[Dixielandjazz] Edinburgh Jazz Festival's Tubaramas

[Marek Boym]

Mike was a banjo player, so what would you expect?  His 1984 Advocates of
Jazz were pretty good, though.  I went to the Tubarana that year, and found
the Tiger Rag a lot of fun, although hardly earth-shaking jazz
performance.  Eli Newberger (and not Weiberger) was there.  His playing was
great!  I don't think that the New Black Eagles have ever been the same
after he left.  I don't remember a Banjorama, but it might have been
because I would not have attended such a gathering.
Cheers

On Tue, 28 Jan 2020 at 00:11, Ken Mathieson <ken at kenmath.free-online.co.uk>
wrote:

> Hi Robert et al,
>
> The Tubarama and its partner in musical crime, the Banjorama, was the
> invention of Festival Director Mike Hart. Their sole purpose was to
> assemble as many tuba-players/banjoists as possible in their respective
> concerts and attempt to make some kind of entertainment from the
> resulting, repetitive cacophany.
>
> I managed to dodge the banjo-thrashing event completely, but on one
> occasion, for entirely financial reasons, I agreed to play drums on a
> Tubarama concert. The line-up was about 20 tubas, one pianist, one
> banjoist whose time was dodgy (no names no packdrill) and me, so I
> figured my main priority was just keeping the time together, play mainly
> brushes to encourage the tubists to play quieter than treble forte  and
> forget about swinging as that was never going to happen with all that
> vertical *rhythm*.
>
> Fortunately Eli Weinberger of the New Black Eagles had been appointed as
> musical director and he did a great job of directing the traffic. He
> also provided the only memorably tasteful piece in the entirely
> elephantine event. For one number, he put down his conductor's baton and
> played a ravishing version of When You Wish Upon A Star, with just piano
> and drums. If you can imagine Ben Webster playing tuba, you'll get the
> idea: an oasis of calm and good taste on a lovely melody with a great
> chord sequence and a great soloist displaying a musical soul.
>
> It couldn't last for long though as the climax of every Tubarama was the
> ritual massacre of The Saints, with everyone taking a solo, so it lasted
> for about 20 minutes and ended in what sounded like an artillery
> bombardment. At the end Eli came over, shook my hand and thanked me,
> just loud enough for the banjoist to overhear, for holding the time
> together and preventing it from coming apart at the seams. As the
> banjoist was renowned for carrying grudges enthusiastically, that went
> down like lead balloon.
>
> Happy Days??
>
> Ken
>
> On 27/01/2020 17:00, dixielandjazz-request at ml.islandnet.com wrote:
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2020 18:14:41 +0000 (UTC)
> > From: "ROBERT R. CALDER" <serapion at btinternet.com>
> > To: <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
> > Cc: Dixieland Jazz Mailing List <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
> > Subject: Re: [Dixielandjazz] Dixielandjazz Digest, Vol 205, Issue 19
> > Message-ID: <371615791.29353483.1580062481859 at mail.yahoo.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> >
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-fUP0p0ET4
> >
> > Bass Saxophone Duet - Sons of Bix -Russ Whitman and Spencer Clark
> >
> >
> >
> > Don Ingle, of whom this site was untimely deprived, is on trombone on
> this performance. ebay is asking a lot of money for a vinyl LP on the Fat
> Cat label with among others Dick Wellstood in the band. ?
> > This is more musical than the sessions Edinburgh used to feature under
> the title TUBARAMA -- I gather rhythm sections were not so easily
> recruited, perhaps with visions of the floor disappearing with lots of
> brass and some heroic exponents of instruments -- is it possible that if
> Don Cherry had been with them there might have been problems disentangling
> his pocket trumpet from a tangle of contrabass euphonium mouthpieces??
> >
> > Happily him I call Bert the Bahnhof Bandsman can be consulted live and
> on record to demonstrate the musical possibilities of bass saxophone.
> Another maestro of the lower horn, not a jazzman, Gerard Hoffnung, did a
> hilarious skit with John Amis based (not bassed) on someone's experience of
> a German broadcast of serious intent which featured a lengthy lecture on an
> avant-garde composition which turned out to be extraordinarily short,
> indeed so short it still seemed short.?
> >
> > I did once witness something similar at Ittingen, in Switzerland near
> the German border, in which the player of a contra-contra-bass clarinet was
> balanced on a bar stool positively alpine in its height, without which
> there wouldn't have been enough space between the player's teeth and his
> shoes, in fact the space lower than the soles of his? shoes where the keyed
> anaconda turned up to where the bell of the item was pointed toward the
> audience. I believe there is a Hoffnung cartoon of someone with a similar
> length of piping -- hilarious like most Hoffnung cartoons, and welcome to
> such as Marek, with a low tolerance for such sounds, in being silent.
> >
> > I can't imagine friends will fault me for not remembering the name of
> the composer of the work...?
> >
> > Robert R. Calder?
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
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