Derby buskers festival

Buskers at 2010 Brecon Jazz Festival

While Ross-on-Wye Chamber of Trade looked at ways of banning busking (hence my letter to the Ross Gazette, see earlier post) Derby Town is running its own Buskers Festival through July and August.

The one downside is that the Council require buskers to have a licence – its free, they say. Suspect a licence is but one short step away from total control of the streets. 

But here’s this positive email from Haley at the Council: "The event has worked well so far so we will definitely be organising another next year, I will keep your details for then.  

"In the meantime please feel free to busk in Bradford City Centre, the best spots tend to be at the top of Darley Street and round the Kirkgate Centre."

Meanwhile, in Ludlow to busk last Sunday where a kindly lady stops her disability scooter and commands me to take 60p. "Very nice," she pronounces before setting off "to see if I can kill anyone. I'm ninety-three...."

Struggling with camellias

In an effort to refresh myself (I'm struggling with the history of that nineteenth-century romantic, the camellia, inspiration for Alexander Dumas - La dame aux camelias - and Giuseppe Veridi's La Traviata) drive to Monmouth for a busk.
Discover I've left my backing track behind and, after ten minutes unplugged (how can anyone sustain solo sax without a backing?) give up.
Collect backing and try Leominster instead. Generous Marcus (above) passes me his spot. Marcus - he's cool.

'Roma guy tries out Marcus' fiddle

I'm playing Manchester City FC's anthem Blue Moon (Rodgers and Hart, 1934) when a couple of Roma guys stop to chat: 'Votre music, Roumanie, nest'ce pas?'
One lady tells me: 'You're very brave.' (Did she mean 'to stand here and play so badly?')
Another declares: 'Lovely,' as she drops a coin in the pot. 'That's cheered us all up.' Bless.

Nothing from dapper local MP, Bill Wiggins who slips by. I think there was a bit of an expenses issue recently: maybe he has to watch his acounts more carefully these days.

Dear madam

It's a mistake that older people often make - writing to the Letters column of the local newspaper in the belief that they have something worth saying.
I've resisted it all these years. 
Suddenly I'm overcome with the need to do so. Absurd.

Reeds r Us

When I started playing (thank you, Terry the Teacher, seen below in a fetching portrait by Jenny Williams) I thought you just bought one of the instruments invented Adolphe Sax (1814 – 1894) and got on with it. No-one warned me about Reeds.

I’m a bass in a community choir and when I sing my vocal chords vibrate. When I play it’s the reed which vibrates. And I learn from The Rough Guide to Saxophone (Hugo Pinksterboer Penguin) that they’re cut from the plant Arundo Donax, a hollow cane, related to bamboo and grown mostly in the Var, southern France.

Harvested at two to three years old and cured for a year, the cane tubes are cut to length, split lengthways into four reeds and shaved to an accuracy of half a thousandth of an inch. (Do we need to know this? Yes, maybe?)

I’m impressed. But still such a novice that I’m best with number 2. My music shop’s run out. Full marks to Sax.co.uk for this: 

and then there's the mouthpiece

Rico Royal- Very much the ‘standard’ reed for a large proportion of players. These are filed, relatively bright and (potentially) loud. A lot of players start off their careers using these. They’re something of a ‘blank canvas’, responsive, flexible but without much character of their own- and, as such, work very well for beginners. The majority of more experienced players move on to reed types which suit their particular style of playing- but Rico Royals are good for keeping your options open.

Mayday in Alhama, Spain by streetsax

Take a pound

Cadeem, or Gauntlett, is a fine sax player from the West Midlands who might be found busking in your town. Take note (forgive the pun) of that beautiful Yanagisawa soprano sax, and the sound he makes with it.

He wasn’t in Monmouth yesterday when I did a forty minute stint with my newly arranged repertoire (start with a blues, finish with a blues). It was slow, but OK. 

I was collared by one old fellow, his jacket lapel peppered with musical symbols including a sax.

‘You on the dole?’ he asked sympathetically.

Nope.

‘Well at least you’re not one of them Polish.’

I am Polish, actually,’ I told him in my best English.

‘No, you’re never. Take a pound anyway.’

Thanks. So what do you play? I point to his music badges.

‘These? I just collects ‘em. Lovely playin’.’ And off he toddled.

Everyone wants to know: 'How much do you make?'

The late, great Alex Stewart, right, one of Scotland's best box accordion players, said his father John used to busk for charabancs in Glencoe.
'He and ma muther ust' tae take somethin' like a hundred and forty pound a week sometimes. He niver touched his pension while he was buskin'.' This was just after World War 2 when John had finished a lifetime of tarmacing.

So what did I make this time in Monouth? Not enough to pay the parking and petrol to get there. But the audience more than made up for it.   

Who are they?

Cadeem in Stroud.

The late Alex Stewart. . .

and Terry Evans, blowing his horn in Hereford..

What do these guys have common?

Musical autopilot

Played the streets of Stroud the other day, struggling to get going at first, then switching to autopilot, playing as I watch the world (and the Roma Big Issue seller) go by.

"Nakal korey padi askal" - "It's by faking that you get to the real," Mimlu Sen is told in her book The Honey Gatherers, about the bards of rural Bengal, the Bauls.

Bauls (from vatula, ones possessed by the wind, errant, drifting) are wandering musicians who busk from village to village, train to train, even bus to bus. They featured in Georges Luneau's Le Chant des Fous 1979. (And check out www.bauliana.blogspot.com)
"To the poor they offered the divine light of inner vision; to the sick and ageing, they gave the comfort of faith and cured them with songs, natural mediciene and yogic practices," writes Mimlu.
Dressed in their long, flowing alkhallas, the Bauls, once patronised by local villagers, struggle to cope with the new way of life in India. According to the book's jacket (Rider Books, 2010) Mimlu Sen collaborates with Baul musician Paban Das Baul. 

On another note.
Philharmonic Orchestera saxophonist returns home after his performance of Maurice Ravel's Bolero.
'Who was conducting?' asks his wife.
"I didn't look," replies the sax player.