Bright as a button?

Bright as a button? Not me! I've only just realized that it's just over a year since I started this blog. In that time I've posted 68 times, which at over one a week, is okay I'm thinking.

I started it with the intention of giving my English family and friends, or any anyone else for that matter, an idea of what it was like for this English "traditionalist" to adapt to living in a new country. It was also intended to give my American family and the many wonderful friends we have made here, an idea of the differences between English (East Anglian) and American (Southern) culture, food and language. I've strayed many times from that original idea but, hey! what the heck?

Many of these differences are very pronounced, some not so. As an East Anglian (Norfolk) boy, I'm used to the rest of my homeland calling us "Carrot Crunchers", "Tractor Boys", "Country Bumpkins" and the like (even though I was raised as a townee). A similarity here is that "Southerners" have traditionally been treated the same by those from more "sophisticated" states.

The differences in language are again sometimes not so great. When growing up in Norfolk, it was common to call a respected person "a good ol' boy". Here in the South, the same was and still is true.

In England the true Norfolk and Suffolk culture is being diluted by "invaders" from London and the Home Counties as well as from Europe. The same is happening here, especially in the Triangle of North Carolina, but this time the "invaders" mainly hail from the North-East. In fact a nearby very fast-growing city, Cary, is said to be an acronym for "Collection Area for Retired Yankees" (only joking). So many similarities exist.

One of my favorite blogging themes has been "my catholic musical taste". If anything this has widened and I spend many hours each day listening to various genres (I'm currently listening to Vieuxtemps Violin Concerto No. 5). I have had the immense pleasure of introducing our wonderful Vicar to jazz. She happened to mention that she wanted to learn and listen more, so I have "trickle-fed" her with the likes of The Modern Jazz Quartet, Art Tatum, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, and many more. Overhearing her recently telling someone that "Mick is teaching and helping me appreciate jazz", did wonders for my ego. Fancy me becoming a "rabbi" to my priest!

Another thing I realized is that, whilst updating my database of music collected, is that, yes, I am a Romantic! This hit home when I was trying to compile a list of my top ten composers and noted that 70% were of the "Romantic" school - Brahms, Berlioz, Bruch, Chopin, Dvořák, Tchaikovsky and Verdi.

I wonder if Gail thinks of me as a "Romantic"?

A catholic music taste - part 2

Despite (or because of) the gentle persuasion of our school teachers to steer us away from the “perils” of rock ‘n roll, I liked the “devil’s music” (although my mother wasn't happy about that - I suspect today's mothers feel the same)! At the same time, I was still enjoying choral music at church, and slowly graduating from light classical to more serious stuff with a special affection for the music of two of the B's - Beethoven and Brahms.

The late fifties and early sixties saw a revolution in popular music and my father decided to purchase a radiogram. Despite my enthusiasm, I think it was because one of his customers had given him a large collection of 78s that really persuaded him. It was a grand piece of furniture, finished in walnut veneer with a large central speaker and manufactured by Pye. I was about 13, just in time for me to start spending my hard-earned wages (I had three jobs whilst still at school) on 45s. Can anyone reading this remember the first record they bought? Mine was Duane Eddy’s “Rebel Rouser” – not exactly a musical masterpiece, but it appealed to me at the time. My early rock ‘n roll favorites were popular English rockers Billy Fury and Marty Wilde and of course, the King, Elvis Presley.

By the time I left Great Yarmouth College to start on my five-year apprenticeship in the printing trade I had purchased a Dansette “portable” record player — state of the art, 3-speed with auto changer of which over one million were sold in the 1950s and 1960s. I could now play my music to my heart’s content in my own room – something of a novelty in the early sixties. Apart from rock ‘n roll, there developed another musical craze in England around this time – Trad-Jazz! It was based on traditional Dixieland jazz and there sprouted a multitude of bands across the country. Consisting of a standard line-up of trumpet, trombone and clarinet and backed by drums, base and banjo and sometimes piano. Three of the best known and most successful happen to be still going strong – Chris Barber, Kenny Ball and Acker Bilk. Needless to say, I soon got hooked. This gave me a taste of many traditional ragtime tunes and this coupled with my admiration of Glenn Miller gradually pulled me away from 60s pop and more and more into jazz, blues and swing.

Johannes Brahms - isn't this a geat portrait?

A work colleague was a great classical devotee and during one of our many lunch break discussions invited me to travel to London’s Festival Hall with him and his wife. The program included Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique and Brahms: Variations on a Theme of Haydn, both still favorites. Hooked again! I lost no time in subscribing to “The Gramophone” magazine and soon was ordering LPs (as we called them then) of more and more classical music. The music of the greats soon boomed from my Dansette. I say boomed because at that time I loved the more “stirring” orchestral stuff, obviously a legacy of the brass band concerts, and I didn’t yet appreciate the subtleties of piano sonatas, chamber music and the like. That was to come with age!

To be continued . . . . . . . . . . .