Mike Hatchard's Crowhurst Breakfast Jazz - overeasy and sunny-side up

Mike Hatchard, jazz musician and singer, played a nearly two hour set this afternoon in the tiny East Sussex village of Crowhurst. Mike is a jazz and popular music veteran. As a young man he was Matt Munro’s musical director, he played with Barbara Thompson's Paraphernalia, and in recent years he has been playing up and down the English south coast with Herbie Flowers, former bassist with Sky and session man on many a classic 1970s rock album.

Those who came to Mike’s Jazz Breakfast at 1030 am on a Sunday morning in Crowhurst Village Hall were served bacon butties and coffee before he took to the electric keyboard, opened up with Sinatra's 'Come Fly With Me', and then provided the audience with a musical guide to some of the leading pioneers of 1920s jazz piano.

Mike plays with feeling and can sing often highly challenging and diverse material. A ragtime number associated with James P. Johnson and a boogie woogie tune popularised by Charles ‘Pinetop’ Smith were played with dexterity and gusto. Performing ‘Spain (I Can Recall)’) a Corea/ Rodrigo/Maren/Jarreau tune that Al Jarreau normally sings is not easy, but Mike carried it off. George and Ira Gershwin’s ‘Someone to Watch over Me’ was sung and played with great tenderness. 

More striking still was his take on  ‘The Dutchman’. The subject matter of this Liam Clancy folk number is a lifelong love ravaged, but not ended, by senility. Mike clearly loves this song deeply. It should have brought the house down. The audience were, I think, still taking it in long after he had moved on to the next number. 

Mike has great rapport with the audience, regaling them with tales from the road, which in his younger years was often traversed by bicycle. Such was the sympathy that Mike created, he even got away with an embarrassing ‘comedy’ number from a very different era: ‘Have Some Madeira, M’Dear’, a tale of an old man seducing an underage girl with the aid of fortified wine. 

At one point Mike brought on Crowhurst’s newest resident to play the trumpet. Paul Eshelby is a professor at the Royal College of Music. More importantly he is a sensitive as well as a virtuoso musician. I am sitting in a village hall with 50 people on a Sunday morning watching Paul play ‘My Funny Valentine’ to Mike’s skillful piano accompaniment and thinking that in many other Sussex villages this space would be reserved for amateur dramatics and the bingo. In fact the children’s club was scheduled to follow.

Toward the end of his set Mike picked up the fiddle and performed a couple of numbers in a swing style accompanied by Paul and Steve Savage, an accordionist.  The three musicians’ feigned exit through the audience brought very loud applause and many, well-deserved, shouts for more, to which Mike responded by switching to an acoustic guitar to perform a French gypsy jazz number with Steve.

A great show. Look out for Mike performing with Herbie Flowers at the St Mary's in the Castle in Hastings, and elsewhere on the Sussex coast.

Manfred Mann Live at the Jazz Cafe (September 10th 2013)

Manfred Mann’s Earth Band (MMEB) were the first band I ever saw live, when, 33 years ago, I went with my elder brother to see them at the Brighton Dome. Seeing a line up of the Earth Band with only two surviving members from the 1970s was never going to match a 16 year old’s rock rite of passage. Back then they were a band that, while far from hip, had had some success only a few months earlier with a consistently good album “Angel Station”. Then, only in their mid to late 30s, they had toured the album extensively. They also had a mixing desk at The Dome. And, they had Chris Thompson on vocals. His is the voice on the most highly rated MMEB albums, all of which, unsurprisingly, were released in the 1970s. He was never especially mellifluous or highly dextrous in the vocal department, but Thompson could do subtlety, and gritty, as required.

Tuesday night’s man in the vocal spotlight was one Robert Hart. He doesn’t play much guitar, leaving himself free to pose with the mic stand like he was Rod Stewart in the 1970s. Close-up, in an intimately small venue like the Jazz Café, this is not a pretty sight. Hart is a competent but uninspiring member of the rock belter school of vocals. It was little surprise to discover later that he was Bad Company’s singer long after Paul Rogers had moved on.

MMEB have a great bass player, Steve Kinch, almost a veteran himself as he joined way back in 1986; a solid and slightly more youthful drummer, Jimmy Copley; and of course an almost undimmed 72 year old Manfred Mann on trademark keyboards together with original member Mick Rogers (no relation) on lead guitar and occasional vocals.

This was a relatively short performance; the night’s entertainment was partly filled with 45 minutes of Lesley Mendelson, a painfully sincere and wholly inappropriate 20-something female singer-songwriter from New York. The Earth Band themselves managed just eleven, admittedly not short, numbers, most of which would have figured on any “Best of” compilation. Subtler, but, for fans, highly popular numbers were probably out of Hart’s technical and emotional range. In some cases they would probably be too musically challenging for the rest of the band too, at least without that mixing desk and more time spent in rehearsal. The atmospheric quality found on numbers like “Waiting for the Rain” (from “Angel Station”, 1979); “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” (a brave Dylan cover from 1972); or “Drowning on Dry Land” and “Circles” (from their most commercially and critically successful LP, “Watch” (1978)) was nowhere to be heard. The performance of “Martha’s Madman”, taken from “Watch”, failed to get remotely close to the drama of the original.

“Blinded by the Light” (originally a Springsteen song) was both obligatory and, as it turned out, well performed on the night. Hart, for once, did not overdo the vocals, while he and Kinche provided a solid, but not overly dominating, chorus to accompany Manfred’s verse part (as per the band’s original version). MMEB are renowned for their covers; detractors would, a little unfairly, say not for much else. In most cases in the 1970s their interpretations actually complemented, even, in the above Springsteen example at least, arguably enhancing the original, in the process of often changing songs beyond recognition. “For You”, also performed, proved a far, far less satisfying cover of a Springsteen original. It wasn’t totally absurd though that a third should be added to the night’s repertoire. “Dancing in the Dark” though proved to be just about the worst cover I can remember having had the displeasure of hearing a name act do. (And I heard Westlife do “Matthew and Son” on a rainy morning in London in 1996). This was embarrassing, even, it seemed, to some of the members of the Earth Band. Total cabaret, and not particularly well done. Unlike “Blinded by The Light”, and the welter of Dylan covers for which they’re famous, it was made all the worse for being more or less a straight reproduction, at least until Manfred tried to rescue it with another blast of what, live, sometimes became an excess of keyboard noodling.

Things picked up when Robert disappeared and Mick Rogers took over vocal duties. He is weaker in volume but more in keeping with the style for which the band is renowned. He sang lead on “Father of Night”, a relatively obscure Dylan song first recorded by MMEB in 1973, and made it one of the highlights of the evening. When most of the rest of the band then exited for a well-earned comfort break, Rogers dusted off another gem, this time from an even earlier Manfred incarnation: “Doo Wah Diddy”. Singing with only his guitar and the drummer for accompaniment, Rogers alternated between the pace of the mid-60s original and a bold, rockabilly-style, reinterpretation.

A fairly decent fist was made of “Davy’s on the Road Again”, written by Robbie Robertson and John Simon, a live version of which MMEB are as equally renowned for as “Blinded by the Light”. For the encore yet another song from “Watch” was chosen, Dylan’s “Mighty Quinn”, which soon relapsed into a pub-style sing along.

It has to be said that there was a lot of emotion on the stage. The band, very friendly, upbeat and engaging with the many apparently recognisable faces in the audience, were plainly having a good time, including even the irascible old anti-star himself, Manfred Mann. At times he would delight his long time followers by emerging from behind his fixed and rather defensive bank of keyboards and strut his stuff with a strap-on “keytar”.

When the band linked arms for one of several bows, you wondered how much longer there would be as many as two original members still doing this routine. “For as long as people want to pay,” he recently commented, and there is a very hard core of devotees who will no doubt go on doing so for as long as he is still able to play. 

Shaw’s Major Barbara at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin

“Major Barbara”, currently showing at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, is not a must-see performance. However it has some very good performances, and, despite being over 100 years old, many still relevant themes.

In a moment of almost childlike Marxist didacticism, Paul McGann, playing the splendidly saturnine arms manufacturer Mr Undershaft, tells the audience that European governments do his bidding. Written less than 10 years before World War 1, the play’s author, Irishman George Bernard Shaw, is celebrated for his apparent power of prophecy.

Yet GBS’ more telling, and more pertinent observations for today's audience, concerns liberals self-righteously raging at the world’s many inequities. Undershaft, a man born of East End poverty who married into an Earl’s family, is the play’s only morally uncompromised character. GBS enjoys giving him many of the play’s wittiest and most perceptive lines. Undershaft’s morality is based on a gospel of material salvation that only money can bring. Socialists of the time scared this businessman by also preaching material solutions to soulless drudgery. However his daughter, “Major” Barbara, played by Claire Dunn, is rather less threatening. She sees the Salvation Army as the surest solution to want: bread and treacle in exchange for a (declared) devotion to God.

The least satisfying part of the play is Barbara’s naive, soul-searching, purity amidst more worldly compromises. At times hammy in actualisation, the difficulties of her role are only compounded. Sadly, but inevitably, it is Barbara’s declamations that end the play. Her “realism” has led her to embrace the pragmatic (or cynical) Adolpus, her fiancé, in his apparently reluctant decision to agree to run (and one day inherit) Undershaft’s business. Her reasoning is that she can then focus on converting less materially-needy souls at his factory. This version of changing the system from within smacks of the same simple-minded wisdom that Lady Britomart (Barbara’s mother, wonderfully played by Eleanor Methven)  elsewhere dismisses as typifying the insights of The Times newspaper.

The most witty, incisive, and electric dialogue is that between Undershaft and Adolphus in the second act. The former, ironically perhaps, often carries the audience in his deployment of well-informed cynicism against the almost puritan pleadings of his soon to be son in law whose version of changing the system from within leads him to imagine that he can make the arms trade more moral. The final line of the play is Undershaft saying to Adolphus, a man of normally more leisurely hours, that he will see him at the factory at 6 am.

Undershaft’s signature claim that only a willingness to kill can change anything, whereas voting only changes the names of cabinet members, suggests a utilitarian use for arms. Eleven years after this play was written, WB Yeats observed that in Ireland a terrible beauty had been born. In Egypt a willingness to kill, or more likely be killed, is convulsing that country, although the most likely outcome is regressive.

This is an antidote, perhaps, to Undershaft’s contempt for the naïve parliamentarianism expressed by his son, Stephen. Either way, “Major Barbara” speaks straightforwardly and often entertainingly to many complex and still contemporary issues.