London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Monthly Archives: August 2018

Jazzing it up

Wednesday 22nd August saw, as far as I can recall, the first time I performed in a bona fide jazz club or venue. (I’ve been to a few jam sessions, but I’m going to consider those a different class of beast.) And hereby hangs a tail of London’s, and music’s, habit of trying to reduce the six degrees of separation theory to two …

Back in mid-July, I went to to a Musicians’ Union London social (always aiming to get the maximum benefit out of my subs!). I gave out about half a dozen business cards and had interesting conversations with several people, including an illuminating but hardly cheering one with a freelance orchestral violinist who has been in this trade a lot longer than me. She was keen to draw my attention to her father, with essentially the same career path, having bought a five-bedroom house in the London inner suburbs, while she has a mortgage on a flat over a chippy down the road. I also learned that a certain well-respected south coast professional orchestra pays additional string players, when required, rather less than I have got for some concerts bumping amateur orchestra sections in London in the last couple of years.

One of the people I chatted to later on the evening – when my ‘networking’ will was starting to flag – was Australian expat jazz (and other) singer-songwriter Lauren Lucille (see photo above. No, not the bald one. No, not the one with the beard, that’s me.). My impression at the time was that I didn’t quite know what to contribute in a conversation largely between her and an, also expat, soul singer-songwriter whose name I have sadly forgotten who tours Europe on a regular basis with pickup bands. However, we sustained a meandering and intermittent email conversation afterwards, notionally about writing and collaborating to write music but reaching all sorts of comparatively far-flung corners along the way.

Ten days on from meeting, I decided to spend a Sunday evening trying something different. I have known jazz and eastern-Mediterranean focusing cellist Shirley Smart (whose music is fascinating, artistically ambitious and yet accessible, and I recommend to your attention!) slightly for what must be at least three years. I’ve seen her at a duo gig in Oxford and we’ve even jammed together once, though never gigged. This summer, she started running free improvisation nights in the tiny, L-shaped downstairs bar of near-legendary Camden jazz / folk / world / anything acoustic and interesting venue the Green Note. The format is fairly straightforward: a shortish ‘set’ from a combination of two or three invited musicians, followed by a series of jams involving the guest players and whoever has turned up and wants to play / sing, in revolving combinations of no more than again about three. I was intrigued, and I know very little about completely free improvisation (although isn’t the point in a sense that there is little to know about it, because it comes from no fixed material? Discuss … ).

The house group on this occasion consisted of Shirley on cello, a double bassist named Ollie (I could go and check these names, but maybe it’s better I don’t) and a tenor saxophonist, Rachel I think. Their two or three extended improvisations, totalling something like 45 minutes, included some spontaneously gorgeous moments, some effective uses of extended techniques and some (perhaps deliberate) temporary forays into sheer noise barely akin to most conventional music. Hearing Shirley’s cello in company of a bass (which I hadn’t before, live) had the enjoyable virtue for me of pushing her away from using the instrument plucked as a sort of piccolo bass instrument (which is the jazz role in which cello probably has most history, though often tuned in fourths an octave above string bass rather than its natural fifths), and towards a low-to-mid-range melodic role more like trombone, baritone sax or bass clarinet which interests me much more.

I’ve commented on how tiny the space was; it has hard surfaces as well, with pretty much only the people there to soak up some of the sound. I would probably have ended up putting in earplugs (musician’s earplugs, not the ones for totally drowning out a factory while working in it) for any tenor saxophone player in there. But the saxophone family are particularly abrasive played at the extremes of their range or with alternative techniques, and it felt to me like this one spent about 20% of her time playing the instrument conventionally, and the rest in the honks, squeaks, harmonics and rasps that are usually considered fringe (though by no means external) to sax playing. Perhaps this represents a release of, or rebalancing towards, what most gigs do not allow or only in very carefully restricted doses. Perhaps, though this would worry me more as to the player’s wellbeing, such extreme emotional territory is what she most wishes to express, given a blank canvas. In any case (and I am in danger of sounding like the carping and prejudiced jazz criticism of Philip Larkin here) I found it bruising both acoustically and mentally – ironically, the emotionally overwhelmed (those with, say, clinical depression, or anxiety) are usually terrible audiences for overwhelming emotional expression!

At the end of the ‘house’ set, I turned round to find Lauren stood right behind me (I cannot convey just how small the space was; suffice to say it would have made an unspectacular corridor), having managed to recognise me from behind in near-total darkness on one previous meeting. Clearly my hair is getting out of hand again. It seems she had met Shirley quite recently and been asked along in person (I just picked up a Facebook plug for the series).

First up in the open spots was a duet between the bassist and his uncle, who engaged in surreal yet unexpectedly hilarious stream-of-consciousness spoken word (sometimes, spoken noise!) improvisation – a welcome contrast from intense expressionism. Pretty early in proceedings, Shirley had me (viola in hand on this occasion – I want to give it as much jazz practise as I easily can) and Lauren join Ollie on bass for a stint. First dry-throat moment: when both the other two look at you (rather like the photo above) for an opening gambit and you realise you’ll have to take the lead for the first few bars at least. As we got going, I found ways of developing what I was doing that felt to me like they created satisfyingly ensemble music – I have yet to find real satisfaction in two or three musicians playing simultaneously but without reference to each other: a lot of what I did was probably nearly modal, and there was a lot of copying or semi-copying motifs, rhythms, phrase shapes etc. between all three of us. And some lending structure simply by repetition, or repetition with slight variation, particularly in Lauren’s hummed or scatted vocal phrases which seemed to be tracing out some kind of gradual large-scale architectonic arc much bigger than I was (consciously!) working with.

If that was a pleasant surprise, even if perhaps a little conservative for the free improvisation aficionado, I found my other slot that night rather a return to earth. Ollie was again in action (I hasten to point out he didn’t get made to play all evening, though he must have worked harder than anyone else), and another trio was made up with a virtuosic and wide-ranging clarinettist. On this occasion, while his playing had plenty of contrast and range, I felt it lacked any ‘gaps’ into which I could easily insert myself, or obvious responsiveness to surrounding players. Echoing his phrases under the next one did not produce results I found satisfying, I never really found courage of my convictions in any modus operandi and ultimately felt the other two would probably have produced a better duo for the audience than adding me to form a trio.

Major discoveries of the evening: I rather like having themes and some fixed content; my ears are over-sensitive for saxophones in confined spaces; and as a player I only really feel comfortable also always being a listener.

In the second week of August, my email thread with Lauren sprang into life again. Did I have any evidence of me improvising on standards? And was I free on the 22nd?

Yes, though not much, really just this:

and I could arrange to be. It turned out Lauren was doing a gig at Mill Hill Jazz Club, performing material from the substantial off-and-on collaboration between Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Pass with fellow Aussie guitarist Carl Orr; she was thinking of opening this up to an ‘and Friends’ vibe with trumpet, cello and perhaps me guesting on a few numbers each. Lauren duly picked a couple of numbers for me to look at and sent chord charts in the right keys (bandleaders take note – this would save me so much time on YouTube and Spotify!) and we were in principle ‘set’.

By the time I showed up, the other guests had pulled out, and despite some attempts at replacement I was the only guest (apart from Lauren’s father Craig, a retired genre-spanning pro double bassist, rolling out his Louis Armstrong voice for an encore version of ‘Mack the Knife’), leaving my presence rather unexpected to the club runners – I was greeted with: Lauren: ‘Oh, hi Martin!’ Organiser (to Lauren): ‘I thought you said this was a duo!’ Turns out this was only a panic over possibly being expected to provide 50% as much fee again, and was quickly disentangled.

Lauren and Carl’s performance was a superlative example of what one rehearsal, shared knowledge of a style and excellent musicianship can bring about. Carl, incidentally, was delivering a distinctive if not unique mix of mainstream jazz and contemporary practice. Inevitably, almost every performance started with an introduction, followed by a vocal theme statement (with more or less rewriting!). During that initial vocal chorus, Carl stuck to accompanying patterns, chords and basslines; but he was playing these into a loop pedal, enabling him to follow this by replaying his accompaniment and soloing over the top. What I find most testament to his musical sensitivity and prioritisation of good jazz over showing off is that, instead of leaving the loop running for the outchorus so as to noodle prominent lead-line responses to Lauren’s vocal, he reliably switched it off and returned to accompanying ‘live’ and interactively.

One anecdote from while I was not playing deserves preservation. Lauren has the endearing habit when ‘fronting’ of introducing songs by reference to other numbers by the same artist, but rather than purely listing titles, often singing a bar or two of them off the cuff (usually whichever bit of the tune contains the title lyric). Introducing (I think) ‘Solitude’, she did this with a call-and-response structured Ellington number, which I therefore think must have been ‘Don’t get Around much any More’. Carl, as if either not thinking about it or having been rehearsed, came in time- and note-perfect in whatever key Lauren had plucked out of the air, and it took them about 8 bars to establish they weren’t actually going to do the song (which wasn’t on the set list or the charts for the evening!). Lauren commented along fairly expected lines on Carl’s ability to do this, including finding the key etc., to which Carl responded ‘It’s because this [playing guitar] is the only thing I can do!’

Of course, this is a slight exaggeration, but it brings out a very important point about professional musicians. In order to join someone in time and in key without warning or pre-arrangement; in order to perform a concerto from memory not just flawlessly but interestingly and artistically; in order to hold a part in an atonal unaccompanied choral piece by yourself well enough to be recorded for posterity; music needs to be your full-time job. If you’re not performing or recording or rehearsing or (sadly) doing the admin and promotion that is a necessary part of a performing career, you need to be practising and studying up to a cumulative time total that probably approaches the horrifying hours per week of the medical profession. This is the single biggest threat posed by the underpayment of musicians: of course we can all do other work, but having to put time and energy into something else, even something as flexible as my self-employed proofreading from home, is a constraint on musical achievement – I’ve watched it in myself, to my chagrin, and continue to work to try and minimise it. Underpaid musicians will not lead there being no musicians, but to the standard of their playing, their musicianship, their understanding and how much they can do with a given set of circumstances gradually but unpreventably falling. In this regard, even the teaching which almost every professional musician except me seems to be engaged in is perhaps a necessary evil, though perhaps we should expect those who are truly good at something to share their insights with students advancing towards their level. Maybe we shouldn’t make them teach six-year-old beginners whose presence is entirely due to pushy parents though.

But I digress.

My contribution to the evening was joining Lauren and Carl for two numbers: the venerable blues-based standard ‘Why Don’t you Do Right’, and Toots Thielemans’ (representative of two rather small bodies: Belgian jazz musicians and jazz harmonica players) strangely un-blues-related waltz ‘Bluesette’. I had been warned not to interfere in the opening choruses, and so although my instinct to accompany or interact as well as, perhaps even more than, solo led me to a certain amount of carefully kept-in-the-background filling out of guitar solos and closing choruses, the main spotlight on me was on my solos. It’s not too evident in the photo, but there were literal as well as metaphorical spotlights, which is one way of making someone feel very visible; and there is really nowhere to hide in an understated jazz trio, especially when it is effectively a duo while you are soloing – vocal accompaniment to instrumental solos is definitely an experiment that will have to wait for another gig! Carl’s guitar playing is excellent, supportive and has the distinctive quality of really good jazz guitar since about the 1950s of being able to play at least three roles (timekeepng basslines, extended-chord harmonies and melodic improvisation) and at least two of them at once, but it certainly wasn’t going to cover me up if I parted company from the song, even playing acoustic violin. And the audience were very much an audience, all ears and only breaking silence during numbers to applaud particularly appreciated solos; no buying drinks and chatting during sets here.

If this wasn’t clear, I felt certainly outclassed and slightly out of my depth as a jazz musician in this context. I was certainly more following cues, including when to come in and when to continue (or not) for another chorus, than taking any command of proceedings! After all, I make a lot of my living from music but only a tiny fraction of that from jazz, and the improvisatory approach required in my rock bands is very different, not least because of the totally different harmonic language involved.

In that context, and the slightly ground-breaking nature of the gig for me (as I started by saying two and a half thousand words ago), I consider myself well content with having produced some nice sounds, been complimented by those who spoke to me and simply not having derailed anything (if I made one flub of structure then Carl jumped to catch it, I couldn’t now be sure) – even when ‘Why Don’t’ underwent an unexpected (by me) mid-performance key change from a fairly unremarkable B minor to a rather eyebrow-raising C# minor (try improvising on that in your own time). Here’s hoping I can make it the first of many (especially if I’m in for an equal cut of the fee next time!) rather than a one-off.

When is a folk club gig not a folk club gig?

Well, when it’s in a church, uses a full PA and is advertised as part of an arts festival fringe (and has no ‘floor spots’ – open performance opportunities), there must be room for significant doubt.

I don’t scrupulously write up every gig with the Filthy Spectacula or Kindred Spirit – it would not only leave me even further behind on blogging, but rapidly become boring for everyone, including me. News flash to nobody: bread and butter bar gigs are often quite similar to each other, and originals bands recycle a lot of their repertoire because writing, arranging, learning and rehearsing new songs takes significant time.

However, several things made 10 August’s gig worth writing about. For one thing, it was a rare duo outing for Elaine and I focused on her original songs – usually, the duo play at functions or in bars, social clubs and so on where the audience haven’t paid to see live music as such and covers they’ve heard before are very much the order of the day, and the original material is performed by the full band in ticketed gigs.

In this case, though, the gig was on the Isle of Wight. This in itself marks an unusually far-ranging engagement for Kindred Spirit, who (unlike far-flung festival-trotters the Filthy Spectacula) rarely play further from my current hat-hanging spot than Hampshire. The promoter was very good in providing a substantial fee (between two of us!), paying for the ferry, feeding us before the gig and putting us up in his house the night after (the headliners had to settle for a B&B being paid for for them!), but unsurprisingly couldn’t have found the budget to do the same for the full quintet.

We were opening for Rosalie Deighton and Edwina Hayes, whose performance I shall come to shortly. Our own set made up roughly half the evening though – no hasty 30-minute support slot for an expansive headline set here. In a way, it was a shame that going on, without coming home, to a Filthy Spectacula gig the following day had led me to bring the electric violin rather than the acoustic one – the church being used as a venue had a very nice acoustic, somewhat flattened by having a substantial PA put in it and everything plugged in; I’d like to think I could have ‘filled’ it unplugged. Another time perhaps; though if this weekend had followed, rather than preceded, the one in which I doubled up the second Mechanics gig (see previous post) with another Filthy Spectacula festival appearance, I might have changed things round anyway. Such is hindsight.

St Catherine’s is a medium-sized church, I would guess potentially seating nearer to 200 people than 100, and must have been something like two-thirds full; a fairly substantial crowd then. However, this is where the folk club element kicks in. We rapidly found that not only did the audience fall attentively silent during her quieter and more introspective songs (after all, a ticketed audience without a bar to visit may do something similar out of mere disinterest!) but they also joined in – both bidden and unbidden! – on her bouncy celebration-of-life numbers too:

Despite the bigger space, PA and spacial sense of an audience separated from performers, this was a combination of attentiveness and active involvement typical of unamplified, acoustically ‘vulnerable’ (even in-the-round) folk-club settings. Both Elaine and later Edwina fell naturally into the distinctively folk club habit of dictating the chorus lyrics to songs with easily joined-in choruses to the audience before they started (folk clubs are the only place I’ve repeatedly come across this presenting of the words alone done, as opposed to either leaving the audience to pick things up for themselves (rock gigs) or singing them the participation section in advance (churches learning ‘new songs’, and Jules Buckley at the Royal Albert Hall for last year’s Charles Mingus Prom)).

You may have gathered our set went down well – over significant hurdles in my case (wow, that must be my mixed metaphor of the year!). The single most frustrating thing about playing electric violin for me has to be that it makes so little noise under my chin and so I’m dependent on monitoring to be able to hear what I’m doing. In ‘touring’ gigs with house PA systems and sound engineers (even more so as here when the latter does not know the hired former well), my preference would be to not be dependent on monitoring at all, given it is usually and ultimately rightly bottom of the pile in limited setup time! On this occasion, we had plenty of time, but I still had a conversation with the engineer that went roughly:
Could I have a bit more violin in the monitor please? Because I can’t really hear it acoustically … OK, not that much! … Erm, still a bit less … Little bit less violin again please? … Thanks!
The bigger issue was that my A string chose to snap half way through the second number. Not only did I have to fit a new one (and tune it up a couple of times as it ‘stretched in’), but the change in tension had sent all the others out of tune as well. Luckily Elaine regularly plays solo, and was able to pull a number out of the bag while I changed the string – but it unsurprisingly felt pressured, and it slipped my mind to head backstage where there was normal lighting. For the record, I cannot recommend trying to get the end of a violin string though the hole in the peg, especially when the pegbox is painted black, against the clock with trembling fingers by dim lighting. Except to psychological masochists of a subtle bent. After that interruption we picked and chose a new route through most of the prepared set list – fortunately something we are used to doing in response to how rowdy, drunk or otherwise punters are at bar duo gigs and so not an extra source of stress!

Edwina Hayes and Rosalie Deighton (it seems invidious to worry about what order the names are listed in) performed more as a double act than a duo. Both write in what might be called a broadly Americana vein, without trans- or mid-Atlantic accents or restrictively ten-gallon-hat lyrical content, but with a distinctively country guitar approach (notably, playing almost everything in G with a capo used to arrive at the right key for the singer’s range) and harmonic language, rarely beyond four chords in a song but potentially swapping between them at high speed; and both perform a mixture of their own songs and ones by professional friends. Their set might best be described as a two-sided songwriters’ circle (geometrists, chew on that concept), with them alternating performances, occasionally harmonising on each other’s songs or adding a few extra guitar notes, and offering quite substantial explanation of and comment on the songs. Indeed they commented on having been barred from playing sitting down as it wouldn’t have been gig-like enough – which didn’t make their manner any less in-the-round, unplugged, again folk club-esque.

Both are north-easterners, but Hayes’ stage manner (or manner in general – she is barely different in conversation without a microphone and an attentive audience) conforms much better to ‘northern lass’ stereotypes in harmlessly mocking garrulity (she also has the slightly less gloomy song repertoire – but by a narrow margin; heartbreak is the chief vein worked by both). In the course of the evening, besides lots of specific information and one long story about a two-minute song being made up on the fly by Rosalie to try and impress a man she was trapped with during a New York power cut but who had already expressed distaste for ‘really depressing country songs’ (he turned out to be gay), we also gleaned the following nuggets:

  • both are members of different weight-control associations
  • being in a thriving relationship is highly damaging to the songwriting output of both
  • Rosalie’s guitars are custom-made by a relative (I forget which), but unfortunately the one she had with her was having an off day for holding tuning

I’m sure there would have been less chat had said guitar behaved itself impeccably – sure not least because of the two statements of: ‘I need to tune this – say something funny!’ Each followed by a (brief, but dead) silence.

The evening had one more surprise up its sleeve for the audience (not for us thankfully). At the previous night’s gig, both acts had joined in an impromptu collaborative encore. So much had this impressed the promoter’s wife and general fixer that she asked after soundcheck if we would do the same. I must have looked slightly uncertain about what we would all know when this was first mooted (Rosalie and Edwina had not yet arrived at this point), but it was pushed through on Elaine’s grounds that I would busk whatever it was perfectly well! Edwina, on being presented with this situation, took about 10 minutes to come up with a very practical Northerly solution: ‘Let it Be in C. I’ve written out the words – me, Rosalie and Elaine can take one verse each.’ Apparently what I played (unrehearsed) was lovely – as the near-silent electric violin hadn’t been brought back up in the monitor on my side of stage, I didn’t really hear most of it! I just wish I’d worked out the right note to start the descending scale prominent in the original lead guitar before we did the song, rather than nailing it down (it’s the second of the scale – D in the key we were doing) just after that figure’s last occurrence in our performance. Well, you learn something new every day they say.

No Mike

Pretty much all musicians know that the wedding business is one of the few near-goldmines left in the trade. I’m not revealing anything not known to anyone who has, or whose close friend has, planned their own or someone else’s wedding when I say that wedding musicians (like wedding everything elses) tend to cost about twice as much per head as ‘ordinary’ function / covers players (who are already, of course, earning something like double what you can generally get for playing original music) and get fed into the bargain – at the price, of course, of having web presence, professional video, audio and photo promotional material, slick service-provider presentation and professionalism, and generally being a business on the same level as the caterers and the waiting staff.

For rather much the same reason, spots falling vacant in existing wedding acts are scarce. It’s likely to be one of the last things a musician holds onto before ditching performing altogether. So there isn’t much opportunity for getting into the wedding business except a new act (for which, perhaps surprisingly, the market seems to have almost limitless capacity). You could go solo, of course. But that would certainly mean a car of my own and, for me personally, backing tracks; the one of which depends on a test I have yet to pass, and the other, as discussed in my last post, is a direction I am seriously loathe to take. Which then means either forming something of your own, or getting lucky on being able to be in on the ground floor in a new group of someone else’s devising. I made an attempt at forming a wedding string quartet (a safe product line by any standards!) back in Oxford – and discovered certain difficulties both with the supply of classical pros north of London and south of Birmingham, and with, a couple of years ago I will stress, my people management (as opposed to practical organisation / administration) skills.

I will come back to the ‘in on the ground floor’ theme at some point in the future, but for now: enter The Mechanics. Not ‘Mike and’, as we get asked an average of twice per gig.

https://www.themorrisagency.co.uk/bands-to-hire/mechanics-roaming/

As far as I was concerned, this started off as a one-off job: audio recording and filming (miming to the audio just recorded) with an acoustic trio in Aylesbury, expenses covered. What the renownedly laconic communication style of guitarist and musical entrepreneur Gary Mullins didn’t immediately reveal to my unschooled eyes was that I was in fact going to produce the promo material for a new function act (joining his managerial roster of a plugged-in, static ‘Mumford-style’ act and the fairly self-explanatory Ukes of Hazzard).

Anyway, material was duly recorded (with some surprise at my willingness to do a take sight-reading from the parts Gary helpfully provided for the showreel) and filmed (with some deliberate featuring of the Ash 70s-style biiiig hair that waves in the wind if I head-toss enough) in March (before I headed off to play a St Patrick’s gig, as chance would have it). And there the matter rested for some time and it had made its own natural way to the back of my mind.

In mid-July, I suddenly realised that we had a gig in the diary and I had no idea where it was, what I should be bringing or what the repertoire might be! Cue some chasing and planning, and a lot of YouTubing songs and googling chords to quickly get my head more or less around the set list (which was then significantly altered by singer-guitarist Mark to bring it into line with his fronting repertoire. Such is life, as I find myself saying too often lately). The key point rapidly turned out to be ‘chords and vocals will be covered; find other useful things to do on whatever instrument seems appropriate’.

On Friday 27 July, fresh or anything but from gigging with the Pogue Traders the night before (see a couple of posts back), I made my way into the Weald. Mark and I then attempted to track down the wedding venue by means of a postcode and the not exactly reassuring name The Lost Village of Dode. Mark’s satnav lost track of the internet a couple of junctions away from where it believed it to be, and led to us missing a turning, ending up at a farm and having to make the decidedly Indiana Jones-esque statement ‘We’re looking for the Lost Village of Dode. Can you help us?’ Fortunately the local subjected to this line of questioning knew what we were aiming for and was able to correct us, leading us to a medieval church surrounded by green space and benches (and, when we arrived, a fish and chip van and mobile bar) and overlooking a small stone circle. The gates read the slightly more plausible ‘Dode Church’, although elements of the fantastical re-inserted themselves with the emergence from the church as we were getting ready of two people carrying a communion set (chalice and patten) and two owls – the larger (barn or tawny, I forget) having apparently been charged with bringing in the rings, and the Scops (hilariously expressive eyebrows) brought along because he resents being left on his own.

A bit of extra discussion (particularly around the song requested for the first dance) had led to me letting myself in for bringing mandolin as well as violin – besides twangly melodic interjections, this offers the possibility of essentially strumming through chords in songs which have no discernible lead instrument in the original! In the end, I threw caution to the winds and took the viola as well, not least because its extra low end and ‘pocket cello’ timbre in that lower register lend themselves to playing oh-so-heartfelt sustained root notes in classic acoustic rep like Oasis ballads. I had also, for little more than curiosity’s sake, brought along the then new foot tambourine.

To clarify, a clarification I only acquired at this gig, the Mechanics are a completely unplugged group – we can perform anywhere with enough space to stand. I find this refreshing, after so much time enforcedly dependent on PA systems and on monitors; there is freedom to move and to make eye contact, you can be confident that the audience are hearing what you’re hearing (and that if you’re deliberately trying to make a noise so gentle it can’t be heard more than two feet away, you’re actually succeeding) and balance is under your direct control, rather than limited by amplification and heavily reliant on the decision-making of the sound engineer, if there even is one. In some senses it is popular music done a little like classical, or like acoustic jazz, and that appeals to me. My own contributions, often conjuring parts out of little more than chord progressions and being looked to take most of the solos, also implicitly improvised, certainly has some jazz-like qualities, though the chord progressions are generally much more straightforward! As to the roaming aspect, so far we have only been expected to change station every few numbers – perhaps the day will come when we are asked to perform literally on the move, and it wouldn’t be impossible, but I will happily defer that extra element of multitasking!

With two gigs under our belt, response from clients and guests has been uniformly positive, and they have been in general fun, relaxed gigs (and, harking back to the opening of this post, ones with nice profit margins). The foot tambourine has seemingly earned its place as a much more portable and rather less obtrusive alternative to Marcus Mumford’s rabble-rousing bass drum from fronting; the mandolin is certainly a useful variation, and I’ve even been prevailed upon (over initial resistance) to play a couple of solos on it; and the viola, while not essential, is quite literally nice to have. I imagine the number of largely outdoor weddings going on will taper down quite rapidly after the end of August, but it has been a good start and advance bookings for events in 2019 and even 2020 are already being sought by some forward-thinking planners, so hopefully we can put rather more dates in the diary over next ‘wedding season’. In the meantime, there’s nothing to stop us roaming indoors if you just don’t want the sheer volume and ‘on a stage’ isolation of a conventional function band …

Geared-up busking

From starting to busk as an income top-up before leaving Oxford, to early this summer, an acoustic violin and a pair of stomp-ready heavy-soled boots had sufficed me as busking equipment. (I experimented with singing and playing mandolin and dropped them again as it seemed most people weren’t likely to pay me for the trouble, though as discussed in the previous post my mandolin is a lot better now than then, so I could revisit that at some point.)

However, eventually the weight of unsolicited advice and in effect peer pressure from the other buskers I saw and heard around London led to me feeling I needed a better armoury on a couple of different fronts. Enter the new kit:

left to right: busking amp, foot tambourine, finger shaker

The most ‘obvious’ decision (but also the one I made later) was to amp up. Acoustic buskers are a rare sight indeed in London these days, even if this may have something to do with the quietness of the (not operatically trained!) human voice and the guitar unamplified (I can punch acoustic violin a little harder), and the frequent use of backing tracks or loop units. I wouldn’t necessarily want to use the electric violin for busking, for various reasons, but having the Fishman bridge pickup on the acoustic means I don’t have to make that choice – and if the batteries go flat in the amp, I can still play! Until recently, the Victoria station pitch required unamplified buskers – but is apparently now being suspended pending negotiations and will permit amplification when reinstated, leaving really no reason not to get used to using the amp whenever I’m busking.

The Roland AC-33 was a classic among buskers and indeed small-gig singer-guitarists in Oxford when I lived there. I think Roland continue to gradually add more bells and whistles, but the underlying principles remain the same: you get an instrument channel and a mike one, with level and EQ controls, it will run off a mains adaptor or a rack of 8 AA batteries, and two speakers are fed at a notional 33-watt power, plus there is an aux in (for, for instance, backing tracks) and a line out (for connecting through to a PA at gigs in a real sense of the word). The whole thing is less than a foot wide with depth and height smaller still, though it still weighs enough to be a pain (though perfectly practical) to walk a mile with!

My big surprise with it has been how powerful, and how directional, it is. With it set up pretty much in front of me, angled slightly upwards on the built-in folding stand, I can barely hear the amp over the acoustic sound of the violin under my chin. However, genuinely outdoors and amid the hubbub of Camden Lock Market, it still produced enough noise for those in front of it to ask me to turn it down a couple of times in succession. What I’ve settled on as a perfectly adequate setting is having the master volume at half and the instrument channel (admittedly the level on the Fishman pickup is quite high) at a little less than half.

I’ve had the amp with me at a couple of slightly annoyingly out of the way busking pitches where I’d found myself rather comprehensively ignored acoustically, and it certainly helps the sound ‘reach out’ of corners and be noticed (and enjoyed!) further across a noisy and acoustically awkward space – I can literally see people waving their hands to a beat, looking over at me or mock-dancing further away than before!

And what about those backing tracks, or looping (there’s a built-in loop function in this version of the amp, though I’d need a controller pedal for it to use it with any practicality)? Well, not for now at least. I seriously dislike the inflexibility and unresponsiveness of playing to tracks, an objection which also applies when the track is a passage I’ve just played, except that live loops are either to knock on the head or replace with another attempt. Equally, with the exception of a couple of classical pieces where I could probably get tracks near enough matching what I do now, I would have to build a new repertoire around playing over tracks or loop composition (a significantly different art to putting together any other kind of music, I do not joke). At present, I prefer to keep everything uncomplicatedly live.

However, the dimensions of what I can do without recording or playback are somewhat expanded by the other new additions, coming specifically from a fellow-busker’s suggestion that the fiddle dance tunes in my repertoire would gain from some percussive support. The straightforward addition is the foot tambourine, which does exactly what you’d expect – strap it around the arch of my foot and every time I tap my toe I get a fairly sharply-defined jangle. This is quite adaptable within its constraints – while the basic option (and the one I use most) is simply to bash it on each main beat, it is also possible to drop it in and out for variation, use it for stops or imply a phrase-end build-up by going double-tempo, or even play on off-beats instead of on. A lot depends on how much multi-tasking my brain is feeling capable of! Sadly, it will only really do ‘crash’ (though substantial dynamic control is possible) – efforts to rotate or wiggle my ankle with my foot off the floor in order to imitate the classic gospel shake-and-windmill tambourine roll haven’t really paid off yet. But it certainly adds extra punch to the fiddle tunes, points up speeding up, and is usefully controllable as a time-keeper.

Slightly more questionable is the finger shaker (though I’m still using it and haven’t yet had anyone say it sounds bad). These fit on one finger like an oversize ring, and the flying saucer-shaped shaker inhabits the same sort of sound area as the egg shakers so beloved of non-guitar-playing folk singers. The intended use is that people playing hand drums (djembe, congas, etc.) put one on each hand for extra definition and cutting edge in the same rhythm they are playing. I’ve been putting one on my right (bowing) hand – after some experimentation, on my thumb, as it seems to get in the way of holding the bow least there. Strictly only for rhythmic numbers where folk-style bowing (down bows on down beats at pretty much all costs – an approach which I think is perfectly valid for art music up to about Beethoven, but can attract some funny looks from players trained fairly exclusively in the Romantic style) means it rattling on each bow change and string crossing lines up pretty well with the main beat, with few enough extra sounds to be interesting. As those who have tried the shaky egg will know, however, getting a coherent rhythm from the innocent-looking items is nowhere as near child’s play as would appear. One ‘shake’ (move and then stop sharply) throws whatever is inside against the front of the shaker, producing a noise; but if that is all you do, the contents then fall back and produce another one. Hence why people who are any good at it base everything on variations (for emphasis) of a constant back-and-forth rhythm. The risk with shaker on fiddle bow hand is that with slower bow changes (say, a tune played with a lot of slurs) and particularly if there is less other noise (from a foot tambourine, perhaps!) going on, there is an audible behind-the-beat extra ‘shk’ that only really serves to confuse the beat, as if there was a percussionist using poorly-judged digital delays (an effect of which I’m no fan, sorry 80s music lovers). However, in general I think it comes out ahead on giving a thicker, busier sound that is less solo violin and more one man band (though you won’t catch me playing bass drum with my elbows and strapping a pair of cymbals to my ankles any time soon).

Of course, the real question is, are they worth it as investments? Few if any people are ever going to judge busking, particularly folk-heavy busking, as art … certainly not me judging myself. Well the minor cost of getting the percussion certainly is paying off in extra ear-grabbing ability and extra accessibility to a casual audience largely unaccustomed to encountering rhythmic music (or much music at all) without some kind of drum beat. The much higher cost of the Roland amp will certainly take longer to pay back, and it is always difficult to assess average increased earnings from a change when so many other factors, from the national economy to the weather to the time of the day, week or month, are in play, but by extrapolation from definitely being heard more playing through it, it should be upping how much I’m tipped as well.

So hopefully, busking gear taking busking up a gear. We shall see.

Breaking new ground

Over the four days 26–29 July, I performed in three new contexts for me (and one very familiar one: a Kindred Spirit duo gig, this time in a Royal British Legion which seemed remarkably indistinguishable from sports and social, working men’s or Conservative / Liberal clubs English suburbia over). There will be appropriate times later to come back to my foray into free improvisation and a new function group, so I shall confine this post to the first gig.

Some while previously I had answered an advert for a mandolin / violin doubler. Those who read this blog frequently or know me personally will know that while I have had a mandolin in my possession for a couple of years, and have known the basics of the instrument and indeed played borrowed ones occasionally in public for quite some while longer, it has never experienced the regularity of use of the viola/violin ‘headline’ pairing of my musical career. Mandolin, like arranging and choral singing, has essentially been a second-string skill.

This is a necessary preamble to discussing the dep gig I had landed myself. It was at a wedding reception in a Brighton music venue (the wedding trade being what it is, musical standards and professionalism would have to be high!); the band were an established Pogues tribute of some substantial reputation, the Pogue Traders; and I was subbing for a mainly mandolin and bouzouki player who doubled on fiddle, rather than the other way round.

I duly started working with the set list and the near-limitless resources of YouTube to supply commercial recordings (mostly, I am glad to say, from the official band ‘channel’, which assuaged my incipient guilt about not buying at least digital downloads of the records!). Like many casual covers musicians, my knowledge of the Pogues’ output was largely confined to ‘Dirty Old Town’, ‘Fairytale of New York’, the collaboration with the Dubliners on ‘The Irish Rover’, and having played generic versions of some traditional songs which they also incorporated into their repertoire. I remain intrigued by this first conscious encounter with ‘Flower of the County Down’, which apart from a repeat of the second half of the tune as a chorus, is note-for-note for the same melody as the English folk song, of a much darker and less rambunctious mood, ‘The Unquiet Grave’, which I have known for years. Neither song entirely suggests the melody’s appropriation as a more (in some senses) modern melody for the hymn words ‘I heard the voice of Jesus say’, though the usual tempo and the structure of the words connect it to unquiet grave rather than Co. Down. But I digress.

The main thing I discovered on proper exploration of the 30-odd songs on the set list was that while the sung portions of Pogues songs are most often fairly straightforward (and not infrequently have no melody instrument line at all), the relief in texture that would normally be occupied by guitar solos is instead taken by jig-type instrumental melodies – some I gather traditional, others original – played for the most part and at breakneck pace by whistle, accordion, banjo (usually) and mandolin / bouzouki / fiddle. (To clarify here: the bouzouki, originally the Greek folk instrument par excellence with three paired courses of strings and usually a very slender body, seems to have been welcomed into Irish folk little later than the acoustic guitar, acquiring along the way a fourth course and a bigger soundbox which may resemble an enlarged mandolin or a petite guitar. It is a very common doubling instrument for mandolin players, though the courses are not tuned in the same pattern as the mandolin’s uniform fifths (at least not normally, though there does not seem to be total consent over a ‘normal’ four-course tuning) and the courses are I believe in octaves rather than unison. The mandolin’s bigger cousins the mandola and mandocello remain rare, though not unheard of, in British folk. I have never played bouzouki and did not attempt it for this gig, using mandolin for most of the numbers played on bouzouki by the regular player.)

It became rapidly evident that the biggest part of the challenge of the gig would be these interpolations – which very often bear little musical connection to the surrounding song, being quite capable of swapping from a straight rock rhythm to a compound time jig / shuffle / hornpipe / triplet one, or shifting from a typical punk handful of chords diatonic major to one of the related minor modes. The challenge was twofold: firstly, work out from the records what the melodies were. Secondly, get my fingers around them on the mandolin at the required speed!

Mandolin being double-strung and fretted, it is considerably harder work on the left hand than violin or viola. Equally, my handling of a bow has been trained off and on over 25 or so years and is in more or less constant practice; neither of them things that can be said of my handling of a plectrum, especially at speed. The flipside is that most melodic passages had doubling from at least one of the other instruments (in an eight-piece line-up pretty closely mirroring that of the original band) for ‘cover’ – which was particularly useful for some runs which I had to despair of playing picked, and resort to plucking the main beats and using pull-offs and hammer-ons to at least suggest the intervening notes.

So involved in this aspect, and in battling the personal issues of June and July at the same time, did I become that I somewhat neglected the songs on which I had to play fiddle (where at least technique was no real hurdle) and was still tidying corners of some of those by the one rehearsal around a week before the gig.

The other hurdle to be overcome was amplification, acoustic playing of my bluegrass-style mandolin having hitherto sufficed for the contexts in which I had used it. After some browsing and consultation with the string instrument repairer / alterer at Hillsound in Hampton, and considering options including buying a cheap ‘electro-mandolin’ (abandoned partly because they almost all come with electric-guitar style magnet pickups, rather than the piezo type which give a much more accurate representation of acoustic sound), I eventually settled on buying a Fishman pickup. Unlike the cousin which I have on my violin (after it initially living on my viola back in pre-pro days), their mandolin one comes only pre-integrated into a complete bridge, and fitting it therefore involves having the instrument re-set up with its, in effect, replacement bridge. I entrusted this task to Hillsound, and had two pleasant surprises as a result. The first was that the minimalist outline of this particular Gretsch mandolin have an uninterrupted taper from the centre to the edge, meaning the supplied ‘Carpenters-style’ (that is, fixed on with screw clamps identical to those on a violin chin-rest) jack socket would not grip; but this had led Nigel to swap it for a surface-mount jack socket and fit that into the side of the instrument, where the sockets on most electro-acoustic guitars are and without any external trailing leads or protruding socket to invite me to damage them moving incautiously! The second was that the instrument benefitted hugely from being set up again by a pro. I had always assumed it was in good shape when it left the factory, and had done no more than lower the adjustable bridge. The instrument came back easier to play, cleaner-toned and capable of being played above the octave fret (something I suspect few players attempt with any regularity on a mandolin!) in perfect tune, as I discovered, along with the impressively clear and acoustic-like sound of the pickup, using it for some low-key studio recording between the alteration work and the Pogue Traders gig.

The proof of the pudding, they say, is in the eating. So how did I fare at this gig? Well, I must give one caveat here, which is that I quite often could not hear much of what I was playing during the gig – an eight-piece band had exhausted the venue’s supply of wedge speakers, and so I was without foldback except what I could glean from other people’s, chiefly the whistle and accordion players stood in front of me. That said, the rest of the band, who all had monitors and could probably hear me a good deal better than I could, were very positive, indeed impressed and congratulatory – and I don’t think that was simply down to my Filthy Spectacula-esque gyrations and roving around what was accessible of the stage during the harder workouts, or to doing the gig on just one rehearsal, though both were certainly factors in seeming ‘a cut above’. I was also to have opportunity at another gig a couple of days later to establish that all that time spent on mastering Pogues instrumental breaks from record had made me substantially more fluent as a mandolinist in general, including playing by ear and improvising. But that is another blog post.

Strands of many threads

Saturday 22 July saw one of my more memorable freelance engagements of recent months (lots of the band gigs have been memorable to varying extents and in variously pleasurable, painful or both ways). The performance was an opera gala concert at the Longhope Estate in Hampshire, by the Strand Chamber Orchestra with four soloists. I had been asked into it by oboeist and cellist Flick Cliffe, with whom I had played Mendelssohn’s Elijah (for the third time as a pro in less than four years) a couple of weeks earlier. I was very puzzled to then not find her name in either section of the orchestra list; it eventually her transpired her role was Assistant Conductor, though I regret to say that the practical application of this would have been better described as Assistant to the Conductor, or simply Orchestra Manager. This is not in any way a complaint about Jeremy Walker’s conducting (he is currently studying the craft at postgraduate level at the Moscow Conservatoire after all!), merely about peculiar terminology.

There had been two rehearsals the weekend before which I was forced to miss by the Filthy Spectacula’s furthest gig northwards to date – a steampunk festival just outside Durham. The first rehearsal I made it to was the afternoon before the concert. It rapidly emerged that I was not the only one with clashing commitments leading to incomplete rehearsal attendance. In fact, this is a general trend I’ve noticed with scratch ensembles, particularly ones having a high proportion of students among the players: the law of diminishing returns sets in very heavily after about one and a half rehearsals. Have just one rehearsal on the day of the concert, and almost everyone will be there. Have two rehearsals, one further in advance, and you will still get the vast majority of the players in both, though the first one will be noticeably thinner than full forces. Have three or four rehearsals, and you will spend all of them that are not on the day rehearsing half an orchestra (or rather various different selections of about half the players), only getting everyone together on concert day.

A seating list had been sent out in advance (invaluable for string players to know whether they need to practice the high notes in upper divided passages, or ensure they are prepared for the inevitable rapid page-turns at some point), and I dutifully sat myself in my appointed place at no. 3 of 5 (directly behind the section leader). When we were evidently moving towards starting to play and I was still in splendid isolation, I followed orchestral convention by moving as far forward as possible without changing side – so in this case, one seat forward to the principal leader chair, expecting to move back again once its rightful occupant appeared. She did not, but the other three violas did over time, and settled themselves around me. We were eventually to discover that Anastasia Sofina, intended principal viola, had slipped on some smashed eggs in a supermarket and broken her wrist, causing a temporary but inflexible cessation of her playing – which might be comical if it wasn’t roughly the violist’s equivalent of a pianist going skating, falling and having all his fingers skated over. In any case, I seized the chance at a break in rehearsal to point out that I wasn’t allocated the seat I was in (with its corresponding responsibilities for leading, not following, at entries and for fixing bowings (the latter not being one of my favourite areas of musical norms)), had no strong attachment to it (it’s not like it came with a pay rise!) and was quite happy for someone else to lead if they wished. Somewhat to my surprise, general popular vote (of three) was to keep me where I was. Maybe no one else wanted the responsibility …

Gala concerts like these generally include very little recitative. As I remember, we did just one extended section of it, an accompanied recitative (meaning at a minimum that all the strings are involved, rather than just continuo) leading into a Mozart aria. However, the bel canto and later opera styles expect fairly dauntless application of rubato, not least in slowing up dramatically to insert improvised or pseudo-improvised miniature cadenzas – something which in bel canto sensu strictu seems to happen at every cadence. The result is a significant test of orchestral cohesion, in which the conductor is probably the only one who has sheet music to follow for what the singer is doing (vocal cues are usually only provided in parts for recitatives) even if she or he isn’t improvising, and so the section principals have to follow the conductor’s beat and their sense of harmonic progression and their part’s place within it, and the rest of the players do the same plus following the section leader, if their principal is alert and physically mobile enough (while sitting down, reading sheet music, playing and not knocking into anyone else on an inevitably crowded stage!) to give cues which are perceptible and early enough to be useful. Attempting to keep a beat, or play with head buried in the part rather than the traditional one eye each on the conductor, the section leader and the music (perhaps a fourth eye on the soloist where there is one), is doomed to failure to stay with the rest of the ensemble.

In any case, in the course of the day before rehearsal, my initial desk partner before a further reshuffle of seating once everyone who (it transpired) was going to arrive had done so, was confessedly struggling with the one accompanied recitative we were playing. It was a somewhat unusually tricky one: most recitative is accompanied by either stab chords or held chords, in either case requiring no real sense of pulse until the singer has concluded a phrase, so the conductor can follow the singer’s progress in more or less natural speech rhythm through the notional rhythmic notation which allows everybody to keep together, merely emphasising the points at which a chord (or the end of one) is needed. However, in this case there were several interjections of a little melodic motif lasting approximately one and two half beats, and therefore requiring a uniform sense of pulse across the strings; all the more so as it is scored for the violins in parallel thirds with the violas divided in the same thirds an octave below. Nowhere to hide in that texture.

Said desk partner was (I think still is!) a current conservatoire student. I was utterly taken aback (given I have never studied at a conservatoire, but opera and especially oratorio have featured heavily in my lower-end pro playing) to find she didn’t think she’d played recitative accompaniment before at all. Given the significant divergence from most purely orchestral music, and even many concerti, where watching the conductor’s every beat for tempo variation is only really necessary at fairly infrequent strategic points, this seems a bit of an educational neglect.

Almost all of the orchestra were taking a charter coach from (appropriately enough) just off the Strand to the performance location. The first problem with that arrangement occurred when the coach had still not shown up by the scheduled departure time. It eventually transpired he had gone to the wrong road; to speed matters up, a few dozen musicians lugging instruments, music stands, formal clothing, etc etc footed it a couple of hundred yards downhill to a more easily accessible pick-up point.

I discovered during the journey that a similar project had been undertaken at the same venue the previous year; with the difference that an entire opera had been staged, with the orchestra and cast taking up residence on the estate for a long weekend of rehearsal and arriving in dribs and drabs in cars rather than as a coach party. Seemingly, this had not led anyone to warn that getting a coach up to the house might not be as straightforward as a satnav made it look. A small difference in distance led the navigation to confidently direct us down a single track road overhung with trees which looked like our passage might cost them significant branches. Barely had we finished turning into this road (after much prevarication) when we encountered two cars coming the other way. We were eventually forced to reverse back onto the slightly more major road from whence we had come, then perform a three-point turn and demi-circumnavigate the substantial country estate in order to find a slightly longer (slightly before the detour) but much clearer and rather flatter route in. Suffice to say this delayed lunch and final rehearsal perceptibly.

The estate is still inhabited by its landed family, and still possesses a substantial tract of land of its own besides whatever farmland and so on further afield may still belong to it. The family (including about half a dozen dogs from lurcher to sheepdog, which were very polite but very apt to attempt appropriating the meals of anyone sitting on the ground) live in the manor house, a largely brick-built Georgian-looking affair quite large enough for Jane Austen level of society purposes, but not particularly grand as country seats go. What I think must have been a kitchen garden has been converted into an outdoor performance venue; a natural more or less amphitheatre shape can have I would guess somewhere between 100 and 200 chairs set out on it for audience, with stone walls around the rear tending to reflect sound back so there is less of an outdoor ‘vanishing sound’ acoustic (which would certainly be punishing for singers with orchestral accompaniment). This converges on a stage that was rather larger than we really needed, with fully controlled stage lighting, and a not insubstantial orchestra pit in front of it (not used, as not a staged performance this year). However, the entire stage was open to the sky; usually a high risk for being rained upon in an English summer, but in July of this year in the middle of a prolonged and spectacular heatwave, more inclining to sunstroke. Some beer garden-type umbrellas were placed (not least in a bid to keep the harp in tune!), but did not succeed in overcoming the rigours of a male black tie dress code. At least the women had been instructed formal in bright colours, allowing the possibility of a little more ventilation than my one, wool, dinner suit.

The invited audience had their first half very early, before heading off to devastate picnic hampers on the other side of the house (while the orchestra were fed buffet-style inside and sought out places around the performance space to consume their spoils), for which they were allowed the surely generous timespan of an hour and a half. Sadly it appears to be true that the longer a break of any sort is, the more it will overrun; and doubly so when almost all the people involved know each other and have alcoholic inducement to relaxed expansiveness. The orchestra had all been sat down on stage, and had pointedly retuned, several minutes since while the audience stood around chatting or were still making a leisurely way back from the picnic regions.

In former days of less respect for the art form, the function of an opera overture was to indicate the imminent commencement of a performance, and to precipitate the audience’s settling down to watch and listen. It also needed to last long enough for them to make their way to their own seats from wherever they may have been socialising at the time. These days, an overture is expected to be part of the performance, and so does not begin until the audience are duly seated, silent and non-disruptive of the music.

The great advantage of the older-fashioned approach is that it leaves control with the performers, rather than the audience! The second half was to begin with, functioning more or less as an entr’acte, the polonaise from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. Playing the same piece earlier the same week in a hall really rather too small and hard-acousticked for a symphony orchestra playing anything, the tendency of the trumpets and trombones right behind me to deliver all their entries enthusiastically fortissimo accelerando had me taking the unusual step of plugging both ears in an orchestral context. This time, I couldn’t help feeling that its courtly vigour would have made a good job of summoning the stragglers into place for the second half. Sadly, Jeremy was not to be seen until the audience did settle themselves of themselves, and my classical rebelliousness stopped (only just) short of trying to persuade Flick to take to the rostrum and matters into her own hands.

Delays and heat notwithstanding, this was an exceptionally well-received concert (and one that stands out for supplying travel and two meals as part of the package, in sad contrast to so many rock band engagements) and one that I enjoyed doing – even if at one point I took an unexpected solo when none of my colleagues ‘made’ a particular entry. Better that than an unexpected solo due to my being in the wrong place! Nonetheless, I will personally trade the return of a certain frequency of rain for being let off playing a full concert in black tie in over 30 degrees …

Rebuilding

All right, I confess, it’s been a shamefully long time since my last blog post. Only a few days shy of two months in fact, which I’m pretty confident if I went through the archive would turn out to be the longest gap since I started using this as the blog of a pro musician ‘shop window’ site.

This shouldn’t be taken as meaning I’ve been musically inactive. Far from it. In fact, since blogging gets done when I have some time and energy that feels like I can safely spare it, often I write nothing when gigging most busily and catch up in the next quiet period.

Summer is always busy for my rock bands at least, what with festivals, steampunk conventions, events like beer festivals and food festivals that like having some folky / ‘acoustic’ music going on, etc., and I have done two gigs each in several of the last few weekends. However, I’ve also been through one of the periodic peaks of my frustratingly difficult-to-break cycle of gradually taking on more and more commitments (these days this includes publishing work, and music whether really work in the earning sense or not), until eventually I wear myself out and am forced to make cutbacks to keep going. Pulling out of a rather lucrative medium-term publishing project because I just couldn’t keep spending 10 hours a week on it unless I wanted to seriously sacrifice music practice and so playing standard was one of the most leap-of-faith decisions I’ve made since going freelance 18 months ago. I can confirm the rent has always been paid so far, and I still have a positive bank balance.

There has also been a more purely personal set of drivers behind my prolonged absence from the blogosphere. I’m not going to go into much detail here – this is in my eyes a professional rather than personal diary – but suffice it to say I am now single for the first time since 2015 and belatedly having my first experience of living in an all-musician house, in a London suburb I had never even heard of before coming here to view the room. The emotional impact has been as you will probably expect (especially coupled with my ongoing poor mental health), and so much as phoning my parents or emailing old and dear friends has been so difficult as to often not happen, let alone trying to document my professional achievements in a public forum.

So, all of that said, where was I?

Saturday 30th June saw me illustrating, again, the virtues of sustained networking on the off-chance. Back when I was living in Oxford and doing some orchestral concerts for little more than pocket change, I played in the Mozart flute and harp concerto, and had an interesting albeit fairly brief conversation with harp soloist Jenny Vereker about the piece and changes in harp construction (and their impact on which things are easy or difficult, as well as possible or impossible). I added her as a friend on Facebook afterwards but thought little of it and had little or no contact with her on there – which is not unusual; my tally of Facebook ‘friends’ is now somewhere northwards of four times what Roger Dunbar theorises is the maximum number of people with which a human can maintain meaningful relationships (around 150 if memory serves me rightly).

It was therefore a total surprise to get an out-of-the-blue phone call from Charlie Vereker, Jenny’s husband. He was fixing some extras for an amateur orchestra concert; could I swell the ranks of the viola section, for a fee of course? Little did I know, until the conversation proceeded, that my once and future music colleague and greatest professional champion Graeme Hollingdale regularly plays trombone (like Charlie, though as a hired hand rather than a subs-paying member) with this orchestra, and he and Jenny had apparently been singing my praises and pushing my blog posts under Charlie’s nose for ages.

First time round I was busy on the concert date; second time Charlie tried me I was available, and so played the end of June concert. It was in one of those boarding schools that are so huge they have genuine named roads within their grounds and you can easily get lost and end up using Google Maps on your phone to try and work out where somewhere on-site you’ve heard mentioned might be (and quite possibly decide it looks too far away to be worth walking to). I think it was half-term; certainly very few people were in evidence bar the orchestra and audience (the latter surprisingly large, especially for a venue inevitably not in the middle of any town). The programme was an ambitious one: Kabalevsky’s Colas Breugnon overture (chiefly just very fast, and with some quite long consecutive rests for the strings, unused to such things, to count through); Rachmaninov’s third piano concerto; and Stravinsky’s ballet score Petrushka.

I tend to pride myself on a sort of musical sense of direction, being able to keep place in harmony and rhythm by ear with or without visual cues and at times almost literally enacting the cliché about early and/or intimate orchestral music being really chamber music, as far as rubato and certain other things go. This can be particularly useful in concerti! Soloist rubato and orchestral colla parte playing are expected parts of concerto performance, at least in anything composed after about 1810, and (depending always on individuals, including what liberties the soloist takes and how consistent they are from one play through to the next), the section leader or conductor may or may not be any better at sticking with the soloist through them than me; conductors can end up at a particular disadvantage if, as is quite common, the soloist is behind them and so most of the orchestra can see the soloist but the conductor cannot.

Rachmaninov, however, writing in the 20th century in a decidedly post-Brahms musical environment, and one in which having a baton conductor in addition to the pianist could be taken for granted, is not necessarily going to make life straightforward by writing music that is as it were rhythmically aligned. Often phrases start and end across each other, or there are in effect two or more pulses going on at the same time, and so on. The result is the ‘trust in me’ approach to orchestral playing; rather than necessarily making sense of their own parts and feeling their way around the jigsaw fit of the ensemble and the piece, cross-checking against the soloist’s playing in particular, the orchestral performers are obliged to follow the conductor’s beat and cues and the exact letter of the part, sometimes at the expense of what feels right, in ‘blind’ faith that everything is supposed to fit together that way and the result will be musically successful. It’s excellent discipline, and obviously has potential to achieve very complex and immersive musical effects that would otherwise be more or less impossible in terms of live performance; conversely it’s almost exactly the opposite of what’s required to perform Classical and early Romantic music well. It can be useful in highly polyphonic writing such as Bach or Byrd though, where sometimes it feels like the only guarantee is that if you are playing the same thing as someone else at the same time then one of you is in the wrong place!

I played the (in)famous Rite of Spring at a study / taster day last year, and discovered just how difficult it is, both in terms of technique and counting / rhythm. Well, for the violas anyway; I suspect it’s even worse for some other instruments. It was therefore with near horror that I discovered, doing some casual research not long in advance, that Petrushka was written on a sudden inspiration between the initial suggestion of the Rite and its actual composition. Not only is Petrushka substantially longer, I was performing it to a paying audience on one afternoon rehearsal in which a very substantial piano concerto also had to be fitted together with the soloist, and had to justify (at least to myself) being paid for my playing of it.

Thankfully Petrushka is not the Rite. Its subject matter is a folk tale which mixes animated puppets, jealousy, death and ghosts in a manner which recalls the original ethnographic Brothers Grimm-collected stories (before they were bowdlerised for Victorian English children, or rather parents). The puppet theatre aspect, and various episodes seemingly introduced largely for their relatively conventional balletic potential such as a dancing bear which arrives and is chased off again without contributing anything to the rest of the plot, incline Stravinsky towards more regularly rhythmic music than the orgiastic, shamanic dynamic of Rite of Spring. Also, where the slightly later piece was apparently made deliberately difficult to play, so that individual players and ensemble would be rather more rough and insecure than the usual high polish of an early twentieth century orchestra, there seems to be no similar goal of ‘distancing techniques’ involved in Petrushka. Not that this prevents Stravinsky from engaging in some startling rhythmic / thematic overlays (I believe there is one section where, simultaneously, some instruments are playing a slowish 3/4 waltz and others are playing in 4 beats to a bar – with bars of equal length), or indulging in severe technical demands such as a climactic first trumpet part rising to pitches (and at a volume) of which Maynard Ferguson would have approved. The trumpets being sat more or less behind the violas in many orchestral concerts (the trombones were even closer to me this time), I was particularly aware of the latter!

Further illustration of how music obeys the six degrees of separation rule to extremes (coupled with the irrelevance of genre labels for most jobbing freelancers): in the interval of this concert, Graeme (playing trombone in this orchestral concert) and I (playing viola this time) discussed a theatre show for which he will be playing double bass and bass guitar, and I had been approached shortly before to play violin, in a combo seeking to span orchestral, big-band crooner jazz and 60s beat-pop soundworlds. More of that anon!