60 albums
1979 - Barbara Thompson's Paraphernalia - Wilde Tales

I knew very little about British jazz musician Barbara Thompson, and literally nothing about her Paraphernalia project. I bought this LP for £4 from Discogs for the following reasons…

• I could add it to my basket for no additional postage
• The sleeve caught my eye
• I needed something that wasn’t rock or folk in the series

Barbara Thompson's Paraphenalia - Wilde Tales

Weirdly, given Barbara Thompson’s reputation, the Internet offered very little in background to this release. I couldn’t find any analysis, or reviews, or history of it… a Google search just revealed a few shops selling it and very little more. I’m not used to the Internet not coming good for me but this time it seemed to fail quite miserably. This, I felt, didn’t bode well, although at least nobody was hating it… just nobody seemed to care about it. I even headed off to the British Newspaper Archive and found nothing.

Side one of the album is a 20 minute suite in five movements based on the Oscar Wilde short story for children “The Selfish Giant” and is, while clearly a jazz suite, quite a bit rockier than I was expecting, and an enjoyable listen. The album had an insert with some extracts from Wilde’s story to help put the music into context, although I opeted to listen to Basil Rathbone’s reading of it for my personal context. I rather liked this, although… stories without words is just music to my ears… sorry, but music I rather liked.

The suite was played live, at least once, for the BBC in August 1979 and was released on a 14(!) CD box set of Barbara Thompson recorded at the BBC, but even that, just four years old has disappeared into the ether (not that I was quite ready to pay £75 for a box set yet, I was hoping it would have made it onto a streaming service somewhere).

Side two of the album is filled out with some unrelated pieces. Despite having taken a jazz appreciation course way back I do still rather struggle to appreciate jazz - some I like and some I don’t… I do quite like this, although sometimes it gets a little bit too… intricate for my tastes.

Barbara died a few years back after a long fight with Parkinsons disease, here’s her obit in the Guardian.