Poetry and Jazz at the Festival Hall

A press-cutting for June 1961 found among the papers of Daniel ('Dannie') Abse, CBE, FRSL (1923 – 2014) well respected Welsh and Jewish poet who worked as a doctor much of his life. From the days of poetry and jazz, duffle coats and beards. The Tribune (a left -wing weekly) emphasises the youth of the audience, this is from a time when 'youth' meant under 30 - the youth movement didn't really begin until 1963 (see Larkin's poem Annus Mirabilis.) Another press-cutting notes the presence of the 'irrepressible' Spike Milligan 'the eminent goon poet.' Press cuttings, like Poetry and Jazz, are surely a thing of the past. Are there agencies still cutting up (and pasting) newspapers that mention their clients?

The Hampstead Poets and Jazz Group whose first recital was such a success at Hampstead Town Hall last February, greatly daring,took the Festival Hall on Sunday for another performance of their unique form of entertainment. Their optimism was well justified, as the hall was just about full; again the majority of the audience was under 30, and they were given the mixture of poetry and jazz much as before, although unavoidably, the intimate atmosphere of the first occasion was lost in the vast auditorium.

The one newcomer was Laurie Lee, himself a young poet in the thirties

‘Come on, Daddy O.’

It was the first visit of Jazz legend Lionel Hampton to England and one of his gigs was seemingly at Hanley Town Hall in north Staffordshire, according to G. A. Roberts, who captured the occasion in an article that appeared in the December 1956 issue cum grado, the student magazine of what was soon to become Keele University.

Photo by William Gottlieb

According to Roberts, the band played one number without Hampton and when the great man was introduced to the audience there was a:

Deafening  roar from the audience, deafening noise from the band. A lean light grey suited  negro ran onto the stage acknowledging his reception. With a wealth of gesticulation, he stopped the band and then led them into another hectic number—loud, driving, swinging. We were away---from the beginning, Hampton’s tactics were clear ---he was going to produce such a dynamic, hypnotic, driving, compelling, metronomic beat that the audience would be goaded  into a frenzy of excitement and enthusiasm…but twice on the evening Hampton sacrificed sheer beat for artistry.
He used the vibroharp to produce sounds of real beauty which even the band could not drown ; caressing the instrument so that its strange tones filled the echoing hall. But then, as though ashamed of his lapse of taste, he returned to the repetition of fast mechanical tunes. The audience loved it…

The Umbrella Club

Let no-one accuse Jot 101 of being Londoncentric. We at Jot HQ welcome quirky Jots on provincial goings-on and just to prove it here is one issue of the quarterly house journal of a Coventry-based arts organisation called The Umbrella Club.

The club, which was opened by The Goons in 1956 operated first from humble premises in Little Park Street, bang in the city centre, a three minute walk from the controversial new cathedral. In 1960 it described itself as:

‘an independent, non-political, non profitmaking organisation for encouraging interest in art music, music, literature, the theatre and kindred subjects. It arranges lectures, recitals, dramatic performances and many related activities’ 

Its house journal was a well produced quarterly anthology of poetry, short stories, reviews and art work entitled, rather imaginatively, Umbrella, which by 1960 was already into its second volume. In the Spring issue, editor T.C.Watson, a local English teacher, urges potential contributors to submit material that paints a portrait of life in the Midlands, and which reflect or interpret:

‘such problems as labour relations, race relations, the world of the teenager, the changing patterns of family life in a mobile society and the attitudes of the citizen of today to the established institutions of the past’

An earnest ambition this, at the start of a decade which saw sociology take over from English as the coolest degree option. However, it seems that many of the contributors to Umbrella were English graduates, with a strong bias towards that coolest of all English Universities in the sixties, Keele. Of the wannabe Amises, Drabbles and Larkins who contributed to  two of the 1960 issues, only two names stands out---local wunderkind novelist Susan Hill, then just 18, and Keele graduate Zulfikar Ghose, who handled the magazine’s poetry review pages. Hill, now 72, went on to become a sort of heir to Daphne du Maurier, while Ghose, a little older, is an acclaimed poet now based in the United States.

We should add that Hill, whose first scandalous novel had a theatrical background, was also a budding playwright, and must have attended many a production at the Umbrella Club while a sixth former at Coventry’s Barr’s Hill School, while Philip Larkin who, after all was born in Coventry, had at least one poem published in Umbrella. As a jazz nut he may also have heard some pretty cool notes in Little Park Street.[RH]

A scrap of Cole Porter

Cole Porter (1891 – 1964) is arguably the greatest popular songwriter of the twentieth century. I read somewhere that he composed around 1,000 songs, not all of which are as brilliant as ‘Night and Day’, ‘I get a Kick out of You ‘ and ‘Anything Goes ‘. One is called ‘Ours ‘and was written for the rather forgotten comedy musical of 1936 ‘Red Hot and Blue ‘, in which Bob Hope, Ethel Merman and Jimmy Durante starred. Somehow or other, along with some unrelated letters, I acquired a tiny fragment of the original manuscript which the maestro had given to a lady to give to a young man he had taken to. This information was typewritten on a slip of paper that came with the fragment. Here are the words on it:

‘Inclosed (sic) is the original hand writing of Cole Porter…This is a number that Cole Porter gave to Mother to give to one of her pupils, whom Cole Porter was particularly interested in. Mother knows him, and was out to his Beverley Hills home on an interview for this same pupil. Cole Porter is a great artist, and as modest and unassuming and sincere as all artists be.

 ‘

I know nothing of this Mother, the child who typed the slip, the mysterious male pupil, or whether Cole Porter’s interest in him was purely professional or romantic. It would be nice to solve this little mystery and perhaps trace the remainder of the musical manuscript. I presume that the pupil allowed Mother to cut off the heading as a keepsake of the great man.[R.H.]

Toni Del Renzio: Piano, a Surrealist Prose Poem for Art Hodes (1945)

Late surrealist poem found in 1945 magazine Piano Jazz, published by The Jazz Sociological Society, Neasden, London. Toni del Renzio (Antonino Romanov del Renzio dei Rossi di Castellone e Venosa 1915 - 2007) was part of the small club of British surrealists most of whom seem to have fallen out with one another. Roger Cardinal in his Guardian obituary notes:

 "Del Renzio was also something of a poet, and one evening in 1944, E.L.T. Mesens and his followers sabotaged their enemy's reading at the International Arts Centre - objects were thrown, and del Renzio and Ithell (Colquhoun) had to duck behind a piano." Take it away Toni--

Piano of tumultuous melody pouring through the milky way in staccato spurts of harsh lyricism alight with the ecstasy of the blues and the stomp and the rag beautiful twists of primitive innocence more marvellous than civilisation.

Piano of mercury and arsenic flowers dissolve in the promises of reefers and alcohol which steadies and firms the sensitive hands of love long-fingered with desires hollow-palmed with hopes slender-wristed with the sending practice of the boogie surprise.

Piano of fireflies sinking in the dark warm swamp of memory where the images of what was are convulsed into the shaking outline of what must be and what will be when the gutted lie in streamers across the barricades of the night and in the distance can be heard the feminine song of a well-licked clarinet.

Skeleton piano of terrors and fears.

Iron piano of inescapable fates fanning paths of hazard.

Stone piano of social neglect beneath the skies of benevolence and other hateful qualities.

Great piano of palpitating heart.
Piano master of all we want and can ever hope to obtain.

Piano ill-used by many whites of the disgusting nature of Bach and Beethoven and filthy Brahms that only the blacks were able to demonstrate anew its wonderful possibilities.

Piano in the despairing desert of coercion and war where only the bitter songs of the dead are sweet street marches of revolt.

Piano sprouting everywhere with greenwood and rare flowers in which enormous bees seek the honey distilled into the nectar that only jazzmen drink at midnight.

Piano which we hear gently treated and subtly tortured in the quietest blues only to be vigorously and strangled noisily in the interior landscape rented by Art Hodes who gives back to the blacks their own way of playing.

Piano athwart the future like the bloody clouds of absurd and strangely moving tears of a bereaved mother beaten by herself about her full bosom.
Piano instrument of giants and dwarfs these latter being the greater and the faster legends of docking and riverboats love beneath stairs beneath the waters of the muddy river lamented by the slowest blues on wax.

Piano tyrant and poet mechanical Rimbaud.

Piano liberal thump of every nuance of a tortured brain in which nestles the tapeworm of ambition Promethean endeavour to spit in the face not only of that priest and his onanism but of the hideous god himself who must have emasculates sing his masses and his too gentle passion.

Piano shouting the lice of New York and the scabs of New Orleans the yellows and the browns and the blacks but above all the blues.

Piano whose each note is the vibration of one of my nerve-chords which sends its jerky message to my head and twitches the whole body like a clumsy imagination and awful miner of deposits of poisonous ores in the depths of a woman's and man's joint sufferings which but for your clanging rhythm might have just become death.

Piano more lovely more lovable than a suicide.
Mad piano neither to be bought or sold.
Mad mad mad piano play if you can without your suffering master.

Piano of fine falling crystal rain in the smoke and steam and in the stench of cigars and bad gin and sweat trickle and tremble shimmering haze of percussion as black fingers and white fingers hammer black notes and white notes.

TONI del RENZIO.