‘They had their memories. Sometimes a memory would assume a more convincing shape than any present flesh. If Arthur picked up from behind the copper that old dress, embroidered with rat-pellets and the light skeleton of a small bird, it was not an act of malice, but because the past forces itself on those who have participated.’
– Patrick White, The solid mandala

Okay so this is the third successive archival post, and for now it’ll be the last (he said). Someone who calls an album ‘Life’s undertow’, ferrets around in the scholarly basement and then proceeds to dig out lines like the one above is starting to look a little too preoccupied with things gone by. But I used to own a DAT player/recorder, and I loved it; all my PhD oral history was preserved on it and I took it to gigs and recorded what went on – I don’t even know why except that I could – and now I’m actually rather glad I did. Since re-booting King, dude and dunce I’ve been thinking about Browne – Haywood – Stevens a bit more, and as I previously wrote we did a lot of Monday nights at Bennetts Lane in the late ’90s, with my DAT player sitting close to the piano. While I didn’t tape all of the gigs we did I have twenty-five volumes of the band playing before audiences of varying sizes – anything between one and, what, even eight people might have been there at any time to hear us going through our stuff. My DATs have been in a box in a cupboard, and since the beloved player was nicked some years ago I haven’t listened to a note of them. Even when I still had it I didn’t play them very much; I tended to track them and write up covers and then put them away.

My friend Luke Howard, who as well as being a fine piano player himself knows tech stuff that I shall never ever get any handle on, has lent me a DAT player and connections so that I can retrieve the contents of my tapes and store copies elsewhere. So this afternoon I listened to the first of my live recordings of BHS, from the launch of Sudden in a shaft of sunlight at Chapel off Chapel, on 11 November 1998.

Funny to think that ten years and a week later, Sall’s and my third child was born. Gee, I had no idea. I remember the evening well enough though, I think, and one of the lovelier things of which to be reminded is that Adrian Rawlins was there. His laughter can be heard frequently throughout Al’s wonderful and surprising monologues.

To go back and revisit one’s own playing from so many years ago is a curious thing; the best that can be said is that it’s not always as bad as one expects it to be. There’s much I am interested by in what I hear when considered in light of what I expect, although it would be narcissistic and irrelevant to go into specifics here, and I’m not going to. I do think that BHS had a sound, though, and somehow that’s clearer to me now than it was then – probably because I didn’t give it much thought when we were actually in the midst of it.

Anyway, here is ‘A slow tune for Kyoko’ from the launch performance. Kyoko was someone who came to a few of our gigs, and seemed really to enjoy the music; she came back a few times and she introduced herself and she said she enjoyed the music, and I had no reason to believe she was lying. The gift of the tune to her though was, apparently, a trigger for her disappearance. I wondered if perhaps she or her boyfriend thought there might be something going on, or preparing to go on. Needless to say, there wasn’t.

If you read this and want to say something – anything – about it, please feel free. I get plenty of comments posted here, but the overwhelming majority are spam. There are three or four most days. Quite amusing to read, when I can be bothered, but absolutely, stunningly, useless.

The picture, by the way, represents the other thing I’ve been doing this evening: baking for grandparents’ day, tomorrow, at kinder.

15/x/2013

Because it’s not a current project I haven’t posted here about Browne – Haywood – Stevens, the trio of which I was a part between about 1994 and 2000. Allan Browne, Nick Haywood and I played a great many Monday nights at Bennetts Lane throughout those years, and did festival things here and there, and released two albums: King, dude and dunce (Newmarket, 1996) and Sudden in a shaft of sunlight (ABC Jazz, 1998). Sudden was re-released on Rufus about two years ago, and if you want to check it out there then you can. KDD on the other hand has stayed very much more elusive.

The trio grew out of some gigs led by the vocalist Lisa Roberts that were organised at Bennetts in, I think, 1994. The band was assembled hastily; Al was invited to organise it and I think I was actually at a gig of his when the invitation was issued – so he invited me. Nick may have been there as well, but I can’t recall for certain. We played with Lisa for a bit but were interested in developing what we could as a trio – a leaderless trio, hence the name – and because Al has had Mondays booked for years at Bennetts we had a great opportunity to work it out week by week.

It was a blessing to have this opportunity. Trio playing with Al and Nick, two blokes of enormously generous musical energy and fabulous wit, was extraordinarily good fun. We developed a repertoire, and a sound, and went for that collaborative thing wherein each member of the band can play whatever seems necessary at that moment, ceding the obligation to perform some prescribed role in the service of another. But I could never, ever get either Al or Nick to write any tunes. Composing was and remains something I feel I need/ed to do, but in the context of our strictly democratic arrangement it didn’t seem unreasonable that I mightn’t be the only one to write material. As it turned out I was, although we played standards – some Tin Pan Alley tunes and some of the Parker and Monk pieces, inter alia. I have here at home a box of DATs that I can’t actually listen to – my player was swiped, years ago – that document a considerable number of our performances.

So King, dude and dunce comprises a program mostly of my compositions, with the Beiderbecke/Trumbauer ‘Singing the blues’ and ‘I have a love’ from West Side Story thrown in. It was launched at the Continental, and that doesn’t exist either anymore. (It was in Greville Street, Prahran, kids, and you missed out.) I remember there was a fair crowd there to hear us. The record seemed to go over very well, and I am sometimes surprised now – you know, surprised and delighted and a bit humbled – to find that people remember it with a particular fondness.

Because I’m occasionally asked about it, and because the copies we printed ran out many years ago, I have uploaded it to Bandcamp where it can be purchased for a measly twelve bucks. Go ahead and treat yourself.* I believe in these things being available, and whereas one might go to any JB Hi-fi and flick through twenty Miles Davis albums, newer and particularly local items don’t enjoy this kind of dependable shelf-life. So: digital it is to be.

The recordings were originally made for Jim McLeod’s Jazztrack (as it was then known) on ABC Classic FM, and were engineered by Mal Stanley. I have the ABC’s permission to put them online.

UPDATE (March 29 2014): And now I’ve taken it down again. Turns out it’s on iTunes anyway, if you want a copy.

* The link doesn’t work, for the reason outlined above.

4/x/2013