“Sky/So vast is the sky….”

So, after lunching with one of Malaysia’s oldest jazz stars yesterday, I went to singing with two of its youngest phenoms today.

These boys.

I went over to R’s flat again for a play (as we jazzers call it) this afternoon (as we jazzers call the morning); and he brought in his two sons, L, who’s just turned eight, and V, who’s nine, to join us.

We’ll be doing a couple of numbers together at the street market festival at the end of the month (my last day in Penang, in fact), so we sat in R’s little music room and ran through two songs for that - ‘Little Sunflower’ and ‘Route 66′ - with V on piano, R on bass and L on his electronic drum kit.

It was really quite amusing/disconcerting to hear a grown man ask a little boy to “give us a bossa beat” - I felt like I was in a band with simply very small grown-ups - but the boys are really good players, and it was a total joy to sing with them.

Plus I like the idea of the average age of The Andrea Mann Trio being about 12. (Although clearly I’m going to have to be the one getting the drinks in on gigs.)

Our session came to an end when one of R’s many private students, a little girl, arrived. As I sat in his lounge waiting for a taxi (I told you: no one in Penang walks anywhere), I could hear her playing a simple piano tune for him; and it took me right back to the days when I used to go to my piano teacher for my weekly lesson. It made me think how lovely it must be to live in a house where music is taught; where you constantly hear that sound. Although that may have something to do with a comforting thought of childhood as with the idea of the actual reality of it: there may be only so many times you can stand hearing the same scales being played over and over again. And probably badly.

There are a few pics of the guys (and the architecture around where they live) here on Flickr. Plus a photo of a very cool gadget that the Family R have in their car:

Call me a luddite (”Andrea, you’re…”), but I’ve never seen one of those before. It just clips on where the passenger seat’s sun visor would normally be, and you control the volume with the normal in-car stereo controls.

The film the kids were watching on it was Enchanted (nice to know it’s not just for girls), and I earned massive cool points when I told them that I’d seen one of the movie’s scenes - bizarrely, the one which was actually playing as I got into the car - being filmed on the streets of New York last year. R’s wife J was a bit disappointed that I didn’t see Patrick Dempsey, though. But hey - as long as I impressed my new trio, that’s all that matters.

(sorry, V)

…their cats may be teeny-tiny, but look at the size of their multi-vitamins!!