The June 2024 Social Whirl Part Two, Plus Jazz In the Crypt With Emma Rawicz & Dave Preston, Mid June

It’s been a long week

Lots of pleasant events in my diary in one mid-June week:

  • 18 June – MCC real tennis club night;
  • 19 June – lunch with Stuart Harris after session with accountants;
  • 20 June – real tennis follwed by a bit of Middlesex v Surrey at Lord’s followed by Jazz in the Crypt at St John Smith Square…or should I say Sinfonia Smith Square;
  • 22 June – dinner with Simon & Timothy… & Ella.

Club Night

The last tennis club night of the current season – we’ll resume in September – had seven of us engaging in various doubles battles until the last four of us standing were worn out.

Lunch With Stuart Harris

The next day, I met up with my very first former tennis doubles partner – albeit “lawn” rather than “real” – Stuart Harris. (No relation).The tale of our great seminal tennis tournament victory in 1974 can be seen by clicking here or below.

Following a most enjoyable Zoom, we decided to meet up properly for lunch. Fitting that Stuart suggested John Lewis’s 5th floor restaurant, as that location was well suited to Cavendish Square accountants and was also faintly reminiscent of Pratts restaurant at the John Lewis store in Streatham, where my dad used to like to take me for tea on rare, cherished occasions during my childhood.

It was great to catch up with Stuart again after all these years. We had lots to talk about and a couple of hours flew by. Stuart’s jokes have not got better over the decades, whereas mine have. That’s one of my jokes, btw. Why isn’t anybody laughing?

LOrd’s For Tennis & T20

Real tennis was fun. Then I had some time to kill, not least because the T20 match was to be a late kick off due to the football Euros match. I got some reading done on the pavilion sun deck while holding some suitable seats for me and Janie. Janie arrived in such good time for the match that we were able to eat first. Good idea, really, as we’d neither of us had lunch.

Yum

Middlesex did its usual “flatter to deceive” bit, looking good for the first 15 overs of the Surrey innings.

Janie and I were not heavily invested in this match, as we had long-since planned to abandon ship in favour of SJSS and a jazz evening there.

Jazz In The crypt with emma raWicz & Dave preston

Emma Rawicz is seen as one of the brightest young jazz talents around. Saxophone too – Janie’s favourite. She, together with her friend Dave Preston, another bright young thing in the jazz world – guitar in his case – were to do a jazz impromptu set of their latest stuff.

No second innings at Lord’s for us – off to collect Dumbo who drove us across London to St John’s Smith Square.

But wait…

…there are balloons and signs of a party as we arrive. The place is no longer named St John’s Smith Square – it had that very day been rebranded as Sinfonia Smith Square. Get it right.

Thus, instead of the promised St John’s Smith Square crypt jazz concert, we saw a Sinfonia Smith Square crypt jazz concert.

Here’s a link to the Sinfonia Smith Square stub for that concert.

It was very good.

Here is a video of the two of them, plus a pianist on this occasion, playing one of the cool jazz pieces they played for us: Vera:

Emma comes across as a warm-hearted young woman, who spent more time plugging Dave Preston’s latest album, Purple / Black…

…than she spent plugging her own latest material. The album Chroma, seeing as you asked:

We really enjoyed the concert and for sure will now be looking out for Emma and Dave – yes we feel as though we’ve done enough to be on first name terms with them both.

Dinner With Simon, Timothy & Ella at their place

Simon & Timothy have a recent addition to their family: Ella. One of the purposes of our visit was to have dinner and a good chat with Simon & Timothy. But the main purpose, obviously, was to meet Ella and take her the present that we have been accumulating for her since we learnt of her imminent arrival – our spent, balding tennis balls.

“Ella” depicted by a lookalike actress

Naturally we didn’t take photographs of young Ella – Simon and Timothy don’t want her to turn into a vain, lens-loving gal…

…in any case, she’d probably just eat the photos. Apparently Ella will try to eat almost anything. She certainly made a good attempt at one of my elbows while I was eating and made headway with the first of the 15 balls we took for her. That collection of balls is not expected to last long. Janie and I will need to play yet more tennis.

Simon cooked a splendid meal:

  • asparagus soup;
  • roast chicken with roasted vegetables;
  • strawberries and cream.

Very English summer, which, coincidentally, is the way the weather seemed to be turning that weekend. At last.

It was a very enjoyable evening which flashed by all too quickly.

Art For Art’s Sake: An Evening With Simon Jacobs Recording I Only Have Eyes For You, Followed BY Dinner At The Brackenbury Wine Rooms, 21 March 2019

Did I mention that I had a recording deal lined up? Yeh, Simon Jacobs, who does producing as well as recording and all that – he signed me up to do a demo in his high tech studio. This could be the start of my stratospheric popular music career and not before time, frankly.

Now Simon is a very musical chap and has been so for longer than I have known him, which is well north of 40 years. Here, for example, is his latest hit, Ghosts, which he released many weeks ago, but it refuses to fade in the Spotify rankings, still getting infeasible thousands of streams a week on that platform – the YouTube is below so you can also see the vid:

So what, in the name of all that is good and pure, was Simon thinking when he suggested that I record the Warren & Durbin classic, I Only Have Eyes For You. Not in the original Dick Powell pitch/key of C (heck knows that is hard enough for me, even with the sheet music to look at), but nine whole stops up the register in the Art Garfunkel range.

Nine whole stops. That’s like, Notting Hill Gate to South Ruislip, if you are daft enough to go west from Notting Hll. Even Ian Pittaway, my music teacher, who has crazy ideas about my ability to reach high notes, only nudges me three or very occasionally five stops up.

Here’s the result of Simon’s wild musical concept:

The idea for this recording session/evening emerged some six months ago, when Simon and I last dined in Hammersmith…

…and discussed the song, I Only Have Eyes For You, which I butchered lyrically for Casablanca The Musical…

…the revival of which I was just about to go and see in September 2018:

Anyway, Simon said that he much preferred the Art Garfunkel version of the song:

While I complained that even the original Dick Powell was wicked hard for me to play and/or sing.

But Simon insisted that his recording gadgetry could rectify any minor failings in my singing and that he thought he could, with a little effort, turn me into a latter-day Art.

It seemed like a jolly good excuse for a get together and/but life seemed to intervene for a while, so a ridiculous number of months passed before we actually got round to implementing the plan.

On the day, I arrived at Simon’s West London studio, which also doubles as his house, late afternoon/early evening, ready for a rollicking rock’n’roll evening of music.

First up, obviously, we indulged in some appropriate herbal substances; a big mug of tea each, together with some chat about really trendy topics, such a Brexit.

Then down to business with the recording.

I felt a little strange working on that particular song, that particular week. A couple of days earlier I’d been to the funeral of our neighbour, Barry Edson, who was an aficionado of film musicals. I’d had several interesting conversations with Barry about Warren and Durbin songs and Barry had shown me interesting stuff about those song writers from his library-sized collection of books on the topic.

But back to me recording I Only Have Eyes For You in an Art-like style with the help of computerised sound engineering.

Actually it was a very interesting process for me. Simon clearly does this sort of thing a lot, but mostly with his own, not with anyone else’s, voice.

We had a rehearsal run through. Then we took a recording take which sounded crackly. That led to some rearrangement of the microphone, the music and me. I even offered to remove my socks but those lengths were deemed unnecessary.

Then a couple more takes, at which point Simon thought we might try to repair take four with some fragments, but after we’d done that, I suggested one more try at a better straight-through take.

I’m glad I did that, because the final take was, in my opinion, quite a lot better than the previous ones (I realise that notion might be hard for the listener to believe).

Then Simon really got down to doing the sound engineering thing.

Simon is geeking my song

It was a bit like having your homework marked in front of the school teacher. On many of my notes, there was a huge amount of vibrato which Simon was able to smooth a bit.

Imagine, as an analogy, someone using fancy software to turn my legendary illegible handwriting into something that looks more like a legible script.

Is there any handwriting-smoothing software that might help? – September 1989 sample

The music software would help each note find its probable home on the scale. But sometimes the thing I had sung was closer to some other note than the note that the purist might fussily describe as the “right” note.

Actually I believe I did sing all the right notes…just not necessarily in the right order.

But it didn’t matter because Simon’s fancy software could shift pretty much whatever I sang to the exact place it belonged on the scale.

On just one occasion did Simon have to say, “I’m not even sure what you’re supposed to be singing there – may I please see the music?” – that was on the second intro couplet, which Art Garfunkle doesn’t sing.

And there is the one note that I strangled so very comprehensively that no amount of tinkering seemed able to repair it. Let’s imagine that I was gulping with emotion on that note.

Then some more listenings and some more tinkerings…

…by which time I was getting quite excited and wondered whether we should try more and more takes, on the basis that my voice seemed to be getting better and better each time.

The conversation then drifted towards artistes who had spent months or even years trying to perfect individual tracks for release.

I wondered whether we might lock ourselves away, perfecting this track, for, say, five years, in order to emerge, not only with a sure-fire hit on our hands, but with Brexit over. Simon thought that five years is probably not long enough…to ensure that Brexit is over with.

Anyway, in case you missed it above, or want to hear it again, here’s the end result:


Timothy then joined me and Simon for dinner at The Brackenbury Wine Rooms, which was a suitably convenient and high quality location for some good food & wine plus some top notch natter. It was a good opportunity to get to know Timothy a little better – the only time I’d met him before was at Simon’s Circle Line album launch, about 18 months ago, which was not an occasion for getting to know people well.

On parting, I suggested dates for me to return to record the rest of the album. But Simon just shook his head politely and solemnly. “A one-off recording deal, that was”, he said.

“Not even a B-side for the single?” I asked.

Simon shook his head politely and solemnly again, as both Simon and Timothy said, “goodbye,” not, “au revoir.”

But…

…and here’s a thing…

…when I listened to the track again the next morning, it sounded far better to me than it had the evening before. I said so to Simon, in a thank you message. Simon’s reply, perhaps similarly inspired by a re-listening:

Glad you like your recorded performance! Do let me know when you’re ready to record your whole album!! 

So now I have an album deal lined up? Yeh, that well-known music producer Simon Jacobs…this must be the next stage of my stratospheric popular music career and not before time, frankly.