SOLO ON SLOW BLUES

Drum solos needn't be confined to fast tempo, high energy pieces of music. On a slow tempo you can start really simple and build it as far as you want to.

SOLO ON CISCO

Make the drum solo sound like it belongs to the piece of music in which it occurs.

 A little taster of my various music projects.

Find out more at www.petecater.org 

Exclusive representation, Strada Music www.stradamusic.com

PETE CATER BIG BAND, 'DANCING MEN' 2007

A replay from 2007, when Anglia Drum Centre invited us to pay our respects to the legendary Buddy Rich.

Pete at Music China, Shanghai, 2016

A few moments from Music China 2016.......

TRADING CHORUSES

Top O' the Mornin' from Pete O'Cater

 

Funny sort of a week.

Wednesday would have been my Mum's 92nd birthday and it's the first one since she's gone. Many poignant memories flying around, but all of them pleasant. Not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to say that about their departed parents, but I am twice over.

So, it therefore followed that in a rare departure from my customary borderline reclusive and reticent nature, I posted a really nice picture of Mum and me taken on her 90th birthday, including a few words about her early life growing up in Ireland in borderline (actual) poverty, and how much she bettered herself in a long, happy and healthy life.

Likes and kind comments followed in abundance. Not only that but also a private message from one of my most thoughtful friends, asking if I had considered the possibility of applying for an Irish passport, as given that the UK is no longer a member of the EU (in case you hadn't noticed) it would make European touring just as easy for me as it ever was, back when I used to do a lot of that kind of thing.

It so happens that I had considered this, right back when David Cameraman set us on course for the referendum. After a few cursory investigations (there wasn't much you could do in terms of online application back then, it all seemed to involve going to an address in Knightsbridge) I set it aside and hadn't returned to the application process until now.

Of course I knew that as a consequence of my Irish Mum I was eligible to apply for a second passport, but what I had not known until yesterday is that I have dual nationality and am an Irish citizen. To all those companies, government departments, assorted worthless quangos, and other organisations where I have wrongly entered 'British' as opposed to 'British Irish' on their various databases and application forms, please accept this generic, blanket apology. Hopefully no lasting damage has been done, and no poll statistics of national importance have been improperly skewed.

So in a week when it has become a matter of significant public debate as to the plausibility of transitioning from being British to Korean (I have no opinion either way before you start getting over excited) here I am, very much on the other side of the coin, having spent 58 years identifying as British, I now find that I am every bit as Irish. I always been proud of my Celtic heritage and wonderful extended family, but it always felt a bit like 'them and us'. Now it's all us.

Of all the things Mum left us this is perhaps the most special of all, certainly the most unexpected.

Top of the mornin' from Pete O'Cater, as it were....

So what are the implications of my new found status I wonder. It did occur to me that many years ago when I was young and ambitious (I am no longer either) having Irish citizenship might have had been of benefit to my urge to explore developing my career in the United States, but as I'm reasonably happy with how things have turned out I'm not going to come down with a severe dose of the what ifs.

Should I adopt Irish mannerisms, and perhaps even an accent? When I was first living in London  (in a close-knit community of delightful Jewish people, there's ancestry on my paternal grandfather's side) I was aware that my Midlands accent was somewhat discernible, so I would at times temper it with a slight Gaelic lilt, the end result sounding like a curious hybrid of Liam Neeson and Jasper Carrott. A fellow musician (not a native English speaker) did ask if I was Canadian, so that was the end of that.

Should I start to spell things differently to accommodate a new accent? For instance, were I writing about the great saxophonist Tubby Hayes (a task that at all times should be left to Simon Spillett) should I spell his first name 'Thubby'/ (I'll wait). Some aspects have always been there. I've always known the correct way to pronounce cupboard (it's 'cubbort' btw) and with Dad out out work day and night I learned most of my early spoken language skills from Mum. At a pre school medical in a colour blindness test I correctly identified the shape of a duck, which I pronounced 'dook' (as in look or book) which prompted the nurse to observe

"Yower sun has gorra spaitch impediment". 

My brother was similarly influenced. His glove puppet replica of Tucker (from the Tingha and Tucker Club) was always known as 'Tocker' (substantive audio evidence to support this is in existence). 

Also am I now, instead of being the loathsome white, middle class, middle aged male I thought I was, in possession of protected characteristics? Is there some sort of gravy train for which I might acquire a season ticket? Or should that be gravy boat if it involves taking the ferry to Dublin? Is it heresy to pour gravy on champ? There's so much to learn. Do I need to live as an Irishman for a probationary period? More questions than answers. I tried reading up on the equality act earlier on, but have been largely side tracked by the search for a new car.

Whichever way it has been quite a revelation to have made this discovery. Things that come to light in later years can sometimes be traumatic (that's another story) this is anything but. Like finding a long lost family, or the proceeds of a Swiss bank account that a distant admirer has bequeathed to you, I feel like I am more than I thought I was, and shall be gearing up to make myself available for freelance work in a whole succession of European cities.

Another advantage among so many is that if Harry and the boys don't manage to bring it home tomorrow I can always claim to be neutral. But fingers crossed that they will........

Sláinte mhaith 

Visit my website or send me an email

Still No Sign Of The Usual Suspects (aka the Musical Super League)

 This is un update on a post I wrote in March last year. It's quite extraordinary as well as somewhat enervating to see just how little has changed.

Understandably there has been much discussion in recent days on the topic of leadership, and my instinct tells me that it's going to get worse before it gets better. Largely neutral and free of any deep seated political allegiance makes this easier for me to deal with than a great many people I know. I treat politicians from across the entire spectrum (with a miniscule number of exceptions) with the contempt they deserve. I find them largely lacking in any genuine empathy or compassion, merely affecting it as part of a spin initiative to gain some notional advantage.

So whether you like our leaders or not, they are there. Imagine for a  moment if we had no leadership.

Frightening isn't it?
No voice, no help, no sense of purpose nor unified direction.

In other words, a bit like being a self employed musician right now.

Obviously millions of self employed people work in other sectors apart from music and much of their current experience will be entirely similar to ours, although since I wrote this original post we have taken a few very cautious baby steps towards an at least partial return to normality, but even this has not been without incident. Lamport Hall and their appeal for top quality performers to appear without payment was rather like our industry having a 'European Super League Moment'. Their retraction was as swift as it was churlish, very much in the manner of a teenage sulk.

Possibly the most thoroughly abhorrent development is the announcement that when Phantom of the Opera returns to the West End it will be doing so with its orchestra cut by fifty percent. We are told that this is to 'take advantage of technology that was not previously available'. This is barely believable. Can you imagine buying tickets to see the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and arriving at the venue to find twelve musicians onstage playing synthesisers. That's not to say that Andrew Lloyd Webber's compositions in any way measure alongside the masters of classical repertoire, even if one or two of them do sound quite similar, but you know what I mean. I had the chance to go down the West End Theatre Musician path back i the 90s and declined, as I didn't feel it was for me. Call it ego if you like but I like the audience to be able to see me. Our theatre pits contain some of the most gifted and experienced instrumentalists you will find anywhere and they are almost entirely heard but not seen. 

That working professionals should be treated in this fashion by those whose vast personal fortunes have been earned from musical performances would be pretty low at the best of times (and is not by any means unprecedented) but on the back of being out of work for more than a year? That, folks, is the trouble with empathy. You don't know when you haven't got it. 

Thirteen musicians' jobs slashed. If each one of them has three regular deps that therefore means that 52 people will have some detrimental effect on their incomes. Mackintosh then adds insult to injury by claiming to be "creating art", whilst actually looking more like an accountant.

Phantom of the Opera, like every other West End musical is just a pile of pieces of paper, a script, a score and some band parts. Without the people to get the words, notes, stage directions and technical instructions off the paper, it's just paper.

What will the theatres do next? Sack all the bar staff and replace them with vending machines? Or perhaps they will replace professional actors, singers and dancers with selected Am Dram companies from the Home Counties, or promising school groups even. All of whom would almost certainly be thrilled at the opportunity for precious 'exposure'. And while you're at it, just have one bloke in the pit with a kazoo, or maybe this is the way forward......

Personally I would like to see a big name, enriched by the West End (Alfie Ball or that other fella perhaps?) step up to the plate on behalf of the musicians, without whom they would be little more than entirely capable if over indulged karaoke performers.

Meanwhile, theatregoers with a conscience can do their bit by voting with their feet and boycotting this show and any others whose producers  see fit to behave in a similar fashion.

There is a bit of noise in the MSM at the moment with regard to restaurant staff being in short supply which is causing wages to increase dramatically. No sous chefs, matres d', nor your humble kitchen porter is getting asked if they would like to work for exposure, or for a free dinner while they get their cooking chops (sorry!) back up to speed.

And then there's festivals. Tens of thousands of people in a muddy field contributing to the fortunes of a lucky few headliners and to a greater extent, faceless industry moguls. These lucky individuals can afford to take a couple of years off in many instances and for it not to cause them undue concern financially, which is nice.

However, lots of those headliners have backing bands comprised of freelance musicians, whose annual income would astound readers outside the industry. That, of course, is the trade off. Getting to spend your life doing something you love but probably earning less than (often a good deal less than) £25,000 a year.

An easily and oft made mistake, there's a common assumption that everybody who does this professionally at whatever level is comfortably affluent. I get it. When you consider that it's perfectly possible for an undistinguished, journeyman footballer playing in League Two to earn north of £100,000 per year, (source, Manchester Evening News) people erroneously think that this is the case across all the supposedly 'glamorous' professions.

Not forgetting the sound and lighting crews, all the techs, the riggers, the roadies, drivers, caterers and all the rest of them. Everyone having to fight their own battles without a trusted commander to display that all-important leadership.

Don't be fooled into thinking this is a self-pitying bleat; I have had a fairly reasonable pandemic and have not needed to drive a van, an ambulance, stack shelves or empty someone's bedpan, but I know plenty of supremely talented people who have had both the need and humility to go out and do all of these tasks and  more besides.

As I said elsewhere the other day, one day you're performing with Van Morrison, the next thing you know you are driving a van for Morrison's.

What disappoints yet again is the fact that no one in a position of genuine influence (with the possible exception of Sir Reginald of Pinner) has even so much as said "boo" about this. Maybe the headliners are afraid of being blackballed by the corporate moguls. Who knows?

Still we wait for a global music icon to take up the cause (maybe someone like Paul Simon perhaps?) but all we hear is the sound of silence.

The industry is in crisis. Speak up!

You are the people who can afford to employ publicists who get you coverage in the mainstream media; media that have no interest in people like me. It's almost as though you have to be famous in order to have a point of view or raise awareness of the problems of being in an industry that even on its best days can be a bit of a challenge (case in point X Factor finalist Rebecca Ferguson's recent stance on bullying in the industry: an unknown would simply not have got any attention at all. Whether this gains any traction in the long term and turns into some sort of #metoo moment for the music industry remains to be seen. Don't hold your breath).

So when it matters, who is going to be the much needed mouthpiece for our beleaguered industry? Somebody with a new record to sell probably.

You only have to look how influential certain music industry types were on matters such as the EU referendum and the last general election (in quite a few instances rightly so as things have played out, but that's neither here nor there). So now that the very industry from which you have so enriched yourselves is crippled, possibly never completely to recover, where do I read your words? How do I witness your deeds?

Stormzy, Bono, Sir Bob, Lily, and all the rest of the usual suspects.

Where are you?

Send me an email or visit my website.

Blue Remembered Drums

Elsewhere I recently commented that 2015 had been an outstanding year for me professionally. It was a year full of achievement; memorable live performances with great people in interesting locations both at home and overseas. I’m not going to regale you with a string of self-congratulatory credits as all of this has, I believe, been adequately documented already,

These life events are a big part of how we chart our progress in the industry as well as giving us all kinds of fond memories to reflect upon with the passing of the years. Significant milestones and achievements which continue to burn brightly through our entire lives (and occasionally beyond), and a means by which we retain a record of where we were, what we were doing and with whom. That does rather beg the question of how the last twelve months will be remembered, and those Facebook memories are all going to start looking a bit similar for the next little while.

For me it’s been a year consisting of a big band session that resulted in a very good album, a number of releases for a talented singer/songwriter, a gig in Eastbourne and a gig at Ronnie Scott’s. Other than that the remaining 360 days have pretty much consisted of online activity and taking books, DVDs and CDs to the post office. So irrespective of what happens subsequently, future recollection of this time from a professional standpoint is going to amount to very little as there have been an absence of life events in the last twelve months of life, which gives a whole new meaning to the word uneventful.

Thankfully, life away from the hustle and bustle of the industry, in state funded temporary partial retirement, has been peaceful and pleasant, with the exception of one very sad recent turn of events. As one or two of you will have seen elsewhere I sadly lost my Mum at the end of January. She lived a long, healthy, happy, and contented life and it was really only in the last few months of her 91 and a half years on this earth that the frailty of advancing age caught up with her, and in spite of the current restrictions we gave her the send-off she would have wished for, fondly remembered in the presence of thirty people all of whom meant a great deal to her.

So now my brother and I have many jobs to do in the months ahead, chief among which is to clear and sell the house that became our family home in March 1967. Understandably this house is full of memories, we all bestow a special degree of significance upon inanimate objects when the people with whom we associate them are no longer there, and for me a great many of those memories are wrapped up in the two sets of drums on which I began my career. The story of the Ludwig Super Classic has been told before and can be found here but my Dad’s silver Rogers Starlighter (1973) was just as significant, and in some ways perhaps more so.

To mark the bringing of those two sets of drums to their new home I shared a couple of videos, one of which has featured on this blog before, but in case you’ve managed to avoid it all this time it can be seen here. So, why, on my first proper television appearance was I using my Dad’s drums and not my Ludwig Super Classic? The answer is that aged 16 I was in the pit band for an international circus at the NEC and my drums were there at that time, so fortunately I was able to use Dad’s drums for the telly gig, but I digress.

Every time I share this video or any of the others from the same period people always make similar sounding, complimentary observations saying things along the lines of “Were you never not great?” which may be a bit of an overstatement but is nonetheless welcome, flattering, and I’ll take it. If you know me even slightly you will be acutely aware that I am not unduly troubled by modesty, but as my friend and major influence the late great Martin Drew used to say (albeit in a slightly different context), “The difference is I know it”. Whether I was great or average at that age was largely dependent upon the musical circumstances in which I found myself, something that is probably still the case to this day, albeit to a hopefully lesser extent. What I will say with absolute confidence is that I don’t sound like a typical teenage drummer of the 1970s. I’m playing more like a forty something on this clip, for which there is a very good reason.

I started going to Midland Youth Jazz Orchestra rehearsals at the end of 1977 after the band had played a gig at my school. They had played there the previous year and I hadn’t found out until after the event which has always struck me as a bit of a ‘What If’ moment. Anyway, idle conjecture aside I hung around until the drum chair came up for grabs which it did in early 1979, so at the time of the television recording I had probably been in the band about ten months. As great an experience as it was, it was by no means the first step in pursuit of my professional ambitions, in fact almost exactly three years previously that journey was already under weigh; a journey that began in a lost era of the music industry which I was fortunate enough to experience at first hand, the like of which none of us will see again.

The sixties and seventies were a golden era for gigging musicians in the UK, and through those early years of my life Dad worked constantly. Four or five gigs a week was perfectly the norm, quite how he found the energy to hold down a five day a week office job alongside all the musical activity is a bit of a mystery. As well as the elite professional music class centred in the major cities (London was always the hub of the profession in the UK, whether it still will be in post pandemic times is another matter entirely) all the smaller cities and larger towns seemed to have their own ‘scene’. Theatres, ballrooms, hotels, night clubs, town halls, civic halls, not to mention countless clubs affiliated to political parties, trade organisations etc. not forgetting pubs of course, all provided paid work for musicians. Also in the Midlands where I grew up, all those big factories had their own venues on site, so gigs were plentiful. Big clubs and hotels all had resident bands, sometimes more than one, and there were freelance, casual gigs in abundance. For a capable player in those days it was perfectly possible to play a lot, hold down a ‘proper’ job, and stay close to your family.

Dad had numerous residencies over the years, and I have early memories of being taken to band rehearsals on Sundays at the George Hotel in Solihull and Penns Hall in Sutton Coldfield where the house band was led by Graham Dalley who was a bit of a legend on the Midland music scene of the time. I was only about six or seven years old at this time, but the power and impact of music being played live was profound. I was also fascinated by the grand piano and decided that I wanted one, but it was drums that we had in the house, so drums it turned out to be, and an early public appearance was a sit in at my cousin Katherina’s wedding reception at the Crown & Cushion, Perry Barr in late summer 1973.

Anyway, fast forward to 1976 and I’m thirteen years old. By now I’m the proud owner of my Dad’s old Ludwig Super Classic which is set up in my bedroom along with a stereo system and an eclectic collection of LPs covering rock, pop, and of course jazz. But that’s not the same as playing music with other people, and so it was that Dad suggested I go with him on a gig with a band he had recently begun to work with on occasion. So we loaded the Rogers drums into the Morris 2200 and off we went; destination Shard End British Legion.

The band in question went by the name of the Colin Phillips Combo, an appearance on ITV’s ‘New Faces’ show from the previous year can be found here. The instrumentation of the band on this occasion was identical as I recall although the personnel probably differed. I recall the trumpet player was Ralph Noakes who doesn’t appear on the TV clip, and that’s obviously not my Dad on drums unless he did it in disguise and never let on about it; neither of which is very likely to be frank.

The main difference was that Colin had added a female vocalist, and midway through the gig it was her task to introduce the individual band members. As it got close to my Dad’s turn he gestured to me to take his place at the drums. The vocalist was only momentarily wrong footed when she turned and saw me there, and I then proceeded to play her next two songs. One was a popular song of the moment entitled ‘The World I Wish For You’ and the other one wasn’t. Anyway, the good news is that everybody survived and we got to the end of the two numbers at pretty much the same tempo they had started in spite of the inexperienced thirteen year old on drums and all the musicians were highly encouraging. So I took a small step on the pathway to getting ‘experience’, that all-important quality that every young musician needed in order to progress to the point of being trusted to get the job done. The charts sitting on the floor tom case that often doubled as a music stand didn’t mean a great deal, so that was the next hurdle that needed to be dealt with, along with getting more precious ‘experience’.

It’s important to realise how different it was to be in a gig band back in those days. Rehearsals were rare, sound checks were virtually unheard of, and the deal was that you turned up and sight read what you were given. Arrive about 45 minutes before the nominated start time, load in, set up, and play. No set lists either. The leader would call out something along the lines of “34, 205, 151,” usually in sets of three, and you would dive in and pull out the nominated charts. Smaller bands would rarely use music at all, and everything pivoted upon hand signals to indicate key signatures. A lot of those old school players had huge, sometimes close to encyclopaedic knowledge of ‘standards’, either that or a sufficiently good ear to navigate one’s way through trickier chord sequences. The bigger, ‘reading’ bands could very often carry a library of two or three hundred charts some of which dated back several decades. The older drum charts for a lot of the popular dance music, as well as the dreaded ‘Old Time’, (about which more later) were not too demanding of drummers. It was mostly all about counting bars, catching dynamic changes and any stops and starts that occurred. There wasn’t much in the way of rhythmic figures or phrasing on the commercially available charts, and I do wonder if the publishing houses lacked faith in the ability of the thousands upon thousands of semi-professional and amateur players to read anything more challenging than a dotted crotchet (quarter for readers in the US) on the & of one. Many of those old arrangements were often a little on the dull side in terms of their harmonic and rhythmic content, and an unusually large percentage of them had printed in the top corner underneath or opposite the composer’s name, ‘Arranged by Jimmy Lally’. Lally was an extraordinarily prolific writer, and what his arrangements lacked in excitement for those charged with playing them they made up for in expanding the repertoires of countless working bands, albeit with the avoidance of mundanity not prioritised.

The more forward looking bands of the time sourced their stock arrangements of more contemporary material from three primary sources; London Orchestrations (aka ‘Random Orchestrations’) Pop Plan (aka ‘Plop Pan’) and John Farley. There were others, but these were the big three and musicians could go from band to band and frequently find themselves playing identical repertoire. Custom arrangements (or ‘specials’ as they were colloquially known) were largely the preserve of the professional bands, a great many of whom also relied on the stock arrangements. When I was on a nomadic odyssey of cruise ships, pantos, holiday camps, backing artists and assorted freelancing, these charts would come up time and again. I could name and shame one or two household name turns of the time who would arrive at band calls with the odd Pop Plan or London Orchs title in their set but good manners prohibits.

John Farley’s charts were in a different league however. Not only did he do utterly dependable take downs of a lot of big band repertoire (especially vocal titles) but would also do good arrangements of his own creation, and these charts with their instantly recognisable slightly italic hand copying, would be the means by which I learned to read.

Obviously there were certain of Dad’s gigs where tagging along was not really a possibility, but in one of those amazing ‘right place, right time’ bits of good fortune as I approached my fourteenth birthday the perfect opportunity came into view.

Although within easy reach of Birmingham, Coventry had its own autonomous music scene. For a medium sized city there was an incredible amount going on and all kinds of good players were based there. Dad had long standing connections to a number of players on the Coventry scene, and as a result got asked to take over the drum chair with the Barrie Phelps Orchestra at the beginning of 1977. This band was the resident ‘dance band’ at the Leofric Hotel in Coventry City Centre, but was a regular fixture at several other hotels in the city as well as clubs, civic halls and even the Coventry Police Ballroom (stop sniggering at the back). The Leofric would offer its house bands to all prospective clients (they had a resident group too, the somewhat curiously named Russell Sprout) as well as a quartet in the hotel’s French restaurant, imaginatively named ‘The French Restaurant’. As mentioned earlier there were gigs to be had in factory venues including Jaguar, Standard Triumph and Matrix. Matrix would become significant later in 1977 but that’s another story.

Although the band bore his name Barrie Phelps had moved on. He was a successful estate agent, very active in local civic society, and had previously promoted jazz events at the Leofric featuring national names. He was a clarinettist and used to play the lead trumpet parts along with alto sax, two tenors and a rhythm section. The band’s charismatic vocalist and front man also played baritone sax so that made for a pretty big sound. After Phelps’s replacement on clarinet moved on the band did the right thing and replaced him with a trumpet player, the hugely resourceful Roy Addinell from Wolverhampton, who also happened to be one of the most nice natured people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting in the industry.

So with no de facto leader the band became a cooperative, largely guided by Ron (lead alto, greeny-yellow N-reg Morris Marina estate) and the aforementioned vocalist/front man Bill (P-reg Austin Maxi, plum coloured).

So the day came and off I went with Dad to the Benn Hall, Rugby. With no trepidation whatsoever I sat in on a couple of buskers, reading ability still not at a level where I could hope to contend with this really rather sophisticated environment. Once again everyone was friendly, encouraging, and hugely supportive. Through much of 1977 I spent most weekends and quite a few weeknights sitting just slightly behind the drums so I could read the charts as Dad played them. This was an extraordinary, hands on, real world learning experience and a great deal of my early vocabulary on the drums was inspired and influenced by listening to what Dad played. These were my drum lessons, this was my music college. As the weeks and months passed I was able to sit in and play the written drum parts accurately. This was due to improving reading skills but probably more to do with memorising the arrangements. I’ve always had a naturally strong capacity for recall and have retained entire structures of many long and complicated big band charts that I haven’t played in thirty five years or so.

The band rarely rehearsed and really only did so a handful of times each year when new material got added. Changing fashion in pop music made this a necessity, but the musicians of this age group considered pop music to be a chore. John Farley to the rescue once again, as his instrumental pop medleys made modern music more palatable. I can remember a selection of Carole King tunes and could probably play the drum part from end to end without so much as looking at it all these years later.  Pop music was played slightly grudgingly and usually a little bit too fast, but you must bear in mind that these musicians were of the big band and jazz era. Their musical tastes were forged at 78 rpm listening to Stan Kenton, Charlie Parker, Woody Herman, home grown British bebop, the Ted Heath Orchestra et al. These were grown men in their early thirties with young families and mortgages when the Beatles exploded on the scene and they remained loyal to the music and musicians who had inspired them when they too were taking their first steps in the industry.

More than just a band, this was the first musician community of which I was a part, and I took a great deal from these players which I believe explains the point at the beginning of this piece. I sounded like someone of their era, an old head on young shoulders, and had no problem with that whatsoever.

Anyhow, on one of those rare occasions when the band rehearsed, a new chart was put up and Dad told me to play it. To my astonishment I sight read it from end to end without error, the studies at the osmosis academy of drumming were bearing fruit; not for the first time and definitely not the last.

1977 continued. The summer was not the scorcher of the previous year and school holidays found me largely indoors with the recently discovered Stick Control book. Sitting in had developed from a couple of tunes to sometimes an entire set (three or four sets a night was commonplace back then). I would often get lumbered with the Old Time set; the joys of The Valeta, St Bernard’s Waltz and The Barn Dance while Dad retired to the band room for a cigarette. Yes kids, people used to smoke indoors!

Then on August 6^th it happened. The band had a quartet gig at the Manor Hotel in Meriden and Dad was already booked to do one of his regular deps at the Allesley Hotel. The drummer for whom Dad was depping used to leave his drums in situ, and as the two venues are a very short distance from one another along the A45 (my personal road to Damascus), I was deposited with the Rogers drums while Dad continued on to Coventry. Resplendent in newly acquired velvet jacket and huge bow tie I did my first proper, grown up gig. It was one of those public dinner/dance events that nice hotels used to do all the time. Local musician and writer Don Mather was actually in the audience that night and referred to it in a review of my ‘Upswing’ album over twenty years later.

Success was complete, I was £15 to the good and thus began my career as a working musician. Youth Jazz Orchestras, actually working with musicians my own age, being on local telly, radio and in the papers was still a way off in the future, a future which arguably began when in October that same year I attended a big band competition organised annually by the Coventry branch of the Musicians’ Union. The die was already well and truly cast, and the mix of inspiration and experience that I gathered in the early months of 77 was the fork in the road, the recalibration of the course and the primary reason for everything that has happened in the intervening 44 years.

For more details of recordings, drum book, DVD, Patreon membership, tuition and (soon hopefully) live appearances visit my website.