Bird song on the Hackney marshes

EARLY DAYS: Phil with his brother Steve, Jack Monck and Pip Pyle.

In the very early days of my friendship with Phil Miller we spent quite a lot of time in the Hackney marshes. It was very close to where we both lived. Me in a basement flat in Mabley Street and Phil in a  flat on the Kingsmead Estate  a few hundred yards away on the edge of the marshes. He had moved there from  a squat he shared  with Jack Monck in a  beautiful Victorian house in Cadogan Terrace on the edge of Victoria Park. The whole Terrace was squatted.  He and Jack – and all the rest of the squatters – a had benefitted from a Hackney Council amnesty which gave all the squatters their own flats in hard-to-let areas in exchange for vacating the houses they had squatted. The Kingsmead estate was a rough old area in those days in the late 70’s. Then it   seemed as if half the houses in Hackney were squatted. There were so many empty houses, a lot of them in terrible condition. A far cry from nowadays where all the houses seem to be selling for millions of pounds and the Hackney population has exploded. The human population that is, not the bird population – that has diminished from a large population to a tiny one.

Back in the marshes: Phil and I had bought, in Oxfam, a very old, battered  golf bag with a full set of clubs and loads of golf balls which used to take  with us to play a kind of golf in the marshes. Phil would start us off by taking an almighty swing with one of the clubs and the ball would travel what seemed like miles until it disappeared out of sight. I would then take a pathetic swing with my ball in the same direction which only travelled a few yards. We would follow the direction that  Phil’s ball had taken and I would take other pathetic swings at my ball each time we reached it. We never did find  any of Phil’s balls. Eventually we used them all up and our golfing days came to an end.

We used to walk along the swathe of grass beside the bank of the old River Lea and listen to the birds. There were loads of birds in those days and Phil could identify them all  bird by their  calls. He was very interested in bird song and was equally interested in the composer Messiaen.
One day we stopped to listen to a wonderful blackbird singing it’s heart out. Phil was particularly taken with this particular bird and declared it was singing quite a long phrase from a piece by Horace Silver. Later,  we went back at his flat and he found the Horace Silver piece in his copy of “The Real Book” of jazz standards and played it to me on his guitar – and yes, I recognised the phrase the blackbird had been singing!

I know bird’s songs differ from one part of the country to another and I know that there is a certain amount of mimicry such as telephone ring tones etc but did this bird pick up Horace’s phrase because it listened to a lot of jazz or did it pick it up from another bird that listened to a lot of jazz?
Answers on a postcard please.