Sunday 8 March 2009

Very tired today after last night's Bongo Club appearance, but what a great audience to play for: the McFall's home crowd.

my lair at soundcheck

The excellent Alex Fiennes was doing the sound, and on his suggestion I propped up my folder of scores with my camera case so that the sound of the harmonium could actually get out: in the photo above (taken beforehand), I'd managed to block most of the crucial long slot above the keyboard. My harmonium case got pressed into service for the first time as a very effective glockenspiel stand too.

Robert has a talent for putting unexpected things together in a very effective way, and before Michael sang The Slave's Lament, Professor Geoff Palmer spoke for a bit about many Jamaicans' Scots ancestry and how it came about - and also how Burns's Ae Fond Kiss fits into the story. The song was written for Burns's 'Clarinda' (Nancy McLehose) before she set sail for Jamaica to find out if her marriage was still really on. And when she got to Kingston, Mr McLehose was already quite happy with his 'ebony woman and mahogany children', thank you very much. I was going to put in a link here to Geoff's criticisms last year of Scotland's Homecoming being marketed almost exclusively to white people, and I found this article - and would you believe it, the first comment at the bottom says 'that's who the diaspora is - white folks'. Well, here's Geoff's piece in scotland.org to correct that misconception. Personally I'll be rather pleased if Scottish musical history can now include Sly Dunbar and Peter Tosh (short for McIntosh, remember?).

I must have been quite nervous about last night's gig as I had some very weird dreams the night before. Alison had dropped in on Friday evening on her way here, so perhaps that explains why in one dream the two of us were playing some baroque piece to an audition panel, despite the fact that we'd already been booked by them to play at their festival (we were even in the brochure). About a page and a half in, one of the two women behind the table stopped me playing and said dismissively 'OK, that's fine, you do realise that in Norwegian music of this period you should be using the [some obscure harpsichord stop, that was on the instrument I was playing].' Uh? Then both of them got up and left for their lunch, Alison said 'I thought you knew that', and I was left feeling supremely incompetent. No more gig in that festival.