Byas’d Opinion

Deuchar’s IPA

I’ve long known that there’s a Deuchar’s IPA. And very good it is too. Listening to Jazz Record Requests last night, I discovered that there’s also a Deuchar’s IPA Special. It was written by Dundee’s Jimmy Deuchar, and recorded by a Ronnie Scott group on the album “Presenting the Ronnie Scott Sextet”. And very good it was too.

Lager

OK, I realise that the erratic bar turnover at the City Halls and Concert Hall means that the bars there are never going to be places where you get a fine selection of well-kept cask ales. In the circumstances, I’ll settle for a reasonable lager.

These bars used to have Tennent’s lager on draft. It was okay: not great but not awful. But since the summer, they’ve been stocking Carlsberg. It’s not an improvement. More to the point, it means that these venues, run by an offshoot of Glasgow City Council, have deliberately moved away from stocking a beer brewed here in Glasgow to stocking one which is no better and is made elsewhere. Why withdraw their support from Glasgow workers like this? And if there’s some particular issue with Tennent’s, why not get in one of the lagers brewed by West Brewery, just a few hundred yards from the City Halls?

Maybe it was just the parts of town I saw, but jazz doesn’t make its presence felt in Washington DC in the way it does in Philadelphia.

That’s not to say it’s not there. There were free open-air concerts on near the Metro Center (sic) Metro station, and on the day I was in that part of town, a very good alto-plus-rhythm quartet was playing some fairly uncompromising modern jazz (see picture). I didn’t catch their name beyond the fact that the drummer was the leader. There are also several jazz clubs, with Blues Alley and the two Twins establishments being reasonably well-known, but that’s about as far as it goes.

Overall, Washington DC gave the impression of being a city which was about power and money rather than about any sort of culture. The National Mall was certainly impressive, but any truly civilised society would have removed one of the monuments to white slave-owners and replaced it with a giant statue of DC’s greatest son, Duke Ellington.

I’m recently back from holiday, my first trip to the USA, birthplace of jazz.

I had to hang around Philadelphia airport to change flights. There was a small stage set up at one end of the food court, and while I was sitting trying to work my way through a “regular” smoothie – a swimming pool with a straw in it, basically – a band came on stage and proceeded to play. A jazz group. The Freedom Jazz Quartet, who despite the name didn’t play free jazz but hard boppish jazz standards. Hanging around in an airport is never my idea of fun, but it’s a lot less dull when there’s a decent tenor player getting stuck into some Monk tunes.

Philadelphia takes its music seriously: there’s a Musicians’ Walk of Fame in the city centre, with plaques commemorating a host of musicians with Philadelphia connections. Among the jazz musicians were Eddie Lang, Joe Venuti, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, the Heath Brothers, John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, and the Brecker Brothers. I didn’t see one for Philly Joe Jones, but I assume I just wasn’t looking hard enough. But why did Albert, Jimmy and Percy Heath have to share a plaque, when Michael and Randy Brecker (or for that matter Darryl Hall and John Oates) got one each? The same street includes the Kimmell Center home of the Philadelphia Orchestra and, directly across the road from it, Gamble and Huff’s Philly International Records Studio.

It was possible to take a Philadelphia Historic African-American Trust (PHAAT, geddit) tour which included a visit to John Coltrane’s house, but I didn’t have time to do it. After Trane’s death it was apparently owned by his cousin Mary (after whom the tune is named), and after her death a few years back got placed on the National Register of Historic Buildings.

I did manage a trip to Chris’s Jazz BarCafé to hear Kenny Werner playing in a trio with the fine young Philadelphia drummer Ari Hoenig, and bassist Johannes Weidenmueller. They were supported by a fine local quartet, lead by a particularly good young alto player called, I think, Dave Powell. The concert was organised differently to any I’ve been at in the UK or Europe it was very much a club, with eating and drinking seeming to play an important role in the evening’s proceedings (including some particularly tasty and particularly potent beers from microbreweries). There were two sets, one at 8.00 pm and one at 10.00 (the one I was at), and the support band came on after the main act and played until closing time. I don’t know if this is normal US practice, or just how they did things at that particular venue. There’s at least one other serious jazz venue in Philadelphia, Ortlieb’s Jazzhaus, which Rashied Ali (another Philly guy) seems to have some involvement with.