Thursday 5 January 2012
It’s a New Year and I’m spending some time organising concerts again at last. Not that I love the organising particularly (I certainly don’t) but the prospect of actually making some music in fascinating company is very welcome. In a couple of weeks’ time Olivia and Pamela will be joining Alison and myself for a couple of gigs of old and new material: details on the live page. As a New Year present, we’ve posted a live performance of Alison playing Bach’s first cello suite on soundcloud.
After another hurricane on Tuesday (more powerful here than the celebrated Hurricane Bawbag last month) I popped round to Alison’s in the evening where Catherine Motuz was visiting from Montréal. None of us were feeling particularly sociable so I took along the wind-up gramophone and we listened to a selection of Jennifer Ward Clarke’s 78s and Bruce Dickey’s fantastic new CD, recorded in Monteverdi’s organ loft in Mantua. Bruce’s beautifully characterised playing makes the 16th century instrumental music sound very much like a jazz album to my ears, and Monteverdi’s organ (no sniggering at the back) is amazing too. Jenny’s 78s of various flavours of Scottish dance music are really fascinating: there’s some orchestral dance sets played by the London session players in J. Michael Diack’s Scottish Dance Orchestra which are unintentionally hilarious, an amazing Eightsome Reel set of fiddle tunes played superbly on pipes and drums by the Band of the Scots Guards, and some Parlophone (rather than Beltona) Jimmy Shands which sound like they were recorded in a huge ballroom (was it Abbey Road studio 1?) and, of course, must not be sat on.
If I can find any time to get the hang of ProTools and start doing some editing, we might have our Robert ‘Red Rob’ Mackintosh disc out in July. I edited Revenge of the Folksingers (which wasn’t complicated) using WaveLab Elements on my desktop here, but Mackintosh may require something a bit more intricate. I’ve also been playing with the iKaossilator on my phone, which like most musical instruments gets very entertaining once you start asking it to do things it wasn’t designed for. Alasdair Roberts and I have begun to cook up a ‘muckle sangs with auld pianos’ idea too, which I’m itching to get started on, but there are so many other things to get done first.
My listening over the holidays was a bit of a hangover from watching all the 1976 Top of the Pops repeats on BBC Four: I think it’s time to abolish the musical use of the term ‘guilty pleasures’ and say that enjoying pop music for its own sake is not something to be ashamed of, whether you choose to analyse it as far as Phil Tagg did with ‘Fernando’ or not. For Spotify users, here’s my 1976 playlist: I’d never realised that (if I’m right) it’s the same people playing on the piece of pop perfection that is Elton John and Kiki Dee’s Motown pastiche as on this jazz-rock workout (Out of the Blue), which used to be the Top Gear playout music, and which I’d always assumed from Ray Cooper’s vibraphone was by Pierre Moerlen’s Gong - oops. Also, does anyone know if it’s Heatwave’s extremely funky drummer Bilbo Berger playing on Dana’s Fairytale? Roll on 1977.
But in the meantime, roll on 2012, and the repairs arising from its stormy start. Our beloved old plum tree (home for birds, climbing children, and my hammock, amongst other things) has lurched earthwards, so I’m hoping it can be saved; the greenhouse has lost a few panes, the back gate is knackered, our roof leaks, and my ridiculous holiday beard has to be shaved off. I never did manage to tidy up all the piles of books on the floor …