#jazzwriting

I’ve just learnt of Ira Gitler’s passing. Although much has been said about his career as a jazz critic and producer, one fact failed to be mentioned because it’s so blatantly obvious— with a few others, he was the creator, the architect and pioneer of a whole writing genre : the jazz liner notes. Because of his proximity with the musicians and critical flair, every one of his comment was relevant. In this respect, his contribution to the history of jazz is huge and his work is here to stay. He was a funny writer, a major story-teller and a cultural beacon. 

I’m glad I got to spend some meaningful time with him in Foix, in the French Pyrénées in 2010, a festival that we were both reviewing for Jazz Hot and DownBeat. Significantly, we were able to listen to music together: Charles McPherson, Kenny Barron, Curtis Fuller, Charles Davis… He was someone who would share his knowledge, delight with his tales, inspire with his insight. Jazz writing at its best. 

Chapter One: Kingston Road to Bexhill and back. 

1.

One late December night I got in from a long day at the office to find Peggy and her mother squatting on the sofa. They each gripped a sketchpad and pencil and drew furiously. A dead hare was laid out on the table in front of them, legs askew. What with no cooker and the dead hare that table never was much used for social dining. On the plus side, the house on Kingston Road did provide us with two ample floors on which to starve. Such japes were funded by my improbable job in senior management.

I was addicted to Peggy. She was a wide-hipped brunette with pouty red lips and a wicked witch’s cackle. Her unpaid occupation as a performance artist involved gleeful pursuits such as staging wolf impressions in Hoxton galleries, and tying her hair to oak trees while chain-smoking. I can’t imagine a more glamorous way to bankrupt yourself. 

We met on a train in 2002. It only took one afternoon of drinking dry martinis in the National Film Theatre bar to get me hooked. I clocked by the third glass that Peggy was the devil in disguise. Still I crawled back for more. 

In the years which followed we watched silent movies together. We went to launch parties and got wildly drunk for free. We travelled across London on Route-master buses, and never paid the fare. We circulated with confidence, and spilled wine on her landlady’s Maria Callas LPs. And in October 2005 we pulled ourselves of the floor of a Dalston warehouse, and moved to this Oxford madhouse. 

One Saturday morning we were planted on the sofa, trying to warm our hands up on a couple of ice cubes, when Peggy said suddenly, “why don’t you come and play Brian’s cabaret?” I hadn’t played music for a decade. How could a bungling hound such as I dream of spoiling the show? 

But I didn’t realise was that this was not any old cabaret. No, no, no.

THIS was an ART cabaret. 

And so, as yet unnamed, the Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band came springing out of Peggy’s womb.

2.

One hour later I cruised across town and knocked on the door of the Reverend Tommy Costello.Standing at just under six-feet-eight, he had developed a hunchback while squatting through 24-years of life. His house, off the Iffley road in East Oxford, exacerbated the problem. 

Wildly squinting jazz tourists may still seek it out. Number 87 sits squashed among a bundle of terraces as though, while thinking only of his lunch, a builder sought to balance a slither of cucumber between two fat slabs of bread. 

Tom achieved nonchalance over such problems through a daily dosset box of paperbacks and weed, but life had not always been this relaxed. I was impressed to discover how, on moving out of a previous rented house in Durham, he clawed his deposit from a landlord by lying on his chest and trimming the back lawn with a pair of nail scissors. In front of the landlord. Such ingenuity extended to music. 

On the day I met him I learnt that Tom had constructed a banjo out of a biscuit tin and some sticks. And that he played a mean ukulele. His model was bright red. He may have acquired it from Poundland. If I was to make this cabaret intact I needed an accompanist. 

A few knocks later, a crack appeared. The door stopped at the bolt, checking I was not from Thames Valley Police. Reassured, the door opened. Tom ducked several feet beneath the jamb and re-emerged into the outside world. His head floated just beneath the sill of the upstairs window. 

Tom, the hot ukulele man. Hair like a yeti and a lawless beard to match. He wore the same Aran jumper every day as it was the only item of clothing he could find long enough to fit him. As a result, he continually looked as though he had just returned from a fishing trip on the North Sea. Corduroy trousers were another perennial part of his attire. Ever fashion conscious, he refused to speak with anyone who wore jeans. Furthermore, I have nothing but respect for a man who disowned his childhood best friend because they sent him a request to join Facebook.  

“Tommy,” I exhaled, introducing my fag-end to its new friends on the doorstep, “how would you like to come and play ukulele in a cabaret?”

He looked reluctant. And I didn’t even tell him it was an art cabaret.   

Annie, his significant other, marched in from work at about five o’clock that evening to find us hanging off the living room floor. Their previous housemate had recently fled, escaping with his rent money and all the crockery and glasses. So we had spent all afternoon listen to the Memphis Jug Band, and drinking red wine out of jam-jars. This continued long into the night. 

I broke the news that the cabaret was to be help at the De La Warr Pavilion, on the seafront at Bexhill-on-Sea. The average age of the punters would be about 87, so if we fucked it up there was a high chance they wouldn’t remember. The Pavilion was built in 1935 which, as Spike Milligan once quipped, meant it was opened “just in time to be bombed.” 

“Tommy-Wommy,” Annie pressed, rolling a stick of the mighty mezz, “it’s quite the opportunity. Stuart can wear yellow and you can wear a red dress and high heels. You’ll be as a tall as a staircase.” 

“I don’t know babe,” he puffed back, “Bexhill is far, far away. Besides, I don’t like heels and I’m worried my strings will break.”

“Then play string-less ukulele. It could be a new thing.”

“It would,” I butted-in, “look…magnificent.”

Annie took a pensive drag. “You could cause a riot with your string-less ukulele, and then everyone could hold hands and sing “I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside.” 

And so it was that she convinced Tom to play the cabaret.  I’ve pondered why it is always women who are so keen to kick-start these projects. And I’ve concluded it’s because they can’t wait to get us out of the house.    

3. 

Drinking wine out of jam jars is a staple feature in hipster bars nowadays. In my head I hear dishwashers clanging in the backrooms of Rivington Street pseudo-dives, at a rate of two hundred jam jars per hour. The folks down Shoreditch can’t eat jam fast enough to keep up with the demand. For us, buying new wine glasses was off the cards for practical reasons – we had blown all our money on records. Jazz, blues, country and gospel. Maybe a little Hawaiian music when it took our fancy. 

Records sound best when they’ve been lived in. Modern record producers claim they can digitally reproduce the sound of crackle. But it’s not the same crackle you get after repeatedly spinning a Jelly Roll Morton 10” LP across the room so your partner in crime can read what’s on the label - “damn, I knew this one would sound better after we dropped the fag ash on it.” Did you ever try to spill fag ash on an MP3? It’s impossible. 

You can have fun with old records too. If it was up to me, schoolchildren would use them as frisbees. I’d put it in the national curriculum – playtime with Parlophone.  And they double as dummies. When my daughter was six months old she took a copy of the Parnassie Sessions with Tommy Ladnier on trumpet and Mezz Mezzrow on clarinet out of its sleeve, and put it in her mouth. I tell you she didn’t cry once all the time she was sucking that record. And it has sounded better ever since. 

78s are the monarch of records. If you’ve ever carried a box of 78s across town your shoulders will feel the weight. They’re so heavy that once I had to stop on my way to the record player to have a nap. By the time the needle hit the disc, I had arms as strong as a bricklayer’s. If you see my biceps all blown up it doesn’t mean I’ve been to the gym – it means I’ve been buying 78s on eBay.

4.

Over the following weeks rehearsals, of a sort, ensued. The first revelation that came from these rehearsals is that I can’t make any sounds approaching a tune while playing a banjo, let alone one that has been made out of biscuit tin. 

My technique, and I didn’t learn this from reading an instruction manual, was to throttle it around the next with my left hand while my right hand banged downwards, in the manner of someone trying to bash mud off their tent after a damp weekend at Glastonbury. Tom had also developed his own method for playing the ukulele. I call it the Costello method. His original intention was to launch into flamboyant solos constructed from quick-witted runs of notes, with each note sounding out like a sexual conquest.  The reality was that between is, I’ll put this nicely, it was difficult to pin us down to anyone particular genre. 

Our aim was jazz, of course. Naturally it’s difficult to replicate the sounds of a full jazz band using only a banjo and ukulele but we had other tricks. Tom would occasionally put his uke down and blow harmonica which, in its upper register, sometimes gave out a sound approaching that of a clarinet, and sometimes that of a cat who had been trodden on. I bent a metal coat hanger into the shape of the letter “O” and sellotaped a green plastic kazoo halfway around it. Whenever we felt a trumpet solo coming on I would use my left shoulder to lift the coat hanger up a few inches until I gripped the kazoo in my mouth. Hence, with the addition of slapping our shoes on the ground in imitation of a drummer, and some imagination, we considered ourselves Oxford’s equivalent of the Original Memphis Five.  Meanwhile Amy rolled another spliff.  

5.

No-one who likes this music ever asked me how I got “into jazz,” but almost everyone else does. I started buying jazz records when I was about 12 because I didn’t want to listen to the same music as my class mates. I refer to them as the Clearasil crew - a crew time has stuffed into vitrines alongside the music of Bros, fluorescent socks, and the art of long-distance spitting. 

Yet when I think of them we are still all sat in a frozen portacabin, furthering out ambitions to fail GCSE maths by locking Mrs Rubberlips in the stationary cupboard. These were the conditions under which I began to dream of New Orleans. 

I pined for an age of black and white. Where the folks were better dressed. When they knew how to dance. And when, as I later discovered, they would have had the decency to keep the stationary cupboard permanently under lock and key. So my musical career started with Hollywood musicals. Fred and Ginger. Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. Judy Garland. But it was Louis Armstrong who ensnared me. 

The epiphany came in Bath, June 1986. St Louis Blues hit like a bomb blast. My foundations never recovered. There were two records in particular we used to copy at these rehearsals. The first was “Big Butter and Egg Man”, originally recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1926. I’m getting tired of working all day / I want somebody who wants me to play. I read it was written in dedication to a producer of dairy products who used to frequent the Sunset Café in Chicago. I like to think there really was an enormous bellied businessman sat there, puffing at a cigar and rolling his eyes at goods he knew money couldn’t buy. 

The second was a tune called “Glad Rag Doll”, which we never got the hang of on account of it being in Eb and Tom’s hands being too big to get his fingers around the strings. 

We got the chords out of a book entitled Its Easy To Play Jazz. As the Pogues’ Spider Stacey once said of learning the tin whistle, “it looked easy. I very soon realised my mistake. It isn’t easy at all.”

I use the word “rehearsal” loosely, but we had good intentions. And there was one original I had written, “White Youth In Crisis” which I had demoed with of all people the bass player from the Jesus and Mary Chain. It was a curious choice. But having failed to memorise any of the others it was this one we took with us when the morning of the cabaret dawned.   

6.

In the intervening weeks Peggy fine-tuned her performance. Her preparations included watching Japanese pornography on a laptop acquired with an arts council grant. On the eve of the cabaret she packed a suitcase with props and made her way to the venue. The journey was made in a coach, hired exclusively for use by performance artists. It probably turned into a pumpkin the moment they stepped off. 

Alas there was no room for me and Tom so we made the trip in his off-white Ford Fiesta. He confided, as we hit the road, that the car cost £150. However, he aimed to make half of that back when he sold it for scrap. From the way it jolted down the motorway to Bexhill, I think that day was fast approaching. Annie reclined in the back with the banjo and ukulele. 

“Babe,” Tom noted as we reversed onto the M23, “I wish you wouldn’t roll them so fat when I am trying to drive.” 

On arrival we found preparations in full swing. A box of Becks lager lit up our dressing room. Next to it was some seaweed in a plastic bag. It appeared that someone had gone for a swim. We found Peggy rehearsing with two other performers in a gazebo which overlooked the English Channel. By the time the audience began to arrive the tension was audible.

7.

I’d never been to a cabaret. Whatever I was expecting wasn’t this. The curtain rose at half-past seven to reveal the organiser’s son, dressed as a fox. He introduced the acts which followed. First of all, three women stood on stools, wearing wigs made from bin liners. They gargled water for approximately 15 minutes. A handful of spectators, sat around cabaret tables, applauded modestly, as though watching someone else’s children at a primary school play.  Next, kneeling in the orchestra pit in a kimono, Peggy sang Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” to the tune of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” in a voice which would have broken Judy Garland’s tonsils. 

Our turn in the spotlight came halfway through the second act. Tom began by strumming D, F# minor, G, and then a chord which I don’t think anyone has invented a name for yet. I leaned into the microphone.  “Mother,” I hollered,” I’ve lost all ambition.”

“Tell it like it is brother Stuart,” offered Tom. I then threw in what might loosely be described as a dance move. 

No-one clapped. 

Backstage they urged that we were among the best acts of the night. Peggy said that my outstretched arms had thrown a shadow on the black curtain behind us in such a way that I resembled someone in the process of being crucified. 

Meanwhile Annie overheard a member of the bar staff comment that the cabaret was the worst thing they had seen in 20 years of working at the venue.  

When we got back to Oxford I had a surprise. Peggy’s mother had moved in.

8. 

Peggy didn’t have much in the way of possessions, having once thrown away everything she owned. But what she had kept was revealing.

On the rocking chair upstairs were a wolf skin and head she acquired while driving through the Arizona desert. On the desk she kept a foetus in a jar. There was one book, on the the three wise men (and gang I clearly hadn’t been asked to join).

Finally there were a few clothes, her laptop and one DVD, entitled The Beast. As a result of this sparse ensemble I calculate it took her and her mother five minutes to pack the lot into the boot of their two-seat convertible and return to Scotland. It was Holy Innocent’s Day, 28 December. 

On their way out, they’d trampled a Christmas tree into the carpet - so at least they left the place looking festive.

“I’m not surprised she left you,” Tom gestured later, “I couldn’t live in a house with no kitchen.

“It’s the rats I feel sorry for.”