Introspective Jazz Thang!

My parents met in musical theatre! Dad was a pretty good character singer, excelling when he had a Jewish role such as Fagan from Oliver or Topov from Fiddler on the Roof. As a teenager, I worked backstage once a year, absolutely loving it.....frantic set changes, weird men in make-up and my Dad and Alec Broon necking Whyte and MacKay in the changing rooms. I must have been at least 16 as I always ended up in Stags Bar, drinking 80 shilling with amateur theatrical types, typically still with their stage make-up on. 

The highlight was always the closing night party. Nearly everyone got up and sang a solo....my Dad always doing "If I were a rich man". It was a typical Scottish working class environment with plenty drink, fags, the odd argument but lots of laughter too. Not that I'm being overly sentimental, with such an environment ultimately leading to my parents demise! It was a time that people were more socially connected though! 

Our house was a musical one.....usually Placido Damingo  backed by my mother's gin fuelled baritone. I'm convinced these evenings lying awake in bed affected my brain. Better was when my Dad played Louis Armstrong or Paul Robson. I loved the ballads of the Deep South, the dark faces,  the big white teeth and smiles that hid the injustices these great singers suffered. My dad would do what would now be considered to be politically incorrect black man impersonations and then end up telling me stories of being in Africa. Mombasa was only mentioned when my mother was out the room, I suspect this was because of the inferences that the beautiful women were quite accommodating to sailors. I also suspect not simply out of the goodness of their hearts either. 

The furthest I got in music was DJing in a few bars.....but I was more tone deaf than my mother and had the rhythm and timing of a deranged chimp! I've talked about my early days loving hip hop before and my mate Tully got us tickets for Guru's Jazzamatazz in the Assembly Rooms back in 1993. I hadn't heard much of the dude or his guests, Donald Byrd a horn player and Courtney Pine on sax! It was a memorable evening though, with two jazz supremos jamming some crazy shit. 

Years later when I was at a conference in Nashville Tennessee, I was having a wee dram with an eminent scientist who's name escapes me right now. We were in a bar at the Gaylord Opryland hotel, an obscenely huge town of a place with a river flowing through it and lots of fat American's wobbling around. Nashville gave me the creeps......preacher men on every TV channel, churches as big as football stadiums and a surreal weirdness that would have freaked a Tate Modern aficionado. 

That was uthe scientist said "f**k it let's find a jazz bar". We headed off in a taxi and were dropped off at the door of a side street boozer! Heading down the stairs, the world changed.....heavenly hell. Huggy Bear types, gangsters and other Quentin Tarantino extras sat drinking beer or spirits in tumbler glasses. 3 guys were on a stage in the corner, a trumpeter , a double bass player and a drummer. They were the archetypal jazz musicians, painful eyes from sorrow, bourbon or a mixture of both. They didn't play music, they lived it......sending their haunting frequencies and rhythms into the smoke filled room. What a night and much better than university staff room talk.

My story has a point. I went to see the film Whiplash about a young jazz drummer and a slightly psychopathic band leader this evening. It was described to me as one of the best films ever with wonderful cinematography and even better music. Hmmmm......admittedly both were excellent but I wonder if a French art house director could have raised it to another level. 

Although lead actor Miles Teller convinced Mark Kermode in his Guardian review, I was more difficult to please. Somehow he didn't quite live the music... The drumming wasn't instinctive or straight out of his soul. The band leader, J.K. Simmonds was better, with his profane and bullying put downs of band members eliciting nervous laughs from the cinema audience.  Great music, like great art, requires a degree of pathological neurology from the artist and Teller somehow didn't convey this enough for me, much as he tried. At least the film brought some memories back!