JazzChantoozieitsJazzChantoozieturningthefinalbendandapproachingthefinish
line…yesitsJazzChantoozieJazzChantoozieleadingthefield…butwaitaminute…
whatsthis?…comingupbehindJazzChantoozieitsReplacementAustrianJazzFilly!
ReplacementAustrianJazzFillyisapproachingJazzChantoozie…shescatchingup
…butJazzChantoozieisstillinthelead…JazzChantoozieisleadingthefieldwith
ReplacementAustrianJazzFillyaclosesecond…myworditsalmostneckandneck…
willJazzChantooziefallatthefinalhurdle?

Hopefully not.

Actually, a better analogy than a horse-race would have been a relay, with me handing over the baton. But then I don’t think athletics commentators talk quite as fast as horse-racing commentators. So it would have been a bit boring, to write that commentary.

So, hey ho. Here I am, coming into the final straight, indeed.

I have a final rehearsal with the guys in a few hours - I want to make sure our final two performances are as good as they can be - and in the meantime, may start packing. Or more likely: do some gift-shopping. On Sunday I go back to Ipoh, where T and C live (funny, that looks like ‘Clive’. Her name isn’t Clive, though); and then on Monday I go to Kuala Lumpur - or KL as everyone calls it here - to spend my final night at the Hilton (the Hilton, I tell you!), before flying back on Tuesday, and landing in the UK on Wednesday.

It really hasn’t hit me that this time next week, I will be back home.

Partly because I’ve been hearing about the snow; and that makes it all the harder to imagine. How on earth am I going to top up my tan?! Tell me that!!

I’m already expecting it to feel very dream-like, this experience. That I will be sitting back home, in my little (probably cold) flat, and be thinking: “Did that really happen?”. I know what it’s like flitting between New York and London seeing B, having two lives; with each place, and the life lived in it, suddenly and abruptly seeming like a dim and distant memory - even though it may only have been 24 hours previously that I was there. And yet conversely, each time I’d return to the place, whether London or NY, it would feel like only five minutes since I was last there, even if many months had passed between visits.*

Clearly, man wasn’t meant to travel quite such distances quite so quickly. But then man also engineered planes, so go figure, evolution fans.

As for the Austrian Jazz Filly - yes, the new singer arrives (with T) today to pick up the microphone-shaped baton. Or rather, to pick it up on Tuesday, after I’ve gone. Although you never know, I may call her up on stage to do a duet tomorrow night.

E (for that is her initial) won’t be performing with the same trio as me; and I don’t know whether it was my suggestion or what T had planned anyway, but she’ll be singing with two different, alternating bands. This is a much better way to work it, as it’s hard to secure players for a six nights a week (they normally have other regular residencies which, understandably, they don’t want to give up for a two-month booking); and also, perhaps most importantly, it means that he can book the guys who are already playing, and know and love, jazz.

So… off to the shopping mall for final, final-gift buying. There just wasn’t enough utter tat and Michael Buble CDs at the street market, y’know?

*I called this phenomenon TARDIBAR: ‘Time And Relative Dimension In B And Andrea’s Relationship’.

A silly thing happened today. I was looking at videos of old jazz performances on YouTube, and found myself going from link to link to link until I ended up watching a few scenes from a film I’ve never seen before.

(I think the sequence of events was Betty Carter > Charlie Haden > Charlie Haden & Pat Metheney > film clip.)

The film was Two For The Road - and the reason I was led there is that Charlie Haden and Pat Metheney, on their lovely album Beyond The Missouri Sky, played the theme tune from this movie, which is by Henry Mancini. Apparently ‘Two For The Road’ was his own favourite out of all the songs that he wrote.

But that’s by the by.

Two For The Road was made in 1967 and stars Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney as a married couple going through a bad time; and the movie traces their relationship in the form of flashbacks. Like I say, I’ve never seen it - I just gathered this from the clips on YouTube and from the write-up on IMdb.com.

But once again: that’s all by the by.

The reason I’m writing this is that one of the clips made me cry. And it doesn’t matter really very much what it was about… Because what I’ve realised is that I’m finding it difficult, these days, to watch lovers. Or actors pretending to be lovers.

I get up on stage and sing love songs every night; and yet I am yearning, longing for love. And feeling its absence so acutely that it hurts. I feel like I’m clinging to something, and barely hanging on to it.

It’s two years ago to the weekend that I met B.

And I miss him.

And my heart is at a loss. And I don’t quite know what to do.

Maybe I shouldn’t even publish this.

But what the hell…

Night night, all.

To scat, or not to scat? That is the question. Well, at least the question I posed on jazz.com, which has just published another article (well, more a ’short opinion piece’ than an ‘article’) by me on its blog and homepage. Hurrah! Click below to read it:

And yes, it’s official: I am a ’singer/writer/blogger’. It must be true, because jazz.com says so. I’m not sure whether I’m prouder of the fact that I’ve achieved this status, or the fact that my name has appeared on a website alongside Wayne Shorter’s. Either way, it feels good .

When I first arrived in Penang, I noticed that the hotel’s spa offered a range of treatments. One of these was a facial which involved ‘whitening’. I didn’t think much of it - I don’t tend to, where this silly ‘beautifying’ malarkey is concerned - although I’m sure I vaguely wondered whether that meant the facial also included whitening your teeth. “How interesting,” I thought. And how wrong I was.

Not that the idea of a facial which also offers teeth-whitening isn’t interesting. Indeed, it’s so “interesting” as to be “completely silly”. Because, obviously, I got it completely wrong - as multiple trips to the pharmacy next door over the past few months have proved.

While the beauty products - or more precisely, the skincare products - on offer in a Malaysian pharmacy look exactly like the ones for sale back in the West, more than a cursory glance shows that there’s one, rather stark, difference. It’s the presence of products like this:

and this:

Yes, my fellow Western ladies: we may think we have it tough, being subjected to the pressure to be thin. But women in the East not only face that (slimming and dieting products are everywhere here, too - despite, or perhaps because of, the general smaller build of Asians); they are also told that they should be more white.

As this article in the New Straits Times pussyfoots around says, the culture here rather uncomfortably tells people - and most specifically, women - that it is desirable to have skin as white as possible; and there are all manner of beauty products (and spa treatments) on hand to make that happen. Lancome, Chanel, Estee Lauder, Clinique, Dior, Olay… they’re all at it.

Clearly there’s a link here between being white and being of a higher class, as well as the implication that it is better to look as least ‘Asian’ as possible. Being of a darker skin is associated with being of a race that is more undesirable; or of a lower class (all that working outdoors in manual jobs).

Conversely, of course, we in the West see having darker skin - but not too dark, mind! - as something desirable, as at its roots it has the association with being either a) healthy (all that time spent outdoors) or b) rich (all that leisure time spent outdoors).

It’s all very strange, and rather worrying. Where will it end? Well, apart from ‘with Michael Jackson’, that is?

The way you know about a watermelon.

Check out the adorable black puffball dress I just bought from a boutique shop next door (new shoes, too. £10. A snip!). Well, I do have a wedding to go to when I get back…

Another strange day today.

Well, strange evening. The daytime wasn’t too strange. I went over to R’s and did that planned recording with him. This included a voice and piano version of ‘Love Is A Losing Game’ - possibly the first cover version of that song to be put to vinyl, or whatever medium people use nowadays* - and ‘Little Sunflower’ and ‘Route 66′ sung over pre-recorded sessions already laid down (as they say in the biz that is show) by his two kids earlier in the week.

The evening then started strangely when L was very upset about an incident at the hotel. His reaction was possibly, probably, exaggerated - but I’ve realised that he’s a very sensitive man, and feels things very deeply. And I admire him for those qualities.

But then I got upset (honestly, we musicians! Tcha!). Over the fact that the horrible incident - I can’t even bring myself to hyperlink it - hasn’t quite resolved itself in the way that I guess I’d expected, or at least wanted, it to.

I suppose I wanted closure, or even justice, about what happened to me, before I left. No, correction: any time. But ideally before I left.

But now it looks like it’s not to be; not just before I left, but at all. The perpetrator has, in short, got away with it.

I suppose that finding that out this evening not only led me to feel more hurt and wronged than I did before, but also brought back all the other feelings which I’d felt about That Incident at the time. Feelings which I had managed to overcome - or at least suppress - until now.

But again, as before, I don’t want these feelings to marr my time here - especially now that I am in my final week.

And getting on stage tonight and making music did wonders for that. I’ve said often that I’m never sad when I sing - and it’s true. Sure, I might get emotional during a sad song, and absolutely feel what I am singing at that moment. But earlier this evening, after I cried down the phone to T, I genuinely thought to myself: ‘Thank goodness I’m going to make music tonight’.

Because as anyone who’s ever done karaoke knows: music really is wonderful therapy. (Insert exception here).

*since Doris Stokes died.

*sigh*

…but it will come back to bite you on the bum.

Not really. Little Buddhism gag, there.

Say what you like about Buddhism… but it’s nothing if not a colourful religion. Just take a look at the temples I visited today:

I like that last shot; it makes me think that that’s what a Buddhist temple would look like in Florida.

One of these temples contained a 100ft reclining Buddha -

- which as you can see, is pretty big. Although not as big as the Statue of Liberty (I know, I just looked it up). But then the Americans always have to do things bigger and better, don’t they? I mean, theirs even stands up.

Mind you, I bet there’s not a sign like this on Liberty Island:

So, another jam session today - but this time not with car radio factory workers, but… Well, people who might have all kinds of jobs. But all of them also working musicians.

There’s a Center For Performing Arts in Penang called Areca, and J, a pianist who I’d seen at the club on one of the first nights I was here (his band was playing there before I started) invited me down to a monthly jam session that he and other jazz players hold there every month.

So I went today - together with D2, the jazz pianist from San Francisco. It was a lot of fun, and great to hear D2 play live. You can see some pictures from the afternoon at the top of the set here.

Then this evening, T2 and HH collected me and  D2 (OK, this whole initial thing is getting silly) from the hotel, and we went for dinner at a restaurant in Batu Ferringhi. I had pizza for the first time since I got here, and it wasn’t bad at all. Although, as B would say, pizza’s like sex: even when it’s bad, it’s good.

The reason we went to Batu Ferringhi is that I wanted to reviset the night market V and I went to, and do a burst of present-shopping for friends and family back home. The night market is basically a series of stalls along the side of the road,  stretching for hundreds and hundreds of yards, and selling all manner of things from utter tat (knock-off designer goods, mostly) and pirated DVDs of films still showing in the cinema (mind you, this is probably the only way I’d get to see There Will Be Blood out here) to lovely Malaysian arts and crafts.

So you’re all getting utter tat and pirated DVDs.

It was great to have HH with me as I shopped, as she has haggling (in Chinese) down to a fine art. I learned that the best technique seems to be: tell them how much you’re prepared to pay, listen to them reduce the price to what they’re willing to offer, tell them don’t be silly, that’s not low enough, and then walk off. At which point they shout after you the price you were willing to pay. Works a treat.

I was too busy taking in all the shininess and potential gifts to take any photos of the market, but I did get quite a groovy shot or two earlier in the evening, as night was falling when we arrived:

Batu Ferringhi - it’s the Vegas of Penang! And that’s guarantee!

Well, it is king-size, you know.