Listening to a Giles Peterson podcast the other day I was catapaulted back to a night upstairs in a London pub listening to saxophonist Lol Coxhill and poet Bob Cobbing. I didn't know anything about either of them, although I'd heard Cobbing's name from a lecturer on my degree course. But the point of this is that Peterson's podcast and the experimental jazz he was playing could have been from the early 1980s. Except we didn't have podcasts. We went to the pub. I'd been going to the pub to hear music in fact since I was 14. It was allowed in those days. I started with a folk club in Crondall, where I also saw Alexis Korner.
I couldn't tell you the name of either pub but those gigs of Coxhill, Cobbing and Korner have stuck in my mind for decades. Experimental jazz takes listening and concentration. As does sound poetry like Cobbing did. And I was led to Peterson because I'd been listening to an improvised session my son did and it was brilliant.
I'm creating very little right now. The demands of caring overtake everything. I earmark pockets of time when I might squeeze out a poem. I compensate with time travel. And a reminder to be open to the new, which may not actually be that new, but is experiment, improvisation and keeping going. Which is what I witnessed in that upstairs room. An absolute belief in just getting on with it.
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