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RADIO

New broom

Day One in Downing Street

BBC RADIO 4

the general election, Peter Hennessy was by far the most instructive. The psephologists were merely dry; the elder statesmen of all three parties (with exceptions) dull; Professor Vernon Bogdanor of the University of Oxford, though erudite, could not disguise the fact that he wanted the Conservatives to win. Professor Hennessy, on the other hand, fea- tured as the non-partisan constitutional expert, keenly alive to the latest batch of coali- tion proposals and remarking of the new Government’s idea for a 55 per cent majority requirement in votes of no confidence that surely one vote was enough. You left the ferment of the post-election

O

bartering process with the feeling that it would be nice to hear from Hennessy again, and, lo and behold, there he was with a two-part

docu mentary Day One in Downing Street (14

and 19 May), purporting to outline the chal- lenges, pressures and administrative protocols that await the new incumbent as he (or she) steps into what the BBC political editor Nick Robinson has taken to calling “the most

JAZZ

Back from the dead

The Giuseppi Logan Quintet

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Marmarosa all claim membership of a rather exclusive club. They all survived their own obituaries. Along the way, other artists pro- nounced dead by virtue of critical unfashionability have been able, like Mark Twain, to announce that news of their decease was somewhat exaggerated. In a field where the casualty rate has always been unusually high on both counts, the case of Dodo Marmarosa is particularly interesting. In the spring of 1992, tributes to the pianist, one of the pioneers of bebop, appeared in both The

Guardian and The Independent, quickly fol-

lowed by a call from Pittsburgh from Marmarosa’s sister to say that he was alive and well and standing right by the telephone. What had happened was that the famously curmudgeonly Marmarosa was being pestered by a British fan who wanted an interview. Picking up the umpteenth call, he adopted a different voice and told the man that, regret- tably, Mr Marmarosa had passed away the night before. The fan promptly called a jour-

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30 | THE TABLET | 22 May 2010

rnest Hemingway, the crime writer Ngaio Marsh and jazz pianist Michael “Dodo”

f all the talking heads wheeled out for our entertainment in the aftermath of

famous address in Britain”. This was a curious endeavour, clearly put together in a hurry (and sometimes showing it) in the 60 or so hours that elapsed between the arrival of the Cameron-Clegg Government and the first half’s transmission, but featuring a large num- ber of interviews with the great and good that had obviously been recorded well in advance. The interviewees did credit to Hennessy’s address book. They included the former Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, Harold Wilson’s press secretary Joe Haines, Lady Avon, widow of Sir Anthony Eden, and the removal man who had been hard at work in Number 12 Downing Street on the day that Tony Blair and his entourage began to make their presence felt two doors down. But how- ever illustrious the witnesses, the procedures they described seemed fairly straightforward. Prime Minister Number One resigns and is driven off to see the Queen. Prime Minister Two gets his summons. The civil servants, meanwhile, have been planning away for months. Having kissed hands, the newly appointed PM turns up at Number 10, greets his staff, inspects the accommodation, picks his Cabinet and receives the telephoned con- gratulations of the world’s leaders. By and large then, the merits of Hennessy’s

two brisk half-hours lay in their fragments of alluring detail and their reliance on anecdote. Joe Haines, awaiting his employer’s count at Huyton in February 1974, had his first inkling that Labour might win when Special Branch began to stake out the hotel in which Wilson

nalist in London and the story took flight. When Marmarosa eventually died in 2002, jazz writers checked the facts carefully before filing copy. Their caution was underlined by something that happened just months later when the bass player Henry Grimes, who had performed on some of the iconic jazz recordings of the 1960s but was long believed to be dead, was discovered by a social worker in Los Angeles, indigent, mentally confused and lacking an instrument. Grimes was astonished to learn that one of his most famous employers, the turbulent saxophonist Albert Ayler, had died in 1971. After treatment and rehousing, and the gift of a striking green double bass by William Parker, the leading jazz bassist of the following generation, Grimes was performing again, tirelessly for a man in his seventies and miraculously for one who had been dead, mourned and obituarised only a short time before.

It might seem that Grimes’ remarkable

story must be a one-off, unrepeatable. That is should have happened again must sound like what Twain would have called a “stretcher”. Just a couple of years ago, a man wandered into a music store in New York looking for a saxophone reed. The shop assis- tant, himself a clarinet player, thought he recognised him as Giuseppi Logan, one of the more abrasive figures of the 1960s avant- garde who made just a couple of records and then disappeared. I often asked musicians

was quartered. Sir Robin Butler recalled election-night parties for the civil-service mandarins, and the resignation call from Major to Blair being fixed up from the kitchen of the Butler domicile in Dulwich. Lady Avon remembered her husband’s “very merry” meet- ing with the Queen in 1955, in which both sovereign and hopeful premier were having such a wonderful time that Her Majesty had to be reminded what errand Sir Anthony had come on. There was also a wide-eyed reminiscence or two from Robin Wilson, sum- moned from his undergraduate studies at Oxford to witness his father’s installation in the new family home.

All this was interesting to hear, but not ter- ribly illuminating. Neither was the interview with Francis Maude, charged with the Tories’ transitional arrangements, who declared that the shadow of the fiscal crisis was “pretty bloody daunting” and that it was impossible to plan an economic strategy “until you had your hand on the levers”. Things picked up no end when a couple of former MI5 directors discussed the highly confidential briefings on various leading New Labour lights which they had prepared for Tony Blair in 1997. Alas, no names were mentioned, although both reck- oned that British intelligence had been so successful during the Cold War that no “Sov” (Hennessy shorthand for “Soviet spy”) had ever sat at the Cabinet table. If a bit short on startling revelation, this was still gratifyingly heavy on Hennessy, and I look forward to hearing more. D.J. Taylor

Giuseppi Logan: back on the racks after 45 years

about him. Those who didn’t merely shrug stated confidently that he was dead. Logan’s story closely parallels that of his exact con- temporary Grimes: drug abuse, mental problems, the steady loss of his instruments (Logan was a multi-instrumentalist, who played some of the more exotic members of the wind family), followed by an unexpected return to music.

By his own account, Logan didn’t play at all from 1979 to 2003, apart from tinkling at a borrowed piano, but once he was rediscov- ered or resurrected it became imperative to Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44
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