December already. Another 12 months have almost ratcheted by, soon to be consigned to the annals of history. The March of Time!, as the stentorian voice-over proclaimed to preface each edition of the bygone newsreel.
AD 2025 will go down in the Gregorian calendar as the Year
of the New Kitchen, with a few short trips to the motherland as appendices. Our
days, though, have generally become those of the privileged semi-retired. Touch
wood, both of us still enjoy sufficient mobility and good health to start each
day, after breakfast of course, by walking the dog. We do it together now, on
the basis that there is a less urgent need to ‘get on’ with our to-dos than
there was a few years ago.
Just recently, our walks have been fog-bound, as the weather decides which way it wants to go. Sometimes we might get a glimpse of a deer bounding across a meadow as it races for cover in the next outcrop of trees. Usually, though, we see no one and nothing. The other day, however, the sun came out and everything turned unseasonably mild. We bumped into the bearded man with the adorable ageing collie whose path we cross from time to time, and, in determining exactly where we live, he gave us a fascinating lesson in local history.
In the days before our respective communes were created, isolated settlements such as an older version of our own were part of an area known locally as Quatre Pariches, its approximate territory linked to four churches and their parishes. The tiny nearby hamlet of Bonnard was even tinier then, excluding the area where Michel, the semi-retired sheep farmer, and his family set up shop. Down beneath the hamlet and all the way along the under-cliff of the limestone escarpment that separates the residents of the ‘crest’ from the dwellers of the plain below, apparently, you can find traces of ancient fortifications built either by the Gauls to keep out the Romans or vice versa. By this time, my French was beginning to pack up and I was itching to get on.
Still, these things are good to know. Local history is a microcosm of what happens nationally. The bearded man seems to have lived all his life in these parts, so he knows just about everyone and everything here. The Good Wife and I now also know that he lives in one of our favourite landmarks: the house with blue shutters and the two amiable donkeys. It’s a slightly ramshackle place with plenty of character, and a suitable dwelling for a man, we conjectured, who might have been a teacher during his professional life.
When I’m not out walking or transporting leaves from our track and taking them to a part of the garden where they might do some good, I’ve been masquerading as a proper journalist this month. In other words, not simply reviewing music in splendid isolation, but actually talking to some of the musicians who create it. I’m not entirely sure why, but I tend to shy away from these encounters: not because I’m reluctant to make a connection with human beings, but more because of my technophobia, I guess. My First Lady does all the donkey-work in setting up calls on her Zoom account, but I still fret lest things go wrong and I’m left mouthing or waving at my interviewee because one of us can’t hear or see the other.
Everything, however, ran perfectly smoothly, I didn’t make a twerp of myself, and I enjoyed my chats with two quite delightful individuals. It’s good to talk. Wasn’t that the slogan of British Telecom a few decades or so ago before social media transformed life into one big universal chit-chat?
Jaime Ospina is an expat Colombian based in Austin, Texas, a verifiable ex-(music)teacher and full-time musician, mainly with the party-hearty cumbia group, Superfónicos. We talked about his inspiring ‘Feeding Souls’ initiative, whereby he (and others who have joined) will go into elementary schools on Friday lunchtimes to bring a different kind of sustenance to pupils. He sets up in the school’s ‘cafetorium’, an auditorium doubling up as lunchtime refectory (similar, I imagine, to my old senior school in Belfast), where the kids eat their sandwiches or whatever food they’ve brought with them. ‘I could see at first hand,’ Jaime told me, ‘the joy of the kids as they come up after their lunch and see what’s going on – and they find the connection between movement and sound. Music is not something sterile that comes from speakers; there are actually humans involved in its creation.’ The first time he experienced this, it got him ‘thinking how great things like this should happen as often as possible, especially in these times when horrible things are happening.’
I discovered, although I knew already, just how difficult it is for a musician to make a decent living in this era of Spotify. Live music should be a right, Jaime underlines, and not a privilege for the well-heeled few who can afford today’s ticket prices. He has a dream – of world denomination. ‘Feeding Souls’ could become a worldwide phenomenon, nourishing the souls of school kids, prisoners, inmates and all who are denied live music, and nourishing the musicians who are paid to go into institutions and perform.
It was the kind of conversation that made me feel that I was performing a useful service in helping to disseminate such positive and inspiring ideas. Not long after this, I had another such conversation, but this time more of a history lesson, with Roger Glenn. Roger’s an octogenarian, who has recently brought out his second solo album after a lifetime in the business and more than half a century since he released his debut, apparently a difficult and dispiriting birth. He’s one of two musical sons of Tyree Glenn, who played trombone with Cab Calloway’s orchestra during the Swing Era, and later trombone and vibes with Duke Ellington, before becoming a studio musician for radio and TV and ultimately joining Louis Armstrong’s All Stars. Roger’s dad taught him to play the vibes, just one of 18 or more instruments that he plays. Thrillingly, I discovered, he played vibes for flautist Herbie Mann, flute for vibraphonist Cal Tjader, and both for Dizzy Gillespie. What’s more, he played flute (un-credited initially) on Donald Byrd’s seminal Black Byrd.
Roger was very keen to talk and I was maybe even keener to listen, so I lost the thread somewhat of the interview, but gathered enough material for an article that will help publicise his solo album, My Latin Heart. Like Jaime Ospina, he needs all the help he can get. The album has been very well received, but he calls the physical CD a mere ‘calling card’. He’s hoping to bring it out in vinyl soon, which will probably sell somewhat better than the CD, but there’s little money to be made from the tangible product in a virtual world. He needs to perform live in order to push the album, but that demands the kind of personal investment that he can’t make without a struggle.
So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would have said. Such matters may be a trifle depressing, but it is good to talk (my garrulous First Lady should know). You never know what you might learn. Talking of which, I learnt on discovering an envelope in our letter box up the track that all septuagenarians and over receive a plastic card from the commune that you can redeem at the local Intermarché for upwards of €10. The exact amount is a surprise.
Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas, one and all!
