Heavier Weather

All at Sea

We are on the first day of three sea days, after stopping yesterday in Ponto Dalgado in the Azores. These sea days are enough to make you nuts if you’re not careful. There’s plenty to do if you’re a passenger, but if you’re in the crew it boils down to the Crew Welfare throwing a party with free booze. If you’re like me, you end up reading and writing and catching up on your sleep, though with my current cabin mate, even that’s tough. Being Spanish, he assumes that everyone has the right to an afternoon siesta, and when his is through, he’s got the right to turn on the lights. Enough. Less said about him, the better. 

Next cruise with him going back to Spain and the usual shuffling around in the cabins, I look to get Trevor as my cabin mate, which can’t happen too soon, I think. Trevor is English, although he’s lived in Wales most of his life, and he has a place in Orlando. He’s been doing this ship for about fifteen years now--not nearly as long as Stevie, but long enough to know the ropes. And, as it turns out, long enough to give a shit about how this ship is in her waning days.

I bought a Kenton album in Ponto Delgado called Kenton plays Chicago (an iTunes music store purchase). I joined the band six months after this album was recorded, and many of the cats I know are on it. Tony Campise for one sounds great on this album. I’m pretty proud we’ve worked together in Austin, because he left the band when I joined. 

In any event, there I played all the charts on this album when I was up there in the big show, twenty-four years old. All of them are somehow related to Blood, Sweat, and Tears or the band Chicago. No wonder this album was destined for big band obscurity. (Although the even more obscure Fire, Fury and Fun, recorded a couple months before I joined, features a cut where Tony, the best jazz flute player I know, grunts like a pig.)

So now it’s 8:00 pm in a time zone so small it has ONE city in the Apple time zone list--Grytviken, South Georgia. Tomorrow we move to another, GFT, whatever that means. but we’ll be closer to land in Antigua on Sunday. (Nice going, guys. Take us out to sea and land us when all the shops are closed.) We island hop through the Windwards at that point, take our holiday cheer at sea, then it’s back to Southampton on the sixth  of January after several sea days.

Then the Main Event starts, as we leave late that afternoon for New York and the World Cruise. I’m looking forward to Chipotle, Starbucks, and maybe even a trip to WalMart from Fort Lauderdale. 

The Ventilation

As we get in more temperate climes, I can’t help but notice that the cabin, once freezing, has now warmed considerably. The current temperature is 79.7 degrees F. and there is some danger of it becoming an alternative to the sauna on seven deck. 

Then again, what can be expected of a ship built in 1967? Remember what the air conditioners were like back then? Gas may have cost a tenth (or less) of what they run now, but I remember that the clocks used to stop working when the car was driven off the lot, and the air conditioner wasn’t far behind.

The old queen has a lot of ventilation problems, and I don’t imagine they will be doing any sort of upgrading in the rest of its days on the sea. I guess I’ll just have to learn to live with it. 

The Mix

The figures are in, and on this cruise we have 16 USA passengers, and over 1600 from the UK. And there are more real winners in this department, like the guy who paid Sian the backhanded compliment at the end of tea time by saying, “I liked your playing, what there was of it.” As usual, we get the nicest folks in the Queens Room, but even they seem to have short fuses about the tempos some times. Maybe they just need something to complain about. 

I’ve been wondering who came up with this idea of Strict Tempo dancing. Seems like a false dichotomy to me--you’re either running the tempo out of a metronome or you’re not. I don’t believe that the Basie band ever adhered to this either/or situation

The Gig

First of all, we are a British dance orchestra, or descended therefrom. As the line in “Young Man with a Horn” goes, “This is a dance orchestra. No blues or low-down jive.” We exist for the pleasure of some rather old, cranky, and opinionated people, who have paid a buttload of money to sail on this ship. Most of them are returning from many sailings over the last 40 years, and they remember the good old days and aren’t shy about flaunting them in front of you. 

The first band to make its mark on this ship was the Joe Loss Orchestra, which worked here in the seventies. The band had passenger privileges, fancy cabins--with bathtubs reportedly--on deck 2. The band had fifteen pieces and was as square as a packing crate. But they set the pattern for all who followed, which is, today:

Swing

Waltz

Quickstep

Cha Cha

Foxtrot

Samba

Waltz

Ballad

Rhumba

Foxtrot

Tango

Quickstep (or Waltz if it’s the last set)

The band comes on the stand with a set list that slots tunes into these spaces accordingly. At least one previous bandleader ground out the same three sets every night, without deviation. There may have been many more.

It’s come to this because of the Carnival Corporation’s desire to keep down costs, which almost bankrupted  Cunard Lines when they bought it. No more deck 2 cabins, down with the rest of the crew, eating only in the crew mess, and once, ingloriously, turning the whole staffing issue over to an agency in Montreal, Canada. The band shrunk down to one tenor player who typically had a problem with alcohol, who could play jazz only to the point where the dancers are effected, a rhythm section and a singer. 

Stevie tells great tragically hysterical tale about those days, when he was leading the Queens Room as the bandleader and had little or no influence on the personnel he was given. There was a singer from Montreal, foisted upon the ship by that agent in her home town, who thought jazz was art and that was that. She had a degree in jazz from McGill University, allegedly wrote her own charts, which were in fact lead sheets. She was married to the bandmaster, who played trumpet in the show band. The tenor player spent lots more time and energy on the crew bar than he did on the gig. He was the sole horn player, but as Stevie tells it he spent a lot of time unscrewing the neck on his saxophone and inspecting the joint. The drummer was an apostle of Elvin Jones, another fabulous mismatch courtesy of the folks in Montreal, who apparently never brought this guy to a dance gig as part of the audition. Then there was Pedro, the bassist from Madrid, who sought only to further his musical excellence, which meant that everything, every musical moment, was potential for a bass solo. These are the leading characters in Stevie’s saga, and they made for a rollicking time on the Queens Room dance floor. They also made it so Stevie, who had no control whatsoever of his personnel, all decisions having been made in Montreal, ended up throwing his hands up in despair and helplessness and was reassigned to the show band in the Grand Lounge. 

As for the band, it was reconstituted with four horns (same line-up as the show band in the Grand Lounge), then it shrunk back to its current line-up of one saxophone (alto and tenor, trumpet, trombone, a singer and three rhythm).

The lesson is an instructive one. Decision making needs to take place close to the ground. Leaders need to lead, with all the power to change the line-up made on the stage based not on the reputation of the player (which can, and often is, a total fabrication) but on the ability to play the gig. The gig’s all that counts. You get the folks on the dance floor moving their feet and keep them moving their feet, resisting the temptation to derail them with some melodic quote from Archie Schepp or some other jazz hero.

Understand, I am a jazz musician through and through. But I also want to work, so I make adjustments to the way I play, honoring the dancers who pay the freight. The gig’s not about me. But I can play as much Johnny Hodges-style alto as I can stand, not to mention tenor like Sam Butera and clarinet and flute as well. You’ve got to play the gig. 

Yet--would you believe it?--we struggle endlessly with our bass player to keep him on the rails and prevent his virtuosic flourishes, which I have seen dancers trip to. And if you guessed that the bass player in question was the artistic Madrid resident who was in the problem band led by Stevie, you’d be absolutely right. If it were my band, I’d have let him go the first time he showed up 2 minutes before down beat. I’ve shared a cabin with him since he got here at the end of October, and his effete surliness is insufferable, almost French. How he ever got rehired is a deep mystery to not just me. 

Ken Ragsdale would feel right at home on the Queens Room dance floor. Some of the charts we play are not strangers to dance band musicians everywhere. There are Dan Higgins charts, copied until every quarter note has become a half note. And the famous Pop pad is there in profusion. These were British charts which turn up everywhere, designed to be played by any combination of horns from thirteen to 3. We explore that lower limit.

After three sea days . . .

We are, at long last, anchored off Antigua. Despite the loftiness of our lineage, there are 8 other cruise ships here today, most of them moored at the wharf, steps from downtown. Our tenders are full of passengers, and crew leave has not been granted. We’re going to have a grumpy crew if this keeps up. I suspect that’s why we’ve had a lot of parties with free booze on this trip. You don’t want the crew to have a sober moment to consider that it’s Christmas time and we’re in lockdown on the most famous liner in the world. 

Still on board . . . 

Christmas Eve, and we’re in St. Kitts, which has no harbor sufficient for us to land properly, so we’re once again anchored off coast and tendering. This has apparently become a source of friction among the passengers, many of whom are pointing out that the brochures say that there will only be one tender port and now that we get here there are four. That’s fine unless you’ve got problems moving around, which describes about half the passengers. They seem to be having a better time of it than they did yesterday, when they borrowed two tender vessels from the Emerald Princess in Antigua. Friends who were working as escorts on shore were waiting 2 hours for the passengers on their tours to arrive. Then the rain started.

Some lady in a walker was down on the pontoon yesterday really laying it on the international hostess about her coming on this cruise specifically because there was just one tender port listed in the brochure.

I chose to stay on the ship today and spent my afternoon watching “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Really, I’m not kidding. I need it to counteract my well-known aversion to Christmas music, which is playing everywhere, including in the mess. 

Christmas Day

I didn’t know there was a rite of inversion on Christmas day. The officers come down to the mess, which they never otherwise do, and serve the crew lunch. This included the captain actually pouring wine for a table of musicians, me included. It was all very pleasant, including the food, which was way above the usual rubber chicken fare. Christmas dinner was even better, although we had to serve ourselves.

But, getting back to lunch, we had an open bar and a lot of the musicians took advantage of that fact, including Jim, the bandleader and drummer, and Richard, the piano player who recently came over from Princess. They were both harmlessly tipsy at the end of lunch but both ended up napping away the afternoon in their cabins.

At the gig, there was an altercation between Pedro and Jim. At the end of our 7:45 set, Jim wanted Pedro, who wears earplugs, to turn up his amplifier so we could hear him better on the stage. Pedro accused Jim of being drunk, which he was not (though he might have been at 6 hours earlier) and ignored him. Jim, who also lives in Madrid, let him have it with mile-a-minute Spanish, and Pedro turned tail and walked off the stage. 

We were warned about Pedro. He had a short contract a few years ago where he caused a lot of trouble, to the extent that some people couldn’t believe he’d been rehired when he came back on board in October. 

Jim caught up with him in the Lido and made it clear who the boss of the band was. Pedro's got all the talent in the world, but none of the interpersonal skills required to present it. He will not play the gig, which requires simplicity and more than a little teamwork. He’d rather make virtuosic flourishes, never playing a single tango rhythm throughout a tango medley. Richard and I agree that, had this been a Princess ship with Paolo as bandmaster and all other things being equal, Pedro would have lasted long enough for his attitude to merely emerge before he’d been fired.

So Pedro went crying to David, our musical director, explained the situation from his point of view, and told David that if things wouldn’t change he’d have no choice but to resign. That was his big mistake. When you resign, the responsibility for getting home is yours alone, and in the Windward Islands that means flying to Miami and getting a flight to Spain at the height of holiday travel season. Jim then tracked down David, and that’s where we stand now, the next morning. I’m sure Pedro was backing David into a corner with his resignation, which is a gambit he used on his last contract. This time it may backfire. 

Boxing Day we’re in Dominica, the first place we have a wharf in the Caribbean, a week since the Azores. Poorest island in the Caribbean. This morning we drill, but I’m walking off to sniff the wind.

Maybe by then this whole ugly mess will have been straightened out. 

Later that week . . .

It’s New Years Eve here on the QE2. Pedro, when told his options for breaking a contract, elected to ride it out until New York, when the gods of irony have arranged a flight to Madrid for both him and Jim. His only real option would have been arranging his own transportation, which would have been plenty expensive from the tiny islands we were hopping around. 

Dave Pitchfork, who gave Pedro the options, came down with tonsillitis and was out for almost a week. 

We burned though the remaining islands, the last being Barbados. I wonder why there are so many British people interested in seeing their country’s former colonies. As for me, I felt too self-conscious to go ashore in Grenada, although it was a tender port as well. I managed to walk around Barbados, though. 

But Dominica was a real dump. Bums sleeping it off on the street corners, lots of rap everywhere, and a whole lot of poverty. Who stole the wealth here? I walked with Trevor and Jim looking for an open restaurant, finally hiding from the midday heat in the Garraway Hotel. We had done a full circle of the town by then and were directly in front of the ship. I elected to have lunch in the mess, as usual. The drummers ordered the local chicken delicacy at the hotel bar.

In Bridgetown, Barbados, the English left a lot of legacy behind. Stodgy Methodist churches and stone Royal Banks of this and that coexist with the Rasta culture in Barbados better than anywhere I’ve seen. There is seemingly no contradiction between the two to the inhabitants of this island. 

So, here is a summary of this cruise’s days. The first week we made for the Caribbean, stopping in the Azores, which was pretty nice. There was heavy weather, though, to go through from England. Leaving the Azores, we dodged some heavy weather for 3 sea days of relative calm. We reached Antigua, which has nothing to do with the woodwind company in San Antonio, but we in the crew were unable to go ashore. (I later learned that over 300 crew members just got on the tenders anyway, to the humiliation of the security folks.)  Then we did St. Kitts (also tender, with more measures to keep crew off the boats) on Christmas Eve, then a sea day, Dominica which unfortunately COULD accommodate us on December 26, Boxing Day. Then St. Vincent, Grenada, and Barbados, which was almost a normal port. Then, two weeks into this trip, we high-tailed it for England (by way of Madiera, which I’m looking forward to) for 4 sea days of smooth sailing 

A “Typical” Port Day

This is the third of January. I wake up in a new time zone, because we’ve been going east for the last 4 days, since leaving Barbados. We’ve lost an hour of sleep every night, making our days a disorienting 23 hours long. Now we’re actually on London time--GMT, or Zulu, or Universal time--so we’re at about 9:15 when I wake up to the ship’s engines being still. The silence is deafening, since we’ve had four days of cruising at around 25 knots. We’ve covered more than 3,000 miles at that speed, and down here in Crewville the roar of the engines two decks below us has been a constant since we left Barbados. 

I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth. Pedro is still asleep. I am careful not to wake him, because he is a light sleeper and can be a grouch, because in Spain he gets 24 hours and apparently sleeps though most of them. 

Walking to the porthole, I quietly crack open a new 1.5 liter bottle of San Benedetto water and take a swig. I can still taste the toothpaste, but I am thirsty. the ship’s ventilation system runs dry to kill the legionella virus, although that’s the least of the concerns about outbreaks. Gastroenteritis, which has our sister ship, the Queen Victoria, in its clutches, is more of a concern. The dryness of the air adds all kinds of fun to the respiratory health, and the crew doctor recommends we drink 3 liters of water every day, 2 bottles, which is great news for the hard-working people at San Benedetto, but at $2 a day a little pricy for us in the rank and file. I buy a half dozen bottles every week or so, and sometimes resort to filling an empty bottle in from the juice machine in the mess. 

Around nine, the ship is starting to come to life. We’ve had 4 days without a garbage pick-up, so I can hear the workers starting to bring the bundles of glass to the rear doors on the starboard side.

Suddenly, without a warning, the officer of the watch comes on the PA speaker, advising us that we’ve been cleared by “Customs and Formalities” and welcoming us to Funchal. Most of the time, the announcements don’t reach the crew cabins and are harmlessly dissipated in the passageway, allowing us another couple hours sleep. Nice weather is anticipated, with a high in the sixties. 

This is an unusual day because we have a day off today. It’s the first total day off since I got on in October. Pedro is still asleep, and that’ll go into the afternoon I believe. I sneak in the back, with the lights still off, and get dressed. I put on my sweat pants, the t-shirt that we were presented with at Christmas, and slip on my Crocs, load my wallet and computer into the backpack we got for Christmas, and head out the door. 

I head down the gangway, and get on a shuttle bus to town. 

And what a town it is. The island is a volcanic speck in the Atlantic, a province of Portugal since the days of Henry the Navigator. The bus left me off by MacDonalds, which was right next to Pizza Hut. Don’t get the idea from this that there is nothing exotic or unique or foreign about Funchal. There’s a lot exotic, unique, and foreign about Funchal, which I stomped though for a couple hours. It was wonderful, reminding me of the was Laguna used to be back in the sixties, only everybody was talking Portuguese. Most of the connection was the sea and the bougainvillea that was running down the drainage ditch in the center of town, or the canal, or whatever they call it. Anyway, a gigantic bougainvillea swept down from the mountain, while a gondola--like a ski lift--climbed up the mountain, from sea level to whatever the top of the mountain is.

A little tired from my efforts, I returned to the ship at the stroke of 12 to have my lunch in the concessionaire’s mess, and what a mess it is! Every once in a great while we get lucky and obtain some lunch item that was received less than enthusiastically by the passengers, and those are the lucky days for us. The rest of the time the mess is a dreary and dull place to eat. I visited with my fellow musicians there and returned to my cabin at 1:00 to find Pedro still asleep. I laid down and took a 10 minute nap, then I got up and went back to town to try to find some free wi-fi, which Funchal has a lot of. Unfortunately, there were to British crew (musicians) and a Russian (dancer) who beat me to it.

I came back to the ship around 3, went to the cabin, and as Pedro walked out for a trip to town, I read a long chapter of Infinite Loop, which I checked out of the QE2 Library. It’s a book that takes the history of Apple Computer up to the last mistake they made during the era between Jobs I and Amelio. The library has been a source of endless reading for me, and there’s no end is sight with the World Cruise on the short horizon.

I then went and saw a movie called Invasion, which was a bit of a turkey. When that was over, it was back to the mess for the second round of facing the food today. Ghastly. 

Shaken but undeterred, I went upstairs to face the music and watch the dancers dance. The occasion was their main show, Appasionata, which was really a series of folk dance moves in tuxedoes and gowns. Damned uninteresting, except for the fact that the weather had taken a turn for the worst and we were swaying like mad. I was sitting way back of the room by the sound booth when a whole section of old folks (look who’s talkin’) who were seated on the dance floor used for New Years Eve, and so freshly waxed, suddenly all slid in unison a good two feet to the right. The dancers were similarly effected, but it didn’t stop them from beaming their Russian dancer smiles. Oh well.

I returned to my room at about 10:30. The ship was absolutely heaving, the room wasn’t made up, and Pedro was nowhere to be found. I put 2+2 together and figured that Pedro was most likely in the hospital for one reason or another. I figured he either took a spill or had a Norwalk attack, the bane of every crew member, which involves massive leakage from both ends. That was correct.

And so ended this atypical port day, our day off. I’d normally have gone up to the midnight buffet, where we can graze for the last 20 minutes on higher-quality food made for passengers. But with the ship twisting and turning I decided not to, and laid down, trying to sleep through the maelstrom.