Now, I can hear a lot more of Jon Hassell's concept of Fourth World music in the Penguin Cafe Orchestra than I can in Hassell's own work. Yet Simon Jeffes' never made the kind of manifesto commitment that the Fourth World idea seems to invoke. His pronouncements were much more oblique:
…I was on the beach sunbathing and suddenly a poem popped into my head. It started out "I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe, I will tell you things at random and it went on about how the quality of randomness, spontaneity, surprise, unexpectedness and irrationality in our lives is a very precious thing. And if you suppress that to have a nice orderly life, you kill off what's most important. Whereas in the Penguin Cafe your unconscious can just be. It's acceptable there, and that's how everybody is.
<tangent>Jeffes sunbathing? How have I missed the implausibility of this until now? The one time I saw him on a beach, he was wearing a grey linen suit.</tangent>
Perhaps this is evidence that cultural integration-and-hybridisation, like happiness, is something best approached sideways.
I think my musical eyes and ears must have been asleep in the mid-nineties. At the time Concert Program came out, I received it as a faintly suspect ruse. A PCO live album? We already had one of those. And this is a live album recorded in a studio (the sleeve does not record whether an audience was present — if so, the microphones don't pick them up)? It does seem prima facie like a knock-off way to sell the same old stuff one more time.
Evidently I was happy to hand over the same old stuff and leave it at that. Now, though, it looks to me as though Concert Program was designed as the Orchestra's swan song, a closing of the circle. The sleeve notes that the album "contains a selection of pieces from the orchestra's 21-year history," and is "Volume 8 (octave) of Music from the Penguin Cafe. Then there's the "encore" finale of Red Shorts, which sounds distinctly like a requiem, with the benefit of hindsight. I'd always assumed that the orchestra would have gone on, had it not been for Jeffes' premature death. But perhaps this is wrong: he may have been putting it to bed anyway, feeling that it had run its course. Or did he already know his days were numbered at the time of this recording, three and a half years before he passed away?
I suggested before that I'm no connoissuer of the sequencing of Penguin Cafe tracks. However, the set of pieces from Vega through to the slightly re-worked Giles Farnaby's Dream on the second disc of this album is particularly fine, like one continuous piece. We listened to it in the car on Easter Sunday, shuttling from one set of the Boy's grandparents to the other, and I shall now forever associate that pretty stretch of the A404, where it crosses the Thames at Marlow, with the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.
Lucy said she heard the PCO as incidental or soundtrack music, the kind of thing that either needed or conjured images as accompaniment. She anticipated that I might take offence at this, and she was almost right. When I listen to something like disc 2 of this album, I don't even get round to opening the book at my side. The obligation is to STFU, put down what you're doing, and listen.
<tangent>Leafing through the CD booklet, I showed Lucy the picture of the ensemble as it was at the time of this recording, including Ian Maidman and Annie Whitehead, who were an item. Ian has since become Jennifer Maidman, but she and Annie remained together. Hats off to you both, ladies!</tangent>
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