Great Musical Controversies 1: The Death of Jazz

[Disclaimer: this was a terrible idea, and far harder to write than I anticipated, and the following is a pile of pretentious twaddle, but I said I’d do it…]

Jazz is dead. Jazz remains dead. And it is we who have killed it – unless that was Ornette Coleman, or Miles Davis, or Kenny G, or possibly whoever’s bright idea it was to replace the tuba with the string bass. Because, while jazz has been killed multiple times – or at least there is lengthy disagreement about when it happened and whose fault it was – it continues to shamble round the place like a zombie, occasionally eating people’s brains so that they listen to the Fast Show’s spoof Jazz Club programme and think, actually that sounds like it could be good…

Music Talks To Me

I miss Berlin… I imagine most of us have been day-dreaming about where we’ll visit first once we’re allowed to visit anywhere (especially those of us in plague-ridden Britain – I imagine that other countries may be maintaining quarantine regulations for Brits for some time to come). For me, it’s Berlin, which feels even more like a second home now that I can’t go there; partly because it’s somewhere I’ve lived for months at a time, rather than a place I travel to for work, I have a much stronger sense of the cafes, restaurants and jazz clubs I’m not able to visit, the places I can’t walk, the S-Bahn stations I’m not using etc. than I do for any British city. And of course the wacky local music scene…

Desolate Isolation Discs – the Finale?

Week 9 of our stay on this desert island – and the first signs that we may not be lonesome and abandoned much longer. It would be too much to think that the sheer narrative determinism of the format has somehow compelled Johnson to start changing lockdown rules so that we don’t have to worry about what to do next – but at least he hasn’t leapt in too prematurely, leaving us this final session to tie everything up…

Desolate Isolation Discs Track 8

We assume that we’re going to be stuck on this desert island for a while, so we choose records that we can’t bear to be without – and generally that implies records that we will happily listen to over and over again without tiring of them. My final choice is… different. I can’t imagine wanting to listen to this more than once a month or so, even if I had only seven other records to choose from; it is the polar opposite of relaxing, and the pleasure it offers is a very specialised kind. But it is a record that I couldn’t live without for any substantial amount of time. There are occasions when nothing else will do.

Desolate Isolation Discs Track 7

Okay, this is where things get difficult: my Number 8 has been pretty well nailed down for years, as have most of the earlier ones, but this is the slot that changes constantly. There is any number of jazz records I would be heart-broken to abandon, but no easy way to decide between them; there isn’t anything with specific personal connotations (or, personal connections that I need to reference with a song – the nearest I get to evoking my day job, ancient history, is my firm belief that Dylan’s Blind Willie McTell is deliberately channelling Thucydides). No, the principle that I end up using is that this record will announce – to the parrots, giant crabs or whatever else is hanging around on the beach under the palm trees – that I Am Still Relevant!, or at least still listen to some contemporary stuff…

Desolate Isolation Discs Track 6

When I first started listening to Desert Island Discs, most guests chose mostly if not entirely classical music; this has changed dramatically in recent years, such that a purely classical list is now pretty rare – and I’m sure there are older listeners who regard this as a sign of decadence and the collapse of all civilised values (hence the ridiculous grumbling against the divine Lauren Laverne). I’m not really a classical buff, despite listening to a lot in my youth – and my tastes have become very modern, seeking out the edginess and experimentation of composers like Schönberg and Messiaen rather than the ‘nice’ harmonies of Bach or Mozart.

Desolate Isolation Discs – Track 5

It took me a long time to find jazz as a music that I loved, as opposed to something vaguely decorative and/or period-appropriate in a restaurant, film (Some Like It Hot) or tv show (the brilliant opening sequence in Jeeves and Wooster). The saxophone player in one of the bands I played with at college was primarily a jazz musician, and so I heard him a couple of times in more sophisticated settings than a ramshackle blues/soul/rock group (also featuring the bloke who would go on to create Spooks on vocals and lyrics, celebrity trivia fans). A few years later, the sax player in the Commitments-style soul group I was in asked if I’d come and play bass for a jazz group he wanted to form, and I bought a couple of cheap records to get a sense of what this might involve; discovered Weather Report this way (great, but clearly not what he had in mind), but the Parker and Coltrane tapes turned out to be truly terrible live recordings, with the audible bits offering precisely the sort of apparently aimless running up and down scales very fast that reinforced all my prejudices. Lead guitar wank on old-fashioned instruments? No thanks…

Desolate Isolation Discs Track 4

With only eight songs to play with, some have to serve multiple functions and carry multiple meanings – including providing material for philosophical contemplation on those long desert island evenings with a long drink of fermented coconut milk or two. This one has, I think, at least three dimensions, albeit overlapping ones: it’s about family, and identity, and sensibility.

Desolate Isolation Discs Week 3

Since my mid-teens, music has for me been about playing – however badly – almost as much as listening. Initially, this was a matter of trying to echo in real life what I heard on records (trying to produce musical settings for the alternately lovelorn and satirical lyrics I was writing), but at a certain point the playing started dictating my listening; specifically, after I started to concentrate on the bass guitar (having realised both that I lacked the temperament of a lead guitarist, and that it was vastly easier to find bands who needed a bass player), and became increasingly cheesed off with the minimal role expected of me. My musical philosophy has always been that my job is to fit in with and support the song, in a manner appropriate to the style of music – but why, in rock music, is that always so bloody boring? I know why Derek Smalls seized the opportunity to play his jazz-rock epic…

Desolate Isolation Discs: Track 2

I’ve always loved words – if I had to do a Desert Island Books, it would be at least as hard as this exercise, and probably twice as long, as the justification for why a book not only is great but will also bear re-reading multiple times (plenty of great works are one-off experiences, or at least once a decade or so) can be deeply convoluted, and that’s before we get onto the issue of Books I Haven’t Got Round To Reading But This Would Be A Great Opportunity…

Desolate Isolation Discs: Track 1

And here we go, struggling out of the surf onto the beach of this deserted island, clutching the pile of the records that mean the most to each of us, and ready to tell an inquisitive parrot all about them…

There’s no set order to the records – not in the real programme, and certainly not here. In my usual pretentious manner, I’m going to do a certain amount of meta-commentary, but you don’t have to take a blind bit of notice; just introduce your own first choice in the comments below. Still, it’s difficult to escape a feeling that the first record really ought to be the one that brings to mind childhood, or the moment we first fell in love with music…

Desolate Isolation Discs

It does feel a bit as if we have all been marooned on our own separate islands at the moment – albeit quite comfortably equipped islands, but without the tropical sunshine – and so this feels like a suitable time to play a bit of Desert Island Discs. If anyone doesn’t know that reference – since we get quite an international audience here – it’s a long-running BBC Radio programme, in which a Prominent Person is interviewed about their life (currently, by the excellent Lauren Laverne, formerly of Kenickie), interspersed with their choice of eight records, the ones they would have saved from the shipwreck that landed them on an imaginary desert island – where they also get a choice of book and luxury item. Those of us who know the programme have probably all spent many hours, over the years, compiling and revising our Desert Island lists, just in case we ever got invited on.

Having thought about this, after seeing someone mention that they are doing something like this with the group of people they used to meet regularly before we all went into isolation, I think this is what we do. Choose your eight records – albums are allowed, as are complete operas if you’re that way inclined, but you need to select a specific track as well – and think about what you would say about them, whether this is autobiographical or musical. Every Friday evening I will make a post on the Spill with my choice, and you then add yours in the comments, complete with YouTube link or similar. That will keep us occupied for nine weeks – eight records, and a final wrap-up where you have to choose just one of them, plus book and luxury item – and maybe by then there will be some light at the end of the tunnel…

The Big Five-Oh

Fifty years, fifty songs, 1969-2018 (I did initially wonder about finishing off with something from this year, but haven’t heard anything I’m certain that I really like yet). With a rule of one track per artist, I’ve endeavoured to find the right balance between artists I love and had to fit in somewhere, somehow (not always successfully; no space for Dylan, for example), and individual songs that simply demanded to be included (which still led to some vicious competition in particular years – yes, it’s possibly cheating to include both Visage and Ultravox, both originally released in 1980, on the grounds that the latter didn’t chart until 1981…).

The Lost Decade…

I have a relatively substantial birthday coming up, and I’ve been putting together a playlist to celebrate: one track for every year. It’s a complex process involving a lot of compromises and trade-offs, to balance fitting in something by favourite artists somewhere with honouring all-time one-off favourites. Inevitably there are years where I have to choose between ten or more things I loved at the time, even before I start reckoning with tracks by artists I didn’t discover until later. And inevitably there are periods where I draw a blank…

2000-7. Or 8-1 BRR, as it’s also known. A period in which I was listening almost exclusively to jazz, but also a period in which pop and rock music seem to have been distinctly rubbish, judging both from my memories of songs I did hear at the time (prompted by looking at lists of top-selling singles to remind me) and from the fact that my gradual rediscovery of pop and rock ARR didn’t lead to much investigation of music from that era, apart from Mogwai (and I’ve set a ‘one song per artist’ rule, so filling up the empty slots with Mogwai isn’t an option).

So… what have I missed? What should I have been listening to? What am I going to put into my playlist?

Spill Awards 2017: The Results

Scene: an empty stage, lit by a single old-fashioned filament bulb without a shade, which every so often flickers balefully. Is this a clumsy metaphor for what the Oscars will look like when all the women boycott them and all the men have been disgraced? No, it’s the empty stage of my mind. I can’t go on. I must go on, or this will never happen. I can’t go on. Go on. Go on go on. Go on go on go on go on go on.

Spill Awards 2017: The Shortlists

Well, we’ve excelled ourselves this year: over fifty different albums nominated for Record of the Year, of which only eight received more than one vote – which gives us our shortlist. Rather more unanimity when it comes to films, TV, or villains (that is, almost everyone nominated three or four of the final eight; choosing between them may be rather harder), similarly blank stares when it came to thinking of heroes. The usual routine: you have until the end of 31st December to cast your votes, with 1 vote for every category but Record of the Year, where you can have three…

And this award goes to… the other guys…

Concerned that, in a year that has in most people’s opinion been a pretty good one for a wide range of music, the end of year awards will still all end up going to Taylor Swift or some other equally undeserving mainstream twaddle? Never fear, the Annual Spill Awards offer YOU the opportunity to push for the records and other cultural events that YOU think are most deserving of recognition. But only if YOU get involved, or I’ll just end up stuffing the envelopes as usual.

I Was Wrong

I like to think of myself as a tolerant and open-minded person, at least within certain parameters (so, exceptions for Brexit, Trump, Niall Ferguson etc.). Mrs Abahachi might interject at this point with a “You kept saying you hated X, until you actually went there/tried it” list (you know, things like Austria, Gavin and Stacey, the USA), and I’ll admit that this does sometimes happen – but I hope I’d get credit for being willing to change my mind *and* admit it, rather than trying to pretend that I loved it all along…

New(ish) Polish Jazz!

I’ve just got back from a couple of weeks in Berlin, mostly work-related but taking in a bit of culture with Mrs Abahachi at the same time. The main event was the Berliner Staatsoper’s astonishing, disturbing and thought-provoking staging of Wagner’s Parsifal, which I’ve written about over on my regular blog (in the course of a general rant about May’s nonsensical vicarage values). However, when we saw that the Polish jazz trumpeter, Tomasz Stanko, one of my heroes, not only had a new album coming out this month but was doing a short European tour with most of his current quartet (Finnish pianist Alexi Tuomarila replacing David Virelles, but Reuben Rogers on double bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums present and correct), including a gig in Poznań (i.e. about three hours from Berlin), we seized the chance to visit Poland for the first time.

#tinyjoys

Yes, it’s a slightly naff hashtag, but the sentiment is perfect: in these dark times, we need to try to find comfort and relief where we can, to fortify ourselves for the struggle ahead. One of my #tinyjoys this week is the fact that my aubergine and Pimiento de Padron seeds are germinating – there’s always a period of nervous uncertainty, as peppers and related species take so long to sprout (and I’m still waiting for any sign of life from the habaneros). The other is the discovery of someone in Finland who improvises Lego sculptures to jazz albums; see @AjuArchIdiot on Twitter, but also this quixotic project to get Lego to produce an actual kit of the ECM studio, complete with Pat Metheny Group…

The Great British Spill Awards!

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the glorious land of green fields, quaint little towns dappled in the evening sunlight, and chocolate-box cottages full of cottage industry making innovative jams and the like, that is post-Brexit Britain. Make Britain Great Again? Quite unnecessary; we’ve always been Great, one just has to wipe away some of the accumulated grime that’s been blown in from foreign places to see it. But making the Spill Awards Great Again, when so many of you good people have shown a dangerous tendency in the past to side with the Enemies of the People – that’s a plan we can all get behind! So, as the fog machines get to work in the Channel and the tea urn chunters in the corner, pull up a folding wooden chair and don’t get too comfortable.

Spill Awards!

I’m never sure whether to call this the Spill Awards 2016, since they all relate to last year, or 2017 ‘cos that’s the year we’re now in. Either way, the votes have been counted and I’ve got my act together, and I’m delighted to announce that the award ceremony will be going out live this coming Friday, from 20:00 GMT – apologies to anyone for whom this will be massively inconvenient, but twas ever thus. All welcome. Dress: traditional and yet forward-looking. Cash bar.

The Spill Awards 2016: Vote Vote Vote!

Nominations have been received, complex algorithms have been applied, unfortunate links to Neo-Nazi fake news sites have been removed and the final shortlists for this year’s awards can now be published. Voting will continue until Christmas Day; you have one vote for each category except for Album of the Year where you have three, in the vague hope that we’ll get a clear result. Suggestions for special additional awards in individual categories can be sent to abahachi(at)hotmail.co.uk. Date and venue for the award ceremony itself to be announced in due course, depending on whether we can find the door to a magical Trump-free kingdom in time, or just have to hunker down in a nuclear bunker somewhere in the Scottish Highlands…

Spill Awards 2016 – Nominations open

We’re still here! At the end of last year, it seriously looked as if RR would be no more, and so the mood at the traditional end-of-year awards was distinctly downbeat. But we have survived, and the optimistic among us might claim that we’re stronger than ever, with a whole load of new people joining in each week, even if they haven’t for the most part made it across to the Spill. And I have a new job, so am less personally miserable than I have been over the last couple of years. So, let’s party!*

This is Stage One of an increasingly complex and laborious process designed to maximise the expression of the Voice Of The People; no, it never works very well, and numerous people end up throwing their vote away because they haven’t paid enough attention to what’s really going on – but anything’s better than leaving it in the hands of those arrogant liberal ‘experts’. Anyway, if the result is unclear we can call on a team of practised Russian hackers to manufacture a few more votes for suitable candidates.

Solid Gold Classics from Radio Abahachi: Gladiators!

It’s been ages and ages since I did a podcast; mainly due to sheer lack of time (which is why I continue to be somewhat missing in action more generally), which means that my more professional blogging – in the sense that it relates to the day job, rather than anyone showing any sign of paying me for it – has had to take preference if I’m able to do anything at all. But the great advantage of a classically-themed music podcast is that it kills two birds with one stone; just a shame that I picked on a theme this time around that turned out to have relatively few relevant songs – or at least that I could think of; very happy to hear of suggestions in the comments…

http://www.podbean.com/media/player/gnyhg-5cd4c8?from=yiiadmin

Download this episode (right click and save)

I’ve been having problems with technology, and in particular Dropbox; unable to get into my old account, unable to persuade a new account to play music via WordPress, so I’ve had to resort to Podbean. Hope this isn’t going to inconvenience anyone. I also have a request, or rather a desperate plea: does anyone happen to have copies of old Radio Abahachi podcasts that you could send me, and in particular the two previous Solid Gold Classics podcasts? I used to have everything on a USB stick as well as on my hard drive; didn’t get round to transferring files to new computer – and now can’t find the USB stick. The previous episode (on Sirens) is definitely still on Dropbox, as I’m able to play it – I just can’t get at it. If someone can send me files, or offer any helpful advice, I’d be pathetically grateful…