[Dixielandjazz] Caribbean Cruise

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

What is the man complaining about?  He says nothing about having had to get out of  bed when the door opened, to make room for the doorhandle, and impressions of spaciousness are not discouraged  by the idea that there was room for the door to swing so that the handle even broke the window!  


But without the failure to realise when one is well off, how would the ancestral tradition of tales of inferior lodgings, infra digs, be maintained as the crucial element it is in our tradition.  


There is competition from venues planned to the last millimetre, and an on-stage operatic soprano finding her notes crack due to the dry hear in the hall, or fiddlers in an orchestra pit waiting as the desiccating effect of air conditioning denied them any fixity of pitch and threatened to split soundboards. 

Ah, these inglorious tales of infra digs! If only they hadn't been true!
I still like Pete Appleyard's return to Glasgow, where after having been told the "Empire" where he had played as a boy was long since demolished, he looked up his diary and asked for the "Royal" as his intended destination. 


Now the Empire was always the Empire Theatre,
but The Royal was the Royal Infirmary, 

which as it hove into view communicated to the vibist that this large hospital was not the place in which he had rehearsed earlier...  

(The Theatre Royal had only just resumed operations, after years subdivided into TV studios).

Jim Galloway would have liked that one, and there was Sandy Brown's tale of a band which used the trip home after a rural gig to consider how things had gone in the course of the evening,  handily piling out of the van across a hedge to trade haymakers and headlocks where that night sheep might not have safely grazed 

the old ones were the best -- if you didn't need to live through them!

Robert R. Calder