Touring Plans – 2019

As a child, I remember a board game called Touring Scotland. It’s a racing, dice game. Each player has a metal car and starts off at Berwick-on-Tweed. He is dealt cards with the names of the towns he has to visit before going back home. A bad hand would include a town which needed a ferry to get to and that meant having to throw a six. The game is out of print but can be bought second hand.

This early training has stood me in good stead because I am in the process of organising a Chico Chica tour. We will have an album out later this year and, as is the convention, the release will be followed by a series of dates – starting on 21^stAugust, culminating in the Bull’s Head on 15^thNovember. This last date would part of the London Jazz Festival.

I have earmarked fifty-two potential dates and this will be my target. We will be returning to venues that know us well but there will be a few new ones.

When organising tours it’s important to make a decision on where the band will be at a particular time and stick with it. This may mean turning down offers from places which are too far – in this sense it’s a bit like Aboriginal songlines. Something can be good, but only if it’s at a particular location and point in time.

So the plan is, (notice I said ‘plan’, not ‘hope’ – a plan is more likely to happen. A hope is just that – it could be forlorn). There will be six legs to the tour. I’m trying to include a head, thorax and abdomen but I’m unsure how to do this. And yes, it will have wings. Chico Chica will be creating a buzz in these areas:

21^st– 25^thAugust: Wales

27th-30^thAugust: Cornwall

1^st– 7^thSeptember: West and South England

Every Wed-Sun between 11^thSeptember – 13^thOctober: London and Home Counties

19^{th – 27th} October: other regions (North East, East Anglia, Kent, West country again.

Every Wed-Sun between 30^thOctober and 15^thNovember: London and Home Counties.

The album will be called Café d’amour though this has yet to be formally agreed. All the songs are in French and it seems only natural one leg of the tour should include France. The will is there but alas, I couldn’t get the figures to add up. Chico Chica has yet to sing a song in the land whose music has inspired us so much. It will have to wait for another year. To tour at a loss is easy – a bit like writing free verse. Chico Chica is a professional band. Making a profit concentrates the mind and improves the music. We live in London and there are thirty million people living with a two hour drive so we’re sure to find our fabled 1,000 true fans within this radius.

Setting up all these dates is something most musicians would run a mile from. But, in a weird way, it appeals to my nerdy side. To minimise travel costs, there has to be a geographic logic and for this reason, I am forever referring to maps.

When the dates are organised, and I look at the long itinerary, I feel a certain pride of accomplishment as well as excitement about the fun ahead.

Once the dates are in place, aspects such as logistics, accommodation and travel arrangements are handled by others. This is because, in my anxiety to minimise costs, I ‘m quite happy to slum it and this may cause friction even among the easy going members of Chico Chica. Also, I don’t drive.

So if you know any promoters in those areas, and who may relish the opportunity to be part of this memorable and exciting adventure, do put them in touch with me.

Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol

I’ve been aware of Dead Souls for many years. It is deemed a classic of Russian literature and Nikolai Gogol is a writer who is talked about with such esteem I had to find out why this is so. Up until the end of December 2018, I hadn’t read a line of his, and it appears Gogol hadn’t written much – Dead Souls is the only famous work he produced. Likewise, Chico Chica are not a prolific band, but I maintain this is because we exercise strict quality control. Robert Graves said a poet’s best friend is the wastepaper basket. For Chico Chica, it’s the delete button. In our current recording sessions, that button is wearing thin with over-use.

The title Dead Souls suggests something grim. But the book is in fact I kind of comedy. The novel is episodic. The hero, Chichikov goes around the Russian countryside visiting various landowners asking if they had any dead souls to sell. Land value was connected with how many serfs worked on it. In this context, serfs were known as souls. Taxes were paid on the number of souls as counted in the last census. In the interim many may have died so their names could be bought and sold as an elaborate tax dodge. I didn’t fully understand Chichikov’s business model and neither did the characters but that’s beside the point as it was a vehicle by which Gogol could satirise Russian bourgeois life.

The nearest equivalent I can think of is Pickwick Papers which was published six years earlier (1836). That was a light-hearted romp through English bourgeois life and I suppose if it wasn’t light-hearted it wouldn’t be a romp. I wonder if Gogol was influenced by Pickwick Papers. It seems so.

Publishers of the novel are confused about whether to include a sequel which Gogol abandoned and wanted destroyed. The sequel contained some of the best passages but Gogol’s wishes should have been respected. Like many musicians, I harbour a conceit that I will be the subject of study by some future musicologist (I know, I know). I hate to think my outtakes, mistakes, doodlings and experiments will be published.

I found the whole experience of reading this stalwart of the Russian canon less than satisfactory which is why I will stop writing about it. However, I have titled this post after the book because I see books, recordings and concerts as milestones in my life.

My mind is much more focussed on Chico Chica’s new album in particular my getting to grips with the intricacies of Logic Pro, an insanely complex pice of recording software.

It’s a paradox of modern times that the more labour-saving devices we possess the less free time we have. In the seventies people seemed to have the more free time. I wrote about this many years ago. It is in fact my very own Second Law of Leisure:

‘The free time of an individual is inversely proportional to the amount of labour-saving machinery he uses.’

So nowadays, musicians are forever struggling to find the time to write and rehearse. Barbara Snow and I have assigned Mondays as our time to bring the next Chico Chica album to fruition.

There’s a documentary of Captain Beefheart (the presentation is annoyingly dated but it’s still worth a watch). The Captain took his band to a remote Californian location and kept them there on a diet of beans for seven months. They then went on to record his greatest album, Trout Mask Replica (warning: it’s an acquired taste). Oh how I wish I had could do the same. But I’d probably be arrested for cruelty or forceful imprisonment, such are the intolerant, anti-art times we live in.

Sibelius – 7th Symphony

Chico Chica have a tour coming up later in the year as well as an album launch. As a result, marketing will form a major part of my management duties. I know the basic principles. The most important is to describe a product’s benefits rather than its features.

But when it comes to listening to complex music, it’s best to start with features. This is more than merely the naming of parts such as Development and Re-capitulation. It is noticing what the melody does, how for example, the flute may take it in another direction, the french horns may play a variation, there could be a tempo change here, a modulation there. After a while, as I become familiar with the lay of the musical landscape my admiration for the craft gradually evolves into a love for the art. Now to describe this emotional response would mean reaching for the thesaurus and using adjectives – but they’ve all been used and over-used so much I can’t bring myself round to doing this. It’s why I’ll never make it as a music critic.

There is an LSO programme at the Barbican called the Half-Six Fix. The concert lasts an hour and tickets starts at a meagre £12 – that’s for a world class orchestra under the baton of none other than Sir Simon Rattle.

The programme is aimed at some who don’t want to get home too late and others who like to go on to do other things while the night is still young. It also suits those who, after a hard day’s work, may find it hard to concentrate for much longer than an hour.

And with classical music, concentration is the key. How can my brain process the relentless succession of musical ideas as it cascades into my consciousness? Music is meant to trigger thoughts but a wandering mind inhibits a deep, sensual appreciation. Listening to music is not as straightforward as we like to think but with practice and time, we become experienced listeners. It is an exercise in mindfulness and for me – a kind of substitute for meditation.

My appreciation is enhanced if I make sure I already know the piece well before I see the concert. Luckily I live a mere 15 minute No 94 bus ride to Music and Video Exchange in Notting Hill. It’s been there since the late 70s. As a streaming-averse listener, I’m so pleased the shop is still thriving because I rely on it so much. Downstairs is an extensive and well categorised collection of classical second hand CDs. The pricing is in the form of a Dutch auction so CDs are reduced by a pound every month. For £5 I bought Sibelius Symphony No 7 and Brahms Symphonies 2 and 3 – all are to be featured in up-coming Half-Six Fix programmes. My Sibelius album (pictured) was by the same orchestra but with Sir Colin Davis conducting.

 

On emerging from the classical basement I heard Captain Beefheart playing. I was amazed, firstly because I hadn’t heard that music since the seventies and also because I remembered it. There’s something about the sixty somethings who inhabit the Notting Hill Gate and Portobello Road that is still imbued with the memory of the seventies and with good reason, in those days W11 was the centre of things – at least it felt like that. I could almost smell the patchouli oil.

At home I listened to Sibelius 7 through my 1970s Philips speakers (these details are important) at every opportunity. That is, whenever I was at home and not writing, sleeping, playing guitar and working. But mostly it was me on the sofa giving the music all the attention I could muster. The music inhabited the rooms of my mind’s internal architecture so when I arrived at the Barbican last Wednesday, I was ready.

With the new bite-sized format, Sir Simon gives a short talk before each piece. He’s a natural at this task. He has an easy charm and humour as well as knowledge and emotional commitment. The first piece was a Berlin Philharmonic commission, Let Me Tell You by Hans Abrahamsen – a shimmering and restrained song cycle and then came Sibelius’s 7^th Symphony. Jean Sibelius has set up camp in my musical memory and it will stay there forever. Thank you Jean.

A Rage to Live, John O’Hara

New Year’s Eve was spent performing with singer Noemi Nuti at the excellent and new Kahani, a restaurant in Chelsea. Noemi has had a long association with Chico Chica but this was the first time I’d worked with her as a duo. I was a bit anxious at first because it was a long gig and I wondered if we had enough material. But it turned out much better than expected. The night was sold out and Noemi was the consummate pro, a delight to work with and she made a big impact on the audience. There may be more gigs at Kahani this year. Watch this space. Noemi and I also spoke of our plans for 2019 in particular our recording projects – yes we both have album on the go and these should bear fruition in the next few months. Exciting times.

Before setting off to the gig I posted a list of the books I read in 2018. I do this every year but I have to say, I’m in two minds about whether I should. There’s something a bit narcissistic about it but we live in narcissistic times and I am genuinely interested in what others read, watch and listen to so perhaps it will start a trend.

The last book on the list was A Rage to Live by John O’Hara. O’Hara was a friend of Ernest Hemingway’s. (I seem to mention EH in all my blog posts). Hemingway championed O’Hara’s novels and the edition I read came courtesy of the trusted curators at Penguin Classics.

The story takes place from around 1910 to 1923. The Great War played a background role and I was surprised to learn that the numerous Irish and German denizens of Pennsylvania at the time wanted the US to join the German side.

We can’t help but notice how there is a strong negativity bias in the media and conversations with our friends. People complain about this and that without realising how lucky we are. The biggest positive change we enjoy over those living a hundred years ago is that we don’t worry about micro-organisms. We are free from the ever-present threat of polio and tuberculosis which so terrified our forebears. Last year I read Amanda Vail’s Everybody Was so Young, an account of Gerald and Sara Murphy, a golden couple of 1920s French Riviera, who’d have the likes Hemingway (there I go again), Scot Fitzgerald, Picasso, Diaghalev and Stravinsky at their parties. It’s a brilliant depiction of the milieu, the place and the times. Gerald Murphy became the model for Dick Diver in Scot Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night. But the Murphy’s were as fearful of a cough as anyone else in the pre-antibiotic days and rightly so. They lost two sons and their lives were never the same again. Similarly, in A Rage to Live, polio and tuberculosis stalked the lives of the characters and became actors in the story.

Somerset Maugham was once described as Britain’s greatest second rate writer. That’s an amusing remark but not true. Maugham did write some forgettable adventure novels such as The Explorer. This story did however have was one notable aspect. The hero studied mathematics at university not because it was his best subject but because it was his worst. Now that’s a brilliant attitude to education which should inspire us today.

Maugham wrote four novels which put him in the very first rank of novelists: The Razor’s Edge, The Painted Veil, The Moon and Sixpence and Of Human Bondage. All are rammed with memorable scenes and characters as well as insights. Of Human Bondage is worthy of particular praise. It is a bidungsroman – a chronicle of youth, and is a model of the genre. Earlier this year I read another: Sinister Street by Compton MacKenzie. Both books were over 750 pages long and occurred in the same city (London) and the same period (both heroes came of age at around 1900). These books captured the atmosphere and mood of the times perfectly and there was one salient fact which the novels revealed – in those days people took life more seriously and thought more deeply. It’s something I’m trying to do.

But I’m here to write about A Rage to Live by John O’Hara. As I read my way through the canon I come across no end of delights, curiosities, mysteries and I have to say, disappointments. O’Hara is not a first rate author though he is deemed to be because he has been awarded Penguin Classic status. A Rage to Live could also be categorised as a bildungsroman but there are a few crucial differences to those I mentioned earlier. The protagonist is Grace Caldwell, a society beauty so there was unlikely to be any autobiographical element to the story. The milieu was the smart set in a dull Pennsylvania town called Fort Penn. The reader was shown its rather shallow characters, the corrupt politicians as well as the commercial life of a town about to expand in the burgeoning mayhem of the 1920s economy.

It is of similar length to Of Human Bondage and Sinister Street but felt much longer. In fact it was way too long. At first I thought it must be a slow burner. But it never came alight partly because there was no spiritual growth in the heroine. Grace Cauldwell has two affairs. The first ruined her own marriage, the second ruined someone else’s. Unlike Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, I never got a definite image of her face in my mind’s eye or a clear delineation of her motives and thoughts..

Penguin Classics famously published Morrissey’s autobiography. This made one suspect the publisher’s marketing department decide on what to include. This is most eloquently explained in AA Gill’s brilliant review which must rank as one of the funniest put downs of our times.

In 2019, I will continue to write my weekly blog posts and will try to avoid being dull and foolish – a difficult task indeed. Bear with me and happy new year.

The Books I Read in 2018

Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier

Eyeless In Gaza, Aldous Huxley

Path to Rome, Hilaire Belloc

Pincher Martin, William Golding

Papa Hemingway, A.E. Hotchner

The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship, Stephen Potter

A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor

Between the Woods and the Water, Patrick Leigh Fermor

Maxwell Knight, MI6’s Greatest Spymaster, Henry Hemming

Hadji Murad, Leo Tolstoy

A History of the Crusades Vols 1-3, Stephen Runciman

Islands In The Stream, Ernest Hemingway

Latin Reader, J H Terry

Sinister Street, Compton MacKenzie

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Anthony Marra

Stoner, John Williams

Nothing, Henry Green

The Arab of the Future, Riad Sattouf

Everybody Was so Young, Amanda Vaill

Clockers, Richard Price

Gates of Fear, Barnaby Conrad

A Rage to Live, John O’Hara

Choirs

If I were to live abroad for some of the year, the months I’d chose would be February and March. It’s the time when I’m bored of the long winter so would rather be somewhere milder. But I’d never go away in December. I love the party season and the atmosphere especially in central London – the lights, the busy pubs and restaurants full of people in good spirits. Any change of season is a celebration – from the contents of your fruit bowl to the concerts you go out to see.

Choral music is an art form I ignore for most of the year but in December it takes on a festive meaning. So I make sure I get out and see some concerts. This year I saw three.

Oh the joys of an amateur choir. When I’m gigging I’m often surprised by who turns up. It could be someone I vaguely knew ten years ago, an old school friend, a family member or a former colleague. It’s what makes being in a band such fun. You never know who you’re going to meet. It’s a bit like that old television program This Is Your Life except it’s spread over the years. As I keep telling people, music brings people together.

There was no better way to evince this maxim than seeing the Chiswick Choir at St Michael’s Church. The church opened in 1880 and is part of the Bedford Park development. Like the houses around, there is a lot of wood it it’s structure. The place was rammed with friends and family of the choir.

It was the 1^stDecember – a little too early for a Christmas programme. So they started with Haydn’s Nelson Mass complete with professional orchestra featuring period trumpets which are basically over-sized bugles. But they sounded great.

Now dear reader, can you think of the very first melody you ever heard and liked? If you are of a certain age, you may, in the deep recesses of your mind, remember this tune. It really is worth listening to the end. It has that warm, comfortable, pre-school atmosphere which makes the listener yearn to return.

Yes, Gabriel Faure was working his magic in our lives from the very beginning. The second half of the Chiswick Choir concert comprised the choral society stalwart, Faure’s Requiem. This is a piece which has one of my favourite melodies and chord progressions, Libera Me:

The next concert I saw was A Ceremony of Carols by the Choristers of Westminster Cathedral. This took place at The Holy Trinity Church, Brook Green and was part of an outreach programme to publicise the choir, its music and the cathedral’s services as well as to recruit new members. Though augmented by some Bach, Mendelssohn and others, Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols formed the centrepiece of the evening.

The Conductor Martin Baker spoke about the music and this was helpful. I learnt about the choir’s history, its association with Benjamin Britten and how the composer wrote A Ceremony of Carols on a liner coming back from New York. It includes this song which I’ve heard before but I can’t remember where:

 

 

The third and last concert was Tenebrae at King’s Place, King’s Cross. It’s an impressive building and was buzzing with that pre-Christmas vibe I mentioned earlier. For me this was fuelled by cans of Punk IPA. It was the first time I’d seen a concert in this new venue. There was evidently a good deal of thought put into the acoustics of the auditorium. It was that good. King’s Place is in York Way, a street which was once the preserve of junkies and prostitutes but now greatly improved (or not, depending on your priorities).

It’s an impressive choir too. I saved the best till the end. Tenebrae are fifteen seriously accomplished singers formed, assembled and conducted by Nigel Short. The programme was called A Very English Christmas. Many of the songs started off sounding monastic and Gregorian but then the modern harmony comes in on the second verse which lifts it up. It was music for our time and all time. Thank you Tenebrae and thank you to all choirs at this time of year. You really are doing something precious and important.

The Next Album – Making a Start

On the off-chance you might interested in this sort of thing, I’m going to describe where my musical attentions are currently being directed. Chico Chica are long overdue an album. Birds came out at the beginning of last year. We were meant to follow up directly afterwards but money constraints prevented us from doing so. The income from streaming services such as Spotify is insufficient to justify large outlays for studio time and session fees. Hence the delay.

But I’m determined to push things forward because in order to get gigs it’s important to have an ever-evolving story – a new album, a new show and a new sound. It also keeps me motivated and stops me getting bored.

Six of the songs we have in our set are in French and this collection will form the new album which I hope will be released by early summer 2019, ready for Chico Chica’s gigging season. The working title is Cafe d’Amour.

Some may say six isn’t enough but there are no rules – an album can be as long or short as the artist wishes. Albums are getting longer at a time when attention spans are shortening. A small collection is easier to produce because I can keep a sharp focus on the material. In my hands, a large amount of recording can become unwieldy and unmanageable.

Chico Chica is a professional band comprising musicians who play for money. This is proving harder to do for a band performing original material. It’s easy to keep a full diary if you’re not worried about fees – the challenge is to get paid. For this reason it’s imperative I keep control of costs. That may be ok for genres which have an electronic backing but Chico Chica inhabit the world of jazz and acoustic music. We’d rather be playing our instruments than sat at a computer screen.

On previous albums, we had the feeling we could have planned our expensive studio time more carefully. We made up ideas and arrangements as we went along and that’s a luxury we can no longer afford. The answer is to record a version of the album at home – we can then try out different keys, instrumentation, tempos and structures until we come up with something we’re happy with.

This procedure means I have to get to grips with complex recording software (Logic Pro). It’s a long learning process but now I’m managing to use it well enough.

With this new skill other ideas are coming to me. I could, one by one, replace the artificial-sounding midi tracks with real instruments. I can do this by going to the musicians’ houses thereby reducing session fees.

It may seem a bit long-winded and lacking the spontaneity of a group playing together in the same room but needs must. The album will probably be more tightly arranged and less jazzy but that is by no means a bad thing. A budget defines style not quality. Rest assured, we will not be crowdfunding this venture.

The aim is to get the whole project wrapped up by Easter 2019. This will give us a good run-up to a planned Chico Chica tour starting in August 2018. I will keep you informed how things develop over the coming months.