I’ve no more … to give

And now here’s a vocal summation of my views on Brexit by Thomas Benjamin Wild Esq, a chap with a lovely beard…

Follow @telescoper

Advertisements

Fat Tuesday!

Well, it’s Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day, Mardi Gras and Fat Tuesday which gives me four excuses to post this lovely old record made by Humphey Lyttelton’s Paseo Jazz Band in the early Fifties. That’s the band that featured Humph’s regular crew alongside a number of London’s marvellous West Indian musicians of the time, hence the abundance of percussion and the resulting infectious calypso beat. Enjoy!

Follow @telescoper

R.I.P. André Previn (1929-2019)

Seven years ago – can it have been so long? – I attended a concert at St David’s Hall in Cardiff that included a performance of Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony. I enjoyed the performance so much that at the end of my blog post about the evening I asked for recommendations of a good recording. The clear favourite – which I bought straight away – was by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by André Previn.

Last night I heard that André Previn had passed away and I wanted to post a little tribute to him. Naturally, I thought of posting that Morecambe and Wise Sketch from 1971, which I love, but almost every website that has mentioned André Previn has included that, so instead I thought I’d post the Third Movement (Adagio) of the Rachmaninov Symphony I heard those years ago. It’s a gorgeous performance of a gorgeous work and, I think, a fitting tribute to a great pianist, both in classical and jazz idioms, conductor and composer who brought music (and laughter) to so many people.

R.I.P. André Previn (1929-2019)

Follow @telescoper

Norman Granz Jam Session No. 6

It behoves me to spend most of this evening at a postgraduate Open Evening here at Maynooth University so I thought I’d take a little tea break and post a bit of Jazz.

This recording, made in 1954, is from one of the famous `All-Star’ jam sessions organized by impresario Norman Granz. These are fascinating for jazz fans because they provide a rare opportunity to hear extended solos from great musicians, not confined to the usual three-minute 78rpm records of the period. This one is almost half an hour long altogether, and was originally issued in two parts (on either side of an LP record) so there’s a rather clumsy edit half way through. There are also a few jumps on the record, but I don’t think they spoil this classic too much.

Norman Granz liked to select contrasting musicians for these spontaneous recordings and this line-up was clearly intended to juxtapose modernist trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie with his boyhood inspiration Roy Eldridge. It is indeed fascinating to hear them play one after the other, but the star of this show for me is the great clarinettist Buddy De Franco whose solo is absolutely superb – few Jazz clarinettists are able to match his control in the upper register. The other musicians clearly enjoy his solo too; I’m pretty sure that it’s Dizzy Gillespie you can hear delivering the encouraging shouts as De Franco gets into full flood.

The soloists (in order) are: Flip Phillips (tenor sax); Bill Harris (trombone); Buddy De Franco (clarinet); Oscar Peterson (piano); Herb Ellis (guitar); Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet); and Roy Eldridge (trumpet). The other musicians providing rhythm accompaniment are Ray Brown (bass) and Louie Bellson (drums). That’s not a bad band is it?

The tune played here is the swing era standard Stomping at the Savoy which is a good choice for this kind of jam session because (a) everyone knows it (b) the melody is quite simple, and (c) it has interesting chords for the musicians to improvise over. It is in standard 32-bar AABA format with a relatively simple A section (Db6, Ab9, Db6, Ddim, Ebm7, Ab7, Db, Db) but has a B section (bridge) with considerable chromatic embellishment (Gb9/G9, Gb9, B13/F#m6, B13, E9/F9, E9, A13, Ab9b); these are assuming that it is played in Db. It’s fascinating to hear how each of the soloists navigates the middle eight on this record.

Stomping at the Savoy is usually played a bit faster than it is here, but I like this beautifully relaxed and comfortably swinging tempo.

UPDATE: By an amazing coincidence*, Part 1 of this session was played by Bernard Clarke last night on The Blue of the Night (at about 10.30).

*It’s not a complete coincidence, as we had an exchange on Twitter about it a while ago and he said he would try to play it sometime – it was nevertheless a surprise that he played it on exactly the same day as I posted this!

Follow @telescoper

Piano in the Foreground

Judging by the statistics provided by WordPress about the traffic on this blog, there’s less than overwhelming interest in the posts I do about Jazz. Whenever I put such an item on here the number of hits invariably goes down nearly as steeply as when I post poetry. On the other hand, there is at least some overlap between people who like Jazz and people who read this blog for other reasons. Last week, for example, during the public defence of a PhD thesis in Copenhagen the candidate made reference to an album by the great pianist, composer and bandleader Duke Ellington. A large part of the dissertation was devoted to foreground contamination of the cosmic microwave background, which is why Piano in the Foreground came up. I even asked a question about the album cover at the end of the talk – I recognized Duke Ellington and drummer Sam Woodyward, but couldn’t name the bass player. It turned out to be a trick question, in that two bass players appear in the personnel listing of the album, but the one in the picture is Aaron Bell.

Undaunted by the likely negative impact on my blog statistics, I thought I would share the album here. Ellington didn’t record many albums with a piano trio, which is a great shame as he had a wonderful individual style that comes across very well in that setting. He was also extremely influential pianist – you can definitely hear his influence in Thelonious Monk, for example.

Here is the whole album via Youtube and very fine it is too. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did listening to it over the weekend for the first time in decades!

Follow @telescoper

The Way You Look Tonight – Eric Dolphy

It’s been a very busy week so I’m about to go home and dive into a glass or two of wine, but before doing that I thought I’d leave a little something for the weekend.

Among the other things I have to do next week is make a short trip to Copenhagen to examine a PhD candidate. This track was recorded live at Copenhagen on September 8 1961 and it features Eric Dolphy (alto sax), Bent Axen (piano), Erik Moseholm (bass) and Jørn Elniff (drums). The tune The Way You Look Tonight is an old standard, written in 1936 by Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern, but what a version this is! Dolphy tears through the changes on this performance, reinventing the piece in a way that turns what might be a routine tune into something absolutely new and refreshing. The combination of virtuosity and exuberance of the saxophone playing in this phenomenal performance is absolutely exhilarating. Enjoy!

Follow @telescoper

Ahead of Teaching

It’s 3rd February 2019, which means that today is two days after Imbolc, a Gaelic festival marking the point halfway between the winter solstice and vernal equinox. This either happens 1st or 2nd February, and this year it was former, i.e. last Friday In Ireland this day is sometimes regarded as the first day of spring, as it is roughly the time when the first spring lambs are born. It corresponds to the Welsh Gŵyl Fair y Canhwyllau and is also known as the `Cross Quarter Day’ or (my favourite) `The Quickening of the Year’.

I wrote a post about this time last year, on the day I gave my first ever lecture in Maynooth University, on Computational Physics, in a theatre called Physics Hall. That was on Thursday February 1st 2018. It’s hard to believe that was a full year ago. Time certainly has gone quickly this year.

Owing to the vagaries of the academic calendar we’re a week later getting back to teaching this year than last year so my first Computational Physics lecture won’t be until this Thursday (7th February) at 9am, but sadly it won’t be in Physics Hall, which I rather liked, but in Hall C – a much less atmospheric venue, but one rather closer to my office, which will be handy if I forget anything (which I am prone to do). There are about 25 students taking this module, a few down on last year, which means they should fit comfortably into our computer lab. I’m not surprised they moved the lecture, really. The capacity of Physics Hall is 90, and even last year I only had about 30 students. Still, it did have a piano (which Hall C does not):

Computational Physics doesn’t start until Thursday. Before that I have to start my other module: Engineering Mathematics II. This (what you would probably call a `service course’) covers a mixture of things, mainly Linear Algebra but with some other bits thrown in for fun, such as Laplace transforms. Interestingly I find the Mathematical Physics students do not encounter Laplace Transforms in the first year, but perhaps engineers use them more often than physicists do? I think I’ve written only one paper that made use of a Laplace transform. Anyway, I have to start with this topic as the students need some knowledge of it for some other module they’re taking this semester. I reckon six lectures will be enough to give them what they need. That’s two weeks of lectures, there being three lectures a week for this module.

By coincidence rather than good planning, the timetable for this module is quite nice. I have lectures on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and then the students have a choice of tutorial (on either Thursday or Friday). That means I can get through a decent amount of material each week before each tutorial. I don’t do the tutorials, by the way: that’s left to one of our PhD students, who gets paid for doing that and correcting the weekly coursework. There are about 50 students on this module, divided into two courses: Electronic Engineering and Robotics and Intelligent Devices. We don’t have Civil or Mechanical or Chemical Engineering, etc at Maynooth.

Campus has been very quiet for the last week or so. The exam period finished in late January but lectures don’t start until tomorrow morning (Monday 4th February) so there have been few students around. No doubt it will be a different story tomorrow. I’ve done my first week’s notes and compiled my first problem set so I’m more-or-less ready to go. First lecture at 2pm tomorrow in Hall H, which is one of the rooms I taught in last term so at least I know where it is!

 

Follow @telescoper