While I am working on writings about Plegate, the televising of Legal procedures and the News of the World Trial I will continues with the new Daily notes series looking back on the past few days after spending the whole of Friday shattered after a night when I found it impossible to sleep having gone to bed later and then setting the alarm for 6.30 in order to start charging up the battery of my car which went flat when I returned from shopping. It is now just before 9am on November 2nd, a very sharp cold morning but having had a continuous session of sleep in terms of remaining in bed although I do remember two sets of interesting waking dreams. I will now breakfast quickly complete the writing and decide if I am going out in search of a local bar showing Newcastle’s game against Chelsea the Premiership which is on BT TV and not Sky.
It has been a good week otherwise several respects with the Trial and the first televising at the Court of appeal commanding my full attention. However there appears to have been no development in the case of the three officials of the Police Federation after their appearance with others before the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee which did hold a further meeting on Leadership in the Police. There was to have been a further meeting involving those who took the actual decision to not to pursue the recommendations of the appointed statutory investigation officer. I suspect the case is also now entangled in the legal processes.
Late Thursday afternoon I took the car to the bottom of the hill and then walked trough the North Marine park to the new leisure centre where I was issued with an Active plus card for free. There is a car park adjacent to the centre which charges, I assume in Winter only a penny a minute with a maximum of £1 which is the free for the rest of the day. I visited just before 9 where there was plenty of space although by mid afternoon when I took the car for a run to get petrol at Seaburn, I noted that it appeared full on my way back. My charging of the car battery had been successful and I went for the first run as far as Marsden rocks before parking in a side street to ensure the refuse bin was cleared. Before filling the car with petrol now under 130 a litre I continued along the coast road to the roundabout at the junction with road to the harbour and to the bridge over the Wear in order to view the improvements being made to the sea front esplanade and which appears to comprises some raised beds, large rockeries and some wood features as well as new seating along the sea wall.
After registration at the Leisure centre on Thursday evening I had crossed over the road and walked to new Sambuca converted from the former harbour mouth station where I find only one other table occupied by a young family where the child got upset as the lighting was turned down and the table candles lit. I had taken my latest Montalbano with me, The Tracks in the Sand and the manager, a Montalbano look alike if ever there was one, mentioned hat he came from the town in Sicily which the novels are set. In addition to his attention there was a young couple of assistant who looked married or at least engaged and later on provide the black pepper while the other the cheese, I had the Minestrone soup, a Napoli Pizza ( anchovy, olives and salami) and coffee for £5.50 in total.
Having complete the shopping and leaving the car with lights on while unpacking and went to the toilet, thus flattening the battery I had to walk briskly to reach the Customs House in time for the commencement of the swing jazz septet, piano, drums, base, trumpet, and two alternating with clarinets and saxes plus the singer Cecile all the way from the USA as the horn player who has lived in in New Orleans for past 23 years, The singer only had one number in the first hour set but returned for the start of the second half with a group of three songs and then returned for several more at the end, with some Billy Holiday covers for which she had an excellent voice reproducing some phrases but with a deeper sound at times as well as some classy top notes to reveal and considerable vocal range.
Cecille Mcordin Salavant aged 23 from Miami is unknown this side of the Atlantic as she appears to be to most of jazz loving USA fans but not for long on after this performance and has already merited a significant piece of writing about her in the New York Times by Tony Cenicola which I reproduce in full
“The jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant, who recently turned 23 and is still mostly unknown to jazz audiences, though not for much longer, sometimes puts on a face when she is approaching or leaving a stage. It looks like a mixture of wariness, amusement and alarm: uh-oh, and hm! and what?
“Her intonation is impeccable, her diction is impeccable,” the pianist Aaron Diehl said of the 23-year-old singer Cécile McLorin Salvant.
Onstage she moves within a small perimeter and talks evenly, mostly in facts, to the audience. She has short hair and white, thick-framed glasses; she smiles easily, but doesn’t have the typical mannerisms of many younger jazz singers — conciliatory, or flirty, or mystical. Ms. Salvant is as serious as a library, and never corny.
She radiates authority and delivers a set with almost a dramatic arc. (This also describes, partly, what she did to win the Thelonious Monk Competition in Washington in 2010; one consequence of that performance was that she was taken on by the manager Ed Arrendell, whose only other client is Wynton Marsalis.) In front of a trio led by the pianist Aaron Diehl she sings clearly, with her full pitch range, from a pronounced low end to full and distinct high notes, used sparingly — like the one I heard a few weeks ago at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola on the last word of “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” the spire in a magnificent set. Her voice clamps into each song, performing careful variations on pitch, stretching words but generally not scatting; her face conveys meaning, representing sorrow or serenity like a silent-movie actor.
She also presents a lot of jazz history, and other things, within an hour and a quarter. Her recent sets have included Bert Williams’s “Nobody,” from 1906; the early-20th-century traditional work song “John Henry”; the standards “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” and “Autumn in New York”; her setting of the poem “Le Front Caché Sur Tes Genoux,” written in the 1930s by the Haitian poet Ida Faubert; and, via her own poem-song “Woman Child,” a sense of Abbey Lincoln in her straightforward, imperious middle period.
“Woman Child,” a parable about innocence and experience, is the title song of her album, to be released early next year. It’s the first original song she didn’t throw away. She wrote it a year and a half ago while studying jazz in France. “Abbey is the reason I tried to write anything.” Ms. Salvant said in a recent telephone interview. “I was adamant about not writing. It was a defense mechanism.” What changed her mind? “The simplicity of her writing, and the impact of it,” she said. “The text is clear. It’s not hermetic.”
Ms. Salvant grew up in Miami, which is still, for now, her home base. Her father, a doctor, is Haitian; her mother, founder and president of a small bilingual French-English school in Miami, is mixed-race French-Guadeloupean. Their daughter grew up taking classical voice and piano lessons. After high school she moved to Aix-en-Provence, France, to study political science and law, and started classical voice classes there at the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud. Then she visited a jazz class taught by the saxophonist and clarinetist Jean-François Bonnel.
“I asked her to sing me a song, and she sang ‘Misty,’ and I thought, ‘There she is!’ ” Mr. Bonnel wrote last week in an enthusiastic e-mail. He immediately put before her a list of the singers she should absorb before she went any further (Ms. Lincoln, Sarah Vaughan, Betty Carter, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Ethel Waters, Babs Gonzales).
Oh, she’d heard a little jazz. She’d memorized Sarah Vaughan’s final record, “Brazilian Romance”; her mother played it around the house. But basically she was coming fresh to his canon. “I didn’t know any of it,” she remembered. “I didn’t like Billie Holiday. She freaked me out. She kind of depressed me.” (She had heard only the late, tragic Holiday.) Four months later, sounding eerily self-possessed, she sang her first gig in Aix with Mr. Bonnel’s group.
All those earlier singers — as well as one of her own favorites, Valaida Snow, the singer and trumpeter who briefly became an international star in the 1930s — can at times rise to the surface in her voice, and one measure of her growth will be how well she can suppress her skill at mimicry. That’s normal for a young jazz musician. But there’s something different about Ms. Salvant: a sense that she’s coming from an outside track, with some outside interests. (The best music she saw last year, she told me, was George Benjamin’s contemporary opera “Written on Skin,” performed in Aix with the composer conducting.) Both the business and audience of American jazz in general are new to her. She’s not hedging; she hasn’t been conditioned to.
There could be some lesson in here, about the blessing of blooming late or not coming to New York until you’re ready. Or maybe it’s really a story of a young person who had an extraordinary period of growth in a short time, still considers herself a student, takes an interest in old things, and doesn’t quite know what her plans are, beyond moving to New York and filling her obligations. (She will play in the Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series in the Allen Room on Feb. 2, near her album’s release date; her schedule of club and festival bookings for the rest of the year is just now falling into place.)
Ms. Salvant has been working with Mr. Diehl since last spring, after signing with Mack Avenue records, one of jazz’s bigger independent labels. Mr. Diehl is attracted to tight, balanced form and an early-’60s group sound; John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet is one of his heroes. She’d worked out a few arrangements before they met, but in a very short time they’ve wrapped their music tight: there seems to be a reason for every solo. “
I thought I had purchased her CD Cecile from Amazon and which includes numbers performed on the night but this proved a download which I had to cancel although this did not proved difficult. I cannot still find the CD, The first album called Woman Child based on the track did not appeal
On the night she was Matthias Seuffert a master of all the reed instruments who performed the role of the Benny Goodman role at The Sage Gateshead, He is a great admirer of Artie Shaw where the two sets included some of show
I was also impressed by Trumpeter Duke Heitger is another young instrumentalist at the peak of his powers who has made New Orleans his home, but divides his time with New York and Europe. One of his heroes is Bunny Berigan amongst his favourite players whose work was also featured
The rest of the group comprised François Bonnel (from France (clarinet & saxes), UK’s Spats Langham guitar & vocal), Henry Lemaire from France on bass, and Richard Pite (UK, drums), and under the direction of BBC Jazz Heritage Award-winning pianist, arranger and bandleader Keith Nichols. The 440 seat theatre, larger than stage 2 at the Sage was full apart from the first couple of rows which are below the state.
I enjoyed a coffee in a cup which I had to request during the interval but the walk back in the damp atmosphere was not great fun!
Last night when I had better things to do I watched a recorded programme on the formation and long performance history of the Mood Blues at least two and have hours in length and may have been longer. The core of the Moody Blues came from Birmingham in the 1950’s as El Riot and the rebels in Mexican outfits breaking up as Michael Pinder joined the Army and served in Germany as a clerk. He played hymns for a Sunday military service using a provided organ and was rewarded with the musical instruments to form a group. However he quickly go himself discharged as unfit when he came across the rock and roll of Elvis and Bill Haley, returning to England joining up with his Ray Thomas the only one of the core originals who had stayed in music with John Lodge deciding he wanted to finish further education. The two recruited Dennie Laine guitarist and vocalist, drummer Grahame Edge and basis Clint Warwick to form the first Mood Blues in 194. There are differences of memory over who thought of the name and why, but none had any idea that a core group of three would still be going on tour in the USA in 2013 and where they have a huge following.
It was their second single Go Now which attracted national attention, a number which is still played on the airways to this day., their only pop charts number 1 and which reached number 10 in the USA. The Group was reformed in 1966 with Laine leaving and John Lodge finishing his college study joining together with someone who was to have a major influence, Justin Hayward recommended by Eric Burdon of the Animals with whom they had toured and formed a long term friendship. The establishment of lifelong friendship with other musicians and those in the record industry management and production side has been a features throughout their extraordinary careers and also my Mary Wilde.
It was at this point in their career that although I favoured Go Now the group took a direct with which I was not a great fan introducing strings, first as sounds using the Mellotron which Pinder has mastered having worked in the factory which made the first attempt at an electronic form of sound although in fact the instrument which looks a keyboard, originally with a rhythm side and melodic side was in fact a glorified tape machine.
It was in 1967 that Decca records chief Hugh Mendl suggested they create an album with fusion of orchestral work, Dvorak’s New World Symphony, In fact they decided to continue with the orchestral fusion concept but using their own material creating what has become their best known album Days of Future Passed and their other historic still played classic Nights of White Satin which I am listening to again the full 7 minute version on Deezer radio on demand. Credit for the album has also to go to Peter Knight who not just arranged the material but was also a key individual and to produce Tony Clark who they came to regard as their sixth member.
In the programme the group explain that the poetic nature of their lyrics and performing within the broad concept of the psychedelic sound they were hailed by one enthusiast in the USA as prophets and the experience is said to have led in later years to the creation of the number I’m just a singer in a rock and roll band. They had great success over the next seven years.
One interesting aside was their reaction to the experience of touring with the Beatles at the height of the public mania they realised the restrictions on having a private life and decided to take steps to avoid success not putting their photos on their records for example and limiting interviews.
For two years in the mid 1970’s they decided on a break from each performing separate material but through the record label they had established with eh help of Decca in order to control the quality of the releases in what had become world wide interest. They came back together in 1977 but Pinder had remarried and moved to a ranch in the USA and this restricted some concert performing, he left the group in 1980. A loss which the remaining three felt deeply was the retirement on health ground Ray Thomas but amazing they found a professional flute player who could also rock. Recruiting Norda Mullen who had grown up with her elder sister playing the music of the group. The programme included comment from Petrol Toll the one flutist who achieved International success in the world of rockfish music. only other, Edge, Hayward and Locke have supplanted their core group with other musicians for both live performances and recordings and have remained in demand throughout the world especially in America` This proved a fascinating programme which held my attention as had the Pink Floydd, Another Brick in Wall, still also touring and selling records, and yet another group who I failed to follow and yet mirror a great chunk of my previous experience.
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