One jazz festival, two buildings, freedom, democracy, love and a stupid blog

Eve Risser (far left at piano) and the White Desert Orchestra blew everyone away with an astonishing 90 minute free set on the final day of LJF 2016

At first this blog was going to be about music on vinyl and cassette, record shops, second-hand bookshops, charity shops and other analogue stuff.  It quickly went off piste and started ranting on about property developers and library closures and all manner of outrages on the sensibility of a disappointed old fool living in a London he no longer understood.  But, by coincidence, the last batch of posts have all been about music in one way or another, and this one will complete that series. It's about the free-est of all free music, jazz music, and the delights of two jazz-filled afternoons, courtesy of the wonderful 2016 London Jazz Festival.

Revelations as Hackney Young Musicians challenge the jazz:classical
music divide at the Festival Hall. Note the thunderous dual drumkit set
up, one of many reminders of the great Sun Ra & his Arkestra

The first of these was at the Festival Hall - yes, back in the Clore Ballroom, scene of last month's National Poetry day events.  You just can't fault the Southbank Centre: yet again on a cold Sunday afternoon a cultural refuge for old vagrants like self, serving up a feast of free, fresh and surprising jazz music for anyone who happened to be around. This was the opening weekend of the festival, and the event was dominated by young musicians.

Over five hours, four big groups took the stage, from the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama; the Hackney Music Service/LSO "Classical meets Jazz" project; a band from the Guildhalll School and finally the Trinity Laban Shapeshifter ensemble.

All through the afternoon, a growing audience was treated to a diverse and exciting range of music. Like many others I drifted in and was quickly hooked - in my case, by some truly astonishing collisions of well-known jazz and classical standards from the young Hackney/LSO group. At one point they seem to be playing Gustav Holst and Sun Ra pieces simultaneously: the two pieces of music fused and intertwined and separated out again in a thrilling way.

Equally intriguing to watch the big Guildhall project, (Im)possibilities and their guest-star vibraphone player,  Orphy Robinson. He played as an equal member of this big ensemble, but when his solo slot came round you see the others rapt in admiration, feeding on his brilliance, firing some truly explosive funk off off each other's skills and energies.

The music that seemed to draw people in from the many corners of this massive arts complex was the funky stuff, and of that there was plenty. A good few blessed moments when total sonic chaos suddenly seemed to crystallise out into a broken madly dancing off-beat, linking back to the root of all jazz, all blues, all music.

The finale was a sort of jazz symphony in six movements written by Mark Lockheart. This was complex, subtle music. The players were the Trinity Laban Shapeshifter orchestra, and a clutch of professional stars, including  Polar Bear drummer Seb Rochford, but without his trademark afro. That great explosion of wiry hair seemed such a good visual equivalent of his incendiary jazz-punk. But here has was taking a much lower profile, his drumming super-sharp but restrained, tied to the composer's score or the conductor.

Hard and angry jazz in London's greatest  brutalist citadel

Medium cool: Israeli trumpeter Itamar Borochov wins over the whole of the
Barbican crowd with a passionate, note-perfect musical storm

A week later, more free festival jazz,  this time over the river to the 1970s response to the Southbank....that is to say, the Barbican Centre.

The Barbican arts centre is even more astonishing, buried deep within the apparaently fortified City of London  housing estate, with its three gaunt, beautiful concrete towers and its high wall and walkways. Inside it's so beautifully crafted, the wood-block flooring and hammered concrete walls,  fabulous 70s style lighting, the weird vistas and angles and the many levels....it's a magical place with a great space for free performance in the main concourse.

I love the Barbican and everything it stood for, although these days those council flats are occupied by rich city types. One thing for sure - we'll never see anywhere of this quality, and on this scale being built in this way in London, ever again.

Again, the ground-level foyer was the scene for a full Sunday afternoon programme of free jazz. As I arrived, an amazingly sharp Israeli-based band led by trumpeter Itamar Borochov were playing a storming set fusing a sort of hard bop with rich Levantine and Maghrebi flavours.

It was the next and final band that really made me write this piece: a French musician, Eve Risser, and the White Desert Orchestra.  Here was a group of highly talented instrumentalists making music that truly defied labelling. In other words, it was jazz.

That for me is what jazz is or should be. Not background plinking in a posh restaurant, not endless noodlings in a posh concert hall, but engrossing, mind-expanding, body-shifting sounds. For the first five minutes or so of the Paris-based band's performance, I wondered if I would stay (and quite a few were leaving). They were doing that thing where each band member seems to be playing a different piece,  at maximum volume, in a crescendo of discordant noise, racket, jangling the nerves, setting teeth on edge, and then it all changed.

This was music for a the new world, incredibly angry at times, amazingly soft and comforting at others, benignly overpowering. It was a sea or ocean of sound, you could jump in and let it knock you about a bit, then it would calm and you dive through it. You just had to trust it!

And after first piece, an almost shellshocked audience hesitated before bursting into applause, and then Eve Risser herself (who had been in the shadows at her grand piano, stood up and began to explian in beautifully French English what the next piece was about, then cracking up with laughter when the English words failed her.

A few minutes later she was laying into her beautiful shiny Steinway grand like a pile-driver. So much anger, but so wonderfully controlled! At each slam of the piano-lid the crowd jumped or winced; it all made sense in the context of this piece. Memorable!

Then I watched from another angle and saw the sax player pick up this massive baritone sax. It was as big as he was, I swear, and he was not a small bloke. He made this monstrous horn emit great honks of sound, like lead bubbles, which plopped out and hit the first three rows of the audience like Atlantic breakers on a north Devon beach. One  man was flinching at each blast, and then grinning like mad.

This is what jazz should be, is: surprising, astonishing, crazy.  And for me at least, the only way to really enjoy it is to be at a performance, to see the musicians close-up, watch how they interct with their instruments and with each other and with the audience, that is  for me about 80 per cent of it. The best recording on the best hi-fi is just a reminder of this if you're lucky.

But the true music criticism needs to be left to the professionals, the informed, and in this case there is no better place to read deeply intelligent reviews of festival performances than the London Jazz site.

All I can say is thanks to the LJF, wish I'd gone to dozens more of their events, will try to next year if by some miracle I've managed to hang on by my cracked nails to my small perch in this maddening city.

Thanks, thank you so much, thanks Eve Risser, and the amazing White Desert Orchestra, for bringing your strange, violent,
hallucinatory, erotic and poetic music to the UK.

On not leaving London 1: National Poetry Day at the Festival Hall

Some days you feel, how much longer can we stick around here? This swamp of  bad money and poison air, especially in this area, stricken as it is by deadly Nine Elms Disease.

Falling out of love with London happens increasingly often in this household, and yet it never lasts more than a day or two because the city has a winning habit of serving up something wonderful, just in time.

Last week it did this again. It was National Poetry Day and a series of readings and discussion was advertised at the Festival Hall. This happened in the Clore Ballroom area, a big space underneath the main auditorium, but a useful performance space in its own right, where most of the Southbank's biggest free events are held.

Poet Ian McMillan and his team prepare for the live recording of Radio 3's
The Verb on National Poetry Day, at the Southbank Centre, London.

There was a full programme, all free. A lot of the earlier sessions were aimed at schoolkids, and the place was packed at 3pm. Poet after poet went up and did their stuff: I was looking at the art show in the basement (the excellent annual event featuring art by people in prisons and young offenders institutions) but every so often came the cheering and chanting and stamping of feet on the floor above.

As the afternoon went on, the school groups left and more and more men and women of a certain age and look arrived and found seats. These people looked to be in their 40s, dressed in tight black clothes, austere of look, thin people. They were quite likely fans of one of the poets due to appear - the singer P J Harvey was in fact top of the bill. And to be perfectly honest, I too was there, above all, to see the scarily wonderful singer of so many powerful songs, in person.

But first, the poets. At 4 o'clock, the poet and radio broadcaster Ian McMillan took to the stage with  four poets to record a live session for his Radio 3 programme, The Verb. He's a brilliant master of these strange ceremonies, and calmly proceeds to get the by now rather staid looking audience whooping and cheering and even chanting responses to certain words, as he take the mickey out of pre-conceived notions of what a poet looks like.

One by one he talks to the line-up of four poets, and each reads some of their work. Meanwhile, the resident cartoonist Chris Riddell is busy sketching his own interpretations of the event. So while Luke Kennard reads one of his pieces featuring a very knowing wolf, Riddell has quickly drawn the most insouciant, upper-crust fanged leader of the pack you could want.

All this is thrown up onto two big screens.....but of ocurse it has to be described for the radio listeners...It's a hilarious event, with McMillan making the most of his power in this situation to get his audience to particpiate in repeating all manner of curious and surreal  lines.

You can listen to the finished programme here.

After that - more poetry, and the highlight of this session was Salena Godden. 

She's a powerful performer, highly political, hilarious as well. She'd written "Citizen of Nowhere" specially for the day, a poem full of anger which grew stronger as the way we treat refugees from wars we have helped to start became clearer.


Her finale was "Die Wasp!" - a long angry hilarious piece inspired by a recent stay in Berlin. She's in a cafe, watching a very young and beautiful woman being very young and beautiful and cool as she works on her laptop, and comparing this vision of calm and collected smartness and brilliance with her own unconfident, messed-up accident-prone self. A wasp bothers her. It does not touch the girl. Hence the title, the chorus. It is so funny, and so harsh, and so beautifully true.

Several of the pother poets were just as good, just as moving - it was an eye-opener, a tear-duct opener. 
Sabrina Mahfouz for example, read "The most honest job I've ever had" - a poem in the voice of woman working in the sex industry. Many of these young poets were first or second generation immigrnats to the UK< and several of them are contributors to the new anthology The Good Immigrant which is currently being serialised on BBC Radio4. 

So that by the time we got to the climax, many were already emotionally exhausted. Not what you'd want to be if you were waiting for a performance from  the high priestess of extreme emotional expressiveness, PJ Harvey.

As it happened, Polly-Jean was as cool and collected as a recently harvested cucumber in a chilled room. She strode up to the mic, opened her book, and read away, announcing each poem with a few very straight to the point words. Maybe she was more nervous than you'd expect of a seasoned performer: her voice sounded a bit strained, it was the voice of a newly-qualified English teacher in her first week at a school in Surrey.
She never really let go. She was almost the opposite of the PJ Harvey we knew from tracks like Rid Of Me.  Beautiful, cool, calm, reading splendidly crafted poems about people and places she had experienced, in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and in the USA. Some of the well-turned images and metaphors were read with almost audible quote marks around them. We clapped each poem, politely.

She's such a brilliant singer and exponent of that spare, blood-curling brand of electric punk blues-rock music, that you wondered, why is this beautiful, slighly diffident lady behaving in this prim manner? Personally, I think her poetry is already there in her music, and it is not  fully expressed in these quite careful, restrained poems about very bloody, horror-filled situations. Maybe we've already seen too much.

The only one that really seems to smoulder a bit was a poem about the countryside, from a new book she's working on. That seemed more like it: raw, bloody nature.

Rock stars who become poets ften have htis problem, and it was fascinating that PJ's set came just a week or so before the Dylan-Nobel prize news broke. Why people get so hung up about definitions of poetry I don't know. If someone uses words and music to have an effect that could not be imagined or achieved any other way....it is poetry, just as an unaccompanied song is just as much music as is a full orchestral performance.

Another poet who had a big role that afternoon was Inua Ellams, who was one of the MCs along with Indigo Williams for part of the event. He's one of that generation of young black poets, inspried as much by hip-hop and rap as by European writers; inpsired by jazz and politics,  and as you can see on his excellent website, he's inspried even by a visit to the office of a quantity surveyor. But today he performs a piece which gets straight to my heart. It's called the ‘Saxophone Player’s Mouth’, and its a sort of warts and all tribute to the great dead Nigerian musician, the inventor of Afrobeat,  Fela Kuti.

Which leads naturally on the next episode of this occasional series....

Nine Elms disease revisited: welcome to the seriously bland quarter

Since the last entry on the redevelopment of Nine Elms in South West London, things have moved ahead at a terrible speed. The view from here has already been partly blotted out by cranes and skeletal buildings shooting up along the river from Vauxhall to Battersea.

The killer tower now has stupid stripes of white lights all the way from top to bottom, making it look even more like a giant AAA battery stuck into the Thames mud.

And the developers have revealed their master plan, complete with the obligatory 3D computer visualisations of the finished project.

What's it  like? Well, when even the local free magazine, Battersea Time & Leisure, damns it with the faint praise that it was "a pretty model…But a new Southbank? It just didn't look, well, cult enough"- you realise we're in for something amazingly dull.

The editor of this mag, whose revenues come mainly from the estate agents who will be flogging these flats for millions and millions, is being quite bold here.

Not that the property men will care - they know that their customers would much rather buy into something safe and secure, bland and convenient and comfortable,  and certainly nothing like the real Southbank, which as I recall has relatively few luxury apartment blocks and lots of great big buildings devoted to theatre, music, art and cinema.

But we must withhold judgment - any investment in art and community has to be good, and even if it's just lip-service, or just a veneer, it could still do some good. Apparently the RCA is involved and maybe Testbed as well.  If they could get the Battersea Arts Centre on board, with all its attendant philosophy of arts for everyone, pay what you can afford, then we might be a bit less sceptical.

Anything that might lure the young and penniless into this zone of the super-rich and powerful could be a good thing. Maybe a new skate park, graffiti and all,  will develop here to make up for the one currently on its last days at Southbank…

Anyway, enjoy those green river views here at the nineelmslondon.com website.

One more overworked word like "curate" and I am going into meltdown

Oh and here's another thing…. having moaned on about pop-ups ages ago, I now (ONLY now) remember the other word - sometimes connected with pop-ups - that I have come to loathe, in its manifold mis-uses, more than any other.

That word is the verb, to curate. What I hate is that it is now used quite, it seems to me, thoughtlessly,  as a way of adding a bit of cultural heft to any old rubbish. (note to self: is not "heft" another of those words you should really not like? ed.) (note to ed, or to the note-maker: Look here! You are probably right but give a recovering journalist a fucking chance, won't you!?)

Ok, back to curate. I might as well say I am curating this blog, or  even worse, I am curating these silly little words and sentences and paragraphs that I am typing onto a little window on a little screen on a 13in MacBook.  Yes, just the same. Just like a dear old shepherd up on the Welsh Hills is curating his bloody sheep.

Back in the 20th century, a curator worked for a  museum or art gallery, and had the job of organising the exhibits. The aim of any curator was first to make sure the exhibits were safe (to curate, from curare, to care for), that they were presented in the best possible way so that the audience could  enjoy them, understand them, and understand their place in the history of art or whatever.

A really good curator could do much more than that - it was certainly an art-form and I am not arguing against the importance of the people who bring things together, display art and artefacts to enrich all our lives.

But at some point in the early 21st century - probably in London or New York - the word began to be used interchangeably with "editor" or "organiser" or "director". So that when it came to be Jarvis Cocker's turn to choose the musicians to play at that year's Meltdown Festival on London's Southbank Centre, he was described as the person "curating" this event.

That was ok for that moment - I mean, it was a fair  metaphor for the job in hand. The Meltdown festival was all about re-discovering treasures from the vaults of popular music, dusting them down a bit and bringing them to one of the stages. You could see it was a bit like organising Tutankamen at the British Museum.

Sadly, though, the word went ballistic, to the extent that club DJs would suddenly be curating deep Chicago house nights or whatever, while other long-in-the-tooth pop musicians or even pop critics would "curate" special editions of of Saturday colour supplements, and so on.

Even worse, with the rise of  easier-than-breathing blogger sites such as tumblr, every single solitary art student or would be art student is suddenly the curator of their own online art/photography/fashion/ or whatever gallery.

The sad truth being that while one or perhaps less than one percent of tumblr blogs are marvellous, imaginative, original, sparked on by the true genius of the curatorial inspiration, most are not.

So today, I was reminded of all this reading an article in a free magazine whose main aim is to promote local businesses in order to raise local property prices. You know the sort of mag that gets stuffed through every London letterbox?

Here's the quote:  "There are so many lovely boutiques in the Fulham area, but my favourite must be (name deleted) on the Kings Road,  because they have a real talent curating merchandise to suit their customer's (sic) need."

Yes, well, indeed. Personally, I am well impressed by the curatorial skills of the manageress of my local Save the Children Charity Shop on Clapham High Street. It is superb. Seriously.

Fun, fear and loathing at London's first arts theme-park

Prelude: A beautiful bright crisp dry Tuesday morning. Bad time for the psyche, no work, fuck the esteem or the steam, I want simply to remember how to live properly.

The sun is there - an amazing enough thing in London at this date and time – and I have energy enough to cycle to the the river, and then along it, past the sad glass snake of Waterloo's now redundant Eurostar platforms and on towards the Festival Hall, the South Bank Centre - which looks more and more like a jolly old theme park, given all the retro 1951 Festival of Britain stuff of recent years.

The back door route to the South Bank Centre has some advantages over the recommended scenic route over Hungerford Bridge. The riverside entrances are now rather tacky with just too much cheery community arts stuff, graffiti, lights, flags, banners and so. As though writing big meaningful words and phrases in bright colours on the lovely dirty rough cast concrete walls of the QEH and Hayward, or spraying identikit "street art" all over the  same - or painting those chunky staircases bright yellow -  actually does any good.

It is so easy to tell "official" sanctioned, paid-for-by-the-Arts-Council street art from real street art. For a start, real stuff is not likely to be tastefully positioned on the largest external walls of one of London's major art galleries, bang next to Waterloo Bridge, in plain sight of hundreds of police cameras. And it is always a bit neater, a bit better finished. To be harsh, it is fake, it might as well be in some art-world Disneyland.

And then there are all those weird excresences on the buildings - that nautical thing on the QEH, for example - which almost disguise the brutal beauty of the original buildings - which I guess was one the aims anyway.

It's all ephemeral, and the sooner it's all gone the better - I mean, they do try, but sometimes too hard I think. Whereas they didn't have to try at all to get the crazy skatepark underneath the QE Hall, it just grew there like fungus, but now - ironically - it is to be swept away.

Even worse right now are the mock-Germanic Christmas market booths along the riverside railings. At least yesterday they had enough sense of the ridiculous to play Bob Dylan's croaky versions of the old  yuletide songs.

But - but - a massive but - underneath this increasingly tacky surface,  the Southbank Centre is still pure gold, a wonderful, priceless place. The Festival Hall is still at the heart of the place, and when - as I was suing - you enter it by the side entrance you get a beautiful sense of the qualities of this strange building.

I was in fact aiming for the Hayward Gallery - but as it's there near the bike racks and so inviting I enter the Festival Hall itself by the ground-level side entrance.

First I find a loo - a rare enough event in central London - a free, clean, empty loo - and then, on the way out, I pass a full-length wall mirror and realise that across the floor in front of me several very beautiful young people are practising what look like very slow break-dance moves.

Across this beautiful polished parquet floor, and through a window past the cloakroom I see schoolgirls playing on a range of Balinese gamelan instruments. A small sign points down a few steps to a lower level still - the "Strength & Vulnerability Bunker".

Three rooms of art by inmates of HM Prisons and Young Offender institutions - some of it funny, frightening, frightened, sad, cheeky, brilliant, clever, stupid. The exhibition is curated by the rapper Speech Debelle, and its only on til the end of November - and I would never of seen it had I not wandered in by the side entrance.

Upstairs, there's a there's the 2013 World Press Photo exhibition, containing some of the most gruesome and stomach churning images I've seen for years - out of Palestine, out of Syria, out of India and Pakistan and Afghanistan.

You look at these images of suffering - a man, apparently someone who paid informers, is having his bare feet whipped by a member of the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo, as two others hold him down. A boy of about ten is being beaten on the hands by his teacher in a religious school in Afghanistan. Four freshly-slaughtered children lie in a makeshift morgue, their faces bloodied and burned by Israeli missile attack.

The hardest images are at the back of the exhibition, and as you go round you almost feel like warning others of what they are about to look at.

And then you make a quick shift across the next level, past the expansive dance-floor beneath the main hall, past the bars and into the gift shop where you can buy charming Christmas presents.

The people who run the SBC really need all the congratulation  available for the way they've kept true the spirit of the RFH - it  does truly seem to be an all-day arts centre for everyone of any age and inclination.

Picking up some of the copious printed material on the way pout (how can they afford to produce such lovely monthly programmes and brochures and give them away to all?) - I find one is called  "Help us make it happen - the Southbank Centre's New Festival Wing.

"More arts for more people" is the rallying cry, and as you read the plans , step by step, you just think well, this is all very laudable. But you senesce there's going to be a catch.  The new ideas - the "Glass Box" rehearsal space on top of the Purcell Rooms and Hayward - looks distinctly uncomfortable. It is exactly that in the drawing - a nice piece of rather bland 21st Century design sitting atop the craggy ramparts of the older art-fortress.

Then there's going to be Arts Education Studios, a Youth Village., a Children's House, a History House, a Word Space - and then of course the  "World-Food cafés" which are supposed to pay for all this. Nosing around the RFH yesterday I was amazed to see how many school kids and students were taking part in so many activities all over the building. You cannot but welcome the idea of more space for this sort of thing - but does it all have to be concentrated here? And do those cafés really have to take the space currently occupied by SBC's one and only true bit of organically grown community activity, the skate park?

Just how much food and drink do people need in order to get active in the arts?