El Cielo Canta

At last a Friday morning session in Monmouth. It’s good: I haven’t been able to busk for a couple of months.

This morning on BBC R4 top violinist Tasmin Little talks of a time when a newspaper persuaded her to take to the streets: “To put yourself in that situation, you've got to come out and attract your audience's attention.” 

She’d do a skip and a dance. I manage only to blow, experimenting with an arrangement of an Argentinian  choral number, El Cielo Canta. ‘Fraid the soprano sax has radically altered it as you can hear below. (Background music to a dash across the allotments).

But one lady stops in a wheelchair and listens attentively. And an older lady in blue comes up close to show me her twenty pence before she drops it in my bag.

Slip up in church

We’re midway through this pagan festival with Christmas caroling out of the way and twelfth night still to come.  (Both caroling and wassailing once constituted a form of busking and usually included a request for alms or some form of refreshment.)

At Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in Hoarwithy Church, Herefordshire our village quire erefordshire our village quire sang an unusual version of While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night. Unfortunately one of the basses (me) forgets to repeat the chorus and the whole performance grinds briefly to a halt. Tut-tut from the congregation.

Where's London's street music?

Took a couple of long walks through the city last week, Lambeth to Kings Cross, Kings Cross to South Kensington, maybe ten miles of the city pavements.

Admiring the architecture especially the Michelin building in Fulham Road with the pneumatic Bibendum and car chase tiles like this.
Savouring the Christmas air in St James and Hyde Parks.
But where are the street musicians? There was ghastly canned music playing on the South Bank Christmas Market. But that was about it.
Tut tut.

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.