Slow train coming... Red Groove by Chris Searle, new from Five Leaves

Somehow Red Groove slipped from last year, and has only now appeared. It happens sometimes. Chris's book is published in association with the Morning Star, where the material collected here first appeared - reviews of records (as we used to call them) and live performances. Chris is the Star's jazz reviewer and this collection includes about 100 pieces selected from fifteen years of jazz reviews.
As you would expect, the reviews are political, but mostly they are reviews and politics comes in where relevant - but with jazz from around the world that is often the case. There is not a bad review here - that is on purpose. Chris reviews to promote the artists, the records and their music, not out of sycophancy but as a way of giving people airtime, or space in the paper. He aims to promote the best. For the regular jazz listener there is much here to remind him or her what he/she has forgotten, for the less regular jazz listener the book is a vade mecum or buying list.
It was fun editing the book because each of the article was meant to be read on the day, not conceived as sitting alongside other reviews, so we had to get rid of a lot of heartbeats and confreres and various other writing tics that only became apparent when the articles were collected.
The book is introduced by Robert Wyatt and has a great photograph of Joe McPhee on the cover. Further colour photos, of Norma Winstone, Sun Ra and the late Niels-Henning Ostred Pederson are included, as well as some black and whites.
For me, the most exciting part of the book was being able to publish something by Chris Searle. I've followed Chris's work from his days in Stepney Words (described also in our book Everything Happens in Cable Street) through to his current writing in Race and Class. People might remember him as the teacher who was sacked for publishing his school students' poetry - this led to a student strike and Chris's eventual reinstatement by the then Minister of Education, one Margaret Thatcher. I wonder what happened to her. Chris has also published books of his own poetry, books about Granada (he knew Maurice Bishop and the other leaders of the New Jewel Movement) and cricket. This is his second book of jazz writing, the first being Forward Groove, published by the jazz specialists, Northway Books.
The two chapters I liked best in Red Groove were inspired by a fellow Star supporter Chris met on a train, who suggested an artists to write about, and a chance meeting with a cleaner from one of his old schools who suggested another jazz singer to review.
Chris loves his jazz. If you are by any chance reading this in time, Chris will be appearing at Lowdham Book Festival on 22nd June. He is available for gigs elsewhere, to talk about jazz, as is our other recent jazz writer, Peter Vacher, who will be at Lowdham on June 29.

Chris Searle on Mixed Messages: American Jazz Stories

Every note a jazz artist plays is an endless story and Peter Vacher's collection of interviews with US jazz musicians is ample testimony of this. He's been posing questions to star names of the music along with its journeymen and women since the 1950s. With tape recorder and camera at the ready he'd seek them out - often in seedy London hotels on Sunday mornings - and his dedicated labours have resulted in this precious work of social and cultural history.

The 21 musicians who tell their story in these pages range from veteran New Orleans trombonist Louis Nelson, with his memories of Mississippi steamboat bands, to bassist Norman "Dewey" Keenan who played with Count Basie. He remembers boyhood beatings by his churchgoing mother for playing the "sacrilegious" Saint Louis Blues on a Sunday. Bandleader Gerald Wilson describes Louis Armstrong's case full of laundered handkerchiefs to mop up the saliva that poured from the side of his moth as he blew his horn using the "skeet" technique.
There are stories too of a people's constant struggle for racial justice. Tenor saxophonist Houston Person recalls that "we woke up every day and survived and still managed to get our education and fight for equality."
But the longest and most powerful story in this collection is the life of tenor saxophonist John Stubblefield, renowned for his huge tone, who died in 2005. A sideman of Charles Mingus and, after the great bassist's death, a stellar soloist in the Mingus Big Band, he was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1945. He remembers his father warning him when he approached a water fountain that he shouldn't drink from it because it's "for whites only."
His experiences with Miles Davis, Mary Lou Williams and Gil Evans among many others make for riveting reading and show again how much the history of jazz reflects the mainstream story of the US. Vacher's fine book portrays all this with humour, drama and a cogent sense of realism throughout.
This review by Chris Searle first appeared in the Morning Star on 24/1/13

Five Leaves' review coverage

This has been a good month for reviews of Five Leaves' books so far. Here's a summary: PN Review for Feb includes a long review of Three Men on the Metro by Andy Croft, Bill Herbert and Paul Summers, drawing attention to a collective poetry venture being truly collective in its writing. Hackney citizens can find a wonderful two page feature on our Roland Camberton novels in the January Hackney Citizen (http://www.hackneycitizen.co.uk/2011/01/23/scamp-and-rain-on-the-pavements-reviews), the only pity being they did not mention the publisher or price. Jewish Renaissance also features both books, concentrating on Rain on the Pavements. Ken Worpole has a big feature on our other current New London Editions writer, Alexander Baron, in the current New Statesman (http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2011/01/baron-novels-war-jewish-class), though the Morning Star was not big on his Rosie Hogarth. Carousel for spring will include reviews on Alan James Brown's Tolpuddle Boy (also covered in the RMT journal) and Dan Tunstall's Big and Clever, while Teen Titles likes Follow a Shadow by Robert Swindells. The current Leicestershire Chronicle lifts a couple of pages from Ray Gosling's Personal Copy. Southwell Folio features Next Year Will Be Better by John Lucas and Fae Nation goes for The Rose Fyleman Fairy Book. Evergreen gives review coverage to Colin Ward and Dennis Hardy's Goodnight Campers. The only international coverage we've had in the last month has been for Jazz Jews, picked up by the San Diego Jewish World, Shalom Life and the jazz programme on the Canadian station CKCU, though that is really piggy-backing on coverage of Mike Gerber's now regular jazz Jews programme on UK Jazz Radio, which is available on their play it again, Sam, scheme. Now then, does review coverage lead to sales... a bit. But not as many as you would think and in some cases not at all. The big test will come for some forthcoming Scottish books where we expect a lot of coverage in that small nation.

John Rety

I am sorry to find fellow editor John Rety, of Hearing Eye, has died. John was born in Hungary in 1930, coming to this country in 1947. Though he came to the notion of anarchism when he was 13/14 ("very late") he became seriously involved in the 1960s, becoming a member of the Committe of 100, and an editor of Freedom. He was a bohemian figure, a former partner of the writer Laura del Rivo, and was the first person to publish Colin Wilson, though he moved away from Colin Wilson as Colin moved to the right politically.

Since the 80s John was one of the key people at Torriano Poets and at Hearing Eye. He had an ability to pull in important readers to this scruffy little venue, none of whom were paid, and who were happy to rub shoulders with "readers from the floor" with all that meant. His press published Dannie Abse and others, actually about 200 publications in total, keeping them all in print. One of his treasures was the posthumous Selected Poems of AC Jacobs.

To everyone's amazement, given his anarchist views, John pitched up as the poetry editor at the communist Morning Star two or three years back, running a popular weekly poetry column which was collected in his Well Versed anthology, now in its second printing. He was thrilled by this, as it ran counter to his usual despairing cry that nobody ever wants to buy poetry.


John Rety would never win any well-dressed man competition. He was never the easiest person to have in a meeting but he did good work at all the organisations he worked with. Our condolences to Susan and Emily.

Bookish

The Guardian's corrections column remarked (21/12/2009) that an obituary of Leonora Kay-Kreizman said "she had worked hard as the literary secretary for the Nottingham East branch of the Young Communist League; she was the literature secretary, charged with organising the sale of Communist party and YCL publications". This is rather a shame. I rather liked the notion that a YCL branch would have a literary secretary, and, possibly, a music correspondent, an arts organiser and a theatrical commission. And why not? The old Communist Party had writers by the library load, a relationship with the Workers' Music Association, the Artists' International Association and Unity theatre.

The original obituary mentioned that the Nottingham Communist Party was one of the only places in town where you could hear jazz and where men could kiss one another. So I think the Guardian was wrong to correct, and that Leonora must have organised the branch book group, reviewed the latest fiction in the branch bulletin and was probably assistant secretary of the YCL poetry circle. After all, the current Morning Star has a weekly poetry column and a monthly round up of poetry books. As CLR James almost said "What does he or she know of politics who only knows of politics?"