(Hartington Rd) Blues
Brothers - Motherless Child Blues 2024 (youtube.com)
That’s Steve on keyboards and myself on vocals and harp. After a number of years off, we revived our New Year ‘concert’ at Maggie’s party, December 2023, into 2024 by the time we recorded this. (We met here in 2005!) This year, we had the pleasure of a keyboard in tune (which meant I could play harp). As ever, Steve gets the phone out to film us after we’ve been at it – hard, this year – very late, when I am vocally and physically exhausted, and ready to stop. I stayed sitting down. (I’ll not link to the 2016 video I’ve just found; my voice has clearly ‘gone’ on that one.) This year we added new songs, though there are no rehearsals, including one of my favourites ever, Antonio Carlos Jobim’s ‘Corcovada (Quiet Nights)’. Here's the recording of that: you can see that I'm battling the dance music in the adjacent room; hand over ear, I begin shakily, I can't hear the key. Again, I'm tired...
This last year, also, has been a return to other kinds of singing, performing in the small-scale Ern Malley Orchestra: but no recordings of our Cambridge gig have surfaced, but there is an account here, with a photograph that makes it look as though there is no audience, which was far from the truth! Pages: Performance of the Ern Malley Orchestra and launch of Doubly Stolen Fire (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).
And the same ‘Motherless Child’, whose provenance I explain, here in the text, was on my lips a decade ago: Pages: Singing in 2013: Motherless Child Blues (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). I had more energy left on that recording.
Here I am ruining my own 60th birthday with a snippet of a performance of me on guitar/harp/vocals (ruining it for myself I mean; I should have been chatting to guests):
Pages: If Dylan can release his back-catalogue, so can I... (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
I’ve never quite felt I’ve been recorded at the right
moment - although there are endless cassette recordings (and a reel-to-reel from the 1970s) of Little Albert Fly
from the 1990s that are OK: too late, too tired, too little. The version of
one of the Ern Malley poems lined up by David Whyte for an album of the Ern
Malley Orchestra might be the pristine recording, as it should.
Music is important to me as something I do (intermittently), something I listen to (not nearly enough), and something I write about (occasionally but quite a lot). Those three areas are often overlappingly distinct. I published a group of texts about music in this fine anthology: Yesterday's Music Today, edited by Mike Ferguson and Rupert Loydell:
I have a plan to assemble a book totally concerned with music. I might assemble a sample of earlier poems, including those in Yesterday's Music Today, both poems for musicians (e.g., Philip Jeck (that’s here: Pages: Philip Jeck 2022 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com))), and about musicians (a Ray Charles poem, for example, 'The Hippest Man on the Planet', originally from Liverpool Hugs and Kisses, but now out of print).
I’ll probably include the revised texts from the ill-fated collaboration with Trev Eales (about rock music festival performances), (See here on its fated ills: Pages: Whatever happened to the book Charms and Glitter? (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
More recently, in the last 10 months, I’ve been working on a long poem about the blues, called ‘Crossing the Desert for the Blues’, which comes out of re-reading sudden-purchase Paul Oliver’s marvellous The Story of the Blues, and was partly nurtured via Tom Croft’s sessions at the Belvedere (there was one on NYE before we went to the party to join Steve and his keyboard; it got me in the mood).
I have just written a poem about listening to Hendrix' 'Voodoo Child' during a radiotherapy session, my first poem of 2024 as it happens. This was about my treatment for prostate cancer in 2022. (Men: check yourselves: Check your risk in 30 seconds | Prostate Cancer UK))
I know I want to write about jazz, too, but new jazz. When you ask folk what they like in jazz they say, for example, ‘Miles Davis’ (so do I: poem here, also in Yesterday's Music Today: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Poetry and Jazz and approaching Monk (Geraldine, not Thelonious)) or ‘John Coltrane’; they never say Rob Luft or Lakecia Benjamin (unless I’m talking to my friend Jazz Ian – the clue’s in the name! – or Patricia). I want to focus on contemporary players (possibly only women), but I don’t want to write about their music, but through it, round and about it. I haven’t found a method, for that’s what it needs, I feel. I'll probably choose a core of albums.
Likewise (see the last link above, again) I never managed to get that critical book on poetry and jazz together. That’s a chimera haunting me. So be it. Aldon Lynn Nielson does a fantastic job without me, and his recent book The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka is a fascinating account of all of AB's recordings.
*
Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com (don’t use the Edge Hill email); website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter (or X): Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com; live: who knows where next? In some smoky bar on the dark side of town?
