11/5/06 - 14/5/06 - Cumbria
SENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS?
Running a bar in a 1920's cinema - The Alhambra - one of the main venues for the Keswick Jazz Festival - all that's Trad (in this venue at least) -
It starts slowly, the audience gathering dust as they queue at the doorway, entering with meager smiles and a sense of broody suffering - none are younger than 50 (with the rare exception) - a large American woman in an XXL T-shirt with sweat stains and a white-river logo across it extolling American pioneers complains about certain doors not being open exactly as they were last year; she huffs and puffs through each word carrying too much weight, then moans about 'the Brits' loving a queue -
Grouchy male pensioners - Scousers, Yorkers and Geordies mostly - with bleak faces now sun burnt red and flat mouthed, grunt in single syllables as they file up to the b
ar looking vaguely embarrassed and wondering why they are here at all; asking for an orange juice for the wife, no ice - if any decision has to be made otherwise they wander off to check that they are doing the right thing before they return; its kind of endearing in some, cute and respectful of their 'other halves', but in others it's like a total loss of self-will, an inner deflation through time and marriage - the happiest, chattier folk are the Scots who've traveled over the border for their short break here; they crack jokes and actually get round to saying 'thank you' to me when I've served them -
All enter the auditorium, this collective of age (what is the collective noun for OAPs on a day out - a 'complaint' of OAPs?). For the next few hours they sit and clap their way through a number of 'All Star' or 'Hot Five' bands playing identical Dixieland and Ragtime - the clarinets shuffle and the banjoes smart - it all blends into one happy-go-lucky rhythm, nothing to separate band from band - The band-leaders talk in the same hushed, self-important tone; crack sly jokes at the same moment in each set, dishing out little anecdotes and winks - it is like a form of aural sedative, a familiar place where the audience can go to relive memories, conjure up the past, if only even the same moment with the same band doing the same number at last year's festival (and the year before that, and the year before. . . . etc etc).
The pianist of the next band, due to play out the late afternoon session arrives in his tux. His wife, an attractive middle-aged woman with long dark hair, wearing fashionable 'combat' trousers and a low-cut top, waits outside as he discusses the get-in with the venue manager and sound engineer. She wants to get away, to travel. She looks bored, tired of the endless circuit of small-time gigs and treks across country to play in backwaters. She is no longer sure if she wants to be with this man, with the predictability of this routine. She loves him certainly, but what more can he offer than this? She craves a freedom that this life will not allow for, to be able to set out on her own; if not for ever at least for the next four days, for god's sake. Escape. Novelty. Experience. After all, one backwater is pretty much like the next, no matter how beautiful they may be - There's a tame kiss goodbye delivered with averted lips and she leaves to wander round yet more shops, and simply to wonder. It's all there in her eyes. He wants to say something. Do something about it - but he can't. What alternative does he have? This is his life. This circuit, this sub-culture, these people, these bands - everyone knows everyone; everyone loves the music. And the musicians love each other most of all - a wee band of Trad brothers - though not without their own competition - some have played with names such as Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, others are shadows who have only recently touched the jazz circuit and yet maintain a serious, moody musician's air where its not necessary - yet more are just ageing men with hair dye coloured a kind of pale ginger, slick full of Brylcream and the smell of the cigarettes from a list of pubs and Labour Clubs -
And the audience: the numb, quiet eccentricity, the straw boaters beneath which rest bottle thick glasses and huge beards; ruddy faces and vacant, sleepy eyes. Portly rustics and downsmen who cannot deal with screwtop bottles but love their warm sandwiches. All here. The Brits in full summer eclecticism. An elite of the moss and the vale and the dry-stone. They mock each other and love each other too. It's an orgy for the Middle English behemoth and his wives. This hybrid mass of liberals and old fashioned pseudo-fascists all basking in this brief resurrected glory of a past long gone. Beneath which the tattered, stained remnants remain - the Masonic badges and crosses of St. George worn on greasy lapels, the RAF tie and blazer. This could be a front for a huge right-wing rally rolled out to the sound of Trad Jazz - the descendents of Oswald Moseley sat on the back row in tweed suits and Lord Haw Haw as your MC.
One pissed 'blazer Johnny' staggers in, handle-bar moustache and eyes rolling, a Cheshire grin and money still to burn. He orders two bottles of Cumberland then starts to chat up one of the stewards, a thin old bird who says she's 'up for anything but not for that' - no. She dreams of the Chippendales as usherettes, waltzing through the Alhambra bare-arsed serving ice-cream from trays; and dishy bus drivers in short sleeved shirts winking at her and 'gorgeous'. 'Blazer Johnny' keeps trying, elbowing her gently and bragging in over-loud tones about how much he can drink yet still 'keep a good woman, know what I mean?' Nudge nudge, wink wink. His athlete's foot is burning him slightly, and his dinner will repeat on him soon; the game old steward turns her back on him and winks at me as she wanders off, sort of flattered but not taken enough. Johnny gives up with a bomber's shrug and stumbles into a wall, laughs, straightens his tie and enters the gloom of the auditorium where the swing is swung.
The following evening and an Anglo-Italian trumpeter with some reputation and one of the headliners, is swaggering at the bar, red wine and sidelong glances at his fingers which now appear double - he's already pissed before the set begins, a jam session afternoon has led him here to perform a try-out set with a new singer who stands next to him in her low cut dress and crushed voice and distracted mind - they talk about Benny Carter for solace, between nervousness and the DTs - the set isn't going down well - her voice isn't up to it (she blames it on the piano but I reckon it's the fact she just can't cut it), but then neither are the audience, the swing, be-bop and late night tunes played here are not to the taste of these grey spectres watching, it shakes them from their slumbers after all and they start to leave in droves - the rows are virtually empty, whistle down the wind between aisles and you have to feel sorry for them up there trying their hardest to entertain the remaining dead - the musicians drink more, drowning the embarrassment of a bad move, the trumpeter shaking his head and brushing the woman's arm, half concerned caress, half come on -
"What's in a Flake 99?" I am asked by a young Scot pointing at the ice-cream board, picture and all (which kind of answers his question)
Those blighted bodies (and minds) -
Speaking of which, in walks a strange figure - a Swedish musician, his hands bound in white felt gloves, slightly loose fitting; he carries a white cane and wears thick glasses, presumably he is partially blind. He has no hair, the skin of his face is red and flaky, burnt in the same accident that scarred his hands I suspect. He wears a peaked cap and his eyes look sideways even when he is walking forwards, another product of his injuries. He orders two beers and drinks them both quickly then heads into the auditorium to perform; he repeats this on each break between sessions and does not seem to be any more inebriate than before - he is huge despite being physically crooked, his voice and presence reflect the hills here and the temper of his Nordic homeland - The Saga Man I want to call him - something tremendously bleak and everlasting -
On the final day the cinema's projectionist returns - a more sour-faced human being you would not wish to meet - ex-army, maybe TA, served in Oman or NI and never wholly returned, left something behind - everything about him nowadays is dragged down by gravity: the bags beneath his eyes sag, the grey moustache and hair, the dour mouth and his tight limbs all have the inevitability of the downward - He looks at me as if I am a suspect in some eternal plan to make his life more difficult and asks me looking down his nose:
"Where's my round table?"
"I have no idea."
"Well they don't walk by themselves, do they?"
He turns away and mounts the steps up to the projection room. His retreat beneath the Art-Deco skylights and the old gas pipes; where the noises of war inside him can be baffled by the music of escapism and the faces of idols (the same ones he has cut out of magazines and stuck to the sloping ceiling in there: Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Janet Leigh and more now become flaking paper and collaged together into other film stars - the eyes of one and the hairline of another, the Greta Marx Temple Cruise line) - he nervously picks at the foam in the seat by the projector, exposing it beneath the upholstered material like a wound, pale and flaking - and that huge projection machine is his weapon of defence, his cannon of light - up there nightly, the hot sweaty room whirring, spliced together in the dark and for a few hours (like the rest of us) he forgets - I guess that's why he's been so arsy, after all the festival has ousted him from his sanctuary for the past few days - tomorrow he can return, safe, warm - the congealed memory of service turned fluid and loose once more -
The final night is cold and wet - the bottles are thinning out on the shelf and the town is emptying - the last phrases of music can be heard rising in the small hours, a clarinet of course - As I'm clearing up a woman in her early 60s comes to the bar, browses a moment or two at what's on offer and says to me "I'm looking for something to suck."
Interesting to note that my watch stopped at 1.44pm on Thursday afternoon and then started up again of its own accord this evening - I suspect some Trad Jazz influenced 'Bermuda' Triangle had descended on the town and removed us from the rest of the world for four days -
Honest -
SENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS?
Running a bar in a 1920's cinema - The Alhambra - one of the main venues for the Keswick Jazz Festival - all that's Trad (in this venue at least) -
It starts slowly, the audience gathering dust as they queue at the doorway, entering with meager smiles and a sense of broody suffering - none are younger than 50 (with the rare exception) - a large American woman in an XXL T-shirt with sweat stains and a white-river logo across it extolling American pioneers complains about certain doors not being open exactly as they were last year; she huffs and puffs through each word carrying too much weight, then moans about 'the Brits' loving a queue -
Grouchy male pensioners - Scousers, Yorkers and Geordies mostly - with bleak faces now sun burnt red and flat mouthed, grunt in single syllables as they file up to the b
ar looking vaguely embarrassed and wondering why they are here at all; asking for an orange juice for the wife, no ice - if any decision has to be made otherwise they wander off to check that they are doing the right thing before they return; its kind of endearing in some, cute and respectful of their 'other halves', but in others it's like a total loss of self-will, an inner deflation through time and marriage - the happiest, chattier folk are the Scots who've traveled over the border for their short break here; they crack jokes and actually get round to saying 'thank you' to me when I've served them -All enter the auditorium, this collective of age (what is the collective noun for OAPs on a day out - a 'complaint' of OAPs?). For the next few hours they sit and clap their way through a number of 'All Star' or 'Hot Five' bands playing identical Dixieland and Ragtime - the clarinets shuffle and the banjoes smart - it all blends into one happy-go-lucky rhythm, nothing to separate band from band - The band-leaders talk in the same hushed, self-important tone; crack sly jokes at the same moment in each set, dishing out little anecdotes and winks - it is like a form of aural sedative, a familiar place where the audience can go to relive memories, conjure up the past, if only even the same moment with the same band doing the same number at last year's festival (and the year before that, and the year before. . . . etc etc).
The pianist of the next band, due to play out the late afternoon session arrives in his tux. His wife, an attractive middle-aged woman with long dark hair, wearing fashionable 'combat' trousers and a low-cut top, waits outside as he discusses the get-in with the venue manager and sound engineer. She wants to get away, to travel. She looks bored, tired of the endless circuit of small-time gigs and treks across country to play in backwaters. She is no longer sure if she wants to be with this man, with the predictability of this routine. She loves him certainly, but what more can he offer than this? She craves a freedom that this life will not allow for, to be able to set out on her own; if not for ever at least for the next four days, for god's sake. Escape. Novelty. Experience. After all, one backwater is pretty much like the next, no matter how beautiful they may be - There's a tame kiss goodbye delivered with averted lips and she leaves to wander round yet more shops, and simply to wonder. It's all there in her eyes. He wants to say something. Do something about it - but he can't. What alternative does he have? This is his life. This circuit, this sub-culture, these people, these bands - everyone knows everyone; everyone loves the music. And the musicians love each other most of all - a wee band of Trad brothers - though not without their own competition - some have played with names such as Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, others are shadows who have only recently touched the jazz circuit and yet maintain a serious, moody musician's air where its not necessary - yet more are just ageing men with hair dye coloured a kind of pale ginger, slick full of Brylcream and the smell of the cigarettes from a list of pubs and Labour Clubs -
And the audience: the numb, quiet eccentricity, the straw boaters beneath which rest bottle thick glasses and huge beards; ruddy faces and vacant, sleepy eyes. Portly rustics and downsmen who cannot deal with screwtop bottles but love their warm sandwiches. All here. The Brits in full summer eclecticism. An elite of the moss and the vale and the dry-stone. They mock each other and love each other too. It's an orgy for the Middle English behemoth and his wives. This hybrid mass of liberals and old fashioned pseudo-fascists all basking in this brief resurrected glory of a past long gone. Beneath which the tattered, stained remnants remain - the Masonic badges and crosses of St. George worn on greasy lapels, the RAF tie and blazer. This could be a front for a huge right-wing rally rolled out to the sound of Trad Jazz - the descendents of Oswald Moseley sat on the back row in tweed suits and Lord Haw Haw as your MC.
One pissed 'blazer Johnny' staggers in, handle-bar moustache and eyes rolling, a Cheshire grin and money still to burn. He orders two bottles of Cumberland then starts to chat up one of the stewards, a thin old bird who says she's 'up for anything but not for that' - no. She dreams of the Chippendales as usherettes, waltzing through the Alhambra bare-arsed serving ice-cream from trays; and dishy bus drivers in short sleeved shirts winking at her and 'gorgeous'. 'Blazer Johnny' keeps trying, elbowing her gently and bragging in over-loud tones about how much he can drink yet still 'keep a good woman, know what I mean?' Nudge nudge, wink wink. His athlete's foot is burning him slightly, and his dinner will repeat on him soon; the game old steward turns her back on him and winks at me as she wanders off, sort of flattered but not taken enough. Johnny gives up with a bomber's shrug and stumbles into a wall, laughs, straightens his tie and enters the gloom of the auditorium where the swing is swung.
The following evening and an Anglo-Italian trumpeter with some reputation and one of the headliners, is swaggering at the bar, red wine and sidelong glances at his fingers which now appear double - he's already pissed before the set begins, a jam session afternoon has led him here to perform a try-out set with a new singer who stands next to him in her low cut dress and crushed voice and distracted mind - they talk about Benny Carter for solace, between nervousness and the DTs - the set isn't going down well - her voice isn't up to it (she blames it on the piano but I reckon it's the fact she just can't cut it), but then neither are the audience, the swing, be-bop and late night tunes played here are not to the taste of these grey spectres watching, it shakes them from their slumbers after all and they start to leave in droves - the rows are virtually empty, whistle down the wind between aisles and you have to feel sorry for them up there trying their hardest to entertain the remaining dead - the musicians drink more, drowning the embarrassment of a bad move, the trumpeter shaking his head and brushing the woman's arm, half concerned caress, half come on -
"What's in a Flake 99?" I am asked by a young Scot pointing at the ice-cream board, picture and all (which kind of answers his question)
Those blighted bodies (and minds) -
Speaking of which, in walks a strange figure - a Swedish musician, his hands bound in white felt gloves, slightly loose fitting; he carries a white cane and wears thick glasses, presumably he is partially blind. He has no hair, the skin of his face is red and flaky, burnt in the same accident that scarred his hands I suspect. He wears a peaked cap and his eyes look sideways even when he is walking forwards, another product of his injuries. He orders two beers and drinks them both quickly then heads into the auditorium to perform; he repeats this on each break between sessions and does not seem to be any more inebriate than before - he is huge despite being physically crooked, his voice and presence reflect the hills here and the temper of his Nordic homeland - The Saga Man I want to call him - something tremendously bleak and everlasting -
On the final day the cinema's projectionist returns - a more sour-faced human being you would not wish to meet - ex-army, maybe TA, served in Oman or NI and never wholly returned, left something behind - everything about him nowadays is dragged down by gravity: the bags beneath his eyes sag, the grey moustache and hair, the dour mouth and his tight limbs all have the inevitability of the downward - He looks at me as if I am a suspect in some eternal plan to make his life more difficult and asks me looking down his nose:
"Where's my round table?"
"I have no idea."
"Well they don't walk by themselves, do they?"
He turns away and mounts the steps up to the projection room. His retreat beneath the Art-Deco skylights and the old gas pipes; where the noises of war inside him can be baffled by the music of escapism and the faces of idols (the same ones he has cut out of magazines and stuck to the sloping ceiling in there: Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Janet Leigh and more now become flaking paper and collaged together into other film stars - the eyes of one and the hairline of another, the Greta Marx Temple Cruise line) - he nervously picks at the foam in the seat by the projector, exposing it beneath the upholstered material like a wound, pale and flaking - and that huge projection machine is his weapon of defence, his cannon of light - up there nightly, the hot sweaty room whirring, spliced together in the dark and for a few hours (like the rest of us) he forgets - I guess that's why he's been so arsy, after all the festival has ousted him from his sanctuary for the past few days - tomorrow he can return, safe, warm - the congealed memory of service turned fluid and loose once more -
The final night is cold and wet - the bottles are thinning out on the shelf and the town is emptying - the last phrases of music can be heard rising in the small hours, a clarinet of course - As I'm clearing up a woman in her early 60s comes to the bar, browses a moment or two at what's on offer and says to me "I'm looking for something to suck."
Interesting to note that my watch stopped at 1.44pm on Thursday afternoon and then started up again of its own accord this evening - I suspect some Trad Jazz influenced 'Bermuda' Triangle had descended on the town and removed us from the rest of the world for four days -
Honest -
1 comment:
the swede - used to be in a death metal band and converted to trad jazz after a stage-trick with a kerosene soaked moog went horribly wrong - the wife - he loves her because she reminds him of the paucity of it all, brittle as a wafer - he too longs to board a boat to Shanghai, or lounge on a Mozambiquan beach - he knows he never well, but she represents the dream of that day - he loves her all the more in his belief that one day she will leave him, though the truth is she never will...the war veteran - sleeps poorly, has banished dreams from his mind, the cinema is the last resort, the forever enclaved bridgehead of his imagination... deprived of it for as long as 48 hours he becomes irritated, fearful his self-authored dreams will return, the scent of suicide on the morning pillow...
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