Strange loop - Monday Music Break No. 10

Simon Jeffes' Penguin Cafe Orchestra was a thing of pure joy. I've always found this quirky, zestful quasi-classical 'fusion' music to be utterly irresistible. This is one of my favourite pieces, the playfully demented Music for a Found Harmonium.  (You might not recognise Jeffes' name or the name of his group, but you'll almost certainly recognise the music. It has thoroughly insinuated its way into popular culture over the past 40-odd years, probably gaining more frequent inclusion in film soundtracks than just about any other contemporary composition.)

Fate sundered me from all of my PCO albums on vinyl long since, and for the past 25 or 30 years my only ready access to this music has been through a CD of 'Still Life' at The Penguin Cafe (a 1988 short ballet suite, adapted by Jeffes from several of his most popular pieces), played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Because I've listened to this so many times over the years, it has 'the comfort of the familiar' about it now and has become my preferred version.

Sadly, Simon Jeffes died in 1997 of a brain tumour, at only 48 years of age. He'd given an awful lot of pleasure to the world in such a comparatively short time.

Some years later, his son Arthur gathered together some of the musicians his father had worked with over the years on PCO recordings, re-forming the project as Penguin Cafe, originally, I think, just to keep Simon's music alive; but they soon began to record new pieces in a similar style. This is an interesting interview & performance segment with them from BBC Breakfast News sometime back in the Noughties. [And here are some clips of the concerts they were probably promoting in this, at the Royal Albert Hall - interspersed with some entertaining bits of chat from Arthur Jeffes. Several years later, they did one of NPR's 'Tiny Desk concerts.]

And if you're starting to get into this stuff,.... here are three more short pieces from a 1984 appearance (still led by Simon) on the wonderful BBC2 programme The Old Grey Whistle Test (and if you don't know about that, go and look it up; simply the best music show on television ever, an absolute treasure-chest of astonishing live performances).

And more treats too: a complete performance of the 1988 ballet 'Still Life' at the Penguin Cafe; a half-hour 'Live at the BBC' concert from 1989; and, best of all, an entire episode (50 minutes) of 1980s ITV arts programme The South Bank Show devoted to Simon Jeffes and the group.

Damn, that was quite a rabbit-hole I just fell down. I fear the poor Algorithm is going to be unable to think of anything but Simon and Arthur Jeffes to recommend to me for weeks now!