Me and my ego we go everywhere...

(A slight familiarity with Anglo-Saxon poetry and 20th Century song might help you appreciate this impressionistic account of a recent gig.)

Me and my ego (named Cedric) performed this morning at a psychiatric sheltered housing place for some elderly chaps. I think we did the perfect performance for this place, for these people.

Cedric complained that this was not Ronny Scott’s and that this piano player is to the famous Crowned Jools as Hyperion to a Satyr. I let him rant on a bit and he soon puffed himself out. Grandiosity subsided as we settled into our honourable role of community minstrel.

We struck out with some Fats Wallerish jazz numbers that broke the ice nicely. Then moved seamlessly into late Victorian music hall pub piano mode and were glad to see one ancient face lighting up, all bright of eye and cavernous of mouth whence vaulted huge dancing fragments of deconstructed lyric.

Then shmoozed into a mellowing Sinatra tribute, took a wrong turning down My Way but laughed it off with elegant self-deprecation (though Cedric shrank in horror at this descent into the rank garden of amateurism grown to seed).

Sinatra Flew off to the Moon and with a bright golden haze on the meadow we heralded the show tunes of Richard Rodgers before returning to base camp at the Old Bull and Bush.

Sensing a hiatus and the punters’ wandering attention, it came time to release the Hound Dog himself and we Rocked in the Jailhouse and comforted each other in the Hotel of Heartbreak.

At this point the well meaning activity organiser brought in the crate of percussion instruments of mass destruction and handed them out the audience. Fort the next ten minutes we weathered the acoustic maelstrom, but it passed as the appeal of shaky egg and tambourine must always mercifully pass.

A short foray into the 1960s alarmed Cedric but I pointed out to him that something of Cole Porter and Gershwin survived in the better songs of Paul McCartney and Ray Davis though much diminished in their harmonic landscape. The 60s is a different country – they don’t do Middle 8s there.

Cedric complimented me on how nimbly I was pirouetting between genres, giving each style its due while embellishing all with the wisdom of jazz masters past and my own strange, apparently bottomless supply of pianistic phrases, some successful, some failing before Cedric’s music teacher gimlet ear.

He also had harsh words to speak of the entertainment organisers of Oxfordshire who are not making use of this remarkable man’s experience and self-evident genius, flitting as he does effortlessly round the twenty four keys of the 60 chord system of harmony as his left hand punches out bass notes and chords with unnerving accuracy and not a backing tape to be seen or heard. The AI robots have a lot of catching up to do, but they’re coming, so make the most of your human entertainers who stand before the creeping tides of sterility!

Cedric is keen to point out that we are in now crowned in our musical prime and should be allowed a little breath to monarchise the keys for a short spell in return for our daily bread before Death comes and with a little flick of his wrist slams shut the lid.

There’s more to caring for people than giving them food, roof, bed and dim corridors in which to wander. Rant over.

We had a poignant return to Elvis’ more bluesy domain and then Lambeth Walked to the close with a rousing Old Tyme medley leaving us in a Daisy Daisy daze, but knowing that this place of desolate forgetfulness had been briefly transformed and the hedgerow blanched for an hour with transitory blossom of song.

I guess it’s a case of offering ourselves as often as possible to our tribe in any place that they will have us. We know it’s good for them. It’s also a sensible way of quickening the pulse as the years pile up and we no longer know ‘ow our father is faring.

There’s no choice but to keep going. Nothing besides remains. Cedric thinks that the mighty would despair if they just heard us. And then he goes back to his shell feigning modesty and forever Blowing Bubbles into the sky.

Without Cedric it would be hard to build these bridges in places of desolation. For all his impetuosity and violations of Zen, for all his his monkey-mindedness, he connects musician to listeners with singular moments of soulful unity.

He needs a kind hand on his brow that one, for around the decay of shattered dreams the lone and level sing-alongs stretch far away.