Moving house

My tosh is upping sticks to my new website, EdwardRandell.com

I hope you'll subscribe, RSS, etc as I chivvy myself into a new regime of prolific blogging in the New Year.

This isn't goodbye. It's greatbye.

Ooh, very posh

I'm looking forward to seeing Tim Key and Tom Basden in Joseph K at the Gate theatre tomorrow night.

I'm not sure why their Neanderthal characters (from their sitcom Cowards) tickle me so much. I think because they go right to the heart of the British way of communicating. Maybe there are other cultures that insist on putting even the most heartfelt utterances in quotation marks by means of little silly voices and pseudo-catchphrases. I know I do it all the time and yet it has the potential to be intensely annoying. For instance. My life at the moment is spent going back and forth between London and Paris, and I occasionally pop up to my alma mater Oxford too. But whenever I'm discussing my movements with friends you can bet we will never actually refer to any of those cities by name. They will be Londres, The Smoke, Gay Paree, Oxenford, The Ox. Maybe it goes back to Old English variation - the reluctance ever to say anything the same way twice. It's a strange kind of mania for being oblique that can't help being very obvious.

Blogapologism

It may seem as though I now only write on this blog to apologise for my lack of blogging. But, dearest readers, if you don’t think it beneath your dignity, perhaps you can follow some of the links below to other pieces I’ve written.

The last month has been heavy on vocalese, for me. I’m obsessed with the stuff at the best of times but lately I have been on an extra heavy dosage. If the word “vocalese” means nothing to you: it is a subgenre of vocal jazz that involves adding lyrics to recorded instrumental solos. The master of the art is Jon Hendricks, who recently came to play some gigs in London, and thanks to a combination of schmoozing and good fortune I was able to meet him and chat to him for the best part of two hours. He is 89 and fond of conspiracy theories, so the conversation didn’t exactly stay on topic, but it was a real thrill for me and I got some great material, some of which can be found here and some of it will be published in Jazzwise magazine in their March issue. I also reviewed one of his Ronnie Scott’s gigs for MusicOMH.

What Hendricks is to the English language, Mimi Perrin was to French. The lyrics she wrote for the Double Six are unparalleled in their wit and ingenuity, albeit almost impossible to follow if your French is as plodding as mine. I would have loved to meet her (and nearly did: the director of my French vocal group knew her well). However, she passed away on the same night I met Jon Hendricks.

The jazz world also just lost James Moody, who besides being a great bebop saxophonist was the inadvertent begetter of vocalese. I wrote a piece about his contribution to the form for Florian Städtler's Vocal Blog.

I’ve been writing plenty for the above-mentioned MusicOMH, including an interview with the guitarist Gary Lucas (Jeff Buckley and Captain Beefheart collaborator, horror movie soundtracker, lovely guy), and an end-of-year look at one of my favourite albums of 2010, Janelle Monáe’s The Archandroid. It is pipped to my personal album-of-the-year spot, though, by Joanna Newsom’s triple album Have One On Me. I’ve already gushed about Joanna on these pages.

The Hendricks and Lucas interviews were apropos of their visits to London for the London Jazz Festival. I reviewed one or two other Festival gigs, and I also did some research for the Jazz On 3 team. Listen out for their broadcast of a gig by Darcy James Argue's Secret Society.

2010 being almost dispensed with, I am making a firm New Year’s resolution to blog at least once a week starting in 2011. That may happen here at Tosh Pit, or it may happen at my not-quite-ready new website. Either way, brace yourselves.

"Paris is maybe the town I hate the most on earth"

I've been doing some writing for the excellent site musicOMH recently, and the biggest deal so far has been an interview with Yann Tiersen, whom you probably know as the composer of Amélie. For my first interview with anyone halfway famous I thought it went rather well, and Tiersen was in fabulously contrary mode, talking about how he hates Paris, how little he identifies with the image of it presented by Amélie. I did have a stomach-churning moment when I looked down halfway through the interview to see my digital recorder hadn't been working, but happily the conversation was memorable enough that I was able to run to a café and jot down most of what he'd said.

Tiersen's Amélie music, most of which had already been recorded for his own albums, genuinely merits that overused word 'iconic', and has become shorthand for Paris and old-fashioned romance (I was watching some crappy YouTube clip of Nigel Slater yesterday - without the internet I swear I could have cured cancer by now - and they were using some of the music to evoke a sense of nostalgia for childhood. Tiersen's music has that wonderful and rare ability of being reminiscent even the first time you hear it.) His new album is rather different, though: grandeur has replaced kook. It's called Dust Lane and well worth a listen.

Brit Jazz at Ronnie Scott's

Every night this week you will find me propping up the bar at Ronnie Scott's, not just because I have a drink/jazz problem but also because I'm writing about their Brit Jazz Fest. Reviews will go up here and here - oh, and here if you're on Facebook. If you're coming down at any point, say hi.

Une couple d'articles...

...on a theme of French jazz.

The Jazz à Saint-Germain-Des-Prés festival happened in Paris back in May and my review is in this month's Jazzwise magazine (August 2010, the one with Phronesis on the cover), on page 59.

And my review of the Barbican's 'Django Drom' is on the LondonJazz blog.

But enough of the French. The Brit Jazz festival is at Ronnie Scott's from this Saturday and for the second half I'll be working as a writer in residence, with my reviews appearing on the club's site and the Jazzwise site. The line-up is outstanding.

Minnie Rip(p)erton, major typo

You know an artist is criminally overlooked when her own label can't even spell her name. I've just realised that I've mentally been adding a superfluous P to 'Minnie Riperton' on account of this glaring typo on my copy of her incredible 1970 album Come To My Garden. Give it a listen. Both Riperton and her producer Charles Stepney, pioneer of the 'chamber soul' sound, died too young (Riperton at 32, Stepney at 45) but they certainly left wonderful, strange, enriching music behind.

Paris Zoo

I'm back in London for the summer, but my full set of 'Paris Zoo' fake animal pictures, as alluded to a couple of posts ago, can be found here or here. Reports of any further sightings welcomed.

I done a poem

Here's a poem I wrote a few months back which has been published on The Literateur.

I guess you could describe it as a cross between The Little Mermaid and My Fair Lady, with some puns thrown in. I'm pleased with it, anyway.

And I also recently reviewed Joanna Kavenna's new novel The Birth of Love for the same folk.

Heart-Expanding

And I regret

how I said to you,

Honey, just open your heart,

when I’ve got trouble

even opening a honey jar.

Joanna Newsom, ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’

There’s a certain tone of voice that is so often borrowed to send up insufferable armchair critics, it’s amazing that there are still real-life armchair critics who use it. A pair of them was sitting behind me at the Joanna Newsom-Roy Harper gig in Paris last night. It was the last date of the tour and an emotional Roy Harper had just bid us a very touching farewell. Now, I don’t think Harper is an extraordinary talent or anything. I enjoyed his set the way I might enjoy watching a beloved uncle playing. His dry, occasionally bewildering patter between songs, peppered with endearing attempts to dredge up his schoolboy French, moved at a glacial, expansive pace that is perhaps only tolerable if you’re used to, and rather fond of, new-age folk relics.

Yes, expansive is the word. Some people expand, others only know how to contract. I present, without further comment, snatches of the conversation behind me (both speakers were British):

“Someone took too many drugs”

“Talk about a rock and roll casualty”

“It’s not the sort of music I’ve got in my collection”

“I’d give him 2/10 for stagecraft”

“I’ll look on Amazon, and if any of his albums is less than £1.50 I’ll buy it”

“It’s the sort of music that’s better live”

“All music is better live”

“Except stuff like Girls Aloud – that’s better off!”

One aspect of my level of French is that, while I can hold a conversation, I tend not to tune into other conversations around me. There are times when I realise what a blessing that is.

Anyway, Joanna. Oh, Joanna.

Some gigs exhilarate through their imperfection: through distortion, recklessness, a sense of being at the edge of control. It’s not often, at least outside the classical world, that a performer will shoot for and achieve perfection.

Three details from last night:

Joanna, while singing and playing the harp, makes small, rhythmic nods of the head to keep time. The way you might do if you were playing a fiendishly difficult two-handed instrument while delivering tongue-twisting, melody-twisting lyrics.

Ryan Francesconi (musical director on the last album) sets his guitar up on a stand, taps it and turns the gain pedal up, building a crescendo of feedback before sharply, on the downbeat, cutting it off.

The band and audience are waiting between songs as Neal Morgan makes small adjustments to the positioning of his drums and percussion instruments. He looks up at the expectant crowd and says mock-defiantly, “What? Art takes time!”

The picture I’m trying to draw is of a group of musicians whose respect for the luminous, angelic– but incredibly disciplined – artist in their midst is such that they won’t put a beat or a note out of place. You could see the concentration on their faces, while Joanna just grinned at how wonderful it all was. And so did we.

Paper beats rock, blossom beats steel, paint beats wall

The Promenade Plantée in Paris’s 12eme arrondissement proclaims a victory for idle beauty over steely efficiency. Once a railway track, and now adorned with trees and trellises, it offers a place to sit, to jog, to woo, to wander at several stories’ remove from the commerce and congestion of the city.

My first encounter with this chemin de vert was through celluloid: it is featured on the walking route of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) in the wonderful 2004 film Before Sunset. Lovers for a night in the Vienna-set Before Sunrise (1995), Jesse and Céline are reunited after nine years of what-if yearning. Jesse is in Paris promoting the novel he wrote about that night; Céline finds him at a reading in the Shakespeare and Co. bookshop, just across the Seine from Notre Dame. He has a brief window of time before his flight home, and they spend it frantically playing conversational catch-up as they stroll in “real time” from the Rive Gauche to a cute café, then along the Promenade Plantée, then onto a tourist boat ride which takes them back towards Notre Dame.

In fact, it’s an impossible route, requiring unwieldy river- and arrondissement-hopping. Not that I tend to bother about this kind of geographical license. I side with the great man who said that “realism is neither achievable nor desirable”; I want films to transport me, credulous and childlike, to their shiny invented worlds without fear of being held accountable to pedantry. But the impossible itinerary of Before Sunset interests me because it’s a film that take as its central theme the tug-of-war between romance and reality. Is the idea of romantic love (the protagonists wonder) just a con? Is there a God, an afterlife, magic in the world? How far have their memories been airbrushed and edited? To what extent does Jesse’s novel fictionalise their night in Vienna? Could their relationship survive outside the enchanted film-set cities of old Europe?

It is the film’s extraordinary emotional honesty that makes me more than usually interested in its mild topographical dishonesty – expedient when shooting in a busy city like Paris, but worth noting nonetheless. The film is both one of the most romantic I’ve ever seen, and one of the most naturalistic in its real-time pace and the artfully artless weave of its dialogue. These contradictions seems apt, though, for Hawke and Delpy’s indulgent conversation is forever going in circles and contradicts itself, working on the commendable principle that in real, lived experience we may feel two opposite ideas to be simultaneously true; that where fictional characters operate according to a cipher-like set of values or traits, real people are a mess of contradictions. Binary oppositions are for computers and fundamentalists; reality is analogue.

On the bright winter day when I first visited the real promenade, the faint absurdity surrounding the benignly Luddite idea of turning a railway track into a municipal garden was compounded by the fact that it wasn’t a chemin leading me to anything in particular. It was a film fan’s indulgent pilgrimage, requiring a metro ride out to Daumesnil on line 8, then a doubling-back on foot through a series of more or less connected walkways and parks: with a high-arching bridge here, and there a garden with a scarecrow and a vegetable patch, the walk seems for all the world to be analogue reality’s fey translation of a Nintendo platform game. At any rate, it had a rather lovely pointlessness to it, the pointlessness that defines both tourism and game-playing, with the accompanying arbitrary and linear objective that is equally necessary to both.

Then the miscellany of greenish spaces gave way to the stretch recognisable from Jesse and Céline’s wanderings, though with the chill air offering a bracing reminder that this was not cinema, and the bright sun showing the plants at their least verdant, and the un-cinematic graffiti and rubbish bins that I don’t recall from the film.

It would be churlish, by the way, to gripe about the ubiquity of graffiti in Paris. So much of it is brilliantly creative and bizarre, infinitely preferable to an expanse of bare brick or concrete. I have become mildly fixated with tracking down and snapping particularly striking examples, filling a wildlife-themed photo album with a safari’s worth of all the zebras, giraffes and unidentifiable chimeras daubed onto walls. It has become a further refinement of the game, a cheerfully arbitrary checklist and focus for my meanderings.

The graffiti serves as a useful shorthand reminder for the complex set of contradictions that define the city, a place marketed to the world as the home of elegance and refinement, but which also cradled a revolution and still regards May 1^st as more sacred than Christmas. The irreverent scrawls on haussmannien walls are an important counterweight to the haute haughtiness. I get the sense that there is a stronger sense of an artistic underground here, certainly than in Britain (is it a coincidence that the phrase faire la manche denotes both busking and begging? It’s certainly possible to read too much into idiom). This despite, or maybe because of, the generous state support for artists (more binary-crumbling): indeed, it’s not always clear whether the street art has been done under cover of dark, or with municipal blessing.

Either way, it can only point to the Parisian tendency to aestheticism, the intolerance of bland functionality and the “digital” mindset. This is arguably the root both of the city’s peaks of beauty and its troughs of snobbery and stubbornness. It extends from the culture of restaurants and cafes to the architectural exile of tower blocks to the banlieue. And it could hardly be better expressed than by the decision to turn a railway track into a space for flowers and flâneurs.

Getting personal

Another week, another top-notch piece up on gnome, if we do say so ourselves.

This time Andrew Naughtie delves into the true meaning of the 'personal' and 'privacy' in the age of full-body scanners and 'sexting', not to mention Beyonce and her video phone.

Chew it over here.

In Jazzwise

A heads-up that if you are skilful enough to locate the jazz section of WH Smith (took me long enough) you should reward yourself by purchasing a copy of this month's Jazzwise. It's the one with Pat Metheny on the cover. My winning Write Stuff review of John Surman's London Jazz Festival appearance is printed on p. 59.

The unedited version is still up on the website.

Introducing gnome

I do apologise for my sporadic blogging lately. I'm sure you've all struggled to locate some core of meaning in your lives in the absence of regular posts to read.

By way of excuse / consolation prize allow me to unveil:

gnome

Ossie Froggatt-Smith & I have been cooking this up for a while, as a space for young people's quality nonfiction writing. Right now there's not much on it - besides an article I wrote about break-up albums (rather Tosh Pit - esque in style), and some handy links. However, it will continue to grow over the coming weeks. We've got some really exciting pieces lined up from some unfairly talented writers.

You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

He who hesitates...

"I think that a price is paid for absolutely everything in life. That we’re sitting here, you and I, means that I’m not sitting in a sunken sauna and you’re not having a gin and tonic. Everything we do must mean not doing something or other."

When it's not publishing my politely scathing book reviews, The Literateur really is fab. I've just read editor Kit Toda's interview with Sir Christopher Ricks.

Ricks is wise. Few people fit the word better. He knows what he thinks - because he's really thought about it. He once gave a talk at my school, and I've don't think I've ever encountered such an eloquent advocate for the importance of how we say things. I remember being dazzled and charmed by his apparently off-the-cuff, but probably well-rehearsed, comparative analysis of the phrases "look before you leap" (it just wouldn't work if it were "don't leap until you've looked") and "he who hesitates is lost" (the dithering sighs of those aitches).

While I was at Oxford he gave nine lectures as Professor of Poetry. Despite renewed good intentions each term, I missed every one. With hindsight I can't imagine what could have taken priority. Certainly not a gin and tonic.

Spells

People hear music in all kinds of different ways. Some people experience music as colours; others just see grey water pouring out of the speakers. Some never listen to lyrics, they just fall under a spell. Some eat it whole. Some just take a bite. Some of us like to get on our backs and roll around in it like a dog.

Tom Waits, 2009

In prehistoric times music ... was a branch of magic, one of the old and legitimate instruments of wonder-working.

Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Lately I've been spending more and more of my day 'doing' music. Singing it, playing it, writing it. Making music feels like something real; like work. Your voice gets tired, your fingers get blistered, you end up with pages covered in scribbles. With luck, you're exhilarated.

By contrast, listening to music, especially on your own, can be an almost ghostly experience. We're so used to processing the world visually that it's hard to fully accept this stuff, these sound waves emerging from a speaker, really really exists. It's there, and it's everything and everywhere; then it's nowhere.*

Music is the closest thing we know to magic. Not a new thought, but one worth repeating.

*This sense of music as hallucination is compounded if I'm listening to it with my cat, who blithely ignores it. You might think that a loud, pitched noise apparently coming from nowhere would make an animal uneasy, but he's long accepted it as one of the oddities of living with humans. From his non-reaction I occasionally think I really might be the only one hearing it.