Summer 1995

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Poetry is in the air and on air, as winter's lowering iron-grey clouds give way to summer's. As part of the Entertainment USA tour Billy Jenkins went West, making it all the way to the Bath Literature Festival, for which several poetic luminaries had penned verses to match the characters on the album. Billy himself contributed the following, a paean to an unsuspected fairness in life and the humility of the artist.

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Sumer is icumen in -

Sing cuccu! Sing cuccu, nu!

Sing cuccu, nu! Sing cuccu!

Lhude sing cuccu!

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From One Entertainer To Several Others:

I have never met the people I have caricatured

on Entertainment USA

yet

I have been fed information about them.

I have seen them

yet

never face to face.

I have heard them

talking and singing

but

I have not had to smell their breath.

I have never met the writers

of these poems

yet

we have been fed information

about each other.

I have seen their work

yet

never their faces.

They have hear me

talking and singing

but

they have not had to smell my breath

Life can be sweet after all

______________________

 

Billy Jenkins on Sonny Rollins' East Broadway Rundown reprinted from Jazz UK

Adolescent life was good. Before it was The Kinks and The Dave Clark Five - a bloody great noise. Then it was Hendrix, Johnny Winter, Ritchie Blackmore - heavy loud guitars. Then one day I left the aural debris from my heavy metal three piece in the family home cellar and climbed four flights to the top flat - where Bob the Lodger seduced me. Never cared for jazz, never cared for saxophones - they belonged to Radio Two - the Light Programme - until East Broadway Rundown. Now in the large Sonny Rollins canon this is not considered his greatest work, but from the moment I first heard it I had passed over. Jazz had struck another innocent. Elvin bashing, Garrison boozing, Hubbard oozing, but above all, that unavoidably seductive Rollins genius.

This is a young teenager who thought the Velvet Underground were the cutting edge, but East Broadway left them sounding to my ear like Andy Warhol's art looked to my eye - repetitious and mechanical. East Broadway was HEAVY! Why, the music lasted a whole side of an LP!! And the crowning glory - he took his mouthpiece off and played that!!! Total Anarchy! A life subscription was assured and within weeks I had a wad of Rollins, Coltrane, Parker et al hard up against 'The Rock Machine Turns You On' (after Sonny it didn't) and 'Nice Enough to Eat' (not any more - I'd become a jazzatarian).

So deeply impressed was I by the ambient nature of the recording (was it producer Bob Thiele, the room, the miking or the players...?) I used the East Broadway sound some fifteen years later on my 1984 recording 'Beyond E Major'. Four years later the musical structure became part of the blueprint for 'Motorway at Night' where I gleefully brought contemporary saxophone giants Iain Ballamy and Andy Sheppard together.

The lineage was completely intentional.

Sonny - thank you for the sunshine in my life.

______________________________

Ray Charles

The Harmonic structure of Ray

Charles' 16-bar blues,

Makes my legs quiver

from my body hair

down to my shoes

Ivor Cutler


Doris Day

Oh, Doris Day:

What wouldn't I give for a roll in the hay -

I would trade all the fabled treasure of Atlantis

For just one sniff of your panties!

Andrew Davies

from Entertainment USA: The Poems