Today we’re off to Merimbula Jazz Festival where I’m playing with two bands. I love the south coast of NSW, and the Victorian countryside is now beautifully green and lush. Not sure that I can blog while on the road, so I’ll be back in 10 days.
Looking forwards to playing, and confident of my playing. Health tolerable (with pills). Ciao.
God, it’s so long since I blogged that all my hundreds of fans must have dissipated! Well, I am resolving to blog frequently to maintain interest, and for my own discipline. God knows I need it because I can be so dissolute, wasting day after day on internet-surfing, reading books and playing the piano.
I’m not getting enough exercise and my back really hurts - day and night - non-stop. Aaargh! I do have a major arthritic problem of non-operative spinal stenosis causing chronic pain, and I’m supposed to get out and walk. But that hurts more than just sitting around, so it’s a bit of a bind, and this suburb is so boring!
Anyway, I have been rehearsing with several musicians each Saturday at my place, and that’s quite good fun - hard work a lot of the time, but good fun. Tomorrow’s the final rehearsal before we go off next weekend to play at the Merimbula Jazz Festival. It’s called the Jazz Travellers (a name I coined in 2000). We have piano (me), drums, bass, tenor sax/clarinet and a singer.
I’m also in a nice little trio called Jazz Therapy, so-called because it makes us feel good. Come to think of it, I once played with a trad band called Major Fieldgood (”made-ya feel good” - gettit?) and that was fun too. My mate Des Shaw from that has given it all way because he now has emphysema, and you can’t play the trumpet with that!
So next Tuesday Glenyce and I pile into the car and push off (actually - pull off) with the caravan for the NSW South Coast - always beautiful up there - staying at Orbost overnight on the way. We’ll do our jazz playing, listening and socializing and then come back in a week’s time.
In the last blog item I blogged on my rash, which has now vanished completely. But Glenyce (my wife) recently saw the GP and got a referral to the same dermatologist who looked at a couple of almost invisible things on her face. She has a squamous cell carcinoma on one cheek and a basal cell carcinoma on the other, and they need to be removed surgically.
A fortnight ago she had the first one cut out of her right cheek and I’ve had the task of daily dressing of the wound with hydrogen peroxide and then vaseline. After the first 48 hours she removed the wound dressing for the first time and I took a photo of the nice, neat 8 or 9 stitches:-
And now she has a bigger cut in her left cheek, up near the eye, which is slowly turning a sort of reddish-purple. We trust that that won’t become too bad, because she assiduously applied an ice-pack regularly after she came from the surgery. When she first takes the wraps off that one on Sunday I’ll take another photo to continue this little saga of the wounded wife.
Stay tuned!
Earlier this year I played in the Grampians Jazz Festival. My usual bass player had fallen ill, so I found a replacement in the form of Don Calvert, owner of one of the venues, the Mountain Grand hotel. Described by him as a “boutique” hotel, it’s closer to a guest house and restaurant, and a very nice place it is, too.
Well, Don provides music in the restaurant on Saturday nights, with himself on the electric bass and singing. He usually gets a piano player on the grand piano or a guitarist to accompany him, and he has a range of good people playing with him. He provides the musician with meals and accommodation.
The pianists he gets are good - very good, so I was flattered when he offered me the chance to go up and there and play with him. And so, accompanied by Glenyce, I drove the 300 km to Halls Gap last Saturday and settled into our room for a rest and recovery. Togged up in musicianly black, we took our places on the small stage and started in with our first set of numbers.
For this, I sight-read the piles of music he places in front of me, and so we proceed through the eight or so songs. Taking a break, we had a chat about how the playing’s going. I was playing a little too loud, with a few too many notes from the piano for his style. That’s partly from the fact that I do all my practicing alone, and am not used to this duo work.
Undaunted, in we go for the next set, after which he expressed satisfaction with my adaptation to the gig’s stylistic requirements which pleased me greatly, because I was working very hard to keep on top of the sight-reading and the need for a kind of minimalist approach to the keyboard.
The dining room had been almost full, and as people left, we could make a bit more noise. We finished up with just one table full of enthusiastic listeners, as we turned to some spirited jamming to cap off the night.
Then it was a late dinner of his beautiful breast of chicken with pistachio sauce, accompanied by some excellent local red wines. We talked of music and vocal style, jazz personalities, and had a damn good time of it all. However, lying in bed, I was so stirred by the stimulation of the night (and the red wine), that, despite a sleeping pill, I had insomnia.
Next morning, showered, I started to wake up (or so I thought), and had a hearty breakfast in the busy dining room. There’s nothing like a good cooked breakfast to get you through the day! Glenyce, bless her heart, loved every minute of it, and so did I!
Knowing how I tick, I’d taken several caffeine tablets (No-Doze) to keep me awake for the drive home, and off we went. Before long I realized that I had a problem. Last night I’d taken a sleeping tablet that didn’t help me sleep. Now I’d had taken wakeup tablets that weren’t keeping me awake! So I handed over the steering wheel to Glenyce.
I settled in to snooze in the passenger side of the car. Now, I am not usually the passenger, and am not a good one, because I get nervous about the driving not being done quite how I do it. And so, whatdya know - I stay awake all the 300 km back home just from my nervous Nellie antics!
As soon as we got to Glen Waverley in the late afternoon of a grey day, I hit the hay, and succumbed into the arms of Morpheus. That, until I awaken by darling Glenyce with the news that the neighbour had noticed that we (actually she) had left the headlights on. Consequently the battery was too flat to start the car! Girding my loins, I got on the blower to the RACV, who arrived quite soon, jump-started the car and we pushed off for a long twilight drive on the freeway to charge it up again. By now I had woken up, fortunately, and after our drive we had tea.
Next thing, we had a knock on the door from a man who had noticed that I had left the headlights on! Talk about slow learners. Fortunately the engine started OK this time.
It was a long trip and an eventful weekend, but most enjoyable, in a very tiring sort of way. it took me a couple of days to get over it. But I look forward to hearing from Don for another chance of playing up there with him.
Making our way down the picturesque South Gippsland Highway to the attractive town of Inverloch, Glenyce and I settled in to the foreshore caravan park for a week. The park gradually filled completely with campers and caravaners for the Labor Day public holiday.
Come Friday, we picked up our registration badges which let us in to all of the jazz venues for the Inverloch Jazz Festival. I’ve been to about eight of these, now, at Inverloch, and looked forward to playing some good jazz, hoping the audiences will be reasonable. That’s the way it turned out, and we had an excellent time of it, regardless of the fact that Glenyce had a nasty fall backwards down 3 stairs and we had a couple of nice folding chairs stolen from our caravan annexe! The weather was nice, apart from some initial rain.
I was registered in three bands. Firstly there was my own band, the Jazz Travellers, a quartet plus vocalist, playing mainstream style. Then there was the Elster Vista Jazz Band, a group oriented to traditional jazz, including a banjo and washboard, led by Tony Brothers. I also played with the Janet Arndt Quintet Plus, a group paying slightly more mainstream style than the previous band.
Each band plays 2 sets of numbers in a 45 minute slot, each set being comprised of about 8 numbers. So I got to play 6 sets, totalling about 48 tunes over four and a half hours playing time. In addition, I was approached in a car park by a friend of mine, Tony Harling, who was looking for a piano player to fill in one set of his band the Clare Castle Jazz Band. I happily agreed, as I’d played with that band for a couple of years in the late 90s. So that made 6 hours of playing, a total of about 56 tunes.
All told, I had a most enjoyable time of it, and apart from one or two hiccups, was happy with my playing. I met a lot of friends from the past, and ate at the Chinese restaurant 4 nights out of the seven. The day after arrival, we drove down to Wilson’s Promontory, through the pretty Gippsland towns of Korumburra, Leongatha, Foster, Yanakie and Fish Creek. The landscape was dry and drought-stricken, but slightly enlivened by some rain on the first night. There had been some severe bushfires at the prom, and it was closed. But there was little smoke visible from the fires, which had been dampened down by the overnight rain.
My wife Glenyce is still pretty sore from her backwards fall, and has difficulty getting in and out of bed and the car. She’s to be seen by a back specialist in a couple of weeks time. She already had spinal stenosis which might need surgery before long. I suspect the fall simply exacerbated that condition rather than cause new damage.
Since we came home this week, I’ve been pretty sore in the back and very tired, taking a bit of sleep during the afternoons. I’m typing this around 6 am, as I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I think my 70 years are catching up on me.
The next jazz festival is at Merimbula Jazz Festival during the Queens Birthday weekend early in June. I have 2 bands registered in that, namely, the Jazz Travellers quintet, and the trio called Jazz Therapy. Quite soon I’ll arrange some rehearsals for both of those groups.
Let the music play!
Last weekend I was away with my wife in the caravan for a week to participate with my band the “Jazz Travellers” in the Grampians Jazz Festival. Just one of 100 or so bands, we play for pleasure and fun. I hadn’t been to Halls Gap for a couple of years, and welcomed the opportunity to play our mainstream style of jazz in front of reasonable audiences.
Our band consists of myself on the piano, a drummer, a double bass player, and a colleague who plays the tenor sax, doubling on the clarinet. We also have a singer who is new to the art of jazz singing: Anne Smith is also a talented actor and puts that to good use fronting the band and entertaining the audience in various ways as well as by singing. The extra entertainment value adds to our success nicely.
On the Friday my bass player phoned up to say that he was ill and couldn’t make it, so I had to do some quick thinking. We have to play for two slots of 45 min each, so I needed to fill that. It so happens that Don Calvert, the owner of the Mountain Grand hotel, one of the seven performance venues, plays the electric bass, and he agreed to play with us, at which I breathed a sigh of relief. I raced over to the newsagent, who kindly enabled me to duplicate the bass music and put it into a folder, after which I had a short rehearsal with Don.
Jazz Travellers playing in the Mountain Grand
Come time to perform on Saturday at 3 pm, with our replacement bassist on deck, all went smoothly, with considerable acclaim from the appreciative audience. Our 45 minutes set of 7 or so tunes passed quickly, and all we had to do was to get through our Sunday 10:30 am slot and all was hunky-dory. We wondered whether much of an audience would arrive so early in the morning, but our fears were groundless.
Glenyce and I listened to many other bands during the day, as usual, and we met many friends and acquaintances from the 11 years we’ve been coming to these country jazz festivals. After tea on Saturday night I got involved sitting in at the piano at a hamburger joint called Ralphy’s. This was just an impromptu “casual playing” venue where whatever musicians feel like sit in during the day and night. There’s a kit of drums and a guitar amplifier provided, and there’s no charge for audiences, unlike the main program venues.
Myself playing the piano at Ralphy’s hamburger cafe, Halls Gap
As I played, other musos came and went; I think at one stage I was surrounded by a sousaphone, banjo, guitar, drums, trumpet, saxophone, clarinet, a couple of trombone players and to top it off, a washboard! No wonder I could hardly hear myself play and had to take the front off the piano! All told, I stayed there an and off for about 3 hours. Tragic, isn’t it?
Come Sunday at 10:30 am, we fronted up to an excellent morning crowd who soon warmed to our musical efforts. In no time we were done and retired off stage feeling relieved at our success, and that was that - we’d sung for our supper - the advantage being that being performers we can attend all the many other performances free, unlike the paying public. What’s more, we get paid a modest fee.
On Sunday afternoon I played some more at Ralphy’s and then we had a band barbecue where some of us were staying. Then Glenyce and had a couple of days to stay over in the caravan park until we came home caravan on Wednesday. On Monday night we decided to eat at Don’s hotel restaurant, in gratitude for his helping me out. It wasn’t a cheap meal, but excellent food - I recommend his menu!
In fact we went to a little vineyard near Ararat on the way home and bought a couple more bottles of the wine we’d had at his hotel.
Bon appetit!
Well, it’s been a long gap since I blogged, but here’s a summary:
Success at Inverloch Jazz Festival
My band the Jazz Travellers were included and successfully played two sets in the Inverloch Jazz Festival, but I came down with a moderately debilitating case of physical and mental exhaustion after-wards. I was done in by a combination of the hot days I spent in the caravan there, and medication for severe back pain originating from the caravanning. That and driving back to Melbourne and then taking my digital piano out to the other side of Melbourne for a one-hour gig in a nursing home.
My psychiatrist baldly stated that I had over-reached my self yet again. I didn’t think it was going to be too much until it actually happened! I seem to have settled down now.
Merimbula Jazz Festival
I have registered two bands to play in the Merimbula Jazz Festival in early June. We have ample time to prepare, and I am taking on board a singer, Ann Smith for the Jazz Travellers.
Colonoscopy
Today I had a “colonoscopy”, a medical examination of the interior of the large intestine. I haven’t had any symptoms like bleeding or real pain, but I can’t resist the temptation of the pun to say that let’s just say that I had a gut feeling about it. No nasties were found, but I do have diverticulosis, a modification of parts of the internal structure of the colon. This can give rise to pain and “discomfort”, and infections or even an abscess.
I remember talk that my father had something the same. I can’t see anything on the internet about the disorder other than it’s not uncommon in people my age, and probably not hereditary. The remedy seems to be lots of roughage, fruit, vegetables, grains and so on. Well, that’s been more or less my diet for many decades - we’ve always eaten healthily in this family. Perhaps the damage arose from my diet in my youth? Who knows?
But it’s nice to know I don’t have polyps or cancer of the bowel down there.
I get periods of constipation arising from pain relief from paracetamol/codeine combinations, but I do my best to minimize that usage. It’s a fine balance of pain relief over against constipation.
Well, I decided to apply the simple basic rules of Rational Emotive Therapy to myself, and seem to be climbing up out of the emotional trough. A reminder of false, ineffective beliefs to be avoided:-
(1) I must perform well to be approved of by others who are perceived significant.
(2) you must treat me fairly—if not, then it is horrible and I cannot bear it.
(3) conditions must be my way and if not I cannot stand to live in such a terrible and awful world.
To the extent that I can counteract those false beliefs, I can then live a healthier life.
And so, accordingly, I’ve conferred with my muso mates and registered the Jazz Travellers for the Inverloch Jazz Festival, which runs over the weekend of 7th-10th of March. The documents were sent by high priority mail, but we will not know if we are accepted until during this week.
We needed a bass player, and fortunately I managed to find someone at last Monday’s Showbiz Club, to which I belong. Unfortunately she is just shifting to Wonthaggi, a couple of hours drive from here, so it’s unlikely she will be able to rehearse with us.
In the meantime, yesterday I rehearsed all of our numbers with Rob Milligan (drums), and Colin Garrett (tenor sax and clarinet). We’ll do OK if we can get into Inverloch. But I’ve decided not to cry myself to sleep if we miss out. We’ll find places to play around here.
As well as that, we are planning to play at the Merimbula Jazz Festival, 6th-9th June, 2008. I’ve been twice to this large festival. You get a range of good bands from Sydney,
Melbourne, Canberra and Adelaide, and my players are keen to go. I just need to find a bass player who wants to travel that far, and preferably is prepared to rehearse with us here in Melbourne. I’ve phoned around, but so far anyone who’s going is already in several bands. There are restrictions on the number of bands to which a musician can belong; this is to make clash-free programming easier.
But we plan to get there in June, and enjoy the ambiance of a beautiful seaside town with an excellent jazz festival, in the South Coast of New South Wales. In the meantime I’ll try to get hold of a bass player, which is essential for the mainstream style of music which we play.
Let the good times roll!
This very date last January I had just come out of a 5 1/2 hour long operation in which my prostate gland was removed by robotic surgery. Results since then show that I am free of cancer cells.
What’s more, my waterworks has recovered almost (but not quite) completely, so that I am almost fully continent. I just have to watch it at night after having a few alcoholic drinks.
However, my sexual functioning is pretty well moribund, which is a great pity - although I haven’t given up all hope yet.
So you’d think that having had a potential death sentence removed from hovering over me, that life would be hunky-dory. Not unexpectedly, it hasn’t always been so. I always find some things to get upset, angry, anxious or depressed about.
I suppose that makes me a normal human being after all, instead of some sort of saint.
But yesterday I found that two jazz bands of mine that I was scheduled to play with at the Grampians Jazz Festival are not mentioned in the program. What’s more, the organizers say they never received my registration forms.
This means that the Jazz Travellers and Jazz Therapy apparently do not exist, and that my wife and I, and my fellow musicians, and their partners and a friend, having booked accommodation and made travel arrangements, are inconvenienced for the weekend of February 8-10th. Three of those musicians are in other bands, and so are not left out, but four other people are highly inconvenienced. To go to the jazz, they would have to pay $50 each, instead of much lower prices as friends of musos.
I know I mailed the forms, plus the cheque, because Glenyce watched me do it. I know posted it all on 26th November. But the cheque hasn’t been cashed, and the first I knew of the situation was a phone call from a friend to say we weren’t in the draft program, sent by mail.
I don’t know what went wrong, but I know it wasn’t something I did incorrectly.
This has hit me very hard. I wish it didn’t but it did. I wish I was tougher, but I’m not. In the last few years I have become more emotionally labile; tears are apt to come over little things, usually when watching the news or a show on TV: something touches my heart unexpectedly and the moisture comes, along with the quivering lip. I hide it because it makes no sense and I can’t explain myself. I have sometimes left the room because I don’t want my wife to see it. It’s a nuisance.
After my friend phoned to tell me we weren’t on the draft program, realization of the true import swept over me like a cold, white, rigid cloud that froze my soul and clutched at my heart. In a dream I walked in to Glenyce to give her the news. Oh, I went through the steps needed to find out the truth; scanning my computer banking records (cheque not cashed); phoning the organizer (nothing received); jogging my memory of events (Glenyce saw me assemble the paperwork and make up the envelope).
It availed nothing. By now, the coldness had invaded my body. I felt faint and weak. I had trouble speaking.
It felt so bloody melodramatic!
I sat down to phone my fellow musicians. My mind was clouded. I asked my wife to sit by my side as I dialed Rob the drummer, who with his wife Fay is booked into accommodation at Hall’s Gap, together with their friend Mae, who will be $70 out of pocket. Then I rang Colin, our saxophone and clarinet player. He’s just separated from a wife who disliked his practising at home. He’s keen to get out and play jazz, and I’d given him this opportunity to get back into the scene. Then there’s Charles, our bass player - he’s OK, because he’s playing in two other bands. I rang Russell (reeds player), bearer of the bad news in the first place, and he’ll phone up Marshall (drummer) from Geelong. They’re OK, because they are in other bands, too.
Everyone was just as incredulous as me, and very understanding for me. But it’s a very hard thing to do.
Right now, my stomach is knotting up, there’s a pain in my chest and a lump in my throat. I feel weak and have to break off typing this.
Why is this important to me? Well, back in 1988, after some years battling serious depression, I had to retire very early from my career as a chemistry lecturer - something I loved doing. It was necessary at the time, but that loss took a lot of getting over. I’ve never really recovered, unfortunately. I just have to accept that that’s what’s happened to me - and and is still affecting me. I wish I could let it go, but it doesn’t happen easily.
One thing I did then was to improve my piano-playing skills.
In 1994 I took some lessons from a well-known jazz piano player, Stephen Sedergreen, and 9 years later some from his father Bob. I’ve practiced thousands of hours. When I felt ready I got myself into a starting jazz band playing “traditional” or Dixieland jazz. I branched out and got to play with other bands, playing at country jazz festivals such as the Grampians, Inverloch, Merimbula, and other places. I’ve also played at quite a few paid gigs and done plenty of freebies. It’s quite hard to get paid work, and there’s competition from extremely good musicians.
A few years ago I started my own band called the Jazz Travellers to play a more modern style called mainstream, plus Latin, and various ballads. I’ve worked with singers, too, and played for a couple of amateur theatre shows.
Playing good quality jazz is something I aspire to, and I think I’m reasonably competent. I’ve become known to many around the scene here in Melbourne. I just want to play the music I like with competent, enthusiastic musicians who are prepared to rehearse. With a reeds player, Colin, and a drummer, Rob, I’ve been rehearsing, and we’ve have picked out the 16 tunes needed for the two sets you need to play to take part in a jazz festival. The reward is that you get to perform in public before discerning audiences, and can enjoy seeing all the other bands.
Glenyce and I have been looking forward to parking our caravan in the Hall’s Gap caravan park, enjoying the unique ambiance of that beautiful place, meeting all of our friends, and listening to some good jazz during the 3 days. It’s a place to play and be heard and judged by your peers, and to make new friends. We’ve been going on and off about for about 9 years.
But last year I had to pull out because of my prostatectomy in January.
So you can see that I’ve a lot of emotional investment in appearing in the jazz festival. I have to try to be philosophical about it all. But I can do all the Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) positive self-talk that I can manage, but my autonomic nervous system has a mind of its own.
Actually, it is a mind of its own.
And no matter how cool I try to be about life’s little dealings with me, on this occasion I feel absolutely knocked for a row.
Here are the main tenets of rational emotive therapy that I need to apply to my present circumstances - these are the irrational beliefs that will prevent me from having a good life:-
(1) I must perform well to be approved of by others who are perceived significant.
(2) you must treat me fairly—if not, then it is horrible and I cannot bear it.
(3) conditions must be my way and if not I cannot stand to live in such a terrible and awful world.
To the extent that I can counteract those false beliefs, I can then live a healthier life.
I’m working on it!
OK, you have a jazz band, playing good old standards, doing some great solos, nice audience. What’s a fan supposed to do to show his appreciation?
Some sit at the bar or at the table, unmoving, cool as a cucumber. No tapping feet, no body movement, no finger moving with the beat sully this cool Joe. When the band finishes, this guy gives polite, restrained applause. He’s heard it all before, spent countless hours listening to live jazz and recordings. He has standards, he’s a critical listener. If I play the piano he’s comparing me with Fats Waller, with Oscar Peterson, with Bob Sedergreen, with Graeme Coyle or some such star.
He doesn’t give unearned applause. He doesn’t applaud just any old solo - oh no! - you’ve got to be good. He’s jaded, casts not his pearls before swine. When others go wild with appreciation, he holds back. The milk of human kindness oozeth not from his dugs. Such constipated audience members are always there. Because they feel superior they get their kicks that way, there they sit, casting a kill-joy pall all around.
Damned Enthusiasts!
At the other extreme (I plead guilty, m’lud!) is the Enthusiast!! Fingers and feet virtually flailing, he lets it all hang out, the devil take the hind-most. Unabashed at his bodily excesses, he wants to show his appreciation every which way! Jazz must be not only enjoyed but must be seen to be enjoyed. Tabletop or bar is enthusiastically tapped, ankles are wiggled, a broad grin lights his dial, and bon-homie exudes from his soul.
Tapping spoons on glasses, though, is beyond the pale!
Musos notice it. I once saw reeds player Alex Hutchinson step down from the stage, stride across the floor and offer a fiver to a highly animated mate of mine, so embarrassed was he by the antics! A good joke, but it made the point.
About Jazz Solos
What do you do about solos? Do you applaud after each one, no matter how good, just to encourage the hapless soul? Purists adopt the classical music approach - clap only at the very end of the concerto - not even between movements - and then the applause must be wild, even extravagant, perhaps with muffled “bravos” interspersed.
But this is jazz, most of which cannot even remotely compared with classical music; the raison d’être is quite different. The essence of jazz is improvised solos - it’s made up on the spot, and on a good day, it can be brilliant, on a bad day forgettable. Improvisation is very rare in classical music - it’s essence is in the delivery, the virtuosity, the rendition.
Some say that clapping only spoils the entry of the next soloist. They do have a point, but - nyah! - really good solos are rare. It’s just that every dog deserves his day.
Well, I sp’ose most folks are in between. Most tap along a bit, or just nod their heads and smile - in time with the music, of course. The day has long gone when I worried about how other listeners react to however I enjoy my jazz. I just kinda let it all hang out - in a sophisticated way, of course. Wouldn’t wanna be taken for one of those - shudder - Enthusiasts!!
Let the good times roll!!
It came to be that last Tuesday I went to the funeral of a trumpet-playing friend of mine, Royce Charlett. Ten days earlier, he had suddenly collapsed at home and died, to be found by his partner Christine, poor girl. He had had no previous symptoms of heart disease, so when she found him dead on the bedroom floor it was a huge shock.
It’s not as if I played regularly with him, but we played some gigs at the Grampians Jazz Festival, 2002, plus a couple of well-paid commercial jobs about the same time, at Xmas luncheons of the Brain Research Institute, at the Austin Hospital. The thing is, I came to realize that it’s not so much how often I play with a musician, or just listen to them, but it’s the fact that a friend or acquaintance is just there, doing their thing in a way that I enjoy or admire. I suppose that even if I dislike someone they still have a part in the warp and weft of my life’s fabric!
His death left a hole in my life. I came to realize that my grasp upon the world I inhabit comprises a matrix of connections with people like Royce. My connections range from intense to casual, from right now to way in the past, or even just some connection from even my earliest years; but each has its place in my being.
Way back about 1999 I formed the first band of my own. Until then, from 1997, I’d been playing with various bands playing what is called, variously, “trad jazz” (traditional jazz), or Dixieland, or New Orleans jazz. Before then I’d just played some solo piano in a few places, and much earlier in my life I’d played the drums for thirty years with my mother’s dance bands - but that’s another story!
My new band was called the Jazz Travellers, to play the style of music called “mainstream”. I was looking for a drummer. Royce at that time was running the Monbulk Jazz Festival, and I phoned him for help to find a drummer. He was very helpful; I did find a drummer and in due course that band played at Monbulk and several other festivals. This year I’m playing with my Jazz Travellers yet again (after some years’ break) at the Grampians.
Trumpeter Royce Charlett playing at Merimbula, June, 2007.
I took the above picture at Merimbula Jazz Festival last June. Like many jazz musicians he plays with his eyes shut. Sometimes I do that while playing the piano here at home, and I don’t quite know where you go to, but it’s somewhere where the good jazz comes from. It must be an altered state of consciousness, because it’s similar to times that I meditate. I don’t meditate enough these days - should do it more often.
I happen to be an atheist. I find no advantage in my life in trying to believe in a non-existent deity, and do not believe that I will exist in any way after my death. But I do know that there is a lot not known or understood about the brain and the mind. I have had many valuable experiences whilst meditating, and I think it’s a healthy thing to do.
Now, I don’t know where my good mate Royce has gone to now, but I’d like to believe that he’s gone to wherever he was when he was playing his beloved trumpet in that picture that I took. That’s a nice idea.
My best-laid plans for regular blogging have (not unexpectedly) taken a nose-dive already, so here’s a summary of this week.
Last Sunday we had the family over for a BBQ lunch. I had trouble with the gas fittings, then in the hands of my son it came good: I don’t know what he did differently, but all of a sudden it worked properly. Now I have to return $70 worth of replacement gas plumbing that I’d bought, unnecessarily so, it seems. Still haven’t got back to Bunnings with that.
Monday I recovered from Sunday.
Tuesday I went to the funeral of a jazz friend of mine, where I shed tears. Then we went to a wake afterwards, and I managed to play the piano for an hour or so with some of the jazzies there. That was good practice, as well as a little exposure to other guys. Several took my details. We’d left home at 9:25 am, and arrived home about 4:45 pm. so it was a long day.
Wednesday I saw my psych on the morning, then played with a trio at the Monash Uni Staff Club for 2 hours before whizzing off to Bentleigh to play with the same musos for about 30 min at a large retirement village/nursing home. Then I shot back to Glen Waverley for an appointment with my urologist. He said my prostate PSA level is zero, so the January surgery can still be called successful: no cancer left. I was pretty tired after all that!
Thursday I wrote letters in some Xmas cards, to get the 6 pm mail in our street (cutting it fine for deliveries). But in the afternoon, nature intervened in the form of a torrential downpour that caused serious flooding and damage in our suburb, plus others. Our back yard was flooded to 9 inches (do your own conversion). The cards missed the mail!
Friday I posted said cards at the Post Office, dropped in 17 prescriptions to get them paid for on the safety net which expires next week. Then I picked up Chelsea and Victoria (grandkids) from school, it being the last school day, all getting caught in yet another brief torrential downpour while we were at it. It rained hard all afternoon, and the underground car parks at The Glen (big shopping centre) were still flooded from yesterday, so the medicine I’ll pick up on Sunday, when we can park properly.
Tonight I have insomnia and have the head cold Glenyce already has. But I did get to cook some Thai red curry and rice for tea.
Now it’s going on 5 am, and I’ll go back to bed. Have to go early to my daughter’s place to be there when the electrician comes to inspect her light fittings which were damaged by water leaking from the ceiling during Thursday’s amazing rainstorm.
I’ll be very tired, but that’s life.
It’s not as though I’ve stopped living my life, but it’s just that I’ve stopped recording it or commenting on it, here in this blog.
My last blog item was early in September. The year just dribbles by. Since I enjoyed the last few outings of the fungi season with my Field Nats friends; I have dozens of excellent photos with with I’ve done nothing. I’ve played jazz piano at monthly outings of the Showbiz Club I belong to, and started rehearsing with several musician friends. We’re playing really well.
In early February I’ll be playing in two bands at the Grampians Jazz Festival. (Don’t expect much from that web site because the bounders don’t keep it up to date at all!) I was going to play in two at this year’s at the Grampians, but I had a radical prostatectomy instead! This time last year I had no idea I had prostate cancer, but glad I had the tests. It’s wrecked my sex life, but for years that was pretty abysmal anyway. A sore point with me, that is. Musn’t dwell!
Since last writing in an act of hopefulness that I could be of service in a fine organisation, the Victorian Jazz Archive, I got involved with learning to be a tour guide and also help them update their web site. But this week I resigned from that endeavour because I am finding too many fuzzy-headed, painful days. When that happens, I can’t be of value to anyone and just an embarrassment to myself.
I’ve learned from the past to restrict myself to just my core activities, namely, being a good companion to my wife (42 years married yesterday), playing my jazz my way with my friends, and attending to my internet activities here and in my elfram.com site.
And…Oh yes!…In mid-October we went away for a month in our caravan, touring the south coast of NSW from Lakes Entrance to Nowra. God, this country’s beautiful in springtime, regardless of the drought. We did a lot of things, saw many sights, and went on three boat cruises. The first was out to sea from Two-Fold Bay, Eden, watching for humpback whales. We did see them, but they weren’t very spectacular.
What was spectacular was a fall by yours truly, smack down on the deck of the cruise catamaran, bucking around in rough seas! To add injury to the loss of dignity, that solidly sprained my ankle. I hobbled around for the rest of the month, dosing heavily all the time on Panadeine Forte and Neurontin for my normal pain in the back and legs, exacerbated from holiday exertion, plus the sprained ankle.
I came back an exhausted mess, then dried out over a fortnight from the analgesics, but have never really recovered. I’m up and down, but continually depressed, very tired, fuzzy in the head, and with unpredictable bursts of back and leg pain. Some days I can barely utter a coherent sentence - or so it feels.
But this is a new start to my blogging. I turn 69 on Saturday, am feeling my age, but resolve to keep enjoying what I can. I’m better off than a younger musician friend of mine, an excellent trumpet player and nice fellow all round. Last Saturday Royce Charlett dropped dead from a sudden heart attack, with no prior warning and no previous illness. I’ll miss him, and I’m going to live as though this could happen any time to me!
Vale Royce! A true gentleman, trumpet player and entertainer.
For readers in the USA, this is called a napkin! Read all about them and how to fold them here.
A day or so ago, we went to an Ethiopian restaurant called The Horn in the inner suburb of Collingwood, distinguished as the birthplace of my wife. Never had Ethiopian before, and found the combination of four vegetarian and meat dishes delicious and spicy.
Ethiopians eat with their right hand only: presumably the left is reserved for personal hygiene. You get a roll of soft, damp, cool cooked bread called injera. To eat, you put a large piece of injera onto the plate, then tear off a smaller piece. You spoon some food onto the large piece, and then you use a smaller piece to transfer the morsels and gravy to your mouth.
We were there on Thursday night to hear some contemporary jazz from a regular group called The Blow.
I had finished my food and had my head turned talking to a friend when my wife urgently said “Bill, careful!!” I looked down to see that my crumpled paper serviette had caught fire from a small candle nearby! I quickly popped it onto my empty plate and helplessly watched it combust to a thin pile of ashes. Swiftly, the waiter took my flaming plate away while I sat sheepishly looking at my wife, who started to giggle!
I had become the centre of attention by other diners, and tried to look small. However, my efforts were in vain, because all of a sudden we were assailed by the urgent, piercing sound of the smoke detectors going off If I had escaped attention before, I didn’t now, as curious diners craned their heads around the corners to see the middle-aged dick-head who set fire to his serviette (napkin)!
Effecting nonchalance, I took myself off the the toilet to wash my spicy fingers and hide from the crowd a bit. Gathering my wits, I went back in to spend the rest of the evening listening to some hot jazz from The Blow. Their music is rather experimental in the style of free jazz. It takes a bit of getting used to, but is played with a very high standard of musicianship.
My mate Bob Sedergreen was getting used to a new digital piano. I listened with fascination as he explored all the new sounds he could evoke from the large range available on keyboards these days. I was also struck by the style of Peter Harper, where he swayed and crouched as he wrestled all sorts of notes and phrases from his alto sax. Jazz as a spectator sport, as it were!
We’ll be back there soon!
I play a bit of jazz piano, reasonably well, on a good day. My musical history is somewhat chequered and potentially boring, so I’ll just say that since about 1997 I’ve been playing piano with various bands in various places, much of it unpaid and done for the fun and love of it. Before that I was playing alone or with a vocalist. And well before that I played the drums for 30 years.
Very therapeutic.
This picture, taken in 1989, shows me playing a brand new white grand piano in a shopping centre; I scored this gig for two weeks, playing daily for a couple of hours. The piano had just been unwrapped, and I was the first to play it.
Blogger Bill deflowers grand piano, 1989
Last year I joined the Victorian Jazz Archive, an organization gathering together everything possible about the history of jazz in Australia. They’ve assembled truckloads of documents, written music, recorded music in many formats, and images, both still and moving. These are stored securely in air-conditioned shipping containers.
Run on a volunteer basis and partly funded by government and other sources, the Archive has set up a large portable display system which can be erected in public spaces.
Next month the display will be in the mall of Forest Hill Chase shopping complex in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. It runs for two weeks, and they have selected pianists who’ve volunteered to play for a couple of hours at lunch times. No pay is involved, but it’s just to support the organisation.
I am to play on two of those days.
That means that I will get to play that nice white grand piano just 18 years after I broke it in, so to speak. I’m playing at lunch-time on March 19th and 28th.
Nice!
I’m busy putting a suitable list of pieces together, appropriate for playing to a general audience, and within my own limitations of style and technique on solo piano.
This is jazz music, which means you play a tune straight the first time, then do a series of improvisations on the chord structure, then wrap it up by repeating the theme tune.
I need to pick tunes that people might recognise, such as Mack the Knife, St Louis Blues, the theme from The Flintstones, and so on. I’ll also do songs from other various shows, such as Summertime, Autumn Leaves, Moon River, My Favorite Things, and some bossa nova Latin style music, which I can do well.
Apparently there will be some seats arranged around the elevated dais supporting the piano, so I might be tempted to get up and address a few words of explanation to the audience.
You can’t keep down the old lecturer in me!
It is strange how the wheel of time can roll around in your life. Here I am playing much better than I did in 1989, getting to play that old white grand piano again after eighteen years. I understand that it’s been renovated.
And so have I!
My urologist today tells me I have a greatly enlarged prostate gland, with 3 out of 12 biopsy samples showing cancer cells with a Gleason score of 7 on a scale from 2 to 10 (worst case 10). This means that I have a relatively aggressive prostate cancer.
Given my age of 68, with my state of health being quite good, and longevity in the family, he recommends total removal of the prostate and the seminal vesicles. This is called “radical prostatectomy“.
He offers operation by laparoscopy using a robotic system controlled by the surgeon, namely him, Dr S. Sengupta. This gives least trauma and speediest recovery. He has trained recently at the Mayo Clinic, New York. I have accepted his advice, but was not pressured to do so. The alternatives were “watchful waiting”, radiology, or more invasive, older surgical methods. There are pros and cons to all of this.
The operation will occur during the week starting January 15th. It will take half a day in the operating theatre, but I will be in hospital up to a week, followed by many week’s convalescence at home, initially with a urinary catheter in place. I will have have a very small chance of continuing urinary incontinence in the long run.
It is pretty well certain that I will have greatly reduced or zero erectile ability, since the body’s source of testosterone will be removed. I am told that that can be remedied with Viagra, but considering that our sexual relationship has been moribund for over seven years, that will not be necessary - at least, not at home.
I think I can cope with all of the above. Now, I do have top medical and hospital private health insurance, but it seems that this method is not well covered. Consequentially, I will have to pay out-of-pocket medical expenses adding up to more than $8000!! I do not have ready access to such a sum.
I will have to take a bank loan to consolidate my current circumstances and expand to cover this new situation.
This will be a substantial blow, but not nearly as serious as choosing inaction, then only to find that my PSA level rises some years further down the track, with concomitant spread of this known cancer to other organs. Best be rid of the source now and for ever!
I can cope with a loan, but not with the uncertainty to my health.
I am really pissed off with the way things are turning out, because as regards sex, I had a lousy, screwed-up childhood and adolescence and a sexually disappointing marriage and sex in general. But that wasn’t really her fault, and most probably mine. Let me just say that I reckon that I have had only 1% of the sex that I would have liked in my life, and very little of that was really good.
I blame the stupid churches and their political and social hangers-on. Go to Hell, the lot of you! Damn you with your pathetic, infantile, cruel, crude “beliefs”. And I was one for 12 years, too!!
What a waste of good life energy!!
New Year’s Eve seems to be special in many countries, even ones dominated with a religion different from the Western ones. Not surprisingly, because it’s not exactly a religious festival, unless you note that it’s related to the structure of the Gregorian calendar. Nor is it pagan, as far as I know. It’s just what happens, for many reasons. Some reader might correct me on that point. Read up on it in Wikipedia.
And so Glenyce and I sought to go somewhere to celebrate.
On one hand we had the choice of going to a family do dominated by uncontrolled kids and also in the middle of a long-running family feud. Not only that, but they do karaoke! On the other hand, we could go out somewhere else, just the two of us, preferably surrounded by congenial company, food, wine and entertainment.
Amazingly, we managed to book a table for two at the Hofbrauhaus, a German restaurant in the Melbourne CBD. We went there for new Year’s Eve two years ago, and loved it.
At a set $69 each, plus drinks, it was slightly expensive, but we knew there’d be good food, a jolly atmosphere, and excellent music from a two piece band playing everything from Strauss through European standards, jazz, plenty of show tunes, and also pop, rock and roll. The drummer does a 3-minute drum solo that as an ex-drummer I greatly appreciate!
The place was filled with hundreds of coloured balloons all over the ceiling. We all got party hats, and near midnight we got complimentary strawberry champagne and apple fritters. The main meal was three-courses a strong German influence. It was excellent. The service was good.
We danced quite a bit, sedately, because we both have bad backs. We’re paying the price today, but it was worth it! There was a floor show with yodelling and a man playing playing the Harry Lime them on a zither. Two couples in German country dress did a “slap dance”, a Bavarian speciality. A singer did cabaret-style numbers and then they got audience members to participate in playing a set of tuned Bavarian cow bells.
Later on we got up and did the Chicken Dance, the Hokey Pokey, Auld Lang Syne and a conga line out into the street. It was exhausting, but it was good to have a “knees up” (literally!) in company of a happy crowd of people.
It was a balmy night in Melbourne, and after midnight we went outside into a lane-way to take a breath of fresh air. We could hear the roar and crackle of a huge fireworks display going on around the Yarra River about a mile away, but they were out of sight. We felt really good because we knew that a huge crowd of our fellow citizens were having a wow of a time!
We each had had two glasses of strawberry champagne, and shared a nice bottle of red, plus a glass of fiery liquor called schnapps. The waitress set fire to it as she served it, and it burned with a beautiful blue flame. It burnt well because it was about 80% alcohol! It was called Teufelskraute, which I think means Devil’s Head! But I always make sure I’m below the alcohol limit for driving.
The freeway traffic was light, and we were soon home. I get a bit of gastric reflux, and was up to about 3am letting my stomach settle. Next day I slept in until 1pm!! Glenyce had risen earlier (being an early bird anyway), but had suffered about five sets of leg cramps during the night.
Yesterday was a recovery day, and today, together with our son Peter, we took our two granddaughters, 6 and 7, to the Melbourne Museum. I came home, staggered to bed and slept for an hour, but we have had a very happy day.
Tomorrow I visit the urologist, to hear the news on my cancer. good or bad.
In February I went with my wife Glenyce in a caravan to the town of Hall’s Gap, in the depths of the Grampians, a large mountain range located in the Western District of Victoria. Like much of southern Australia it is prone to bushfires, and a major blaze in the area on New Years Day had caused extensive damage.
The hot weather continued, and from Sunday Feb 22rd to Thursday Feb 26th (Australia Day) another fire, caused by lightning, spread widely from the depths of the Grampians across into farms and small towns, destroying much property, stock, and even causing deaths of two people who were overwhelmed by the smoke, crashed the car and were tragically burnt to death near the small town of Moyston. Hall’s Gap itself was under threat, but fortunately was saved by valiant efforts from firefighters and residents.
Now, for some years I have been performing in various jazz bands in the Grampians Jazz Festival. I play the piano, and enjoy playing jazz whenever I can manage it. I had booked my current group, Bill Leithhead’s Jazzmates, into the festival. But we all had to hold our breath after the fires while we waited for the authorities to decide whether the festival could continue. Hundreds of burnt trees had to be made safe for road travel, the electricity and phone had to be reconnected, white posts and reflectors had to be replaced along the roads, and also the town water supply had to be made safe after some contamination indirectly caused by the fires.
At last we got the go-ahead, the news came that the festival was on, and we did the 4-hour drive westwards from Melbourne. We enjoyed the jazz festival, enjoyed listening and playing, and did quite a lot of photography. About 120 bands were there, and an estimated 5000 visitors came along - that includes musicians and their friends, and many visitors from surrounding towns, and from Melbourne. I had not tried to take photos of a jazz festival before, so tried to capture some aspects of it all. The results can be seen in my Photobucket image hosting site as follows:
On Saturday morning a Jazz Parade was enjoyed by everyone.
From Friday Feb 10th to Sunday Feb 12th a total of about 7 different venues were in use by bands, into the small hours of the night. I tried to show what it is like, and my photos of some , but not all of the venues can be seen in my Jazz Activities pictures in Photobucket, split into segments for easier viewing.
After the jazz festival finished, we stayed several more days to unwind and photograph the burnt areas. I had not been close to the aftermath of such extensive bushfires, so decided to try and show what we saw. I actually photographed for the next 4 days, on and off. The various regions affected by the bushfires had their own different characters.
The road south 60km down from Hall’s Gap to Dunkeld had only just been opened, so we spent an afternoon going down there and back. This was the area where the fire had started from a lightning strike, and travelled down SE, driven by a hot NW wind. This was badly burnt, but after only a 2 0r so weeks, there were new signs of life. Split into 3 segments for ease of viewing.
Major damage had also happened when that fire diverged to the east and destroyed a lot of properties and two lives in the Pomonal-Moyston regions. This is where many houses, property and stock were lost. Split into 3 segments for easier viewing.
The earlier fire on New Years Day, called the Deep Lead fire (after a place name), had damaged areas closer towards Stawell, and we toured that region, too. But it was confusing, because the fires had crossed over each 0ther.
And both fires had crisscrossed other areas and made their mark, and so here are some images from the Stawell to Hall’s Gap road.
And so we came home, and I worked on all those photos to show what it was like up at the Grampians after a serious bushfire, but incorporating a joyful, cheerful jazz festival that we hope did its part to lift the spirit of the town of Hall’s Gap and those nearby.
We will certainly be back there, and in spring the wildflower display should be very spectacular, if we have enough rain!!
The Grampians will grow back and bloom again!!
Original Blog post at this time point called Faking It! has been shifted to the Pages (full articles) as seen at top right —–>
You can also go there by clicking here.
In a previous blog item I waxed not so lyrical about some of my experiences playing in jazz bands with vocalists. It seemed to focus on female singers, and was meant to, because it encapsulated certain feelings that other musos and myself had about them. This is a general phenomenon, I believe, and applies to the large number of rather imperfect wannabes out there. Much the same could be said of some of the musos, I can tell you!
And after that, we tend to regard most vocalists as a potential menace and look for the Exit sign. Much in the same way that I regard any dog that approaches me in the street as a potential attack animal!! If that upsets dog owners who swear that their animal is harmless, then tough titties to you, you pavement foulers, you! And never mind about “She won’t bite you! She’s a family pet, and as gentle as a lamb!” Poppycock!!
I haven’t upset anyone for over a week with this blog, and want to rectify that fault here. But it won’t be by further libelling vocalists. But will there be an onslaught of wounded owners of those universally smelly, slobbering, hole-digging, barking and growling shit machines? Maybe, but it is unlikely, because, as yet, this blog has a minuscule reader base.
Glenyce and I got lost last Sunday during a pleasant drive in the Dandenong Ranges, a beautiful range (well duh!) just east of Melbourne. Dressed well, we looked in antique shops and thought to get a Devonshire Tea. But the place was a mad-house, with cars everywhere, parking scarce, wall-to-wall people enjoying a sunny winter’s day. We finished up at Silvan Reservoir, a water-storage for the city, with beautiful wide lawns studded with conifers and deciduous European trees, but surrounded by mixed eucalypt forest.
Last year Glenyce and I had a mid-week picnic there on a cool, grey winter’s day with hardly a soul to be seen. I had my camera and searched for fungi to photograph, a hobby of mine. I took a couple of dozen shots, including some exotic fungi associated with the exotic trees. Now here we were again, and although I was not dressed for it, we obviously had to check out the fungi again.
Because fungi photography involves much kneeling and lying in the moist leaf litter, I was reluctant, but made a beeline for the very stumps and areas I remembered well from a year ago! There they were, like old friends. So I pulled up my clean slacks above my knees and could kneel in the dirt, contort my body to look into the viewfinder of my trusty Canon EOS300 SLR, and do the usual damage to my protesting back!
Cursing those lucky owners of digital with swivelling viewfinders, I took shot after shot of fungi we spotted everywhere. Glenyce is a fungi-spotter par excellence, and her gimlet eyes missed nothing!
With a screaming back and knobbly knees protesting at being assaulted by assorted twigs, small pebbles and squashy, rotten leaves, I recorded the little bastards for posterity, hoping that there were in focus and that if all went well, I could identify some of them later on. After each shot I had to wipe the dirty debris off my knees and adjust my trousers.
Glenyce had just found for me my first glimpse of an Australian truffle called a Thaxterogaster (where do they get these names?). I bent down to photograph these little potato-like blobs, with twigs of the shrubs stabbing my neck, when I heard a sort of whooping noise and a squelching sort of thump!
Glenyce had walked on a greasy-mud slope and gone arse-over-tit, as we Aussies call it. Now, at our age (66) a fall can be nasty, so let me say that I was concerned about her. But when we both stopped giggling, she stood up with perfect circles of mud on the knees of her jeans! And I thought I was the one taking the risk!
Uninjured but shaken, we wandered off to find the Armillaria and Gymnopilus species on the very same stumps we saw last year. When we finally drove out, we saw some big more fungi in the lawn, did a circle around the driveways, and shot it - so to speak. It was a nice Paxillus involutis, an introduced species with a marvellous inrolled cap margin!!
Off we drove at 4:3 pm into a gathering dusk, wondering if they still had the desired scone and jam and cream with cappuccino somewhere. Nope! - we found nothing promising! But miles away, on the road back to Melbourne, we found Micawber Tavern, an English-style pub and bistro in the midst of the tree ferns and tall mountain ash in Sherbrooke Forest.
Moving through the smoky bar, we settled at a bistro table to await our cappuccinos, and the shared two-spoon Sticky Date Pudding with cream and ice cream. The bar was pretty full and the joint was mighty cozy with a log fire and great piped music that I liked!
Tarnation and dagnamit it! It was a terrific mixture of classical rock-a-billy å la Bill Haley, and what the Blues Brothers were pleased to call “country and western”! If it wasn’t for the tree-ferns outside we coulda sworn we were in Bob’s Country Bunker, Ohio, US of A!
You know how people say. “I can remember exactly where I was when I heard Kennedy was shot”, well, I remember the room exactly where I was when I first heard “Rock Around the Clock” on the radio, when I was about sixteen - it was electrifying!! I had been brought up on a diet of what you might call 50/50 dance music and some classical. My mother was a dance band pianist, and at age about eleven I became her drummer - that lasted about 30 years!
I always liked jazz, but wasn’t really aware of the “blues”, which is a pattern of chords found in all sorts of music. It doesn’t have to be sob-story about lost love, but full-on, driving, gritty music with universal appeal. I only understood “blues” chords forty-five years later, but Bill Haley’s rivetting rock and roll number has that blues pattern, as do many standards of Elvis Presley and thousands of others.
Glenyce and I sat cheerfully soaking up the ambience of the place: the log fire, the smoky bar, the growing crowd of locals, the tree-ferns outside in the early dusk of a Melbourne winter, the beautiful breasts of the lovely black-haired young thing sitting close by! I couldn’t take my eyes off her tattoo! Not so much the tattoo as her beautifully darkly perfect skin.
As my temperature and my blood rose I remembered one afternoon thirty years ago when I walked in nearby Sherbrooke Forest with Glenyce and our three children, the youngest about three. In the dense forest we lost our way and finally walked out of the thicket into the back yard of this tavern. Back then, embarrassed, we ordered afternoon tea and a taxi! Refreshed, we clambered into the cab and instructed the amused cabbie to drive us back to the carpark back on the other side of the forest!
Anyway! As Glenyce and I “chowed down” on the Sticky Date Pudding I giggled as I thought of the peculiarly Australian connotation of a “date”. Undaunted by good manners, I shared the idea with Glenyce, so that the delicious dark sweet developed a strange nuance for us both. She knows me well, and is so tolerant!
I have always found most song lyrics to be boringly banal; so much so that I tend to ignore them. Although this might detract from my musicianship, I still feel that if you have anything important to say, use prose, or, if you must, poetry. But please, please, don’t smother it with music!
There are many exceptions, of course. “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Rock Around the Clock” would both sound much the same without the words; and so they should, because they have an identical blues chords pattern. With other musos, we could play for an hour doing solos over that pattern, make it all sound different all the time, and have a ball.
The buxom beauty left so I turned my attention to the music - a typically love-lorn country music song. Amusing myself by listening for the clichés that make up such music, I successfully encouraged my long-suffering, shy wife to try doing the little vocal “catch” characteristic of such music. Diffidently, she followed my example so that we, in our small corner, chuckled together over those full octave downward little hiccups in the middle the words that lend the necessary pathos.
Suddenly the music went up a few notches and we bopped along together to the shuffly beat as in Bill Haley’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll”. I suddenly yearned to play with a rhythm and blues band - piano or drums - it wouldn’t matter! I never got to do that, except on occasion with Mum and the odd sax player or two who could break out of the foxtrot mode into rock’n'roll or blues.
Nothing defeated my mother and me! On a number of occasions we had requests to play “Golden Wedding” on only piano and drums. We always did it, to great applause. It’s supposed to have a backing band with trombone, trumpet and solo clarinet. But I knew the drum solo backwards because I learned it off the record at age ten! And the audience always provides the band and clarinet in their own imagination!
We left as the band arrived for the 6pm session of rock and blues, the crowd of local yokels eagerly filling the bar for their Sunday fix of live music. Posters gaudily displayed a healthy string of gigs for bands who play live music suitable for lovers of hot rods, pretty girls and strong, simple rhythms. It felt good to see! Any place that allows live bands if fine by me - so many places are poker-machine hot-houses or have a DJ. Urgh!
With a warm glow in our hearts we braved the cold dusk, hopped in the car, started the engine, turned on the heater and switched on the headlights, which shone brightly, probing at the mysterious forest glades, sputtered and went out! Some gremlin had deprived us of our low beam headlights for our trip through the the heavy traffic of Ferntree Gully and busier suburbs!
But that’s another story!
I have been playing the piano on and off since I was about 3 years old. My mother Millie Leithhead was a dance band pianist pretty well all her life. For forty years I was her drummer. And in the last 10 years or so I got involved playing a lot of jazz piano in lots of bands in many places. A really nice lady, a singer, Jan, helped me to get started.
Last year I dropped out suddenly for all sorts of reasons. I will probably pick it up again soon. On my own terms!
I really like just playing music. I really just like hearing music - without any words. I’ll play songs that have words. People can hum them to themselves or listen in their own brains.
But spare me the vocals!! Because for me, they just get in the way of the music.
From childhood I realised that most singers sing badly. The other thing is that most people can’t tell the difference! Just look at TV, rock music and “popular music”. Wall-to-wall crap singing! Have you ever listened to the music in supermarkets? It’s what I call wailing bitch music! They would call it”’soul” - I think it is really “arsole”!
In country jazz festivals, where I played a lot, there are a lot of pre—tty ordinary musos. I have been one of them. That’s partly what they’re about - a chance to mix and match and jam and ham. Of course, some of them are brilliant….!
So the musos are gigging along having a good old time, and the audience is tappin’ and jigglin’ and maybe a bit of dancing and prancing.
So then a lady comes up and grabs the mike. And what does she want to sing? A fucking ballad! Something where she can “emote”. So she sings her friggin’ song, and she gets to have a moan and a groan. And you know what?
A lot of the audience love it! They love the maudlin’ words! They sing along and have a little sadness, a little sigh,
“I’m gonna weep! I’m gonna die! Will he luvv me? Bye and bye?”
“I cain’t live wivout him/her/(insert: ‘current lust object’)!”
“My bebby done me wrong! So I havta sing this fuckin’ song!!”
“An’ ah’rm gonna make it re–ally l-o-n-g”
I feel like shouting “Listen!! Isn’t there anyone wanna take this sheila out the carpark and give ‘er the good shagging she really wants and needs?”
But I don’t. Because most of these women are my friends. I love ‘em, in their own way. They are bonzer sheilas!! I respect them, even adore them. I love to sit down with people and talk about life, the universe and everything, have a good laugh, get drunk a bit. And there isn’t one for which I would say no to a good naughty!! If she asked. In ya dreams!!!
We..ll .. one or two … I might say no ..
Nope, none!!
And that’s why I don’t give way to my true feelings! That’s why we keep out traps shut if we know what’s good for us.!
Some of us havta sleep with these singers! Jeeezuz!
Not the male vocalists, but! Speaking for myself …. you understand…?
And most of the musos feel the same as I do. We just wanna boogie (say that with a loooooong ooooooo sound, for Christ’s sake!”) We wanna jive, bounce, be alive, get goin’, take risks in our music. We wanna push the pace, trump the Ace!!
That’s what I think!!
If you’ve got a message for the world, don’t sing it! Write it down and keep ya trap shut! Or put it in a blog, like me here.
And am I going to be in trouble if any of my vocalist friends read this!!
