• Boulder Bach Festival Website
  • Join Us on Facebook
  • ColoradoGives.org Profile
  • Boulder Bach Newsletter

Boulder Bach Beat

~ Boulder Bach Beat hopes to stimulate conversations about the ways Bach’s music succeeds in building bridges between populations separated by language, culture, geography and time.

Boulder Bach Beat

Tag Archives: Eric Clapton

Jimi Hendrix in London

30 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Successors, Books, Other Artists, World View

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alan Douglas, Albert King, bass guitar, Beethoven, Billy Cox, blues, Bob Dylan, Cafe Wha?, chalk, Chas Chandler, Cockney, Cream, dance, Ed Vulliamy, Eddie Kramer, electric guitar, Electric Ladyland, Engelbert Humperdinck, Eric Clapton, Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, flamenco, Geordie, Georgie Fame, Greenwich Village, guitar, Handel, Howlin’ Wolf, Isle of Wight, Isley Brothers, jazz, Jimi Hendrix, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Jimi: All Is by My Side, Jimmy Page, John Cale, John Coltrane, Karl Höfner GmbH & Co. KG, Kathy Etchingham, Keith Altham, keyboard, Killing Floor, Little Richard, London, London Evening Standard, Mahler, Mick Eve, Monika Dannemann, Mozart, Muddy Waters, New Musical Express, New York, Notting Hill, Pan American World Airways, Paris, Patti Smith, Paul Gilroy, Peter Neal, psychedelic rock, radio, Regent Street Polytechnic, rock and roll, Roger Mayer, saxophone, science fiction, Seattle, soundscape, Steve Winwood, Stratocaster, Tappy Wright, The Animals, The Guardian, The Wind Cries Mary, Tony Garland, Velvet Underground, Walker Brothers, waltz, wine

Jimi Hendrix in 1967

Jimi Hendrix in 1967

Mick Eve, sax player for Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames, was mooching around the musical instrument shops in London’s Denmark Street as one did in 1966. His friend Chas Chandler, whom Mick had known as bassist for the Animals but who had recently returned from a talent-fishing trip to America, ran out of a guitar store and said excitedly in broad Geordie: “Mick, Mick! You got to come and hear this bloke play; I found him in New York!”

“I don’t need to go into the shop, Chas,” replied Mick in droll Cockney, “I can hear ’im from ’ere,” which he certainly could – a restlessly remarkable, eerily savage sound emanating from within. This was the afternoon of 22 September 1966, Jimi Hendrix’s first full day in England.

Eve’s is one of the many stories not included in the biopic Jimi: All Is by My Side, narrating the life of unarguably the greatest guitarist and blues magician of all time, as he left New York for London.

Hendrix had arrived aboard a Pan Am flight, little known in his own country and a stranger to London. He had been born of Native and African-American blood in Seattle to a poor father who cared moderately for his son and a mother whom he adored but barely knew, and who died when Jimi was fifteen.

He had joined the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army to avoid a jail sentence for car theft (under a judge’s ruling) but hated the army immediately. A regimental report read: “Individual is unable to conform to military rules and regulations.” It is important, says Paul Gilroy, a historian of black culture, to see Hendrix as an ex-paratrooper who gradually became an advocate of peace.

Reared on Muddy Waters and Albert King, music was Hendrix’s love and after teaming up with army colleague Billy Cox on bass, he played for Little Richard and the Isley Brothers before venturing out on his own.

Hendrix collected a small coterie of dazzled admirers in New York, among them John Cale of the Velvet Underground who, after playing a concert with Patti Smith in Paris last week, recalled going down into a dive bar in Sullivan Street to see Hendrix play during the mid-60s. “There was this fella heckling him all the way through, giving him gyp until Hendrix said, ‘I see we’ve got Polly Parrot in the house tonight.’ He got no trouble after that.”

Hendrix also amazed Chandler at the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village one night, enough to fly him to London where the hunger for blues was inexplicably greater than in America. “Black American music got nowhere near white AM radio,” says the man who met Hendrix at Heathrow, Tony Garland, who would manage Hendrix’s British company, Anim. “And Jimi was too white for black radio. Here, there were a lot of white guys listening to blues from America and wanting to sound like their heroes.”

One of them was Eric Clapton of Cream, who invited Hendrix to sit in on a performance of Howlin’ Wolf’s Killing Floor at Regent Street Polytechnic, but who afterwards told Chandler irritably: “You never told me he was that fucking good.”

In London, Hendrix with his band Experience forged a new soundscape, stretching the blues to some outer limit of expression, ethereal but fearsome, lyrical but dangerous, sublime but ruthless. And yet, he wrote: “I don’t want anyone to stick a psychedelic label round my neck. Sooner Bach or Beethoven.”

This was not serendipitous, nor was it as effortlessly “natural,” as Hendrix himself often suggested, or even pure genius: Hendrix had found an alchemist with sound in the unlikely form of a sonic wave engineer in the service of the Ministry of Defense, Roger Mayer.

Mayer was an inventor of electronic musical devices, including the Octavia guitar effect which created a “doubling” echo. “I’d shown it to Jimmy Page,” Mayer recalls at his home in Surrey, “but he said it was too far out. Jimi said, the moment we met: ‘Yeah, I’d like to try that stuff.’”

Mayer left the Admiralty and thus began a partnership that changed the sound of sound. “And don’t forget,” says Tappy Wright, who had been a roadie but joined the management team, “these were no Fenders or Stratocasters. These were Hofners we bought for a few quid. Very basic but stretched to the fucking limit.”

Mayer is fascinating on the science of the sound: “When you listen to Hendrix, you are listening to music in its pure form. . . . The input from the player projects forward the equivalent of electronic shadow dancing so that what happens derives from the original sound and modifies what is being played. But nothing can be predictive . . . if you throw a pebble into a lake, you have no way of predicting the ripples. It depends how you throw the stone, or the wind.”

Casting this magic around working men’s clubs in the north of England, and opening for the Walker Brothers and Engelbert Humperdinck, Hendrix forged his furrow with what Gilroy calls “transgressions of redundant musical and racial rules.”

“He would take from blues, jazz only Coltrane could play in that way,” says Keith Altham, a reporter for the New Musical Express, who became a kind of embedded Hendrix correspondent. “And Dylan was the greatest influence. But he’d listen to Mozart, he’d read sci-fi, and it would all go through his head and come out as Jimi Hendrix.”

Mozart, Handel, Bach, Mahler: influences which Hendrix listed in a collection of writings recently assembled by his friends Alan Douglas and Peter Neal to create the nearest we have to an autobiography. And appositely so, for Hendrix’s address in London, which he called “the only home I ever had,” with the only woman he ever really loved, was the same at which George Frederick Handel had resided in another era: 22 Brook St, London W1.

On the night he arrived in England, Hendrix met Kathy Etchingham, his match and lover. Her recollections are priceless: she remembers Hendrix buying music by Handel and jamming along with his guitar on the sofa. “People often saw Jimi on stage looking incredibly intense and serious,” she said over dinner in London a few years ago accompanied by her husband, an Australian GP. “And suddenly this smile would come across his face, almost a laugh, for no apparent reason.”

“I remember very well [Jimi] sitting on the bed or the floor at home in Brook Street; sometimes he would play a riff for hours until he had it just right. Then he’d throw his head back and laugh. Those were the moments he’d got it right for himself, not for anyone else.”

Except perhaps Kathy too: Hendrix wrote The Wind Cries Mary, her middle name, when she had stormed out after an argument.

Hendrix returned to America to record Electric Ladyland, during the making of which producer Eddie Kramer remembers “his wonderful, swaying dance coming off the keyboards [played by Steve Winwood], in a waltz with the guitar.” Hendrix then gave the name “Electric Ladyland” to his grand studio project in New York. And any suggestion that he had some kind of “death wish” is given the lie by his own written intentions to record there “something else – like with Handel and Bach and Muddy Waters and flamenco.”

Patti Smith remembers the opening party in summer 1970, from which Hendrix himself took a break to join her on the steps outside. “He was so full of ideas,” Smith recalls, “the different sounds he was going to create in this studio – wider landscapes, experiments with musicians, new soundscapes. All he had to do was to get over to England, play the [Isle of Wight] festival, and get back to work.”

Hendrix never made it back to work. He died in the street on which I was born: Lansdowne Crescent, Notting Hill. I’d moved a block away by the time I picked up the Evening Standard on the way home from school on 18 September 1970, flabbergasted by the news. The front-page picture showed Hendrix playing at that Isle of Wight festival less than three weeks beforehand. I’d been there; his searing cry against war, Machine Gun, was still ringing in my ears.

Back home, I changed into all white and waited for cover of darkness to go round to 22 Lansdowne Crescent, where Hendrix had died in the basement, swallowing vomit after a night out with wine, amphetamines and a German girl called Monika.

There was no one there. I took a piece of chalk out of my pocket, scrawled “Kiss the sky, Jimi” on the pavement and crossed the road to ponder the gravity of the moment and place. A man emerged and washed away my scanty tribute with a mop.

Ed Vulliamy – The Guardian

The Hip Side of the Accordion

03 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Successors, Organology, Other Artists, World View

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

accordion, Accordions Around the World, American Accordionists’ Association, Arcde Fire, Art Linowitz, Art Now, bachata, Beethoven, Beirut, bluegrass, Bob Goldberg, Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, Bryant Park, Calexico, Chantale Urbain, Chopin, Copland, Dancing with the Stars, Decemaberists, drums, Eric Clapton, Euclid, Flogging Molly, forró, Frank Zappa, Frankie Yankovic, Gogol Bordello, gospel song, Graceland, Grammy Award, Green Day, guitar, heavy metal, hipster, Jean-François Leclerc, Jimi Hendrix, John Mellencamp, Journey, kitsch, klezmer, Lady of Spain, Larry Rohter, Lawrence Welk, Les Poissons Voyageurs, Linda Soley Reed, Marion Jacobson, Matt Dallow, melody, Montréal, Mumford & Sons, musette, musicology, New York, No Woman No Cry, Paint It Black, Paul Simon, Peaches en Regalia, percussion, Phillip Racz, piano, Pogues, polka, popular music, qawwali, Quebec, reggae, rock and roll, Rolling Stones, Scriabin, Sheryl Crow, Squeeze This!: A Cultural History of the Accordion in America, tango, The New York Times, The Voice, Thelonious Monk, They Might Be Giants, Titano Accordion Company, Tom Waits, vallenato, zydeco

Matt Dallow playing accordion

Matt Dallow playing a Titano “Combo ‘Cordion”

The accordion just can’t get no respect.

Guitar players have Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix as avatars; accordionists are stuck, at least in the public mind, with Lawrence Welk and Frankie Yankovic. Pianists have the works of Bach, Chopin and Scriabin to challenge them; accordion players are saddled with requests for Lady of Spain and the monotonous oompah oompah of the polka.

But the free Accordions Around the World festival at (New York’s) Bryant Park this summer is offering accordionists an opportunity to change the stodgy image of their instrument, which was invented in Europe in the nineteenth century. Every Thursday through 29 August 2013, from 5pm onward, accordion players are stationed around the park, where they perform a varied repertory meant to show off their instrument’s versatility and range.

In keeping with its name, the festival’s emphasis is on folk and international genres like zydeco, vallenato, tango, klezmer, musette, qawwali, forró, bachata and the music of the Balkans. But last week’s edition, with twenty accordionists involved, also found Matt Dallow playing the Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black, Phillip Racz covering Frank Zappa’s Peaches en Regalia and Art Linowitz, who performs as Art Now, serving up Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry.

“People will still say, ‘Hey, play a polka,’ because they still have that niche thing in their heads and pigeonhole the accordion as lame and kind of kitschy” said Mr. Linowitz, who will also be performing at the festival this week. “But I’ll play anything – Journey, heavy metal, Jimi Hendrix. It’s a goof, but I think you can do anything on an accordion.”

Conversations with the accordionists at the festival revealed a clear generational divide. Those in their fifties or older, like Mr. Linowitz, who is 64, showed a certain defensiveness about their choice of instrument. But the players in their thirties or younger had an entirely different attitude: proud, assertive, even arguing that their instrument has acquired an aura of hipness.

“Lawrence Welk played the squarest music this side of Euclid, and because of him, the accordion was lambasted as corny,” explained Marion Jacobson, a musicologist who is the author of Squeeze This!: A Cultural History of the Accordion in America. “But teenagers and people in their twenties are unlikely even to have heard of him, which means the accordion is now baggage-free and ready to participate in all the world music, ethnic and folk styles that have developed since the 1980s.”

Ms. Jacobson also mentioned that she had noticed what she called a “wave of hipster accordion playing.” She then rattled off a list of indie and punk rock performers who include the accordion in their instrumentation – They Might Be Giants, Arcade Fire, the Decemberists, Beirut, Calexico, Green Day, Gogol Bordello, Flogging Molly, the Pogues – and also noted that “certain rock stars, like John Mellencamp, Bruce Springsteen and Sheryl Crow, have adopted it as a side instrument to show their links with rootsiness.”

Among the performers featured at the festival last week was the Montreal-based ensemble Les Poissons Voyageurs, which will be playing again this Thursday. The group is notable not only for its eclectic style, which members describe as “Russian bluegrass and Gypsy gospel,” but also because it has two accordion players, Jean-François Leclerc and Chantale Urbain.

“The goal of Les Poissons Voyageurs is to gather music and songs from everywhere we go, and the accordion is an instrument that can be put into every kind of music style or situation,” Mr. Leclerc, 23, said. “Really, there is no limit. At the beginning, it wasn’t my primary instrument; I studied classical percussion, but you can’t really play alone as a drummer, whereas with an accordion you can, because it’s complete, an orchestra in itself.”

Ms. Urbain, 28, was originally a pianist but switched to the accordion because, she said, “it’s pretty hard to carry a piano and travel,” adding that pianos are often out of tune at bars and clubs. “This is a good instrument for traveling, it doesn’t need amplification, and you can play melody and accompaniment,” she continued. “In Quebec, the accordion had an image as something for old people, mainly men, but I have really come to love this instrument.”

On 15 August 2013, as part of festivities marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of its founding, the American Accordionists’ Association plans to bring seventy-five accordionists to Bryant Park to play and jam together, with New York, New York already on the set list. The organization will also be holding its annual convention here that week, and the group’s president, Linda Soley Reed, said that both turnout and interest in the instrument have grown in recent years, especially among young people. “A lot of our younger crackerjack players are going to come over, to show that we are not a dying breed,” she said. “I think we are long past the oompah problem. You see accordions on TV shows like The Voice and even Dancing With the Stars, and it was uplifting for me to see Mumford & Sons win a Grammy with an accordion on stage. All of that adds to a positive vibe.”

To a longtime accordionist like Bob Goldberg, who played the festival last week, that news comes as something of a mixed blessing. Mr. Goldberg, 54, cited Tom Waits’s 1980s recordings and Paul Simon’s Graceland as works that encouraged him to pick up what was then viewed as “a square and cheesy instrument, associated with boring pop stuff or straightforward two- or three-beat music.” Since then he has found ways to adapt Bach, Beethoven, Aaron Copland and Thelonious Monk to the accordion, and makes a living teaching music and playing on advertising jingles. But one aspect of the accordion’s apparent resurgence seems to make him fret.

“I feel like right now the instrument is in a very strong moment and still in a state of evolution,” he said. “People have tended to look at the accordion as a novelty, not really accepted into serious instrumentdom – you know, the one-man band with a silly hat on his head and a kick drum. The accordion is a bit of an outlier that has tried to make its way in. But part of its identity comes from being outside.”

Larry Rohter – The New York Times

Archives

  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011

Categories

  • Audio Recordings
  • Bach Excursions
  • Bach's Life
  • Bach's Predecessors
  • Bach's Successors
  • Bach's Works
  • Books
  • Festival Events
  • Films
  • Interviews
  • Memorials
  • Music Education
  • Organology
  • Other Artists
  • Uncategorized
  • Video Recordings
  • World View

Bach Resources

  • A Bach Chronology
  • About Boulder Bach Beat
  • BWV Catalogue
  • The Liturgical Calendar at Leipzig

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy