Pete Thomas’s Blog

Probably the hardest recording session in my life was for a Michael Caine movie, Blue Ice. My brief was to compose and play a tune in the style of Charlie Parker. I assembled some great musicians for this including Bobby Orr on drums, Steve Rose on piano and Guy Barker on Trumpet. I was quite confident about the tune as I’d studied a lot of be bop in my time, but to play and sound like the great Charlie Parker was rather daunting. Of course, Bird improvised his solos on the spot, but I cheated slightly by preparing quite a lot in advance. I wasn’t expecting anything to quite equal the quality of Bird, that would be impossible for most players, let alone me, but in the end I got something that would do, although would never fool anyone who knows Charlie Parker’s music.However the piano player, my friend and trusted be bop expert Steve Rose, mentioned that my playing sounded flat. Not what you want to hear when you are a professional musician who should be able to play reasonably in tune. I checked my saxophone against a tuner and guess what - bang in tune. So I tried again (more or less the same solo, by now I’d practically memorised it). Same problem for Steve. I pushed the mouthpiece on to sharpen the instruments and tried again. Slightly better but still flat. So I pushed on even further and tried again. This one got the thumbs up from the control room so I breathed a sigh of relief and settled down for a cup of tea, but not without first checking my saxophone. It was actually about 12% sharp according to the tuner, but so what? It sounded reasonably like Bird. It just shows that being in tune does not always mean being in tune.Mind you, in the movie, Michael Caine crashes his car while listening to the track in this scene.