Friday Photo(s) #69

My gaff is in Suffolk, though only just. The River Waveney flows about 100 yards from my front door and this ancient waterway defines the county's boundary with Norfolk. Across the footbridge that spans the river is a substantial green space, protected in perpetuity for the town, even though, technically, it sits just outside the town. I use the meadow regularly as either a cut through, a brief circular walk or a place to stop and recalibrate while watching the river flow. To quote Courtney Barnett, sometimes I sit and think, and sometimes I just sit.

A vantage point just before the footbridge offers the opportunity of an uninterrupted view along a stretch of the river and it's one I seldom turn down. Here's that view in spring, summer and winter. It never gets old.

Brian Eno - By This River

Monday Long Song

Mal Waldron's 'Candy Girl' has been on my look-out-for list for a very long time, though, with original copies changing hands for silly money, I'd long since stopped holding my breath for an affordable one to appear within grabbing distance. Waldron released upwards of 100 albums under his own name between 1957 and 2002, almost exclusively as a jazz pianist. 1975's 'Candy Girl', however, finds him exiled in Europe, playing electric keyboards backed by the funktastic Lafayette Afro Rock Band, whose music would later be sampled by the hip-hop generation and beyond. I'm indebted to the fine folk at Strut Records for dusting off this obscure treasure of an LP and allowing me to finally cross it off the list.

Mal Waldron - Red Match Box

Monday Long Song

The jazz-fusion sweet spot runs from 1969 to 1975, a period where electricity pushed and prodded its way ever further into the previously exclusively acoustic instrumental palate. Miles Davis didn't even regard his seminal 1969 LP 'In a Silent Way' (which effectively kick started the movement) as a part of the jazz genre at all, referring to it instead as '...directions in music...'. Les McCann's 'Invitation to Openness' falls bang in the middle of that sweet spot, being recorded in the summer of 1971 and released the following year. 'The Lovers' takes up the whole of side one and is an eastern infused, ethereal masterpiece. Yusef Lateef and Alphonse Mouzon are probably the prominent names from the jazz world on the LP, but who's providing the guitar hook that threads its way through the tune? It's David Spinozza, whose other credits include Paul McCartney's 'Ram', John Lennon's 'Mind Games' and Don McLean's 'American Pie'.

Les McCann - The Lovers

Monday Long Song

I've featured the work of American guitarist Jeff Parker in this slot before (here). He's one of those musicians who clearly just loves to play and has appeared on 230 albums since 1993, as a sideman, a leader and a band member, most notably as part of Tortoise. Parker's 2016 LP 'The New Breed' is about to get the full reissue treatment via International Anthem's IA11 series. It's a woozy, retro sounding record, that takes this elderly listener back to the glory days of DJ Cam, Req, DJ Krush and similar Mo' Wax-era beatmakers.

Jeff Parker - Executive Life

Old (in) New York

60 years ago today - the fifth of my annual birthday portraits in front of the family radiogram.

This morning you find your roving reporter at the front end of a 10 day stay with my cousin and her family in New York. Interestingly, a couple of things will have changed forever by the time I return to Old Blighty next week. 1) All future visits to my barber on a Monday or Tuesday will be £5 cheaper than previously, and, of even greater significance, 2) My local pub will apparently give me a 10% discount every Thursday. The reason? Today I turn  65....sixty bloody five! Like the t-shirt says, it's weird being the same age as old people, but at least those are two somewhat positive points of my extreme dotage.

I'm obviously writing this ahead of time, but my cousin has already let it slip that they've made plans for my, ahem, big day, even though I will only just have flown into the country and will therefore probably be a complete mess. I can barely make it past 8pm when I'm on home turf these days, so attempting to stay awake, alert and coherent late into the evening of my first day in a different time zone is going to be something of a challenge, to say the least. In a restaurant on the first evening of a New York trip about 20 years ago, after being awake for 24 hours, I momentarily forgot to open my eyes again when blinking and very nearly ended up face first in my meal. I'll let you know how I get on this time round.

Our old pal Brian pointed me in the direction of Community Radio's 'Look Now You're Cursed' nine long years ago and I still spin it regularly. This one seemed appropriate today.

Community Radio - Old New York

Monday Long Song

Have I really never posted this before? It's hard to believe quite frankly. 'Are We a Warrior', the title track of Ijahman Levi's 1979 LP, sits comfortably among my favourite reggae tunes of all time. It lilts, swings and sways, delivering a plea for universal peace in the most soulful way. Let not your arrow from your bow.

Ijahman Levi - Are We a Warrior

Friday Photo #68

A 1930 photo of Joyce in the arms of her maternal grandmother, Anorah.

My Aunt Joyce's life, which began over 95 years ago in an East London terraced house, ended last Sunday evening in a small white room in a Norwich hospital, with my cousin and I by her side. Following a couple of years of steadily declining health, her passing from this world was peaceful.

My cousin has spent much of the last 18 months criss-crossing the Atlantic to care for her mum, while I made regular, though somewhat shorter journeys up and down the M11 to support them both. Latterly my aunt was relocated to a lovely residential care home, just across the Norfolk/Suffolk border, about a mile from my front door. It was by far the longest period she'd spent outside London in her entire life and, unsurprisingly, she didn't care for it much, but it was close enough that I could drop in to see her and report back to my cousin on a regular basis.  

For the first 15 years of my life Joyce, my uncle and my cousin lived upstairs in the same house as us. As a consequence, my cousin and I regard each other as siblings and grew up feeling that we'd each been blessed with an extra set of parents. 

Joyce leaves her daughter, son-in-law and three remarkable grandchildren.

Johnson Mkhalali - Joyce No.2