Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Photographer and writer who spent 70 years photographing jazz legends and wrote the seminal book 'As Serious as Your Life'.
On the island
Eight records
Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven
which has really never been equalled.
I heard this amazing sound, and I didn't know what it was. It's Kodály's sonata for unaccompanied cello.
Langston Hughes with Red Allen's Band
When I got back to London, I sent him a few copies of the photographs, and he sent me another collection of his poetry.
It's a song about his best friend stealing his girlfriend away… one of the most popular records of that age in West Africa.
Criss CrossFavourite
This is a record I learned to dance to with a Nigerian boyfriend of mine. They said we couldn't dance this kind of music, but he showed me how.
This is a sort of typical thing, Julius Hemphill, alto sax player, Abdul Wadud cello and they've called it Dogon AD.
This is a record that sums up being in the women's movement for me. It was the record that everybody played… it somehow reminds me of myself.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:01How did you know [Louis Armstrong] was going to be at the airport?
My mother and I, and my brother, who was very young at the time, we'd all been to see him… Then I read in the paper that he was leaving from what was then called London Airport. It wasn't even called Heathrow. So I said to my mother, Could we go? And she hummed and harled, but it was I think it was half-term holiday, so she said, All right then so we went there and uh suddenly there he was. So we followed him outside and I said, Could I have your autograph? And then I said, Could I take your picture?
Presenter asks
2:19When you were exploring the music side of things, buying records for example, where did you go? Where did you used to shop?
Well, I was very lucky because I grew up in South London in Streatham and there was a place called the Swing Shop. So when I was about 12, I think it was about 12, I walked in there and the guy looks up and he sees this little girl in sh wearing shorts and he says, yes, what do you want sort of thing? And he probably thought I wanted a pop wreck of some kind. But I I asked if he had any jazz records. The first one I came to that I recognised the name was Humphrey Lyttelton. Fidgety Feet the record is called. It was two shillings and sixpence old money. He said, Oh, you can have it for two Bob, two shillings. So I came home with it, and I've still got it tucked away somewhere in a cupboard. My mother said, What's that? She heard this noise. What is that? I said, That's jazz and that was it really.
The keepsakes
The luxury
I'm afraid it breaks the rules in terms of useful things, but it's very, very small.
Presenter asks
3:16What was it about jazz that you love? Why did it capture your imagination as a young girl?
Well, it was the excitement, but it's also the story, because through that record shop I found out that there were one or two books that told the story of jazz. The first thing you learnt was that jazz comes from Africa… The force of it, the driving force of it, the whole ethos of it, the whole history is the music of enslaved black people in the Americas creating a new sound as a way of carrying their history.
Presenter asks
6:17Your father died when you were very young, the day before your seventh birthday. Must have been incredibly traumatic for all of you and a huge blow for your mum, who was then left to bring up you and your brother alone. What exactly happened?
I remember coming home from school and um she was polishing the doorstep with you know this red polish we used to have Ronic. And she just had her head her head down, I suppose, literally, and she said to me when I came home from school, she said, Darling, she said, Daddy died today. Just like that. I can still remember her and seeing her say it, you know. So life would never be the same as it should have been in the in the s in the conventional sense, you see. But I think that she had expected that that the family would be looked after in a way that you then weren't, right? Yeah, yeah. But what exactly happened? It's complicated. It's to do with the law of intestacy and um… We had a house, but we had nothing else. We had a very nice house. And we had six bedrooms, so she took in lodgers. And we used to call, you know, paying guests, which was very common in those days… our first two lodgers was a woman and a man, and the woman was from Ireland, and the man was from India. So that's how it started, which is very radical for those days.
Presenter asks
24:42Some of your books are regarded as classics… and whilst many people were happy to be interviewed, not all musicians were compliant. I know that Miles Davis was tricky and Thelonious Monk was quite hard to pin down. How did you succeed in the end?
Monk's not a very articulate person. He's a person who goes a week without speaking. I had a friend, John Hopkins, who was a photographer. Hoppy said, Listen, man, he said, We should Monk's coming to town, we should go and interview him, and we'll sell the story to Playboy. We went to a rehearsal… I went up to him and said, excuse me, Mr. Monk, could we come and interview you? He said, yeah, come tomorrow afternoon at four, whatever it was… Monk was just about to have some sandwiches… he was very monosyllabic, you know, everything was, yeah, meh. After a while we started to ask him questions got him slightly riled and Hoppy asked him something, I think, that was quite political. And he got really mad and he shouted at us and he got up and he paced up and down and he started to speak, and it made quite a sensation amongst the musicians, because nobody ever heard him talk that much before.
“I had never dreamed such a thing was possible. I'd been brought up to think that we were in advance of the third world as it was known in those days, you know, that we were we were so progressive. And I found out we weren't. We weren't progressive at all. We're just different.”
“I want to go to the South and hear people singing the blues in the rural situation and I wanted to go to churches and I wanted to go to New Orleans. But because of slavery and the whole history, the South was not a jolly place to be. I've met a lot of people who've envied me my experiences, but there was a price to be paid. You needed to be eternally vigilant yourself… So I learnt what an innocent in the world I was, even at the age of 31, or whatever it was.”
“Words can hurt people. They hurt people for the whole of the whole of their lives. They hurt people for centuries.”
“Every time I walk by I think, hello Freddie, how's it going? But really I'm saying hello Val, how's it going?”
“I was a shy person. I still am. It's ridiculous to be this age and to call yourself shy. You have to be able to handle yourself and the world. But I was shy and I think that was part of it really. And to be sensitive, you know, to others. And it all goes back to all those days in the church and the girl guides and discovering jazz and going to Africa. That's where it all starts, how you form yourself.”