If music be the food of love...

On thursday night I and my flatmate Sam dj-ed at our first proper club night up at the Art College, it was fun and we had a modest turn out, but one which covered costs and gave us a small profit.
50 pence of which I spent on an album, the cover of which I shall attempt of which here to post, but don't hold your breath....

fingers crossed that works

in case it doesn't and to clarify, it's a 1964 jazz album by Cleo Laine and John Dankworth, in a late 80s repressing. A quick Amazon search reveals it not currently available on cd. What I've got here is a selection of Shakespearian sonnets, songs and dialogue set to music.

Dankworth apparently did this to commemorate the bard's birthday, quoth the sleevenotes but then they also acclaim it as a Highpoint in British Jazz, which sadly, it ain't.

That's not to take anything away from Dankworth and Laine however, who are both in fine form. The music is top rate and the words are top rate, but together they are rather less than the sum of their parts. Jazz, it is true, generally has a more flexible rhythm on the whole than other disciplines, but it is not conducive to singing in iambic pentameter. Another failling is that the snippets chosen to be sung are so well-known, to the chattering masses as well as the literature classes, and while they do not fall into the trap of declaiming Lear's final speech over some jaunty clarinet, there is still something odd about being warned that Ms Laine was from the womb untimely ripp'd (I'm sure someone will correct me if I've got that wrong from memory) and the closing song, entitled 'the compleat works', is a frankly bizarre, consisting as it does of the titles of the aforementioned 'compleat' works one after the other, over a jazzy backing.

The overenthusiastic sleevenotes tell us that it was played in schools to encourage the kids, to make Bill Waggledagger hip. If this was its intention then it was most likely doomed from the start. It put me in mind of Austria's recent attempts, 'Mozart Cool zu machen' by holding a big festival heavy on the textile art and selling die Ringtonen over das Internet. Mozart, Jazz and modern German pop are very different, and those differences are important, trying to pretend that they're not, with Mozart Virtual DJs und ein crazy kids party, is a mistake.