[Dixielandjazz] sex

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

The extra-musical "resonances" of music might be assessed in a number of ways, I suppose, including the poor heroic sods who have marched into battle kilted and surrounded on three sides by running  (and falling) men of their own army and allies' while blowing the aural and maybe superior version of a martial banner on the great Highland pipe(s), (with bag no less prone to puncture or explosion than the piper by metal flying from at least the fourth and other side). 
 
As regards what has been called "the other", which people are well encouraged to make rather than making war (not but that some of those things what have been called love have been causal factors in wagings of wars) I have memories of a late night concert in which ballad playing of a species commonly associated with Ben Webster ("Atmosphere for Lovers and Thieves") occasioned boudoir-related vocalisations from some of the audience of a darkened sometime church. 
The sometime church was the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh, and the musical instrument the trombone in the hands of Roy Williams in an entirely tenor-saxophone-free concert. Think of the (grand)mothers who might have insisted their daughters ought to be in bed at that time of night. 

Of course George Melly did preface one item in his repertoire as liable to shock a respectable bourgeois audience, for all that the topic was blatantly an activity in which many of these same people indulged in, and associated with, going to bed at night.  After an exercise in the sort of prose in which this and the above paragraphs were composed Mr. Melly would signal the band and commence a song which was nothing if not commercial: "we are the Ovalteenies!"
I gather its composition was commissioned to be sung by British children and encourage them to partake of an alleged soporific of a sort Americans have called "Malted Milk", a phrase whose occurrence as the title of a naughtiness-related Robert Johnson blues (with a guitar accompaniment lifted straight from Lonnie Johnson) shouldn't confuse thoughts of the innocent origins and significance of the cheery little ditty George sang, 

slainte mhath!
Robert R. Calder