Barlows Children in need Rocks at Apollo plus 30 pod disco around the London Eye

It is Saturday16^th November 2013 and just before I get back to digesting the first season of that exceptional Danish political series Borgen which dares to challenge conventional political leadership and management, albeit in a small European country of 5 million people I must catch up on some recent music popular music experience having spent two hours before midnight with Children Rock, the latest Garry Barlow extravaganza, this time for Children in need, playing at the famous Hammersmith Apollo and which I knew at a distance as the Hammersmith Odeon in the 1960’s having commenced life as a Gaumont Theatre in 1932, and remains to day one of the great former picture houses with a capacity of thousands, reminding of the Davis Theatre Croydon from my childhood and as a young man.

The Apollo has changed hands several times during the past decade, recently closing for a major refurbishment and reopening only this September so unless I am mistaken this was it first major event and a new guise and being Gary reminding of the concert he created to celebrate the Queens something of 50^th year at the Gates of Buckingham Palace, he produce an extraordinary array of stars to perform on the night suggesting those looking in paid the modest £5 plus call line fees for the experience( if they wished).

The highlight for me although she was not top of the bill was Agnetha Folksgog, yes one of the two female members of ABBA, not seen anywhere before alive general audience since the band broke up in the early 1980’s although she did attempt a career away from the group during the rest of the decade. There was also media speculation about the group getting together one more time to mark the fortieth anniversary of Waterloo.

Top of the Bill in fact was another little known name except for those who appreciated the music of the Electric Light orchestra, Jeff Lynn, who has continued to play music with another member of the original band of some forty years, Jeff subsequently turned record producer for the likes of Ringo Starr, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan Randy Newman and Roy Orbison, whose music as his life, remains timeless, poignant and tragic. Both Jeff and Agnatha are in their 60’s. The other oldie who is finding new fans among the younger rock and pop generation is Tom Jones while the other great treat of the night was when Garry and Robbie joined Barry Manilow for Its Magic .Barry the oldest of them all is now in his 70’s but he sounded and looked as he has for the past forty years, amazing.

The Apollo now comes under the umbrella of Eventim a monster entertainment conglomerate who manages events and establishments across the UK in some thirty tons and cities

Before this I had dipped into Children in Need with Terry where JLS and One Direction played contests while a host of International and national stars primarily from BBC shows, centring on East Enders and Albert Square helped to raise tens of millions as part of an extraordinary nationwide efforts which saw Asda raising £700000 alone. The extent to which children of all ages now dress up of this event now surpasses those on Halloween which is a mighty good thing, For me however, as with the Rock Children concert it is the heart rendering stories of courage and survival although sometimes not which brings hone the true nature of the British people, just as a few days earlier they raised millions to help the devastated people of the Philippines

This was rot have been a longer piece covering several forms of cultural events commencing with another music event, an event which still puzzles me as someone had the bright idea of trying to revive Disco club land by inviting those involved in existing clubs or from past venues such as the Hacienda in Manchester to put on a two hour play session from the capsules, must not all them Pods on the London Eye. Each capsule was large enough to have a full deck of disco playing gear at one end , a narrow central stage which I assumed covered the electrical connections and around a dozen participants, some dancing, some just looking on and some taking photos and generally looking misplaced in what is after all were often dingy venue’s hostess Anne Mac, described several as grimy and where young people danced to hypnotic rhythms largely fuelled on drink (which was mentioned, and was also in evidence and drugs.

The event was indeed a cultural one viewable on the Channel Four Website and sponsored by Red Bull. There was a brave attempt to create a party atmosphere but this mostly failed. All thirty capsules were live with Anne Mac hosting which of the capsules one of the thirty produces viewing their screen decided to push the master producer to tell Annie they were showing. She looked a mixture off bemused and fed up with the chaos as views complained they wanted to hear and seeing everything which was naturally impossible in a situation where the maximum viewing time for each pods was four minutes. A crazy absurd idea which could be described as contemporary performance art. I wondered who else was tuned in

I do possess a three CD set of Hard House, another of Garage, a third of Club Ibiza and a fourth of Ayia Napa and there was a time when I would stay up with Peter Waterman and a young bird whose name I cannot now remember doing the club scene into the early hours. I am listening to the first club Ibiza sound as ten am approach which just about matches the feel of the show on Thursday evening. To have been truly creative the show should have started around 10 pm and gone on until six or 8 am and with a multi screen option which I believe was intended but did not work out as all one had on the multiscreen was the club and DJ info. The holiday season over I forget to check if Sky were showing any of the club nights from the island although the scene has now moved to former central European coastal resort and other distant places where unlimited drinking, drugs and 24 hour partying is promoted to earn the tourist dollars.

Swing Jazz and Blues at the Customs House and the history of the Moody Blues

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.