71: I thought this was meant to be a food and drink newsletter 🎷
As someone who didn’t care about jazz, didn’t understand it, didn’t connect with it, how has Gilles Peterson’s 3pm show on Saturday afternoons become the highlight of my week? Lockdown has done weird, shape-changing things to all of us, but bringing out a deep, personal connection with a genre of music I had never been able to understand before is a positive outcome I could never have expected. To me jazz was indecipherable; jazz had been music for other people, in an intimidating cerebral language I had not been taught. Now it’s a fascinating conversation I’m welcome to settle in and overhear, in an emotional spectrum of colour and movement.
I owe this enlightenment to what’s come to be known as the New Jazz Explosion. Young, energising, exciting artists like Ezra Collective, Moses Boyd, Poppy Ajudha, Nubya Garcia and Nubyan Twist have captured my heart and my imagination and changed my outlook in ways only electronic music has managed to before. I realised that artists I’d always admired, like James Blake, Caribou, DJ Shadow, and Thom Yorke were jazz fans, played versions of jazz, and I just hadn’t made that step myself yet. I find GoGo Penguin and Portico Quartet in old playlists from 5, 10, 15 years ago. I had always been stood on the edge about to dip my toes, but never quite brave enough to step in. That cold water shock, I’ve now found, was a revelation, not an obstacle. Now I’m in, I want more.
Other Stuff
“Artists were playing jazz, even if they didn’t realise it,” said Ronny Scott, recorded speaking to an interviewer in “Ronnie’s”, a new documentary film about the inseparable lives of Ronnie, his club and London’s jazz music scene itself. Watch it on BBC iPlayer now.
More music history: the Amen break is, aside from jazz, perhaps the most important influence on the music I listen to daily. Here's where it originated.
Jonny Garrett at his emotive best in this short B-Roll snippet on the British hop harvest during the pandemic. So small, yet so vast.
I know I'm always sharing Andy Kelly's stuff but he's one of my favourite people on Twitter. This week he's created a soothing ambient soundscape featuring sounds from the BBC shipping forecast.
When creativity gets in the way of accessibility -- Matthew Curtis on beer packaging design and how it can cause more obstructions than it thinks is both a fantastic idea for an article and a super-important issue that I bet not a lot of folks, myself included, had considered.
Last year I wrote in this very newsletter about how much I love tiny houses. Well, this year the company that makes the ones sold in my local department store has made a whole range of tiny pubs, a cooperage and even a brewery! And I want them all.
United Farm Workers are an excellent Twitter account dedicated to showing the skill, work and effort of their union farm workers. This thread by them was great -- enabling people to find out exactly where the food on their Thanksgiving plate comes from. I particularly liked the answers to dishes you know people put forward to be awkward. Funny thing is, all food is grown or raised! So there!
The best pub in the world, written about lovingly by one of my favourite people in the world. Hey Laura!
The Food Chain podcast had a great episode on opening a restaurant during the pandemic that I found immensely helpful. Dunno if you know this but I'm kindof trying to open a bar right now. Anyway, restaurant owner and guest on the show Adejoké Bakare had a great quote I wanted to share: "The world's best ideas are in the grave, because nobody ever pushed themselves to do something while they were alive."
Divide & Dissolve are a drone/ambient/doom metal band concerned with making protest music to dismantle and destroy white supremacy, while securing Black liberation and freedom, and demanding Indigenous sovereignty. Tom showed them to me this week and they kick every ass in the world. I want their hoodie so bad.
When I saw the title of this piece, I thought about the calm I feel walking around Wing Yip in Manchester. I have no personal connection to the place, but I love it. Then I found out this piece is actually about Wing Yip (albeit not the one in Manchester, but the one on Edgeware Road in London). Spooky. A beautiful piece on how we find solace and comfort in unexpected places, how we deal with grief, and how food is, as always, at the centre, connecting it all.
"Recently, I’ve been spending an increasing amount of time exploring supermarkets, treating them as an outing, an excursion, an adventure. It’s one of the few things we have left to do during lockdown, one of the few things that hasn’t been lost in the disarray of restrictions."
My Stuff
Our bar doesn't exist yet but we've been mentioned on the most recent Neutral Cider Hotel podcast, which is lovely! Thanks Grant!
I will be presenting the next Manchester Cider Club "Women In Cider" event on behalf of Corto The Hypothetical Bar, which hopefully won't be so hypothetical by then. Loads of great guests with loads of great ciders to talk about! Get your zoom tickets here.
Neptotism? What's that? Anyway my friend Bridie who is a chef talked to me about vegan snacks you can make at home very easily that'll match with your beers for Ferment mag.
Ronnie Scott's, Open Nightly by Chris Lopez