Roger Garfitt is a poet with a particular interest in working with artists and musicians and jazz plays an important part in his memoir, The Horseman's Word (Cape, 2011). He has always published with Carcanet and his Selected Poems includes 'The Hooded Gods' from a poet-artist collaboration on the theme of Hadrian's Wall as well as the two sequences he discusses here, 'Border Songs' and 'In All My Holy Mountain'.
In All My Holy Mountain
Roger Garfitt tells the story behind his CD of Poetry & Jazz and the launch of a new CD label, Re-stringing the Lyre.
Everyone knows that inspiration is ninety percent perspiration. Perhaps we should amend that a little further and allow a percentage for luck. It was certainly a lucky moment when I was introduced to the bandleader John Williams at the bar of The Three Tuns in Bishop's Castle, where he had been playing a gig. I suspected we might be on the same wavelength because I had heard Jacqui Dankworth singing the settings of Housman poems he had commissioned for New Perspectives, his ensemble that brought jazz and classical musicians together. But it still felt like the granting of a long cherished wish when he said, "We should do some Poetry & Jazz."
Poetry & Jazz was in the air when I first discovered jazz in the early Sixties. Red Bird, Christopher Logue's incomparable performance of Neruda poems with the Tony Kinsey Quintet, was an EP many of us had and we listened with equal fervour to Stan Tracey's Jazz Suite inspired by Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, which had no words but did have Bobby Wellins' astonishing solo on 'Starless and Bible-black'. In 1965 I had even persuaded the Oxford University Poetry Society to put on an evening of Poetry & Jazz in Oxford Town Hall and Stan Tracey took a night off from Ronnie Scott's to appear with Michael Horovitz, Jeff Nuttall and Harry Fainlight. That went off at half-cock because I hadn't set up a scroll-back amp to enable the musicians to hear the poets and the best Stan could do was play quietly behind Michael's voice. I tried to make amends in later years by hosting Stan and Lol Coxhill, Michael and Jeff Nuttall at the Theatr Gwynedd in Bangor and by inviting Stan and Michael to perform together at Evesham Library, which happened to have a Yamaha piano that was up to Stan's high standards.
I had worked with folk musicians, with Tristram Robson on the Irish harp and with Sue Harris on the hammered dulcimer, but never had the chance to take on Poetry & Jazz. Where should we start? With the funding, of course. The band John assembled for Music at Leasowes Bank, his summer festival in the Shropshire Hills, were top London jazz musicians. They would need to be properly paid. And we needed an idea that could start in Shropshire and travel the country. Which is when I thought of Mary Webb, the one Shropshire writer everyone knows.
What began as a tactic turned into a discovery. The more I read of Mary Webb, the more I was able to see these hills through her eyes, as finely attuned as a watercolour painter's to the most delicate shades of light and colour. And the more I read about her, the more I warmed to her as a person. As a daughter of the gentry, she had to take on the duty of parish visiting, taking food and medicines to the poor: but, rather than descending like Lady Bountiful, she went "as on a round of visits to her oldest and dearest acquaintance" and it was her closeness to the people she visited that gave her the stories and the turns of phrase she was able to draw on for the novels. When she came to marry, she drew up the guest list for the wedding breakfast in the same spirit: rather than asking the great and good of the county, she invited
all the old women- people she knew would relish a good feed. Mary Webb was a radical figure and, reading her account of how the countryside emptied as the men went off to the First World War, I saw that Gone to Earth was far more than a cry against hunting: it was a novel of protest.
from Cross Houses, released
from the workhouse ward
for the day… old men
winkled out of shuts
and back lanes, herbalist
and organ grinder…
Given Mary Webb's ability to draw one wash of colour over another, I felt that we would need layers of sound. I went to John and said that we would need all three saxophones, alto, tenor and baritone, plus a trumpet: in other words, a septet. We decided to have guitar rather than piano in the rhythm section so that we could tour without being restricted to venues with a good piano. John had heard good reports of Nikki Iles and suggested her as the composer, a woman composer to celebrate a woman writer. Now all we had to do was pitch the idea to the Arts Council.
That meant securing local funding first and here again I was in luck. When Shropshire County Council put up a new building to house the Shropshire Archives, Jenna Kumiega, the Arts Officer, had applied a Percentage for Art and commissioned a poem from me to go on the glass screen that separated the Public Room, where all the parish records were stored, from the Rare Manuscript Room. One poem was not enough, I thought: here were all the voices of the past, generation after generation. I came up with Border Songs, twelve short lyrics that told the history of the Marches, starting with a Stone Age ridgeway and ending with Wilfred Owen. These had to be spare on the glass because the screen was a security screen. That left room for music and I had performed them with Sue Harris on the hammered dulcimer, first on BBC Radio 4's Kaleidoscope and then to the assembled councillors in Shire Hall.
Jenna said she could find £500 in seed funding. Armed with that, I went to the Arts Council's Literature Director, Gary McKeone, who was always refreshingly can-do in his approach. "The only way we could do this," he said, "would be from the Libretto Fund. If the Music Department commission Nikki, we can commission you." John duly applied to the Music Department, they commissioned forty-five minutes of music from Nikki and over the next six months, section by section, I sent her what turned out to be In All My Holy Mountain.
First I wanted to establish the physical presence of Shropshire. My study window faces north but the light is not as austere as you might imagine because our weather mostly comes from the west. I was used to seeing the colours change as milder air flowed in from the Atlantic and that's what I set out to describe in 'Westerly':
It begins as a breathI followed the weather down the valley until I had four of those, four of what are virtually four-line haiku, each one taking a week to get right.
a softness in the air
over the oakwoods
the first dustings of blue
The reward for all those erasures came when I walked into a rehearsal room in London and heard a flute coming in over two bass clarinets. I had asked John for all three saxophones, not realising that this band of master musicians could double and even treble on other instruments: the sound palette we had at our disposal was even richer than I had imagined, the bass clarinets brooding under my voice for "the luminous shadow / of an Atlantic calm" and pulsing steadily for "catches the drift // of the stream, the wooded tumps, / rephrasing them in blues // finer than woodsmoke". Then the guitar took up the tune and the whole palette lightened for
takes the breath awayI haven't the space here to evoke all the qualities of Nikki's score, the gentle dance she created for 'The Wedding Breakfast', "such bright music of silver on china they might have been at table in the halls of heaven", or the ghost dance she conjured up for 'The Haunting', which tells of that emptying of the countryside in the First World War, "The dead were walking with the walking wounded // their hands hollowed in the hands around a match": but when the band stood up after two days' rehearsal and applauded us for "a good strong vibe", I knew we had something and that feeling was confirmed at the end of the first performance at Leasowes Bank when a girl ran up to me and said, "That was bloody brilliant!"
over the hillfort
in a blue that lifts
like a curlew call
We gave twelve performances all across England and Wales and there it might have remained, a resonant memory for those lucky enough to hear it, if an aunt who was a dancer and a dance teacher had not left me a small legacy. I felt I should use it for something she might have enjoyed and I have launched a CD label, Re-stringing the Lyre, to promote partnerships of poetry and music. If this CD takes off, others will follow, and not always of my own work.
To order one, just go to the website here.