Keith Tippett is back on the road

[Serial_Apologist]

There's c. 14 minutes, opening credits, maybe the highlights, with music and dialogue still up on YouTube under "the season of Julie Driscoll". Yep, it was Blind Faith. As you say, I thought she was very natural in it and it really is a kind of time capsule.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f30gQOpUy7Q

Absolute dynamite of a performance, as someone has commented. Julie not all "dolled up" [sic] with those huge wigs she was expected to wear, which she hated, among other things. Couldn't find anything from that play, however. (It was one of the Wednesday Plays btw, which went from 1965 to 1970, to be followed by Play for Today, so this must have been one of the last of that series).

[Serial_Apologist]

Actually....BIBA...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPrdEDzHbm8

Of course!!!

When it was around the corner in Church Street in 1967/8 it was much darker and plusher than by the date of that programme - black walls, discrete spot lighting, lots of mauve velvet, from memory. Your feet would sink into the carpets. Downstairs were the fitting rooms. I went down there, looking for other merchandise - of course!

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

http://youtu.be/DkwPlRC_Tow ...that "should" be the 14minute edit from the film/play, mostly cut over the music with just a bit of speech where she meets up with her friends again in the Park over Blind Faith.

I agree with SA about that very fine "Save Me" clip. Only thing that throws me is what's on her feet! Suede elf boots? Pirate Boots? There's a great Danish clip of Astrud Gilberto from the late 60s, she's sitting on a stool singing with a Getz like Danish group. She's lovely and great, but when the camera eventually pulls back from her, she will wearing those appalling plastic "Go Go" boots beloved of Lulu etc. "Oh not those Astrud!", I shouted, spilling me Vino!

[Serial_Apologist]

http://youtu.be/DkwPlRC_Tow ...that "should" be the 14minute edit from the film/play, mostly cut over the music with just a bit of speech where she meets up with her friends again in the Park over Blind Faith.

I agree with SA about that very fine "Save Me" clip. Only thing that throws me is what's on her feet! Suede elf boots? Pirate Boots? There's a great Danish clip of Astrud Gilberto from the late 60s, she's sitting on a stool singing with a Getz like Danish group. She's lovely and great, but when the camera eventually pulls back from her, she will wearing those appalling plastic "Go Go" boots beloved of Lulu etc. "Oh not those Astrud!", I shouted, spilling me Vino!

Huge thanks for finding this - must have taken some spadework! Lots of other follow-on clips, including footage from a 1965 blues fest where The Animals combined forces with Stevie Winwood and the Steampacket front-line vocalists which included Julie and what must have been an equally young Rod Stewart,. I was very sniffy about the infiltration of blues and rock into what I had supposed to the the Richmond Jazz Festival (so-called though it was actually held just west of Windsor, in a field near the Thames). I had taken an Irish girl called Linda from my place of work, especially to see Stan Tracey Quartet perform "under the Milk Wood" - which was wonderful, except a violent thunderstorm broke out, and all that was visible from where we were and the open air bandstand was a sea of umbrellas. My companion had come totally unsuitably dressed for the occasion, wearing those white PVC boots mentioned above by Bluesnik, and to say she was thoroughly miffed on getting those and her black fishnets caked in mud would be an understatement. But the worst moment came when I put my umbrella up, and it caught in her huge piled up beehive hairstyle, causing it all to unravel in a disorderly cascade from the top down! Not one of my more gallant youthful moments, and I have to say whatever might have become something was immediately snuffed out - we parted at the bottom of one of the escalators on the tube - forget which station - with Linda saying, "I go this way now, and you go that way"!

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Young love! My mod partner in 1966 refused to go out with me on a Saturday night because I (bad idea) turned up wearing big check trousers. "I'm not going out with bloody Rupert Bear, what if my friends see us! You can change or we stay in!" I changed into my suit and promised never to fashion sin again.

Talking of beehive bouffant hair, in the early days of Dusty Springfield's solo career, she cultivated that towering hair (pre stage wigs) and was afraid to wash it in case it "collapsed". She'd just spray it with a ton of hairspray every morning. Her guitarist said he had to stand right next to her on some numbers and the smell of the "unwashed for weeks lacquered hair" was appalling. Show biz eh.

[jayne lee wilson]

http://youtu.be/DkwPlRC_Tow ...that "should" be the 14minute edit from the film/play, mostly cut over the music with just a bit of speech where she meets up with her friends again in the Park over Blind Faith.

I agree with SA about that very fine "Save Me" clip. Only thing that throws me is what's on her feet! Suede elf boots? Pirate Boots? There's a great Danish clip of Astrud Gilberto from the late 60s, she's sitting on a stool singing with a Getz like Danish group. She's lovely and great, but when the camera eventually pulls back from her, she will wearing those appalling plastic "Go Go" boots beloved of Lulu etc. "Oh not those Astrud!", I shouted, spilling me Vino!

Poor resolution, but the Save Me ones look like fringed knee-length boot-tops worn over sneakers... quick reach-me-down if you had no boots around...or just wanted to be different every day...

Ooh those white ankle boots! How I longed for those true 60s Quant classics... and never got them then of course.... (my sister wore her knee-length version with an op-art black & white pvc coat - which was so stiff she never wore it much after a few dates....it ended up in a heap on the bedroom floor calcified into unwearability...fabrics were often a problem in those days.)

In fact I have pair now almost identical to that go-go design complete with low block heels, but they're soft-lined glossy ivory leather, very comfy and often worn in the winter, barely visible beneath a big tweed coat, black jeans & polo....

[Serial_Apologist]

Keith Tippett's duo gig at the Purcell Room with the still youthful Matthew Bourne went off well last evening, beginning with Matt coming onstage with two male cellists and a female violist whose names were indistinguishable from where I was sitting, there being no announcement mike onstage. Taking to one of the two shiny concert grands placed soixante-neuf alongside each other, (surely the brand of French Polish used should have been on the programme??) the four of them performed four short group improvisations, in idioms, mostly subdued, ranging from pastoral to abstract-pointilliste, concluding with a piece written by Bourne for a TV show - again I didn't catch the title, nor the lighthearted remarks that had audience members on the left hand side of the hall tittering. Following a break which itself followed the shortest first "half" of any concert I've ever been at (25 minutes) Matthew returned to the stage, leading Keith Tippett through the black curtains backstage to tumultuous, and I thought, rather premature applause. What if it turns out to be a flop? What followed - a continuous set of actually nearly an hour - demonstrated, as always with Keith's choices of partner, an ability to match styles, which in this instance were pretty much complementary. Understandably Keith took most of the initiative in this instance, Matt, early on, asserting his ground with some quite belligerent high dissonant chord interjections over one of Keith's looping bass ideas, but much of the performance consisted in fast swirls of hand movements and reiterated figures semi-out-of-sync producing shimmering ebbs and flows in intensity, with less attention that often to piano innards or add-ons, the whole build up and detumescence coming to a gradual halt, and a few rapt minutes of silence before Keith opened his eyes, and the room erupted.

Matthew told me afterwards that this was not the first time the pair had played together - he listed several previous occasions, mostly festivals from what I gathered. Keith is now over the breathing difficulties; his hand repaired from the injury I mentioned upthread, but the poor man is now suffering greatly from osteo-arthritic back problems - which must have made the repeated bowing in acknowledgement at the end particularly painful, speaking as one who also has the same trouble, albeit intermittently - and Matt said the medics were keen on prescribing the strongest treatments, implying that this might be not such a good idea. It was thus understandable that Keith had not, as customary, emerged to say the usual hellos.

All in all, a most satisfactory concert, and a great relief to see Keith back at what he does so brilliantly. And a good preparation for tonight's Cafe Oto, where the formidable Pat Thomas is booked to give a performance of Duke Ellington interpretations. About which, more, in all probability, anon, folks...

[Jazzrook]

There's an excellent 6-page article by Mike Barnes on Julie & Keith Tippett and review of Tippett's 1980 solo piano album 'The Unlonely Raindancer' in the current WIRE magazine(August 2019).

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=XSS9FLzKO68

JR

[Serial_Apologist]

There's an excellent 6-page article by Mike Barnes on Julie & Keith Tippett and review of Tippett's 1980 solo piano album 'The Unlonely Raindancer' in the current WIRE magazine(August 2019).

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=XSS9FLzKO68

JR

I haven't bothered much with The Wire for quite some time, so thanks for the thumbs up, JR.

The two versions of Tortworth Oak, especially the second one, show more clearly perhaps than anything McCoy Tyner's influence over Keith's piano style - swarming right-hand runs over modal chords in perfect and altered fourths, grounded in emphatic open fifths in the bass, (you can hear the origins in Tyner's powerful, at times Bartokian solo towards the end of Coltrane's "Ascension"), together with his very personal development of and away from that style, as the free flow of his ideas, more and more tenuously related to the opening theme, assumes the free rhapsodic nature of a delerious voyage, taking on the most recondite tonal and atonal relationships in a boiling stream of consciousness continuum to reach the final joyous pounded out open fifths in sustain-reverberating unison. The other tracks each take some aspect of Keith's then-evolving style to focus in on inner workings and reverberative properties arising from them: effects on room acoustic and inner ear of repeating arpeggiations at top and bottom extremes of the keyboard, overlapping movements between the hands unfolded in pedalled and unpedalled alternation in ways previous innovators had not investigated but which seem to draw the worlds of Debussy's more atmospheric Préludes, Bartok's percussive middle period piano works, and the early Minimalist American composer Steve Reich into one orbit, with consequences Tippett would investigate further, altering timbres by laying found objects on the strings rather than pre-fixing the instrument in the manner of Cage's Sonatas and Interludes in a series of albums for the German FMP label under the Mujician heading, of which here we have part of a blueprint.