Weddings,
Barmitzvahs and a touch of Fame
I don’t remember the first time I heard music performed live. I do, however, remember singing lessons at Mayville, the pre-prep school in Southsea that I attended from the age of four. The teacher rejoiced in the soubriquet of Mrs Nutton. Like most of the other teachers, she seemed positively ancient. Her most distinctive feature was a mass of wiry brown hair that straggled skywards from a widow’s peak, her most endearing characteristics a sharp tongue and low tolerance threshold for anything other than perfect behaviour. She played a battered upright that stood in the corner of the ‘nursery’ – the classroom used for entry level pupils in the morning and which doubled as the music room in the afternoon. The piano had a plinky-plonky sound and always seemed out-of-tune. The echoes of the twenty-odd largely tuneless voices it accompanied may well have been reconstructed from the relatively more recent experiences of my own children’s schooldays.
Singing lessons were a weekly feature of the curriculum. What we sung, or, in my case, attempted to,
is mostly lost in the remoter recesses of my memory. ‘A frog he would a wooing go’ seems
to have stuck somewhere and, of course, the school song. Until well into adult life I believed that ‘Now as I start upon my chosen way’ had
been written exclusively for Mayville. We sung it at Prize Day and on other big
occasions during the year. In fact it is
known as the ‘Scout Hymn’ and was written by Ralph Reader who promoted the
early Gang Shows featuring members of the scouting movement.
At about the same time as I started at Mayville, I also started to
attend weekly services at the local synagogue. Each Saturday morning, I was
taken with a bunch of second cousins by my great-uncle Issy, who bundled us into
the back of his ancient black Wolesely 4/50.
I learned by rote the psalms and songs that are sung at every shabbat service in every synagogue such
as ‘Ayn Kelohenu’, ‘Yigdal’ and ‘Ahnim Zemirah’. Whenever one of these emerges in a broader
context, for example, Neil Diamond leading his congregation in ‘Adon Olom’ in the 1980 remake of ‘The
Jazz Singer’, I am instantly transported to the homely interior of Portsmouth
& Southsea Hebrew Congregation’s pretty little synagogue.
Growing up in a small provincial Jewish community in the 1950’s meant that whenever there was a simcha – a celebration, such as a wedding or a barmitzvah – the whole community would be invited. The parties were usually thrown at Kimbells Ballroom in
From about the age of six or seven I, too,
would be invited. These events ran to a
pretty set formula, one that then seemed to be followed around the world in
contemporary Ashkenazi Jewish communities.
‘The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz’ (1974), ‘A Serious Man’ (2009) and
‘Barmitzvah Boy’ (1976) are all films/television plays that capture the essence
of such occasions. Following drinks and
nibbles, guests were asked to consume a gargantuan meal that typically featured
chicken soup, a main course of brisket and rounded off with large helpings of
lokshen pudding. Speeches by the
barmitzvah boy, his friends and his father combining bad jokes and melancholic
sentimentality were then followed by dancing to a live band.
Promising and delivering so much more than
Mrs Nutton’s mundane renditions of nursery rhymes and ‘Ten Green Bottles’, the function
bands would consist of five or six musicians and maybe a singer or two, all
duly attired in tuxedos and dickie bows.
Even the musical programme was fairly predictable, generally including a
waltz, a foxtrot, a quickstep, a cha-cha, a Charleston, a conga and, from about
1960, the Twist. The musicians were often former Marine bandsmen
who would never quite make it to the LPO or the fabled bands of Ted Heath or
Joe Loss. They had dutifully learned a few lively, traditional Jewish
favourites – ‘Hevenu Shalom Aleichem’, ‘David
Melech Yisrael’ and, of course, ‘Hava
Nagila’. In my crazy family, the
Jewish tunes were a cue for mayhem.
Cousins and Uncles would schlep a table into the middle of the dance floor,
hastily remove the final detritus of the meal, strip off the cloth and
use the bare table as the platform centre of the Hora circle. Two or three at a time would
jump up onto the table, grip hands and perform the gezutzke counter-clockwise as the rest of the dancers circled around them. As each chorus of the tune was played faster
than the previous one, so the dancers speeded up. On more than one occasion I can recall a
table collapsing as a trio of out-of-breath, sweating male Morrises fell into a
bruised heap of tangled limbs. The laughter
was raucous, the anger of the venue manager barely concealed.
I believe that it was at my cousin Jack’s
wedding in early 1964 that I also experienced a special moment in my musical
development. Having had my fill of
brisket and fox-trot, I decided to explore the rest of the labrynthine
Kimbells’ complex. I went down a back
staircase and heard music coming from below.
This was a sound that was instantly intoxicating and I followed it to a
balcony that overlooked a large square room packed with teenagers and students
from the local technical college. A
tight band that included a punchy brass section and an exotic conga player was
led by a man whose voice had a unique tone and who played jazzy figures and funky
chords on a B3 Hammond Organ. Georgie
Fame and the Blue Flames were about as far removed from the barmitzvah band as
anything that I had ever heard. I leaned
over the balcony totally mesmerised.
It would be another year before Fame hit the
number one spot in the hit parade with his cover of Mongo Santamaria’s ‘Yeh,
Yeh’. That would become the first in a
run of chart successes that continued through the sixties with the likes of
‘Getaway’, ‘Sitting in the Park’, ‘Bonnie and Clyde ’,
‘In the meantime’ and ‘Sunny’. In the
early seventies Fame performed in a duo with Alan Price. He reformed the Blue Flames in 1974 since which
time he has also played with big bands and as a
guest with others. For a time in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s he acted as MD
for Van Morrison. Together they were wonderful
on stage.
One particularly memorable set that I was
privileged to enjoy was performed at the Bulls’ Head in Barnes in early 1990 or
1991. En route to a recording session
with Van the Man, Fame arrived with a trumpeter and a sax player. Legendary British tenor player, Dick Morrissey,
was leading a quintet through a blistering set of hard bop and straight ahead
modern jazz. The versatile Fame and his
cohorts were invited up on stage.
Sitting down at the piano, Fame exchanged a few words with
Morrisey. With a knowing nod, and
calling out the keys and the time signatures, Fame led what was now an octet
through half an hour or more of extemporised jazz and blues. Awesome!
To this day Fame still performs with
continually evolving line ups of Blue Flames.
I have seen them at more venues than I can remember – concerts, clubs
and festivals. I thought about hiring
Fame to play at my son’s barmitzvah, but he was on tour abroad at the
time. It would have been a nice way of
bringing the experience of his music full circle.
The times may change, but good music is
always good music and great musicians mature with age. Serendipity is often the way that musical
discoveries are made and no happier accident occurred than my discovery of
George Fame at Kimbells in 1964.
The Scout Hymn' maybe heard at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gebU7AvK4KI ;'The
Jazz Singer’ Soundtrack Album by Neil Diamond is a vinyl album released by
Capitol Records in 1980. ‘Israeli Folk
Dance Party’ by various artists is a vinyl album released in Israel Columbia Columbia
The
premises once occupied by Kimbells Ballroom in Osborne Road
Wow, I remember seeing Georgie Fame at Kimballs that night...but had forgotten about it until I read this entry. Thanks for the memory!
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