One...two...three...four... and welcome to your Saturday Blogger's jazzed up, bopping, finger-popping homage to the musical quartet (in uncompromising 9/8 time).
You've probably heard, or at least heard of, Liverpool's millennial all-girl caterwauling pop combo Atomic Kitten? (Yes I know there were only three of them). You've maybe also heard, or heard tell of, strutting '70s hard-rock outfit Atomic Rooster, born out of the ashes of Arthur Brown's Crazy World? (Now they were a four-piece band, except when they were a three-piece or a five-piece.) But how many of you, I wonder, can claim to be aficionados of this quartet from the 1930s, the boom years of jazz? Ladies and gentlemen of readerland, open wide your ears, disbelieve those eyes and put your sweaty hands together for... Atomic Bittern. 😉
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| Atomic Bittern live at The Imaginarium |
Apologies for having to make do with a somewhat comedic caricature of the Bittern, but they were a notoriously camera-shy quartet. There is a rumour that they banned photography at their shows because they were all on the FBI's most wanted list, but I'm not buying that. I just think they were incredibly unassuming chaps who wanted their music to be the focus.
Let me introduce the band. From left to right we have Tony 'Hot Lips' Tarabuso (horns), Fabio 'The Bean' Tarabuso (different voices, sonics and kazoo), Terzo 'Rimshot' Tarabuso (percussion) and Father Lui 'Fingers' Tarabuso, also sometimes called Kit-Kat (bass viol). Funnily enough, although they all shared an Italian surname (look it up) and were happy to be mistaken for brothers, none of them were actually related. Rather, each was the progeny of different Sicilian fathers*(1) and African-American (as we would say now) mothers across the southern states of the USA, and they didn't know of each other's existence until they all chanced to enrol at the famous Baton Rouge Conservatory of Music.*(2) Don't you find that life is full of such peculiar coincidences?
*(1) There is a strong suggestion that 'Fingers' might have been the illegitimate son of Pope Notorious I, conceived while his mother was on a pre-war pilgrimage to Rome.
*(2) The Conservatory was widely considered to be a front for Mob operations in the south of the country.
As for the Bittern's music, you should know that these guys eight-handedly invented Pre-Bop in 1930s America, a precursor to the Be-Bop jazz which swept the country in the following decade. Pre-Bop began to free jazz, barely out of its teens as syncopated dance music (born of the marching bands and ragtime blues of the deep south), or more strictly began to free jazz musicians to be able to express themselves as players, and to explore rhythms, chordings and time-signatures that took the genre way beyond the dance hall and into the avant-garden. Pre-Bop was fast, complex, hard-hitting. It was cerebral, virtuoso musicians' jazz, not dancing fare, the first hint of a split looming between trad and the new cool, and Atomic Bittern were booming right at the cutting edge.
They frequently exhausted themselves and their ecstatic listeners through hot nights of impassioned and often extemporised playing and though it was almost impossible to reproduce on 78rpm shellac discs what they achieved in the clubs, they did make a few recordings. Their most famous work was 'Botaurus Stellaris, I-IV ', believed to be the first double-album (i.e. four sides of music) in recording history. At the outbreak of WWII thousands of their records were either smashed or burned (or both) at mass protests in the south against the perceived threats of communism and fascism (for the Bittern were big in Berlin and massive in Moscow), predating a similar burning of Beatles' records in the southern states of America a quarter of a century later. It was a strange time. It is a strange place. I don't believe a single playable copy of 'Botaurus Stellaris, I-IV ' is extant today.
The quartet called time in the wake of such violent ructions and went their separate ways again, signing off with the pithy remark that "Tempos got frayed". They disappeared unassumingly into the backwaters of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, never to boom again.
And regarding their unusual moniker, you may be wondering quite how they picked the adjective 'Atomic', as if anticipating Oppenheimer, A-bombs and all that jazz by at least a decade. I simply have no idea. If I did, I might have written a poem about it. Instead, I'm sharing one by a local Lancashire poet and sometime Dead Good guest blogger of my acquaintance.
Bittern
Deep in the rustling reeds, I listened
for that bottle-blowing boom.
Every morning, in my diligence,
I jotted down the latitude and longitude,
triangulating echoes in the feathered
muffling overtopping me.
Plotting on the map, I saw,
around the Wash, the Humber
Estuary and Dungeness,
a line of foghorns
strung along the Saxon shore.
Norman Hadley (2014)
By the way, this (below) is what a real bittern looks like. Smaller than a heron, it is something of a rarity nowadays in the UK, nesting in a few marginal locations: Anglesey, the East Anglian broads, parts of Kent and Lancashire (yay). It is liveliest at dawn and dusk, rarely flies very far, but struts its stuff in the camouflaging confines of reed beds. The male bittern in spring makes a booming sound that can be heard up to three miles away on a calm day.
Thanks as ever for reading my crazy noodlings, S ;-)
