The Power of Love

Continuing on from the previous post and the brief set by First Fold Records for the second edition of their publication 'Premier Pli', I have begun work on my precious four pages for the magazine. 'Nostalgia' is the brief and with it being such an incredibly personal subject I wanted to make small objects, trinkets that could be kept safely. Whenever I have the urge to clear out cupboards or drawers it is the big stuff that goes, the small stuff tends to survive and my thinking is that these small objects will act as memory aids, time-machines, a link from the 'now' me to the me in the past.

The things that have been important in the making of these objects are:

1. A desire to believe that personal trinkets possess innate magical properties.

2. The fan-fetishism associated with film props.

3. Time travel.

4. Making by hand.

5. The use of children's craft/ art materials.

6. Memory's ability to juxtapose facts and fictions into one flawless entity.

This blog post will focus on just one of the objects, future blogs will, no doubt, indulge the other three.

I happily managed to obtain some sheets of Shrinky Dinks (shrinkable plastic) with a view to make a replica of my mum's old Datsun Sunny with Back to the Future De Lorean time travel attachments.

Rather than write about it I think the pictures that follow tell a much more interesting tale. 

This piece is called 'The Power of Love' (a reference to the Huey Lewis & the News track and, therefore, Back to the Future). I completed it over about three days, just in case you were interested.

 

I will post a picture of the finished time-machine when 'Premier Pli 2' is published. It has been fun and games making these little objects and a lot of patience and love has gone into them. And maybe that's what it's all about, maybe that's what gives these objects their magic.

Thanks for popping by.

Shrinky Dink Time Travel

Art/ music collective First Fold Records have, over the past couple of years, encouraged me to be creative and the results of my endeavours have, thus far, been supported without question. They offer up projects that can take either audio or visual form and are very hard to turn down. I find it difficult to say ‘no’ as, for one thing, First Fold Records are an incredibly decent and amiable bunch of people and also the projects are so challenging and enticing. ‘Premier Pli’ is the record labels most recent venture. It is an occasional publication where artists/ musicians/ writers are invited to contribute pages of images or text and the work is linked by a theme selected by guest editors. This ‘commission’ has taken me in creative directions that I would never have travelled on my own and, add that to my wife’s invaluable critique and encouragement, I have pushed myself like never before to produce some of my most successful visual material to date.

For issue two of ‘Premier Pli’ the theme has been set by guest editors Pierre and Karlheinz. It is simply ‘Nostalgia’. The brief is to fill four pages with visuals and to contribute one audio track (for the cover CD) keeping the nostalgia theme in mind. The theme acts as a guiding light through the foggy seas of the creative process.

It has been a strange thing for me to think about nostalgia, the things that I am nostalgic about and the things that trigger these bizarre feelings. Nostalgia comes in many forms. From an idealised yearning for the past to being seen as a sickness often grouped in with melancholy in the early modern period (around 1500AD – 1800AD according to Wikipedia) nostalgia has many faces and therefore has numerous creative directions and possibilities. This can be overwhelming and yet incredibly seductive from a creative point of view.

Talking of nostalgia triggers, I read the words ‘Shrinky Dinks’ today. I probably hadn’t thought about this peculiar home craft item for maybe thirty years but those two mystical words opened a wormhole to my past and brought a whole load of happy memories back to me in an instant. This plastic material that you could draw on with colouring pencils and whack in your oven and cook triggering a magical transformation used to fill me with wonder. I am amazed to discover that this material is still available. I am overjoyed and inspired that this material is still available. Maybe this is a just a little hint that magic really does exist. By believing and instilling a certain supernatural quality to the things that, via nostalgia, we have put on pedestals we can journey back to happy times, to other worlds long thought dead or forgotten. We can travel to a time and place where, as a child, we used to actually make things by physically interacting with them. To the artists and crafts people who make stuff with their hands - stitch, stick, cut, sew, fold, paint, craft, sculpt - I salute you. I enjoyed my trip in the Shrinky Dink Time Machine. Thoroughly.

The Curiosity Pipe No1

My Mum is a big jazz fan and growing up I had listened through half open ears as she would play Cannonball Adderley and Ray Charles records. But during my time at university I was on a musical journey, going deeper into the woods, and acquired access to jazz through my university city’s library. I was listening avidly to this incredibly absorbing and immersive music but never straying too far from be-bop, Miles and Coltrane.

I was studying Fine Art and our painting studio resided in an old drill hall in Wolverhampton. I got the impression that all the students who didn’t quite fit in with the university’s perceived obsession with Conceptual Art were moved to this dreary place to keep us out of the way just in case someone came for a look around. One day I heard this distorted jazz noise coming from one of my fellow painter’s CD player.

It was a five CD set of rare and unissued recordings by John Coltrane spanning 1951 – 1965 and I persuaded its owner to part company with this heft of CDs while I recorded them to cassette.

About seventeen years later subsequently ‘lost’ all my cassettes during a house move and I hunted desperately for a copy of the CD, finally tracking it down in the US via Ebay. I had a great sense of achievement finding this as it reminded me of the much-missed old days of having to actually hunt for a record by visiting a record shop. I do miss that – Amazon, Play and iTunes have taken the fun out of actually looking for and buying music.

Anyway, I digress…

One track always stood out for me on this collection of remarkable performances: ‘A Love Supreme.’

The liner notes are vague at best and this was recorded live (at some point) in 1965 in Europe (somewhere) and features the same line up as the studio recording of this suite. This is a quartet with so much skill and energy that it is breathtakingly dangerous and thrilling: John Coltrane (tenor sax), McCoy Tyner (piano), Jimmy Garrison (bass) and Elvin Jones (drums).

The original studio album from 1965 is separated into four ‘movements’ over three tracks (Parts 3 and 4 joined together as the final track) but here the whole of ‘A Love Supreme’ is presented as one track that runs just shy of forty minutes and insists you listen from beginning to end, uninterrupted and fully focussed on the action.

From around the two minute mark Coltrane is off, slipping in and out of the framing joy of the suite’s main refrains. It is almost as if he couldn’t wait to leave the safety of the ‘tune’ behind and leap headlong, fearlessly and with a child’s excitement into new musical territory. Tyner tries to nail him down with heavy and necessary chords but Coltrane weaves around these effortlessly. At times this comes off as a battle of wills, Tyner in the roll of sensible adult trying his hardest to make their mischievous child fall into line, but it quickly becomes an elegant and exciting dance.

Thankfully the spoken mantra of ‘Part 1: Acknowledgement’ is absent here (I was never a great fan of this on the studio album) and it isn’t needed. If the mantra was intended as a preacher style sermon, Coltrane’s playing alone checks all the boxes for its purpose: elation, elegance and exaltation. Coltrane’s 'personal search for purity’ and his belief that ‘his talent and instrument [are] owned not by him but by a spiritual higher power’ is conveyed with power and complete conviction by he and his quartet’s talent, belief and focus.

The quality of this lo-fi recording with Coltrane moving in and out of focus as he seemingly moves around the stage, the barely perceptible bass of Garrison, the clatter and pound of Elvin’s drumming and Tyner’s nailing and grounding piano work makes this for one of the most compelling and exciting jazz recordings I have ever heard.

This is the sound of Coltrane pushing himself, his music and his instrument to the very limits of his ideas and creativity, his saxophone acting as a flexible, malleable barrier as he blows the music closer and closer to rapture, his instrument creaking and straining to accommodate his search for spirituality and creative freedom.

As Coltrane flies off to the outer reaches Tyner leaves him a musical trail should his band leader stray too far and need a little guidance in returning home to the main refrains which the quartet do with deadly accuracy time and time again. I know these are musicians at the top of their game but while listening I like to imagine Tyner, Jones and Garrison hanging on Coltrane’s every note with wide eyed wonder.

It is an extreme listening experience because of the music performed and the quality of the recording but it is a performance of unmatched vigour and vitality that is documented on this CD. Coltrane and his quartet are enjoying themselves, getting lost in the music, getting lost in each other’s playing and seeing where it takes them without being self conscious and without the constraints of recording a ‘product’. The performance comes first here and the recording is a happy coincidence.

This is truly exciting stuff and, although not for everyone, if you can track this boxset down and you are focussing completely on the unfolding drama of Coltrane and his quartet this is an incredibly worthwhile and rewarding listen and may even bring you close to musical rapture.

John Coltrane – The Legendary Masters Unissued or Rare 1951 – 65

SIAE – Recording Arts Reference Edition, 1988