Bourne again: Sleeping Beauty

In December, Matthew Bourne celebrates 25 years of his company, the New Adventures, with Perrault's Sleeping Beauty, decribed as the gothic romance of a young girl who sleeps for a hundred years then awakes to the modern world. It's the third of his Tchaikovsky ballets, the first being his Nutcracker! in1992, the second his most famous , 'Swan Lake', with the all male corps de ballet. The original Sleeping Beauty was choreographed by Marius Petipa in 1890; this is the year Bourne begins with for Aurora's christening. Bourne has used three of his regular collaborators, including the award-winning Les Brotherston (set and costumes).

Although I have loved seeing many of his ballets, my favourite is still Swan Lake, internationally famed not only for its own tours, but also for the 'cameo appearance' it makes at the end of the film Billy Elliot, with the original lead Adam Cooper playing a grown up Billy about to go on stage for the Bourne production.( Adam Cooper is currently starring in Singing in the Rain, in Shaftesbury Avenue.)

In Swan Lake the Tchaikovsky music is danced to riotously in the bar, which with Bourne's distinctive choreography takes on the atmosphere of a Toulouse Lautrec painting, even if the costumes are more of a strange mish-mash of fifities and sixties. This contrasts with the dance at the palace, which is invaded by characters from the other world.  The court also goes to the theatre, so you see  dances within a dance, this last one a comic pastiche of  ballet.                        

Other Bourne productions I have seen include Edward Scissorhands, which stayed very close to the Tim Burton, Johnny Depp film.

The Nutcracker! was a frothy and exhuberant  Christmas entertainment, and well suited to introducing people who don't normally go to ballet to the world of dance, though as far as spectacular dancing it wasn't the best production, though it has a Busby Berkley style effervescence.

'Play without words' was based on the 1963 film, 'The Servant', Harold Pinter's adaptation of a 1948 novelette, starring Dirk Bogarde and James Fox, where the servant/master roles are gradually reversed. In the dance production, Bourne  shows the story unfolding with three versions of each character and multi-sets within the set.               

Finally, 'Car Man', set to the music of Bizet's Carmen, loosely based on 'The Postman Always Rings Twice'. Here it's the small town that's sleepy, woken up by a visiting drifter, Luca.

Translation through Reeds recorded

The most recent choir I've been in has had a fantastic day today recording the piece of work we performed in the summer, Translation through Reeds, which is about the local countryside around the rivers Waveney and Blyth, composed by Karen Wimhurst using the specially commissioned poetry of Joanne Guthrie. So we spent the whole day in a church in deepest Norfolk, having to wait when the odd car went past, working incredibly hard, but am looking forward to hearing the result. Conducted by Sian Croose, who had also taught us the piece, accompanied by Karen on bass clarinet and piano, we were also joined by the soloist Sianed Jones. It's been a full weekend of singing as Saturday evening I also went to see Sianed performing at the Halesworth Cut, singing wonderfully plus playing a mean fiddle, supported by Sian and a young guitarist cum tamboura player, Adrian Lever. Sian and Sianed often perform together as part of Human Voices, who I've seen several times and are absolutely brilliant, acapella, but not as you know it!! Sianed has a new cd out,  'Flickering into Existence'.

Thurston Hopkins

Thurston Hopkins and his wife Grace Robertson were both photographers on Picture Post in the years after the war when the magazine  was helping create a new sense of national identity.
The young Hopkins had originally gone to Brighton College of Art, and had worked for a publisher making decorative frames for pictures of Edward VIII until he abdicated, leaving Hopkins without a job! Hopkins joined the PhotoPressAgency on the advice of his employers, who told him he could make more money with photography.
He was in the RAF Photographic Unit during the war, and managed to get a job with Picture Post in 1950. One of his first essays for them was Cats of London (1951) - many cats had been made homeless by the Blitz and were living and breeding in the bombsites.
Later he set up a studio in Chiswick, and taught photography at the Guildhall School of Art. Since retiring he leaves the photography to Grace Roberts, nowadays mainly painting.

Polar Bears and other drumming

And as for my favourite drummer -Sebastian Rochford. I'm losing count how many times I've seen him, having seen Polar Bear, Rochford's own band, several times; plus Basquiat Strings featuring him on drums; plus Ingrid Laubrock Quintet; also Seb and Andy Shepherd at Snape Maltings at the end of a week's residency, where they had been composing together.

Polar Bear's 'Held on the Tips of Fingers' was nominated for a Mercury award in 2005, as was Sebastian himself in 2007 for 'Basquiat Strings with Seb Rochford'. He is part of the F-IRE collective, which includes the Basquiat Strings and Laubrock.
The line-up of Polar Bear of two saxophonists (Pete Wareham and Mark Lockhart, who also play with Rochford in Acoustic Ladyland) double bassist Tom Herbert, and Seb on drums, was added to by Leafcutter John with assorted electronica in 2004.

Watching Seb is magical, he continually experiments and looks as if  he is as surprised with the results as the audience. This sense of wonder is accompanied by a quiet, intense stage presence, where he charms the crowd with what appears to be an innocent naivety and gentle sense of humour which extends to titles of tunes, which seem to be continually developing, such as 'Fluffy (I want you)'. He recounts how he wrote a tune when his girlfriend was leaving him, then qualifies this with, well not as she was ACTUALLY leaving, or he wouldn't have been paying attention. And of course there's the famous hair and elfin features, which somehow belie his years.I met him when I was helping with a local jazz club, and he was the only performer who helped me put away the chairs at the end, quietly chatting.

Apparently recently he has been working with Herbie Hancock and Corinne  Bailey  Rae, and in the past has worked with David Burne and Brian Eno plus Babyshambles.

Potted history of pop and rock drummers

As a small child I can remember being very impressed with the Honeycombs - with their one hit 'Have I the Right?' - who had a female drummer (Honey Lantree). More recently female percussionists tend to be in all-girl bands, though you get the odd exception like Meg White of the White Stripes.

 More often the drummer is the less than pretty chap up the back, though Dave Clark contradicted this, not only by being good-looking, but also by being the up-front leader of his band, the Dave Clark Five.Though not as good looking as the beautiful Carl Palmer, originally of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, joined by Emerson and Lake to form E.L. and P. instead of Mitch Mitchell - who nearly joined them when Jimi Hendrix left The Experience for The Band of Gypsies. Mitchell worked for The Who just before the arrival of Keith Moon, the archetypal eccentric and exuberant drummer . There's a theory that Moon was the inspiration for the Muppet's Animal, though it was in fact Henson's friend  Steve Mitchell.

After the breakup of the Yardbirds, Jimmy Paige was searching for a new drummer, with a list that was rumoured to include Ginger Baker as well as Procul Harem's B.J. Wilson. Robert Plant bombarded Bonham with telegrams, and he decided to accept their offers rather than Joe Cocker's and Chris Farlowe's as he preferred their music. He died aged 32 after drinking forty shots of vodka during rehearsals. Led Zeppelin disbanded out of respect for his family.

  Def Leppard went from strength to strength when their drummer lost an arm. Rick Allen joined the band when only 15, but just as the band were making a breakthrough, he lost his arm in a car crash. The band didn't consider a replacement, but supported him as, with a modified drum kit, and using his legs to do what his arms had previously, he retrained himself initially with the backup help of Jeff Rich. His fans call him 'The Thunder God'.

Although Ginger Baker was seen as rock's first superstar drummer and the inventor of the drum solo, pioneering the use of double bass drums, he prefers to see himself as a jazz drummer, though he also has influenced world music. For Charlie Watts, touring with the Stones pays the bills, but jazz was his first love, and he has a jazz band, the Charlie Watts Orchestra. Neil Peal (Rush) was originally influenced by Moon and Bonham, but later emulated jazz drummers such as Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich.  Josh Freeze (Nine Inch Nails) has possibly the most experience in every style of music.

 Ringo joined the Beatles late, replacing Pete Best after meeting the band in Hamburg. His unusual turns of phrase, or 'Ringoisms', such as  a Hard Day's Night, were often used in their songs; he sang in at least one song per album to establish the vocal personality of all four:  However he saved his only drum solo as a Beatle for the last song on their final album. Ringo was the moderator in band arguments.

Not so Stewart Copeland, he reputedly had Sting's name on his drums in the later years of Police, so he could beat the living daylights out of it. Copeland formed Police with Sting after the demise of his previous band, Curved Air. Early track lists were mostly his compositions; later they were mainly by Sting. Post Police he has composed several film scores.

After Peter Gabriel left Genesis, drummer Phil Collins filled the gap as best as he could without resorting to the outlandish costumes of Gabriel. The first album with Collins as main vocalist, 'The Trick of the Tail', could almost refer to the man in the background moving into the foreground. To help ease his change to vocalist, Bill Bruford of Yes stood in for touring. Collins's first solo albums recounting the pain of his recent divorce touched a chord - 'Face Value' was an international success.

But Dave Grohl had a more impressive transformation, starting out as Nirvana's drummer, now the lead singer, guitarist, main composer and founder of Foo Fighters. Mind you, the guitar was his first instrument originally, converting to drums in an early band called Mission Impossible. He has also worked as a session drummer for Bowie, Paul McCartney, Nine Inch Nails, Garbage, Tom Petty and others.

Glad, bad, mad and sad

Is pop music really getting gloomier? A recent article in the Indy suggested so, listing happy songs of the 1960s, such as 'Daydream Believer' by the Monkees, 'She Loves you' by the Beatles, 'Shout' by Lulu - well, she may have been happy but it didn't exactly fill everyone else with joy did it? They could have included 'Glad all over' by the Dave Clark Five! Now glad is a word you don't often hear nowadays.

But apparently psychologists have recently shown that hit songs have become progressively sadder in the last half a century of pop music, analysing 1000 songs and showing that with each passing decade they have become more reflective and sombre. To contrast the two decades:

1960s: 85 per cent of  songs in a major key, 116 beats per minute;
2010s: just 42 per cent in a major key, 100 beats per minute.

The report suggests it's because people nowadays think they are smart, and happy music is a cliche. Life's more complicated, and we want our music to reflect that.

So the pattern goes: 1960s: carefree; 1970s: Abba kitsch; 1980s: Wham and glam;1990s: Grunge's angst;
2000, post-millenium tension of Radiohead and co.

All I can say is that Tears for Fears' (that's a pretty pessimistic name for a band if ever I heard one though their original name was History of Headaches) 'Mad World' reached no 3 in the charts in 1982, but when it was used by Michael Andrews in the Donnie Darko soundtrack, sung by Gary Jules  and given a much slower pace and lashings of melancholy it was a Christmas number one in 2003. It's a mad world and it's getting madder......

Wednesday is Indigo Blue

Possibly up to four per cent of the population, when seeing the number five, also see the colour red, although many have this condition but don't realise. And the  percentage might go up to 20 - 25 per cent among artists but it's also more common in women and among people who are left handed.There are over 60 types of synesthesia. In number form synesthesia numbers or letters are seen as coloured. For example, according to Marian McPartland, the jazz musician who is a synesthete,  'the key of D is daffodil yellow, B major is maroon, and B flat is blue.'

In ordinal linguistic personification, numbers, days of the week, months of the year  evoke personalities. In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year and/or days of the week have precise locations in space.

The science of it: Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. Or in simple terms, synesthetes involuntarily link one sensory perception to another. It runs in families, but can also be the result of a stroke, deafness or blindness. Some scientists believe it's a kind of cross-wiring, that we all possibly have it at birth but later lose it.

Famous people who may have had synesthesia are  the painter Vasily Kandinsky, the composer Franz Liszt, the poet Arthur Rimbauld and the physicist Richard Phillips Feynman.

In  'Wednesday is Indigo Blue' (2009), neurologist Richard E. Cytowic and neuroscientist David M. Eagleman introduce research on this condition.