Saturday 25 October 2008

on the London-Brighton train
I’m on my way to tomorrow’s Early Music Show/Brighton Early Music Festival gig, enjoying the luxury of a whole evening off with nothing but a room in the Grand Hotel to look forward to (well, I might have a beer with Kate and Stephen if she gets back from her gig in Chichester in time).

Yesterday’s rehearsal with Ms Bott and James Bowman in a basement was very entertaining in lots of ways. Any rehearsal with Kate is entertaining, and James’s legendary near-constant stream of filthy gags keeps everything moving along very effectively indeed. Even with a Kawai grand piano, the Dowland song we ran through suddenly reminded me that this voice singing to me was the one that I found so arresting, singing lute songs on a record I borrowed from Glasgow’s Mitchell Library when I was about 14.

I was staying at Alison’s place in London last night while she was in Paris rehearsing with Emmanuelle Haïm. I’d planned to make her some supper when she got back on the last plane out of Paris, but her train to Charles de Gaulle was late and she missed it, so I ended up booking her onto the (very) early morning Eurostar and looking up hotels while she got on a train to Lille. Then that Eurostar got cancelled, so the supper which was briefly going to be breakfast became lunch, before she headed to her concert lateron in Wales.

I made good use of her piano anyway: I’d planned to go to the British Library to get a reader’s ticket for the first time in about 20 years, but doing some practice for tomorrow seemed more important, and I’ll be back in London again soon anyway. And I’ve spent the last two hours in a café with Barb Jungr getting some ideas in motion that might start to take shape in the future …

I’ve also been completely enthralled by a 90-minute film about Les Paul which I downloaded from the BBC last weekend. I suppose I’d always assumed that his records with Mary Ford were clever novelties, never having listened to them properly, but I was utterly amazed at how good they are. If you’re going to invent multi-tracking, home recording, and the solid body electric guitar you might as well get all of them spectacularly right. And the results are more unashamedly pop than those of his fellow genius musician-inventor Raymond Scott.

The documentary also showed him in the 30s playing in a hillbilly band with a cello in it rather than a double bass.  Nowadays we’re conditioned to hearing 16 foot bass on everything, and not just in early music.  I really think that it’s only in the last few weeks that I’ve properly recalibrated my ears and brain not to think that there’s something missing when it’s not there. I’m still listening to Maria Kalaniemi records when I can, and knowing most of the tunes from the peerless Tokyo Concert recording which is just accordion, piano and guitar, now hearing the original studio versions which have more instruments seems wrong: What is that bass doing there? It’s too low! It doesn’t sit in the track, it’s in its own frequency space! Join CANLOB, the Campaign for the Abolition of Needlessly LOw Basslines. You know it makes sense.