RIP Dad

William F. Watkins
19th May 1924 – 18th August 2017

My dad never got a lot of the weirder music I listened to, but there was plenty of common ground.

Being an old-school socialist, I remember him singing and whistling this anthem when I was a kid (the Labour party used to sing it at party conferences back then, not these days). I played him this once and he really liked it, the only Canterbury Scene music I think he ever heard (I don't think I'll be able to listen to this for a while without it bringing a tear to my eye):

His youth coincided with the Swing era, so for him, jazz never got any better than this (Benny Goodman with Harry James on trumpet and Gene Krupa drumming):

I used to think Goodman was part of an affluent white cultural appropriation of jazz, turning it into a safe commodity. But having just read about him, I discovered that he grew up in abject poverty on the South side of Chicago (a Jewish immigrant family) and was the first prominent bandleader to have a racially integrated band. And listening to that recording of "Sing, Sing, Sing", trying to imagine being a teenager in the late 30s, I suspect it would have sounded as wild and mind-bendingly intense as "Interstellar Overdrive" did to me in the 80s. So I've had to concede that my dad was actually a lot more far-out than I'd given him credit for.

He had a deep love for classical music too, and I never did find out where that came from (certainly not his family or his shipmates in the US Navy). Generally he went for the bombastic post-Baroque stuff, whereas I can't really handle that, preferring earlier composers (Bach, Byrd, Dowland, Gibbons, Hildgaard von Bingen). His favourite symphony was César Franck's Symphony in D Minor. A lot of that is too bombastic for my ears, but this movement is nice:

Here's something very much in the overlapping region of the Venn diagram of our musical likes. We used to play a lot of chess when I visited, and in recent years I'd tend to put on Ellington and Count Basie so we could both enjoy the sounds while playing. Mid-period Coltrane and Monk were a bit too far-out, but tolerable to him, and the extended Eno ambient works I'd put on occasionally didn't seem to bother him (he was too absorbed in the chessboard). But we both rated this one highly:

Love you, Dad. Thanks for everything...