This little sea shanty is a love song for a place that’s literally and figuratively high on a hill above the ocean. It’s such a long time since I spent countless days in the Isle Of Wight the idyll I remember so well may now only exist in my heart. But if I close my eyes I can easily place myself standing in the brisk sea breeze on the crest of Tennyson Down overlooking the arc of silver and blue water and sky, the dancing wildflowers running from my feet at the summit right down to the sea. 

Tennyson Down is a whale-backed ridge of chalk that rises 147 metres above sea level at the western end of the Isle of Wight in the English Channel. The tail of the ridge extends into the sea, culminating in a row of three stacks of chalk about 30 metres high called The Needles. To the east lies Freshwater Bay and to the south Highdown Cliffs, a near vertical chalk face that drops 100 metres to the sea below. 

Tennyson Down is named after the poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, who lived at Farringford House near Freshwater Bay from 1852 for the last forty years of his life.

I don’t know why I wrote this homage to Tennyson Down in the form of a samba, but to my ear there’s no more joyful music than samba, the song whose message is so often about letting go of your troubles, your pain and your poverty for long enough to celebrate and make music for the sheer joy of it.


The illustration is my watercolour sketch of Gurnard, a hamlet on the Solent about 2 miles west of Cowes.

Tennyson Down-21

Tennyson Down

Thanks Sam Broverman for the charts, thanks Peter Hill for rehearsing with me when I couldn't sing at all... Here are these little kids in Cambodia... That was 5 years ago... I wonder how they are... With a few dollars a school was built for them, thanks to all my friends who contributed... Here's to life!
I must say I was thinking of my mother when I sang this song... Here's to you mom!
Thanks Asher Ettinger for all the time you put into this, thank you Shelley Coopersmith for your violin! XOX Here's to love! Here's to you!

Here's To Life

Another closet special played and engineered again by the dear Asher Ettinger. The guitar playing and the male voice is a gift from the lovely Serge Nikol...

Agua De Beber

I know now that the Lyrics in English mean something completely different in Portuguese than in English. Regardless, the English words speak to me. Thank you Asher for the arrangements and Serge Nikol for the delightful guitar... xxx

Chega De Saudade

Thanks again Asher Ettinger for the music, the recording and the mixing.
Composed by Bruno Martino in 1960. English lyrics by Shirley Horn.
Estate means summer ;-)

Estate

boy soprano solos from church and school in  1957- 59

1958 - 1964 Darryl Palmer 

How lovely are thy dwellings (church solo)

This song, written in 2017 is my Hallowe’en themed Major Opus. It’s heard here in its 2020 incarnation with a louche Middle European or possibly Argentinian ensemble consisting of clarinet, accordion, acoustic bass, conga drums and harpsichord. 

The accompanying illustration is my very early pen drawing of a snake charmer in her dressing room with a snake around her neck, wearing multiple pairs of shoes.

You, You, You- 2020

You, You, You

This is the second time Clifford Brown’s innovative reinvention of an obscure ballad inspired me to have a go at writing my own arrangement. “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” and the more familiar, “I’ll Be Seeing You” were composed in 1937 by Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal  for the unsuccessful Broadway stage show, “Right This Way”. Other Sammy Fain tunes that have made it into the jazz standard lexicon are “You Brought A New Kind Of Love To Me” and “That Old Feeling”. 

The ink drawing accompanying this song is another very ancient example of my early work in the visual realm.

I Can Dream, Can't I?

I wrote this memento mori in 2015 for no particular reason. Now, in January, 2021 its day has come. The melody is wistfully cheerful as befits a song whose lyrics gently alight on the subject of mortality. The phrase “Do not go gentle into that good night” comes from the poem by Dylan Thomas.

The accompanying image is “Young Man With A Skull”, painted in 1626 by Dutch painter Franz Hals. The painting is in the National Gallery, London.

Old Stories New Clothes

Old Stories, New Clothes

I remember hearing Bossa Nova for the first time while attending a dance at my senior public school. The teacher who was responsible for the music played Desafinado, which was the flip side of the single The Girl From Ipanema. 

Fast forward some years when someone asked me why I should presume to sing songs that weren’t in English because, after all, there are native Portuguese singers to whom singing in Portuguese comes naturally. That conversation inspired me to write The English Speaker's Lament. The guitar solo was inspired by the Beatles song And Your Bird Can Sing.

The accompanying image is my 1990 watercolour painting, Valentine’s Day. The photograph of the sailboat in the painting is by Beken of Cowes.

The English Speaker's Lament-2021

The English Speaker's Lament

Insomnia seems to be affecting ever more people than it did when I wrote this tune five years ago. 
In this song the singer speaks to the anthropomorphic personifications of Insomnia, Morpheus, Slumber and Night. Insomnia is the persistent one who just won’t make himself scarce.

About the illustration:
One night in March, 1987 we were marooned overnight in the cross channel ferry terminal at Dover. I spent some hours sketching other would-be travelers who were trying to sleep until ferry service resumed early the following morning, when we sailed to Ostend.

No Sleeping-2021

No Sleeping

Vocals, piano, choirboy training, harmony singer, musicologist.

How lovely are thy dwellings (church solo)

darrylpalmer

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