https://tomtidnam.com Tom Tidnam Mon, 30 Dec 2024 11:39:50 +0000 https://tomtidnam.com en https://tomtidnam.com/Selected-writing-1 Thu, 05 May 2022 17:05:48 +0000 Tom Tidnam https://tomtidnam.com/Selected-writing-1 https://tomtidnam.com/Joe-Davis-on-Three-Decades-of-Far-Out-Recordings Mon, 30 Dec 2024 11:39:50 +0000 Tom Tidnam https://tomtidnam.com/Joe-Davis-on-Three-Decades-of-Far-Out-Recordings Joe Davis on Three Decades of Far Out Recordings Wax Poetics, November 2024 <img width="672" height="866" width_o="672" height_o="866" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0f3d45c7b24737ad850aa9d8d8d53abdb4e458dea96e84dc2c2d5cbd91403796/Screen-Shot-2024-12-30-at-11.48.34.png" data-mid="223936939" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/672/i/0f3d45c7b24737ad850aa9d8d8d53abdb4e458dea96e84dc2c2d5cbd91403796/Screen-Shot-2024-12-30-at-11.48.34.png" /> A trip to the pub after a Sunday afternoon spent ice skating in suburban southwest London isn’t a setting where one expects to encounter a&nbsp;seismic musical discovery. But it’s against this backdrop that the origin story of an unlikely figure whose influence has loomed large over the U.K.’s music scene for three decades essentially begins. The year was 1984, and the pub was the Belvedere Arms, an obscure spot in Richmond where crowds congregated—somewhat incongruously—to dance to the likes of Sergio Mendes, Cal Tjader, and Jon Lucien, unaware that they may have been at the forefront of a burgeoning global scene. It was here that a fifteen-year old Joe Davis first heard Marcos Valle’s “Crickets Sing for Anamaria.” “I heard about this pub and went there one night with my skating friends,” Davis recalls. “They weren’t into it but I was really digging it, and the first thing I heard was Marcos Valle.” The propulsive, percussive samba rhythms of Valle’s 1968 hit sparked an obsession with Brazilian music that would go on to shape Joe’s trailblazing career. His passion for the sounds of Brazil would eventually lead him to form Far Out Recordings, which this year celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. The label, which has recently released new projects from a now eighty-one-year-old Valle (his twenty-third album, Túnel Acustico) and young Brazilian songwriter Bruno Berle (April’s No Reino Dos Afetos 2), alongside reissues of lost ’70s LPs from Opa and Augustin Pereyra Lucena, has been the most influential disseminator of Brazilian music in the U.K. for three decades. Between that early visit to the Belvedere Arms and the 1996 founding of Far Out, Joe set out on a voracious musical quest, which led to his becoming a purveyor of sought-after Brazilian rarities. If you’ve heard a DJ play a samba, MPB [Musica Populara Brasiliera], or Brazilian fusion record in the U.K., there’s a strong possibility that, “it passed through my hands first,” Joe says. By the early 1990s, still in his early twenties, he was travelling to Brazil, sometimes monthly, discovering unheard gems and bringing them back to London to rapturous reception. As a label head and music producer, Davis would eventually find himself working directly with Brazilian icons like Azymuth, Joyce, Milton Nascimento, and Marcus Valle. It was all a dream come true for a boy from Greenford who first heard Azymuth in the early 1980s on Robbie Vincent’s Saturday soul show on BBC Radio 1. “He had a wicked little jazz feature …some of it a bit cheesy but then he’d throw in an Azymuth or some rare Japanese jazz,” Davis recalls of Vincent. “I used to run back from football, record over it from the week before, write down the songs that I loved, then slowly start buying them. He played an Azymuth track from Telecommunications…that freaked me out.” This was a heady period of musical discovery for Joe, and radio was instrumental. “A lot of pirate stations were emerging like [Radio] Invicta, later JFM, Horizon, Solar, Kiss…the Black music scene was massive but there weren’t easy outlets to hear this stuff,” he says. It was Joe’s older brother who first pricked his ears to the sounds of soul, funk, jazz, and disco. “He used to collect soul music, all the ’70s stuff – my earliest memory is throwing all these seven-inch singles around.” His first time hearing these sorts of records outside his suburban home was at local dances, where they would play Bobby Byrd, James Brown and Lyn Collins.Soon he was a DJ and collector himself, playing alongside a young Gilles Peterson at the aforementioned Belvedere Arms. While he also harbored love for jazz, soul, and disco, Joe’s passion for Brazilian music became his motivating force. “I really had this thing about it, I think, because I felt a bit isolated, because my parents were Indian, and they liked their own music,” he explains. “They were first-generation [immigrants who] came over in the ’50s. I didn’t really like what I had access to as a kid, which was Indian music or British pop.” Another cultural avenue seemed to promise a world of greater possibility: football. “I was a huge football fan, and I liked the way the Brazilian team worked, and I noticed their multiculturalism—Black and brown and blonde players,” Joe says. This fed into a subconscious link with Brazil, he explains. “When I saw the Brazilian football crowds, they looked so happy and colourful, whereas the English football fans were all shouting and swearing,” Joe says. “There was a real distinction then between what was Black and what was white, and I was seriously into Black music.” During this time, an expanding Indian diaspora population were viewed as a threat by white suburbanites. “There were so many of us, the local English population got confused,” he explains. “It was a reaction.” These formative experiences resulted in a greater connection to Black culture, just as his peripheral status fed into his fascination and identification with the distant, and seemingly exotic, Brazil. “I always had this anger in me going on in the background, but I affiliated myself with Brazil,” he says. “When I did eventually get there, I felt at home straight away, like I already knew the place.” He first travelled to São Paulo in 1986, at age seventeen. The opportunity arose from a chance meeting, at a record fair in Croydon, with the owner of a record shop in São Paulo, who invited him to visit.<img width="1487" height="1158" width_o="1487" height_o="1158" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f9fd17d9e55f4628d5edccb30ac460f3c63ecca9b58bb70742f355c722a0e043/Joe-Brazil-1.jpg" data-mid="223937019" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f9fd17d9e55f4628d5edccb30ac460f3c63ecca9b58bb70742f355c722a0e043/Joe-Brazil-1.jpg" /> “He had a stockroom upstairs, there were so many records,” Joe reminisces. “I remember thinking: ‘Bloody hell.’ It was my paradise…I spent three weeks going through them, staying up until I couldn’t stay awake, drinking loads of beer, smoking fags, eating fantastic food…I loved it.” The experience was a heady thrill and a welcome release from a Britain that had started to feel constraining. His connection to Brazil, at the time freshly released from the grip of a brutal and repressive military dictatorship, was “not just physical or visual, it was also spiritual,” he says. “It felt almost like India in some ways because Brazil was quite underdeveloped. I really liked it. It was rustic but modern at the same time.” Joe draws a connection between this distant haven and the sanctuary the music scene provided in the often fractious environment of ’70s and ’80s London. “Growing up in school, the racism and violence from English kids was a nightmare but, when I went out on the jazz scene and started going to record shops, it was a bit of an escape from the mainstream culture. It was more diverse, more welcoming,” he says. As well as being lots of fun, the São Paulo trip also proved to be a lucrative experience for Joe, who was already displaying a canny, entrepreneurial instinct that went hand-in-hand with his musical passion. As he continued to travel to Brazil, these trips naturally developed into a commercial enterprise, with DJ contemporaries asking Joe to bring back certain records that were impossible to locate in the U.K. “I would be buying twenty, fifty copies,” he says, bringing them back on a courier flight and shipping the rest. “There were other guys going to America, cornering the acid jazz or Latin scene, doing the same thing, getting loads of recognition. I didn’t think I was anything special, I just loved the music and the culture and the vibes out there. At first it was slow—I was going for myself and making just enough to cover travel costs. And then it exploded around ’89, ’90. Suddenly in that acid jazz scene, Brazilian was the next big thing.” <img width="1170" height="818" width_o="1170" height_o="818" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/70f19fa259d418a5411b206641301d67b4a22908617ccb38560bcb4740832a03/Joe-Brazil-2.jpg" data-mid="223937020" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/70f19fa259d418a5411b206641301d67b4a22908617ccb38560bcb4740832a03/Joe-Brazil-2.jpg" />By 1994, Joe was visiting Brazil practically every month. “Gilles had started&nbsp; [record label] Talkin’ Loud by this point, and there was a big demand for what I was doing,” he says. “It was totally my niche.” From this, Far Out Recordings came into being. “I was looking at these artists that I loved, thinking, apart from Milton, they’re not recording, so what are they doing? I saw both Marcos and Azymuth [live] around ’92 and I thought ‘These guys are killer, they’ll blow up in England.’” Joe’s connections got him funding to record and produce his first major project, the 1996 self-titled debut album by Friends From Rio, which brought some of his favourite Brazilian musicians, including Alex Malheiros, Hyldon, and Robertinho Silva, together in the studio. Espousing his love for Azymuth during the recording of the album triggered a serendipitous chain of events. “The guy in the studio said, ‘We’re all good friends, we come from the same town…’ and he put us in touch.” After an initial meeting in Brazil, the group came to London. Despite having intended to set up the label as a showcase for his own productions, Joe’s attention was soon redirected. And so Joe found himself making an indelible mark upon the history of the group he’d long admired, orchestrating their reunion. The resulting album, 1996’s Carnival, was followed by nine further Azymuth releases for the label. Eventually, Far Out went on to release music from Marcos Valle and Joyce, although, Joe says, “these relationships took a longer time to build.” <img width="1170" height="779" width_o="1170" height_o="779" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ec2e712aca31e206fdb2699a62e2012526623d7b9f0657b1443a12c99e727de6/Joe-Joyce.jpg" data-mid="223937035" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ec2e712aca31e206fdb2699a62e2012526623d7b9f0657b1443a12c99e727de6/Joe-Joyce.jpg" />Joe readily admits that his experiences in the music industry haven’t always been harmonious, and have been by no means immune to the racism he’d hoped to escape growing up. “I had some nasty shit when I was growing up and within the industry as well, but I've never said anything,” he says. “I just want to get on with it.” Some experiences, however, have left their mark. “Somebody once said to me, ‘Oh, you’re Paki Joe.’ I said, ‘What are you on about?’ This is somebody in our scene. He said, ‘Everybody knows you as Paki Joe.’ I said, ‘Listen mate’—this is probably after ten years of being on the scene—‘Nobody’s ever said that to me, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I really disliked it.”&nbsp; After thirty years in business with Far Out, the legacy of his Brazilian discoveries continues to loom large. The label’s marriage of the old—the Brazilian jazz and fusion that first sparked Joe’s passion—and the new— collaborations with pioneering electronic musicians such as Theo Parrish, Mark Pritchard, and Dego—has been key to its appeal. Joe has continued to chase and capture the excitement he felt when he was first exposed to Azymuth’s pioneering sound, which sounded like the future then and, arguably, still does. “I wish I knew then what I know now,” he reflects, “because I think my records would be even stronger.” The day-to-day business of running an independent record label in 2024 leaves little time to pursue the more creative aspects that drew him to music initially. “I don’t have time to produce records anymore, I’m too busy running the label,” he says. This can inevitably lead to a degree of frustration, as, Joe attests, “what’s in my head isn’t necessarily in someone else’s.” Still, he has done better than most at getting what’s in his head out into other people’s. Looking back on the ascendant 1990s, Joe shares a bit of nostalgia for simpler times, but little regret with how things have evolved. “It was a great time,” he says. “Maybe I didn’t take advantage of what I could have, [and] made [more of] my own records, got signed, made loads of commercial music.” The truth, Joe says, is that wasn’t his primary objective. “In the end, I loved the artists I worked with and I was very passionate about the music and thought it needed to be heard.” Read on Wax Poetics here.&nbsp; https://tomtidnam.com/Europe-Endless-The-America-Of-Paris-Texas Tue, 30 Aug 2022 11:32:46 +0000 Tom Tidnam https://tomtidnam.com/Europe-Endless-The-America-Of-Paris-Texas Europe Endless: The America Of Paris, Texas The Quietus, August 2022 <img width="550" height="309" width_o="550" height_o="309" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6813e78dd1b279b946a6ea71d916e0f716c9ffb277f2b7b1b65dbbb1926d6a6c/paristexas.jpeg" data-mid="151621638" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/550/i/6813e78dd1b279b946a6ea71d916e0f716c9ffb277f2b7b1b65dbbb1926d6a6c/paristexas.jpeg" /> It begins with an endlessly vast, endlessly empty desert plain. It could almost be an alien landscape. But, when accompanied by the sparse, plaintive twang of Ry Cooder’s slide guitar, based around Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark Was The Night (Cold Was The Ground),’ which the musician called “the most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music,” it becomes clear. Paris, Texas presents America through the eyes of European outsiders – German director Wim Wenders and Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller. Through this lens, the scorched terrain, out of which Cooder’s score seems to organically seep, is rendered with a searing beauty, both otherworldly and quintessentially American. Into this stark, unforgiving vista walks a lone figure, like the crusading hero of a Western, but with no discernable direction or purpose – mute, trauma-scarred Travis Henderson, played with gaunt, craggy intensity by Harry Dean Stanton. Another outsider in this strange land, he emerges from the desert and collapses in a remote bar, forcing his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) to make the journey from Los Angeles to collect him. Walt doesn’t know where Travis has been the last four years, and neither do we. Both Travis and Wenders take their time, and the glacial pace at which the heartbreaking backstory is filled in is one of the film’s triumphs. In the meantime, America is observed as both Wenders and Travis see it, iconic imagery somehow anew. There is something mythic in its visual landscape, with diners, parking lots, gas stations and highways presented in warm, painterly compositions by Müller. The transatlantic identity of the film, a co-production between companies in France and West Germany, is embodied in the incongruous juxtaposition of the title. ‘Paris’ is the first word spoken by a previously mute Travis. This initially confuses Walt, who, unaware of the Texan town, assumes he is referring to Paris, France. An oft-repeated joke of their father’s, recounted by Travis as he slowly starts to speak again, hinges on this same confusion, a pause between ‘Paris’ and ‘Texas’, which, in its momentary misdirection, conjures an aura of distant, sophisticated Europe before crashing us back down onto dusty American land. As with the likes of Billy Wilder or Miloš Forman, Wenders’ portrait of this vast, unknowable country has a distinctly European perspective, one that can reveal hidden depths. While the imagery and soundtrack embody Americana, Hollywood clichés are absent, replaced with restraint, subdued quietude and nuanced, unsentimental humanism. Stanton, after a lengthy career as a supporting actor, makes for a highly unconventional leading man. The film unfolds slowly, trusting in silence, leaving things unsaid, Travis himself not speaking for 30 minutes. Towards the end, there is an embrace, or an acceptance, of moral ambiguity – there are no heroes in this tale, only damaged individuals struggling to connect. Other small details warp the landscape, revealing it to be populated by aliens of various stripes – the first human Travis encounters is the similarly stranded German doctor who treats him; Natassja Kinski, a German actor, plays Travis’ estranged wife Jane, a much younger Texan woman; Walt’s wife, played by Aurore Clement, is French. While the story contains a classical tale of seeking redemption, the film’s elements render them strangely foreign. Wenders had, over the course of an already prolific career, been building steadily towards this definitive examination of American life. Along with contemporaries Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Margarethe von Trotta, he pioneered New German Cinema, a mostly self-funded, low-budget, Nouvelle Vague-inspired movement. Of this cohort, Wenders was not alone in his fascination with the mythical United States. Fassbinder forged a new form of modernist melodrama out of his reimagining of the 1950s oeuvre of Douglas Sirk (another German who took a sideways look at America) in films such as Fear Eats the Soul and The Marriage of Maria Braun. Fassbinder did so to expose the hypocrisy of a German society he accused of living through a collective post-war denialism, unable or unwilling to face up to its own history. Lacking Fassbinder’s excoriating cynicism, Wenders was more concerned with the hold America seemed to have over the collective European imagination. For Wenders as for many Europeans, America would have been a filmic domain before it was a real place. In 1973, he visited the country for the first time, on a road trip from New York to Los Angeles with photographer Annie Leibowitz. “I felt like an astronaut visiting another planet,” said Wenders of the trip, declaring that “‘America’ doesn’t exist – only in our minds or as a figure of speech.” Perhaps this is what he had in mind when he had one of the characters in Kings of the Road say, “The Americans have colonised our unconscious.” The ‘Road Movie’ trilogy, also comprising Alice in the Cities (the most obvious precursor to Paris, Texas) and The Wrong Move, began to crystallise this fixation, but it was evident as early as Wenders’ 1970 debut Summer in the City, with its debts to The Lovin’ Spoonful and Edward Hopper. Paris, Texas inverts the sense of cultural imperialism animating the director’s earlier films, by rendering America itself irreconcilably ‘other’, populated by atomised outcasts. In the first of two road trips, Walt takes Travis to Los Angeles, where Walt’s wife and Travis’ estranged son Hunter live. They travel from the vast empty plains of Texas to the modern alienated, fragmented cityscape of Los Angeles, all sprawl and no centre. Walt tells Travis that he designs billboards, which pepper the highway, heralding Travis’ arrival from wilderness into civilisation. Emblems of American excess in a world dominated by the imagery of advertising, they embody the aesthetic gulf between a European city and an American one. Their ubiquitous presence is as surreal a sight as the barren Texan desert to the outsider, the man who walks endlessly, arriving in a city where, in the words of Hunter, “Nobody walks, everybody drives.’ These words are spoken when Travis attempts to connect with his son by suggesting he walk him home from school. Wenders’ America is one where people struggle to connect all the time. Travis does gradually begin to connect with Hunter, who quotes Star Wars, as clear an example of American cultural hegemony as any, when he comes to understand that Travis and his mother Jane loved one another “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” Keen to assimilate and assume the role of traditional American father, Travis seeks assistance from another outsider, Walt and Anne’s Mexican maid. She tells him he can be a rich father or a poor father – he’d like to settle somewhere in the middle but she tells him this isn’t possible, it’s one or the other. Naturally, he chooses rich. Their understanding of the roles they must assume within American society is either aspirational or clear-eyed, or both. These fumbling attempts to navigate modern life amount to a search for human connection in a cultural and geographical landscape often all too hostile to such notions. As Travis walks through a city only truly navigable by car, he encounters a fellow outcast, whose view of America, screamed from the top of a bridge overlooking one of the many highways slicing through the city, is one of imminent apocalyptic destruction. His response is to reach out and touch him before continuing on. Eventually, Travis and Hunter embark on another road trip, this time to find Jane. They travel to Houston, where the streets seem deserted but for father and son, as if they are alone in attempting to forge a connection here. At the film’s conclusion, Travis and Jane almost but don’t quite connect, their ability to touch stymied by the one-way mirror between them. But Travis, in an act he deems as fulfilling a straightforwardly heroic purpose, is more concerned with facilitating another connection – reuniting mother and son. At the film’s end, he rides out into the night, having done so successfully. It’s almost like a quintessential Western, but this denouement isn’t straightforwardly happy – Jane initially abandoned Hunter because she felt unable to take care of him. Is he really better off here than he was with his surrogate parents in Los Angeles? Has Travis done the right thing, or has he made things worse? Satisfied, he returns, to where we don’t know, back into the unknowable immensity of America. The film doesn’t judge, doesn’t provide easy answers. It simply portrays, from outside, just as Wenders does with America. Read on The Quietus here https://tomtidnam.com/The-Souvenir-Part-II-And-Joanna-Hogg-s-Relationship-With-Class Thu, 05 May 2022 17:35:44 +0000 Tom Tidnam https://tomtidnam.com/The-Souvenir-Part-II-And-Joanna-Hogg-s-Relationship-With-Class The Souvenir Part II And Joanna Hogg's Relationship With Class The Quietus, February 2022 <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/25f11d3c18fe3a3cef8c6775c28a241e0f17f077e7588c6e4a6517bf20f6af3a/FHcq984XoAAgRsG.jpg" data-mid="141773275" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/25f11d3c18fe3a3cef8c6775c28a241e0f17f077e7588c6e4a6517bf20f6af3a/FHcq984XoAAgRsG.jpg" /> “I feel as though I want to not live my whole life in this very privileged part of the world I come from,” says Honor Swinton Byrne’s Julie in Joanna Hogg’s 2019 film The Souvenir. “I want to be really aware about what’s going on around me.” Julie is a quasi-autobiographical stand-in for Hogg, and the film recreates a traumatic love affair from her early 20s. Swinton Byrne is Hogg’s goddaughter, The Souvenir her first major film role. She is also the daughter of arthouse mainstay Tilda Swinton, who plays Julie’s mother in the film. Swinton and Hogg are lifelong friends, having attended boarding school in Kent together, and Swinton made an early appearance in Hogg’s 1986 film school graduation piece Caprice. Hogg’s film school travails drive the narrative of follow-up The Souvenir Part II, which details Julie’s response to the traumatic events of the first film. This complex webbing of autobiographical and metatextual elements intensifies the story dynamics at play, remarking, in the process, upon “this very privileged part of the world” that both Julie and Joanna Hogg come from. In The Souvenir, Julie initially attempts, through art, to transcend her own background by making a social realist portrayal of working class life on the docks of Sunderland. When the charming, mysterious and deeply damaged Anthony sweeps her off her feet, he does so with bold pronouncements about the role of art in relation to life. “We don’t want to see life played out as it is,” he tells her, “we want to see it as it is experienced in this soft machine.” Anthony, an addict, dies of an overdose at the end of the first film, provoking a reflection and subsequent change of artistic tack in Julie. “I don’t want to show life as it plays out in real time” Julie says, explaining her change in direction to her sceptical film school tutors towards the start of The Souvenir Part II. “I want to show life as I imagine it.” The brilliance of The Souvenir Part II lies in the way it succeeds in doing both at once. The disarming realism of the first film remains, with unmannered performances from a cast of often non-professional actors. But a new sumptuousness emerges too, in perfectly judged tandem with these familiar traits, expressing the ambition swirling through Julie’s head, as Anthony’s extolling of the virtues of Powell and Pressburger leads to their influence bleeding into the visual palette of the second film, and particularly Julie’s film-within-a-film. The sequel’s power builds upon the first film, opening up its form in dazzling and sometimes moving ways. Life is shown in a way that is both as real as possible and alluringly filmic. Where does this shift leave Julie’s attempts to expand her scope beyond her own privileged upbringing? The films are aware of the limits of their own societal purview, yet insistently portray their characters fundamentally as humans experiencing pain, loss and trauma. At the same time, their auto-fictional dimension further highlights the integral connection between their material circumstances and the rarefied milieus they inhabit and observe. What makes them complicated is how they do so not necessarily uncritically, yet also not as critically as some of Hogg’s detractors may like. Any internal critique of the centring of upper-middle-class lives in Hogg’s work becomes most marked in the Souvenir films, which contain a tacitly self-effacing class politics – the contrast between bohemian London and the genteel, bourgeois parochialism of Julie’s family home seems quietly pointed, while there is an awareness of the way Julie’s material circumstances affect her ability to explore her own inner world, as Anthony implores her to do in the first film. It’s obvious in the contrast between her initially intended work and her final graduation project. The Souvenir Part II becomes more of an ensemble piece than the two-hander the first film was, as Julie sheds the insular self she was in her relationship with Anthony, the world expanding beyond the immediate environment of the protagonists, looking increasingly outward even as Julie’s work turns inward. Hogg’s first three films are far more environmentally contained: the rented Tuscan villa of 2007’s Unrelated and the tense family holiday to the Scilly Isles in 2010’s Archipelago both present closed-off, isolated spaces for the well-heeled characters to express their internal angst and tensions without much interaction with the wider world. “I tend to think other people think that I’m investigating class when actually I’m not that interested in it,” said Hogg in an interview around the release of the first Souvenir film. Discussing the particularly hermetic milieu of her third film Exhibition, released in 2013, Hogg, perhaps tellingly, said she was “making a film where no one's going to talk about class, because I’m talking about two artists, artists are in a class of their own in a sense, so we’re not going to have these phrases bandied about like ‘privilege’ and ‘middle-class.’” It’s a strangely short-sighted remark from Hogg, as a vital thematic thread in her films from Archipelago onwards explores the link between one’s social status and their relationship to art. With The Souvenir, adversely, she admits to “heading into the eye of the storm because I’m dealing with a young woman who’s asking these questions herself.” In making a film about her own experiences, Julie surrenders herself to the privileged upbringing she was trying to escape from, but it is that very upbringing that has allowed her the tools, platform and space to recreate and potentially work through her trauma. Her material circumstances remain integral, and the space to reflect is not merely internal, as we see in Julie’s chic Knightsbridge flat, where much of her troubled relationship with Anthony played out. These films trade in a sort of cinematic auto-fiction, a form of fictionalised autobiography very much en vogue in contemporary popular literature. Names like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Chris Kraus, Eduoard Louis and Sheila Heti are synonymous with the style, but a much earlier pioneer of this melding of autobiography and fiction was Jean Genet, in his 1940s novels Miracle of the Rose and The Thief’s Journal, which dramatise his experiences on a penal colony and as a criminal and prostitute across Europe. Despite the accusations of bourgeois navel-gazing some auto-fiction may receive, Genet was radical and outward-looking, seeking to subvert traditional moral values through an unflinching portrayal of lives usually ascribed to the underbelly of European life and culture. By positioning himself amidst these lives, blurring fact and fiction, he challenged assumptions and prejudices of readers in a way that was genuinely disruptive and audacious. A generation or so later, another pioneer of this ambivalent style, Annie Ernaux, used it to present an unadorned accounting of the small, accumulative facts of her life. Positioning herself within broader French society allowed her to comment on it without resorting to didacticism, remaining deeply personal and not undercutting the inherently political nature of such self-examination. Her own life and those of her parents, the people she grew up with and the people she observes on the Paris Metro, its streets and supermarches serve as a collective chronicle of French society and its stratified class structure. Ernaux’s working class background, and her conflicted extraction from that background into the rarefied world of literature, lends her work a conflict, an outsider’s radical eye that Hogg’s privileged background may deny, creating a more ambivalent relationship to the auto-fiction form. Discussion of Hogg’s films could be more open about this. It is their simultaneous acknowledgement of the class system, and raw emotional truth that allows it to be briefly forgotten, that lends them their ambivalent power. To dismiss the class politics running through them is to do them a disservice, however, just as much as it would be to apply a strictly materialist critical reading of them. One should not dismiss her work for the gaze it fixes on a privileged elite as much as one should not ignore criticisms arguing that the world she portrays is alienating to many, but should instead call for a more broadly democratised cinematic landscape in which many voices as vital as Hogg’s may have the opportunity to produce work as simultaneously innovative and honest as hers. Read on The Quietus here https://tomtidnam.com/A-sad-and-beautiful-journey-Jose-Mauro-speaks Thu, 05 May 2022 16:58:18 +0000 Tom Tidnam https://tomtidnam.com/A-sad-and-beautiful-journey-Jose-Mauro-speaks A sad and beautiful journey – José Mauro speaks The Wire, May 2021 <img width="940" height="735" width_o="940" height_o="735" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1eceee0fb0344a333958fd7fafb1cf6834cfce6e1dbe9c39eea071dc6ff4a6b6/jose_mauro_cropped.jpg" data-mid="141768395" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/940/i/1eceee0fb0344a333958fd7fafb1cf6834cfce6e1dbe9c39eea071dc6ff4a6b6/jose_mauro_cropped.jpg" /> For decades, the most pervasive theory as to the whereabouts of the enigmatic Brazilian musician José Mauro was that he was dead. Speculation varied as to how: a motorcycle accident, shortly after the release of his staggering 1970 debut, Obnoxius; ‘disappeared’ by the censorious and authoritarian military junta sometime in the 70s, perhaps owing to the nature of his music and lyrics. Ultimately, all these rumours have proved fanciful – Mauro is alive and well, living a quiet existence on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. In 1970, Mauro, with the help of producer Roberto Quartin, co-writer Ana Maria Bahiana, also a prolific journalist and author, arranger Lindolfo Gaya and future luminaries of Brazilian music such as Wilson Das Neves and Azymuth’s Ivan ‘Mamao’ Conti, recorded two brooding, idiosyncratic, beautiful records in Rio’s Odeon Studios that sounded – and sound – like little else, from Brazil or elsewhere. “It was wonderful,” Mauro tells me. “They [Das Neves and Conti] were giants already, real pros… Roberto Quartin taught me a lot: how to sing, more than anything else. He was a great master to me.” That year, Obnoxius, the partial result of these recordings, was released, but it took six years for its successor A Viagem Des Horas to appear, despite being recorded concurrently. By this time, Mauro seemed to have disappeared completely, and for a long time this remained the case. Obnoxius was reissued by London based Brazilian music specialists Far Out Recordings in 2016, and it’s taken them about as long as it initially took Quartin’s label Forma to put out the latter record, which is released in May. “I really wanted to track him down before we carried on doing anymore of his releases,” Far Out head Joe Davis tells me. “When we released Obnoxius after all those years, we had people contacting us saying they knew where José was and it gave me a strange vibe.” Eventually, “we managed to track José down. Over the years people have contacted us and they turned out to be a bit phoney, or very aggressive and strange. I couldn’t understand it. We had heard, contrary to what we’d been told, that he was still alive, but with all my contacts in Brazil no one knew anything about José, it was a real mystery.” Now, with Mauro’s whereabouts finally accounted for, “to be able to release his work today is amazing, especially this never properly and fully released record.” A Viagem Des Horas, which translates roughly to Journey Of The Hours, is as remarkable as its predecessor, which has built up a cult following, earning accolades from Flying Lotus and Floating Points and providing sample fodder for Madlib. Both records share an air of mystery befitting their creator. Psychedelia, soul, orchestral music and folk mix with MPB, Música Popular Brasileira, the style most pervasive in Brazil at the time. The results are something entirely unique. Mauro’s own omnivorous tastes informed his approach. “Jazz and classical music influenced me a lot,” he says. “As for Brazilian music, I was always into Edu Lobo, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Dorival Caymmi, and [Heitor] Villa-Lobos. I went to the studio thinking about my own style, in order to do my own thing without emulating anyone, even though we always take something from our musical education.” He reflects on the strangely stirring sense of melancholy that runs through these records, saying “most of my music is also sad, and I’ve tried to apply beauty to it.” His and Bahiana’s shared interest in Candomblé and Umbanda, amalgamations of traditional West African religions and Roman Catholicism, was also instrumental. “I used to attend Umbanda centres from time to time,” says Mauro. “I was also fascinated with the musical side of it, with its percussive dimension.” Bahiana picks up the theme: “I had a close encounter with, let’s say, a very powerful energy, some years before meeting José Mauro. He had been involved in Umbanda and Candomblé around the time we met – again, this is a generation looking for options… [those of us] that grew up under the dictatorship wanted, at the time, to escape.’ The search for something transcendental runs through Mauro’s mournful vocals, the haunting opentuning of the acoustic guitar and the soaring orchestration. Mauro and Bahiana both shared a sense of searching, of yearning for something better, when they eventually came to work together. Bahiana was already prolific, having “been writing essays, short stories, articles, poetry, since forever”, alongside contributing to the major Brazilian newspapers, O Estado De S Paulo, Folha De S Paulo, O Globo and Journal De Brazil. “One of my closest friends from school introduced us,” she recalls. “He was a constant presence in the informal musical meetings that were common in the south neighbourhoods of Rio… [and] was looking for someone who could work with him for lyrics.” In Mauro’s telling, she caught his eye “while she was defending a song as a composer at a University Song Festival. I fell in love with her lyrics, and I said to myself, that girl is going to be my musical partner. “Three days later, we were already composing Obnoxius together,” he continues. “We created about 100 songs in little more than a year.” Bahiana’s elliptical lyrics, in translation, are full of surreal, haunting, at times violent imagery, replete with images of broken bodies, lonely winds and quasi-religious lamentations, drenched in despair, regret and solitude. A sense of some sort of spiritual quest links all this, the Journey of the title. It’s perhaps unsurprising, given that these records were made against the gloomy backdrop of military authoritarianism, with Mauro staying put unlike the many musicians who fled or were, like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, exiled. “There was a shared dream of creating an alternative way of life, an alternative country, maybe,” considers Bahiana. “Some dropped out and created communes by the beaches or up in the mountains, or forests. Some embraced drugs, and, for many, it was a dangerous option. And some, like the two of us, and many of our friends, optioned for focusing on the arts, music being something that runs deep in Brazilian culture.” The management of all sectors of public communication at that time was overseen by the Special Counsel of Public Relations. For Bahiana, the indirect nature of lyric writing may have been the best way to tackle an oppressive and authoritarian regime that otherwise made dissent very difficult. “Music, visual arts, cinema, poetry, writing – it’s almost ironic that a pretty horrendous period of Brazilian history was also one of the most fertile on the cultural front,” she says. “The challenge was – how can we share this and not be arrested or worse? After 1969 – the year when the extreme military right wing took power, in a coup within a coup, showing your work in public was highly dangerous. Options were created – house parties, concerts in semi-abandoned theatres, at all hours. The goal was to survive, in spite of it all.” The military dictatorship, which took power in a coup d’état in 1964, issued Institutional Act 5, the fifth and most infamous of 17 decrees, in 1968. This gave Artur da Costa e Silva, the dictatorship’s second president, power to dismiss the National Congress, strip politicians of their powers, and repress left wing activists and groups and any other forms of opposition. This oppressive apparatus was continued and expanded under Costa e Silva’s successor, Emilio Garrastazu Medici, who ruled from 1969–74. The so-called Brazilian Miracle was a period of rapid economic growth alongside harsh repression, which mainly benefited the country’s wealthy elite whilst the minimum wage was lowered. It was out of this fractious milieu that Mauro and Ana Maria Bahiana emerged, recording their often dark and foreboding yet defiantly beautiful music at the apex of the regime. For Mauro, unlike Bahiana, the conditions under which they made this music were incidental. “My music is non-political, as far as I can see,” he says. “But, well, I was not a writer of lyrics. I don’t have all the answers.” Bahiana concedes that, “our songs were dealing with existential issues, emotions, memories. None of this captured the attention of the censors – they were worried about what they called protest songs, songs dealing explicitly with what was going on.” It’s notable that while none of Bahiana’s lyrics were ever censored, “most of the pieces I wrote during those dictatorship years got either mutilated or barred for publication. Keep in mind, this includes articles about, say, The Who’s Quadrophenia – it came back to me with huge Xs in most pages, and a note in bright red saying that the album and my review were ‘a call to civil war’.” Despite Mauro’s insistence that his work is apolitical, rumours still persisted, over the decades in which Mauro vanished from sight, that the regime had something to do with his unexplained absence. After Obnoxius, it took six years for A Viagem Des Horas to be released, about which Mauro simply says “it took too long… the Odeon [record label] director at the time called me to his office once and said: ‘Your songs are wonderful, but I doubt that they end up selling more than ten records. Your music is not that popular.’” After that, nothing. “My body pushed me away from music, health became a stumbling block for me,” says Mauro by way of explanation. “If I had the strength to carry on with composing, I would have... always focused on achieving a sense of beauty, a sense of wonder.” He spent the next few decades ”giving guitar lessons and making music for theatre… all kept me connected to music.” He remained in Rio, living now on its outskirts. His attitude towards his musical past remains contemplative: “I still think about some of my songs, like “Exaltação E Lamento Do Último Rei” and “Tarde De Núpcias.” Sometimes, problems distract me from music. I still listen to a lot of music, from Liszt and Bach to Dionne Warwick and Frank Sinatra. And always Danilo Caymmi, Edu Lobo and Milton Nascimento.” Bahiana, on the other hand, has remained prolific, continuing to write books and articles. I ask her how, as a journalist and writer, she reckons with the legacy of the dictatorship, in particular the idea of a widespread cultural amnesia about the crimes of the regime – partly a result of the 1979 Amnesty Law, which absolved the government and military of political crimes committed during the regime. “Most of it was completely lost and banned from the collective memory,” says Bahiana, “for a substantial amount of people, everything that happened between 1964–85 was really good – ‘we had progress and order’, etc.” She recalls a particular moment in 2014, touring Brazil to promote her book The 1964 Almanac, “a massive collection of facts, ideas, personages, and the arts” from that year, during the research of which she “became fascinated with the correspondence between the leaders of the coup and high authorities in Washington DC. At every single event, I had a substantial group of young people, who bought the book and then would ask me ‘wasn’t 1964 great?’ … It was rather difficult to answer that without being extremely rude.” Throughout all this time, Mauro’s music languished in obscurity. In 1991, Joe Davis, then a young DJ from West London a few year’s away from founding Far Out Recordings, stumbled upon Obnoxius on one of his record digging trips to Rio. It was in the $1 section, and a combination of the cover and his recognition of the producer Roberto Quartin led to him buying two copies. “Definitely what makes these records unique sounding is the musicians first and foremost, and the arrangements of Gaya,” says Joe. “You’ve got the A-Team working on that record: Wilson Das Neves, Ivan Conti, Rildo Hora, Dom Salvador, Paulo Mora, Geraldo Vespar. Roberto, being a great producer, he could call them in.” Nearly three decades on, between reissuing Obnoxius and its follow-up, “a young guy whose record we’re about to release, Guilherme Estevez, contacted me out of the blue and said ‘look I’m living close to José, I can help you if you need anything from him, I love his music.’ From there, we managed to get straight to his doorstep because, until then, he hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone.” “I feel gratified because my work is being recognized,’ reflect Mauro. “I did not expect it to last that long. I do think that my music is contemporary, but I never imagined a comeback.” As Mauro and Bahiana reflect on the perilous era that saw the creation of their twin masterworks, the political situation once again looks bleak in Brazil. The country is currently one of the epicentres of the Covid-19 pandemic. The notorious right wing president Jair Bolsonaro continues to oppose any measures to curb the outbreak. Thinking about the situation in Brazil now versus then, Bahiana says “I don’t think it’s the same because there’s still freedom of the press, and the basic freedoms and human rights are technically available. But we have an extreme right wing, maniacal, ignorant individual in power, surrounded by an extraordinarily stupid, greedy and corrupt group of minions. It’s a disaster of a different brand, but still a disaster.” Mauro meanwhile asserts that “Brazil is still fertile ground for music. Yet the pandemic casts a shadow over everything. It’s hard to make music apart from the audience.” If anyone knows about producing remarkable music without much of an audience, it’s Mauro. Read on The Wire here https://tomtidnam.com/Tomorrow-s-Warriors-Interview-with-Janine-Irons-and-Gary-Crosby Thu, 05 May 2022 17:28:17 +0000 Tom Tidnam https://tomtidnam.com/Tomorrow-s-Warriors-Interview-with-Janine-Irons-and-Gary-Crosby Tomorrow’s Warriors – Interview with Janine Irons and Gary Crosby Straight No Chaser, Autumn 2019 <img width="2454" height="3145" width_o="2454" height_o="3145" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f44147c69b1333f4b059bb8dff50506a08a2588c87665b85c1ff760e398c1afd/Cover.jpeg" data-mid="141772406" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f44147c69b1333f4b059bb8dff50506a08a2588c87665b85c1ff760e398c1afd/Cover.jpeg" /> <img width="2358" height="3152" width_o="2358" height_o="3152" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/96852019fc0597f2e02ec5518439f5d9f017a9f1ecdd38df167baea425c3a965/Page-1.jpeg" data-mid="141772405" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/96852019fc0597f2e02ec5518439f5d9f017a9f1ecdd38df167baea425c3a965/Page-1.jpeg" /> <img width="2340" height="3101" width_o="2340" height_o="3101" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d5a015033fac6030c29486a86b1754658a1248e521aa7824290e685d334c6ac4/Page-2.jpeg" data-mid="141772404" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d5a015033fac6030c29486a86b1754658a1248e521aa7824290e685d334c6ac4/Page-2.jpeg" /> An unassuming residential road in Harrow, North-West London, is an unlikely location for the headquarters of an organisation that’s served as a vital hub for the UK’s jazz community for nearly thirty years. But it's here that Janine Irons and Gary Crosby have forged a path for which the current rude health of the UK jazz scene and its blossoming of young talent owes an enormous debt. Together they run Tomorrow’s Warriors, a nonprofit music education organisation that grew out of a jam session that Gary, double-bassist in influential ensemble the Jazz Warriors, set up in 1991 following his departure from that group. Two years later, Gary met Janine, who was instrumental in building it up from those roots into the professional, structured organisation it is today. “When we started”, she tells me, “what was lacking was access to higher-profile gigs and a regular platform for people to play…we developed that platform, and had to keep putting in bits of infrastructure to the scene because it just wasn’t there”. It is thanks in large part to their work that today’s UK jazz scene is so thriving, though Janine also gives credit to organisations like Jazz Re:Freshed, Good Evening Arts, Church of Sound and Steam Down, who “have shored up the infrastructure…we’re not quite there yet, we’re in a good place at the moment, but it does remain to be seen how robust this resurgence in jazz is”. &nbsp; Gary and Janine’s respective paths pre-Tomorrow’s Warriors illuminate the values that have informed their work ever since. The Jazz Warriors, which Gary helped found in the mid-1980s, influenced multiple generations of UK jazz, and was a launching pad for figures like Orphy Robinson, Courtney Pine and Cleveland Watkiss.Just as the current crop of Tomorrow’s Warriors alumni incorporate a mishmash of contemporary influences unique to modern London, the Jazz Warriors combined traditional jazz training with a more unorthodox approach, reflecting their backgrounds in reggae, funk and marching bands. Through this, they rejected stuffy traditionalism, instead connecting more broadly with music of the black diaspora, representing a heritage not necessarily reflected in the jazz establishment of the time. This radical approach continues to have a seismic impact on UK jazz, informing the values that Tomorrow’s Warriors have instilled in multiple generations of young musicians. With influential Jamaican jazz guitarist Ernest Ranglin as his uncle, Gary knew a career in music beckoned but it wasn’t until his mid-20s that it led to regular work, when “Courtney Pine, Steve Williamson and those guys came on the scene…I met them when they were 18, and I could feel there was another energy I hadn’t felt before, especially in the black community.” He learnt early on of the importance of having a space in which a musical community can come together and collaborate, because “that’s how you learn music, you don’t learn music at college”. It’s clear how crucial this lesson has continued to be upon subsequent generations of jazz musicians searching, like Gary, for “a place to play”. For many, Tomorrow’s Warriors has been a fundamental provider of that much-needed space, and the sense of collaborative community that it provides. But once you become aware of the need for a space for the community, you raise the question of how you provide that space. “There was something Art Blakey said to me one day - we were doing something at ITV, and he looked around and said “damn, who’s paying for all this?”” This led Gary to ask that question himself - how were scenes like the one he’d found his musical voice within kept afloat financially? “This was money filtering down from major record companies who’d invested in two or three people, and everyone else was trying to exploit that. And it made me think, “are there other ways to do this?”” Meeting Janine helped Gary with that side of things, as he freely admits he “never had the skills”. Her journey into the jazz world was less conventional - after early musical endeavours studying classical piano and dance, as well as singing in a funk band (“not one that you’d know or want to know”), she ended up in the City as a PA for an international bank. Despite climbing steadily through the ranks, she “hated the City. I thought they were all a bunch of philistines, only interested in money - for me there was no humanity - I needed something creative”. This urge led to a sideline in photography which led to her meeting Gary at one of his Jazz Jamaica gigs. Eventually she began helping with the admin of the still-nascent Tomorrow’s Warriors project, which then led to “driving the bus, booking the gigs, doing the photography, writing the press releases, doing all the marketing…and eventually moving into a management role”. Her primary motivation came from seeing “all these young black musicians, who I knew absolutely nothing about, and I thought “how come I don’t see you in the press?” They were invisible and I thought we needed to make them visible.” This sense of injustice continues to inspire her. “I’ve always had that in me, that’s why I always got thrown out of school, because I was the one to say “this isn’t fair” - and it’s not fair that everyone doesn’t have access to arts and those opportunities. There was always that sense of civic duty, helping people and giving back. It was great having a proper salary in the city, but it’s a soulless place where the only focus is money and, really, Gary saved me from all that”. Giving back has remained central to the organisation’s ethos, as it moved from a regular jam session at the Jazz Cafe to the Spice of Life in Soho, whilst also setting up Dune Records, another platform for talents associated with the organisation. Next came a weekend residency at the Southbank Centre, and it’s there that their free Young Artists Development Programme helped them impart their values onto multiple generations of musicians for whom their guidance was invaluable. “Everything’s changed since we went to the Southbank” Janine says, “whereas before, we could only really work with a small group at any one time, once we went to the Southbank, that meant more people could come…so they’d all descend on the Southbank at the weekend, and slowly this community started building up. That meant a lot more young people developing together, which is why you’ve now got Ezra (Collective), Nubya (Garcia), Binker and Moses, Kokoroko, and they’re all in each other’s bands”. This free musical education programme, which nurtures the talents of aspiring jazz musicians aged 11 to 25, has provided the scene with a plethora of pioneering musicians who may not have been able to make such an impact without the programme’s support. Gary agrees that this residency marked a turning point - “at the Southbank, it was just an explosion…I think Binker and Moses’ success has been important to all of them, being taught by them and then seeing them reach that level…prior to that, people like Nubya and Sheila, you’d barely see them take their instrument out of the case, they were so shy”. Key to this development of artistic confidence amongst young people who may otherwise struggle to find their place in the jazz world is, Janine points out, the fact that “they’ve all grown up together, they all have great respect for each other…they are happy for each other’s success”. Ultimately, Gary says, the current community represents a break from the past and “a different type of musician”, one for whom these ideas of mutual support and responsibility towards your fellow players is paramount. As for how they’ve been able to instil this attitude in their alumni, Gary sheepishly admits “I’m going to be totally left-wing and hippy about it, but it’s about love, which can’t be explained”. “It’s a really holistic approach”, Janine agrees, “it wasn’t just a place where you come and do a lesson and go home, you come and be part of something”. “It was like a community centre, we were playing football together, we were dancing together in that space”, Gary says, reinforcing the sense that this was something bigger than just free music lessons at the weekend. For their focus to remain on community values over a more financially oriented model, the programme’s free model is vital, ensuring a focus on young people whose financial circumstances may have otherwise made a career in music untenable. For Gary, this is “the most important thing…that’s what makes it special and different…without that, you’re not going to get those kids off the council estates whose parents are worried about basic things like paying for the electricity - how are you going to involve those children if you put a cost on it?” “Ultimately”, he continues, “we want to say to those in power that music is not just a recreational pastime, it’s an important part of society”. Clearly, the rewards of such an egalitarian approach are bountiful, resulting in a healthier and less homogenous jazz scene than there may have been otherwise. “We wouldn’t have that if it wasn’t for the programme”, agrees Janine, adding “if it wasn’t free, who would you get?”. “Those who can afford it”, answers Gary, saying a great deal with just four words about the wider inequalities of the music world. He is similarly unequivocal: “charging, for me, is a no-no, if you really want to create real diversity in music or art in general. But we’re not at that point yet where we can start beating our chests, saying “jazz can save the world”, because ain’t nobody going to listen to you.” It is undeniable, however, that it remains urgently important to continue to make the case for programmes such as this within the current political climate, particularly when its benefits to culture at large are so clear. “In the context of music education”, says Janine, “it’s absolutely vital that programmes like this are free, because there’s a growing problem that by starving the schools of funding for arts, it means fewer schools can offer proper music lessons, and inspire students to go further with music. Removing the funding means you remove that teacher who can inspire that generation…especially when hard-pressed parents can’t see a career path in it that’s going to pay their child a living wage”. The success stories of Tomorrow’s Warriors provide a hopeful alternative to this dispiriting state of affairs. “It’s really important that we have the successes we’ve got” Janine asserts, “with the Nubyas, the Ezras, travelling the world, living their dream and earning a decent living - they are the beacons”. Unfortunately, this success can also come at a cost. The programme is currently facing threat of closure due to a lack of funding, and they are now seeking urgent financial help. “We still don’t have a funder for our programme, so we’re still crowdfunding…the pressure’s on now”, says Janine. Despite the charity’s overt success, Janine is keen to stress “we’re a not-for-profit charity, any profit goes straight back to supporting the next activity. Nobody’s getting rich out of this”. While Gary may have expressed doubts about the efficacy of chest-beating exhortations about the transformative power of jazz for society at large, Janine is unafraid to tell it how she sees it. “We’re good at what we do, there’s no two ways about it. We’ve shown that we can deliver, we’ve achieved an incredible level of success…we’re not very good at shouting about if from the rafters, and people always say there’s an institutional modesty, and that’s because both of us were brought up not to boast…but sometimes we have to step forward and say “you know what, we’ve actually done a bloody good job””. Given their current situation, however, they are not yet ready to sit back and bask in their successes. “It remains to be seen”, says Janine, "how robust this resurgence in jazz is…hopefully it will solidify and we’ll be able to build from there, I just hope it’s not a bubble that’s going to burst in the next year or two”. Either way, whatever the future holds, one thing is clear for Janine. “We can’t franchise this” she says, "that’s where the love comes in…you don’t want just anybody teaching these young people…they need to understand where they’re coming from, the legacy, the tradition, and feel part of it”. “And have some social service values”, says Gary, “I believe the music has to take on something wider than just the group”. It is evident from our conversation that they do indeed stand for something wider, something that teaches us all about the importance of instilling values of community and collaboration across society. It’s a sense of belonging it instills in its alumni that seems to resonate loudest. This is important to Janine, who reinforces that it’s “good for them to see where they fit in the family tree of jazz…to be able to say “I was part of this…this is where I come from”. On a personal level this is crucial for them because, as Janine points out, “as a black person, I can’t go that far back in terms of lineage, it’s virtually impossible to trace our roots that far back. That’s why we want to create that heritage and map it out, so a young person can look back and say, “I’ve come from that” - and it’s a rich heritage”. https://tomtidnam.com/Detroit-Love-Interview-with-Carl-Craig Thu, 05 May 2022 17:36:39 +0000 Tom Tidnam https://tomtidnam.com/Detroit-Love-Interview-with-Carl-Craig Detroit Love – Interview with Carl Craig Straight No Chaser, Summer 2018 <img width="2272" height="3044" width_o="2272" height_o="3044" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/555cd56635af382f42fc91a7836182707a0b4eca7c29a4a498bddb479efe5e52/Carl-Craig-1.jpeg" data-mid="141772908" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/555cd56635af382f42fc91a7836182707a0b4eca7c29a4a498bddb479efe5e52/Carl-Craig-1.jpeg" /> https://tomtidnam.com/Breakin-Convention-018-meets-Jazz-Re-freshed-1 Sat, 18 Jun 2022 11:18:46 +0000 Tom Tidnam https://tomtidnam.com/Breakin-Convention-018-meets-Jazz-Re-freshed-1 Breakin’ Convention 018 meets Jazz Re: freshedAncient to Future, April 2018Reflecting on 15 years of Breakin’ Convention, the hip-hop dance festival held annually at London’s Sadler’s Wells, its Artistic Director – and pioneer of hip-hop theatre – Jonzi D acknowledges that such an event was, at the time of its conception, pretty unprecedented. Despite this, he notes that “15 years down the line, we’ve seen how hip-hop dance theatre is affecting contemporary dance generally…now, artists who come from hip-hop as a practice are doing work that’s hard to define as hip-hop…it’s very theatrical, exploring different styles, like classical music.” He stresses, however, that despite the festival’s broadened appeal, he is “keen to maintain the audience, because it’s changed so much over the years…the traditional Sadler’s Wells audience feel comfortable absorbing hip-hop now, and middle-class, white folk go in their droves… you often get what seems to be a lot of non-hip-hoppers peering into the culture – this year, we definitely want to address that.” Potential ambivalence about this aside, to Jonzi, the benefits are clear, with “hip-hop (now being) taken seriously as an artistic medium and an artistic discipline, allowing us to stretch our understanding of what hip-hop can be”. <img width="635" height="818" width_o="635" height_o="818" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cbd69a069be1413ba52a029b92e6f830b9463d851c7e9eadc5a46eef59259683/Screen-Shot-2022-06-18-at-12.20.49.png" data-mid="145739139" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/635/i/cbd69a069be1413ba52a029b92e6f830b9463d851c7e9eadc5a46eef59259683/Screen-Shot-2022-06-18-at-12.20.49.png" /> Expanding this understanding of the art form has always been on Jonzi’s agenda. 15 years ago, he says “hip-hop was suffering from a lot of stereotypes about gangsterism, which wasn’t truthful to my experience of hip-hop culture – Breakin’ Convention challenges those ideas.” This approach and ethos, centred around questioning assumptions about genre and audience, is shared by Jazz Re:freshed, also celebrating their 15-year anniversary and bringing their specially commissioned Jazz Re:freshed Sonic Orchestra together for the first time to perform at the festival.Jonzi and musical director Jason Yarde credit Jazz Re:freshed with rewriting the rules of contemporary jazz and expanding the scope and influence of the UK jazz scene. Jason, who has been involved with Jazz Re:freshed since its conception, praises them for “flying the flag for UK jazz in a way that’s not been done before” and agrees that the pairing makes sense: “hip-hop and jazz is not a new marriage”. For Jason, the opportunity to get a roster of fresh jazz talent working alongside a varied selection of dance troupes – including Boy Blue, The Locksmiths and The Ruggeds – was a uniquely exciting one. “Jonzi’s always trying to take this hip-hop talent from around the world and give it a platform” says Jason, “and we’re lucky at the moment, in terms of jazz, that there’s a lot of young musicians who are really into it, finding their voice and making their way, with more young people appreciating it”. The connection with young musicians is key to this, according to Jason, as Jazz Re:freshed has “fostered different players and different audiences…if you don’t keep on the people doing new things and trying to push things forwards, then things can stagnate”.Nurturing young talent remains a key motivation for Jonzi – “we were all young once, and we all felt that we needed doors opened for us…it’s important that we’re constantly aware of what young people are doing and how we can provide platforms for them.” As for Jonzi himself, the drive to create remains strong, and he is devising a new work to be performed at this year’s Breakin’ Convention, a poem whose subject matter he is keen to keep under wraps. He does, however, offer this hint: “all my work is political, and if the arts aren’t political, then we’re gonna have to rely on politicians and we can’t do that now, can we?” The ambition inherent in this statement is evidence that there remains in Breakin’ Convention a desire to push the boundaries of what hip-hop, contemporary dance and live music can address, how it can be expressed and who it can speak to.Read the article on Ancient to Future here https://tomtidnam.com/The-vanishing-of-Brazilian-musician-Jose-Mauro-and-the-masterpiece-he Wed, 01 Jun 2022 10:04:42 +0000 Tom Tidnam https://tomtidnam.com/The-vanishing-of-Brazilian-musician-Jose-Mauro-and-the-masterpiece-he The vanishing of Brazilian musician José Mauro and the masterpiece he left behindThe Vinyl Factory, September 2016 <img width="1007" height="543" width_o="1007" height_o="543" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/176a37a1e18efdcca5080893ae9002fb425478ef953a8cd808dd704e3f9a5858/Jose-1.png" data-mid="144234722" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/176a37a1e18efdcca5080893ae9002fb425478ef953a8cd808dd704e3f9a5858/Jose-1.png" /> The ongoing enigma of Obnoxius begins with its title. A word denoting brash insolence seems ill-suited to a record such as this. The Latin definition is quite different, however: it signifies guilt, ensuring that Western audiences hearing this scarcely heard Brazilian record for the first time will be unprepared for the strange, sombre otherworldliness found within. Released initially on producer Roberto Quartin’s eponymous label – whose entire catalogue Far Out plans to reissue over the course of the next year – Obnoxius was a record over which the backdrop of the military dictatorship loomed large. While many young musicians fled the country, preferring their prospects in the liberated and affluent US, others like Mauro chose to stay and reflect their anger at the authorities through thinly veiled protest songs such as the stirring ‘Apocalipse’, one of the standout tracks on Obnoxius. The fraught political background of the record also fuels one of the lingering rumours about Mauro’s disappearance, that he was abducted by the military on account of the incendiary nature of his lyrics and music. The sunny escapism that cloaked some of the era’s more politically motivated music is conspicuous by its absence on Obnoxius. Instead, it revels in a dark, yearning sort of beauty, a seamless blending of disparate styles and trends, seminal not just in the world of Brazilian music but also in the intersectional paths of jazz, folk, psychedelic music and baroque pop. There are other pervasive rumours, but little evidence to support them. One enduring claim is that Mauro died in a motorbike accident shortly before (or after) the album’s release. The cancellation of the production on the record, which may or may not have been a result of Mauro’s disappearance, and its lack of commercial distribution, meant that the record went on to languish in obscurity in the years that followed. But as is often now the case, records such as these are given a new lease of life by collectors and DJs whose influence far outstrip that of Mauro himself. Sam Shepherd, best known as Floating Points, calls it an “amazing record” and “one of my top 5.” Gilles Peterson has given it “holy grail” status and selected the title track for inclusion on his 2009 contribution to Far Out’s ongoing Brazilika series. Its singular sound has also provided ample sample fodder for the likes of Madlib. Sampled on his track ‘Cali Hills’ with rapper Guilty Simpson, ‘Apocalipse’ almost sounds like an experimental West Coast head-nodder even before being given the boom-bap treatment. Joe Davis, founder of Far Out Recordings, himself first discovered the record – and the rest of the Quartin catalogue – in the 1980s. “I came across the catalogue as I was hunting down rare Brazilian records and I really liked these releases on a label called Forma,” he says, pointing out that “the records were very special and quite contemporary for their time… You could hear that they shaped the Brazilian music which was to follow.” After running into financial difficulty, Forma’s head Roberto Quartin set up his eponymous label in the hopes of sustaining a continued outlet for his musical vision, to provide a platform for the talented young musicians working in the shadow the censorship and oppression. At the time unfamiliar with Quartin’s story, Davis’ initial discovery of the catalogue was fortuitous, happening upon it in “a small shop in Rio above a store, run by a guy called Carlinhos and his mother, with incredible knowledge of Brazilian music.” “He had all the Quartin records,” Davis remembers. “They were about $1 each… Like the Forma records they were extremely different and free of their time. They really stood out to me and still do, they are like no other. The musical approach and freedom and expression is really something special.” <img src="https://vf-images.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Jose-Mauro1.png"> Antal, co-founder of Dutch label and record shop Rush Hour agrees. “I had been sleeping on it for quite some time to be honest… [I] was always after other things first and never really bought the record as it was already higher priced then most of the Brazilian things I wanted. But at the end of the day it’s beautiful Brazilian soul music with wonderful arrangements.” As far as the mysterious circumstances surrounding Mauro’s life and disappearance, though, Davis in the dark with the rest of us. “The musical mystery of the records speaks for itself. He disappeared, I know he is not around but it is a real mystery and no one knows anything about him, not even Roberto. I asked Roberto if he knows where he is and he told me he either passed away or got out of the music scene.” With recent rumours circulating that Mauro may in fact be alive and living in poverty in a favela outside Rio, there may be more of Mauro’s story that is yet to be told. But until then, all we have is the remarkable, strange, beautiful music he made all those years ago. Read the article on The Vinyl Factory here.&nbsp;