THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 132, 2 January 1942, Page 3

THINGS TO COME

A Run Through The Programmes

HE Kings of Jazz session from 2ZB on Saturday, January 10, is intended as a tribute to a London night club band which was obliterated one. night last April by a high explosive bomb during a blitz on London, The night club was the Cafe de Paris, and the band was the West Indian Dance Orchestra, conducted by a spectacular negro musician rejoicing in the name of "Snake Hips" Johnson, Mr, Johnson, whose band frequently broadcast in the BBC’s Empire Shortwave Service, was himself a West Indian, and his musicians came from Barbadoes, British Guiana, Trinidad, Grenada, and Jamaica, and were all British subjects. " Snake Hips," whose other name was Ken, studied medicine at London University but took up dancing, and eventually music, and toured America with Fletcher Henderson’s band. He was playing at the Cafe de Paris on Sunday, April 6, when a bomb came through the roof and exploded a few feet from the bandstand. At 1ZB on Monday, January 5, Kings of Jazz features "Woody" Herman, a clarinettist, and at 3ZB on Saturday, January 10, there is a session of music by Ozzie Nelson. Bliss and the Future The grim, strident music Bliss composed for Wells’ film Things to Come is probably an apt choice for an early New

_- Year programme, even if it does represent.an unseasonable facing of facts on the part of the programme organisers. For Wells painted anything but a cheerful picture of the immediate future, and the early part of the film, as picturegoers who saw it may remember, envisages sad times for humanity before the rebirth of sanity and sense and man’s emergence into a world of true progress with science safely harnessed to his

needs. Similarly, Bliss’s music has its grim undertones, though the note of final triumph corresponds with Wells’ ultimate optimism. Music from Things to Come played by the London Symphony Orchestra will be heard from 4YA at 8.35 p.m. on Monday, January’ 5. Social Life Australian Social Life and Women in Uniform is the title of Miss Helen Zahara’s talk from 2YA next Monday morning, and it must be presumed that Miss Zahara is aware of the small scale social revolution created by the presence in our midst of so many young women in severely cut uniform. It’s all a matter of tradition. In the days when the first five hundred strolled the sidewalks of Newport, the women who wore uniform were the nursemaids, the parlour maids, and an occasional Salvation Army lassie, and obviously it was only when a woman had donned something other than uniform that she had a chance of penetrating the inner circle of the Gilded Age. Nowadays, even if a uniform is not as convenient and comfortable a garment for party going as a handful of silk or chiffon, it is de rigeur in Mayfair. And we may even see the day when a woman not in uniform just won't be accepted in smart circles. Fruity Gossip We live and learn (if we may coin a phrase). Last’ week we found out that the blackberry bushes at the bottom of the garden are simply hopping with vitamins. Next week listeners to the Health in the Home session from 2YA on Wednesday will hear further revelations-" New Facts About Fruit." Housewives who can should listen. There are some depressing new facts about fruit (such as the price) but the exigencies of war economy bring compensations, It is true that no-one has yet managed to get any fruit out of a fruit machine, but nourishment has been discovered in the most unlikely places of late. In Britain, strangely enough, hips have come to the forefront (we mean rose-hips, of course) as a source of energy, and it goes with-

— out saying that hops are also doing their bit to maintain the offensive spirit. Out of the nettle danger we pluck the vitamin safety. Boys Will Be In her campaign to sublimate the destructive instincts of the small, child indoors, Mrs, F. L. W. Wood advances another stage with the talk which will be broadcast from 1YA on Wednesday of next week. "The Young Carpenter" is the topic which she has chosen to speak on, and if her experience parallels our own she shouldn’t want for words. But there is no doubt that she is touching on a real problem. Boys can be so lower middle class in their ambitions: I'd rather drive an engine than Be a.little gentleman; I'd rather go shunting and hooting Than hunting and shooting. But there is perhaps more point in shunting and hooting-and carpenter-ing-under present circumstances, than in cultivating the graces. Man From Illinois The ghost of Abe Lincoln must be restless these days. It is easy to imagine the shade of the stooped, lank man in his top hat and plain worn shawl pacing up and down the lawns in front of the

Capitol, pausing, like Mr. Smith who | went to Washington, to read the inscription of his famous words about a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. (" Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that fiation, or any nation so conceived, can long endure.") And walking restlessly, too, as Vachel Lindsay pictures him, through the streets of the little town of Springfield: He cannot rest until a spirit dawn Shall come; the shining hope of Europe free: The league of sober folk, the Workers’ Earth, Bringing long peace to Cornland, Alp, and Sea. The first instalment of a life of Lincoln will be heard from 2YA on Monday, January 5, Wanderer’s Return An old acquaintance will be back. on the air-waves on January 10 when 2YN will broadcast the first instalment of Soldier of Fortune. We first made the acquaintance of Captain Geoffrey Somerset (the S. of F.) way back in the palmy days of the sitzkrieg in Western Europe when democracy sat under its

umbrella in the shade of the Maginot Line and we thought and believed lots of things we know better than to think and believe to-day. But from what we can remember about him, Captain Somerset was ahead of his times, and his greatest service to the Queen of Borovnia (next to making her fall in love with him) was providing her army with adequate air support. Music, It’s Wonderful! It’s wonderful what music can do. Even sergeant-majors have been known to forget themselves at a campfire singsong and none of us who remembers the famous advertisement, "They gave me the ha-ha when I sat down at the piano, but when I began to play-Oh, boy!" can doubt that music can accomplish miracles. Just think of what Joshua and his Musical Army did when they started to swing it under the walls of Jericho. And among its other attributes, music (like money) talks, wherein witness the session, " Say It With Music," from 2YA on Wednesday evening next. True, music does not talk a universal language, like money, or rather its various dialects are not always understood and appreciated by all who hear them, but with the Melodeers and Allen Roth and his Orchestra as the featured artists in 2YA’s session the language should be that of the average listener.