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John Dankworth passed away on Saturday. Here’s a recent performance of his arrangement of Duke Ellington’s It Don’t Mean a Thing, still going strong at 81 at the 2008 North Sea Jazz Festival, and only hung up his saxophone in December.

This clip epitomises a lot of what Dankworth’s music meant to me – his close partnership with his wife Cleo Laine (one of the great voices of the 20th Century), his penchant for tight, witty ensemble writing, and his consistent ability to connect with a wide audience well beyond the regular jazz public.

Something to watch out for in 2010: Brèves de trottoirs is a new web-documentary project lead by journalist Olivier Lambert and photographer Thomas Salva. The objective is to bring together a collection of short documentaries focused on personalities met on the streets of Paris.

Their first subject was Elie, the famous “Papy Dance” who dances outside the Italie 2 shopping centre in the 13th arrondissement. His performances have made him an internet star, but his life story is far more poignant… (this video is subtitled in English)

Also recently released is the next short film, an interview with Violette, a florist on Place Monge in the 5th arrondissement.

Brèves de Trottoirs provides an interesting example of how journalism, film-making and internet are coming together to create new modes story-telling. It’ll be fascinating to watch the project develop during the year. You can follow their Twitter feed or their blog.

Beck and Charlotte Gainsbourg seem a strangely appropriate duo: America’s pop wunderkind of the 1990s teaming up with the daughter of one of France’s most famous performing artists.

Heaven Can Wait is the first single off Gainsbourg’s new album Master’s Hand, but it sounds like a Beck song through and through. And the video is completely fabulous:

Although officially it’s on a Charlotte Gainsbourg disc, Heaven Can Wait sounds almost like a return to form for Beck. He’s frankly showing a little of his age in this video, but the music contains some of the hallmarks of his classic period: honky-tonk beat-making, lyrical bricolage and a story of misfits played out under the sun of East Los Angeles.

The video even contains sly visual clues to Beck’s earlier work (and the visual is almost as important as the music with Beck). See if you can spot:

• The hemp rope guitar strap (from the interior album artwork on Mellow Gold)
• Guy in a horse mask (a Human Jackass partly made his Odelay tour of 1997 such a gas. Still the best concert I’ve ever seen.)
• The goat skull that’s another reference to cover of Mellow Gold

(Don’t know if I should confess that Mellow Gold was the first CD I ever bought. Given that the first cassette I bought was Arrested Development’s 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of…, I’m not sure if my taste improved. But I do own all of Beck’s albums. Including the pre-Geffen indie obscurities).

Muchas apologias. Writing on the blog has been intermittent lately. The last week has been a blur of trains, meetings and sleeping in strange beds. And somewhere among all this I’m pushing towards handing in a thesis at the end of September. Things have been kind of busy.

If anyone wants a clue about what’s going on in Montpellier, read Ed’s blog, because I’m kind of out of the loop.

However, I was introduced to Le Quatuor last week – and thought it was worth sharing: four highly accomplished classical musicians who have turned to physical comedy… well, for laughs.

I think the entire performance on their DVD is funnier as a whole, rather than the few excerpts you can find on YouTube. I’m surprised they aren’t more known outside France: most of the jokes are physical or musical, and their dialogue-based sketches are carried out in a surreal mélange of German, Italian, English, French and Spanish (check out their music lesson sketch).

If Montpellier has an internet celebrity, it’s Rémi Gaillard. He’s been making prank videos on the internet for ten years, and his clips have received over 350 million views on Youtube.

Many of his gags are filmed right here in Montpellier. One would have thought the locals would have got used to his antics by now, but Monsieur Gaillard always finds new ways to amuse and annoy: last year he turned the streets of the city into a Nintendo Mario Kart racetrack:

His classic clips include a re-creation of Saving Private Ryan on the beach at Palavas and the arrival of an astronaut on a golf course, but my favourite is when Rémi and friends turn a supermarket into a Pacman maze. (According to the “making of” article, all damage was repaid in full):

There is obviously an anarchist and possibly dadaist streak in Gaillard’s humour,  and his motto “C’est en faisant n’importe quoi qu’on devient n’importe qui” (roughly – “By doing whatever you can become whoever”) suggests that there may be a philosophy behind what he does. There is also money – he was hired last year by Orangina and Nike to make viral videos.

You can find dozens more videos on his site, nimportequi.com. Although his gags are largely harmless, it really is a wonder that Rémi hasn’t ended up in jail yet…

Here’s the next chapter in the story of the hip-hop boys from Oxford, GTA, who we’ve mentioned a few times on the blog. MC Chima Anya has now moved to London, where he’s working in a children’s hospital (remember Dr Anya is a trained medical professional by day, and rapper by night), and breaking into the London scene as a solo artist.

His new single is New Day, featuring Soweto Kinch, and produced by some bloke called Astronare, about whom I can find nothing on the web. The video looks a lot more slick and professional than the previous “home-grown” clips filmed around Oxford… you could say it’s a big step up.

Soweto Kinch (born in London but growing up near Birmingham) has a bit of an Oxford connection too. A pretty handy jazz saxophonist and rapper, he also has a degree in Modern History from Hertford College, Oxford. Now, whatever you think of jazz, hip hop or Oxbridge education, you’ve got to admit that that’s a pretty cool CV.

Anyway, if you’re in London in August, you can catch Chima Anya’s album preview gig at The Gramaphone, 60-62 Commercial Street E1, on Thursday 27th August.

Thought this was worth posting… the video for SJD/Sean Donnelly’s new single Baby You’re Oh So. A really nice concept, which takes me back to my earliest computer experiences on the neighbour’s Apple IIe in about 1984.

(Hat tip – video found via Andrew Dubber’s tweet.)

Nice to see Sean working with Chris O’Connor on drums these days. I’ve worked with both Tom Atkinson (Sean’s previous drummer) and Chris, both excellent musicians. Among various improv and jazz projects, Chris also plays with Don McGlashan, and probably will lend a more organic sound to Sean’s live set.

Here’s my photo of Chris at the beach in New Zealand a few years back.

For those readers who haven’t visited Montpellier, here’s a little video-taste of the town (well, the historic centre at least).

I’ve just got a FlipCam MinoHD for a new web project I’m starting. It’s pretty much the world’s smallest HD camera. Today I took it into town to try it out. Here’s a quick edit of some street scenes I shot. The camerawork and the angles are not great, but I’m learning.

If you compared this performance (from the 1943 film Stormy Weather) to last week’s Eurovision Song Contest, you could make a strong argument for the general decline in the quality of popular music over the past 60 years. But such a comparison is barely valid, and such a conclusion could never be drawn – surely?

The weather’s too good this weekend to spend time indoors writing a long blog post. So here’s Another New Zealand Music Month Post, immodestly featuring my old band… I discovered this clip that I didn’t think was online, but someone’s posted it. The song is The Original off our first album. Luckily I don’t appear the clip at all!

Filmed over a weekend on a road near Muriwai beach, in downtown Auckland, and on the cycle path along the Northwestern Motorway… shoestring budgets and digital post-production all the way!