Across the pond

Halfway through tonight’s concert at the Bridport Arts Centre I decided to call upon all the manic depressive/bi-polar crowd to rise up and start calling themselves melancholics. If we have to have  a label melancholic has a more dignnified ring about it. And it jolts  the thinking away from the contemporary practice of treating depression as a mental illness, which is best treated by doctors and shrinks, using drugs or specially trained psychotherapists. The idea was given wings by the music, and it soared during one of episode of deeply melancholic music, led for a time by the trumpeter, Byron Wallen, a young black, in what was otherwise an all-white, all-male band.

From the applause,  I guess, that most of the audience liked the accent on the  negative, the long drawn out notes conveying pain, suffering and very gloomy feelings. We go out to concerts, or turn on the tele to be taken out of ourselves, to be cheered up after a hard day’s work. Or a hard day of not being able to work. We are not looking for more gloom, but when a performance, like this one, puts us in touch with our deeper sadness inside, the effect is hugely positive.

Tragedies can cheer us up more than funniest comedies.

Which is one reason, why I think it is more useful to regard manic depressives as people with a non-average temparament, which needs to be managed differently, rather than sick people, who should be cured.

This particular concert came from the manic idea of a journalist, and jazz-lover, Paul Lashmar, who got together a local band, to re-enact  the Miles Davies Concert (now a CD), Kind of Blue, performed in NewYork in 1959. The climax was the deeply melancholic final number on the CD. But the encore, sending the audience out into the chilly night, was the manic So Long, in which the drummer, Matt Fishwick,  thumped the drums with more exhuberance than skill.

Earlier in the programme, he had given one of the finest performances of the evening, which came out of the improvisation, that makes a live jazz performance so much more exhilirating than a CD. Fishwick was probably the youngest member of the band. To me he looked about 18 but he must be older. His moment came when responding to a nod from the leader, he went into an inspired virtuoso battery of drum bashing, quite amazing in its dexterity.

All jazz musicians are not manic depressives (sorry, melancholics). But perhaps all mainc depressives should be offered offered jazz tuition as an alternative to Prozac and shrinks. Who knows, it might even get a lift from David Cameron’s Big Society, with that most notorious old rascal and jazz fiend, Ken Clarke, being made Minister of Jazz, as well as Business Secretary.