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Power Thinking, with Dr Morris O'Connor

Jazz Thinking: Manifesting extreme life success from music.

I play the sax and vibe in on vocals in a four piece called Chateau. We perform what I like to call ‘reliable jazz’. This isn’t self-indulgent music – with so much chaos in the world Chateau are about creating a vibe you can depend on. It’s unsurprising that we’ve sold over 500 albums with many glowing testimonies. For example:

Clint from Shrewsbury said: “I just want to thank Chateau from the bottom of my heart for writing Café of Dreams. Every time I think I haven’t got the confidence to do a powerpoint presentation I picture myself in that little café ordering a dream sandwich from the kindest pony in the world and I know I can get to that last slide. By the way I’d love to know whether that boy with the rosy cheeks in the song was just hot or he actually had Roseaca? The lyrics are little ambiguous.”

I should tell you Clint that it’s going to have to remain ambiguous because that’s the nature of jazz – it’s up to individual interpretation. Ironically it was first performing that track Café of Dreams that gave me one of the greatest performance enhancing tools of my life. On the track I’m required to do a 12 minute sax solo. I seriously questioned it at first, I almost left the band, but Ed, the bandleader, is right, it’s our best number we do need to make the most of it. Still, that’s almost a quarter of an hour of uncharted rumba territory and I didn’t know if I could do it. I was terrified I’d blow myself off the jazz map and come back with those starey eyes and wobbly lips.

I had to learn to really improvise. I had to free myself from the notes on the page and create something new, but that also wasn’t weird or awkward, corporate social mixers can be quite sensitive events. Once I started Jazz Thinking my whole life started to change. If I didn’t get the respect I wanted at work, I wouldn’t go and whine to HR I’d Jazz Think and throw a chair across the room. If my wife Paew Pang asked me at breakfast why I didn’t get in till 2am last night I’d just start gargling my cappuccino. I learnt to improvise with life. May all your life riffs be melodic.

Chateau are available for all types of business and social functions for £500 plus travel. Guests are encouraged not to look at Jimmy the bass player directly in the eyes.

Dr Morris O’Connor is the best selling author of Jazz Thinking: Life is Just a 90-year Saxophone Solo.

 

 

BBC tells D:Ream keyboard player to shove it

PRODUCERS of Professor Brian Cox’s Blimey! Planets, Eh? have told him to keep his opinions on music to himself.

The pop-science, grinning haircut had complained that the last episode had insufficient amounts of early 90s house-indie positivity alongside the visuals.

The original edit, which featured Groovejet during the section on supernova explosions and Jack Your Body as Cox explained how the elements in humans were created, was radically altered before broadcast after producers realised it looked and sounded shit.

Cox said: “All that film of me looking dead pensive on a mountain and stars proper blowing up and stuff – it needs a bit of Whigfield behind it.”

But producer Roy Hobbs stressed: “When I worked on The World At War Laurence Olivier asked me to whack up the Wagner during the Auschwitz section.

“If I can tell the greatest actor of all time to fuck off then D:Ream Casio Boy can lick my balls.”

He added: “We’re presenting the history of the universe here so when he’s doing his piece on how everything that ever existed will eventually grind to a lifeless halt in a cold, dead cosmos, I think the last thing we need is someone screeching ‘Acieeeed’ in the background.”

The series will be released as a DVD box set later this year with his earlier documentary Stars & That, Yeah? Right in both their original formats and, at the Cox’s insistence, a version remixed by Frankie Knuckles.

 

 

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