[Dixielandjazz] Live non-jazz

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

This tale of incrashing bands reminds me of the hot responses when I reflected some years back (see our archive) on the enormous Orange Walk which by passing through George Square in Glasgow one Saturday afternoon maybe ten years ago stopped the Glasgow Jazz festival that sunny week being presented from an open bandstand. Ken Mathieson will remember, his CJO had just played a brilliant set when stewards appeared telling people that if they wished to get off the central space of the square into the south and south east of the city centre they should do so soon, for two or three miles of parading sectarian religious partisan parade, with drum and fife ensembles abolishing silence for a long way in every direction, would shortly close off all access. 

Bus services were disrupted for some time afterwards. I ought to have taken the northern route out of the city. 


In vain did I address this site -- or some of its members -- regarding the misfortune of that afternoon period, to which time slot the parade had been redirected on account of the need for police -- because on the normal date Glasgow police were bussed like constabulary from other cities, to protect world leaders including Dubya at their G (8 or  20)  meeting in a southern Highland hotel and parkland, ringed with the fencing behind which Dubya it seems fell off his bicycle. 

UNFAIR TO MARCHING MUSICIANS one member responded, though how far can a sectarian partisan accomplished only on fife or drum (maybe both, but one at a time) -- and only in a specific repertoire -- be allowed the appellation musician? 

How seriously do jazzfolk  or musicians who work in marching bands of other persuasins take the danger of a King of France becoming dominant in alliance with the Pope over European politics, such that a movement with its centre in Northern Ireland must continually celebrate three centuries of events and canvas resistance to a Franco-Vatican takeover and a ceding of power now vested in London and Belfast to Dublin?  

Of course it is not always incompetent to schedule one band to play while another is marching toward it whether or not with ambitions to eclipse or collide, because there are situations when that is a desired outcome, though these seem to me to be restricted to performances of a specific and eccentric big work by Charles Ives. 

Reminds me also of a gala in Edinburgh, where Yank Lawson and others as World's Greatest Jazzband were standing on stage playing when the marching band came in. And Kenny Davern on stage presented the bell of his clarinet, to which horn he had by then pledged all, forsaking all others, to a microphone and added potent improvements. 

No-one should of course argue that the orangemen ought not to have changed the date but rather headed for Perthshire, where they would have passed many of the same policemen piping through the valleys semi-wild along the barbed wire periphery of the famous golfing hotel 


F-O-R-E !!!!!!

Robert R. Calder