Episode 2 — Tiny trumpets, harps, jazz and Robbie Williams
In this episode Steve tries to keep his chops alive on the road with a pocket trumpet and a practice mute, then dives into an immersive harp session with Valeria Clarke, breaks down how to actually listen to jazz without fear, and road-tests a pop rock / Robbie Williams-style banger for comedian Alexander Bennett as part of Genre Tombola.
It’s a practical look at the unglamorous reality of keeping brass embouchure together on holiday, a binaural tour of orchestral pedal harp techniques, a clear, friendly "jazz 101" that frames improvisation as conversation rather than homework, and a thoughtful chat about authenticity, pop, rock and why Robbie Williams’ big anthems might be more emotionally honest than some supposedly "real" bands.
What we cover
Holiday chops: Pocket trumpets, practice mutes, weird resistance gadgets and why brass players panic about time off.
Entertaining Noises — harp with Valeria Clarke: Orchestral pedal harp in a tiny shed; 47 strings, 7 pedals, gut vs nylon vs metal strings, bisbigliando, harmonics, percussion on the soundboard and global folk harp traditions.
Soundbox Ensemble: Why Steve and Valeria’s project uses harp, brass, toys and electronics as "soundboxes" for experimental chamber music.
Jazz 101: Using "St James Infirmary" to explain melody, chords, improvisation as spoken language, and jazz as a conversation rather than elitist code.
Genre Tombola — pop rock / Robbie Williams: Writing a spoof-but-sincere Robbie-style track for Alexander Bennett’s show; debating authenticity, commercialism and why a pop rock power ballad can be as "real" as indie guitar bands.
Further listening & links
Full Transcript
Verbatim transcript, reflowed into paragraphs for readability only. No wording edits.
Welcome back to the show. My name is Steve Pretty. This is my podcast, Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces, and it's a show that helps you to hear and understand music in new ways. Yes, welcome to episode two. Thank you so much for streaming, tuning in, downloading, whatever it is, however you've got here. Thank you very much for listening again and lending me your ears for the next half hour, 40 minutes or so. Thanks also for the amazing feedback we had for episode one. It was really, really encouraging to see how many people really enjoyed it, shared it with people, got a lot out of it. I got a really, really interesting insight into some ideas that people shared with me about the evolution of music and all that sort of stuff. So it's a really encouraging way to start things off with people sharing their thoughts. And so I'm going to be encouraging you to do that lots more over the coming episodes. Yeah, but meanwhile, thanks again. Please do continue to share, spread the word, all that good stuff. It means a lot. Coming up this episode in the entertaining noises section, we have a brilliant guest in the form of Valeria Clarke, who is a wonderful harpist and a good friend of mine and colleague. We have a new project called Soundbox Ensemble, and she was in the studio this week while we rehearsed stuff and wrote some new music for it. So we got together and we had a lovely chat. We made some entertaining noises with a harp, with some percussion, with some electronics. And then in the music theory section this week, I'm going to be looking at some of the most feared music of all and that is jazz. I'm going to be taking a little overview of how jazz works and how to listen to it. Even if you think you don't like it, I'm going to try and lead you through that in a kind of Jazz 101. And at the end to round things off in the genre tombola, we're going to be looking at pop rock. You may remember that's what I got dealt last week from the genre tombola to mix a metaphor. And we're going to be looking at that and pulling out next episodes genre, whatever it may be. Will it be Sri Lankan hip hop? Will it be Indonesian Gabba? Will it be funk from Northern Ireland? Who knows? Wikipedia will guide us and the virtual tombola. So stay tuned, all of that and lots, lots more. It's going to be a fun show. Here we go. But before we get on to any of that, I wanted to have a quick chat about what I've been up to in the last couple of weeks, and that is traveling. Between the release of the last episode and this one, I was away for a week, which has made the production of this second one a challenge. I tell you what, setting yourself a goal of releasing an episode every fortnight, and then for the very, very first iteration of that, being away for a whole week without being in the studio, without any of the usual stuff I have, it's a challenge, but that's what we're here for, right? We're here to be lightly challenged in hopefully enjoyable way. Anyway, so I've been traveling. It was technically a work trip, but if you check out my social media, you will see that it was a very jammy work trip.
And actually, weirdly, I wasn't doing music on this one. Music is what I spend my life doing, but this, I occasionally do a bit of photography, and this was a photography gig, albeit, as I say, a very jammy one. So I wanted to just very briefly touch on what it's like as a musician when you're traveling, whether it's for holiday or a trip with the family or whatever it might be. It can be a real challenge, actually, because the thing is that people assume that once you're at a level, once you're a professional musician or a very experienced musician, you don't need to kind of practice in a conventional way, or you might need to practice new repertoire for a concert, but you don't necessarily need to kind of put in the hours of practice that you do while you're learning. But of course, as musicians, we know that this is not the case. It is every musician's nightmare is kind of going away, having a lovely time and then getting back and having a very high profile concert or gig or even not high profile, but just something that's very, very demanding straight away because you've been away and it's very hard to practice if you're away traveling on holiday with a family or with friends or whatever. It can be quite tricky if you're away with non-musicians who don't necessarily understand that you have to kind of keep up your skills while you're away. And the problem is, right, it's not so much that you're having to practice pieces, at least speaking for myself. What I need to do as a trumpet player predominantly is to try and keep the physical side of things in shape. And I think it's easy to underestimate that side of things because the trumpet and brass instruments in general are pretty physically demanding. And of course, particularly demanding on the lips and on the face and what we call the embouchure, the muscles around the mouth. And now look, I am not a weightlifter. I am not a gym person. Those of you who are listening who know me or have seen me play will know that. It is physically very obvious that I need those things. But my understanding is if you are a big fitness person, if you're into weightlifting, particularly something like that, you really, really notice if you take a few days off, right? If you do loads of lifting and then you have, let's say a week or two off while you're away on holiday, you come back and you can really feel it in your muscles straight away, right? And believe it or not, that is really the same for most instruments. But I would say as a trumpet player, especially the trumpet, we have a thing as musicians, but again, especially as brass players where we call it holiday chops. And chops in this context means kind of is a bit of a catchall really for everything about playing the instrument, whether it's repertoire or scales or any of that stuff. But as a brass player, it particularly means your physical chops, which is your embouchure, the muscles around your mouth, because these muscles are really small. And even a day off or certainly a couple of days off, you can really feel, if you're an experienced brass musician, you can really, really feel it if you're not playing every day or every couple of days. And so that presents a bit of a problem when you're away. And it basically means that there are a series of devices that brass players use when we're on holiday, that we get very strange looks
when we're sitting around the pool with these weird things in our mouth. There's a thing, a bit like a kind of vape. It looks like a vape, but it's just a little metal rod that you use to basically weight lift with your lips, which looks very odd. There's another compression thing, which you kind of blow into to try and get the muscle tone around the corners of your mouth and your diaphragm going. And if possible, I always try and travel with a little tiny trumpet. I have a little tiny trumpet. It's called a pocket trumpet. You'd have to have pretty big pockets to actually fit it in one, but it is very small. It's the same length as a trumpet, but it's all wrapped up. So it's the same length tube, but it's all coiled up into a very tight knit little bundle of tubes and plumbing. And so wherever possible, I try and take that with me because it's the most surefire way of being able to try and come back and hit the ground running and be able to play the minute you get back, which is not a given, because if you've had a week or two off, you really can't make a decent sound out of a trumpet, no matter how experienced you are sometimes, if you don't do that. So yeah, I travel with this little pocket trumpet. It's good fun, but of course that presents the problem of where the hell do you practice the trumpet? The trumpet is a very loud instrument, notoriously so. So if you're in a hotel, then obviously that is tricky. If you're in a chalet or whatever with friends, also tricky. There is a practice mute, which is an ingenious little invention, which is a mute is the thing you stick in the end of a trumpet that keeps it quiet. And that is what we use to try and practice the trumpet. So I will demonstrate that for you now. This is my warmup that those musicians who are listening, who've played with me before will have heard me do interminably. And I think for other musicians I've played with, this might be the thing that I'm most associated with out of any music that I've ever played, to the point that I have a trumpet playing friend who I have got to promise me that he will play this at my funeral. And this is that same bit of the warm up with the practice mute in. And I did this in the hotel room while I was away so you can hear the ceiling fans and stuff. It's much quieter. Obviously you still wouldn't really do that at night. I still don't like to disturb people if I can avoid it. So I try and find a discreet time to do that, a discreet place if I can. Sometimes if I'm by the sea, you can take the practice mute down and play into the white noise of the sea. And that's quite nice. And means you're not disturbing people too much. Yeah, but of course the other thing is that if you've got an instrument with you, people assume that you're there because you want to play. You know, you want to kind of show off your skills. You want to be the music guy who can entertain everyone. Let me tell you, certainly speaking for myself and most musicians I know, if you are on holiday as a musician, you do not want to play your instrument. I guess if you are a guitar player, maybe you can get the guitar out and you can sing along to it, fine, whatever. That is quite
entertaining for other people. But no one wants to hear a solo trumpet. People think they want to hear a solo trumpet. That's the thing. People think that they want, oh, play a tune. But no one wants to hear you round the pool in a nice holiday place or by the sea or wherever you are in the beautiful wilderness. No one wants to hear the trumpet being played, particularly not in the way that you need to practice as a musician. Because you need to practice this stuff you can hear now. As a trumpet player, long notes, these things called lip flexibilities, where you're having to kind of move around the instrument. It sounds like you're a beginner, but it's because what you're doing is physical practice of the instrument. You're not often playing musical things. You're trying to play the stuff you're doing in a musical way, but you're not practicing beautiful music. You're trying to keep your chops in. You're trying to keep the physical embouchure and everything about the physical way you play an instrument in, not practicing this stuff. So this is a public service announcement on behalf of musicians everywhere. Unless a musician explicitly says that they would like to play for you, don't bug them to play just because they've got an instrument with them. They probably just need to do some practice so that when they get back, their first gig isn't utterly humiliating because we've all been there, believe me. So yeah, public service announcement. Be kind to musicians when on holiday and they will be kind to you. Equally of course, if there is someone who's brought a guitar and insists on strumming it around the pool, you should be kind for everyone else and please tell them to stop. Public service announcement over. On with the show. Okay, we are at the entertaining noises section of the show. And you may remember from last episode that for this bit, what I'm gonna try and do is try and record these with binaural sound. So that means that I put little mics in the ears of whoever I'm talking to. And that means that this section is best enjoyed with headphones in yourself so that you get the perspective of whoever I'm talking to. If it's a musician, you might hear them playing as you will today, or you'll hear some me playing at someone else or whatever it might be. So please pop headphones in if you can. And if not, don't worry, you can hear it and enjoy it as normal, but the best experience will be with headphones. So today I am talking to my great friend and collaborator, Valeria Clarke. She is a fantastic harpist. I'll let her explain a bit more. Right, so you got the little headphones in? All good? Yeah. Okay, we're gonna be, the listener's gonna be inside your head. I don't know if that's good or bad thing. It's a good or a bad thing. What's your instrument? That's probably the first question. It's a harp. It's a harp? Yeah. Shall I go for the magical fairy tale or hardcore sound?
Transport us to a magical land. Magical land it is. So we're going to put some Anchormonics and here we go. Oh man, it's just something, it's quite magical. I know, I feel like that every time I play harp, I'm very, very lucky. When did you start? I was eight, and I started on the big harp, which is quite a big instrument to start on. Because to be clear, it's this instrument, so you're in my studio shed at the bottom of my garden, which we introduced people to last week, and as Jo described last week, there's not a lot of space in here. No, it takes about 40% of your room. I'm gonna take a photo and put it up on social media when we drop the show, but it's, yeah, I mean, the clearance with the ceiling is about three inches? Yeah, yeah, not much. Oh, very much, and yeah, and it takes up a massive amount of room in the middle, but it's lovely. And we've been doing lots of recording in here. And it's not as heavy as people think. It's hollow inside, so it's 36 kilograms. Yes, so. I mean, that is still quite heavy. It's still quite heavy, but it is the biggest one you can get. It's called orchestral pedal harp. It's got 47 strings and seven pedals, and 47 strings is luckily the maximum amount of strings you can have. That's more than enough. Do you have a favorite string out of the 47? No, I've never been asked that question. Well, I quite like the bassist strings because they've got so much more... Yeah, and so lower you go, because a lot of people think that harp is all angelic and light. And of course you can have a lot of that too. But when you go to the bassist... Well, one of the things we've been doing, which I'll see if I can find a clip of, because we're not set up today with the effects and things, but we've been running through a load of effects and loops and distortions and all sorts of things. But we've been getting some really kind of dark, breathing sounds out of it. I can give you one without any effects. The pedal is called gliss or slide. Each pedal has three positions, flat, natural and sharp. And when you half press it, it creates the buzz. Yeah, it's amazing. So when you say pedals, just because I think a lot of people won't be clear, I think until I started working with you and writing for Harp a bit and stuff, I hadn't quite clocked how complicated the pedal system is. So you've obviously got all the 47 strings. What else have we got? So the seven pedals for each of the notes of the scale, C, D, E, F, G, A, B. And then each of the pedals, so they control simultaneously the same note of the scale. So it would be all the different octaves.
For example, this is C. So this is a C natural. And then if the pedal goes to the top position, it's flat. Then in the middle. Sorry, just to be clear for those people who don't have musical training, flat means a little bit down, right? A little bit lower. So that would go, this is the lowest one for the pedals. Then we go higher. That's half a turn higher. And then the down position of the pedal, that's a sharp. So that's the highest. And to be clear, because obviously people can't see this, but those are the same strings that you're playing. You're playing the same strings, you're not moving your fingers. Could you just do that on the same strings in a succession? Could you do like low to high or high to low? Low to high, what do you mean? So in other words, play the strings and then just move it. So I'm not touching the strings as I'm doing that. That's just the foot moving the pedal. Can we, let's prove that orderly by you clapping at the same time. Okay. That's a challenge of coordination. Or bang it, bang it. That was out of time, but yeah. Fantastic. And so, yeah, so this is a harp with 47 strings, orchestral, did you say orchestral pedal harp? Yeah, they're called orchestral pedal harps. And we can go as low as about 20 strings or so. Some people make them themselves. Yeah, so it's easy to, well, I say easy, but you can make your own harp out of like a little cardboard and put a couple of strings in it. I'm surprised you've never done that. It's probably next midlife crisis coming on. Making harps. But it's funny, isn't it, because of course the shape is the same. It's the same shape as like a grand piano, right? It's what you've got inside a piano. Yeah, they call sometimes the harp. It's a piano. No, piano is a harp in the coffin. Half in the coffin, yeah. I don't like that comparison. But this is like traditionally, it kind of came from bow and arrow and from that kind of shape and then evolved to it. So it does go a very long time too. Yeah, well it goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, right? Yeah, you can find it in the tombs or in Egypt as well. So you can go, I don't know what it is, a few thousand years BC at least. But then who knows? Who knows? Yeah, probably well before that. And they used to be made of gut, of animal gut, did they, the strings? The strings they still are, sorry vegan people. But you can find nylon and that's another alternative. These are metal, right? These are metal and so the metal, that's the first metal string and from that, that's the gut. So the benefit of the gut, they sound a little bit warmer and yeah, a bit more resonant, whilst the nylon is a little bit brighter in sound. Right, right, right, right, interesting. But also it's a folk
instrument, so isn't it? Have you ever played, I should say that we met, not playing folk music but playing hip hop music. We have, indeed. Through a really good hip hop producer. One of our cool projects, yeah. Shout out to The Last Skeptik. Yeah, yeah, yeah, The Last Skeptik. Fantastic hip hop producer who's now in America, but was in London at the time. Yeah, so we met doing that, but Harp, again, you think of it as very floaty and dreary, but it was quite dark in that and it's used in folk music, right? A lot, yeah, obviously Ireland, a national instrument, and Welsh as well. And yeah, it's been used in many other countries, apart from England too, as a Celtic folk instrument, medieval, whatever you want to call it. But also I think like the Middle East, they had their own, yeah, there's so many different variations and Peruvian Harp as well is a very fun one. Slightly different technique because the strings, the tension of them, isn't as high. So people play more kind of upwards when they kind of hold their hands more in the air and use more kind of glissando effect, that kind of, I'll try and imitate something. It kind of sounds more like a guitar. Yeah, I see, I see. So it's quite cool. But yeah, that's very different. You talk about tension, I mean, they must be under a lot of tension. They are, yeah. If one of these strings, do they ever snap, do they ever break? They do a lot. The metal ones which you're pointing at now, they don't snap luckily as often as the higher ones. So here, because they're obviously a lot more thin and they're under a lot of pressure too, a lot of tension. And so they do break fairly regularly, unfortunately. And strings are not cheap and they've gone up in price again. Thank you inflation. Wow, but it must be a bit terrifying if one of these metal ones breaks. I've had that before during the concerts as well. And it does give you such... Because it sounds like a gunshot when it breaks and your heart stops for a second. But you're not worried about being taken out by one hitting you in the face? Well, yeah, I do worry about that. But I've never had that problem. I had once just a little slap on my wrist from a string. But it wasn't as bad as you can imagine. Right, right, right. Can you give us some harp techniques? Harp techniques, right. Because it's one of the things that I can never quite remember how you say it. But what's my favourite one? The favourite is bisbligando. It's the abbreviation in music. So it's basically repeating... I'll put some fancy double pedals. And repeating the same note... Over the same chord. And that's something, sorry to interrupt, but that's something we do a lot with electronics, isn't it? If we run that through a lot of electronics, and it creates these beautiful sort of soundscape. Exactly, and then it can just evolve. It's basically more evolved
from a normal trill. And then you can do it, because we only use four fingers on the harp. We don't play with the pinky. And so I only have eight notes. Whatever you can come up with. And I should say, if people were listening on headphones, because we're using the binaural mics, if people were listening on headphones, you might hear that it's louder on your right side, right? Because it's... Closer, yeah. Because you're holding it over your right shoulder. Exactly, yes. I wonder, I'm quite interested to hear how it's going to come out. Hopefully, it should sound like it does. When we listen back to it. Yeah, other effects we've got, when we play Prede La Table, near the soundboard of the harp, that creates kind of a guitar effect, and then you can pretend to be a guitar. It does sound a lot like a flamenco guitar or something there. It does, indeed. Then we've got little pedal glisses that are kind of covered. Then we've got the harmonics on the harp, which are very different from harmonics of other instruments, because you just hold the string whilst plucking it, and it kind of creates a very different... So that's the harmonic, and that's a normal... It takes the note you play an octave higher. But it's got a purer sound in a way, hasn't it? It's a simpler waveform. Yeah, if you want to go more angelic, that's the harmonics for you. All right, well, we should play something, and then because we've got to go, we've got to finish our day's work. Yeah, we can chat for hours. Yeah, we can. This is what we have a habit of doing, getting together. And then not doing much. Yeah, so the project's called Soundbox Ensemble, and that is because we both use soundboxes. I mean, I'm using trumpets and flugelhorns and brass instruments, but I'm also using all sorts of weird and wonderful electronic devices and small little boxes and toys and all sorts of manner of percussion and stuff like that. But more importantly, you have a soundbox on your instrument as well, right? Well, it's kind of a soundboard, soundbox, which then you can also use a percussion instrument by tapping on it. Some composers use that extensively in their writing too. So, yeah, there's this kind of tapping, this kind of tapping. Because it's really big and resonant, isn't it? Exactly. Thank you. So that's that. And you can also hit the strings. Beautiful. So that's why it's called Soundbox, is we both have soundboxes of our own, and doing our own things. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so should we do the tune that we were just looking at? This is a brand, we've literally just opened this now, and spent two minutes on it before we started recording. But this is a really nice tune, as a Rufus Wainwright tune. We mainly do original stuff, but we decided to do a couple of other
people's numbers, because occasionally we get asked to do that sort of thing. And we've got a gig coming, I suppose our next gig we should talk about. We're doing something with Robin Ince, which is what we've also done quite a bit of that stuff with him. We're up in Manchester at Contact Theatre on the first and second of December, and we're the house band, Soundbox. Playing some Christmas stuff, playing some of our own stuff, playing some other people's stuff. So that'd be fun. And then you're going to join me at Wilton's Music Hall. Yes, I will. Yeah, Soundbox at Wilton's. It's going to be really lovely, I think. It's such a nice room for this stuff. All right, so should we do this tune? This is a tune by Rufus Wainwright. It's the title track of the album, Poses. Let's have a little noodle on this. Okay. So I hope you enjoyed my chat with the brilliant Valeria Clarke. I'm reluctant to fade this out because I really enjoyed playing this with her, but there is lots more where that came from. If you liked what you heard there, then you can listen to some of our original music. It's mainly on my YouTube channel at the moment. We're just in the process of setting up our own YouTube channel and all that business for Soundbox Ensemble, but we have some bits coming up as we said there. We are playing at Wilton's Music Hall in my show on the 20th of January, and also if you're up in Manchester, we are doing a couple of shows with Robin Ince. We have a house band for Robin Ince's Nine Lessons and Carol Show at Contact Theatre. So if you're in the UK in either of those places, try and get down and say hello. And we have a lot more stuff coming up next year. We've got some festivals already in the book, and we've got various things. We're working on an EP of original music and lots of other things. So please do check that out and look up Valeria Clarke if you like. Right, on with the show. We're gonna press on. It's time for music theory. Here we go. So this week, we are jumping in at the deep end of music theory and looking at jazz. Perhaps the most feared music of all. Because in the last week or so, I had a straight ahead jazz gig, which is actually quite rare for me these days. I mainly do other stuff crossing over into other genres, as we discussed previously. But I put together an evening about the history of jazz trumpet at the fantastic Old Courts venue in Windsor with the great local band, the Jazz Vanguard, and I was their special guest. And we did a really fun evening about the history of jazz trumpet right the way through from the 1920s to the modern day. And I thought that would be a good jumping off point to look at basically what is jazz and how to listen to jazz. Appreciate that it's not a music that everyone likes or necessarily understands. A lot of people just think you're making it up as you go along. And there's a degree of truth to that, of course. Jazz has improvisation at its very heart. But for some reason, people associate improvisation in music with being difficult and
complicated and something requiring a great deal of technical knowledge. But my point with that is that we are making stuff up as we're going along all the time. I'm making this up while I'm talking to you now. I know roughly what I'm going to be talking about. I know the topic area, but I don't know the exact words that are going to come out of my mouth. When we're having a conversation, we're making stuff up all the time. We're improvising with language all the time. It's based around a framework of grammar and vocabulary and the context of who we're talking to. And so without being cliched about it, when we're improvising as jazz musicians or as improvising musicians of any sort, we're really thinking in those terms. We're using a framework to build our improvisations around. And so what I thought I would do is just play a few little clips for you from my performance the other night so that you can hear some of what's going on. So as the basis of this discussion, we're gonna take the tune, St. James Infirmary. Now this is a very old tune, old jazz tune, dating back to, I think the certainly 1920s, probably before it's associated with New Orleans. As I've mentioned, the kind of the birthplace of jazz in a lot of ways. And I wanna use this tune because the melody itself is relatively simple and hopefully it might allow you to hear the way that the melody then kind of fluidly moves into an improvisation around the melody. So this is the basic melody. If I just play it on the trumpet, you can hear it. So this is the way the melody is written out on some sheet music I have of this tune. So I'm just playing it exactly as the sheet music says, as much as it's possible to do that, as I alluded to last week, sheet music has only very limited instructions for how to play something, but I'm just playing what's written there. Very simple melody, it's only got six notes over the whole melody, six different notes. So yeah, that's how it's written out. This is the basis for what we're gonna look at. But what you'll hear, as we start moving to the recorded version that I played the other night with the band, is that I'm embellishing the melody. So I'm playing this melody, but I'm kind of adding little bits, taking little bits away, changing the timing, just making it my own, all right? So already I'm slightly improvising around the framework of this tune. And then, as the tune progresses, and we go into more of an improvisatory, soloistic approach, you'll hear me maybe deviate more from the tune, but still keep the sense that it is there, it's underlying everything. And part of that underlying structure is the harmony, which in this case, you can hear the guitar is underpinning this, and then later on, the double bass joins in, and of course the drums to give some sort of rhythmic decoration around it. But really that structure runs all the way through this. So when you're listening to it, I mean, this is a fairly simple example, but really a lot of stuff that you'll hear if you're listening to jazz is variations on this, a melody that then people embellish and take off in their own direction. And there are all sorts of fancy tricks you can do to do with melodies, to do with
harmony, rhythms, fancy flashy techniques you can do on whatever instrument you're playing on. But really it's the same idea. It's the spontaneous creation of a melody around a framework. And of course, as jazz and other forms of improvised music evolve, there are all sorts of ways that that structure can be broken down and messed with and subverted, of course. So those things do evolve and change over the years and over different styles of jazz, of course. But really what you're listening to, mainly if you're listening to jazz, is someone who's been playing a melody, found their own way through that melody, and then is creating their own melodies based on that melody or by the underlying harmony, which can be played by the bass, the guitar, the piano, or in fact, any instrument that's outlining chords like that. Now, I'm aware that maybe not everyone is aware of what chords are or what harmony is. Don't worry about that terminology. We will get to that in future episodes. The main takeaway from today is just to remember that when you're listening to music that has an improvisatory element like jazz, to try and think about it as a conversation. The musicians have learned a vocabulary on their instrument and it's important to remember that although jazz is a form of music that prioritizes improvisation which is relatively rare, relatively uncommon these days for most Western listeners, the idea of music being fixed and written down or recorded in the definitive version, that is the outlier in terms of musical history or music making across the globe. The vast majority of music that's been made over the centuries, over the millennia and across the world has been made with a more improvisatory spirit involved. Just as many art forms have been improvised over the centuries and millennia, whether it's epic poetry or theater, any of these great art forms would have had a very strong improvisatory element to them and that is very much true of music. It's a conversation like any other. And for me, that is what is so great and so exciting about jazz and other improvised musics. It's musicians having a conversation with one another. Sometimes that conversation can get feisty, sometimes it can be full of dialogue, very mellow, everyone can be getting on really nicely. Just like a good conversation will involve listening, improvisation involves a great deal of listening. And for me, that's one of the most exciting things about music, this ability that it has to be spontaneous and to exist only in the moment and to have this point of connection between musicians and between musicians and their audience to understand each other in this non-linguistic way, just for a moment, just for a fleeting moment in this little musical conversation. So I think that's one of the great joys of jazz. It's not all scribble, I promise. I mean, some of it arguably is. And certainly we as jazz musicians should often be trying to work harder in my opinion to bring people with us rather than to push people away. I think that's a discussion for another time, but yeah, it's a conversation and when it works well, it's a nice conversation, an interesting conversation and a conversation that can help bring us closer to a little more human understanding of one another, which I think we can all agree we could do with quite a lot more of at the
moment. There we go. There's my pitch for jazz. All right, onwards. So, for the genre tombola this week, I am exploring pop rock. You may remember that that's what the random list picker from the 1300 genres on Wikipedia picked for me, but by genuine coincidence, now, this will seem like I've rigged it, but anyone who knows me knows that if anything, I over commit to stupid ideas. Welcome to the podcast, by the way. So yeah, I did not rig it, this was a genuine thing. It happened, it came up with pop rock, and by coincidence, I had been commissioned to write some music for my friend, the brilliant comedian, Alexander Bennett, for his show, and he wanted me to do a tune in the style of Robbie Williams, kind of power ballad, pop rock power ballad. So I was already working on that when the pop rock thing came along, and then here we are. So I have worked on a pop rock tune for Alexander, and I had a little chat with him about pop rock. But before we do that, I thought I would play the track. So here we go, here's my pop rock Robbie Williams-esque track. Now I should say that it's still a work in progress. I'm still working on it for Alexander, and his vocals are kind of placeholders. He just recorded some sample vocals on his phone, and I've pulled them around and messed around with them. And so if it sounds weird, that's why. It's nothing to do with Alexander's brilliant singing. So yeah, enjoy, enjoy, don't judge, but enjoy. When you think about kind of authenticity or perceived authenticity in rock and commercialism in pop and when those two things meet. And Robbie Williams for me is the epitome of that. And I don't mean that in a negative sense. I mean, you know, marrying those two things as some sort of in some way authentic rock star style image with massive commercial appeal and a pop sensibility. And also like the instrumentation of it is, it's not Led Zeppelin, is it? But you've got electric guitars in there. You've got a lot of the tropes of rock music, but with more of a pop sensibility. Yeah. And I think it's interesting to talk about authenticity in relation to that because, I mean, you'd probably be able to speak better on behalf of the musicians, but in terms of sort of rock fans who's really enjoying that genre, I think you could sort of possibly say that authenticity in that genre means more to its audience than it possibly does the audience for other genres. They might not necessarily, you know, mind that whatever performer they're watching is not the originator of the music that they're performing. It's not sort of part of the culture of that particular genre. So to do pop rock, you risk kind of really rubbing people up the wrong way, because it's almost a kind of attack on that authenticity, or it could be perceived as an attack on that authenticity. I think that's right, but also I think that is a kind of arrogant position on the part of rock fans or rock music, because I think the idea that rock is authentic and pop isn't. I mean, in the world of major labels, authenticity is completely in the eye of the beholder and frankly in the eye of the marketing team. There's nothing
particularly to say that a rock band is any more authentic as a musical experience than a pop artist. Both of them, particularly these days, I appreciate in the 50s and things it was a bit different, it was maybe a bit more two different streams. In 2023 or when Robbie was doing this in the late 90s, early 2000s, by that point, things I would argue are so, there's so much crossover. And authenticity is an inherently problematic term as well. It's not to say you should just be able to appropriate whatever you want as a musician, of course. But the idea that anyone kind of owns authenticity in rock music is really problematic in the first place, especially white guitar band. The idea that it's not rock is obviously... Yeah, it's a very complicated idea. And then also, the idea that to blend the genre of pop with that is somehow inauthentic because pop is somehow inauthentic. The argument for how authentic any particular band or performer is is a case by case basis, something that could be debated. But there's definitely acts who are not just would be perceived as pop musicians, but are very proud of the fact that, yes, I am a pop musician, who you wouldn't argue the authenticity of or you would be hard pressed to. Are you a genuine Robbie Williams fan or is it a sort of ironic stance that you take? So it was Robbie was played a lot in the house when I was growing up. So, you know, my mother was a big fan of Robbie. Of course, of course she was because, you know, he was a sort of cheeky chappy. It's sort of I say in the show, the sort of the thing that I think Robbie sells himself on is it was just complete self-love. It's I am brilliant. I hadn't listened to many of them for years and years and years. And then I was writing the show and knew that there was this story about going to see Robbie live that I wanted to include. But I was saying about that sort of distance of time is that you can stand outside of that. Something being big in a moment where it might be hard to actually stand apart from a piece of music and decide what it is that you think of it. And there's a couple of Robbie songs, particularly the song Come Undone, which I was using in the show, that is just a brilliant piece of sort of pop music because it's so celebratory and it's about self-hatred. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I really love it for that and love, you know, the idea of someone like Robbie Williams is like, my brand is how great I am and, you know, I'm very much kind of a feel good artist in terms of what my audience expects of me. Writing something that triumphant with lyrics that miserable is something the Smiths would do. Yeah, exactly. The medium and the message being at odds is quite an interesting sort of artistic statement for someone like Robbie Williams to do, you know, because you would think one of those iconic anthemic power ballad type tunes, yeah, you would think it would be about our greatest, but the fact that that song is about self-loathing is a really interesting thing for someone that famous to do at that point.
And also, you know, because I had to do some Robbie research for this show. You both, that's what I spent this last week doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. His autobiography, he really struggled with self- loathing for that whole time in his career. These are the reasons why Robbie is in my show, because my show is about self-loathing. It's really funny, by the way. You know, that sort of conversation about authenticity. It's like, well, at the peak of his fame when they're making hundreds of millions of dollars off this feel-good artist, he's managing to get through a song that is about self- loathing. Is that not Robbie exercising? Is Robbie exercising his own authenticity there? Yeah, exactly. It's a really, really good point. It's a really, really good point of whether or not he wrote it. And presumably, did Guy Chambers write that song with him? I don't know. Yeah, but it's definitely collaborative. But I mean, as most of it was, I think. But whether he personally sat down and wrote it himself or not, I think there's a very strong case for saying that that is a more authentic piece of songwriting, if such a thing can exist, than a rock band going and trying to discover the new riff, which they think is going to be, it's going to catch on and be played in all the indie clubs and all the indie stations and stuff. I mean, neither of those is more cynical or less cynical than the other, really. Robbie, we've done Robbie. Robbie Tick. Tell us what you've got. What do you want to plug? Have you got anything too? So I am filming the show Hidwich Robbie Features. Alexander Bennett, I Can't Stand The Man Myself is being filmed at the 9th of November at the Pleasance Theatre in Islington. So I would love for people to come to that. The podcast that we mentioned, Born Yesterday, which Steve did the brilliant intro music for, is available wherever you get your podcasts. And it's sort of a weird improv game where me and a comedian, Gulland Bar, pretend to not know anything and other people have to explain other things to us. So good. Yeah, we're clones of ourselves. We've been alive for a day. And in a day, we've learned about three things. And then Phil Wang has to come on and explain other things to us. But we only know about Toy Story, a cheesecake, and who Gordon Brown is. And he has to explain it. And he has to explain how the Second World War started using those as reference points. It's such a great concept. I love it. So tune in to those things. And yeah, thanks very much, man. Appreciate that. And thank you for the Robbie Williams commission that happened to coincide so nicely with this. Yeah, it's like I didn't get Sri Lankan hip hop. But maybe that'll be the next show for you, will be a Sri Lankan hip hop piece. I think it's time I start really experimenting with who I am on stage.
Let's talk about authenticity. I mean, maybe your truly authentic voice as a comedian is as a parody Sri Lankan hip hop artist. See, you say parody, I say authenticity all the way through. Thanks a lot, man. Yes, Steve. So there we go, Alexander Bennett, fantastic comedian and lovely man. So thank you very much for A, his commission and B, him appearing on the show. I thought that was really interesting chat. Hope you enjoyed it. Right, the time has come. It is time to look at what my genre for next episode will be. Here we go. OK, so I put the list of genres from Wikipedia in all 1300 of them. Right, here we go. Let's spin the virtual wheel. What have we got? What have we got? What have we got? It's spinning. It's spinning. What have we got? Wow. OK, this is a bit of a change. Umbacanga. Umbacanga. So that is spelled M-B-A-Q-A-N-G-A. M-B-A-Q-A-N-G-A. No idea what that is yet, but I'm very excited to find out. So tune in next time, two weeks' time, to find out what Umbacanga is. So, yeah. There you go. I told you it was random. I don't have any Umbacanga commissions as far as I know in the next couple of weeks. Alright, wish me luck. Thank you very much for listening today. Do all the usual things you know what to do. Go on, rate, review, share. That's the most important thing at this stage in this early stage of the show's life. Please do share with your friends if you like it. Please do share with your colleagues. Spread the word. It really, really genuinely helps. In person is the best way, but of course, electronically is really, really helpful as well. So thank you very much if you've done that already. And please keep doing that. Rate, review, subscribe, etc. Right, I'm going to sign off. I am going to be back in two weeks. That's Thursday the 2nd of November to talk about Umbacanga and all sorts of other interesting stuff, no doubt. So thank you very much for listening. And don't forget to pick up your tickets to my show and live podcast recording at the amazing Wilton's Music Hall in London. That's on the 20th of January. That's going to be an incredible show. I'm really, really looking forward to that. We've got Valeria, who you heard from earlier. She's going to be there. Lots of other fantastic people. Hackney Colliery Band people. Many different guests. It's going to be a lot of fun. So pick up your tickets for that. Meanwhile, thank you so much for listening. Thank you to everyone who appeared on this week's show. Valeria, Alexander Bennett, the Jazz Vanguard. Thank you to the old courts in Windsor. The theme music is by Angelique Kidjo, Hackney Colliery Band and me, frankly. So do check out Hackney Colliery Band and Angelique Kidjo as always. Thank you very much for listening. We'll see you next time. Bye!