2023 Skidoo!

Fast Away the Old Year Passes Dept.: Exactly no-one ever has asked me about this, but that won’t stop me from holding forth on a beloved subject, to wit: How I put together a cabaret-show program.

Malcolm Kogut and I will be performing together again a couple of nights from now, making our seventh fairly annual appearance under the auspices of Steamer No. 10 Theatre in Albany, NY. (We skipped 2020 – who didn’t? – and livestreamed 2021 from my house.)

Donald Swann & Michael Flanders

Once again it will be mix of not-often-heard comic and unusual songs, my justification being that I choose numbers with which the audience is unfamiliar so they won’t know if I’m singing it wrong.

My main requirement for a program is variety. Tempo, style, subject matter – it should all be a mixture with a degree of unpredictability about it. I’ve sat through too many performances during which every successive song lopes along at exactly the same speed, each of them (typically) some kind of lament. Singer-songwriters can be the worst offenders. I’ll confess that I’m not as familiar with the popular-music world as my contemporaries (not to mention those who are younger, which covers pretty much everybody in the world), so I don’t have the recognition factor to sell me a song.

Where Did You Get That Hat?

Personal Narrative Dept., Encored: As we’ll be visiting London shortly (in a blog post, that is), here’s a repost of something I essayed a decade ago. And the photo below was taken about fifty years (and twice forty pounds) ago, not long after I graduated from high school. It reminds me that the hat therein pictured – a classic bowler – still sits in my closet, in its original box, hand carried from London. Not surprisingly, there’s a story attached . . .

                                                                                            

THE BOWLER HAT, or derby, or billycock hat, dates from the mid-19th century, and the best story attached to its legend of origin is that a design was sought to avoid losing one’s hat to an ill-placed tree branch while on horseback. The bowler’s popularity in England was matched in the U.S. as it became the topper of choice for cowboys and other personalities of the American west.

The author relaxing
between puffs.

I made my second visit to London in mid-February 1973. I was a high-school senior. The visit, like one I made the year before, was for the purpose of play-seeing. Most of the students also were involved in the school’s plays, which meant they weren’t averse to partying. You may think that the sports crowd would have a lock on high-spirited carryings-on. You would be wrong.

Trouble was, I have a layer of reserve that’s like an igneous crust. What I wanted to do on this trip was declare my passion to any or all of the several young women with us who’d captured my heart. What I did instead was indulge in oddball sightseeing.

This meant avoiding the Tower of London in favor of finding the Thames-side walkway where a scene from “A Clockwork Orange” had been filmed, and visiting the Houses of Parliament only because that’s where the finale of “The Ruling Class” takes place.

On the Fringe of Edinburgh

AS THE CAPITAL OF SCOTLAND, Edinburgh is home to the country’s houses of government and its highest courts. It’s also where you find Edinburgh Castle, the Palace of Holyroodhouse, and the historic churches of St. Giles, Greyfriars, and the Canongate. Not to mention the National Museum of Scotland, the National Library of Scotland, and the Scottish National Gallery. It’s centerpiece of higher learning is the University of Edinburgh, founded in 1582. The city is so steeped in antiquity that has a section called New Town that turns out to have been built in the 18th and 19th centuries. But it also has the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and I wish someone had warned me about this.

There are actually two festivals with a certain amount of spread: the Edinburgh International Festival, which presents the more high-culture offerings, like opera and ballet (although there’s much else), and the Fringe, which takes over the town in August to give well over 3,000 different shows in nearly 300 venues.

And we showed up just as the Fringe was getting underway. Actually, I wasn’t quite so innocent of it. I’d learned through Facebook that my friend Amy Engelhardt, former member of “The Bobs” and a keen actor-singer-songwriter, was presenting a solo show there, so we had tickets even before leaving New York. But let’s enjoy our arrival day, which was Sunday, August 6.

Once again, we booked a limo to drag luggage, transport chair, and, of course, us from Manchester to Edinburgh, and our driver introduced himself as Francesco, a native of Spain who had settled some time ago in Scotland. Once again, we wrestled with the etiquette of how much we should annoy the driver with our chatter. The problem solved itself as we drove.

In the Dorian Mode

From the Recording Vault Dept.: Here’s a piece I wrote 35 years ago about a record company while it was in its infancy. A CD company, to be technically correct, but it’s hard to shake old jargon from your heels. I was so impressed with Dorian and its recordings that I convinced them to hire me to write some liner notes, many of which have been reproduced elsewhere on this blog (just search “Dorian” if you’re curious). Dorian had a 16-year run, ultimately succumbing to financial troubles that left them a million dollars in the hole. They declared bankruptcy, and their assets were sold to Virginia-based Sono Luminus, which now markets many of the CDs and has added new ones under the Dorian imprimatur, but without any sense of the wonderful graphic design that graced the original catalogue. I got in touch with them to see about some royalties for the liner notes of mine that they’re using, but they refused to return my calls. There. That’s off my chest!

                                                                                                

CRAIG DORY PLACES SIX COMPACT DISCS upon his desk with the care of a man dealing a high-stakes poker hand. “The artwork arrived today,” he says. “This is our first look at the finished product.” It’s the culmination of over two years of working and waiting, and Dory is as radiant as a new father.

On the other side of his desk sits partner Brian Levine, placing jackets into the jewel boxes of a dozen or so more copies of the discs. Both men are big, bearded fellows in flannels and jeans. They fit nobody’s image of the world’s newest, and possibly best, entrepreneurs of recorded classical music.

Nevertheless, that’s Dorian Recordings’ specialty. The operation is located at State and Second Streets in Troy for proximity to the acoustically marvelous Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, where most of the discs will be recorded. The offices are in a quiet building that mixes doctors and other professionals with long-time residents.

Dory and Levine like it that way. Both came from small towns – Dory in Iowa, Levine in the Toronto suburbs – and appreciate Troy’s small-town feel.

Miller’s Dale for Tidewell

THE TWELVE STONE DWELLING-PLACES known as Ravensdale Cottages were built in 1823 as two rows of six facing one another across a small terrace. They sit in a sheltered valley with a picturesque view of the tree-lined slopes that flank this gorge. To reach them, you drive along an impossibly skinny cartlane until you despair of seeing civilization; then you park as the cottages come into view. But you have to walk to the brink of the terrace to get a full dose of the charm of the place.

Ravensdale Cottages

They’re now holiday retreats, or possibly domiciles for the truly anti-social. True, you’re cheek-to-jowl with adjacent neighbors, but it strikes me as a place where you can count on being ignored or otherwise left alone. Our friend Moz has a connection here: a good friend of his spends summer in one of the cottages. His attempts to reach the fellow by phone were fruitless, but (as we learned) cell service there is variable. And so our long drive through the Peak District brought us here, Mohammed again skillfully piloting us. Moz phoned again; no answer. We parked in a small lot near the terrace and walked to the houses. Not surprisingly, there was no response when Moz knocked on the door. We were left simply to enjoy the peaceful surrounding on a pleasant summer day, looking at the craggy cliffside that drops from the Derbyshire Dales National Nature Reserve, dreaming of the comfortable retreat any one of these cottages would provide.