103 Performances I’ve Done In The Past 2.5 Months

Good morning Planet Earth, and welcome to a little blog post I like to call ‘103 Performances I’ve Done In The Past 2.5 Months’. For those of you who don’t know, I’ve noticed that the best way to make people read something online is by putting a number in the title, so today I’ve decided to up the ante by including not one but two numbers! I can’t vouch for the accuracy of them, but that’s not really the point is it?

The purpose of today’s post is to address the concerns of anybody that’s been thinking I’ve dropped off the face of the Earth, or perhaps that I never existed in the first place and was just a strange example of mass hallucination. To those people, I say this: Fear not! For my existence is still as certain as it ever was, and I’ve been out and about doing all sorts of gigs. Let me elaborate…
 
The Jelly Roll Jazz Band

January isn’t usually peak time for The Jelly Roll Jazz Band. Most of our members either fly south for the winter or hibernate in caves, so it was a bit of a novelty this year to have a regular booking over the course of January. We were hired by Huddersfield BID** to perform alternately in the city’s train and bus stations every Monday morning between 7:00 and 10:00 am, to cheer people up as they headed off to work. And what a success it was! Here’s some evidence for the doubters:
 

 

 

The Dixie Beats

Jelly Roll may well be the greatest trad. jazz trio that ever existed, but as 6/7-piece bands go, The Dixie Beats is hard to… well… beat. And we’ve had a fun time so far in 2020, with three gigs already under our collective belt!

First up was a return to Southport on 19th February to play for Fleetwood Hesketh Social Club. You may remember that the last time we were there (in December) I spotted a sign that rather took my fancy, but didn’t have a proper camera with which to photograph it. Well this time I remembered to bring my magical picture-taking machine, and can present you with a new improved image:
 

 
Our next booking was on 2nd May [EDIT: Surely I meant to say ‘March’? MG, 3/4/23], when we made our way to Eagley Jazz Club for a free pasty or two. Sadly I don’t have any pictures or anything from that evening, but here’s an image of a pasty to make it up to you:
 

Isolated Cornish Pasty Meat Pie Royalty Free Stock Image ...

 
The next pasty-related Dixie Beats gig was a charity concert on Friday 13th March at Dobbies Sports & Social Club in Bolton, and despite the unlucky date it went extremely well and raised well over £1000 (as well as converting one or two skeptics into trad. jazz fans). If you’re interested, the reason behind the whole thing was that our magnificent drummer Karen will be travelling to distant lands in the summer to help build schools for orphans or something. Admirable stuff. And here’s a picture of all the pasties I managed to scavenge at the end of that performance:
 

 
Mmm.
 

Orchestra of St. James’

I went for a little weekend excursion to the lond of Landon over 21st-23rd February to play some clarinet in a church that was famously used in the Comic Relief parody of Four Weddings and a Funeral. The orchestra was made up largely of musicians from my time at the University of Durham, most of whom I haven’t seen since performing Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé Suite No. 2 in Durham Cathedral in 2015 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YHfceCfZfs). It was good to see that all those demisemiquavers hadn’t killed everyone off, and we all slotted back into place as if the intervening 4.5 years had never happened.
 

God smiling on us through the back window.

 
Never one to miss an opportunity, I even managed to get a little video of me playing some Dvořák:
 

Sadly, however, no pasties were forthcoming and hence I consider the weekend a failure.
 

Shrek

I’ve been hard at work over the past few weeks practising the piccolo, in preparation for a production of Shrek The Musical for which I was to be playing near Stockport from 25th-28th March. Sadly they’ve had to postpone it until 23rd-26th September (save the dates!), but the good news is that gives me plenty more time to get to grips with horrific things like this:
 

 

Emergency Bassoon

I am delighted to announce that I have officially added an extra emergency service to the boring old trio of fire, police and ambulance: The Emergency Bassoon Service! On Saturday morning I received an email asking if I could perform 2nd bassoon in two concerts with Macclesfield Symphony Orchestra because their regular guy had opted to self-isolate for a bit. So I sprang out of bed, grabbed the nearest reed, sprinted out of my room and slid down my emergency fireman’s pole (I knew it would come in handy sooner or later) before darting out of the door and running all the way to Macclesfield as fast as my supercharged bionic robot legs would carry me.

Once there I was able to rehearse and perform an enjoyable (if tiring) programme consisting of Wagner’s Mastersingers Overture, something by Glinka, Strauss’ Suite in B flat, and Rachmaninov’s Symphony no. 1. We did it in St. Michael’s Church (Macclesfield) on Saturday evening, and Congleton Town Hall on Sunday afternoon.

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be my music stand, the following video will help enlighten you. Sorry that I spend the whole thing hiding behind my bassoon – I was feeling a bit shy that day. Also, I noticed there was some blank space at the side so I thought the thing to do would be to fill it with various Comic Sans motivational quotes.
 

Not Really A Performance, But…

I’ve got a new page on my website! You see, I’ve done some odd bits of recording work over the years and would very much like to do more in that vein. It occurred to me that the next step towards studio superstardom was to put together a little online showcase of some stuff what I’ve done, and here it is: www.michaelgrantmusician.com/recording

Along similar lines, I’m also now available to book for remote recordings on Fiverr, which apparently is a website that does things: https://www.fiverr.com/share/vvjzdZ
 

In Conclusion

It is safe to say that this is the greatest blog post ever written.

* Which stands for Improvement D***
** Which stands for Business ID*
*** Which stands for District

Transcription Tuesday But On A Wednesday: ‘Frenesi’, Artie Shaw

If Radio 3 is to be believed (and they’ve never lied to me yet), then yesterday marked exactly 80 years since Artie Shaw recorded his classic version of ‘Frenesi’, as orchestrated by William Grant Still. Which made my decision of what to transcribe this week a nice easy one. So here I present yet another version of Clarinet Marmalade…

Nah, just kidding!
 

10 Creative Endeavours I’ve Been Involved In Recently

Firstly, hello.

Secondly, welcome to a brand new blog post, which on this unusual occasion makes no reference to Clarinet Marmalade whatsoever! Except that reference I’ve just made there… Oh dear.

Thirdly, I hope you like my new style of title. Apparently these days people only read something if it has a number in the title – don’t ask me why, it’s probably something to do with The Instagram. So I thought I’d try it out for a bit of a larf.

Fourthly, to business! I thought today I would share with you a range of creative exploits I’ve been working on in various capacities over recent months. A lot of these are things that don’t tend to get noticed because (unlike live performances) they happen behind closed doors and then sneakily make their way on to YouTube when nobody’s looking. This is my chance to address that injustice and give them their moment in the limelight…
 
1) It’s Not Really the Apocalypse – Terrible Previews

What self-respecting blog post would be complete without reference to my tremendous new musical, which is available at www.michaelgrantmusician.com/inrta ? The answer is: none. At the moment I’m constantly trying to come up with ways to promote this masterpiece without just giving it away for free (which for some reason seems to be the done thing these days).

The solution: Terrible Previews! This is a natural extension of the classic method of offering a lower-quality version of a product for free, but asking people to pay for the high-quality one. What I have done is take each song from It’s Not Really the Apocalypse (available here), convert it to mono, chop a few notes off the beginning and end, overlay myself saying “Buy the album!” every 15 seconds in a variety of silly voices, and export the whole thing in the lowest-quality .mp3 format available to me before uploading to YouTube. The result is a version that gives a good idea of what the music is like, but is far too irritating for people to just listen to without buying the high-quality recording! Pure genius.

If you’d like to listen to these Terrible Previews, there’s a convenient playlist right here.

On a related note, It’s Not Really the Apocalypse (available here) is now also available on BandCamp: michaelgrantmusician.bandcamp.com/releases
 

Most of you will presumably already have heard of the world’s local celebrity, James Ure – he’s quite a big deal, you know. What you may not be aware of, is that I have been privileged enough to be involved in several of his recent projects…
 
2.1) Egg on My Face (Official Music Video)
Egg on My Face is the third single from James’ upcoming album ‘Banquet’, and back in November I was tasked with assembling the song’s official music video. This mainly involved throwing a range of different foods onto the artist in question, in a single shot that lasts over 4 minutes. If you’d like some idea of what the setup looked like, here is a little behind-the-scenes photo:
 

 
And here, dear reader, is the work of art that resulted from these efforts:
 

2.2) You’re My Cadbury Flake
You’re My Cadbury Flake is, to the best of my knowledge, not going to be released as a single. It is, however, set to feature on Banquet, so you can look forward to that when the album is released! The song is in a trad.-jazz-meets-The-Kinks kind of style, and at the end of December I helped out by recording a slick smooth swingin’ clarinet part for it. Here’s a behind-the-scenes photo from that adventure:
 

 
2.3) I’m Having Trust Issues with Crispy Seaweed
This is yet another song that will feature on Banquet, and is due to be released as a single very soon. I’ll let you know when it is (or maybe six months later, knowing me). Once again I’ve managed to sneak a little bit of my clarinet playing into the track, which will be a treat for the world.

2.4) … Reads the Diaries of James Ure
Always keen to push the boundaries of modern art (and good taste), our old acquaintance Mister Ure has recently started a new podcast, in which he invites a guest speaker every month to read through his diaries. I was honoured to be asked to read the inaugural episode, and you can find the result by clicking here. It’s received lots of positive feedback so far. Honest!
 

Me in my special reading chair.

 

3) Morella

What can I say about Morella? Well, I suppose I could say the following…

Morella is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, about… well, it’s difficult to explain. In typical Poe fashion it’s pretty weird – perhaps Wikipedia can help me out in this department: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morella_(short_story)

Anyway, it has also recently been turned into a musical, with lyrics by Lesley Creasser Guymer and music by Jack Mitchell Smith. They are at present working on producing the entire thing as a concept album, and in January I was tasked with recording the flute parts for said album. No mean undertaking, when you consider that it contains over 2 hours of music and there are 2 flute parts (each of which I did 2 takes of)! Anyway, it was a jolly experience and the relevant people were very satisfied:

“Wow – what a wonderful job you’ve done! I didn’t know if I was going to get round to listening to all of them tonight but I just had to keep going and have now listened to the whole thing and honestly it was a pleasure. […] I do hope you’ve enjoyed the project and I (we) are so grateful for you having not only done it, but doing it so well and so quickly!”

Just sayin’.

It’ll be a while before the album itself is ready, but to tide you over in the meantime here’s a little clip of some of my fluting from the project, taken completely out of context:
 

4) Piano Miniatures

Since finishing work on It’s Not Really the Apocalypse (available here), I’ve been able to return to one or two old projects that have been languishing on the back burner for far too long. Long-term devotees of this blog may remember my series of miniatures for solo piano which I started in 2017, with the intention of composing 12 in total. Well, I’m glad to say that I have now completed the final piece in the series, so will soon start thinking about getting them recorded and maybe even performed! How exciting.

Below, you can listen to a rendition of the latest and last of these miniatures. I should point out that, over the years, I have come to realise the futility of trying to make computerised MIDI performances sound anything less than terrible. Therefore, for this piece I thought, “In for a penny, in for a pound,” and so have rendered the entire thing on tubular bells instead of piano. I hope you like it.
 

5) The Atwood Project

Many of you who read this blog, view my website, watch my videos etc., may find yourselves thinking “That’s all very well, but isn’t it a bit too ordinary?” After all, there are plenty of clarinettists out there, plenty of bassoonists, plenty of orchestrators. Well, to those people, I would like to introduce The Atwood Project.

The Atwood Project is a recently-formed ‘band’ of which I am a part. What we do is take suggestions for song titles from various people, pick our favourite, and then write and record a song with that name. Results so far have been artistically masterful yet emotionally quite disturbing, but I would encourage you to give them a listen because you won’t hear anything else like them anywhere ever.

Here we have song number 1, ‘If Only Your Legs Were On Your Head’:
 

And here, to celebrate US Banana Cream Pie Day, we have the (freshly released) song number 2, ‘Banana Juice?’
 

Conclusions
  1. I realise that there are probably not exactly 10 creative endeavours featured in this blog post, so for those who feel short- or long-changed by the title, I apologise. But I really can’t be bothered to count them and change it.
  2. This is quite a long blog post. Next time I’ll be taking you through all the fun and exciting gigs I’ve had over January and Feburary, so it should be a lot shorter.
  3. Conclusions are hard.

Transcription Tuesday But On A Wednesday: ‘Clarinet Marmalade’, Sidney Bechet

It’s Tuesday, but it’s actually Wednesday (and by the time you read this it may even be Thursday or any other of the days)! That can mean several things, but in this context it means it’s time for another of my beautiful jazz transcriptions.
 

This week I continue my enduring survey of great artists’ interpretations of the greatest piece of art ever created: Clarinet Marmalade. So far we’ve heard from Edmond Hall, Sid Phillips and Benny Goodman, and today I’m going to throw a little Sidney Bechet into the mix, in a recording he made with Bunk Johnson and co. in 1945 or thereabouts. Here’s what I make of what he makes of it:

Transcription Tuesday But On A Wednesday (But On A Thursday): ‘Clarinet Marmalade’, Benny Goodman

This week’s edition of TTBOAW(BOAT) sees me sticking with the undisputed greatest piece of art ever created, and taking a look/listen at/to a 1939 radio performance of Clarinet Marmalade, by Benny Goodman and his eponymous orchestra. As is often the case with big band arrangements, there’s not a huge amount of actual soloing in this. Therefore I’ve also transcribed an outline of the tutti sections so you don’t feel short-changed.
 

Transcription Tuesday But On A Wednesday: ‘Clarinet Marmalade’, Sid Phillips

Today, dear readers, I would like to share with you a recent personal experience of mine that has affected me quite profoundly. It is with some trepidation that I share this, as I realise that to some it may seem at best naive, at worst bordering on the heretical. But I believe that to keep this glorious epiphany to myself would represent the height of selfishness, and therefore I ask that you bear with me as I state my case. Judge me as you will, but if this article can inspire just one person in the way that I have been inspired then it will have served what can only be described as a truly great purpose.

I realise that I am preaching to the converted here, as all of you reading this are presumably devoted followers of my blog who read, analyse and digest it in extreme detail and hang on every word I write. But just in case there are any newcomers amongst you, I would like to take a moment to fill you in on a little background. For some time now I have been engaging in a regular Wednesday ritual of taking a jazz recording from a notable musician and transcribing the main solo part (i.e. writing it down in conventional Western musical notation). I call this series ‘Transcription Tuesday (But On A Wednesday)’, because I publish the transcriptions on my blog every Wednesday but ‘Transcription Wednesday’ is not alliterated and is therefore repulsive to my mind. It is of course of huge benefit to the musical fraternity and the world in general, because everybody knows that the best way to play jazz is to recite, note-for-note, a solo that somebody else improvised 80 years ago. But it also gives some benefit to me as a musician, in that it grants me a deeper knowledge of the improvisational techniques and ideas showcased by these great performers, which in turn feeds into my own musical vocabulary when I ‘take to the stage’ (sometimes literal, but usually metaphorical) as a soloist.

As I write this, it is a week since I last published a transcription and since the event which has forever changed the course of my life. For whilst searching around for some appropriate jazz to notate, I came across something wonderful, perhaps even divine. It was a piece of music that spoke to me in a way that no other artform has done before. It awakened layers of my being that I never even knew existed, and opened up entirely new realms in my consciousness. The more I listened, the more certain I became that I was experiencing something truly ineffable, and that surely this was the greatest piece of art that had ever been created. The Mona Lisa, the symphonies of Beethoven, Milton’s Paradise Lost… All of them faded into nothingness when compared with this monumental exploration of the human soul. And today, dear reader, I would like to share it with you all. It is called ‘Clarinet Marmalade’.

There is little point in me attempting a verbal description of the many delights to be found in Clarinet Marmalade. To do so would be simply impossible, and could only serve to weaken a such thing of utter perfection. All I can do is urge you to find it and listen to it, so that you too may be enlightened as I have been. As with all great art it is open to an infinite degree of interpretation, and therefore there are many different recordings readily available to those who choose to seek them out. I implore you to do so at the earliest opportunity, and to spread the word of this glorious entity as widely as you are able. For this music needs to be heard, and the more people who are exposed to its remarkable power, the closer humanity will creep towards paradise.

I am only one lowly woodwind musician, but I am determined to do my part to aid in the advancement of this music. Therefore, for the foreseeable future my Transcription Tuesday (But On A Wednesday) posts will explore as many different versions of Clarinet Marmalade as I can lay my ears on. Last week I notated Edmond Hall’s 1958 recording, and this week I have transcribed a rendition from Sid Phillips. Keep checking this blog for further transcriptions of this remarkable piece, and in the interim please remember: What’s good for Clarinet Marmalade is good for humankind.
 

Transcription Tuesday But On A Wednesday (But On A Thursday): ‘My Funny Valentine’, Wynton Marsalis

https://youtube.com/watch?v=7tUIe_NulaM%3Ffeature%3Dplayer_embedded

It seems that once again I have let time get away from me (time, you dirty scoundrel you…), and so this week’s TTBOAW is a little bit late! Oh no! To atone for this sin, I have put myself through something of an exercise in self-punishment by transcribing a 9-minute-long performance of ‘My Funny Valentine’, from Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and featuring a 19-year-old Wynton Marsalis as trumpet soloist. I hope you enjoy seeing these notes captured for all time on virtual paper – just don’t ask me what chord changes they’re using!