The trumpet shall sound ...

during the Ottawa Jazz Festival, in the Rideau Centre. I went to hear Derek Robertson (also of the Rockcliffe Flying Club*) and his band playing to the shoppers there at lunchtime. These quite elderly musicians enjoyed themselves so much that they overran their allotted hour by a good fifteen minutes.

Everybody loves my baby! they were playing when I arrived, Derek on trumpet, Bob on clarinet, Alistair on trombone, Ted on banjo, Aubrey on the drums and Neil (of Barbados), who runs a jazz ensemble of his own, currently performing at the Goose and Gridiron in Merrickville, on bass. Then with a "One, two, one-two-three..." they were launched into the St Louis Blues by W C Handy. Derek, who like his friend Alistair is a one time Scottish immigrant, put his trumpet aside to sing part of this number:

That St Louis woman
She aint goin' nowhere with me.
I got the St Louis blues! ...

The band used to play on the pleasure boats that sail the St Lawrence but apparently there isn't the demand for this any more. Someday you'll be sorry! they continued.

"Now let's do a fast one," said Derek to himself over the microphone. "Here we go!" with That's a-Plenty, before slowing the tempo again for the Old Memphis Blues. "If Beale Street could talk..." sang Derek, Beale Street being where W C Handy wrote the first ever blues song, in 1909.

What entertained me more than anything was watching the reaction of unsuspecting shoppers passing by on the up and down escalators to the side of where I sat. Some people did not respond at all and went by leaden-faced or lost in their own concerns or chatter, not in the least curious to know what was going on. Others, when they heard the jazz and noticed the band, immediately started tapping their fingers on the handrail, their faces lighting up spontaneously. At first I wondered if it was a generational thing, most of the younger people having earphones stuck in their ears so presumably deaf to everything but their own choice of music. But then I saw some of these looking down and smiling too. Then I wondered if it had anything to do with racial types, Asians or people from the middle east perhaps less likely to respond to this kind of sound, I imagined. But after a few minutes' more observation I could find no correlation there either. I finally came to the conclusion that there are simply two kinds of human being, the musical and the unmusical, and it makes no difference what age they are or where they come from.

Oliver Sachs in Musicophilia claims that it is possible to distinguish the physical brains of musicians from other brains. There's a noticeably larger corpus callosum between the two halves of your brain, if you are a musician. The question I'd like to ask is whether it becomes more enlarged with constant exposure to music, or whether it shrinks if you don't get enough music in your life. The nature v. nurture debate.

The band rounded off their performance with Oh when the Saints go marchin' in, of course, but then there was "time for just one more" number, Goin' home, at which I went.

*Talking of the Rockcliffe Flying Club, you can download a pdf of our Newsletter (containing an article by Chris and an article by me) if you click "Spring 2008" on this page.