NEWS JUNE 2009
News Archive Julian Hellaby | Northern Star People | British Piano | Pilibavicius | The British Quartet | British Piano Concert | Camden Reeve |
New CDs by Mike and Kate Westbrook and Vladimir Miller, available for sale on our albums page
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Allsorts Standards, Theatre Music and Original Songs
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"The first recording we made with Jon Hiseman was sometime in the 80s, a demo of the Music Hall song Jolly Dogs with, I think, the Off Abbey Road band. Perhaps one day that track may be released. In 1991 we went back into Jon’s Temple Music Studios, to record Kate’s Goodbye Peter Lorre album. Surabaya Johnny from that session is included in this selection. On The Beach, also recorded then, was not included on the Lorre album, but that version has re-surfaced now. The other songs in allsorts are all previously un-issued performances, though some, notably the William Blake settings, have been recorded in other contexts. Over a period during which Jon’s studio has moved from analogue, razor blade editing and all-hands-to-the-pump mixes, to digital computer mixing and the technological sophistication of ProTools, Kate and I have returned to the studio at every opportunity. Recording the music for the TV opera Good Friday 1663 we virtually lived there for weeks. Kate’s “neoteric Music Hall” album Cuff Clout was recorded there, as was the Trio’s L’Ascenseur/The Lift. Chanson Irresponsable recorded for BBC radio 3, was remixed by Jon for the CD. Turner in Uri, in which he and Barbara Thompson both participated, was rehearsed at the studio, and the music was re-mixed there for the Swiss TV film of the piece. Both Art Wolf and The Nijinska Chamber are albums recorded at Temple Music. Jon recorded The Village Band’s Waxeywork Show on location in Devon using a mobile studio, but the album was mixed and edited back in Sutton. More recently a film music piece Tamar River, which made full use of the studio in the composing process, opened up possibilities which we have explored further in our latest album Fine ‘n Yellow. All this time our interest in song writing and arranging has continued to evolve. This is partly through work on the albums, which has always involved music for voice. But we have also been collecting from music hall, theatre and opera, not to mention the Great American Song Book, the material that we adapt for the Duo. We have recorded these discoveries with Jon at various times, sometimes in ones or twos in odd bits of spare studio time, sometimes in a special session. We’ve come across songs in a multitude of ways. We added Cole Porter’s You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To as a request for the wedding of Philip and Olivia Clark. Limehouse Blues, an oddity from the 1920s, Kate first sang at David Panton’s 60th birthday party. David had lived on the Thames at Limehouse for some years. This is juxtaposed with Blake’s London Song, which has been in the repertoire since the 70s. Just down the road from Limehouse is Poplar, where Kate and I wrote our first song together, Wasteground and Weeds describing the picturesque dereliction of the East End, long before Canary Wharf took over. We picked up other songs on our travels. We were introduced to the Hollywood songs of Friedrich Hollaender by the composer Dirk Raulf, when he invited us to take part, along with German artists, in a retrospective of that composer’s work, in Bonn. Kate first sang Theodorakis’ On The Beach at a jazz festival in Thessaloniki on tour in Greece with Chris Biscoe. Jazz musicians tend to ignore the verses on standard songs, which do not generally lend themselves to improvisation. In the context for which they were generally written, musical theatre, the verse introduces the mood of the song and the story behind it. A beautiful example is September Song. In our version Kate sings Maxwell Anderson’s lesser known female version of the verse. With Stormy Weather, it was the discovery of the verse, which vividly sets the scene, that attracted us to this 1930s classic. Among songs not often heard in the jazz repertoire are the Brecht/Weill pieces, Surabaya Johnny and Pirate Jenny, in which successive verses move the story along. The same is true of On The Beach, and Is That All There Is? an uncharacteristic song by Leiber and Stoller, who were responsible for the early hits of Elvis Presley. Often the written accompaniment to the verse is merely functional, a vehicle for the words, with the main musical interest saved for the chorus. There are exceptions, as in Lush Life where the verse is a major part of the work in its own right. Verses like this can be musically ingenious and, as in Cole Porter’s You’d Be So Nice, go through all kinds of modulations, giving no hint of what’s to come. The chorus comes as a surprise. With Is That All There Is? the sheet music was so sketchy that I took the opportunity to put in my own chord changes and Kate found a new approach to the delivery of the words. When it came to Limehouse Blues we found the lyrics to the verse but no music, so wrote our own. The original songs in this selection are not in a verse/chorus form. The Blake songs, Kate’s Wasteground and Weeds and Helen Simpson’s Honest Love are simply settings of the text with, as often in our work, the piano supplying the introduction, an interlude or a coda. The little known Hollaender songs, Breathless and The Moon’s Our Home, written for movies now long forgotten, are perfect music-theatre cameos, the verses building up anticipation, musically and dramatically, the chorus coming as a delicious release. |
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Diaghilev's Dance
Music for jazz piano trio
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