red riding suit wearing writing for tv bheki mseleku

slept late, did my improvisation chores, smoked a small one while watching last thursday's red riding on the i-player...

very, very good...

channel 4 are making some damn good telly at the moment.... and it makes me want to be writing music for tv,

particularly because channel 4 are british and they seem as though they're open to newcomers...

redriding is a three-parter, this 1st part was fantastic...

killer opener, lets just hope they don't f*ck it up, the devils whore was another recent channel 4 outing and it had a killer opener also... to be fair it was good all the way through, but it did slacken just a little bit in the 3rd episode (of 4)...

i've just been invited to our cousins wedding, the 2nd of 4 brothers to get married... also to play the organ which is a lovely thought...

x

oh and why was i wearing a suit all day yesterday?

i played a massively long gig in cecil sharp house, solo piano for a vintage fashion fair... a longer gig than i've done before... 4, 45 minute sets, longer than the jazz gig last summer, but for the same money, money which was small for that gig, let alone this one...

but it was lovely... a grand piano in good condition, i met a lovely woman who was one of the stall holders... she was the 1st person to thank me, thinking i was leaving after my 2nd set...

her mum was a jazz singer and she recognised some of the songs i played, songs very few people recognise... i think it was her singing along to a tune earlier on and later she mentioned "wait 'till you see her"... she wrote down a couple of tunes and put it on the piano while i was playing, tunes i couldn't play her because i don't know them,

but i'm certainly going to track them down if i can, she has great taste...

i also met 2 other women i've met before (quite apart from my beautiful dinah and her friend who there), 1stly an ex-student of mine who had a portable gramophone with her, she played 78's in the 45 minutes between my sets... great combination...

also the owner of mishka just north of crouch end where i go and get presents for my dinah...

the 1st 2 sets went like a dream, easy (kind of), improvised sections, tunes, beautiful tunes...

by the 3rd set i was starting to fade a little and i wasn't as good as i should have been... don't get me wrong, i was still fantastic, just a little slackening, like the devils whore... 3rd of 4 is a difficult place to be...

in the 4th set a different stall holder came up to me and asked if i could play something more upbeat to wake people up a bit... i did my best with a version of "closer to the source" by bheki mseleku which drew a very small round of applause from her, but by this time it was about the furthest thing from what i wanted to do...

now searching for his name, (largely because i'd forgotten how to spell it) i came across his obituary... that is a sad, sad thing...

my memory is terrible (particularly just now) and i honestly don't know if i'd heard in september 2008 that bheki mseleku had died... i must talk to my dad about it...

he was a huge part of me becoming the pianist i am today... in my late teenage years and into my early 20's he was it for me...

there is a tradition in jazz (and indeed in many fields) of imitating one's idols when young... modelling yourself on them and being them as close as you can be... it's a stepping stone to becoming yourself, becoming the adult you...

in the years after i was a student, living as i briefly did in leamington spa, experimenting a little with drugs... i read a journey in ladakh by andrew harvey...

i loved it dearly... in that book AH describes a method of meditation where you learn the appearance of the buddha in very precise detail...

the object of your meditation is this image of the buddha and you become (as close as you can) this image of the buddha...

back then i related this to the jazz tradition of becoming your idol and i was helped in this relating by the beautiful fact of bheki mseleku's early arrival in the london jazz scene, where he made a bit of a splash, but then went off to a buddhist monastery to meditate for 5 years...

i loved him dearly...

it's one of my regrets (although it doesn't trouble me overly these days) that i didn't play with him when i had the chance... i was sat with my mum & dad in a concert hall in the docklands and bheki mseleku had played a lovely 1st set... (this is early in my london living - early to mid 20's me)

somebody announced at the beginning of the 2nd set that bheki would like it if there were any musicians in the audience to come and play with him... if they were pianists he would play bass...

mu mum was very keen that i should do it and she didn't keep it to herself...

i didn't do it..

it's possible that part of the reason was some daft thing in my mind in relation to my mum, freud would certainly encourage that notion, but then as my dinah says: freud's a w**ker...

check it out, 2 swear words in one post...

anyway, yesterday, after the gig i went straight up to the rehearsal for the musical i'm involved in... long, penultimate rehearsal, pepped me up though, gave me that energy i needed to get through it, it was walking from the rehearsal to crystal kebab that i had the lovely footsteps moment i mention in the earlier post x