|
Downriver
Keith and I had written some songs for BigFest, (‘Songs From the Drowned Book’: see Graeme Rigby’s essay elsewhere on the site). Keith’s work was astonishingly rich and melodic, and I felt there was a natural imaginative sympathy which might mean that we could work together on a larger project. If I hadn’t encountered Keith, I doubt if the idea of a big work for the musical stage would have occurred to me, but he had the gift of making such things seems possible. Hence Downriver. We decided that the idiom should by jazz. It made sense that the subject should also be jazz, which allowed for the conflict of love and money. So I imagined a jazz club on Newcastle quayside, Mack’s Shack, a prime site owned by the returning seafarer Johnny Mack and greatly coveted by Rantan O’Hara, property developer and hood, who also covets Johnny’s girlfriend, the singer Susie Rivers. Arson, double-crossing and murder ensue. The Newcastle of Downriver has a tropical climate and the quays are always busy with big ships. It’s high summer and the quayside is awash with sailors looking for girls and vice versa. The strong Latin inflexion to the music came naturally to Keith. So what we had was a story set on the Tyne, a romantic myth for the city of Newcastle. It was to be comic, erotic, celebratory and at some points extremely dark and violent. I wrote the outline and a large number of lyrics in a burst, and Keith took the material away with him to Bergen on a Fellowship. Once installed there, he reported that the accommodation was fine, the workroom luxurious, the view splendid, the piano excellent. The only problem appeared to be an endless jazz festival audible from somewhere across the harbour, where the only tune ever played was ‘Girl from Ipanema’. Keith’s saturnine sense of humour was always cheering. He returned from Norway with a vast body of work – music for maybe fifteen of the twenty or so possible songs, from which we concentrated on a dozen. We wanted to get a public hearing in order to get some impression of how the piece might work, so we decided to stage a concert version. A small grant from Northern Arts had helped with the writing so far. We looked for a venue and the Playhouse kindly offered us two nights, rehearsal time and other facilities. I know musicians are used to having to work very quickly, but to get ninety-odd minutes of highly arranged and very diverse material ready for performance in about a week seemed to me heroic. Keith was composer, MD and pianist, infinitely patient and enthusiastic. The band and singers were astonishing: Annie Whitehead (trombone), Brian Abrahams (drums and vocals as Johnny Mack), Lewis Watson (sax), Richard Scott (sax, flute, vocals as Rantan O’Hara), Brendan Murphy (percussion), Gerry Hunt (guitar, sax, flute) Jonathan Thorpe (drums), Neil Harland (bass) with Katherine Zeserson (Susie Rivers), Walter James (Bobby Smart) and Libby Davison (Lulu Banks). Keith also managed to record the piece in its entirety during rehearsal, and a few people have managed to get hold of copies of the CD. The music there, I would suggest, is magical at some points – for example in the ballad ‘Take Me to the Bridge’ (vocals by Katherine), in ‘My Girl Friday’ (Brian) and in ‘Riverbeat’ (Walter and Brian). Elsewhere you can hear what would have been possible, given the opportunity. Downriver is a very ambitious project The performances are warmly remembered. We’d done the sketch. Next should have come the complete work. Keith in particular, music being his workplace, put a good deal of effort into trying to drum up support for a full version of the show, which needed to be staged on Tyneside, but we couldn’t pull it off. Neither of us was a producer, nor wanted to be, and we both had other work pressing in, wanting to be done. So time passed, turning into years, and though we worked together again, and had further projects in mind, Downriver went on waiting for its chance; and then Keith was killed. It would be an appropriate tribute if, now that concerts of his music are planned at the Sage, there emerged, let us say, a readiness to find a way of staging Downriver properly and in full. Expensive? Sure. But so what? Sean O’Brien |
|
|||||||