I was listening to Elvis Costello's new album and it got me to thinking about collaborations.

On his new recording Costello partners with hip-hop funksters The Roots for an impressively tough set. He's previously worked with others from across a wide musical spectrum, classical to country, avant-garde to Bacharach.
I was wondering, in the great scheme of things, when we look back in a hundred or two hundred years time whether these will be seen as historical meetings or
just forgotten.
It's hard to know what will last a hundred years, which music will have the staying power, which artists will be the Mozarts and which the Salieris, but anyone you've still heard of after a
century or two must have done something significant.
Which is why I find stories about famous people who knew each other so fascinating. Forget Elvis Costello. What if Beethoven and Mozart had collaborated? They were alive at the same time so it's not impossible. What would they have talked about if they'd met?
There are virtually no collaborations between the leading geniuses of the classical world. Shame really. In fact many seem to have loathed their competitors from a distance. Amongst other proof we have a delightfully intemperate diary entry from Tchaikovsky: 'I played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms... what a giftless bastard! It annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed as a genius.” (Brahms, on the other hand, described Anton Bruckner's music as 'symphonic boa-constrictors.”)
But famous people did meet and we can only wonder at what might have gone down at those meetings. All we have are tantalising glimpses.
For instance, in 1940 Orson Welles, famous for a radio adaptation of War of the Worlds which had panicked gullible Americans, met H G Wells, the man who wrote the original. In 1940 they sat down for a chat in San Antonio, Texas. There's even a recording, though it only shows two men being very polite to each other. What did they say in private? 'So you're the bastard who ruined my book!” perhaps?
A far older literary meeting always boggles my mind (and we're going back a ways here). Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen, most certainly both literary giants, were contemporaries. Andersen worshipped Dickens' writing and even went to stay with him in London. Unfortunately, once he arrived he wouldn't leave and drove Dickens crazy with his obsequious manner. So much so that Dickens later immortalised him on fiction as Uriah Heep (the 'humble” clerk in David Copperfield, not – obviously – the rock band).
Just recently another of these literary get togethers has been revealed and it's a doozy. In 1882 Oscar Wilde and the great American poet Walt Whitman met. And they, to use the correct literary term, got it on.
Wilde was young tall and slim, Whitman was in his sixties with a bushy grey beard. Wilde was on a tour of America; they were introduced by publisher John Stoddart. Here's a passage from The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, Neil McKenna's excellent biography: Stoddart tactfully left the two poets alone. 'If you are willing I will go off for an hour or so – come back again – leaving you together,” he said. 'We would be glad to have you stay,” Whitman replied. 'But do not feel to come back in an hour. Don't come for two or three.” Whitman opened a bottle of elderberry wine and he and Oscar drank it all before Whitman suggested they go upstairs to his ‘den' on the third floor where, he told Oscar, 'We could be on ‘thee and thou' terms.”
Gotta love those poets!
Oops. That was a kinda lengthy intro. Spiralling towards relevance, remember that this Saturday (28 September) there's the Tauranga Waterfront Festival from midday on the Strand. There'll be music from Jesse Matthews, Carlee and Tilly, UkeJam NZ, Celtic outfit The Wild Clovers, Megan Sidwell, Aaron Saxon, U4RIA and more. Things run till 7.00pm.
And, as a reminder to anyone who missed last week's rant, also this Saturday, boogie-woogie pianist Jan Preston plays the Baycourt Exhibition Hall and bluegrass-country-swingers The Remarkables (featuring Aucklander Neil Finlay, local Robbie Laven and more) will be playing the Te Puna Memorial Hall.