Continuing to work from home…, Part III
At John Cumming’s funeral…by Denis Herbstein
As cremations go – and I’ve been to too many - it was unusual. How often do you tap your toe to a line of jazz while thinking, why has this bloke been carted away so early when I know of a few who deserve an earlier demise?
Dear John’s final obsequies was a fine send-off, limited to 15 of us, and excluding many old friends, and much of the jazz world who’d ever bought him a drink – more likely he did the buying – after a gig in a dusty venue or the Festival Hall. They were represented in person by Guy Barker MBE on trumpet; Orphy Robinson, vibraphone; Gary Crosby OBE, double bass - John was an OBE, too, but I don’t recall him ever mentioning it. And, from John’s company, Serious, his co-founder David Jones; and Ros Rigby, with whom he ran the jazz festival at the Sage in Gateshead.
We entered the chapel in the East Finchley cemetery to ‘Shades of Lipstick’, Tippett and Sheppard, and were seated two metres apart, which might have seemed like an unhappy family preparing to contest the will, but no, this was the incontestable John Cumming. Ginnie spoke. ‘There were three in our relationship,’ she said, ‘John, me, and the venue.’ He had ‘pushed jazz into the concert hall, building a new audience base for the country’s jazz industry.’ He was often away on gigs, but ‘when present, he was absolutely present.’ There was no side to John. A production manager said of him... ‘he could be in a room with the legends of our music, but he would take as much time for the unknown and up-and-coming as he would the established stars.’ ‘He faced death,’ Ginnie said, ‘with the sang froid one might expect from a distant descendent of French seigneurs, and barely mentioned it.’
Kate, who has inherited dad’s humorous bent, as well as his cooking skills, said she shored up his internet uncertainties as ‘his personal IT help desk’. It was through Kate that we there, having met dad and mum at the school gates of St Michael’s primary in North Road all those years ago. We were representing their Highgate friends.
Next, Carla Bley’s ‘Who will Rescue me?’ As someone who enjoyed jazz half a dozen times a year, on invites from John and Ginnie, who loves Benny Goodman and Fats Waller, it seemed progressive stuff until, suddenly, I was tapping my feet to a rhythmic uplift. Couldn’t stop it, but did resist a bop in the aisles. Others said their piece. My wife, Pattie, recalled those Burns Nichts in Bickerton Road, the neeps and tatties and drams of single malt, with John reciting impenetrable verse from brave Robbie.
John, you lightened the world for us. I’m so sad, and quite a bit angry, that you’ve gone and left us.
Denis Herbstein, friend