Dusty Springfield: Some Of Your Lovin'

Consider: "Some Of Your Lovin'" - released August 1965. I can't find my Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles but I know it was a medium sized hit - slightly below par by Dusty's chart standards of the day. But what a perfect record. In every way. Even down to its release date at the absolute high-water mark of English domination of world pop. The Beatles, Stones, Who, Kinks were all pumping them out - Carnaby Street, Mary Quant, David Bailey, The Shrimp, Terence Stamp - pop was never more POP, never more perfect, more unassailably irresistable, and right in the middle of it there was Dusty with this stately majestic confection of Carole King's and Gerry Goffin's. A song about giving and receiving love even when you know it's hopeless - a subject Dusty knew more than a little about. When I hear it I can see the session: A big hangar of a studio, maybe thirty or more musicians in attendance, cigarette smoke like a pall under a high ceiling covered in baffles. Music stands, white shirts, glasses, ties askew, underarm sweat, hot and sticky. And Dusty in the vocal booth, clutching her lyric sheet, smiling shyly and slyly at her should-have-been lover, Madeline Bell, doing back-ups along with Lesley Duncan. Dusty's in civvies too: hipper than the orchestra, of course, but under-dressed - a white blouse, blue jeans, no wig, mascara somewhat the worse for wear, trying not to smoke too much as she has a tough gig in the evening and she must save her voice. But she can't save her voice: the song means too much to her, and there's Madeline grinning at her through the glass of the booth, egging her on. She requests another take. The orchestra are groaning but with good humour: they know it's a good session. Ivor Raymonde, the musical director, calls for silence on the floor. The red light comes on. The tempo is perfect, Dusty soars. Ivor waves his baton at the end of the last bar. "Come and have a listen!" comes a delighted voice over the monitor. Dusty and Ivor pile into the control room. Ivor's trying not to grin too hard and blow his cool. Dusty tickles him. He blows his cool. The engineer runs the take. Dusty always wants to do another take, no matter how good the last one in the can. They listen to the playback. No-one says a word. Everyone waits for Dusty to request another take. But Dust is nodding, she purses her lips: "OK", she says, "that's OK." A huge wave of relief passes through the control room and out onto the studio floor. The musicians start packing up. Dusty's PA is in reception, waiting to take her to the limo waiting to take her to the evening's gig. Just another day's work in the 60s.

The Deviants: "Ptoof!"

Back in the days of free festivals there was an ignoble tradition of the ad hoc band that would appear from somewhere or other and take an eternity to set up a bunch of bashed up amplifiers and a barely functioning PA system. Eventually they would get out their guitars and start playing something barely recognizable as music and stoned people would lurch about to it. Hawkwind set the template but the tradition started here – with The Deviants. This, their first album, was recorded in 1967 with £700 of Nigel Samuel’s money and pressed up in a limited edition of 8000 copies, housed in a luxurious poster fold out sleeve and sold via mail order through International Times. Oh, if only it was chock full of great music, if only it was the great underground masterpiece. It ain’t and it isn’t. Mick Farren had everything going for him - the looks, the clothes, the attitude, the street cred – but he couldn’t sing for toffee. That’s not to say this record isn’t entertaining - it is. As a bona-fide 1967 curio it’s worth the price of admission but the period humour hasn’t aged well – the attempts at self-referential irony are teeth-grindingly embarrassing – but there are some rather touching moments, such as the acoustic numbers “Child Of The Sky” and “Bun” which really don’t sound quite like anything else of the period. The blues based “Charlie” is simply appalling but the “heavy” freak-out numbers possess the odd moment or two of genuine menace. If only it were sustained then we could legitimately point to this record as being the progenitor of UK Punk that revisionist critics wish it was and claim it to be. Amateurish it is, but amateurishness itself is not a virtue unless it reveals hitherto unsuspected talent. Sadly, this is not the case with The Deviants - or any of their mutant children: Pink Fairies etc. Compared to the likes of Syd Barrett’s Floyd, or the Soft Machine, this is just a bunch of bullshit. But hey! Don’t let me spoil the fun. It’s not about the music, after all. It was an Event, a Happening of sorts, and on that level it’s still quite funny – if extraordinarily paranoid. The cover was a genuine bit of period pop art. Too bad they can’t re-issue THAT.

David Studdert's Mumbo Jumbo

So, once upon a time this guy with an Aussie accent phoned me up asking for guitar lessons. We arranged a time and he turns up with a beautiful Gretsch guitar and a mischievous twinkle in his eye. I thought he'd be into Bruce Springsteen and Bryan Adams but it turns out he's into Arthur Lee's Love and heavy dub. We get along. After a few lessons he asks me if I'd like to play guitar on his record. "Yeah, sure", I think but I say Yes. I go to this studio in Southall (almost exclusively Asian district in London suburb) and try to follow his eccentric instructions. I remember playing louder than I'd ever played in my life (before or since) on a song about a "Dirty Drug Deal" and, lo and behold, the album gets made and its great. He gets a dodgy manager on the back of a dodgy record deal with a dodgy record executive back in Oz and the band is up and running and doing gigs. There's a tiny Aussie lady saxophonist with a huge sound who's permanently stoned ("Bobby Keyes" Louise), there's a cynical South London cockney diamond geezer on the drums who's in recovery from cancer and playing with Shakin' Stevens for many years. There's a naive gentle giant Welshman on bass, there's a neurotic dipsomaniac keyboard player who should've been born in New Orleans who tells terrible jokes and eats terrible food. There's a detached session trumpet player who's maybe slumming it a bit. And there's me and Dave. We are undoubtedly the hippest and best band on the planet but London isn't ready for our exotic blend of jazz, blues, reggae and "rock noir" - all set to Dave's extraordinary Raymond Chandler-esque lyric tales of seamy city underbelly life and love. Undeterred, we found a club: The Conspiracy Club, where we play, firstly above a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown in Soho, then at the Marquee cafe (also in Soho). There is a "Biting Booth" where Giselle, a painfully hip American will bite you to order, there is a big bully of an MC, various supporting players, an obnoxious "poet" with "behavioural issues", Lorraine Bowen whose musical and comedic talent almost upstages us every time, and there's us. First gig Dave instructs me to roll joints with a lump of hash he has thoughtfully provided and dispense them amongst the crowd. This is possibly the most flagrantly illegal thing I have ever done and, amazingly, we get away with it. The juvenile delinquents (Dave's students) who had come to heckle are suitably pacified and, indeed, impressed. Perhaps the best comment made about us was from a drunken American singer who said: "You guys really play music, it's not just bullshit."

We made a supposedly "commercial" single at great expense that did nothing, but the acoustic version that Dave and I cut in about 10 minutes for the "B" side was possibly the best thing we ever did together. We made another album, live in the studio, we went to Australia for two gigs (!) The band split up. It was a wonderful experience and I'm very proud to have been part of it. Maybe one day the world will be ready for the great records that we made... 

The Beatles and The Stones: the difference

The Beatles were a rock'n'roll band - they came from a different world - Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, leather, brylcreem, winkle pickers, playing for thugs with flickknifes, touring at the bottom of the bill for Larry Parnes's second division acts, booze and speed and fighting, you know... the whole Northern bit.  

The Stones were an r'n'b band - London - Art school, Chelsea bohemia, posh birds with long hair, pot, CND, all that...

The former fascinates and horrifies me, the latter is where I live, but I've never had any trouble at all in loving them both. The trouble is The Stones didn't have the good grace to quit while they were ahead. If they'd only called it a day after "Exiles"...

Mourning Sad Morning: The Ballad of Free

It’s hard to imagine nowadays, but in the strict context of the then-emerging British blues boom, Free were a punk band, and “Tons Of Sobs” – their debut album from 1968 - was very much a punk album. In terms of their youth and inexperience (their average age was 18) it was patently ridiculous for them to be making such heavy weather of a song like James Oden’s “Goin’ Down Slow”, and this one track more than any other reveals their initial shortcomings and gives a strong flavour of what they must have been like in the clubs in the early days. Paul Kossoff, that master of understatement, over-playing as guiltily as any teenager possessed of a Gibson Les Paul and a fistful of licks learned off John Mayall albums. Andy Fraser, the purveyor of pared-to-the-bone funk bass, sidestepping semitones with no regard for context or subtlety. Simon Kirke, soon to be the tightest drummer in British rock, bashing away, and, of course, Paul Rodgers, trousers tighter than prudence would suggest health permit, bellowing about having had his fun and “would you please write my mother, tell her the shape I’m in”… 

It’s good for a laugh, but it’s strictly a period piece, and there’s very little on that debut album that stands up to closer scrutiny. “I’m A Mover” and “The Hunter” were firm live favourites and consequently are much better on the live album. “Moonshine” and “Worry” are almost worthy of Black Sabbath, but not really. “Walk In My Shadow” is macho teenage trash. Again, good for a laugh. It’s only “Over The Green Hills”, the acoustic tune that bookends the album, that has much to say about what Free would become.  

It all came together for the second album, “Free” (1969). Right from the start, you can hear that this is a much better band altogether. “I’ll Be Creepin’” stands to this day as one of the very best bits of funk ever played by a rock band. It’s tough, tight and lubricious as hell – Fraser’s bass line is a hook in itself and Kossoff’s solo is a model of controlled violence: the way it snarls off at the end, that’s how it’s done. On the other hand, “Mourning Sad Morning” is a keening acoustic lament of the most melancholy hue, featuring Chris Wood of Traffic playing his African styled flute. Exquisite sadness with a mutant crossbred Irish-Hebrew melody. Then there’s “Lying In The Sunshine”: a lazy soul ballad singing the joys of…laziness. The sheer poise of it, absurdly classy for a bunch of kids hardly out of their teens. How did they get so good? By playing all the time, that’s how. And KNOWING they were good.  

By the time they got to their third album, “Fire And Water” (1970), they were the tightest band in the UK. Tighter than The Stones, The Who, and way tighter than Led Zeppelin. Tighter, not better. The songs were still mostly crap but, my God, they played them like they were gold dust. Some of them were good: “Don’t Say You Love Me” continues in the soul ballad style and extends it to quite outclass something like, say, The Stones “I Got The Blues” – the Stax tribute off “Sticky Fingers”. Paul Rodgers was obviously a better singer than Mick Jagger but usually he “over-souled” everything – a bit like his obvious idol, Otis Redding. On this track, however, he unfolds the story like a master, singing his best lyrics to date about a love affair gone on too long. Then there was “All Right Now”, and that was it. “All Right Now” is so famous, so well known, so well established in the Classic Rock genre that it’s almost impossible to hear it in context. For Free, it meant the end of one kind of career and the beginning of another. Try to listen to it objectively and what have you got? A basic guitar riff that’s incredibly difficult to play exactly right, a throwaway lyric about a casual pick-up, a wonderfully subtle arrangement that’s also perfectly simple, a guitar solo to die for (which Kossoff did, effectively) – sounds like classic rock’n’roll and that’s what it is: Eddie Cochran updated for the 70s and for all time.

But poor old Free: they couldn’t handle success. At first it all looked good. The gig fees went up dramatically, they got taken seriously by the business, they got a decent budget for the next album, but it all went horribly wrong and they split within a year. The problems were obvious on “Highway” (1971). In many ways, this was their best album yet. The songs were so much better, the production was crisp and warm, the playing as good as it ever was – but there were no more “All Right Nows”. The closest to it, the wonderful “Stealer”, was put out as a single and bombed. The album was panned in the press as being too soft and introspective. Free were perceived as a heavy rock band (this was a period in which heavy rock had become commercial for the first time), what were they doing messing about with beautiful heartbroken ballads like “Soon I Will Be Gone”? Or plaintive Van Morrison-esque stories like “Bodie”? They began to lose heart. More worryingly, Paul Kossoff began to use heroin.

Kossoff deserves an essay to himself but suffice it to say that, in the opinion of this writer, he played with more heart than any other British guitarist bar Peter Green. Both of them London Jews. Both of them casualties. Interesting. Peter Green burned out and spent 25 years of his life in and out of mental institutions. Kossoff died at the age of 25. The comparison with Green is germane also because Kossoff idolised him (with good reason) and couldn’t accept it when people compared them. There’s a heart-breaking story about when Free supported Blind Faith in one of their only UK concerts. After Free had done their set, Eric Clapton appeared in their dressing room to ask Paul Kossoff how he achieved his finger tremolo. Kossoff was completely thrown; thought Clapton was mocking him. But, no, not a bit of it, Eric was completely genuine – he has always been a real musician, whatever else one may say of him. But Kossoff had massive self-esteem problems, and they led him – as they have led so many others – to heroin.  

The rest of the band looked on in horror as he fell apart. Although he wasn’t the youngest, he was the baby of the group. He had come from a wealthy show-business background, he was closeted, shy, hypersensitive, timid, belying his lion’s mane hair and wildly emotional on-stage demeanour. Free was all he had in his life that he cared about. When they split, he became a full-time junkie. In an attempt to rescue him, his former colleagues decided to put the band back together. Their commercial standing was still good – they had scored another minor hit with the beautiful “My Brother Jake” where Andy Fraser reveals himself as at least as good a pop piano player as Paul McCartney – and Island were happy to bankroll them. They produced another minor hit in “Little Bit Of Love”, which despite featuring another superb bassline, suggested the vacuousness that would later damn Bad Company, but the accompanying album “Free At Last” was an absolute dog. In those days, bands had artistic integrity and Free knew it was all over. They split again. But then, just as before, Kossoff hit the smack again and this time the poison took.

Prematurely aged by his mid-20s, Paul Rodgers wrote the most achingly sad lyric to “Wishing Well” – dedicated to Kossoff - and recorded it, along with the various other songs that make up “Heartbreaker” – the final album put out under Free’s name in 1973. Simon Kirke was still there, just about, but Andy Fraser had gone. Tetsu Yamauchi stood in for him on bass,  Rabbit added keyboards and the guitar duties were handled by various sessioneers who were on hand if Koss was absent or too fucked-up to play. It’s an aptly named album: much overlooked by fans at the time who were busy mourning the band and worrying about Koss. There is fine, bittersweet music on the record and if it isn’t as good as Free at their best, it’s still way better than anyone could have expected – and miles better than “Free At Last”.

Somewhere in between Free’s split-ups and re-forms, Island had put out a sampler of live tracks recorded at various colleges on tour in the UK in happier days, “Free LIVE!” It was a feast for the fans featuring Kossoff on blistering form throughout and Fraser’s epic bass efforts on “Mr Big”. Today it stands as proof of just how great they really were on a good night.  Also, tucked away at the end, was “Get Where I Belong” – a graceful waltz inexplicably left off “Highway” – with its most plaintive lyric of dislocation and confusion. It’s almost a prayer. How far Paul Rodgers had come from the arrogant strutting of “Walk In My Shadow”.

The massive 5 cd box set, “Songs Of Yesterday”, should be approached with great caution. What it doesn’t say on the box is that (apart from a cd’s worth of unreleased live stuff, some of which is excellent) it is entirely comprised of alternate takes, oddities, jams and odd bits of session work undertaken by various members. In other words, it is strictly for the fan who has everything. For those who have yet to acquaint themselves, start with “Fire And Water” and take it from there. 

It’s funny: Free were one of those bands whose reputation suffered the most with the advent of punk. I remember selling all my Free albums in 1977 in case someone should find them in my collection – nestling with The Ramones or The Damned. Then I had to buy them all back in the 80s!

These days I have only the highest regard for them. It’s incredible how young they were, and how in those days, being that young and that proficient didn’t seem all that remarkable. How times have changed. It would be impossible for a band like Free to make it now, but the sound they made pioneered so much of what rock became – without ever really sounding like a straight-up rock band at all. All their songs were slow: “All Right Now” is by far the fastest thing they ever did. They worked a slow burn like no others, they were subtle, and they took their time. That’s why their records still sound good. If you’ve not heard them, check ‘em out. If you have, listen again.

Adam Blake. London

Roy Harper re-evaluated

I think I've come to a momentous conclusion: I DON'T LIKE ROY HARPER ANYMORE! 

What does this say about me? Help! I used to LOOK UP to him!! He was a ROLE MODEL to me!!!

I wanted to BE LIKE HIM!!! Now, so much of what I used to find admirable or endearing just seems irritating to me. All that stoned rambling that I used to liken to the art of the raconteur now just seems insufferably smug and self-satisfied. All that openly expressed lust which I used to think signified a liberated and free libido now just strikes me as a distasteful lack of self-discipline which can (ocassionally) be worryingly close to borderline paedophilia. Songs like "Francesca" now just sound cloying and facile to me where once they sounded beautiful. "I Hate The White Man" is just a megalomaniacal rant from a Hyde Park soapbox - no more, no less. Once I thought it was courageous and committed political poetry. Only "When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease" strikes me as the work of a genuinely talented artist. The rest is just self-indulgence, which one can enjoy to a greater or lesser extent, depending on how much you like the noise it makes. (I will always like "How Does It Feel" and "Sgt Sunshine", for example.)

I realise, of course, that it's patently absurd to apply such high standards to what is really only pop music but I do it because he himself demands it. Besides, as pop music, it fails completely. The Shirelles and Edison Lighthouse, or Kylie Minogue for that matter, easily leave this portentous, overlong, overblown material in the dust. No, Harper demands to be taken seriously as an Artist. But does he measure up? As a singer he can be wonderful, but he seems to have no sense of proportion. His wobbling vibratos and falsettos on, for example, "I'll See You Again" are quite excruciating. Where he can be sensitive and genuinely affecting, he can just as easily bludgeon and hector - sacrificing subtlety for empty bombast. As a poet he is equally inconsistent: some of his lines are genuinely insightful and thought provoking, or funny, or both ("the milkman rides his clanging cow.. and all the time it's now somehow"), he is good at expressing an angry outsider's view of the society of which he is so critical ("with your God strapped to your wrist"), and equally adept at the converse edenic ideal ("the barefoot dream of life"). But... he seems only too happy to just chuck away a good lyric with a stupid schoolboy obscenity, like an eight year old blowing raspberries in church. And.. his poetic vision of womanhood is patronising and sexist almost beyond belief! Only his guitar playing is consistently good throughout - and he seems to take this completely for granted, often burying his urgent and spiky and original playing under the more polished but infinitely less interesting contributions of his "rock star" friends such as Jimmy Page or Dave Gilmour.

So - is it all over for me and Roy? Should I send him this and piss him off? Poor old bugger. It's too late to expect him to do anything about it. I broadly suspect the old waccy baccy myself. A lifetime spent stoned has robbed him all along the way of the ability to effectively edit himself. What a shame, because, as "Cricketer" in its entirety, and a handful of other bits and pieces prove: he was a genuinely original English voice and, if he had had a little more artistic self-discipline, he could have developed into a significant one.

The Magician's Stenographer (Charlie Parker & Dean Bennedetti)

THE MAGICIAN’S STENOGRAPHER

The Parker/ Benedetti box set has held a talismanic fascination for me since I first discovered its existence. Dean Benedetti was the man who followed Charlie Parker around taping his saxophone solos – and only his solos – for a short period in the mid-to-late 1940s. It was an act of obsessional devotion. Benedetti had thrown away a promising career as a professional saxophonist because he had heard Parker one night and realised that this was the way in which the alto saxophone was meant to be played - and that his calling lay in becoming Parker’s self-appointed amanuensis: his unpaid, un-hired secretary. What Benedetti had immediately recognised was that Charlie Parker was a bona-fide genius, and that nobody was documenting his performances. He set to work.

I knew about all this from reading Ross Russell’s biography of Parker, “Bird Lives”. I also knew that the hardline according to the “Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD” was that Russell was more than a little inclined to exaggerate, or even directly falsify. But I also learned from this Penguin guide that the Benedetti archive really existed and was available to buy: a bunch of jazz obsessives running a company in Connecticut called Mosaic records specialized in complete sets of recordings of noted artists at specific stages of their careers. These were only available by mail order or from specialist shops. Lovingly restored. lavishly annotated, cripplingly expensive – the Benedetti set was 7 cd’s long and cost well over £100. And what did this thing actually consist of? Literally hundreds of (in some cases very) short recordings of snippets of performances that had taken place in small clubs in California over half a century ago. These recordings were allegedly of exceptionally low fidelity. How could they not be, considering how they were made? The legend according to Russell was that Benedetti had used an ex-Nazi wire recorder. Imagine that! Little reels of wire! But no, the sober report in the Penguin guide gives this the lie: in reality Benedetti’s tool had been a disc-cutting machine. Which is even better! Imagine this guy, Benedetti, sitting in a locked toilet cubicle (Ross Russell again, unrefuted so I take it as gospel) monitoring the levels on a weird, ancient 78rpm disc-cutter. Imagine the fragility of those discs! How  precious they were! For what was on those discs was nothing less than the sound of Bird in flight: casually giving proof of his extraordinary gifts night after night, scattering unprecedented streams of notes to the four winds without a thought for posterity. Only Dean, huddled over his machine in the gloom of a stinking nightclub toilet cubicle, only Dean could provide documentary evidence to the sceptics and the faithful alike. Dean Benedetti: the magician’s stenographer.

Myself, I’d avoided Parker’s music for years, scared of his reputation. I knew that if I got stuck in then I would probably become obsessed; and I was already obsessed with so much music, even then the library was out of control. Then, one day, inevitably, it happened: in all innocence my flatmate loaned me a copy of the Dial Masters. “Listen to this”, he said, “it’s great stuff, you might really like it”.  I could tell just by looking at the cover that it was dangerous. I avoided listening to it for weeks, not until my flatmate started asking for it back did I finally give in. And, yes, it was “The Famous Alto Break” that did it for me. This was the unaccompanied four bar bridge to “A Night In Tunisia” - famous amongst Bird-fanciers as a particularly choice bit of Parker. When I heard it I was dumbstruck, as so many have been before and as I’m sure so many will be in the future. I played it over and over. The dam duly broke: I’d find myself singing bebop riffs at bus stops. Vainly, I would try to play them on the guitar, not knowing where to start. I made tapes for bewildered friends. I was hooked. Charlie Parker had got me. 

I’ll try not to bore you with the details but as the years went by I found that  I had gradually got hold of all the Dial sessions, and all the Savoy sessions, with all the out-takes, some 11 lp’s (I made sure to get ‘em on vinyl) representing about four years of Parker’s 11 year recording career (not including juvenilia). They all sounded roughly the same but they were all totally different: musical snowflakes. And like snowflakes they were all so exquisitely detailed, so intricate and - when Bird was flying - so effortlessly perfect. As well as these I had got some of the Verve sessions -  which I didn’t like so much, Parker having been placed by Norman Granz into some highly incongruous commercial settings - plus some live sessions from the later period: the ‘Massey Hall’ concert, Birdland, Royal Roost radio broadcasts etc. I was helped in this by my friend Stan Britt, veteran jazz critic and true believer in Bird from way back. There was no doubt in my mind, any more than there was in Stan’s, any more than there can have been in Benedetti’s, that Parker was among the most extraordinary musicians of the 20^th century.  

His technical innovations, marvellous though they were, were not his alone. Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Christian, Thelonious Monk to name but three were all working towards the same goal at the same time. And certainly Lester Young, who was Parker’s idol, had suggested in the mid to late 30s that he could have invented bebop there and then if it hadn’t seemed like so much hard work. No, what set Parker aside and above his contemporaries were his perfectly rounded phrases, his graceful ease and swing; at even the most punishing tempos he always sounded like he had time to spare. He always played melodies, even if they were sometimes rather oblique, and he had that extremely unusual gift of being able to make time do his bidding. It’s something that all great virtuosos have: it’s one of their distinguishing features, and it’s very difficult to describe  - even in technical language. He himself described what he did as being:  “just music. It’s just playing clean and looking for the pretty notes.”  

Nevertheless, Bird was well aware of his gifts and was notorious for playing tricks on his rhythm sections. He was fond of shaving off beats from bars by playing irregular phrase lengths that sounded regular by virtue of their melodic symmetry – perhaps a result of listening to Stravinsky and Berg, as Parker liked to do – and thereby throwing bass players and pianists into terrified confusion as they found themselves approaching the end of a 12 or 32 bar measure apparently several beats behind. “Don’t follow Bird!” Max Roach would bellow from behind his drums, as Parker would chuckle a phrase to finish the measure in exactly the right place - leaving the hapless accompanists in rhythmic limbo. (“I used to want to quit every night” – Miles Davis)

Of course, we have the records to prove all this, one only has to listen to them. But Dean Benedetti didn’t have a box set of cd’s to listen to. Only his precious home-made 78’s. He had seen what needed to be done and he had had the wherewithal and savvy to get it down anyway that he knew how. I admired him so much for what he had done. How the hipsters must have laughed up their sleeves at him: (“Hey, there goes Dean, that wiggy cat with his big box under his arm.”  “Uh, like, Dean got thrown out of the club by the union rep!” “No way!” “Dig that kinda shit!”) And what about the nights when his discs got broken, or spoiled, or lost, or when his microphone didn’t work, or when he would get interrupted and ejected by some philistine authority figure who had no conception of how important his work was. And where was his reward? Who defrayed Dean’s (not inconsiderable) expenses? What was his payment? Only the recordings themselves: the truth of how completely it was possible for a man to master the alto saxophone.

I saw the Benedetti box set in Honest Jon’s in Portobello Road. It was up on the wall behind the counter. I didn’t even ask to see it. I couldn’t begin to afford it. Anyway, it was madness wasn’t it? Seven cd’s of crackly lo-fi saxophone solos, all out of context. What kind of maniac would listen to such a thing? I sighed openly in the shop. I knew the answer to this question: Me. I knew also that some of the solos had been transcribed in manuscript. Imagine how painstakingly difficult that must have been. How much time and patience that would have taken. My own reading would be too rusty to get the full benefit from such scholarship, but wouldn’t it be something to just follow the line? It was driving me nuts. I had a record collector’s mental cold shower and bought something else instead. I never saw the box set again and I assumed that the very limited edition that Mosaic had pressed had been exhausted. All the nutters who were going to buy it had bought it – all except the ones who couldn’t afford it and who cares about them, right? 

Some years later, I was on tour in Europe playing bass with a celebrated pseudo-Arabic diva. We were in Helsinki and Hami the drummer told me he was going to check out this record shop he’d been told about. I tagged along for something to do before soundcheck. We took a tram down the road, saw the shop, hopped off, walked in. Hami went to look at World Music cd’s and I immersed myself in jazz. And there it was. At around £120 in Finnish money. I looked at it properly for the first time. It was everything I expected. The essays were long, the pictures superb, the transcriptions and annotations all present and correct. Oh God, oh God…

I tentatively showed it to Hami. He was tickled. Casually, but not without a knowing smile, he suggested I come back the next day and buy it with the money I was to make from the evening’s show. “You won’t regret it”, he said. Torture. As a panacea I bought two very cheap Parker albums – one of which I already had, albeit in a knackered copy, the other being some radio session with Dizzy from 1951. Nice, as it turned out: an insanely fast “Anthropology” which hangs together by magic, also a tough “Blue’n’Boogie”. But I digress. I came back the next day with the money in my hand and, do you know what, folks? I couldn’t do it. Just couldn’t. I sat there for what must have been an hour reading the booklet. It was fascinating, totally absorbing stuff. Serious discography is a kind of strange modern science but with roots stretching back to the kind of work  that the master librarians in the monasteries must have done in medieval times, or even earlier. Was it not they who were responsible for recording the culture for posterity? Likewise the compilers and producers of the Benedetti box. In it, they warmly praised Benedetti’s accuracy and scholarship: “He was one of us. And a good one”, wrote the editor at one point.  And I felt like weeping. Whose work is it that I was hankering after: Parker’s or Benedetti’s? I thought of Benedetti dying a painful, premature death, not long after Parker’s, of all that work, all the trouble he took. For what? So that fifty or so years later, a few hundred similarly minded devotees scattered all over the world should know the truths that Benedetti discovered about Parker’s music? I put the box down. It seemed too easy to just buy it, with this funny money. I put it back. Left the shop. Sat in a café. Had a coffee. Cigarette. Stared into space. 

I realised that it’s enough just to know that it exists. I’m a working musician. The time it would take to listen to it, study it, absorb it, is time that Parker would have spent practising. It’s a hard discipline. But it’s simple and truthful. You serve the music. Parker himself once famously observed: “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” And this remark has been quoted endlessly by romantic apologists for Parker’s abominable, dysfunctional lifestyle. But I think he meant something else quite different from drugs, booze, whores and homelessness, he meant that you must serve the music. That’s what he and Benedetti had in common, what they shared, what they did together. The artist and his faithful Boswell.

And besides, how could I have solved the problem of the missing £120….?