12: I'm dead afraid of Fred and Aida
Innocents encounter zombie out gathering fuel
The winter is upon us. The season of water ingress, and fogbound minds seeking safe harbour in the long dark nights. That’s just one thing that binds me to the slug that seems to have found its way to our dining room rug.
It’s time for hunkering, and feeding the spirit.
My own slime trail of creativity includes making a short profile doc of my sax teacher, Larry. There’s a piece shaping up about taking care of the music, with his musings on discipline and freedom, ageing, and how decades of chain-smoking can really suck when you need air to blow.
Here’s an out-take that’s pertinent to this letter…
Which brings us to the start of a live performance, sometime since the last time I wrote.
On stage in London. I’m holding a saxophone. There’s an audience of 80 or so people watching a band and four comedians (Conor Jatter, Max Dickens, Charlotte Gittins and Paul G Raymond). The night is Giant Steps, the show where improv comedy meets live jazz.
The keys player is Ky Osborne, who is still only 19, I believe, and a student at Trinity Laban Conservatoire.
We met half an hour ago. Ky said he’d help me navigate the gig. He’s got a tune going with the bass player (Alex) and drummer (Joe Steyn), and is now smiling at me from behind the keys, telling me the chords: a simple modulation from A major to Bb minor and back.
‘A major, Bb minor,’ I think, my lips moving to the mouthpiece. ‘Got it.’
I don’t got it.
In order to transpose the chords to the alto sax, I have to go through a little mental process. Ky’s A major is my F# major; his Bb minor is my G minor. That’s all good. And normally the scales are right under my fingers. But inside my head lives a little health and safety guy. And now that the operating environment is a live gig, he is duty-bound to check and re-assess those details multiple times, lest there be errors. Can’t have those.
By which point, the musical train I was hoping to catch is hurtling down the tracks. I’m left on the platform throwing daggers at that little jobsworth, who’s looking sheepishly at his clipboard. ‘Probably best not to try to jump on now,’ he says.
Larry would say I’m just not there yet.
I do what I can for Fred and Aida. I’m in prime position to watch the show, and it makes me laugh a lot, so I laugh a lot. I dig the musicians. And I try to stay present enough to volunteer a few little bursts of melody so it doesn’t look weird – some random old bloke hovering on stage like the undead, holding a mute mechanical pipe.
Then, in a brief lull, Ky says: ‘How about you start this one? Get a loop going and we’ll follow.’
What a gift. Now I can just let a note out and see where it leads. That one note turns into a phrase, which starts repeating. The piano, drums and bass all kick in behind me, picking up on what I’ve started. That feels unbelievably good, like being hoisted by a wave and carried along. I’m now free to embellish as my fingers desire. A genuinely brilliant experience.
The Giant Steps Christmas Special is on Wed 11 December, at the Miller in London Bridge. I won’t be there, but Conor and Max will, together with mates from music and comedy, making things occur.
And keep your ear out for the Ky Osborne Quartet sometime. That also features Joe on drums. I saw them at We Out Here festival in the summer and they were ace.
Stride on
I remember when I first heard about Giant Steps. I was walking through Deptford on a little after-breakfast amble with Conor. He said he’d been brewing this idea for a new show. He could see it clearly in his head, something he was peculiarly well-placed to pull together: a collaboration between friends in the improv comedy world and those in jazz. It would share the uniqueness of each world, the overlap of both, and get people together to see what happens. The whole thing is an improvisation – on stage and off – and I’ve loved seeing it all materialise.
I’ve been having similar thoughts to Conor’s, about my own musical road. I want to continue playing with others, and to practise enough so I can make it look easy to Fred and Aida, but I realise I can also be pulling my own unique threads together too. I’ve made a lot of phone notes and musical sketches.
When I saw that my old improv buddy Katy Schutte was running a course on writing solo shows this winter, I signed up. We’re two sessions in so far. It’s doing just what I’d hoped.
I discovered a music podcast recently, called The Hang. Its strapline is that the hang after the gig is more important than the gig itself. In the downstairs bar after the Giant Steps show, several hours flew by in a flash, chatting to old friends from a world I thought I’d left long ago, about growth and life and projects. I felt like myself.
The interrogation
I caught another show during that London trip: Artifacts, at Cafe OTO [Nicole Mitchell on flute, Tomeka Reid, cello, and Mike Reed, drums]. All three came up through the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago. Their music is free and organic-sounding, but with a proper neck-snapping groove to it too. It was hell of a good.
You may recall that the title/theme of these letters traces back to the AACM, and an instruction from one of its founders: take care of the music, and it’ll take care of you. These documents are part of a loose experiment in what happens if you try living by that credo.
After the show, I saw Mike Reed chatting to a couple of audience members as he packed down his drums. He’s from the AACM, I thought, so he must have carried that wisdom with him. I had to take this opportunity to find out what it’s done for him.
Mike couldn’t recall ever hearing it before. He asked me to repeat it. He thought about it for a while. And he ended up concluding that it doesn’t stand up. Too much pressure to put on something. He said he was lucky he doesn’t depend on playing for his income. He runs venues and puts on concerts for that. (I’ll let you decide whether that denies the hypothesis, or confirms it.)
When I went to the kitchen/green room to collect my bag, Tomeka Reid and Nicole Mitchell were there. I was a bit star-struck. I asked them about the phrase too. They had vague memories of hearing it, but it didn’t seem to have been a guiding concept for them either.
All of which reminds me of a dream I had the other morning, just before waking. Sun Ra was on speaker phone. I was giddily telling him how I’d responded to his instruction, by committing my time to music.
‘That’s not what I said,’ he replied. ‘Volunteer in a community kitchen or something.’
Soon enough, my train set off for Cornwall. I was on it this time. And these travels, conversations, blocks and encounters all rode the rails with me, ready to feed in to the work here. The clocks have now changed. Nights have drawn in. Logs procured and piled. The dehumidifier is busy sucking buckets from my record sleeves. The slugs gathering at the gate.
And my little studio room upstairs is clean and kitted out, with a little oil heater on under the desk.