Jazz Champions and Gyles Brandreth

I don’t buy newspapers any more.  My friend Kim and I were discussing this the other day.  We agreed that we are more interested in the crossword than the news, and that when we do buy newspapers it is for this purpose only.  We are both confirmed purchasers of the Telegraph, or ‘Torygraph’ as my friend calls it, simply because their cryptic crossword is a lot easier than The Guardian or The Times.  Apparently Kim’s sister has The Times and almost always finishes the cryptic crossword.  I am very jealous.  I can usually do a few in the Telegraph.  I think my best ever day I got about eight right.  I then read a book that my mum lent me all about a man who became addicted to doing cryptic crosswords and wrote a book about how they originated (they are peculiarly English apparently) and how to do them.  Ever since I read it, and his list of handy hints, I have become worse and worse at it.  I curse the day I ever set eyes on him and his stupid book.  Now, because I can’t do more than one right a week, there is no point in me buying newspapers, and it offsets my crimes against the environment by using my tumble drier twenty four hours a day, slightly…

 

Anyway, this is my very long preamble to the fact that if I want to know what’s going on in the world (and with children like mine it is important to keep abreast of current affairs in case they start to quiz me at the dinner table), I look at the BBC News website.  It’s updated regularly, it has nice pictures and sometimes they let Clive James write amusing things in the magazine section.  All very satisfactory.  Anyway, today, one of the headlines on the home page was about the death of a man who the journalist referred to as a ‘Swedish Jazz Champion’.  Now this is very sad really.  Apparently he died in a horrific scuba diving accident and was only 44.  A great loss to Sweden.  A great loss to the world of jazz.  Probably his wife and children were also a little bit upset.  However, it was the phrase ‘champion’ which really surprised me, and I’m ashamed to say, made me laugh.

 

It’s not often that you hear the word ‘champion’ applied to musicians is it? You can be a champion fisherman or a champion prize fighter, but you’re hardly ever referred to as a champion cellist or Evelyn Glennie the champion xylophonist (if there is indeed such a word).  Words are so odd like that.  Jazz champion makes it sound like he battered people over the head with his saxophone until they submitted and bought his CD. 

 

Actually, that’s what most jazz makes me feel like normally.  I’m really not a fan.  I did try.  I even clapped when my friend did a particularly fine impression of Cleo Laine.  Admittedly we were both drunk at the time.  Anyway, when my friend Kate and I lived in Germany we did a bit of travelling around, particularly in the Czech Republic where it was dirt cheap and we could pretend to be millionaires, not something that happens to students very often. It was quite bizarre how cheap everything was, and we had to keep kind of pinching ourselves.  I remember Kate getting hysterical about not paying ‘that much’ to go and see a castle, and me having to gently remind her that this was Czech money and not German money.  She was having a fit about paying three pence to get into a several hundred year old historic monument!

 

One of the things Prague was known for at the time we visited, was its flourishing jazz scene.  We decided to be cultural, because we could afford it, so we went to some jazz clubs.  In fact we went to about three or four as I recall, mainly because we’d go in, have a beer, sit looking intelligently, trying to tap our feet and being hip.  Then we’d look at each other sheepishly, and agree that it sounded like a load of people trying to build a shed by hitting it repeatedly with pipes.  We thought that perhaps we had had the misfortune to hit upon some free form, experimental jazz, and that if we visited some other places we would learn to appreciate jazz better if it were played differently.  We didn’t.  I’ve now tried all the available flavours of jazz and I can honestly say that I think jazz is one of those marmite moments.  I can’t like it, as Tallulah said.  Philip Larkin did like it, as did Kingsley Amis, and they were both misogynistic, misanthropic, racist, sexist bastards, although Philip could write a lovely poem (sorry Kingsley, I was born thirty years too late and the wrong sex to find Lucky Jim even vaguely amusing. My loss, I’m sure), so maybe I’m just not filled with enough hatred to find jazz one of life’s great pleasures.  Give me thirty years more with the kids and I’ll probably be grooving along with glee.

 

At first I thought it was just me being a pleb.  Kate was much more musically cultured than me.  She took piano lessons and listened to lots of classical music.  She tried to educate me in the ways of what I believe is called ‘twelve tone’ music, which is kind of the modern art approach to classical music, for which the Czechs are also famous.  There is a particular composer, Janacek I believe, who hailed from Prague and who specialised in such music.  I sat and listened.  It sounded like cats being minced alive in a bag.  I can’t like it either.  I was a great disappointment to Kate, who nevertheless refused to give up and took me to several concerts while we lived together, most of which I attended because I was feeling charitable, rather than through any great love.

 

It did help me discover things I hate; most choral music, organ music and most contemporary classical music (although I have quite a soft spot for Philip Glass and Michael Nyman).  I also find Mahler suicidally depressing and have a particularly virulent hatred for most things by Bach.  It’s good to know these things I suppose, and I did try.  Jazz was one of a long list of my musical failures. Thankfully Kate wasn’t keen either and it wasn’t just me.  I was greatly relieved, as at least most classical music has some sort of recognizable form, whereas the jazz we tried was so long and complicated it was difficult to know when to clap, when to get up and have a wee, and if they had actually started yet or were still warming up.  It was like an eternal: ‘I’ll get my coat’ moment, but with musical accompaniment.

 

As my reward the next day we went to a Mozart concert.  Mozart is classical music for the great unwashed masses apparently.  He was the Westlife of his day and forever after, which is probably why I quite like him.  He’s fairly easy to understand.  He doesn’t give you a headache while you’re trying to cook dinner, and when you’re playing it, people from next door don’t come round and threaten to report you to social services for torturing your children. Mozart I expect would undoubtedly be called a classical champion by the headline writer at the BBC, bless their little cotton socks.

 

So, don’t know why I felt the need to write about that, but I did, so there you are.  And another thing. I know it’s not the right time of the week for question time yet, but I just had to mention this one.  Today someone has googled on: ‘Where does Paul Weller get his jumpers?’  They found my blog, the poor things. This is excellent though.  I wonder whether this person wants to purchase some Paul Weller type jumpers, or whether they want to hunt down and kill the source of Paul Weller jumpers in order to ensure that the modfather maintains his high sartorial standards and doesn’t slip towards the lonely fashion world inhabited only by John Craven and Gyles Brandreth? I don’t think they’d get long in prison even if they were convicted.  It would surely be classified as a mercy killing?