Posted on by Cantara Christopher · 3 Comments

My Beloved John Wilson Conducts The John Wilson Orchestra in a Swingin’ Christmas on BBC2, Christmas Day 2010

With singers Anna-Jane Casey, Seth MacFarlane, and Curtis Stigers. Mike Lovatt solos on the trumpet. Plus brazen hussy shimmy alert. Whoever would stifle that shimmy in years to come, my bonny, would stifle your spirit.

Swinging Christmas, 2010Above: The FULL 1h23m audio of the BBC’s Swingin’ Christmas With the John Wilson Orchestra, 2010. Big Band medley selections are listed below. Find the (incomplete) show on YT here, or watch the longer version below.

For the Big Band medley: “Skyliner” – Barnet / Charlie Barnet; “Take the A Train” – Billy Strayhorn and vocalist Joya Sherrill / Duke Ellington; “Let’s Dance” – Gregory Stone (based on von Weber’s “Invitation to the Dance”, orchestrated by Hector Berlioz) / Benny Goodman; “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” – Irving Berlin / Ray Noble; “Begin the Beguine” – Cole Porter / Artie Shaw; “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” – Ned Washington and George Bassman / Tommy Dorsey; “Midnight Sun” – Hampton and Sonny Burke / Lionel Hampton; “You Made Me Love You” – Monaco and McCarthy / Harry James; “Moonlight Serenade” – Miller / Glenn Miller; “Peanut Vendor” – Moisés Simons / Stan Kenton; “Woodchoppers Ball” – Joe Bishop / Woody Herman; “One O’Clock Jump” – Count Basie / Count Basie.

This is the kind of music ID-ing I used to do when I was 18 and a night solfeggist at ASCAP, John.

Composer Andrew Cottee is the show’s orchestrator-arranger.

The ENTIRE 1h23m 2010 BBC Swingin’ Christmas With the John Wilson Orchestra is available to view here (thanks, Jayne Anne Strutt!)

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Posted on by Cantara Christopher

John Wilson and Orchestra at the Royal Albert and Holly Does Hollywood in Body Double, Written and Directed by Brian De Palma (Columbia, 1984)

The flick Holly Does Hollywood is fictional, of course, a fictional movie in the world of a real movie called Body Double, which was conceived and executed by the man who in an ideal world would be king of Hollywood, Brian De Palma.

De Palma’s affectionately knowing, utterly non-patronizing visit to pornland is a bit of a fantasy, of course. No flick I ever did or saw had a budget big enough to afford a mirror ball, let alone an MGM-sized dance floor (though Damiano’s later movies came close). But scale aside, De Palma understood the thing that kept nearly all of us, cast and crew, jazzed while we were being pushed to get out product, and that is: When you are making a porn movie, you are making a movie.

Now, every so often I’d remember this. I’d be in the middle of a take, and like a klieg wash switching on I’d suddenly become very aware of everything around me: the lights, the mikes, the crew, the director, the luxuriously gorgeous surroundings (half my films were done in those sumptuous private homes in Marin County), the smooth-skinned, sweet-smelling people touching me, the amused audience (most of the homeowners would hang around watching us film)—and the realization would thrill me so perceptibly I would be open to the moment and I’d like to think it showed up in my performance.

Which is the same jazzed-up open-to-the-momentness I thought I saw in John Wilson one evening when I was trawling online for classic show tunes and stumbled onto my bonny in a 2012 BBC-TV clip, commanding the podium in the middle of the Royal Albert, surrounded by an orchestra of eighty and an audience of 6,000, conducting a hot piece of Jule Styne and shimmying like a brazen hussy. And when I say shimmying like a brazen hussy, understand: I’m the brazen hussy he was shimmying like. I fell in love with him because I recognized him. I got his number. Or so it felt like…

Boogie Nights 1 flat 2Above my crew: The Liverpool group Frankie Goes to Hollywood, who made their initial splash in 1984 (dig it) with the best stroke song ever written, “Relax”. Of course it was banned by the BBC.

And so for over three years I’ve been following my Tyneside lad’s career and person, not as a fan, really, but as an…interested party. So you know I’m going to sit up and take notice like I did when John, conducting in 2019 possibly the last John Wilson Orchestra concert ever at the Royal Albert for the BBC Proms, looked deadly serious, almost toothache-grim, at first when he commanded the stage. Especially when you compare him to that cocky whippersnapper who took the podium back in 2011…

I don’t mean to read a lot into this, maybe he did have a migraine or a toothache at the start. But I think more probably he’s thinking differently (that is, more “seriously”) about things nowadays. Eight years have passed between those two appearances, after all, and I’m sure he’s gone through scads of internal changes during that time and made some interesting decisions we’ll all find out about, sooner or later. It’d be sad if it’s John himself who thinks it’s now “unseemly” for him to shimmy in public anymore (I’m way not the only one to have noticed his gorgeous limey shimmy); but it would be a sadder thing if John’s taking the nudge-nudge hints and advice of others to heart.

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Posted on by Cantara Christopher · 6 Comments

Sid Ramin and Red Ginzler’s Overture to Gypsy (1959) and John Wilson Conducting The John Wilson Orchestra, BBC Proms 2012

The indication “burlesque strip style” was actually written on the music right around 4:00. Both Ramin and Ginzler cut their teeth writing swing arrangements; lead trumpet in the original Gypsy pit was Dick Perry, late of the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. Solo trumpet Mike Lovatt here lays it down fine. Some people obviously know something about burlycue. Composer Jule Styne was pleased with this overture’s orchestration.

The entire 2012 BBC Proms concert The Broadway Sound with The John Wilson Orchestra is available on YT here

John Wilson Gypsy OvertureAbove the man of my desire: The entire audio recording of The Broadway Sound. Plus at 4:00 of this clip on YT of the Overture John shimmies like a brazen hussy. This is the moment one year ago today when I fell in love with you, John mi vida. That lovely luscious moment when I stumbled onto that clip above of you at the Royal Albert and got your number…

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Posted on by Cantara Christopher

John Wilson and The John Wilson Orchestra at the BBC Proms, the Royal Albert Hall, 29 August 2011: The Complete Concert of Hooray for Hollywood Including the Overture Arranged by John

For their show at the 2011 BBC Proms, called Hooray for Hollywood, John and The JWO begin here with an overall satisfying medley of tunes from the picture—inconveniently called the “Hooray for Hollywood” overture—tunes selected, arranged and orchestrated by my self-satisfied darling himself. Starting with John’s cribbing from Ray Heindorf’s execrable arrangement (that hard downbeat!) of the Gershwin brothers’ 1919 “Swanee” (Jolson turning in his grave), it does get better: “Lullaby of Broadway” by Al Dubin and Harry Warren, very nifty and swingy; Rudy Friml and Herb Stothart’s 1924 “Indian Love Call”, a lot more lyrical and moving (he included the birds and the waterfall!) than you remember it (especially when leader Andrew Haveron takes the soulful melody); Jerry Kern and Yip Harburg’s glorious 1944 “Can’t Help Singing” (written for Deanna Durbin); Kern and Ira Gershwin’s 1944 “Long Ago and Far Away” (Howard McGill on tenor sax and Matthew Regan on piano—I’ve never heard it played any lovelier): Frank Loesser’s 1950 “Guys and Dolls” done in Big Swing style; then, in a weird leap, “Chim-Chim-Cheree” by the Sherman brothers, 1963 (for which our John cribs 2 bars from Shostakovich’s Jazz Waltz No 2); and ending with “Hooray for Hollywood” from 1937 by Richard Whiting (who wrote “On the Good Ship Lollipop”) and Johnny Mercer.

Hooray for Hollywood
Where you're terrific if you're even good
Where anyone at all from Shirley Temple
to Aimee Semple
is equally understood
Go out and try your luck
you might be Donald Duck
Hooray for Hollywood

my-beloved-john-wilson-2012Dates are of composition, not the date of the movie. Because it contains John’s own actually-pretty-good arrangement it’s one of my favorite numbers of The JWO (although I would’ve swapped the timpani for a little chord coloring at the beginning of the “Swanee” melody).  He seems to have nailed down the Andre Previn sound in his strings, which is okay by me. Plus extra points @7:40, where my self-satisfied darling shimmies like a brazen hussy yet again.

The entire 2011 BBC Proms concert Hooray for Hollywood with The John Wilson Orchestra is available here

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Posted on by Cantara Christopher

From The Patrick and Maureen Maybe Music Experience, Written and Performed by Patrick Barlow, with Imelda Staunton

On BBC radio streaming until the middle of October, 2019. From 1999, so I guess that makes this show 20 years old.

The Patrick and Maureen Maybe Exprience.jpg

Patrick: This is Irina, the performance artist from Praha.
Maureen: Where?
Irina: Praaa-ha.
Maureen: Yes, I think we know where she comes from. Does she normally wear that?
Irina: I wear very little. There is a saying in my country, “Music is like the body. The more it is exposed, the more it can arouse.” Another expression we have in Czech, “Music is like sex—if we do not have it, WE DIE!!!”
Maureen: (alarmed) Sex. She said sex!
Irina: My music is like my sex. It come from the dark inside of my wooomb of my sex! Yearning to receive the seed of the dark black innards of my inward being… Dark, black, and hot, they copulate in the tone of the music of the fire that meets and heats, and in the heat is born the sacred coming of the sex of my body, is sex and my body is music, on and in, and in and on, my body is the sex of my heat, and my music, my heat, my body is on…
Maureen: Heat?
Irina: Of course. Always. Or as we say in my country, “[something-something-sex in Czech]”… Now I tune and prepare. (plays violin, orgasming loudly to music)
Maureen: Well, that was quite unusual.
Irina: (panting) Thank you.
Patrick: Um, did you actually achieve…?
Irina: (more panting) Orgasm? Of course.
Maureen: So, any other questions you’d like to ask, Patrick…? Any tips? Sorry, the producer’s flashing me. (in headset) Yup! Sorry? Yes yes, I know, well, he’s had her on, it wasn’t my idea…
Patrick: I did not get her on! I was under the impression we agreed we needed an example of the solo fiddle…
Maureen: Yes yes, you would like a fiddle wouldn’t you? (in headset) Yes, yes, all right. (hangs up headset) I’m afraid this is the BBC and we can’t have people having orgasms on it. Can we, Patrick?
Patrick: (deflated) No, no, I’m afraid not.
Maureen: (to Irina) So please leave. Now our next guest…

The battling couple then goes on to humiliate Juliet Stevenson.

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