New Ways to be a Singer

I think the old way is about turning music into a discreet commodity that you can trade. So you separate one singer from all the other singers and put her on a stage. A story about quality enters; good singers get on stage; OK singers join a choir; everyone else is Not a Singer so sits in the audience and listens. You can charge these people for a ticket to hear the singers sing.

This Singers/Non Singers divide is in contrast to the times when Everyone's a Singer. Like, the pub at St Issey on Mayday Eve, when I walked in and everyone in that packed out pub was singing 'Let the Light from the Lighthouse shine on me" and the sound went through my bone marrow, the joy lifting up my spine and bursing out through my cheeks.  Or, new years eve and Auld Lang Zine. Or, when everyone's drunk and sings Bon Jovi or Robbie Williams at top voice.

In the old way, you record The Singer and sell the CDs to the people who play the professional musician on the stereo rather than making music themselves.

And in the old way, you have Songs which people Wrote or Covered and own some kinds of Rights to, so again, other people then pay to use them.

Commercial music in other words.

Which is probably necessary for people who are actually full time musicians and need to make some money out of it. But then there's the whole music industry which I think probably fucks a lot of people up. Like, why are Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears so messed up? Dunno. That's for another time.

So the new way. I'm exploring and I'm starting to find some things.

So I have three 'gigs' booked.

1. Leading the singing at Radford Mill's Apple Wassail
2. Getting everyone singing a funny 'baby is coming' kind of song at my friend's baby shower, and
3. Singing two songs for my uncle Henry, who is ill, and when I go to visit him he asks for music, so then I go away and prepare what he's asked for, and when it's ready I arrange another visit, and then he listens and says he likes it and then asks for something else. Today he asked for I wish I knew how it would feel to be free by Nina Simone, and he asked me to sing it at his funeral too. My aunt Kate's not sure about that. We'll see. It's a good song for a man with Motor Neurone Disease. He's something of a star now, Henry. On Friday night there was a documentary about him on Channel 4 , made, strangely enough, by my old housemate Chris.

I haven't seen it yet.

So I like these gigs. Weaving song back into community, and community back into song. And actually doing it, rather than just thinking and talking about it. I like that. Let's see how it goes.

I'll peak in my late sixties

Saw my friend Sam Lee last night, who taught us some great Wassail songs.

Sam's a great folk singer.

"Singers peak in their late sixties," he said. "Something about the muscles. And the attitude."

Great!

I've got a couple of small performances coming up this week. I'm performing Opportunity on Thursday night, and I'm singing for my uncle on Sunday. He's very ill and he's talking straight, wasting no time. He thinks I'm crazy for not devoting my life to singing, he tells me. I mentioned this to Sam. Well, I rather agree, he said. "You've got a big quota of song-givingness that you haven't really used yet."

I like this. I find it encouraging. That is motivating.

But what people don't see is the invisible hive of activity that is happening! Learning! Practicing! Exploring! Discovering! Re-imagining! Playing! Got to start. Performance tomorrow. Voice a wreck.

But I'll peak in my late sixties! I can sing forever! And relax!

The stereo in Neros

Red letter moment yesterday.

Getting coffee for my colleagues in Neros. Listening to the music in the queue. I was interested in the singer and thinking about her style.

Another track comes on. Oh, I think. Someone else has done a cover of Change is Gonna Come, like I did with Honeyroot. Humm, I think, these people must have heard our track and been really influenced by it. I feel proud. Humm. Hang on, that singer sounds a bit like me.

We get to the chorus.

O! It is me! I'm on the stereo! It's me singing like a proper singer on the stereo in Cafe Nero in Hampstead!

I bubble with excitement. I look around. I want to tell everyone. I'm handed my coffees. I want to tell the barrista. I'm shy. I don't.

But it was cool :)

You're on yer own, darlin'

I'm in the tea line. “Are you singing tonight?” asks an old Jazz man in a long anorak. “What you did last night was beautiful. Beautiful. It was like a piece of old lace. Delicate, and full of holes. Some of them were big holes! But beautiful. Beautiful! What next? It was a tiny piece of lace. The lace needs form... edges. That genre...”


“Ah! Is it a genre?”


“Well, you've just invented it, haven't you?”


“Really? Don't other people do that?”


Jazz man furrows his brow. “Well, there were a few in the seventies, but... No. You're on your own, darlin'. It's a new field. A big, wide open space. With a sign on it: Here be wilde things.”


Humm. I wander thoughtfully to the milk and de-tea-bagging stand. Duncan the guitar tutor comes up. 


“You the trombonist?” 


“No, singer.” 


“How's the week been?”


 “Humm.” 


“?” 


“Well, I think... I think that what I want to do isn't normal.” 


“What do you want to do?” 


“I think it might be called free vocal jazz.” 


“Ah! Free Jazz! Well you can't teach that,” he grins cheerfully. “You just have to start and see what happens.”


“That sounds like fun!”


“Yep, it is. I used to know some guys who did it. They'd have a set list with titles on, like 'Red Sunset...  Thick Brown Water...' and they'd start and they'd all stand and imagine what a red sunset might feel like, then one of them would start playing and the others would think of what might sound good with that, and join in.”


“Ah I see. Thanks!”


I walk towards the studio theatre and bump into the course director. We talk about free singing and different cultural approaches to vocal music.


“Your singing last night was very beautiful,” he says. “In some ways it was extremely simple, musically, but it was absolutely full of emotion. You probably couldn't get that if you were playing second violin on a Bach Fugue.”


Humm. I go into the concert and sit at the back listening and scribbling notes.


Is there a spectrum with complexity and one end and emotional content at the other? I think of the Peulh and Richard Quantum Lightbreak Bock and the power of singing a single note.


It can't be that simple. Atul's music is quite complex – it gets very fast, at least – and it's packed full of emotion. Bobby Mcferrin on the other hand can get really complex and lose emotional charge, gaining impressiveness – but that's a different experience.


And how do you learn complexity, or things that make your improvisation sophisticated, without smothering out the emotionality? It's as if once we know what we're doing, we leap confidently in and reel it off, but when we're not sure we explore like raw curious things. I like raw curious things. We explore like raw curious Clowns.


How do you keep the clown, and make it a clever clown? How do we feed our little voices? Maybe we feed it in the language it knows, the language of the heart and ears and rhythmic guts. We feed it aurally and through experience, like in Indian and Zimbabwen music, rather than through mathematics and diagrams. ?


“You've got to have form and structure,” said Jazz man. Yup. This is my question: what kind of rules and sections can you have in an improvisation to give it form, like Indian improvised music? Maybe just using the rules from Indian classical music would be a good start. They're good rules. Then you could just make them up. For the first five minutes, no drum, and you don't sing higher than a middle G. Second five minutes, you only use the pentatonic scale, and you can have a drum but it's quite steady and spacious beat. And so on. It could be a whole different approach to writing music: to establish the sectional and overall principles and set it free.


Gosh. That's exactly how a chaordic organisation works: establish the principles and set it free.


I'd like to turn the fun fed into a chaordic organisation.


Humm.


“You're on your own darlin'. It's yours to explore.”


“You can't teach that.”


“Genre? You've just invented it!”


“Your piece last night was the highlight of my week.”


“Breath of fresh air.”


“You are the most free person I've ever met.”


“Can I hug you?”


“There's a sign... Here be wilde things.”

Free Birds

I lie in the park at the end of the penultimate day of Jazz Summer School, almost in tears. All day, almost all week, my noise-making has been tightly controlled by a central person – a composer, a conductor, a tutor.

Where is the space in our world to sing like a free bird?

Who puts the birds in a circle and dictates what they must sing?

Who rounds up the Whales?

Simply left to make noise together, humans create such beauty and magic. I've felt it time and time again. With central control, quality, pleasure and presence get diminished.

Walking slowly away from the Guildhall building I feel such a terrible weight. I feel it in my body and I've seen it grow on everyone's faces as the day progresses.

I feel angry with the rigidity of the structures that try to control us so tightly and kill our pleasure.

For our beautiful innate music is not allowed to find itself.

Last night in the studio theatre I did my first ever entirely improvised performance. Actually it wasn't entirely improvised. I knew the five or six chords on the piano I'd be using, but I didn't know in which order. I knew the rhythm and tempo of the piano playing that I'd use as a base. And I knew the first note I'd sing.

It went down really well. “You make being in the room feel like being inside honey.” said one. “I felt as if I was walking by a river, calm and free,” said another. Many questions about my training.

I am extremely untrained, formally. I am simply incredibly honest, and I listen for what the small singer in my tummy is singing, and I copy. And when it is silent, I let myself be silent too. And I trust it. Most of the time...

I have never got on well with formal music education because it seems to ignore that small singer inside me. It tries to paste over it with its knowledge and rules and theories and scientification of music which it assumes to be superior. For many years I simply thought that I wasn't a proper musician, I was inferior. But now I think actually, I am a real musician, and I just disagree. 

I disagree.

And here, even where the course director is a singer, singing is somehow inferior. The instrumentalists in their small bands pass the improvised solos round like sweeties, while in choir we sing exactly what the choir master tells us. Finally solos time comes! With the exception of me, everyone gets their solo at the same time – unlike the instrumentalists - with no guidance at all about how to approach simultaneous improvisation, and the result is uncomfortably chaotic.

I find myself feeling offended that the voice is not considered an instrument in the same way other instruments are. Maybe the whole issue is just the course but these people run the jazz master's course at the London Guildhall and as far as I know that's pretty high up in The Establishment. This perspective feels systemic.

I feel sad and a little angry.

Where is the space to sing like a free bird?

Birds, come along. We can create it! :)

when we fell through the ice - fireworks night

I like this song.

I used to sing with the lovely fellows of Fireworks Night. This is us.