Following on from last year’s volume of Ghost Stories for Christmas, now available is The Festive Symphony, a novella-length Christmas tale, intended to be read with the curtains shut, the fire burning, and the lights ON!
PhD student Jonathan Ballantyne is tasked with going through the papers of composer Sir Alfred Taylor, which have recently been donated to Marlington University Library by his family. Amongst the many boxes of material, he finds a sealed envelope containing the score of a previously unknown orchestral work, entitled the “Festive Symphony.” But why has one of the movements been obliterated by the composer? What secrets do Taylor’s diaries keep? And, as Christmas approaches, why is Jonathan experiencing strange events that appear to be linked to his discovery of the symphony?
The novella is available in both Kindle and paperback formats from all Amazon sites and selected other online retailers.
The Kindle edition is free to “purchase” from November 26th to December 1st 2022 inclusive.
Ever since the beginnings of the “album,” some of the finest and most enduring jazz vocal albums have been those that unite the voice with just a single instrument, normally piano or guitar.
Perhaps the first really notable LP of this type was a 10-inch album that paired Ella Fitzgerald with pianist Ellis Larkins for eight songs by George Gershwin. 1950’s Ella sings Gershwin stands out among her late Decca output not just because it’s an exquisite disc of quality material at a time when she was often lumbered with poor songs, but also because it foreshadows the songbook albums that she would begin work on in 1956. Not only that, but Ella would return to the vocal and single instrument format time and again throughout her career. There was a second album with Larkins in 1954, and a reunion with him on stage in 1973 at the Newport Jazz Festival. In 1960, she would team up with the under-rated Paul Smith for a series of ballads that were heard in the film Let No Man Write My Epitaph (the disc is also known as The Intimate Ella). She would also record an album with Oscar Peterson in the mid-1970s, and, perhaps most importantly, she would work with guitarist Joe Pass on a series of four studio albums between 1973 and 1986, as well as numerous live shows together. Ella is perhaps best-known today for the songbook albums (although the first two of which are surprisingly unexciting) and her virtuosic scat-singing, most often heard in concert rather than in the studio. And yet many of her best studio performances are during the quiet, intimate albums I have just mentioned, in which she sings perhaps more purely than elsewhere, but also with much more depth and emotion than she is generally credited with.
Ella wasn’t the only singer to have embarked on these projects, and sometimes those involved seem rather unlikely. Sammy Davis Jr, known these days for his showmanship more than the quality of his singing (and this is such a shame, for he was a brilliant singer) paired up with a guitarist on two occasions for albums of reflective ballads, first with Mundell Lowe in the late 1950s, and then with Laurindo Almeida in the mid-1960s for what may well be Davis’s masterpiece. Davis is accused so often of simply trying to be Frank Sinatra, and yet nothing could be further from the truth. Sinatra never recorded duet albums. The nearest he got was both sides of a single with pianist Bill Miller in 1976, and the beautiful It’s Sunday with guitarist Tony Mottola, although he did duets in concerts in the 1970s and 1980s on a regular basis.
Elsewhere, there’s Doris Day’s wonderful album with Andre Previn, without doubt her finest work. And there are the duet albums by Tony Bennett and Bill Evans – albums which have become classics but which, I confess, I don’t actually like all that much. But what is important to point out in all of these albums I have mentioned (and many more besides) is that the format isn’t that of singer and accompanist, but of two musicians collaborating together as equals.
That brings me to Songwriter, a new album by Alex Bird (vocals) and Ewen Farncombe (piano). Alex has mentioned in comments about the album that it is in the spirit of the Bennett and Evans LPs, but Bird and Farncombe actually do something more than those vocal/piano duets of the past in that all of the songs here are originals. There’s also a great deal of variety, from the dramatic to the intimate, and from ballads through to salsa. These two men have worked together for several years now, having composed two previous albums together, on which Farncombe has also acted as arranger and pianist, and Bird as vocalist.
Songwriter opens with The Song is Ours, a song which demonstrates so well how Bird and Farncombe operate, with the entire four minutes or so performed rubato, and yet there is no false move here, with neither men thrown by the timing of the other. Bird’s vocal has become richer and slightly darker since Whisky Kisses, two years ago, and Farncombe’s touch is truly beautiful – and I should add here that the entire album sounds great. The mix and production really is very good indeed.
I’ve Seen the Sun follows, with its salsa rhythms that shouldn’t work in this kind of arrangement, but does. Perhaps my favourite song of the new disc is The Soul I Left Behind, a solemn, brooding ballad, which has echoes of Where the Blackbird Sings from the album You Are the Light and the Way. Meanwhile there is some wonderful work on Raindrops (Falling Down), particular from Ewen Farncombe, who has a ball creating pianistic raindrops, and demonstrates the range of his playing in doing so. If You’re Not Laughin’ (You’re Crying) changes the mood to something bluesier in a song with a Fats Waller vibe, and there is something of a more traditional blues on the title track, Songwriter.
This might be the third album of originals from these two songwriters in three years, but there is no sign that the well is drying up with regards to material – and it’s refreshing that each of the three albums so far are distinctive from the others. Despite my mentioning all of those great duet albums of the past, the albums that this effort most reminds me of aren’t duet albums at all, but the solo albums 20, 25, and 30 by Harry Connick Jr. These, too, are vocal and piano discs, but Connick carries out both duties. Perhaps these albums come to mind as a comparison because the chemistry and interaction between Alex and Ewen feels like they are just one performer. Without prior knowledge, you would assume that there is one person here, playing the piano and singing into the microphone in front of him. There is no battle of wills going on, no fighting for the spotlight, just some really excellent, utterly selfless, music that shows that, in a world of gimmicks and big production, there is still room for an intimate disc such as this.
My plan for this afternoon was to write a nice little piece about a rather lovely jazz album that was released this weekend by my friend Alex Bird. Sadly, though, that has to be put on hold because of an idiotic and ignorant monologue from GBNews host Mark Dolan last night about mental health, or, rather, his belief that such issues are an indication that we have “lost our balls.”
Dolan’s nine-minute tirade began with sixty seconds of reminding us of all the hardships the country has suffered in the past, from the Blitz to famine to those who worked down the coalmines, and how “grit and determination” got us through those hard times. He then tells us to “fast-forward to 2022” where we have the internet, smart-phones, and “free healthcare for all at the point of need” (clearly he hasn’t been waiting two or three weeks for a doctor’s appointment, or a couple of years for a knee replacement). Of course, you know exactly where this is going. Ah, yes, because “we have never had it so good.” Dolan says that he is “sceptical about the current obsession with mental health,” stating that we have turned mental well-being into a “religion, a cult.”
Of course, being GBNews, it doesn’t take very long for Prince Harry to be mentioned – the obsession of all GBNews presenters – who shouldn’t be having mental health problems, we are told, because he has “sixteen bathrooms.” What more could you possibly want in life? Ironically, Dolan tells people that are really struggling (in other words, not one of the fakers) to “reach out” because “help is there” – we can only presume that he hasn’t been in a position where the wait for talking therapies is six months to a year in many parts of the country.
As is so often the case, Dolan makes no sense. He tells how he finds it a tragedy that so many young men are committing suicide, and then he tells us that the young have been “infantilised by this cult of mental health” (yes, folks, he’s been looking at that thesaurus again). He accuses the country of “wrapping people in cotton wool” and indulging in a mental health “hypochondria,” and that we should tell young people that negative emotions are “like the weather…You have sunshine, you have rain.” It sounds like a hippy Ladybird book.
All of this simplistic, baseless, and downright ignorant spiel would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous. He tells us that mental health issues are treated with “adverse medication” (without providing proof or evidence of the adverse effects) and that “before you pop any pills,” make sure you are controlling the parts of your life that are controllable, and make sure you’re getting enough sleep. Stop taking drugs, and apparently cannabis is the “elephant in the room when it comes to mental health.” He also tells us that if we cut down on alcohol “your mood will lift.” And don’t forget that eating “plenty of fruit, vegetables and well-sourced animal protein is like a happy pill.” And water. That helps, too, apparently.
What Mr. Dolan forgets is that if people are not eating well, are in debt (another source of mental health issues, he says), not getting fresh air, not sleeping well, or drinking too much alcohol, it may well be BECAUSE they have mental health issues. He doesn’t understand at all, it seems, the difference between a cause and a symptom.
Maybe this is because Mark Dolan is not a doctor. He’s a comedian (apparently). He has a degree in politics, but not one in medicine, but that didn’t stop him from telling Talk Radio listeners in 2020 that a facemask was “wretched, godawful, damned, blinking, uncomfortable, [and] scientifically empty” – with the final comment as baseless as the conspiracy theories surrounding the Covid vaccines. No doubt, by cutting up a mask live on air, he thought that he was channelling his inner Sinead O’Connor, who famously tore a photo of the Pope in two on Saturday Night Live thirty years ago. But Dolan achieved something that O’Connor did not: he made himself look like an idiot.
His lack of qualifications clearly hasn’t stopped him telling the nation that young people generally don’t have mental health conditions, they’re just expecting too much from life. He then goes on to blame social media, where the “me, me, me egomania is the business model.” So says the man who has been on Twitter since 2010 and makes around a dozen posts a day. “Give it up,” he says. And then, most alarmingly:
“pull your socks up, get your life in order, and soldier on. Whatever happened to the stiff upper lip?…Grow up, man up, and get on with it.”
He wonders why suicides amongst young men are so high, and then he tells them to basically stop snivelling because there’s nothing wrong with them – not to mention that the term “man up” is one of the most toxic when talking about mental health.
IMPORTANT: If you think you have a mental health issue, see a professional as soon as you can, and ignore the Mark Dolans of this world.
It is impossible to underestimate how dangerous Dolan’s comments are. While he covers his back by referring to those who have “real” mental health problems occasionally, he makes the accusation that most people’s problems are not real, and that they should go for a walk, eat a carrot, or have an extra hour in bed. This kind of advice then causes more delays in people getting help, resulting in more problems for both the patient and the failing mental health system – a system which seems to get worse with every passing month. These comments on mental health issues are just as dangerous as those made on the channel about Covid vaccines and other conspiracy theories that it tries so hard to get clicks from on social media.
When GBNews started, most thought it would fail in a year (including me), and it probably still will fail in the long term. We thought it would be simply an echo chamber for a hundred thousand or so people who all felt the same way, and that it would have no influence. That would have been the case without social media, but GBNews does have an effective social media presence, and its tweets do cut through to the masses, meaning many will have seen Dolan’s diatribe who wouldn’t ever watch the channel itself.
Presumably, courting such controversy is the channel’s way of getting attention, alongside its roster of nobodies and has-beens that are unable to stay away from the spotlight when their star has faded, rather than keeping some of their dignity and letting their career slide quietly away: Alistair Stewart, Anne Diamond, and (soon) John Cleese.
Despite its name, GBNews isn’t a news channel but a studio-bound TV tabloid (and the worst kind of tabloid at that), surviving not by providing its own quality journalism and news reports, but by simply criticising everybody else, and making cheap and irresponsible claims to get attention on social media. It criticises Sky and the BBC with alarming regularity, accusing them of bias – which is rather hypocritical coming from GBNews and its presenters. And yet, its actual news bulletins are about three minutes per hour, with the rest of its time filled with self-indulgent rants such as the one that prompted this post, and “discussions” amongst “superstar panels” that make this year’s contestants on Strictly seem like Hollywood A-listers. It demonstrates the very worst aspects of our world of multi-channel TV, and there are no indications that it’s going to get better or any more responsible.
NB. I really and truly do not want to post Dolan’s monologue in this post, but I feel that I should for transparency. Therefore it is below:
Beyond Boundaries 