No play today

November. The Grey Month. Time, if you’re in the northern hemisphere, to consolidate, practise, sharpen the sound.

Two stags fight over a good busking spot.

Played Monmouth on a recent Saturday morning and it was good. Moved to Church Street, but stopped playing in an empty shop doorway by a bookseller who’s setting up here (He kindly commissioned a talk from me on Fifty Plants That Changed The Course of History not three months back. We, both of us, were embarrassed to recognise each other. But I had to go.)

The following day to Ludlow, by train. I bought a Remembrance Day poppy before going to play. Then discovered the streets were closed off for the Remembrance Day Parade. No play today!  

Summertime New Zealand

Make a note

It's Saxaphone Day on November 6.
(Of course: you had it written in your diary - you just forgot to look). 


It is the birthday of Adolphe Sax (seen here with professional saxaphonist Mandy Grezeszah html www.mandysax.com/gallery/more.html) who invented the instrument in 1846 for military bands. 
Taken to higher levels by busk-don't-battle jazz musicians, the sax spawned the likes of Johnny Hodges, Lester Young, Charlie Parker and Sidney Bechet. 
I'm working up his Petite Fleur for a street performance in Monmouth on Friday. 
How are you celebrating?    

Catch 22

My soprano sax on holiday in West Wales

"I’m sooo cold," Snowdon tells Yossarin in Catch 22.

Know how he feels. I’m standing in Church Street, Ludlow last Sunday, belting my way through the first set (Blue Moon, Shadow of Your Smile and that odd one I made up, posted on Sunday 10 July).

Foolishly I’ve dressed for the Indian summer that never quite reaches this Victorian passage, shielded from the sun by three storey buildings and given extra ventilation by a curious architectural monument, some kind of a drain, beneath which I play. It’s a three way breeze.  

But it’s good to be out and playing again, even if my fingers are numbing up and my embouchure is frozen in rictus with the cold. I must rethink this if I’m going to play through the winter.  

I’m about to give up when an older lady in blue, comes up very close.

“Are you professional?”

I’m still thinking of the reply when she says . . . bless . . .

“Because you’re very good. Now where do I put this?”

She hovers a pound coin before me.

John Kirkpatrick and man's but an autumnal leaf

To John Kirkpatrick’s Farmers’ Songs workshop and performance at Aberllynfi (Three Cocks in English, but never mind) among those rolling hills west of Hay on Wye. 
And to hear him sing that touching hymn to impermanence:

What's the life of a man any more than a leaf?
A man has his seasons so why should we grieve?
Although in his world we appear fine and gay,
Like a leaf we must wither and soon fade away.

Picked up Brass Monkey’s Head of Steam (no website on the CD cover so you’ll have to search for it yourselves) for its brassiness. Good, but not quite my thing.

The workshoppers rehearsed On Yonder Old Oak and gave such a dreadful rendering during John’s performance that he, quite rightly, foreshortened it. But at least I did get to talk to fellow bassist Roy Hollowell (longest beard in the world) of Still Seeking, who, with his mates busks for charity in Leicester.

Dorothy's Blues

Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet

Is it the performer's curse? The better you know your music, the more mechanical your performance? I'm working on a new routine, maybe with the clarinet in place of the soprano sax. 

I need to beef up my background guitar (recorded on my Edirol, left, and played in the street through my iPod connected to the little Roland amp). It's lost in big streets and I have to find accoustic hot spots like the entrance to the shopping mall in Stratford on Avon for it to work well. 


And I'm looking at new songs. Nice guy asked me to play Take Five in Leominster yesterday. Couldn't oblige.


One piece of music I'd love to add sax to is composer Gavin Bryars' 1971 loop recording of a London tramp singing the hymn Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbczBcz78vo This version has added accompaniment and the gravel voice of Tom Waits.