In an earlier instalment of this series I promised to devote a post to Dilly Barlow's long-vanished Radio 4 programme Friday Treat but - as is so often the way - I passed on to other matters and forgot all about it.
So here is my attempt to make amends and offer a belated but heartfelt thank you to Ms Barlow: her radio tenure, at least in the role of DJ, may have been short-lived in comparison to the likes of Hubert Gregg and Benny Green, then seemingly permanent fixtures on the sister BBC station Radio 2, but her musical choices had a profound influence on me.
Dilly Barlow's Friday Treat was a fifteen minute programme devoted to jazz classics of precisely the era favoured by the purchaser of vinyl for Motherwell Library - roughly late twenties to mid forties - so I was particularly receptive to the show, which offered guidance about jazz greats I didn't get in the library itself - not, to be fair, that I was ever bold enough to ask for any. The programme became another strand in my remote musical education, an opportunity to hear some of the very best of that era as selected by Ms Barlow, things I might have unwittingly passed over in my awkward and selfconscious flipping through the racks in the library, hoping for a promising-looking album cover I could turn over in the hope of finding sleevenotes by Brian Rust or others (usually Rust) which I could scan for clues about the riches awaiting only the crash of stylus.
Sometimes, it's true, this approach had led to wonderful discoveries such as the Luis Russell Orchestra and their fiery rendering of Panama, still an all-time fave; at other times, however, the process yielded less happy results. I can't recall the names of particular offenders though I do remember listening to Charlie Christian's extended improvisation on such numbers as Up on Teddy's Hill (a rose of the honeysuckle variety by another name) on a cassette (so no sleevenotes); I sort of enjoyed it but also realised I didn't particularly want to revisit it or explore that area any further. Beyond lay the Wild Wood of bebop; Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and the like were a plenty for me.
And Friday Treat fell squarely into what I had decided was my comfort zone: its irresistibly upbeat theme music came from a late twenties/early thirties Ellington recording which I can no longer identify (though it can be found among the selection on the Living Era CD Jazz Cocktail), suggesting that when it came to choosing music Ms Barlow, like Philip Larkin, posed herself the query coined by Zelig-like musician Eddie Condon: "As it enters the ear, does it come in like broken glass or does it come in like honey?"
That said, I can't actually recall much of the music played on the programme. I can only assume it fulfilled its purpose, allowing me thenceforward to stride into Motherwell Library with more manly assurance, seizing the works of particular musicians without the need to decipher more Rustic runes before taking my prize to the desk. Maybe.
But there is at least one recording retained from the many playlists.
In my memory, I always seem to be in the bath when listening to Friday Treat. It's possible I may have taken especial care to arrange my ablutions to coincide with the programme, though that would suggest a degree of - well, I don't really know what. But that doesn't matter because it's more likely that the experience of hearing the show has become irremovably fixed in that damp location because that was certainly where I first heard Dilly Barlow play Billie Holiday's 1948 recording of I Loves You, Porgy, accompanied only by piano and bass and drums.
I still recall the sense of being stunned and an awareness of the bathwater cooling; years later, in dominie mode, I played it to a class and almost immediately felt the temperature in the room drop in a similar way. Not just me, then - or, indeed, Ms Barlow. The directness of that emotional plea is breathtaking and has never, to my knowledge, been bettered; Nina Simone's attempt seems rococco by comparison.
I can't say, at this distance, whether that was the first time I ever heard Billie Holiday, as I was listening to Hubert Gregg and Benny Green around the same time, but no recording I'd heard had been as naked and open. Hubert Gregg, like Billie's biographer John Chilton, would have certainly favoured her thirties recordings; I seem to remember Chilton using the word "springtime" in connection with them and his ambivalence about her later, croak-voiced performances.
I suppose part of the power of Porgy is that her voice is still strong - not that that seems the right word to use of her style. Around the same time, perhaps as a result of the programme, I borrowed a tape of Songs for Distingue Lovers, recorded nine years later; some of the more upbeat numbers made for painful listening but the resignation of Lorenz Hart's lyric for I Didn't Know What Time It Was seemed to suit that battered instrument; I can still place where I was on a late night walk when that song sank into me, particularly the enunciation of the words: "I was naive."
It reminds me of another radio guide a little later: Mel Hill, who had various radio series about jazz singing and playing. Comparing an Armstrong solo with one by Bix Beiderbecke he surmised that the latter's seemed consciously worked out - the suggestion was that of the trumpeter Max Kaminsky - whereas Armstrong seemed to be more instinctive in his approach, "like some Bisto Kid of genius."
With this wonderful phrase rattling around in my head, I wrote to Mr Hill, thinking about a 1960 Louis and Ella duet, Autumn in New York: Ella Fitzgerald sings the first part of the song, and it is beautifully done, but for my money when Louis Armstrong starts singing it is something else entirely, linked to that Holiday performance of Porgy: it seems wholly unguarded, open, unafraid to reveal evidence of the passing of time. Armstrong, no longer the tiger of his youth (I think the recording dates from 1960) was still indivisibly Armstrong, which reminded me of a line in King Lear which seemed linked to that "Bisto Kid" image: "There I found em, there I smelt 'em out."
I'm not quite sure now what I meant precisely, but I suppose I was saying that Armstrong had, as it were, smelt himself out, knew his own essence, so the lessening of power and range in his voice was a mere detail: he was still, after all, Louis Armstrong.
Which reminds me, in turn, of Humphrey Lyttelton or George Melly quoting the gnomic utterance of a girl who apparently met Armstrong during a visit to the UK: "You cannot get away from what you have got." Indeed not. Years later, just after I had shuffled off my dominie shackles (does one shuffle shackles?) I was being painted by an artist friend and tried to keep that performance of Armstrong's in mind, as though that openness could somehow transmit itself through my being - not sure whether it did, but it's a good painting all the same.
Which has taken us some distance from our notional subject, though maybe that's appropriate: in addition to Dilly Barlow, Mel Hill and many others not mentioned in this series provided stepping stones, bringing me closer to an understanding of this wonderful music. Each new discovery, each piece of the jigsaw, remains valued even if I can no longer identify the donor.
And it occurs to me that these memories call to mind a time, only a few short decades ago, which now seems aeons away, when the would-be musical explorer was dependent on a small group of people on the radio or the purchasing whim of the local librarian (if you lived in an enlightened borough which lent out records): no vast snowdrifts of youtube or spotify to lose yourself in.
I didn't learn much about Ms Barlow during the programme, except that she did say at one point that she had accompanied someone doing research into some aspect of jazz music, though whether that signified her own entree to the world of jazz or simply deepened that love I don't know. But my eternal thanks to her as one of those who did, indeed, turn me on to a wider musical world.
They Turned Me On - Part One: Ian Whitcomb
They Turned Me On - Part Two: Ken Sykora
They Turned Me On - Part Three: Hubert Gregg
They Turned Me On - Part Four: Benny Green & Robert Cushman
They Turned Me On - Part Five: Russell Davies
They Turned Me On - Part Six: Those Unheard or There is a Balm in Islington
Postscript:
Looking for details of Friday Treat on the Radio Times genome I see that it ran itermittently between August 1980 and August 1983. The music is initially described simply as "up tempo" then later as "jazz, blues and gospel" - which has reminded me that she did play Aretha Franklin's version of I Say a Little Prayer for You, pointing out the borrowing of gospel-style call-and-response in the vocal arrangement. There may have been gospel and blues songs I heard there for the first time and sought out on vinyl or tape; alas, I can't recall.
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