[Dixielandjazz] S------d Lady

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I chanced last night on the NPR radio podcast of Marian McPartland (available as I type) with the wonderful Alan Clare, himself speaking normally unlike when (day?)lighting, working as a sort of ultra-straight man on Spike Milligan's TV shows of the distant past (Clare's job was to deliver one by one and in their normal sequence each word of the script --  I -- am -- sorry --- sorr-y -----  
Never has there been any nearer approach to perfect mistiming, though in this case sheerly unmusically verbal.

You couldn't have got a machine to sound halfway as mechanical, very unlike the piano playing of the dear little man, who at around the same time as George Shearing (who has now been blind the whole of his life, unlike when he answered the interviewer's question with "not yet!")  got the impression when he was first introduced to Fats Waller, whom he could never see, that someone had put a bunch of warm bananas into his right hand.   

Alan C. and Fatso Wallero were waiting for a train at a London underground tube station in 1938, and eventually got fed up waiting and decided to walk to the next station along the line, but without getting on the moving staircase  or otherwise ascending to ground level.  A rear view silhouette of the pair would be wonderful, or indeed some performance along the (two) lines as devised by Donald Lambert and his longtime partner Paul Seminole Jr., combining two compositions at once. There might even be a nice composition of Alan Clare's ....  

I don't know whether any recording of Oscar Peterson's short weekly BBC series survives -- I would really like to have seen the one with (the piano playing) Joe Turner, longtime resident of Paris France.
In the course of one in which Alan Clare participated a happy mistitle cropped up. My comic experience of the number dates from the duo tour celebrating Ellington which in 1999 brought Mulgrew Miller and Nils-Henning Orstedt Petersen to Edinburgh (both of them victims of bad timing as both of them departed this life far too young!). 
Without losing pulse, and without any hint of jazz adaptation, true deadpan perfectly timed, Miller as NHOP giggled played a complete chorus of LONDONDERRY AIR, the tune on which as LONDONDONNIE Mr. Byas outdid even Mr. Webster. 

The number with which they had begun, and which they resumed, was SOPHISTICATED LADY.
As I understand from Alan Clare's reminiscence Oscar Peterson's show had to be paused due to old Forte/Fortyfingers sliding helpless under the piano and rolling round in hysterics when he heard the mis-title 
SUFFOCATED LADY 

I may abstain from delivering the Allan Sherman/ Johnny Barnes on that one, 

ciao!Robert R. Calder 




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