The music in my head in 2016

Something I’ve remarked on before is that these posts don’t properly reflect the ubiquitous presence of music in my daily life. Occasionally I do mention a new album that has made an impact, and I do record here all the live music events that I attend. But there’s always so much more. So here is a roundup of some of the music which I have particularly enjoyed in 2016. The post ends with a playlist of the music mentioned.

Mose Allison, the William Faulkner of jazz, dies aged 89

Sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s, on a trip to London, we were lucky to see Mose Allison perform a set at the Pizza Express which included such characteristically witty and sardonic songs, rooted in the blues, as Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy,  I Love The Life I Live (I Live The Life I Love), Gettin’ There, Tell Me Somethin’, and Your Mind Is On Vacation.

Today, in his Guardian obituary of Mose Allison, who has died aged 89, John Fordham writes:

At the PizzaExpress jazz club in London, which he took to visiting twice a year in the 90s and early 2000s, Allison would sometimes seem to be in a fascinating private reverie, in which stomping bluesy figures would wrestle with swirling, wind-in-trees melodies, or turn into a jerky clatter like a silent-movie soundtrack. Ain’t Got Nothing But the Blues, Trouble in Mind and Knock on Wood might hurtle by in a blur.

‘Pizza Express has been a real godsend for me,’ Allison once said. ‘I’ve been working there for several years, six weeks a year. You can go to work every night and play. It’s a nice little club. It’s just about the right size for me, about 150 people.’

Van Morrison at the Phil: in good voice and totally committed

On Tuesday evening we sloshed our way through the first real rain of this autumn to the Philharmonic for a performance by a man whose lyrics have revealed a man who loves nothing better than to walk in gardens wet with rain – Van Morrison. With a notorious reputation for grumpiness and offhand behaviour in his concerts, we were a little apprehensive about what we might get. But Van was in fine form and, supported by an excellent band, crammed 90 minutes with a stellar selection of songs from a career in which he has recorded an astonishing 36 albums.

The music in my head (part 1): recycled and new this year

There’s a programme on Radio 4 that I hear sometimes when I’m driving in the car. Called Recycled Radio, it chops up old BBC programmes and recycles the snippets into something new. That made me think of all the recycled music I listen to, with album tracks often reassembled into new playlists. As I get older, I listen to a lot of recycled music – but not all the time. Every year brings exciting new sounds. In this post (the first of three) I want to round up some of the music – recycled and new – that I’ve enjoyed in 2015 but never got round to writing about.

Back on the Lleyn: landscape and memory

We’re back home after a week spent walking stretches of the newly-designated Wales Coast Path on the Lleyn Peninsula. We returned just as the extended spell of high pressure began, bringing beautiful sunny days and clear blue skies we’ve waited for all summer.  Nonetheless, the week we were on the Lleyn was predominantly dry, though very breezy.

We had arrived on a glorious sunny afternoon that extended into a warm evening as we walked out from our holiday cottage, sheltered beneath Anelog Mynydd, the last outcrop of the range of mountains – some of them extinct volcanoes – that stretch down through the Lleyn.

Van Morrison at 70: back on the corner again

In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke advised the aspiring versifier to mine their childhood as a source of poetry: ‘that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories’. Probably no songwriter has taken that injunction to heart more than Van Morrison, who literally returned to his roots on his 70th birthday at the end of August by performing a concert on Cyprus Avenue, a location of mythic significance in the world of back streets and mystic avenues that he created in song.

Fifty years of Bringing It All Back Home: through the smoke rings of my mind

Fifty years ago, in May 1965, Bob Dylan’s fifth album Bringing It All Back Home was released in the UK. I don’t know for sure when I first began to hear songs off the new album, though it must have been soon after its release since by then I was listening for nearly a year to music beamed from the pirate radio ship Caroline North, broadcasting to sleepy Cheshire from the Mersey Bay. My 17th birthday in September brought a copy of the LP with songs which have remained personal  favourites through the years, including ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’, ‘It’s Alright Ma’ and ‘Maggie’s Farm’.

‘Daddy! Play that!’

At the end of a rather typically obfuscatory article on Van Morrison by Greil Marcus in today’s Guardian, he delivers a wonderful anecdote.  He’s been promoting his new book on Van Morrison on a reading tour of the USA:

“I was talking to my father today,” a woman in Portland said. “He asked what I was doing tonight, and I told him to was going to hear someone talk about a book he’d written on Van Morrison. ‘Oh, Van Morrison!’ he said. ‘You know, I used to work with his father on the docks in Belfast. After work he’d take me to his house to listen to his records. I’d never seen anything like it. Hundreds and hundreds of 78s and LPs, jazz, blues, country music, everything. And there’d be the little boy there, dancing around the room, saying play that, Daddy! Play that!'”

It’s a lovely image, crystallising the impact that his father’s unique music collection had on Van Morrison’s own artistic development – something to which he referred in many of his lyrics.

Van was the only child of George Morrison, a shipyard electrician, and Violet Stitt Morrison, a singer and tap dancer in her youth. Morrison’s father had what was at the time one of the largest record collections in Ulster, acquired when he lived for a time in Detroit in the early 1950s. His father’s record collection exposed him to the blues of Muddy Waters, the gospel of Mahalia Jackson,  the jazz of Charlie Parker, the folk music of Woody Guthrie, and country music from Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers, while the first record he ever bought was by blues musician Sonny Terry. He grew up listening to Jelly Roll Morton, Ray Charles, Leadbelly, and Solomon Burke.

I heard Leadbelly and Blind Lemon
On the street where I was born
Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee,
Muddy Waters sing “I’m a Rolling Stone”
– ‘Cleaning Windows’

When I was a young boy
Back in Orangefield
I used to gaze out
My classroom window and dream
And then go home and listen to Ray sing
I believe to my soul after school,
Oh that love that was within me
You know it carried me through
Well it lifted me up and it filled me
– Got To Go Back

Take me back, take me way, way, way back
On Hyndford street
Where you could feel the silence at half past eleven
On long summer nights
As the wireless played Radio Luxembourg
And the voices whispered across Beechie river
In the quietness as we sank into restful slumber in the silence…

In the days before rock `n’ roll
Hyndford street, Abetta parade
Orangefield, St Donard’s church
Sunday six bells, and in between the silence there was conversation
And laughter, and music and singing, and shivers up the back of the neck
And tuning in to Luxembourg late at night
And jazz and blues records during the day
– ‘On Hyndford Street’

In many of his songs, Morrison yearns for those childhood days in Belfast, soaking up his father’s musical influences.  In ‘Foreign Window’ on his No Guru album, the singer watches a pilgrim’s progress, ‘bearing down the sufferin’ road’:

I saw you from a foreign window,
You were trying to find your way back home
You were carrying your defects
Sleeping on a pallet on the floor
In the palace of the Lord.