デイビッド・ニュートン

これまでは余りジャズを聴いてこなかったのですが、2007年1月のマイケル・ブレッカー逝去以来、時々耳にするようになってきました。これも年齢によるのかも知れません。
今日はＢＧＭとして David Newton という英国スコットランド生まれのピアニストの曲を聴いていますが、ジャズは夜、独り静かに聴くのが良いようです。
http://www.davidnewton.biz/index.shtml
http://www.myspace.com/thedavidnewtontrio

Eye Witness

彼を知ったきっかけはいつものようにＢＢＣラジオの Words and Music で Eye Witness というアルバムの Angel Eyes という曲を聴いたことです。
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:axfuxq8jldke
MySpace で聴ける Julia では彼のピアノも良いですが、Iain Dixon のサックスもなかなか良いですね。メアリー・ガルドーやアリソン・バーンズとのご縁もあるようです。David Newton 実に心地良いです。今後、注目ですね。

We're sorry. We could not process your order because of geographical restrictions on the product which you were attempting to purchase. Please refer to the terms of use for this product to determine the geographical restrictions. We apologize for the inconvenience.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/DNA/dp/B001IKN1RA/ref=pd_ecc_rvi_cart_1
MP3バージョンで購入すれば配送料もかからず入手でき一瞬にして聴けるはず。そう思ってトライしたところ、上記のメッセージが。残念ながら海外では購入できないとのことですが、考えてみると試聴はできるのですから、こんな制約は本当に馬鹿げたことではないでしょうか。
結局、日本の Amazon で購入することにしました。

DNA

Biography

Growing up in Renfrewshire, Scotland, Newton had a musical upbringing with the piano trio sound of Peterson, Tatum or Garner an ever-present feature in the Newton household. After graduating from Leeds College of Music in 1979 David Newton freelanced around Yorkshire and eventually became a resident musician at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough for two and a half years. A move to Edinburgh followed where theatre work using local musicians quickly led to an established position on the Scottish jazz scene but after some four years there, his old roommate from college, Alan Barnes, persuaded him to move to London where he rapidly became a much sought after pianist teaming up with Barnes, guitarist Martin Taylor and saxophonist Don Weller.

Newton's recording career had begun in 1985 with Buddy De Franco and Martin Taylor and his first solo album was released in '88 in association with producer Elliot Meadow who oversaw the next nine years of recording for Linn Records followed by Candid Records. Once again, in 1997, David Newton and Alan Barnes teamed up and together with Concorde Label agent Barry Hatcher, made four CDs for that label. By 2003, Newton had learned a great deal of the ways a record company operated and he set up a business partnership with former pupil Mike Daymond and they established "Brightnewday Records" initially as a vehicle for Newton's own music but with an eye to opening up the catalogue to other artists later on.

In the first five years of the nineties, Newton's reputation as an exquisite accompanist for a singer, spread rather rapidly and by '95 he was regularly working with Carol Kidd, Marion Montgomery, Tina May, Annie Ross, Claire Martin and of course Stacey Kent, with whom he spent the next ten years recording and travelling all over the world. While all this was going on, Newton was composing music which he would record on his own CDs as well as writing specifically for Martin Taylor, Alan Barnes, Tina May or Claire Martin and Newton's music can now be heard on many television productions, especially in the United States where over twenty TV movies benefit from Newton's haunting themes. In 2003, after a twenty year gap, David Newton was reunited with playwright Alan Aykbourn having been involved with eight world premiers in Scarborough and London back in the early eighties, and he was asked to write the music for two new productions, 'Sugar Daddies' and 'Drowning on Dry Land'. Currently, with the release of a new CD called "Portrait of a Woman", on the 'Brightnewday' label, David Newton is relishing the musical freedom of his Trio and the special sound it makes whilst working on two other new recording projects, as an arranger and a composer.

David Newton has been voted best Jazz Pianist in the British Jazz awards for the ninth time in 2009 and was made a Fellow of Leeds College of Music in 2003.

http://www.davidnewton.biz/biog.html

If you've managed to track down this week's 'last week's news', then you are entitled to know that there has been a slight breakdown of communications and as a direct result, 'davidnewton.net' has vanished from t'interweb. Thanks to some friends in very high places (Perth) the site has moved temporarily to where you now are.

I'm not going to dwell on the events of the last month as most of them have been horrendous as I'm sure you know, so all I will say is make sure you've got your tickets booked for the jazz lunch at the Bothy in Perth on the 26th September. Not to mention the evening concerts at Stoke by Nayland on the 17th and my quartet with the gorgeous Martin Shaw on the 18th September.

ps Martin Drew was probably the greatest fan of the AP page there has ever been and I will miss his unbridled enthusiasm for the whole thing very much. Rest in Peace. And if you can't do that, at least Rest on One and Three..........

DN

Stack 'em high.....

I was engaged in conversation with a punter the other night and after chatting of cabbages and Kings for a bit, the subject of our nation's recent budget came up and said punter came up with what I thought was a pretty nifty idea. The fact is, one can buy if one is so inclined, enough booze to knock out a horse for less than a fiver if it's bought at a supermarket or even some corner shops round our way. 'Boozebusters' I believe they are called. The customers then go off to some secluded place (the local war memorial usually) and consume the stuff. Bearing in mind that ninetythree pubs close their doors permanently every two minutes, why can't the powers that be make the alcohol for sale in our inns and taverns subject to far less taxes and try to encourage these folk back into pubs where they drink in a controlled and monitored environment? This might save the hostelry business and a few livers to boot. I was very impressed with this line of thinking and went back on for the second set whereupon this punter turned out to be so pissed he proceeded to whoop and holler in all the wrong places, shout enthusiastically and generally get on everybody's nerves. So much for the controlled environment. Now I'm not so sure. In retrospect, most of us in the room that night would have preferred that he'd stayed in his secluded spot. Maybe the answer is to make it the law that if you are buying hooch in Morrison's, it has to be consumed within the confines of the car park. Maybe the supermarkets would think a little more carefully about how they price their drink if they become responsible for clearing up the mess afterwards.

DN

Ninepins

Sorry to see that American drummer Jake Hanna has passed away. A really fantastic swinging player and hilarious company to boot. I was lucky to have worked with him a couple of times and also saw him work with some of his fellow mainstreamers. (At the sadly missed Jersey Jazz Festival I think). He was a very quick thinker and there will always be three stories that spring to mind when I think of him. Two of them involve him standing in a bar enjoying a drink when someone comes in and makes a pronouncement. On the first occasion, the pronouncement was "I just read a biography of Buddy Rich written by Mel Torme." "Really," says Jake. "Did he mention him at all?" (Torme was reputed to have had a bit of an ego) On the second occasion, someone rushed in and announced to all and sundry," John Lennon has just been shot dead." Jake's memorable response was "one down, three to go.........."

The other story came from the drive to a new-year's eve gig on the west coast with most of the band squeezed into one car. Jake remembered that he had a friend playing with Zoot Sims doing a new-year's broadcast from New York so with the time difference, they tuned the car radio in just in time to hear the countdown to midnight and a completely pissed Zoot Sims starting to play not 'Auld Lang Syne', but 'Happy Birthday To You'. Jake's insider informed him later that Zoot sort of 'came to' on the roar of the crowd and seeing a load of balloons go up at the back of the hall decided that it must be somebody's birthday and launched into it without a second thought. Meanwhile, on the road to Santa Monica there's a fully laden Oldsmobile pulled up on the hard shoulder with it's seven occupants crying with laughter.

So, farewell then to Kenny Baldock. Bassist, character and great fan of the alternative professions. At Simon Becker's funeral, he was sitting beside me and out of the corner of my eye I could see his heaving shoulders as he enjoyed 'God' giving us a solo bass recital whilst surrounded by all the trappings of a very comfortable church. I imagine he will be listening to the real God playing bass now but I'm assured it won't be a solo recital as I've heard He has a girlfriend that sings a bit............

DN

There was an article in the papers this weekend about a concert held in Rome's Pantheon, by the Bach Consort, a Russian outfit I'm told and terribly good too. They were about to start their last piece of the evening when a caretaker suddenly announces that "the concert is over, the Pantheon closes at 6pm on a Sunday, please go towards the exits". How marvellous to see that the jobsworth is alive and well. A Eurojobsworth in fact, living in Italy and carrying on what I thought could only have been only a British tradition. Many years ago I heard of a String Quartet performing at a large hall in Leeds or Bradford and they were just on the brink of commencing the last and reasonably brief allegro section of a Mozart Sonata, when from the back of the hall there could be a clearly heard jangling of what could only be a very large bunch of keys. As bows were positioned, a booming voice followed from the keyholder. "That's yer lot......concert's over.......I'm on t'double time now so you'd best be off." Whether it was the same chap or not, I don't know but at a concert at the Kitson College in Leeds I was performing in an ensemble that required a fair amount of electricity for amps, keyboards and the like and at 10pm precisely, the Kitson College caretaker decided that the best way to bring down a metaphoric curtain on this one was to sneak on to the back of the stage and pull the plugs out of their sockets thus rendering most of the rhythm section silent. It worked too I seem to remember. After muttered apologies from an apoplectic band leader, the band and audience just dissolved into the night and that was that. It's all a question of balance I think. There will always be a little brave band of people willing to ensure that 'the show must go off'.

DN
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/07/vivaldi-concert-ended

End of an Era

And so farewell then to the brightest star in the British jazz firmament, Sir John Dankworth. There are a few others glimmering in the background slightly but what separates JD from the rest, is the respect he drew from ninety-nine per cent of the musical community. (I'm not going into the airline pilot community at this point but the percentage may be similar) He was a much loved figure and a great deal of that love came from the fact that every breath he took, was taken in order to think of another musical idea. Nothing else seemed to concern him and he seemed to possess a selfless devotion to a lifetime of juggling with twelve notes, and the spaces in between, in order to make his music communicate to as many people as possible without compromising in any way. That's the man I saw anyway and for those reasons alone, I tip my hat. That he came up with the theme from 'Tomorrow's World' is another. I love that piece of music and that it instantly transports me back to 1969 is an added extra bonus. An extraordinary man who had the gift of being able to spread enthusiasm and joy to those around him but still managed to achieve great great things. The education courses and a concert hall for crying out loud. Two things he leaves us, and we've not even touched his musical contributions yet. Bloody amazing. It won't be the same without him.

DN
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qldxs#synopsis

The Folks who are stranded on the hill

I live on a hill. Quite near the top of a hill in fact and on the side of the road with the houses, there are cars and they are parked on that road. On the other side there is an eight hundred feet drop which takes you directly to another part of town. When the snow fell last week I found myself at the top of the hill in the trusty four seater looking down my street, parked cars on the right and devastating drop on the left. 'Should be interesting' I thought and I was right for with the first merest touch of the brakes the car started to skid and rearranged itself so that it was pointing towards the vehicles at the side of the road. With a certain amount of Clarksonesque steering-wheel turning I managed get the car pointing towards the other way which I have to say didn't really help alleviate my anxiety one little bit. Meanwhile, for all the pointing this way and that, the car was gathering speed and all the brakes did when applied, was send it off in a new and exciting direction. Luckily, I managed to make contact with a friendly hedge which managed to slow me down sufficiently in order to pull up opposite the house. I took this opportunity to unload the umpteen Morrison's bags full of stuff but I quickly realised that anybody else coming down the hill after me would be faced with a similar problem only what they would see would be a row of parked cars on the right and an eight hundred feet drop on the left with only a hedge and my car acting as a barrier.

Other than that, a dreadful start to the new year with an audience of three at the Bull's Head and the concert at Wakefield being re scheduled for October. I think I can hear wolves howling in the distance...............

DN

http://www.davidnewton.biz/brightnewday/