Eclectic Company: 'Tis A Season

For some years I lived in England, first in London, then Oxford, and just outside in tiny Toot Baldon, important enough to be named in the Doomsday records of William the Conqueror. In those years, I mostly spent Hanukkahs and Christmases back home in New York and New Jersey, but sometimes I stayed in Merrie Olde and got into the spirits and spiritus over here. Yes, I’m in London at the moment, stuffed with Indian food, just ending a well-earned vacay, and already missing the old friends I’m about to leave behind.

As soon as I landed I picked up Time Out, London’s entertainment weekly, and a couple of music magazines with bonus Christmas music CDs glued to their covers. Classical FM, Mojo, and Guitarist were only a few of the monthlies celebrating Christmas, which is an especially musical season in England, celebrated by all kinds of music purveyors. In addition to adding the CDs to my iTunes library, in ten days I’ve had some magical musical encounters.

The intimate traditional English folk music club with its guest artists, residents and floor singers is a village staple, and London is just a collection of villages, each with its own character, flavor and dozens of pubs. My old friend Sheila Miller has run the Cellar Upstairs – a spin-off of the English Folk Dance and Song Society’s Cecil Sharp House folk club – in various Camden Town pubs most Saturday nights for more than 35 years, and that’s where I’ve been introduced to many folk performers who’ve inspired my own singing. So that’s where I went with international star Heather Wood (famously the female member of The Young Tradition trio) the night I landed. The guest that night was Peter “Racker” Donnelly, a genius Irish poet humorist, fresh from a gig opening for Ireland’s most famous musical group, The Chieftains. The Racker’s show of read and sung poems, and his own take on Irish Gaelic sayings, translated with word play and smart-aleck puns, was (happily literate) “craic” (Irish for good fun). Ken Hall and Peta Webb, red-haired resident singers, as well as most of the regular floor singers and Ms. Wood tackled songs with Irish and English themes in the intervals. All, that is, except for banjo player and fiddler Tom Paley, American folk music royalty, whose early ‘60s Greenwich Village folk group, the New Lost City Ramblers (with filmmaker John Cohen and the late Mike Seeger), taught backwoods folksongs to urbanites. Paley, who’s lived abroad for nearly five decades, studying and perfecting traditional Swedish fiddling styles, performed some Swedish “polskas.” So when I got up for a floor spot myself, I paid homage to Paley’s Ramblers with an old timey song I’d learned from them thirdhand years ago.

Over the following 10 days I saw guitarist Richard Thompson twice, secondly with early musician Phil Pickett (recorders) and the musicians of the Globe Theatre (violin, lute/guitar, bandora, and bass viol) performing “spicy” songs (read sexy/bawdy) from Shakepeare’s time, RT doing the vocal honors, and playing a special eight-stringed acoustic guitar luthiered for the occasion. The program contained the lyrics as well as some back story on the event, and after close scrutiny of same, I can tell you that while the meanings of the songs were racy, the language – all early English double entendre – was barely understandable as such. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Earlier I’d seen RT performing with actor Harry Shearer (“This Is Spinal Tap” and “The Simpsons”) and his wife, welsh singer/writer Judith Owen, and an all-star cast in the Owen-Shearer family’s annual Christmas sing-along, this year at the intimate Purcell Room of Queen Elizabeth Hall to raise cash for the New Orleans Musicians Fund. The all-stars kicked off the show and we were entertained by newlywed jazzers vocalist Jacqui Dankworth (daughter of jazz royalty Dame Cleo Laine and Sir John Dankworth) and Memphis pianist Charles Wood (who together offered such a hot version of “Baby It’s Cold Outside” that emcee Owen claimed she “fell pregnant” during their performance), comedians Ruby Wax and “Barry from Watford,” alter ego of actor Alex Lowe, guitarist Thompson, bass player Danny Thompson, harpist Lucinda Belle, cellist Gabriella Swallow, and Shearer and Owen, in various combinations. When we got to the sing-along, Owen led us cheerfully but firmly through an action-packed version of “12 Days of Christmas” that had the whole audience up and improvising movements for each of the “Days.” “Geese a-laying” took first prize to thunderous applause, but I was envious of the crowd miming cell-phone crim cons for “three calling birds.” Smashing. Owen and Shearer are bringing the show to New Orleans’ Contemporary Art Center December 17 and 18, so you can still get in on some of that holiday cheer yourselves.

Two other truly notable performances were in live theatre, visited in the company of my childhood best friend Barbara Toennies, in London for work. The National Theatre’s West End hit, “War Horse,” is the allegedly true story of the journey of one horse conscripted into the Belgian army in World War I, and his owner, a teenaged boy, who runs away to join up and be reunited with his war horse. The most amazing puppetry I’ve ever seen to make the horses live onstage, a moved-to-tears script beautifully acted, and traditional and in-the-tradition music performed plaintively as punctuation to the live and puppet action by a fiddler/vocalist and an accordion player. Checking my program at the interval I discovered the songs were written by an old friend – John Tams (actor/composer/bandleader of “The Home Service” best known for the music in “Sharpe’s Rifles,” the popular English television series starring Sean Bean). I indulged in some cathartic sobbing at the happy ending.

The last gem was an American musical hit from the 1930s, “Pins and Needles,” making its England debut in the tiny pub theatre (60 tiered seats) at The Cock Tavern, far off the beaten track in the NW6 postal area. In 19 skitlets, this political play originally for and by the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union rang changes on working conditions, the economy, and the state of social relations that felt chillingly/laughingly timely. The stage was a postage stamp, especially when filled with nine actors/singers/dancers, one of them playing an upright bass to counterpoint the versatile pianist who accompanied the show. Back out in the snow!?! the pub's sign announced live opera to follow in a week. Wow!

Did I remember to say wish you were t/here?