Why I Love Jazz Cow

And how it's partly Europe's fault

Over the next few weeks, I will be writing about jazz. Don’t back away. I get it. Let me explain. The reason for this is I’m involved in writing a brilliant smart new animated comedy called Jazz Cow.  This saxophone-playing creature could only the brainchild of an animator. They have ideas like this. In this case, the animator is my friend John Lumgair.

We’re running a Kickstarter in September to help this project off the ground. If you like my writing, and want to support me and this project that has legs – at least four – please do get involved.

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There are many reasons why I love Jazz Cow and have been thrilled to help explore John Lumgair’s vision for his reluctant and moody hero, Jazz Cow.

I come from a long line of dairy farmers, so that might have been the appeal for me. But when John told me about his idea, he had me at ‘jazz’. You see, I’m one of those people who likes jazz. I like it. I bought cassettes and CDs of it in my teens. And not just compilation CDs or Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue to put on during parties to make me look cool. I developed a taste that stretched from Rag Time to modern jazz that borders on BeeBop.

There are two reasons for this. The first is simple: Europe.

1986: A Bad Year for Music

If you are able, cast your mind back to Britain in 1986. John McCarthy had been kidnapped. Alex Ferguson was made manager of Manchester United. And Neighbours was broadcast in the UK for the first time.

As for music, 1986 started strong with West End Girls by the Pet Shop Boys, although the sound of the Roland TR-808 drumkit was creeping in to all kinds of heavily-produced pop and dance tracks. A prime example would be I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me) sung by Whitney Houston, recorded in 1986 (and released the following year).

Overall, 1986 was not a good year for music. The next high point might have been the Comic Relief record of Living Doll by Cliff Richard with cast of The Young Ones. That should be a warning sign. Sure, The Phantom of the Opera had just opened in the West End of London if that was your bag. For me, Michael Crawford was a physical comedian from Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. Why was he pretending to haunt a theatre by running around in a cape and half a mask and singing very serious songs? That’s not funny.

Turning Off the Radio

Then there was The Final Countdown by the Swedish band, Europe. It was a hit that blared out of every radio at the end of 1986 alongside another recent hit by someone who was actually from Europe: Rock me Amadeus by the Austrian musician, Falco. This insistent din pushed me over the edge. It made me realise that if I wanted music I actually liked, I would need to turn off the radio and look elsewhere.

In 1986, we were at least fifteen years away from any kind of usable internet. If I wanted music, I would find it on cassettes and discs in the basement of HMV in Bath. But how do you know if you like the music on the cassettes and the CDs? You don’t. Or at least, I didn’t know how to ask, or even if you could.

And this is one of the appeals of Jazz Cow, who represents of world of tangible objects, craft and artefacts. In the bohemian part of Poppworld, people fix shoes and sell real books that are impossible to find in shops with giant basements. Jazz Cow and the Herd will need to scour the shelves to find what they’re looking for. And who knows what else they will find?

You Made Me Love Jazz, Charlie Brown

So what music should I look for? I knew one thing. I liked the music from Charlie Brown. In fact, I liked Charlie Brown. It was quirky, wistful and downbeat. To me, it seemed astonishingly unAmerican. America was the land of hope and John Hughes films. 1986 was the year of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, although I probably didn’t see it until at least three or four years later. Charlie Brown was a curious world where adults were never seen and only heard. And they sounded like a droning trombone. Wonderful. And there was Lucy, a tormentor of Charlie Brown, who was in turn tormented by Schroeder’s total indifference to her.

During my childhood, the BBC broadcast episodes of The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show. Although the theme tune of that particular incarnation of the Peanuts comic strip was rather brash, the continuity music was much more laid back, with brushes on drums, a quiet double base, some piano and not much else. I didn’t know the name Vince Guaraldi but that’s what I was looking for. Thanks to Apple Music, Spotify, Shazam and YouTube, I now know these tracks are called ‘Linus and Lucy’ and ‘Thanksgiving Theme’.

The Serendipity of Jazz Cow

The world of Jazz Cow encapsulates the allure of tech. Dr Popp has all the algorithms that make life so simple, giving you exactly what you want, when you want it. Why won’t Jazz Cow and his fans give in? Because they know that convenience robs of you of the pleasure of the search, and the serendipity. If I’d found Vince Guaraldi straight away, I might not have found Earl Hines, Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Horace Silver and probably the greatest of them all, Bill Evans.

So I bought cassettes of piano jazz that I thought would sound like Charlie Brown. Some did. Some didn’t. And that was okay. Then I bought CDs. And I loved them. Or at least, I loved various tracks on them and listened to them over and over again. And I bought more cassettes and CDs by those artists.

I’ve started listening to those old cassettes and CDs again. To avoid distraction when I write scripts, I turn off the internet on my main desktop computer (using a neat app called Freedom). But it also extinguishes Apple Music. Rather than use my phone, I’ve recently fired up my old Sony hi-fi – complete with CD, cassette deck and mini-disc player. I’ve really enjoyed going back and finding old friends, played via my radio cassette player (with double tape deck, so I could record and then edit the BBC Big Band that was on BBC Radio 2 every Monday night at 8.30pm). I still have a couple of the mix cassettes that are like audio capsules from the 1980s.

Those tracks don’t just make you think about where you were when you first heard them – but who you were. What exactly was the 15-year-old James Cary? I shudder to think, but maybe some reflection would do me good. Or I could just turn up the music and think about Charlie Brown instead.

Find out more about Jazz Cow over here:

TV has a problem,