Ep10 Adventures in New Orleans, music to V8 engines & sea slugs! - Bob Tomlinson

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Luke 00:00:03  Welcome to another episode of the Impro Pod podcast. Today I am interviewing my father, Bob Tomlinson. So would you describe you as a house designing renegade?

Bob 00:00:15  House designing renegade? I like that. Yes, well, that's what I do. I design houses and places to live. So I'm not really an architect. I'm not really an urbanist. I'm just a person who designs good places to live.

Luke 00:00:29  And what's your relationship with improvisation?

Bob 00:00:32  I can play 1 or 2 musical instruments, but I very rarely improvise. I keep on trying to play the same old tunes competently.

Luke 00:00:42  So you say there's a process of trial and error in what you do.

Bob 00:00:46  What I do is I look at what exists and find out what works, and then learn from that to do new places. But there is a trial and error element of that. But as you get used to doing more and more of it, you make less errors and have less trial hopefully.

Luke 00:01:03  All right. So I'm going to play a piece of music okay.

Luke 00:01:06  And I want you to tell me what that makes you think of something that comes into your mind okay. Give me anything. Yeah.

Bob 00:01:12  All right. So it started out with what seemed to be like walking or steps, as though walking through a forest or wooded area somewhere that was enclosed, who then turned into a dancing element to it, and that dancing went round and round and more people became involved with it until maybe one individual became more active, separated from the others anyway, and was spotlit. Then it all quietened down and we all went to bed happily.

Luke 00:02:52  All of us.

Bob 00:02:54  Oh yes, it was one of those sorts of festivals.

Luke 00:02:56  Okay. Did you find that there was a transition point then?

Bob 00:03:00  I thought there were several transition points. One was where it went from singular to plural, and then when it went from, say, plural to many and then one, where it then began to disperse again until it sort of ended by either fizzling out or going to sleep, as I said.

Luke 00:03:21  I see. Nice. That's quite a good image of everyone coming together in this dance class. Was it like a ceremony or did it feel like more for fun?

Bob 00:03:32  There was an element of ceremonial looseness. Is that a word?

Luke 00:03:37  No, but it is now.

Bob 00:03:38  There's an element of ceremony about it, because there was quite a distinct rhythm and chord process, which was a bit much like, but overall not.

Luke 00:03:52  Okay, I see there was a marching quality to what I played, which was, yes, gave a sense of ceremony. Okay, great. I let you tell me a story.

Bob 00:04:03  Okay.

Luke 00:04:04  And then I'm going to play a piece of music to the story.

Bob 00:04:07  I'll do my best. Okay? So here goes. So this is the story of a time with my grandmother, who must have been about 85. We ended up in a car given to us by the CIA, visiting various parts of North America. And one of these places was New Orleans. And I'd arranged to stay in New Orleans with a woman who is roughly my grandmother's age, because I thought it would be good for the two of them to get on.

Bob 00:04:35  And she lived in part of New Orleans, a suburb made out of grain barges which had been floated down the Mississippi full of grain. The grain was loaded onto the ships, but the barges were left behind, and so they were turned upside down and made into houses. And she had one of these. So when we arrived, she was busy cleaning the front doorstep, and we introduced ourselves and she apologized for doing that. She said she was cleaning the blood off the doorstep because someone had been shot there the night before. So okay. Fair enough. But we're here now. And we went inside and had a nice dinner. And then she said it was time to go to bed, and she had a room for my grandmother and she had her own room. But then I had to sleep on the couch downstairs. So I was there asleep at about 4:00 in the morning, and she came downstairs and she shakes me and she says, Bob, I want you to come and help me pick mushrooms.

Bob 00:05:27  And she had two big plastic bags with her. And I thought, oh, okay, so get up. And then we went out of her house into the estate and we started picking these large ear shaped mushrooms off people's lawns because it rained. And apparently these were good things to eat. And so we were there doing this, and she was busy putting mushrooms in the bag because it was a grid system I could see down the road across the end of the road, when this pickup truck with people in the back with rifles and I thought, oh my goodness, it was, you could hear it go, ju ju ju ju ju ju ju doo doo. Because it's one of those big V8's and I could see it go down one end of the block. And then we were still picking mushrooms and you could see it come round. So I saw it go across the end of the street with g g g g g g g g g. They came back. At that point I thought whether I was going to run or just stand there and wait to be shot and everything else.

Bob 00:06:18  And so I was a bit afraid. And they just came up, says, hey, Martha, you picking mushrooms again? Yeah, that's my little story. We actually had mushrooms for breakfast and survived, but at one point I didn't think I was going to, but it all turned out all right.

Luke 00:06:33  What did you think these guys were?

Bob 00:06:35  They were vigilantes. They were the neighborhood watch. Oh, yeah. They were either shooting people they didn't like or stopping robberies. I'm not sure.

Luke 00:06:43  Yeah, yeah. Okay. It's a good story your gran was oblivious to. Oh, yeah.

Bob 00:06:48  She was fast asleep all the time. Just woke up to find mushrooms for breakfast, which I don't think she liked very much.

Luke 00:06:54  Music time. Then, think about this for a minute.

Bob 00:09:24  And they all lived happily ever after. Ha ha. That was brilliant. Yes, I loved the New Orleans jazzy bit, and I. I think that's a very nice touch. I could have a bit of brightness in there as well, I heard.

Bob 00:09:37  Yeah. Well done.

Luke 00:09:38  Thanks. I mean, what if one was difficult, was keeping the the consistency of the New Orleans sound and then introducing the sense of fear. Foreboding. Yeah. Did you get the sense of nighttime.

Bob 00:09:51  Now that you come to mention it? Yes. The twinkly bits in there. In fact, that was interesting because when you were playing it, I thought, oh, I should have given more color to the story by describing how it was one of those hot, misty, humid New Orleans night stroke early mornings. And I didn't really think about that in the story. You put it in. Interesting.

Luke 00:10:16  So if I was to improve that piece of music, would you say I missed anything?

Bob 00:10:21  You missed the V-8.

Luke 00:10:23  Missed the VA. So for the listeners who don't know what a V-8 is, it's an eight cylinder piston engine that powers things like trucks, boats and planes. If you were to sing a rhythm of a VA. So what kind of rhythm?

Bob 00:10:40  It's a sort of doo doo doo doo.

Bob 00:10:42  Doo dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee.

Bob 00:10:43  Dee dee dee.

Bob 00:11:12  That made me think of having a car with or whatever with a V8. Driving across those long American straight roads in the desert. And it's just that rhythm going all the time. The revs don't change a lot once you've got them up at speed, so you just sit there all day doing that.

Luke 00:11:28  When the engines are quite interesting musically to because of different kinds of engines and you have different rhythms.

Bob 00:11:34  Talk about syncopated rhythm. The old ship's engines do that big three cylinder engines.

Luke 00:11:40  Because there's three cylinders because it's a slightly different rhythm, isn't it. Yeah.

Bob 00:11:44  You couldn't you couldn't kidding because it's blowing off every third cycle or something. What came first, the music or the engine.

Luke 00:11:52  Yeah. I mean, a lot of blues music's got that like a train kind of rhythm to it. If I was to improvise a piece of music for a ship's engine like an old one. You could go.

Bob 00:12:16  Oh, yeah. Could listen to that all day.

Bob 00:12:20  Except I might fall asleep, because that's what happens to me on boats. Were those sorts of rhythms.

Luke 00:12:28  Utah for telling me another story.

Bob 00:12:29  Then another story. Yes. Okay. It's about the time when I wanted to catch a bus from Madras, as it was called, then to this place called Mahabalipuram. If you've ever caught a bus in India, you will know that it is a difficult process to get in on the bus and get a seat because of the number of people trying to get onto the bus and the fact that they're very used to it, and they've got very sharp elbows and are able to get all the seats anyway, so I went to the bus station expecting to have all this big fight, and there was a bus going to where I wanted to go, and he was sitting there and the door was open and the windows were open. They didn't have any glass in them anyway, and it was empty. There was nobody sitting on it. And so I thought, oh, goodness gracious, this is my lucky day.

Bob 00:13:19  And so I went across and I sat in the bus and I found a nice seat, and I thought that was rather good. And then as I sat there, I noticed all these people who were standing under a big mango tree, I think it was, who were just looking at me. And I was thinking, well, why are they looking at me? Then a moment later, the sun came out from behind this building, which was just the bus stop, and hit the bus, and it started to get like a sauna in there, got hotter and hotter and hotter, and I could feel the sweat running down my back, and I could see all these people looking at me. And I knew that if I got up and went to stand in the shade, I would lose my seat, So I stayed on in there and they were looking at me, and then I could see the bus driver, and he was playing a game of draughts for somebody. They started to have another game and I'm going, oh my God, how much longer can I hold on to this seat? Let's see the bus driver going.

Bob 00:14:11  He's light a cigarette and I'm going, oh no no, no. Then he starts having this argument with someone I got no, no no. And then he throws a cigarette away and he stands up and starts heading towards the bus. And at that point, the whole stampede of people and luggage and goats and everything else that was coming on the bus happened. And as soon as they started coming to the bus, it just moved the air a little bit and everything became bearable again. And then of course, when the bus moved all the open windows, it was absolutely fine. But there was a moment there I thought, I'm going to have to abandon my seat because I can't stick it any longer. So that's the story.

Luke 00:14:52  So what was Madras Bus Station like?

Bob 00:14:54  This one was just a big area of ground with dusty, hard baked mud and lots of buses. Like all bus stations. Busy with people. Going backwards and forwards.

Luke 00:15:06  Yeah.

Luke 00:15:06  All right. Music time then. So what are your thoughts on that?

Bob 00:17:42  I imagine it is, the tricky bits is the sweat running down my back.

Bob 00:17:49  Yeah. It was the sort of stampede for the bus was quite dramatic in real life. I don't know if you captured that. Perhaps I should have been more explicit about how, because people just absolutely scramble for the bus and it's tooth and nail, and then the tension rising with the game and the cigarettes, and then everyone just waiting at the starting line and yeah, no. Pretty good. And then also you did give it a bit of an Indian musical tent. I thought that was very clever.

Luke 00:18:29  All right. Given another story.

Bob 00:18:30  Then one time when we were in Western Samoa travelling on the road and there were these guys selling pickled sea slugs, and I thought, oh, that's interesting. I wonder what a pickled sea slug tastes like. And they were very keen for me to buy one. So I did, and I ate some of it. For the first time in my life. I was reminded of the time I was a kid in Nigeria. It must have been really young because at the time when you don't think you see something and you think, oh, I wonder what that tastes like.

Bob 00:19:03  And the thing that I had chosen to try out as a two year old, or it was a piece of rubber, but I don't know if you come across this, when rubber begins to decompose, it starts bubbling up. And this rubber had gone a bit red. So I think that was all part of the decomposition. Maybe mould or fashioned rubber in a hotter climate did that. And I ate a piece of this bit of rubber tire or something, and it didn't really like it very much. And then eating this sea slug was exactly the same taste and consistency as the old rubber. And so that was a bit of a memory flashback. I didn't eat very much of it, actually. I think it's an acquired taste.

Luke 00:19:42  So it's an interesting idea to take tastes and texture and turn them into music.

Bob 00:19:47  What does pickled sea Slug sound like? Yeah.

Luke 00:19:50  If we describe eating one, you've got this rubbery texture that breaks apart. So there's slightly acidic.

Bob 00:19:56  It wasn't acidic. They were more likely in salt brine, which is a sort of pickling.

Bob 00:20:02  But it wasn't vinegar. It's a strong taste as well. Very pungent Roquefort cheese that's been rubberized and then starts to crumble. It's been smoked for a long time. I'll get you some.

Luke 00:20:18  All right. Well, so I'm going to attempt to play a piece of music which is reflects this taste somehow. Tell you what. We play the hot and cold game. So I'm going to start playing. And then you can tell me how close I am to this experience. So hot. Close.

Bob 00:20:34  Yeah. All right. More discordant.

Luke 00:20:39  More discordant.

Bob 00:20:40  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a it's it's the. All right. The sequence is that it's a shock but it's sort of interesting and then it's overwhelming. And then you spit it out.

Speaker 5 00:21:28  They say that that was great.

Bob 00:21:32  Apart from the end. It's once you've chewed on it and you've got this rubbery sort of stuff in your mouth that doesn't come out all at once. It's got to be a real yeah.

Luke 00:21:41  You spit it out. But of course, the taste kind of lingers.

Bob 00:21:44  I'll have to find some pickled sea slug, and then you can chew on it and see what you think. Yeah.

Luke 00:21:52  What did you get out of this podcast?

Bob 00:21:54  I thought it's very interesting that discussion around how you describe food and turn that into music, or the engines and the fact that you interpreted things in the story that I hadn't actually said that because of the music I remembered as being part of the story. So things like the sweat trickling down my back, I didn't particularly remember that in the story, but because you'd put something like that into the music I did, or the mushroom picking elements of that that I hadn't thought about, like the atmosphere of early morning New Orleans in terms of the humidity and so on. Yes, I was.

Luke 00:22:33  Making that up, just adding bits of atmosphere, which are just a guesses. Really. Yeah. But, all right. Well, thanks very much, dad. It's been very insightful. It's a pleasure.

Bob 00:22:43  So do I get my fee now or do I have to invoice?

Luke 00:22:45  Just invoice.

Bob 00:22:46  It. Okay. All right. Thank you.

Luke 00:22:48  Takes about a year. Join us next week for another episode of Impro Pod. Thanks for listening.