Also, I started on the Chico Chica story. This started out as a record of our musical development and was intended for PR purposes, so giving journalists some background information on the three musicians who make up the group as well as describing the creative process that culminated in Mélangerie, the debut album. But it grew and grew and came to dominate my time and thoughts. Iy has turned into a memoir of my childhood and I still haven’t finished. Christmas 2011 was the deadline I gave myself. I have sent the incomplete draft to a couple of friends and told them to read it with a big marker pen and cross out anything dull or foolish. 

When complete, I will sell it as an e-book, give it away to professional journalists and serialise on this blog. For now, I would like to draw your attention to the Chico Chica Christmas card to the world in the form of a sequence of photos taken throughout 2011, shown in chronological order, and set to the soundtrack of the album’s opening song: C’est Ta Chanson.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuWwapAyyek

Harder To Hide, the second song, can be heard here (video to follow):

http://soundcloud.com/chico-chica/02-harder-to-hide

One last thing before I wish everyone a happy Christmas – here is a list of the books I read in 2011. All are by Joseph Conrad unless otherwise stated, Some of the stories listed are short stories. These have been compiled in different ways so I have listed the stories rather than the books. 

Lord Jim

Youth

Heart of Darkness

The End of the Tether

Nigger of The Narcissus

Typhoon

The Shadow Line

An Outcast of the Islands

Heart of Darkness (again)

Karain, A Memory

The Return

The Brute

The Informers

An Outpost Of Progress

The Idiots

The Lagoon

Almayer’s Folly

Nostromo

The Secret Agent

Under Western Eyes

The Dual

Gaspar Ruiz

The Anarchist

Il Conte

Victory

A Mirror Of The Sea

A Personal Record

A Smile Of Fortune

Rime of the Ancient, Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Secret Sharer

Freya Of The Seven Isles

Amy Foster

Falk

Tomorrow

Typhoon (again)

The Rescue

In The Blood, Andrew Motion

Goodbye To All That, Robert Graves

For the first time in my life, I decided to devote an entire year to one author. I read them more or less in the order they were published. I  didn’t get round to reading Chance. I read this a few years ago but cannot remember much about it which is not a good sign. Writing my memoir took hold of me towards the end of the year. The last two books are memoirs and I used them as models for my own. I will be writing more on Conrad later.

Merry Christmas.

Being a Fuller’s pub means  I can buy Honey Dew beer on draught. Yippee. I love Honey Dew and I had a pint of it with my pizza. I can’t remember the topping but I do remember I enjoyed it. I suppose that means it was good in a rather bland, forgettable way. My companion had a New Yorker Burger. I discovered this is a burger with a cheese, bacon and chicken topping. Chicken!!  It sounds like a burger for people who can’t make up their minds. What struck my companion and me was that the meals were served on wooden chopping boards rather than plates. This is obviously a 2011 idea dreamt up by some catering design consultant which will run its course for a few months.

Getting back to Conrad, which I have a tendency to do, I have been thinking about how artists need to feed the imagination. Some argue that an artist must be tuned into the Zeitgeist so as to tell the story of the times. I prefer to choose sources that others avoid or more likely, don’t even consider. This is one reason why I find Conrad so compelling.  So many go with the flow, when it comes to their reading. They choose which ever titles are being talked about , reviewed and advertised.  Instead of joining a book club I would rather read what others don’t read. The one drawback is there are fewer conversational opporunities.

It’s hard to explain my reasons for liking Joseph Conrad without sounding like an English professor and that is what I most want to avoid. To say that Kurtz in Heart of Darkness represents European civilisation is not only obvious and unnecessary but it also spoils the fun. A reader can can get enormous pleasure from Heart of Darkness just by reading it. All the representational aspects which academics love so much, works best when it operates sub-consciously. It’s best to avoid the academics. Their work is aimed at those poor souls who have to write essays. If you want insight into an author, read essays written by other writers. In Conrad’s case, Virginia Woolf and Henry James are good. For me, the best way is merely to point the reader to those sublime passages that Conrad keeps coming up with and which mark him out as a writer of the highest quality. Here I have typed one such passage from The Outcast From The islands. It is about Lingard, who, up to this point, the reader is made to understand is  a successful and benevolent trader. I will leave you with this antidote to those How-To-Be-Successful books you may had the misfortune to read.

‘Consciously or unconsciously, men are proud of their firmness, steadfastness of purpose, directness of aim. They go straight towards their desire, to the accomplishment of virtue – sometimes of crime – in an uplifting persuasion of their firmness. They walk the road of life, the road fenced in by their tastes, prejudices, disdains or enthusiasms, generally honest, invariably stupid, and are proud of never losing their way. If they do stop it is to look for a moment over the hedges and make them safe, to look at the misty valleys, at the distant peaks, at cliffs and morasses, at the dark forests and the hazy plains where other human beings grope their days painfully away, stumbling over the bones of the wise, over the unburied remains of their predecessors who died alone, in gloom or in sunshine, halfway from anywhere. The man of purpose does not understand, and goes on, full of contempt. He never loses his way. He knows where he is going and what he wants. Traveling on, he achieves great length without any breadth, and battered, besmirched, and weary, he touches the goal at last; he grasps the reward of his perseverance, of his virtue, of his healthy optimism: an untruthful tombstone over a dark and soon forgotten grave.’

Let’s hope my reading of Conrad and suchlike will give me enough self-awareness to avoid Lingard’s fate. But I have to say, a sense of purpose is needed to push through the Chico Chica album project. It is taking so much longer than originally planned partly because it’s hard to have everyone available at the same time but also because mixing always takes longer than you think. I am particularly grateful to Nick Taylor at Porcupine Studios and Andy Lafone. Jen Ruppert has also helped the project by bringing her video camera to the studio. Our friends recognise the passion Chico Chica are putting in to the project and are responding in kind.

Gratitude is a kind of happiness so allow me to wallow in my thanking mode. Regarding my recent home refurbishment I’d like to thank Steve Davies the mortgage broker -(if he can get a mortgage for a Jazz musician you know he’s good), Matt Keeler of KSK Architects and Tom Kennedy of TFK Services (the builder).

My big surprise with Renezio was that there were no surprises. It is a generic Italian restaurant. It’s a little bit of a throwback to the time when there were a lot more Italian restaurants. In the ’80s there were more Italian restaurants in London that in any other city in the world though I am not sure if that included Pizza take-away shops.

For those of you who enjoy lists, here is one I have compiled. It is called, The Ships in Joseph Conrad’s Novels and What Happened to Them. I should also record the names of the ships, the captains, the cargo and the ports of embarkation and destination. That will have to wait for another time.

Lord Jim

- abandoned in the mistaken belief it was sinking.

Youth

- catches fire and sinks.

Heart of Darkness

- starts off sunk, the Captain fixes it, then goes to fetch a man who then dies.

The End of a Tether

- deliberately sunk as an insurance fraud.

Nigger of the Narcissus

- survives a storm and a sick man dies.

Typhoon

- survives a storm but Chinese passengers suffer the most.

The Shadow-Line

- crew of becalmed sailing ship incapacitated by fever.

In one Author’s Note Conrad came up with a comment on literary  theorizing. (If you are an academic, look away now):

‘It is an amusing and egotistical occupation of no use whatever to anyone and just as likely as not to lead to false conclusions.’

Renezio looks just as a 1980s Italian restaurant ought to look. That’s not a criticism, in fact it’s quite nostalgic. The food was reasonably priced and the service was efficient though a little joyless. I chose Spaghetti Vongole and did some menu modeling. By this I mean, I study the dish carefully and see if I can replicate it in my kitchen. I have done this very successfully with the Nando’s chicken and couscous salad.

The conversation centered on the two big, current projects in my life: the refurbishment of my home and recording Chico Chica’s debut album. The former is currently at its nadir, by that I mean the home looks as unhomely as I have ever seen it. It’s just rubble and builders’ tools. It’s a little upsetting to see it like this. It’s like seeing a good friend undergoing major surgery. Italian comfort food was much needed.

As a topic of conversation,  the album was short-lived as I was reminded by my companion that it is ill-mannered to talk shop over dinner. But I’m an artist, I protested,  – we don’t do social conventions and besides it’s not as if I work in a paper clip factory. The album project is at the rehearsal stage and oh what fun it is!

Ariana

There is something about large organisations. I really resent handing money over to them and it is especially true of phone companies. This is one reason why I no longer have broadband at home and that Ariana at Goldhawk Road is, for me, a kind of office. I write a list of all the online tasks I need to do before I go there and leave when they are completed. It does away with all the broadband time-wasting which can eat into a day spent working at home. Ariana is not one of those internet cafe with dreary rows of computers. There are a couple of computers but it is best suited for the laptop-and-sofa kind of working. They also provide printing, writing paper, envelopes and pens so I don’t need to keep a stock of stationary.  It is run by three Afghan brothers with various helpers one of whom is Kathia, a young SpanIsh woman with a husky voice. If a Spanish woman doesn’t have a husky voice I feel a little disappointed. Kathia does not disappoint.

Previously, Ariana was called Pacific Net and was run by a Kurdish family. They were forced to leave by a bullying local council and the local library service. There is a an important rule in business: don’t compete with your customers. Someone should tell that to London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. Book lending has declined significantly over the years so the local library moved in to records and CDs. Result: all music retail shops in the borough closed. They then went into video and DVD. Result: all video shops shut down. Then they started to become internet cafes. At first, the family-run operations held out but then the libraries, greedy for market share, allowed the first half hour of computer use to be free. The family-run cafes could not compete and so Pacific Net, who were paying thousand of pounds a year in business rates, had to to call it a day.

I used to love libraries but now I just don’t see the point of them.  Last year I borrowed Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall but they refused to let me renew it because someone else wanted to borrow it. Being able to renew a book is a basic function of a public library.  This must happen a lot when a book is both long and popular.  Thankfully, I wasn’t that bothered because I think Woolf Hall is over-rated.  Thanks to the Library Service I didn’t get to read the last hundred pages so there is the possibility that the novel redeemed itself at the end but I doubt it.

This week, I asked if they had a copy of Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly. The reply was: ‘Sorry we don’t do it.’ instead of ‘We’ll see if we can track down a copy for you’.  I have vowed never to bother with the service again. It would be much easier and cost-effective if the Government contracted a company like Amazon to provide a mail order service.

Looking for Almayer’s Folly was part of my Year of Conrad project.  At the beginning of the year I resolved to read nothing but Conrad. There is so much written about him that I decided to keep my comments brief and personal. The two big complaints about Conrad is that he is overly serious and difficult to read.  Conrad is a Modernist in that he often deliberately obscures a narrative for artistic effect. I started the Conrad series with Lord Jim because that is regarded the as the novel that launched him as a literary great. The idea was to read the canon in chronological order but it hasn’t worked put that way. His first two novels were set in Malaya and are known, unremarkably,  as his Malay novels. They are Almayer’s Folly and The Outcast Of The Islands. I read the latter first which is a pity because they should probably be read in order because one of the principal characters in The Outcast of The Islands is a man called Almayer so it seems to be a sequel.

Another reason for using Ariana as an office is the lunch.  The time taken to shop, cook and clear away can eat into the working day and I am determined to make a more effective use of my two days a week I work from home, managing Chico Chica, my Latin/Lounge/Jazz band. It’s strange that a trio should have three genres but remember it is a trio and Barbara Snow best represents Latin, I represent Lounge and Hilary Cameron, Jazz.  The new album will have songs sung in three languages: English, French and Spanish. That’s enough about the number 3. One thing I have noticed about the live music scene is that it is now much, much more difficult to get the diary full than it was back in the ’80s and ’90s. There used to be so much more work in bars, restaurants, pubs, hotels and night clubs. There also seemed to be more work in parties and weddings as well as in the thriving corporate hospitality industry. My hunch is that there is a shift away from naffness and white-suited function bands playing ‘Celebration’. There is a much stronger demand for authenticity and this is the thinking behind the album project.

My favourite Ariana lunch is the lentil ravioli. No doubt it has a proper Italian name but I don’t know what it is. Weekday lunch is the meal to eat here. They close at 8pm and there is a limited selection of hot food at the weekend. I usually sit on the sofa at the back. Feel free to introduce yourself if you visit.

I have been living on the Goldhawk Road for 18 years. If a road has two bus routes then it deserves the definite article. It also needs a report on all the eating establishments. It’s so easy to get in habit of eating of at the same places so I have decided to give myself an eating list. I will systematically eat my way from Shepherd’s Bush Road to King Street and then back again. No establishment will be missed. It will be a different restaurant every month and I will report on each.  This arduous task will take around two years and it will be my modest contribution to the sum of human knowledge. I should add here that I’m not a proper restaurant critic – I’m too polite and easy to please. I love the idea of someone else cooking, waiting and washing up for me. This series is just thoughts which occur to me as I dine.

If, with the predictive text on, I press the ABC button on my phone 6 times, I get the word Cabbage. (Well just fancy that!). It is generally considered to be the second least glamorous vegetable after turnip. Not so in Poland.  People tell me that Patio Restaurant is an institution. By that they mean, it’s been around for longer than anyone can under fifty can remember. Yet despite this institutional quality, I had never visited it. This is why eating lists are important. The evening was pleasant enough. My companion tried out her three words of Polish which she learnt on a trip there last Summer. She told me that all the museums were dedicated either to the Second World War of Chopin. Starve yourself before you come here because two courses are almost too much. Earlier on in the evening, Hilary, the piano player in Chico Chica gave me half her Sainsbury’s tuna sandwich which was probably not a good idea. It was just after our gig at the National Theatre and I felt I deserved a reward.

There’s bread and butter and a tasty relish spread on the table as you arrive which we ate greedily. A few years ago I read A Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning. There’s one character who lived for Blinis. The author made them sound so delicious so I was determined to try them here. In the book they came with caviar among other things. However, I was told that at Patio they only come with smoked salmon. Perhaps it’s a Polish thing. The trouble is, I don’t eat salmon it’s my one Special Dietary Requirement and it makes so proud to have one. The waitress suggested the potato pancake with sour cream which she insisted I would prefer to blinis anyway. And I have to say, I did enjoy it. But what is it about beetroot? They love this in Poland. To me it’s fine but it just doesn’t go with anything. It’s a bit like the acordion – there’s nothing wrong with the sound it’s just really hard to make it work in an ensemble. So like any food which doesn’t  fit in, I ate it on its own before a tackled the pancake. As for the blinis, they will have to wait for another time. In Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, the characters seem to drink nothing but Bellinis. I have never tried such a drink so perhaps one day I will have a meal of blinis and Bellinis.

The next course was mincemeat wrapped in cabbage in a tomato sauce.  I can’t remember the name. It had to be cabbage – in a Polish restaurant nothing else would do. There was a Polish lady in the last Come Dine With Me Series. She did something with cabbage – it met with sneers and sniggers from the other contestants. I didn’t watch long enough to find out how it went down. I ordered cabbage out of a kind of solidarity with her. There is something about the relationship with my mother and a general sense of thrift which makes me finish my meal, and this includes the garnish.  But I could not quite finish this. Maybe it was the tuna sandwich but perhaps I just didn’t need the second course. My companion had ice cream and fruit and this came with an unexpected vodka.

One thing I like about the Patio Restaurant is the acoustics.  Since Terrence Conran became a restauranteur, soft furnishings have been banished from all modern restaurants.  Conran is a designer – for him, a restaurant has to look right , the acoustics are irrelevant. There was some research done recently into why airline food tasted so bland. They discovered that the noise level on aeroplanes does something to the taste buds. Get the acoustics right and the food tastes better and you don’t have to shout. Bring back soft furnishings in restaurants.

2011 and so many new projects. On New Years Day I started to read Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. This was not planned, it just so happened that I came to the end of a book on the final day of the year. For the last few years I have been thinking about my reading habits and wondering if I put breadth before depth. I was doing no re-reading, I didn’t see the point as there was so much to discover and, despite a 40 year reading habit, there were so many important books I hadn’t read. Why re-read Bleak House when I hadn’t read Pickwick Papers? I am now starting to enter that period of life when I start to re-read my favourite books. Lord Jim was to be the start of this process. However, another idea came to me, that is, to read nothing but one author for an entire year. Of course, there is the danger that I will have read all the best works before the end of the year and end up filling the rest of the year the second-rate works. To avoid this, I will concentrate on the period when Conrad produced his best work: 1900-1915. I will supplement the reading with a few critical essays if I can get hold of them. There are some by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Ford Maddox Ford, John Galsworthy and F.R. Leavis. My rule of thumb is to stay away from academics because their attitudes to literature seem to me to be joyless. The get so caught up in their themes, dichotomies and historical contexts that they overlook the sheer joy of language. I will also write about each book and, of course, read them again.

It is not just a love of his work which connects me with the great man. There is a family connection to the world Conrad inhabited. My mother came from a family with a long merchant shipping pedigree. I remember as a child family photographs and mementoes as well as snippets of conversation that conjured up this golden age of steam, how it co-existed with sail and before it became militarized. Allow me to scrape one other connection from the barrel. Conrad was born in 1857 exactly 100 years before me and 100 after William Blake. It’s now down to me to carry on the ’57 tradition. There must be someone else, surely.

Conrad is not an easy author. Many modern readers find is prose style turgid and Edwardian. I struggled with him at first. Now I am awestruck by the grandiose, epic and poetic nature of his sentences. It’s easy to parody but impossible to equal. I collect his sentences and use them in my Chico Chica newsletters. Chico Chica by the way is the name of my Jazz band. I use them as a tag line at the bottom of the message. Let me know if you wanted to be included on the newsletter list. For years I used the phrase ‘….fished up from the depths of the incredible’ for a band project. I will publish a collection of these sentences in a future blog post.

One advantage for you the reader, is that my impressions will be heartfelt and sincere. I don’t look for over-complicated analysis and where there is too much obscurity and ambiguity, I leave at that. I do not claim to know the mind of Conrad but I will for the first time in my life, try to get inside it. To this end, I will, once again for the first time, provide myself with something I have spent a lifetime avoiding: a reading list. It will be in chronological order and comprise his best works from his most productive period. I have asterixed the ones I have perviously read.

1900  Lord Jim*

1902  Youth

1902  Heart Of Darkness*

1902  The End Of The Tether

1903  Typhoon

1904  Nostromo

1907 The Secret Agent

1911  Under Western Eyes*

1913  Chance*

1915  Victory*

Once again, I find myself as a band leader. They say that it is the weakest musicians that become band leaders for the same reason that it is ugly people who start swingers’ clubs. But there’s another reason. Many musicians just cannot do management. They don’t like the hard work, they fear failure or they find the whole organisational challenge too daunting. They may also be bad communicators which seems odd for an artist because communication supposed to be their business. In some cases, though, happily, not with the musicians I work with, there is a reluctance to engage with management issues.  They see themselves as precious artistes and commerce as being below them. This is a little like a mother in a Jane Austen novel talking about a suitor: ‘But darling, he’s in trade’. This line probably never occurred in Jane Austen -  I’ve never got round to reading her. Some musicians believe that an aptitude for business is a badge of mediocrity. It seems silly, but these attitudes persist.

Separating management from creativity is very difficult for an upstart band because a manager controls the levers of power it is bound to influence the creative process. Business and art have very similar mental processes – they do not occupy different parts of the brain.

Some of my work is as a creative careers mentor. I deliver talks and workshops in schools, colleges and career fairs. For this reason, I have decided to keep a log of the management of Chico Chica. I will inevitably make mistakes and I am sure I will make money and have a lot of fun with the band. Chico Chica was to become not just a band, but also a case study. I make no claim to special knowledge but I have discovered something: nobody has a clue. This is a wonderfully liberating thing to realise. I speak to so-called experts but they all disagree with each. Some say CDs are finished some say there life in them yet.  Some think the era of the professional musician is coming to a close, others believe that ‘we are the movers and shakers and: With wonderful deathless ditties

We build up the world’s great cities,

And out of a fabulous story

We fashion an empire’s glory.’

You should be able to guess which side I’m on. I’ve still yet to resolve the CD conundrum though.

Chico Chica comprises three musicians, Hilary Cameron, Barbara Snow and myself. We are all experienced freelance Jazz musicians with our own interests and inclinations. Hilary is the purist Jazz musician of the three. She trained at the Manhatten School of Music and has a voice and playing style which suits a more Bluesy, American style. Barbara prefers Latin Jazz, She has led and co-led her own bands (Que Barbara and Candela) and spent fifteen years working around the world with Roberto Pla’s salsa band. She takes a multi-lingual approach, and often sings in Spanish, Portuguese and French. I have led and co-led various Latin Jazz function bands, worked with Rat Pack style swing bands, Music Theatre (mainly composition) as well a few experimental guitar projects (Zeigon).

Hilary and I were busy working and Barbara started to join us on some gigs. This resulted in a decision to form a band. It was to be unusual in that all the players sand.  I now feel a little short-changed when a player doesn’t sing or a singer doesn’t play. We also happen to be very good friends and we all write. Furthermore, one of the trio (myself) had a reputation of being good at getting gigs and keeping a band with a busy diary.

Reputations are funny things.  Chico Chica was launched in July 2010.  Seven months later, and I have not delivered the full diary. Am I losing my touch? Is this era so different to the 1990s, the one in which my reputation was earned? Join in me in the journey.  And remember, I am happy to hear of any advice, suggestions or comments.

It seems right at this stage to set myself a target. We are professional musicians so need to generate an income straight away. For this, using my contacts within the event industry, we play at functions. Often playing a chilled-out, ambient Jazz set or else the full fiesta experience. Conventionally, function or covers bands are regarded as an aesthetic cul-de-sac. What differentiates a band playing at Glastonbury and one playing a mile down the road at a wedding in a country house hotel is not musicianship but imagination.  However, we live in an era that has to challenge conventional assumptions. So I have decided that Chico Chica straddle these two worlds. When it comes to straddling, we will become Olympic hopefuls and possibly world-beaters. And besides, needs must.

This will become a journal of how Chico Chica makes the journey. It will be unknown territory for me. Of course the most important task will be to record an album. This will take place in February 2011 and will be the focus of my attention. I will let you know how this goes in my February blog

http://www.youtube.com/tomhannah

Hilary, Barbara and myself.

In the past I have led two other Latin Jazz Party Bands: Tropical Brainstorm and Trilogy but Chico Chica inhabit an entirely different qualitative and aesthetic dimension. The trio started as a series of casual bar gigs but soon gathered an unstoppable and irresistible momentum. There are certain combinations that just feel right and this is one of them which is why all three of us are so passionately committed to the project.

Barbara Snow (trumpet/percussion) and Hilary Cameron (piano/flute) are two sublimely talented  multi-instrumentalists and singers, each with a distinctive style. The third member of the trio is me. I sing and play Spanish and bass guitar. Most importantly, I love speaking to audiences and engendering a warm, light-hearted ambience. I want listeners not to be merely entertained, but to feel part of a connected assembly. I also work as a public speaker so this is something that comes naturally to me. I speak good French and some German so I particularly enjoy playing to international audiences.

This is the first stage of a launch period. Our medium is neither video nor audio, it is the live event. This is how you can attain a true measure of how good we are and how we. Come and take part in the Chico Chicas launch happening. It is free entry and it takes place 9pm  this Thursday at:

The Plough

297 Northfield Avenue

Ealing W5 4XB

As a visiting guitar teacher, I am forever singing to my students, I do this to set an example. It is an excellent way of communicating with them. I also discovered that children like it when adults sing to them, and that they are far more impressed with talent than with knowledge.

Teachers should not suffer assaults on their professional dignity because they should not be professional in the first place. Teaching, being about communication, is a creative career,like writing and singing. Yet they insist on seeing themselves as professionals like accountants and dentists.

The children instinctively know this. They should be encouraged to find out more about their teachers, Google them and see if they have any talent.