage tomorrow.
In
this photo, Andy emerges from the restaurant and surveys the palm trees - 'it's
just like Plockton'. In the car, Chris: 'Hey David, bet you can't guess what I
did last weekend.' 'Yeah, you're right, I can't guess.' 'I eloped.' 'What?' (he
had) Then it was off to the concert hall at the University of South Alabama. 
Then
it was back to our new digs: I'm staying in the daughter of the family's bedroom
(she's away at university), and Jamie seemed to blend in well with the multitude
of pinups on the wall.