NEWS

February 2010

As another Liverpudlian once said, All Things Must Pass. Guy Barker and I have decided to retire the piece known as dZf, our ‘jazz-noir’ version of The Magic Flute (all of Mozart’s notes, none of the tunes). It’s had a good run, three years, and perhaps twenty performances. It’s time to move on. So, there are two final performances scheduled, on March 3rd and March 4th at Ronnie Scott’s in London, with the full band and Michael Brandon once more narrating. Tickets on www.ronniescotts.co.uk. Hankies at the ready.

Meanwhile, the latest GQ blog:

SAVING FACE

I don’t know that anyone would ever travel to Paris hoping to detox. Quite the reverse, in fact. Just look at the weary, culture-sated, wine-damaged faces and shaking hands on the Eurostar pulling out of Gare du Nord on Sunday evenings. Paris, surely, is all about over-indulgence, both spiritual and physical. But earlier this week I had serious need of a Parisian detoxification, and fast.

I was primarily in the city to interview Alexandre Cammas, the founder of Le Fooding, the iconoclastic food movement that’s set out to usurp the Michelin old guard by combining cookery and rave culture with enormous food ‘picnics’, attended by up to 5,000 people (there is one in Val d’Isere this April, see the website: www.lefooding.com) and top Djs.

After a very convivial lunch, he recommended I have dinner at Le Chateaubriand, ‘Where De Niro goes whenever he is in Paris.’ In my experience, De Niro spreads himself very thinly when he is in any town, as most top-end joints claim his patronage (although when he can’t make it, Clooney will do). But I can well believe Le Chateaubriand is the sort of place Bobby would like. It’s a very unflashy interior, not so much designed as half-remembered from French restaurants of the 1950s, all dark wood and white tiles. The chef, Inaki Aizpitarte, is a young-ish Basque with a reputation for outlandish experimentation and severe moodiness. There was none of that on show, just a five-courses set-menu, where each dish got progressively more solid (the amuse bouche was positively ethereal), ending with a lovely sliver of monkfish followed by a melt-in-the-mouth pinker-than-Barbie’s-bottom lamb chop. There is an excellent wine list with many available by the ‘pot’, that is 50cl, although, as I discovered, just one of those isn’t enough to see you over the five leisurely courses (which costs a very reasonable 45 Euros).

Refreshed, I went on to New Morning to see trumpet wunderkind Christian Scott. The club itself is an old garage and looks (and smells) like it, but it generates a great atmosphere when someone like Scott is playing. He is 26 and manages to fuse elements of hip-hop, funk, pop and even 1920s New Orleans into his jazz without the joins showing. Check out the impressive album Yesterday You Said Tomorrow (especially his breathy, jittery version of Thom Yorke’s The Eraser) and try and see him live, which is even better.

Afterwards, I discovered that my hotel, the Pavillon la Reine, on Places des Vosges in the Marais (and where, funnily enough, De Niro is meant to stay now and then) has an honesty bar in its lovely lounge, complete with roaring fire. A smooth armagnac or two in front of that would be a perfect end to the night, I figured.

The next day I had a second lunch appointment and a raging would-you-please-keep-this-room-still hangover. Armagnac, it appears, doesn’t agree with me, even on a full stomach. Worse, I not only looked as if I had had a night on the tiles, but also that the pattern of said tiles was imprinted on my face. Nothing I could do would make the mottled skin do anything other than suggest I say hello to a new career as a corpse on Waking The Dead or Silent Witness.

To top it all, the woman I was meeting – a publisher - was an elegant French woman of a certain age, who makes Carla Bruni look like she has the dress sense of a Harriet Harman or Jacqui Smith. I was there to pitch a novel that she had expressed interest in. I had never been published in France. I would like to be. But I suspect she wanted a Robert Harris to turn up, not a Charles Bukowski.

In desperation, I remembered that the nearby Hotel Gabriel, close to Oberkampf, advertised itself as Paris’s only detox hotel. I rang them and asked if they had anything available that could help. Like a total blood transfusion treatment or head to toe skin-peel. Alas, no. They could do me a detoxing mini facial. Money-shot jokes aside, I’ve always felt facials to be a waste of time. No doubt it would involve mud extracted from a Zambezi Hippo’s anus, or seaweed dredged from the Sargasso Sea and rowed over by hand-picked Polynesians being slapped on my visage at great expense and then left to set while the therapist did nothing except file her nails. Again. But still, I had to try something. This was an emergency.

The Gabriel is a small hotel, 40 nicely crafted rooms, all of them done in a clinical white, softened with touchy-feeling fabrics. There is only one small treatment room, just off the bar/breakfast area, where I was welcomed by therapist Mitcha (pronounced ‘Meecha’), who is half-Japanese, half-French. I told her I urgently needed to look 24 hours younger and she didn’t think that was too unreasonable. But there was no mud or seaweed masks involved. Just a quick exfoliation and then a face massage, albeit a very peculiar one, with Mitcha working on a micro-massage scale. It was like a bonsai version of the real thing, with tiny muscle groups pushed and kneaded and softened with aromatic oils and astringents.

Thirty minutes and 65 Euros later, I was out on the street, ready to meet my lunch companion without looking like Methuselah (although inside I still felt like I’d drunk one). I went back to the Pavillon to change and in the bathroom mirror, I thought I did look taut and glowing, although I was well aware that there was a Cinderella effect here – in a couple of hours I was likely to return to a wrinkled pumpkin. But by then, with a bit of luck, I’d be easing out of Gare du Nord with my fellow casualties of the Parisian highlife.

So how did the lunch go? Very nice, thanks for asking. Cantine du Troquet. I had the fish. Oh, the book? OK, I think. I didn’t speak with my mouth full and stuck to Badoit and was very enthusiastic about it being translated. The real test is whether the novel is on the Parisian bookstalls this time next year. In which case, I’ll go back and give Mitcha an even larger tip.

Jazzy January 2010 (1)

To paraphrase an old joke: what do you call someone who hangs around with musicians? A librettist. At least that is the grand title I awarded myself when I wrote a short story for jazz trumpeter Guy Barker and he turned it into a mammoth 50-minute suite for jazz orchestra called dZf (as in Die Zauberflotte – it’s the Magic Flute by way of Mickey Spillane).

That was three years ago and it’s been played live a dozen times since, with gravelly Michael Brandon - of Dempsey & Makepeace and Jerry Springer: The Opera – narrating. Now the old warhorse is to get another airing in March at Ronnie Scott’s (3rd and 4th) and, for one night only, at the Hong Kong Arts Festival on March 20th.

The terrifying logistics of the latter got me thinking about the financial perils of being in jazz. As Quincy Jones found out when he toured a crack big band through Europe in the early sixties, eventually stopping at the intersection of Nervous Breakdown and Totally Broke, the economics of running any jazz outfit, let alone one with fifteen members like Guy’s, just doesn’t make sense. (Another old one: What's the difference between a jazz musician and pension fund? A: The pension fund eventually matures and earns money. Well, that used to be the case, anyway.)

This is especially true here as the featured alto player – the outrageously talented Rosario Giuliani - has to be flown in from Rome and the contra-bass clarinet from Stockholm. And even then, you would be shocked at how little Guy can afford to pay them. The whole band goes out for less than a PA by Joe McElderry.

But every year, like Jake and Elwood Blues, Guy announces he is putting the band back together and without fail they leave their better-paid gigs and come together one more time. Why? Perhaps because those gigs include stints with Kylie, Strictly Come Dancing, X-Factor, Kyle Eastwood, movie and video sessions or in the pit at West End musicals such as Wicked. Good steady work, all of it, but as one of them said to me: ‘We come for three reasons. One is for Guy. The second is to hear the others in the band, all of whom can blow you away. And the other is to play some real, complicated, full-on jazz once in a while.’

I was a big band agnostic before I got involved with the project, preferring small combos, but once you have seen this lot roaring through the fiendish charts in a setting like Ronnie’s, you’ll be a convert too. Just watch out for the bloke stage left with the daft smile on his face, tapping his foot ever so slightly out of 7/8 time. That’ll be the librettist.

(This blog also appears on the GQ Daily website)

Jazzy January 2010 (2)

I made a woman cry last night. And you know what? I was proud of myself. Not, in all fairness, that I was solely responsible for the lachrymose blubbing. No, I took her to see some jazz, you see, and it really did end in tears.

My companion was a Fleet Street editor, a veteran of the days when there really were newspapers produced in that London thoroughfare. We meet up in Soho every couple of months to lament the decline of newsprint and this time I insisted we take in some live music rather than just drink ourselves into a maudlin stupour. She, however, is a hardcore opera and ballet fan. I am not. Besides, you try finding a decent Cosi Fan Tutte on a snowy Wednesday night in Soho.

So, I said, it would have to be jazz. Her nose wrinkled. Like many disbelievers, she claims to ‘hate’ all jazz, which always annoys me. It’s like saying you loathe books or cinema. It’s a very broad church, taking in everything from Mrs Elvis Costello (Diana Krall) to Albert Ayer, enjoyment of whom is the jazz equivalent of becoming a Made Man.

But not wanting to scare the horses, I started at the cuddlier end of things and took her to see Ian Shaw at the Pizza Express in Dean Street. Now, Mr Shaw is frequently described as ‘our finest jazz singer’, but even that doesn’t do him justice. True, you will get a few pages from the Great American Songbook, but there might also be Joni Mitchell, Anthony Newley, Randy Newman, Nick Cave, possibly even Send In The Clowns, f’chrissake. Plus – and this is something that will sort the jazz sheep from the goats – he scats.

Yup. You know – he sometimes goes doop, doobie, doop, do WAH, instead of singing the lyrics (and no, it isn’t that he’s forgotten them). In the wider world, scat singing is as fashionable as a mullet, and is frequently used by the Anti-Jazz League to attack the whole edifice. (In its defence, I would call Esperanza Spalding, a scat-singing, afro’d double-bass player, who looks like a young Marsha Hunt or Angela Davis.)

But I also know Ian can melt the coldest Wagnerian heart, so I took her down to the basement with the kind of anticipation on my part that you have when you know someone hasn’t seen Casablanca or Citizen Kane before, or has never properly listened to Astral Weeks, Pet Sounds or Kind of Blue. You sort of wish it was your first time, too. But then there is the fear it will all fall on deaf – or perhaps snobbish – ears.

I needn’t have worried. One thing you need to know about Ian Shaw is that the part of the devil in Jerry Springer: The Opera was originally written with him in mind. He has a easy, bitchy charm that can put any audience at ease, and he kicked off with Down With Love (as memorably done by Barbra Streisand) and some of his own compositions, which, as the Guardian’s John Fordham has noted, sometimes have a distant twinkle of Elton John about them. But with better lyrics.

So far, so good. Then he introduced Lianne Carroll, another singer you may not be familiar with. Like Ian, she’s not from the glossy, airbrushed side of the street. In fact, she’s from Hastings. But when she sings you would believe that the little, shabby Kent port was twinned with Memphis, Tennessee (her version of the Young Rascal’s/Dusty’s How Can I be Sure? is devastating).

Accompanied by the rich tones of saxman Tim Whitehead, they played a version of Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi, which featured — wait for it – an extended scat section, where the two singers traded phrases and octaves like circus jugglers swapping pins. As it ended, I turned to look at my companion, and she had tears streaming down her face, which she later explained were of joy at the sheer intensity and spontaneity of what was happening on stage. Now that, I thought, is jazz.

(This blog also appears on the GQ Daily website)

November 2009

After much discussion there is a title for the new book. It is based on the Great Train Robbery, although it also involves the previous job by the prime movers, at London Central (Heathrow) airport. This was an old-school wages snatch, involves fast Mk. 2 Jag getaway cars.

We knocked dozens of possible titles around, including the none-too-serious Rogue Mail, Grand Theft Railroad and Thievin’ Bastards. In the end the novel, which is due from Headline early next year, will be called SIGNAL RED. I used to have a Capri S in that colour….

Talking of fast cars, I had lunch with Bruce Reynolds (the main man behind the GTR) on Friday 6th. He is 78 years old, and a little wobbly on his feet, but still dapper, funny and great company.

Lunch lasted four hours. His book about his life, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A THIEF, is well worth reading and despite having his own account, he was very supportive of my novel. He is also dangerously knowledgeable about cars, guns, history, movies and books. We spoke a few days after lunch and he was reading Empire of Sand and he picked up on the calibre of a gun I had mentioned. Turns out we were both right (they made them in .35 and .45) but he gave me a nasty turn.

As we left the Groucho Club a very statuesque women came in (this was 5.30; the evening crowd), who looked like a young Brigitte Nielsen – over six foot, scraped back platinum blonde hair, simple diamond necklace worn with a tight black dress that encased – just- her prominent chest. As she steamed by Bruce and I both stopped to stare at her. ‘Well. They’re not real,’ he said. ‘What her breasts?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he replied disdainfully, ‘the diamonds.’

Heartwarming event of the month? About a year ago I was thinking of doing something on the Winter War, when Russia invaded Finland, partially based on the memoirs of my friend John Debenham-Taylor, who as a young man went out in 1940 to help the Finns use the obsolete artillery Britain had managed to find to send the beleaguered little country.

It didn’t quite make the cut, but I edited John’s account of his efforts and sent them to the Finnish Embassy. Months went by, but this week a reply finally came:

“We have a great pleasure to inform you that Mr John Debenham-Taylor has been awarded a Winter War Medal for his valuable effort, courage and willingness to help to fight for Finland in Winter War 1940. The Finnish Defence Forces thank you very much for your great assistance with this. Finnish Defence Forces thought Mr Debenham-Taylor´s report/ experiences were very interesting and valuable indeed. The Defence Attaché has sent to Mr John Debenham-Taylor a letter by post to inform him about this award. We hope to receive the medal from Finland by the end of the year (latest).”

So, 70 years after he volunteered to go out to Finland, undercover (he had to travel through neutral Sweden who would have interned him) John finally gets a medal.