Oh, Babe, it's the JDB

If you can get to Southampton tomorrow night, by all means come to the Jess Davies Band event as per their Facebook site under Recommended here. I've looked at the Orange Rooms website and it looks completely mortifying to a 58 year old but one must be brave and the gig won't necessarily be overrun by teenagers spending their student loans on shots of vodka.

First Three Tales will be available there, then released on Friday and be on i-tunes and Spotify, too.
It was once inconceivable that the first time my name appeared on a pop record, if ever, it would be in the Country genre but that's fine. Genre is neither here nor there and my only preference would be to be in no genre at all.
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Regular readers might be awaiting my review or article on Rory Waterman's poems and those of his father, Andrew. That might be still to come but the pace is slackening at DG Books and the necessity of passing comment here on anything and everything that I come across is less imperative than it was.
Both of the Watermen are fine poets and to be admired but if the TLS review of Rory's Sarajevo Roses led me to believe he might be added to the super league of living poets whose books are essential, maybe he's not quite that. Enjoyable, sympathetic and admirable though the poems consistently are.
But it did prompt the question of which living poets are 'essential' to me, then. Who can't publish a book without me having to order a copy.
Admired but not essential are major names like Paul Muldoon, Carol Ann Duffy, Andrew Motion and Simon Armitage, a list that includes the last two Poets Laureate and the next.
But those whose books will be ordered unquestioningly until further notice, in no particular order, are Don Paterson, Julia Copus, Derek Mahon, August Kleinzahler (although the latest two titles look suspiciously like re-packaged Selecteds), Martin Mooney, Caitriona O'Reilly and, I dare say, the two Kathryns, Gray and Simmonds, plus Sean O'Brien and Roddy Lumsden. I said it was 'in no particular order'. But that doesn't mean they are the essential poets currently writing, they are just those that, in Facebook terms, I'm following.
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But there is such a thing as a kind of post-natal depression, a need to blank it all out, after finishing a 'book', however minor it is. Thom Gunn said he couldn't start writing poems again after publishing a book and so put the finished book away and continued writing before going to press.
It sounds almighty precious to say I can't follow up The Perfect Book but writing a poem is the last thing on my mind since editing that to a standstill and then still finding things in it I should have addressed.
What was the point. Readers have been very kind about it, it would be impolite to be otherwise and, yes, they are generous to say it is better than what went before but I still quite like several things from many years ago. Moving determindely into harder irony doesn't always make for better poetry. Maybe it's not just that, then.
It's all very well but, really, is that all there is to it. Where does it go from there. Having tried to write poems that embraced cliché rather than try to avoid it but fall into it anyway, the only way to transcend anything properly is to leave it behind, like I did with sport.
But it would be far too grandiose to announce any such thing. I'm sure there will be another poem along one day and I'll be there for the JDB if ever they want a song idea. I am forever in their debt for using my words once.
Meanwhile, it's not as if the world is over with yet. The shame of not finishing last Saturday's Times crossword means that next weekend, the effort must be re-doubled. I'll sit on very respectable chess ratings at Chess24 and hope to carefully plot my way through the summer horse racing by avoiding the so-called big issues of flat racing, an industry so boxed-off by cartels that it's more a subject for players of Monoploy than sport. The Skeltons are likely to be helping themselves in some low-wattage summer jump racing, Dan will be leading the jockey's table in September and all one has to do is be on a good percentage of those winners that put him there.   

Fretwork - John Jenkins

Fretwork, John Jenkins, Complete Four-Part Consort Music (Signum)

What a difference forty years makes. When once I would dash into Gloucester to buy a new Sex Pistols single, unheard, as soon as I heard there was one, it is now solo cello, viola da gamba or viols that inspire equivalent loyalty.
There aren't many better at it than Fretwork, consummate purveyors of The Art of Fugue at the Wigmore last Autumn in a concert that imprinted the B-A-C-H theme on our memories for good.
John Jenkins is contrasted with William Lawes in the notes here, Lawes being the adventurous, short-lived innovator while Jenkins is 'mellifluos', 'for the most part eschewing drama'.
And why not. One can have both. Music is a wide church, as is evidenced by my buying a Jesus & Mary Chain t-shirt on my way back from the cathedral this afternoon.
Fretwork and Jenkins can be allowed to meander through their seventeen Fantasias interspersed with two Pavans while one reads or, if so is inclined, discourses with friends over a bottle of probably something red but not too vigorous. On the other hand, it is also a pleasure to follow the lines through their natural development and elegant phrasings to their sensible conclusions. The mood shifts like the light might but the album is best treated as an organic whole and I don't suppose many will be favouring one piece over the others to any great extent. Fretwork are expertly across the whole show, demure, controlled and expressively in their element.
One might be concerned about anybody nominating Jenkins as their greatest composer or this disc as the best they've heard but you could equally despair of anyone who found no benefit from taking time to spend in its quietly radiant company. I hope it commands my attention often enough from the shelf once it is off the playlist and filed, next to Lawes by way of compare and contrast.

Lunchtime Live ! at Portsmouth Cathedral

Samuel Ali, organ, Portsmouth Caathedral,  26 April

Samuel Ali, organist at Christ Church in Chelsea and student at the Royal College of Music, was today's attraction at Portsmouth Cathdral with a new season of Lunchtime Live ! underway.
On a day that has turned out unnervingly well so far, it was too much to expect Buxtehude on the programme but one is always more than happy with a generous helping of Bach.
The sinfonia from Cantata 29 was a bright opening before we proceeded to the main item of interest, for me, the Prelude and Fugue in B flat minor from The Well-Tempered Klavier. Presumably composed on and imaagined for harpsichord, I'm used to it on piano that Bach wasn't to know about and so an organ version was new to me although surely not that rare.
I wouldn't have recognized it in its early stages, much as the hugely impressive Buxtehude Trio Sonata on Monday didn't sound like either version I have on disc, but that's performance for you, endlessly re-inventing, and Max Reger's transcription builds powerfully and inexorably to a sustained, moving final passage worthy of a cathedral organ setting.
Frocker's Pastorale twisted arond in the upper register, eerie more thyan pastorale but being C20th (d. 1990), one expects less than tub-thumping counterpoint. In common with so much C20th music, which seems emphasized all the more in organ music, one is aware of fractured human experience even if the left hand (I imagine) here added some gentle ambient accompaniment.
Back to Bach and reassured by the fine, upstanding and rigorous Prelude and Fugue in G major, BWV 541, one did wonder if that might not have been best saved until last.
Marcel Dupre's Prelude and Fugue in G minor, op.7, published 'before 1923', my minimal research tells me, began shell-shocked and uncertain, inevitably making me think it was a reaction to World War 1. That was no 'age of enlightenment' and the cofidence of Bach and Handel is gone. It was cheerier in the Fugue, however and rounded off powerfully, like a resurgence of the spirit and so the programming was convincingly justified.
It is a pity these lunchtime recitals are not better supported, compared to Chichester's well-populated events on Tuesdays but Portsmouth Cathedral is not so advantageously positioned down there. I had a tremendous Spring Day in Southsea almost to myself only to emerge to find it had been raining but do get yourself down there if you can. I never regret it.

Sean O'Brien - Europa

Sean O'Brien, Europa (Picador)

art is all there is and might not be enough

looks like one of those lines deserving, if not destined, to pass into the language. Masterful at his potent best, Sean O'Brien's surely nailed it and, moreover, not for the first time.
But selective quotation does not a scholar make. Poems work as whole poems, not as quotable wisdom strung together by conjunctions, the other bits and syntax.

What it says in Completists, whether or not the R.L. it is 'for' may or not be Maestro Lumsden, is,
         for an hour it was beyond dispute
That art is all there is and might not be enough.

Like all those who think that Larkin wrote, What will survive of us is love, which he did but he went to great lengths to qualify it so far that wasn't really there, anybody who thinks that Sean has summed it all up needs to look again and notice that what he offered has already be taken away.
But, there again, if it's not the case that art 'might not be enough', perhaps it is and, for some of us, it might be 'all there is'.
Completists could almost be the masterpiece in Europa but for line 4. About a band that never got beyond a restricted, 'cult' following, 'By accident we saw them live one night',

On a 'short autumn tour' of seaside toilets.

Is that really necessary. They might have been dives. And Prof. O'Brien makes use of more serious vernacular more than dignity might allow without me needing to be either Barbara Cartland or wonder if machismo isn't diminished rather than enhanced by such regular usage. Although such words have become more commonplace with a generation of comedians like Lee Mack or Jonathan Ross superseding the Ken Dodd vintage, they lose their impact exponentially the more they are used and the fact that Larkin used the f word three times, each in a different participle, won't mitigate the offence by reference to a more revered authority.

Europa opens with a wonderful line,
The grass moves on the mass graves

which is as close as a poem might ever get to the smooth wonder of the opening bars of Brahms 4.  O'Brien could possibly have been Keats if he had wanted to be but can't let himself, doesn't want to be and why would he.
The blurb tells us,
Europe is not a place we can choose to leave

but whether or not the poems add up to a pro-EU, anti-Leave lament is less clear than the recurrence of mirrors in the poems, making us look at ourselves in the way that the poet has always found us guilty of being ourselves and stuck with it. Although his vision was 'noir' long before it became the staple diet of television drama imported from Scandinavia, it is not clear that he would ever have been anything but a malcontent; much though there may be to be malcontented about.
There is more of a sense of an ending in Europa than the accustomed, ongoing recipe of sinister goings-on, ominous politics and personal alienation but that is autobigraphical, Sabbatical being an understated title for a poem about leaving his old professorial office for perpetuity.

There might not be anything in Europa to put alongside the several major pieces in Ghost Train or such things as the supplicant Beautiful Librarians. But the book maintains the insistent rhythms with which O'Brien has always cast his compelling spell. It is quite possible that any of these poems found in a magazine under an unknown name would alert the reader to a new talent but it is what I might call 'Magnetic Fields Syndrome' - nothing's ever going to be as good as 69 Love Songs, or 'Al Green Syndrome', it will never be 1971-73 again, and even Manchester United don't win every week now that Eric Cantona is elsewhere.
The generation born from 1945-the early 1960's had it all. State-paid-for Liberal Humanities education; The Beatles, Tamla Motown, David Bowie and T. Rex, all the amusement of the cranky avant-garde; the most incredible sense of entitlement and progress being made. And we blew it. Maybe it was circumstances beyond our control but it happened on our watch and we blew it. And it is too late to complain now. Poetry is a very unlikely instrument to use to set it right but it can be a powerful way of resigning oneself to a game that has been played out and gone.
It's a fine book and I wouldn't be without it but future retrospectives might decide to put other of his books ahead of it in estimating which represented the ones he should best be remembered for.    

Buxtehude at the Wigmore

Sophie Gent/Matthew Truscott/Jonathan Manson/Trevor Pinnock, Handel, Buxtehude, Froberger, Hacquart, Wigmore Hall, April 23rd.

More than Buxtehude, of course, but Dietrich at the Wigmore were the two things that made today's lunchtime concert the automatic selection for the intrepid trip to London.
Not many will have heard of Carlos Hacquart, a Benelux man of the C17th capable of producing all the spriteliness and stylized sweet langour required of a musician of his age. It is only that there were so many of them that means we can't be familiar with them all but I'm sure he was glad of this rare outing to have made his 'small body of published work' worth the effort and one was struck by the clarity, confidence and dexterity of this quartet of star instrumentalists in preparation for even better things to come.
I had thought it unfortunate that the Buxtehude Trio Sonata on the programme was not my preferred option among Buxtehude Trio Sonatas but that turned out to be a blessing because after hearing the Andante in the flesh as opposed to two recordings on disc, its luminous, soaring interplay between the parts brought to mind the Bach double concerto and it will be on the turntable soon for further consideration, leading to rapture, and the piece instated alongside the previous lone favourite.
Buxtehude doesn't need much of  a musical idea to produce electrifying music, wrapping and layering what was no more than a few notes into hugely satisfying, and convincing, compositions. I realize Bach is bigger and better but that does nothing to diminish Dietrich who, although apparently best-known as an organist, writes gorgeous violin parts. Choral music dominates the Opera Omnia and it is the organ music I rarely listen to. But the piece justified the journey even if central London doesn't get any easier to deal with as one reaches greater maturity.
Trevor Pinnock has been a mainstay of this period repertoire for as long as I've been aware of it but they don't spare the old warhorse. As the younger generation took a rest, Mr. Pinnock offered Suite no. 12 in C for harpsichord, catching our attention with a vertiginous climb up the keyboard scales at the end of the opening Lament. Spending by no means all, but much, of the rest of the concert sparkling or jangling along as continuo, it was only right that we should hear the harpsichord on its own terms, too, and as a billing that did nothing to detract from this as the chosen visit, he was in good form.
But if anyone was going to upstage Buxtehude, you can always rely on Handel whose music is full of a glory that his temperament as reported in so many anecdotes was said not always to be.
I haven't been in error in listening to more Handel opera than any other Handel in recent years but one can't concentrate on everything. I was as thrilled by Matthew Truscott's violin as by Sophie Gent's, who I take to be of slightly higher renown, but the programming was right and you can't not finish with Handel.
The Passacaglia encore tacitly accepted that once you've arrived at Handel, you can't take a step back. I only hope that Fiona Talkington escaped her post in the Radio 3 announcer's chair, directly in front of me, so that she didn't have to tell every passing member of the audience what they'd just heard. The rest can find out by tuning into the repeat on Sunday lunchtime, which is what I recommend you do anyway.

I thought I'd call on Mr. Handel at his home immediately afterwards but he wasn't in. Neither was his neighbour, Mr. Hendrix. In fact the only thing there that actually belonged to the maestro was his bookcase. Still, I wanted the book on Charles Jennens, word man of Messiah, and I don't think you can get it anywhere else.
London is indeed more of an effort these days and one needs a good reason to make a date there. Us provincial types have settled into a more sedate pace. But I wouldn't have wanted to miss this, for real and only a few yards away rather than refracted through the airwaves. It'll never be over for me.  
  

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

A genuine pleasure, and the real point of it all, for the minor dilettante literatus is the arrival of a few things at a time. One book or record arriving is good but several in a week offers the satisfaction of a binge.
While still anticipating About Larkin ft. Move Over, Darling, this week has been blessed with books by the Waterman family, Andrew and Rory, almost finishing the TLS crossword with its Shakespeare thread and, never less than momentous, a new book by Sean O'Brien. So there will be reviews and reactions to record here next week but I'd better give them a fair hearing first.
Something seemed to be echoing while reading Prof. O'Brien's poems, though, until I realized what it was his poems were reminding me of. Mine.
That is, of course, though, the wrong way round and probably post ergo proper hoc. It's me that imitates him, whose rhythms and idioms I've adopted sometimes more consciously than at others. In the 70's, we might have said 'influenced by' when a third-rate act lacking originality aped the style of a major one in the hope of some coat-tails success. But by now, 'influenced by' is redolent of 'under the influence' and brings to mind memories of spaced-out artistes barely able to remember their own names. My debt to Sean O'Brien is more like that of Mike Yarwood to Denis Healey, as a poor impersonator but books are generated by previous books, poems by poems that came before them and The Perfect Book is my poems as much as Brett Anderson's songs are his and not from Hunky Dory.

And great minds sometimes have similar ideas to mediocre ones. In the last weeks of filling up The Perfect Book to make it fit 28 pages, I had planned a poem called Career, a long look back on the oddballs, corporacy, downright indignation of having to earn a living in such a way as well as all the wonderful things that employment has provided. I couldn't do it justice. I've never been able to. More than one abandoned novel bear witness to that. But there is Sean, in Sabbatical, saying farewell to his office at Newcastle University where he was Professor of Creative Writing.
I'm sure that must have involved a lot of nonsense and bureaucracy but it might be for others to estimate how much money can be got for old rope. Just for once, the jury's out and in due course we will be the judge of that. 

First reactions to my book are naturally very polite but the poems so far mentioned in dispatches are not those I'd have expected, which is unnerving in one way but to be expected in another. How would I know what readers would like best. They won't necessarily agree with me and I've noticed poets or their editors omit from Selecteds poems that I thought were among their best.
And I could offer you a cup of tea now and a gin and tonic later and you might say you liked the tea better. I'd be surprised, but you might.
So, we will see. These must still be the good, old days if we still have time to muse upon such trivial questions. And we might as well make the most of it, and days at the races and the sheer joy of it because we may not be the young ones very long.

Meanwhile, have we had enough of Oh. Babe, What Would You Say yet. Not the content, I'm afraid you're stuck with that, but the title.
I don't know whether to stick with the great Hurricane Smith and call it Don't Let It Die, go with the Northern Soul masterpiece, It'll Never be Over for Me, or keep it open to consideration. I bet you can hardly wait to see what happens.

Cheltenham

With God's own racecourse, a major literature festival, genteel reputation and lots else to recommend, Cheltenham has been a possible retirement destination for a few years. The downside would be the major upheval of moving as well as the knowledge that there's snakes in them there hills. I saw one once about 40 years ago and I'd worry it was still there.
But the next best thing is having a mate good enough to want to go once a year for the quieter but still very classy April meeting.
We knew today would be difficult. Two winners today would have put you in the champion tipster bracket. I was lucky that my D minus homework was mitigated by reserving judgement with scrutiny of the betting market on the day always a crucial factor, so having landed the favourite in the first with proper money, it was bookmar's money that ebbed back to them throughout the rest of another otherwise wonderful day there.
The genuinely lovely champion trainer acceded to my impertinent request for a photo. I said, my mate at work, by which I meant The Professor, only backs your horses.
Bit like me, he said.
Class act.

Unfortunately, the equally great Bryony, the best thing to happen to horse racing since Derek Thompson was sidelined to Fakenham on bank holidays, let me down but you can't have everything. I think it's the last sentence of Flying Finish by Dick Francis,
That's racing.