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Feb 20

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Oh, Yoko

The first time I met Yoko Ono, at the Apple HQ in Savile Row in September 1969, I was impressed by her obvious engagement. She and John Lennon were doing a day of interviews, and I got my couple of hours on behalf of the Melody Maker. At that stage she was being treated by the media as a bit of a sour joke. The film she’d made of people’s bottoms got her in the papers, and her relationship with Lennon rendered her, in the eyes of many, what we would nowadays call toxic. Not only did she look weird, she thought weird. But at that first meeting, it was impossible to ignore the way the two of them shared the burden of the interview as equal voices.

The second time, two years later, was just after they’d moved to New York and temporarily sequestered themselves in a suite in the St Regis Hotel on East 55th Street. I spent a few days with them in the hotel, at the Record Plant studio a dozen blocks south, and on a trip to the West Village during their hunt for a permanent address. And that time I could see, much closer up, what it was that he liked so much about her: she was funny, and physical, and assertive, and full of life and ideas — all the characteristics that are currently on very clear display at Tate Modern in Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, an exhibition of her life’s work.

The wittiest T-shirt around just now carries the message JOHN LENNON BROKE UP FLUXUS — a play on the belief that Yoko destroyed the Beatles. Her work while a member of Fluxus, the informal avant-garde art movement founded in New York by her friend George Maciunas in 1961, also involving La Monte Young, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Jonas Mekas and many others in events often held in her downtown loft, is to me the most interesting part of the show, occupying several rooms.

It features documentation of the notorious Cut Piece of 1964, in which she sat on a chair in the Carnegie Recital Hall while members of the audience cut off her clothes, and Bag Piece of the same year, which I saw her re-enact with Lennon at the ICA in London in 1969, and Ono’s Sales List of 1965, in which she offered such items as a blank tape labelled “Sound tape of snow falling at dawn”, a Light House constructed from light, and custom-made underwear, including “special defects underwear for men — designed to accentuate your special defects: in cotton $10, in vicuna $175.”

Like a lot of people wandering through the rooms, I found myself smiling a lot, and occasionally laughing out loud at something like a 1962 work called Audience Piece to La Monte Young, in which the 20 performers simply lined up across the stage and stared at the audience until the audience left, and Smoke Piece of 1964: “Smoke everything you can / Including your pubic hair.”

The exhibition shows off her imagination and her indefatigability, as well as the way she was influenced by pre-existing Japanese culture (Zen koans, haiku, kabuki theatre) and the experience of living, as a child evacuated from her family home in Tokyo, through the final stages of World War Two.

On the morning I spent there, the show was full of women and small children who were having a good time with the all-white chess set, the wall-hung board into which visitors are invited to hammer a nail, and the room called Add Colour (Refugee Boat), whose walls, floor and eponymous centrepiece are covered in blue graffiti. In the final room, many people had accepted another of her invitations: to write something about their mothers on a small piece of paper and tape it to the wall.

I thought of Yoko’s own mother, a descendant of an aristocratic family forced — in the absence of her captured husband — to scuffle for her family’s existence amid the postwar ruins before, reunited, they left to resume a comfortable existence in the US. And, too, of the scar tissue of Lennon’s “Mother” (“You left me, but I never left you…”), written after he and Yoko had undergone a course of Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy. That’s something else they were mocked for, along with the bottoms movie and the riddles and the naked cover of Two Virgins and the Bed Peace event in Amsterdam.

Ah, peace. Remember that? WAR IS OVER!, they announced in 1969 via the medium of billboards plus a concert at at the Lyceum. All we are saying is GIVE PEACE A CHANCE. Send a bag of ACORNS FOR PEACE to world leaders. You can mock all that, too, if you want, but it wouldn’t really seem right in 2024.

I don’t mean to sound patronising when I say that I was surprised by how much the exhibition made me think, even when those thoughts were not necessarily the sort that can be followed to a conclusion. The first thing to do with a mind is open it.

* Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, curated by Julia Bingham and Patrizia Dander, is at Tate Modern until 1 September. There’s an illustrated book of the same name to accompany the exhibition, its selection of short essays including a good one on Yoko’s relationship to sound and silence by David Toop (Tate, £32).

Feb 15

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Songs for a mother

When the painter Penny Marrows was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer in March 2023, her son, the London-based composer and guitarist Billy Marrows, began writing pieces for her. Some of them were recorded and played to her before her death five months later, aged 72. In the aftermath Billy carried on writing and recording, and compiled the pieces in an album, Penelope, for which one of his mother’s paintings provides the cover (you can see it above).

One good reason for buying the album is that the proceeds will go to World Child Cancer, a charity providing help in countries that don’t have the benefit of the sort of organisations that cared for Billy’s mother, such as the NHS and Macmillan Cancer Support. But the music is reason enough.

The aggregation of musicians heard on the album is known as Grande Família. Five of the pieces, interspersed throughout the running order, are for solo guitar or baritone guitar. One is a duo for guitar and viola (Teresa Macedo Ferreira). Another is a trio for guitar, piano (Angus Bayley) and clarinet (Gustavo Clayton Marucci). The remaining three are by a 12-piece chamber-jazz ensemble including trumpet, trombone, French horn, flute, clarinets, saxophones and viola.

I’ve been playing the album a lot over the last few days, and it’s made a friend of me. The solo guitar pieces are pitched somewhere between Bill Frisell (a refined backporch sensibility) and Mary Halvorson (the sparing and subtle use of effects, and a sense that a surprise isn’t far away). The solo version of “Shenandoah” (the only non-original) which provides the album’s coda is lovely; when I do my “Shenandoah” mixtape, it’ll go nicely between Frisell’s interpretation (with Ry Cooder on Good Dog, Happy Man) and Bob Dylan’s (one of the saving graces of Down in the Groove).

The most striking of the ensemble pieces is “L’Heroïsme”, which features the tenor saxophone of Tom Ridout and the trumpet of Mike Soper. You can see them playing it here. But what I really like about the album is how its 10 separate pieces, for all their variety of means and approach, behave as though they belong together, like a family.

* Penelope by Billy Marrows + Grande Família is available as a CD and download. Details here: http://www.billymarrows.com. They’ll be playing at the Pizza Express in Soho on 13 May. Penny Marrows’ painting is used by kind permission.

Feb 13

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‘Rhapsody in Blue’ at 100

The first public performance of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” was given 100 years ago this week, on 12 February 1924, at the Aeolian Hall on West 43rd Street in New York City, by Paul Whiteman and his Concert Orchestra, with Gershwin himself at the piano. Whiteman had commissioned the piece from its composer specially for the evening, which was billed as ‘An Experiment in Modern Music’.

I first heard “Rhapsody in Blue” in childhood, played by the same Whiteman/Gershwin combination, on the 12-inch 78rpm record you see above, which my mother would have bought from a record shop in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, in the 1930s. Nine minutes long, it’s split over both sides of the disc. The gramophone — a Columbia Viva-Tonal Grafonola — is the one on which she played it, along with her other 78s.

To mark the centenary, the pianist Ethan Iverson started a lively debate the other day with a piece for the New York Times in which he examined the artistic impact, then and now, of what he called “a naive and corny” attempt to blend the superficial characteristics of jazz with European classical music. If “Rhapsody in Blue” is a masterpiece, he wrote, it’s surely “the worst masterpiece”: an uncomfortable compromise that blocked off the progress of what would later be called the Third Stream, and with which we are both “blessed and stuck”.

Thanks to my mother’s influence, I view it from a slightly different angle. For me, in childhood, it became a gateway drug. I loved the spectacular clarinet introduction, and the shifting melodies and the hints of syncopation, but more than anything I responded to the tonality that reflected its title, expressed in the exotic flattened thirds and sevenths of the blues scale.

It didn’t take very long before I was following a path that led to Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, right up to the Vijay Iyers, Matana Robertses and Tyshawn Soreys of today’s jazz. Pretty soon I’d worked out that an ounce of Ellington was worth a ton of Gershwin’s instrumental music*, but I retain a respectful gratitude to “Rhapsody in Blue” and its role as a gateway, just as I do to The Glenn Miller Story and “Take Five”.

A few weeks after the world première Gershwin’s piece, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his young family would set off for France, where he spent the summer knocking the early draft of his third novel into shape. When The Great Gatsby was published the following April, it contained a vivid scene in which the society guests at one of Jay Gatsby’s Long Island parties were entertained by a band described by the author as “no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and high and low drums.”

The bandleader — who is unnamed, but it’s easy to imagine him as Paul Whiteman, with his tuxedo, bow-tie and little moustache — makes an announcement. “At the request of Mr Gatsby,” he says, “we are going to play for you Mr Vladimir Tostoff’s latest work, which attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May.” The piece is known, he adds, as “Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World”. I’ve always idly wondered what it would sound like, but I imagine Mr George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”, with its bustling bass saxophone eruptions and flamboyantly choked cymbal splashes, is as close as we’ll get.

* A few people have picked me up on this statement, and I tend to agree with them. I was trying to make a specific point, rather clumsily. George Gershwin was a genius songwriter, as any fule kno.

Feb 11

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At Peggy’s Skylight

Some jazz clubs are intimidating to the first-time visitor, and maybe that’s how they’re supposed to be. Not all of them, though. I’d been meaning to visit Peggy’s Skylight in Nottingham for ages, and on Saturday afternoon I walked in there for the first time and felt right at home.

A Saturday afternoon might seem an odd time to visit a jazz club. But I’d just got off the train from London, with a couple of hours to spare in my old home town before the start of the football match I’d come up to see, so I walked from the station to George Street, just off Hockley, a narrow but always busy street on the edge of the historic Lace Market.

Peggy’s Skylight occupies the double-frontage of a nice old building. The club was opened in 2018 by Rachel Foster and Paul Deats, and it’s named after Charles Mingus’s “Peggy’s Blue Skylight”; you can see a visual reference above the bandstand in the photo. The Mingus track was recorded in 1961 and featured Roland Kirk, who in 1964 played a concert one street away from where Peggy’s now stands, at the Co-operative Arts Centre on Broad Street (I wrote about it here and here).

On Saturday afternoons Peggy’s has an Unplugged session, with free admission. Deats was playing piano when I walked in. He was sharing the stage with a seriously good local tenor saxophonist, Ben Martin, and they were playing “My One and Only Love”, one of my favourite ballads. The room was full, and I was lucky that they could find me a seat. People of several generations were eating, drinking, chatting and occasionally checking their phones while Martin and Deats produced accomplished, unflashy, nicely proportioned duets that were soon putting me in mind of how Hank Mobley and Tommy Flanagan might have sounded together.

At this session, the music had a different vibe. It was part of a social setting, absorbed in a way that didn’t devalue it at all. If you wanted to listen to as good version of “Alone Together” as you’re likely to find this side of Jo Stafford, or a lively “On the Sunny Side of the Street”, you could do happily do so, joining the warm applause at the end of each tune. But the voices from the tables around you were part of the environment. It wasn’t like that oaf guffawing for posterity over Scott LaFaro’s final notes on the Bill Evans Trio’s sublime version of “Milestones” at the Village Vanguard in 1961. Here, the ambient sounds were perfectly natural and unobtrusive.

Normally I don’t like eating while I listen to music, and I’m not much interested in food anyway. But I was hungry and it seemed fine to enjoy an excellent pan of eggs with harissa while keeping my ears open. (Deats is also a chef, and Peggy’s menu has a North African and Middle Eastern tilt.)

Last year the club’s partners were required to resist plans to sell the building by the local council, which owns the freehold and has recently become one of several around England to announce its own bankruptcy. The day before I walked in had brought news the reduction of the city’s entire culture budget to zero. Nottingham Playhouse, opened with great pride 60 years ago almost to the month and whose artistic directors included John Neville and Richard Eyre, will see its council subsidy, which stood at an annual £430,000 a decade ago, reduced from last year’s £60,000 to £0.

This is mostly due, of course, to the severe reduction, during 14 years of Tory misrule, in the government funding on which local authorities depend. The present generation of Conservative Party politicians seems to regard the arts as something that might open minds and encourage independent thought, and therefore to be stamped on.

On the train from London I’d been reading a depressing piece in the FT about the boom in giant high-tech music arenas — the sort of place where you might go to see Taylor Swift or U2 — being built around the country, paralleled by a crisis affecting small-scale venues, almost one in six of which closed or stopped scheduling music during 2023. That made a first visit to Peggy’s Skylight seem even more precious.

* The very nice new album by the guitarist John Etheridge and his organ trio was recorded live at Peggy’s Skylight. It’s called Blue Spirits, it’s on the DYAD label and appropriately enough it concludes with Etheridge’s solo treatment of a favourite Mingus tune, “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”. Forthcoming attractions at the club include the saxophonist Tony Kofi and the trombonist Dennis Rollins. Full programme: peggysskylight.co.uk