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Anything goes: Wooden legs, slobs in love, Armenian menus

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  • Anything goes: Wooden legs, slobs in love, Armenian menus

    The Guardian (London)
    September 16, 2004

    Anything goes: Wooden legs, slobs in love, Armenian menus... Alan
    Plater on what makes a great jazz song

    Mr Topsy-Turvy . . . Slim Gaillard, who played piano with his hands
    upside-down

    In 1923, at the Palais de Danse in Ladywood, Birmingham, 17-year-old
    Lily Goodman from Cannon Hill broke the British record for marathon
    dancing. She danced for 24 hours and five minutes, covered 68 miles,
    used up two partners - Mr Harold Quiney and Mr R Webster-Grinling -
    and 482 tunes. This was the inspiration for Lily's Dancing Feat, a
    swinging instrumental by reeds player Alan Barnes, which he performed
    in the year 2000 as part of a Birmingham jazz festival programme. (I
    introduced it: my job was to tell the stories behind the music and
    divert the audience's attention from the bar.) Another of Alan's
    pieces celebrated Peg-Leg Bates, a tap-dancer with a wooden leg, who
    toured the UK in the 1950s with the Louis Armstrong All-Stars.

    After hours, Alan and I discovered a mutual interest in writing songs
    about unsung heroes like Lily and Peg-Leg, and places and
    institutions largely neglected by the music industry. It was, as Eric
    Morecambe might have said, like the moment when Gilbert met
    O'Sullivan. Since then, we have celebrated fast food joints on the
    A66, being in love with a slob, and the psychological complexities of
    a vegan chicken.

    A key element of our approach to songwriting is laughter, a quality
    that doesn't always sit comfortably in jazz clubs and concerts. The
    larger-than-life exuberance of Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy
    Gillespie, while adding enormously to the gaiety of nations, was
    frequently victim of tut-tutting from some of our music's most solemn
    devotees. For years, the music of the US pianist/composer/ bandleader
    Carla Bley was under-valued because of her triple error of being
    political, a woman and funny.

    This is odd, since jazz musicians themselves are legendary for their
    relish of the comic and the absurd. The tenor player Zoot Sims, for
    instance, following a US State Department tour of the Soviet Union
    with the Benny Goodman band, was asked about the experience. He said:
    "When you're working for Benny, everywhere is the Soviet Union." The
    same Zoot Sims, watching the first moon landings in the back room at
    Ronnie Scott's in 1969, commented: "Imagine - we've got men on the
    moon and I'm still playing Cherokee."

    Despite this attitude, many of the most original, inventive and witty
    of performers tend to be marginalised and redirected to the cabaret
    room: singer/pianists like Mose Allison, Bob Dorough, Blossom Dearie,
    Dave Frishberg and our very own George Melly. The central stance is
    one that Allison has defined, naturally enough, in song: "I'm another
    little middle-class white boy who's out to have some fun." Allison
    would be the first to acknowledge everyone's debt to the great black
    rhythm and blues singers like Louis Jordan and Wynonie Harris, and
    the blissful surrealist Slim Gaillard, whose considerable oeuvre
    includes Yep Roc Heresy, with lyrics taken from the menu of an
    Armenian restaurant in New York.

    In a long, colourful career, Slim invented a semi-private language
    called Vout, was the centrepiece of a chapter in Jack Kerouac's On
    the Road, played Clair de Lune on the piano with his hands
    upside-down and, with Down at the Station, could claim to be the only
    jazz musician to contribute a genuine nursery rhyme to the children
    of the world.

    His early life - or legend, the two things being difficult to
    disentangle - included time spent as a professional boxer, a
    mortician and a truck-driver for bootleggers before going into
    vaudeville as a tapdancing guitarist and singer. He became a handsome
    young man about Hollywood ("They used to call me Dark Gable"), who in
    his later years was a genial and benign presence at the Chelsea Arts
    Club. Slim's verbal gymastics concealed a serious and poetic
    understanding of the music. Of the tenor player Lester Young, he once
    said: "He played real quiet - like a rat walking on silk."

    Among the middle-class white kids, Dave Frishberg, an outstanding
    jazz pianist by any standards, has contributed many of the definitive
    songs to the canon, from I'm Hip, co-written with Dorough, a guide to
    being cool in a square world, to My Attorney Bernie, a sardonic hymn
    to the American legal profession:

    "Bernie tells me what to do

    Bernie lays it on the line

    Bernie says we sue, we sue

    Bernie says we sign, we sign

    On the dotted line."

    Frishberg's announcements reflect the same sweet-and-sour attitude.
    "I have reached that time of life when everything gets worse," he'll
    say, before drifting into a song bemoaning such footnotes to life as
    unwanted changes to the rules of baseball. With the seriousness of a
    true clown, he also wrote Dear Bix, an exquisite tribute to the great
    Beiderbecke.

    This isn't, and never will be, mainstream music, but it is a lovely
    tributary where writers, musicians and audiences can splash about,
    irritate the grown-ups and have a lot of fun. That's pretty much what
    Alan Barnes and I have been doing this past couple of years, enabling
    Liz Fletcher to sing our hymns to the unnoticed, the unwanted even
    the unwashed - not to mention a tenor saxophonist who's still playing
    Cherokee.

    (C) Alan Plater. His Songs for Unsung Heroes is out now on Woodville
    Records. It will be presented as part of the Scarborough jazz
    festival on Saturday. Box office: 01723 376774.
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