(By Lance)
Those of us old enough to remember the Marx Brothers’ film The
Big Store will recall Tony Martin singing the Tenement Symphony.
“Schubert wrote a symphony, too bad he didn’t
finish it. Gershwin took a chord in G and proceeded to diminish it... And from
this confusion I dreamed up this grand illusion of my Tenement Symphony (in four flats - get it?)”.
It
was a funny picture and the song was a great musical portrait of life in, what we would now call a multi-story block.
Ellington
too painted a similar picture, indeed an even greater picture - a picture without words – in his Harlem Airshaft.
Riding home on the 27 bus the other night, these two classic moments came to mind – just about everyone was jabbering away on their mobiles. And, like on the Tenement Symphony the conversations were all in different dialects. There was Geordie, there was Mackem, there was, maybe, Bangladeshi and some were even speaking (shouting) English. The Galaxy 6 behind me was interspersing his blasphemies with the occasional ‘Och Aye’ whilst I, Luddite that I am, was reading a book!
All
of this brings me to the idea that, just as Ellington and whoever composed Tenement Symphony incorporated the sounds of New York City, maybe Paul Edis or someone could create the sounds of Newcastle and it's surrounding areas as heard on the bus or the
Metro or maybe just the sounds of the street in the jazziest possible way.
Lance
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