Force of Circumstance

September 16th New York duos

2011-10-20T16:05:00.004+01:00

Two duo clips from New York this past Sunday.

First, with Alex Ward at the Downtown Music Gallery:

And then with Jeremy Brown at John Zorn's improv night at the Stone:

In praise of monochromaticism

2011-09-30T08:10:00.010+01:00

Two recent CD releases have got me thinking about certain aspects of contemporary music. The recordings in question are Simon Fell's large group piece Positions & Descriptions (recorded at the Huddersfield Festival in 2007, and released this year on Clean Feed) and James Saunders' collection of recent compositions, divisions that could be autonomous but that comprise the whole, which has just been released on Another Timbre.
The musics on these two discs are very different from one another, but there are nevertheless affinities that merit considering them together, besides the relatively trivial fact that harpist Rhodri Davies and pianist Philip Thomas appear on both of them! (I should issue a disclaimer here to the effect that I know both composers; I was taught by and have performed with Fell; have performed music by Saunders; have had work released on both of these labels; and that I know a great many of the other performers on these discs as well and count a number of them as close friends. I haven't discussed these thoughts with anybody else though, for what it's worth.)

In an interview with Julian Cowley that was published in The Wire in August 2000, Simon Fell, referring to his then-most-recent large group work, said:

I've tried to do the same thing in more subtle ways in my composed work for as long as I can remember. Often, people who are taken with the wild recklessness of Compilation III's broad-stroke collage method are not going to follow all the way to the finer detail if you give them a monochrome version.

In the years since then we have had Compilation IV (Bruce's Fingers, 2005) and now the work under discussion, which is Fell's most monochrome large group work to date. And that is meant as an enormous compliment.

Fell's monochromaticism is achieved through a sort of saturation of density, perhaps akin to the way that white light includes all other colours (or white noise all other frequencies). There is of course a history to such a sensibility – it can be found in certain manifestations of total serialism, for example, but also in freely improvised music, such that George Lewis can comment on a recent CD reissue of a cassette of Derek Bailey's solo guitar playing that:

the music itself presents a flat, blank surface, a slow-motion white noise whose infinitely variagated texture is only revealed when a listener zooms in, after the fashion of a scanning tunneling microscope.

As with his previous works in this area, the elements that Fell is attempting to combine are improvisation (both "non-idiomatic", a la Bailey, and more idiomatically rooted, most notably in jazz), contemporary composition, and electronically produced sound. To avoid misrepresentation, I should point out that Fell's monochromaticism is only relative – there is great diversity on this disc, and some dramatic sectional shifts as well, but the important point is that the distinction between composition and improvisation is often so difficult to discern that working it out isn't really an engaging exercise, like it often was with previous work by Fell and similar work by others, but more closely approaches irrelevance - except insofar as this music could only really have been produced in this way. Certain "moves" have become pretty standard in "composition/improvisation" circles and it's impressive how Fell avoids them without sounding like he's avoiding them. That is, he does not avoid them by foregrounding their omission but rather by using them but so deftly that it's only when you really pay attention that you notice how cunning he is. And he somehow also manages to avoid jokes without being humourless – the music is certainly not dour, but the tango that appears in "Position 8" is played straight and yet does not strike one as pastiche. Clarinettist Alex Ward (who has taken part in all of Fell's large group works of this nature) told me not long after the original performance of Positions & Descriptions how impressed he was that Fell somehow manages in this piece to pile on more of everything than he has done before, all at the same time, and yet have the thing end up both clearer and more cohesive than his previous efforts.

Saunders takes a different approach; rather than Fell's interest (as expressed in the liner notes to Positions & Descriptions) "not in sequentially exposing or juxtaposing different musical areas, but in overlaying and interpenetrating them" – gesturing towards the monochrome, we might say – Saunders is interested in penetrating into the superficially monochrome to tease out the multitude of vibrantly coloured threads that lie disguised within. Fell has a continuing interest in the "classic" period of Darmstadt serialism (such as the work of Boulez, referenced in Positions & Descriptions); Saunders on the other hand, although he has participated in more recent Darmstadt summer courses himself, has recently looked for inspiration in a different form of serialism – namely that of the minimal/systems/conceptual developments in the visual art of the 1960s and 70s. All the pieces on the Another Timbre disc have titles derived from artists' statements from the period, in which Saunders discovers a stark beauty.

Such a description could also be applied to the music on the disc. The first composition, imperfections on the surface are occasionally apparent, features ten players dragging cardboard coffee cups across various surfaces. The sounds change from rubbing, to rustling, to stridulating, with occasional little squeaks or low rumbles of pitched noises. A strongly tactile quality is evoked by Simon Reynell's beautiful, unfussy recording, capturing all the tiny grains of difference in the various sounds. The piece is in a sense easily described and yet it would be all but impossible to capture in words the myriad of variations and developments going on at the microlevel – there is a disjunction between microstructure and macrostructure in this music that is extremely beautiful: sounds start and stop, that's all... and yet it isn't all, by any means. Throughout this CD (as in his earlier work) Saunders focuses on simple sound-producing actions that result in unstable sounds; an extreme economy of means to explore the diversity of colour available from singular, or at least similar, sources.

The "orchestra" in this first piece is used for diversity, not mass: we seem to have only 2 or 3 players playing at once most of the time. The sound of all 10 could have been overwhelming, but it would also have added up to something else: here, although the players do not individuate themselves as "characters" somehow they always remain "one" and do not really blend into each other. Similarly, each surface is only used for one page, by one player and so effectively only appears once (though sometimes there are two "blocks" of sound on one page). Hence there is a linear progression – sounds once finished do not return, and and we also constantly get new sounds. There is freshness and surprise (within a very narrow compass) and yet neither teleological movement nor circularity.

The second piece on the CD (mistitled on the back of the CD), is PART OF IT MAY ALSO BE PART OF SOMETHING ELSE. This is a solo work, but one in which Philip Thomas plays piano, melodica, harmonica and radio simultaneously. The presence of sounds with definite pitch is surprising and refreshing after the first track. Here Saunders really seems to explore different continua, expressed through apparently binary contrast. For example, the difference between the "non-pitched" sounds of radio static and breath (though the first track has taught us to hear the pitch in such sounds), or the contrast between mechanically produced and sustained sounds (radio/piano) and those controlled by human breath (breath/melodica/harmonica). This last element breath brings the body of the performer emphatically to our attention, as well as retrospectively emphasising the role of the body in imperfections on the surface are occasionally apparent. In that piece the body seems at more of a remove, and yet the directness with which the contact between two surfaces is translated into sound in that piece more approaches the erotic than the solitariness and vulnerability of PART OF IT MAY ALSO BE PART OF SOMETHING ELSE.

In components derive their value solely through their assigned context, for two performers playing radio static and bowed wood, as with the three solo pieces on the CD, the performers are required to do more than one thing at once. These are often simple actions but performing them well simultaneously requires great poise and focus. In contrast, the performers in imperfections on the surface are occasionally apparent and any one part can replace any other part (the final piece on the CD) get to focus on a single action at a time. In the latter piece, three performers (playing violin, bowed metal, and coffee cup on brick) each have only one action, which they perform for 25 seconds at regular intervals, 15 times. So in a sense (conceptually) the piece consist of an identical 40 seconds of music, repeated 15 times. And yet, of course, it is never the same at any one point – but neither is it radically different. In this it puts me in mind of a recent composition I performed by Antoine Beuger, one of Saunders' favourite composers, which specified only that sounds should be either similar or different to the other sounds going on concurrently, or which had been heard previously. In the final analysis, however, every sound is in some way similar to every other sound, and also in some way different even from the most superficially similar sound. Really getting into these similarities and differences, finding one where previously you heard only the other, is one of the great pleasures of monochromatic music, whether produced by "building-up" or by "paring-down".

Philosophical tidbit #4

2011-08-17T23:52:00.003+01:00

Has anybody looked into the relationships between Spinoza's thought and current cosmological theories about the multiverse? Such as the relationship between the claim that "from the necessity of the divine nature there must follow infinite things in infinite ways" (Ethics, Pr. 16, I) and the idea that "all that can occur, occurs" (as paraphrased by George FR Ellis in his 2008 paper "Issues in the Philosophy of Cosmology").

Philosophical tidbit #3

2011-08-11T19:07:00.004+01:00

In his 1999 essay "A Fresh Look at Zuhandenheit", contained in his collection Towards Speculative Realism (Zer0 Books), Graham Harman argues that in discussing Heidegger's concepts of the ready-to-hand (Zuhandeheit) and present-at-hand (Vorhandenkeit),

[t]he custom is to distinguish between causality and perception, invisibility and visibility. In fact, the only relevant distinction is that beween actuality and relation.

But both of Heidegger's concepts are inextricably bound up with relation. They are mutually exclusive modes of Dasein's relation to the object: the information (knowing that) about the object that we gain when we consider it as present-to-hand is purchased at the expense of the usefulness (knowing how) of the object when ready-to-hand.
I understand that this predominance of relation is precisely what Harman wishes to critique, but on what I've read so far I don't understand quite how his argument develops out of Heidegger's theory - it seems more like a redefinition of the terms involved.

Philosophical tidbit #2

2011-08-10T15:38:00.003+01:00

Spinoza can seem astonishingly contemporary. From the appendix to part one of the Ethics:

Further, since they find within themselves and outside themselves a considerable number of means very convenient for the pursuit of their own advantage - as, for instance, eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, cereals and living creatures for food, the sun for giving light, the sea for breeding fish - the result is that they look on all the things of Nature as means to their own advantage.

Which view Spinoza of course insists is mistaken. It is this very same phenomenon which is adduced to explain the metaphorical applicability of the language of purpose to discussion of evolution, all the while insisting on the essential purposelessness of the processes involved (as Georg Büchner put it, "Alles, was ist, ist um seiner selbst willen da" - "Everything that exists, exists for its own sake").

Magee again

2011-08-10T05:18:00.003+01:00

I've been going over those good old Brian Magee programmes on philosophy again. Here's one I hadn't seen before, Hilary Putnam on the philosophy of science:

Philosophical tidbit #1

2011-08-09T18:04:00.002+01:00

The first sentence of Donald Cress' translation of Descartes' Discourse on the Method runs as follows:

Good sense is the most evenly distributed commodity in the world, for each of us considers himself to be so well endowed therewith that even those who are the most difficult to please in all other matters are not wont to desire more of it than they have.

My observation is simply that if one read that sentence in a translation of Marx, say, it would be heavily ironic.

Recent musicking

2011-08-09T17:33:00.002+01:00

But as a prelude to these philosophical tidbits, a couple of recent examples of what I've been up to musically. I am a musician, after all.

The first is an improvised performance with David Stent from ABC No-Rio on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The second is a version by myself, Angharad Davies, Julia Eckhardt and Stefan Thut of my recent composition "for four", from Solothurn in Switzerland.

Lash & Stent live in NYC by domlash

for four (Solothurn) by domlash

Reanimation

2011-08-09T17:28:00.003+01:00

After more than a year of dormancy, I feel the time has come to bring this blog back to life! Recently I've been doing a lot more philosophical reading than usual, so my intention is to regularly post little "philosophical tidbits" that come up in my reading. (I'm not formally trained in philosophy, I should point out.) The tidbits will be just things that occur to me, nothing very profound or earthshattering, but simply things that have bothered or intrigued me. And of course I heartily encourage comments - if others can help explain the source of my botherment or intrigue that would be wonderful. Let's see how it goes...

Maladjustment

2010-04-28T00:23:00.002+01:00

Don't know why I'd never heard of this speech before (which MLK delivered in a number of versions over a decade), but I saw this excerpt in an Adam Curtis documentary I watched last night:

"Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is the word "maladjusted". It is the ringing cry of modern child psychology. "Maladjusted". Now of course we all want to live a well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But as I move toward my conclusion I would like to say to you today in a very honest manner that there are some things in our society and some things in our world to which I am proud to be maladjusted. And I call upon all men of good will to be maladjusted to these things until the good society is realised. I must honestly say to you that I never intend to adjust myself to racial segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, leave millions of God's children smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society."

And here's the man himself delivering it. Now that's oratory.

Interblogging

2010-04-26T23:38:00.000+01:00

Richard Pinnell has kindly posted at review I wrote of a recent concert by the group incidental music on his excellent and indefatigable blog, The Watchful Ear. Seems superfluous to post it twice, so those interested can read it by heading here.

Practise as practice

2010-02-25T23:16:00.003Z

No apologies for having let the blog slide so much recently, I'll just get on with rectifying the situation somewhat, with a thought that's been bubbling around my head for the last couple of days as a result of having spent time at the wonderful Modern Times: Responding to Chaos exhibition of drawings (and some films) at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, as well as having begun Seth Kim-Cohen's recent book In The Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art, and which I shall attempt to express, in what I am afraid may appear at this stage a somewhat gnomic fashion.

What occurred to me is whether drawing and improvisation (specifically of the mode employed by musicians such as Derek Bailey) might be seen as practices which involve - indeed require - skill, but do not reify it and which may leave traces (& may involve an audience) but which do not rely either on the production of a finished object or the performance situation for their meaning. They can thus provide a means of avoiding the fetishism of the "artwork" to which modernism is prone, as well as incorporating some of conceptual art's valuable critiques of modernism (such as of its formalism) without conceptualism's didacticism, indifference to material, or parasitic relation to the forms of artistic practice. That is, the banality and traditionalism of drawing and instrumental practise could be seen to provide a way out of conceptualism's cerebral cul-de-sac. Sustained engagement with a material on a daily basis - without always keeping an eye on the production of "works" - replaces the need to trademark every advance. (Though in practice of course certain territory will be staked out: few visual artists only engage in informal drawing, and few improvisers make no public performances or recordings.) In fact, does conceptualism not subscribe fully to a modernist conception of progress, for all that it claims to undermine modernist illusions of originality?

So I am wondering whether one can respond to the crisis of "the work" not by questioning the form of the work, its reception and so forth, but by engaging with material in such a way that the production of "work" qua work is a secondary, and at times even incidental result of an artist's or musician's activity. It also seems possible that other art forms could have comparable versions of practice: photography and field recording might be two examples.

What we're getting up to...

2009-10-29T14:31:00.002Z

Documentation is amazing these days - the dust is still on our trail boots, and here for your listening and viewing pleasure are the quartet's first gig (at the Cluny in Newcastle) in its entirely and a chunk of the gig at the Vortex in London the next day. (There's also a review of the London gig on the Jazzwise website by Stephen Graham here.) If you enjoy these please come down to one of the other gigs! All the details are below in my previous post. Many thanks indeed to musicfilmbroth and to shuffleboil for making the videos.

On tour...

2009-10-27T10:03:00.002Z

Sorry, once again very slack in posting on this thing. I've got some thoughts to post on German Romanticism but you'll just have to contain your excitement about that, and instead (better late than never) here are the tour dates for the tour beginning tonight with the great US guitarist Joe Morris, Berlin-based Aussie drummer Tony Buck and Marsh Gibbon-based saxophonist Tony Bevan. You have been warned!

Tuesday 27th October
The Cluny, 36 Lime St, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, NE1 2PQ
8:30pm, £7/£5/£3 0191 230 4474
(double bill with the Alastair Spence Trio)

Wednesday 28th October
Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, London, N16 8AZ
8:30pm, £12

Thursday 29th October
Hare and Hounds, High St, Kings Heath, Birmingham, B14 7LG
8pm, 0121 444 2081

Friday 30th October
Cube Cinema, Dove Street South, Bristol, BS2 8JD
8pm, £9 (£7 adv)
with The Fungus Moth and the Cube Orchestra

Saturday 31st October
Folly Bridge Inn, 38 Abingdon Road, Oxford, OX1 4PD
8pm, £7/£5

Sunday 1st November
Rising Sun Arts Centre, 30 Silver Street, Reading, RG1 2ST
8:30pm, £7/£5

Philosophy 101

2009-09-07T12:22:00.003+01:00

Been trying to give myself a crash course in the history of philosophy recently. One most valuable resource has been the following series, splendidly presented by Bryan Magee, originally broadcast I believe in 1987 and available again via youtube and the commendable efforts of "flame0430", to whom many thanks. There are some technical issues (picture and sound synchronisation, in particular) but for a clear but unpatronising exploration of a huge body of thought they're wonderful.

Worth a pint of cider or two

2009-08-25T10:35:00.001+01:00

Bass solo! Bass solo!

2009-07-02T10:36:00.002+01:00

I know, it's a lazy way of maintaining a blog - just embedding youtube videos - but what the hell, this is such great music. Two of my absolutely favourite bass players (who have been continual inspirations to me for years) playing solo.

Mopomoso June 21st 2009

2009-06-23T12:28:00.003+01:00

Videos by Helen Petts, to whom many thanks.

Now That's What I Call Music 73

2009-06-02T23:38:00.002+01:00

Gigs this week

2009-05-26T15:07:00.002+01:00

A couple of gigs this week, with some incredible musicians. I'm very excited about both of them and if anyone could make either or (if you're really up for the improv this week!) both you would have huge appreciation on my part.

Wednesday 27th May

Dave Tucker (guitar), Dominic Lash (bass), Henry Lowther (trumpet), Tony Marsh (drums),Ray Warleigh (sax)

Flim Flam (Ryan's Bar, 181 Stoke Newington Church St.), 8:30pm, £6/£4

Quintet of amazing players put together by the irrepressible Dave Tucker. Don't really know how this will sound but I'm excited to find out . . . Plus the excellent prospect of a trumpet/clarinet duo of Paul Shearsmith and Alex Ward.

Thursday 28th May

Evan Parker (saxophones), Steve Beresford (piano), Javier Carmona (drums), Dominic Lash (bass)

My first time playing with Steve Beresford on piano in a small group, and I believe Javier Carmona's first encounter with Evan Parker in a small group. More astonishing players I truly feel honoured to be able to play with - and another band whose sound I can't quite predict, but then isn't that what improvisation is all about?

The Vortex, 11 Gillett Square, London, N16 8AZ, 8:30pm, £8
Tickets available here or on the door.

Forces of Convergence

2009-04-23T11:39:00.000+01:00

Self promotion time. The second Convergence Quartet tour begins this Saturday. I quite like what Time Out had to say:

"Youthful and intense US/European jazz improv quartet featuring cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, drummer Harris Eisenstadt, pianist Alexander Hawkins and bassist Dominic Lash. Bringing together two opposing but complimentary sides of improvised music – where Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton meet Evan Parker and John Butcher – this band take no prisoners in their reach for the outer limits of music."

Anyway, the gig details:

Saturday 25th April
The Cube, Bristol
8pm; £8
http://microplex.cubecinema.com/

Sunday 26th April
Rising Sun Arts Centre, Reading
8:30pm; £7/£5
http://www.risingsun-artscentre.co.uk/

Monday 27th April
Vortex Jazz Club, Dalston, London
8:30pm; £9
http://www.vortexjazz.co.uk/

Wednesday 29th April
Jazz Club at the Rainbow, Birmingham
8:30pm; £3
http://www.birminghamjazz.co.uk/

Thursday 30th April
Denis Arnold Hall, Oxford University Music Faculty, St Aldates, Oxford
8pm; free with retiring collection
http://www.music.ox.ac.uk/
(please note that some listings will give this concert as at the Holywell Music Room; this is not the case, the above location is correct)

Friday 1st May
Pitville Campus, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham
(with Ernst Reijseger solo and Alex Ward/Chris Cundy duo)
8pm; £7/£3
http://cheltenhamfestivals.com/jazz-2009/xposed-club-the-convergence-quartet/

Saturday 2nd May
Churchill College Recital Rooms, Cambridge
8pm; £9/£5
http://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/

Sunday 3rd May
Colchester Arts Centre
8pm; £10
http://www.colchesterartscentre.com/

Please do contact me if you would like more details.

Before the guitar hero there was . . .

2009-03-31T18:23:00.000+01:00

New Eartrip

2009-03-27T09:42:00.002Z

For more stimulating reading, check out the brand new issue of David Grundy's Eartrip magazine, including pieces on Pharoah Sanders, improvised music in Berlin, Graham Collier, Ghedalia Tazartes, Henry Grimes, Ken Hyder and much more. Plus a free MP3 compilation album which, amongst many I'm sure excellent pieces includes a double bass solo by myself. Download both magazine and album here.

And this Wednesday . . .

2009-02-23T17:43:00.001Z

Where did I come from?

2009-02-23T17:09:00.003Z

I'm a little confused about my musical background.

One moment I'm secure in the knowledge that I have my "roots in free jazz". . .

and the next minute I find out that I've "come up through the academic, classical crossover scene".

No disrespect intended to either author, incidentally! This is more just a tongue-in-cheek observation on the (perhaps unavoidable) tendency to, not pigeon-hole exactly, just to clarify, perhaps. Which inevitably implies simplifying.

And not that I want to give an "official" story, but for the record the first music I played live was rock, followed in the early 00s by free improvisation. This was mainly in ad hoc combinations or with one of two trios - sax/drums/bass with Sandy Kindness and Paul May, or violin/guitar/bass with Malcolm Atkins and David Stent. Kindness May Lash, via their instrumentation, may have leaned more towards a free jazz soundworld than the other trio, Hadaly, but that was not the musical intention. We never played any compositions, for example. Hadaly did meet on an MA course, and may have played music that had affinities with contemporary chamber music at times, but my conscious influences in that band were, rather, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and the Butcher/Durrant/Russell trio. My first extended encounters with jazz-derived music (as a performer) began a little later, in various bands led by the saxophonist Tim Hill. (It may be of interest that I still play with all of these musicians.)

Incidentally, I was listening to British and European free players (especially Derek Bailey and Evan Parker) and downtown American improvisers (Zorn) quite a long time before I really got into Ornette, Cecil, Ayler and so forth. I have no formal classical instrumental training of any kind, though I have had some fairly limited periods of compositional instruction. So now you know!

What's going on

2009-01-08T10:57:00.002Z

Morning!!

2009-01-04T15:41:00.001Z

This should blow away any remaining post-holiday cobwebs:

And if you don't know what the tune is (and would like to hear an earlier Brötzmann version with a different band), check this out.

And the award goes to . . .

2008-12-26T11:54:00.007Z

That time of year again. For anyone who's interested, here are my nominations for the best of 2008:

Best album
Schlippenbach Trio, Gold Is Where You Find It (Intakt)

Best music I heard on the radio
John Butcher Octet, somethingtobesaid (Jazz on 3, broadcast December 15th [recorded 22nd November, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival])

Best book
Branden Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate (Zone Books)

Best film
There Will Be Blood

Best concert
Didn't get out to many gigs I wasn't playing at this year, but for completely contrasting evenings it's a toss-up between:
Public Enemy (supported by Edan, Anti-Pop Consortium and Kool Keith) at Brixton Academy, May 23rd
and the double bill of Portable with Patrick Farmer and John Wall/John Edwards/Mark Sanders at Cafe Oto, September 8th

In memoriam
Many great people sadly died in 2008, but some artists who particularly meant something to me:

Steve Harris, Freddie Hubbard, Mauricio Kagel, Humphrey Lyttleton, Harold Pinter, Oliver Postgate

And one who won't be missed:

happy christmas

2008-12-24T19:18:00.001Z

In memory of Derek Bailey's death on Christmas Day 2005 (hard to believe it is already three years ago), a great clip of him playing with another master at the Knitting Factory in 1995.

Another master (with masterful accomplices)

2008-12-18T10:20:00.003Z

I love this music!! (It's Composition 98, by the way. Braxton's observes in his Composition Notes that audience responses to the piece moved from the question "Where is dee jazz?", through "boredom", "humour", "anger" and finally ended up with the more appropriate question "What is it?")

I would also recommend people who want to see more footage of Braxton to head over here.

The man himself

2008-12-09T16:13:00.003Z

I had no idea this existed. Not great quality of audio or visuals, but somehow it's tremendously moving just to see him speaking. (He's apparently in Paris, in a room in the PLM hotel on boulevard St Jacques in Montparnasse, talking about the German television production of What Where. The clip was filmed by John Reilly and included in the documentary Waiting For Beckett.)

Five in Five Days

2008-12-05T23:01:00.003Z

London Improvisers Orchestra
Sunday 7th December,
HMS President, Victoria Embankment, near Blackfriars Bridge, London, EC4Y OHJ
8pm, £7/£5

Tenth anniversary gig, should be a blast!!

Somedectet
Monday 8th December
Cafe Oto, Cafe OTO, 18-22 Ashwin St, Dalston, London, E8 3DL

Brand new band, playing compositions by myself, Alexander Hawkins, Abdullah Ibrahim, Joseph Jarman, Leo Smith and maybe more, as well as free improvisations.
I thought it was really exciting at the rehearsal this morning, so I hope it should be a great gig.

The line-up is as follows:

Nick Malcolm - trumpet
Gail Brand - trombone
Mark Hanslip - tenor saxophone
Shabaka Hutchings - tenor saxophone, bass clarinet
Dylan Bates - violin
Hannah Marshall - 'cello
Olie Brice - double bass
Dominic Lash - double bass
Alexander Hawkins - piano
Javier Carmona - drums

Ricardo Tejero/Steve Noble/Dominic Lash
Tuesday 9th December
Jazz Rumours at the Cross Kings, 126 York Way, London, N1 0AX
8:30pm, £5

Free jazz trio with excellent reeds and drums. Part of a really exciting bill - solo sax from New York courtesy of Blaise Siwula, and what should be an exhilarating trio of Norwegian stars Frode Gjerstad (reeds) and Paal Nilssen-Love (drums), with the great Nick Stephens on bass.

Paal Nilssen-Love, Frode Gjerstad, Nick Stephens
Wednesday 10 December
Oxford Improvisers at the Drama Studio, Oxford Brookes Headington Hill Campus
Oxford, OX3 0BP
8:30pm, £6/£4

And if you can't catch the trio in London, how about in Oxford? The gig to also feature an unusual ensemble featuring John Grieve, Chris Brown, Malcolm Atkins, Miles Doubleday and Sarah Verney Caird

Gannets
Thursday 11th December
The Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, London N16 8JH
8:00pm, £10

"Gannets posit an alternative jazz history in which 30s swing developed straight into a form of free jazz and fusion, without any of the intervening decades or subsequent factionalism. Featuring Fyfe Dangerfield, Alex J Ward, Christopher Cundy, Dominic Lash and Steve Noble." (it says here!)
I really enjoy this band - and we're supporting the exciting Acoustic Ladyland, so it should be a great night.

Sorry if this post seems like overkill but it would be really great to see anyone reading this at one or more of these shows!! Come and say hello . . .

Farmer Lash Milton @ Kämmer Klang 2/12/2008

2008-11-26T17:43:00.007Z

Patrick Farmer (snare drum)
Dominic Lash (contrabass)
Matt Milton (violin)

intense textural improvisations

Also:

* Lucy Railton (cello) performs Pression by Helmet Lachenmann

* Sasha Milavic Davies, Lucy Railton, Matthew Shlomowitz & Mark Knoop perform When Is a Door Not A Door? by Matthew Shlomowitz

* Mark Knoop & Matthew Shlomowitz perform Counting Duets by Tom Johnson

Tuesday 2nd December
8.30pm
Charlie Wright's
45 Pitfield Street
near Old Street tube in London

website

Slight change

2008-11-26T17:41:00.002Z

Just a small change to how I'm going to use this blog - I'll still be posting my rambling thoughts once a month or so, but since I haven't found a better way of doing this, I'm also going to be publishing posts announcing upcoming gigs of interest. I don't plan on bigging them up too much, just letting people know they're happening - if you can, come along to something and make up your own mind! First example of such to follow very shortly.

2008-11-22T12:28:00.002Z

I've been watching some more films than usual recently, partly due to my newest housemate, guitarist David Stent and his much better taste in and knowledge of them than me. So it was great fun last night to take part in the Not-Applicable collective's Appliances #8 evening of film and music at Cafe Oto - I played with Isambard Khroustaliov to Martin Hampton's film Traum. The whole evening was excellent and I strongly recomment following the links on the event page where a number of the films shown can be seen online. It was beautiful as well to see Misha Mengelberg's film of the cat on the piano, which I've heard about but never seen before.
The night before that gig I watched Christopher Petit's film Radio On for the first time. Barely any plot or characterisation to speak of, shot in gorgeous black and white and with a fantastic soundtrack featuring Kraftwerk, Bowie et al. And yet it manages to not be some kind of glorified music video: there may be barely any plot or characterisation but there is not none. In fact, influenced by then-contemporary German cinema, it ends up feeling wonderfully cinematic, utterly impossible to imagine transposing it into any other medium.
Petit speaks in the accompanying interview on the DVD about the cinematic nature of driving, with the windscreen as screen and accompanying soundtrack thanks to the car stereo. My recent car soundtrack has combined three Kraftwerk records with some Delta blues (Blind Willie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Son House). A strange combination perhaps, but inspired by Kodwo Eshun's book More Brilliant Than The Sun where, on page 100, he observes that

Dusseldorf Is The Mississippi Delta. Kraftwerk are to Techno what Muddy Waters is to the Rolling Stones: the authentic, the original, the real.

The two kinds of music might seem contradictory: the rough, expressive folkiness of the blues and the clean lines and machine sounds of the Kraftwerk. And yet alternating the two is a very satisfying experience, and actually highlights connections: rhythmic drive, timbral detail, irony. I'd stop short of wanting to hear a Kraftwerk remix of Dark is the Night, Cold is the Ground though!
And finally just a couple of shouts out about new records: John Edwards and Alex Ward have both just released solo albums. I count both of them as friends but as I was first introduced to both of them by their music I don't think I'm too biased in saying that both are extraordinary works, chock full of imagination and (the right sort of) virtuosity. They both manage that delicate trick of sounding very characteristic and yet also surprising - following each musician's train of thought through their music (something solo records of improvised music allow one to do more easily than group recordings) is a pleasure.

Made It

2008-11-05T12:47:00.000Z

The funniest moment from the BBC's coverage of an historic night:

Ram Narayan video

2008-09-12T00:35:00.003+01:00

I've been listening a lot to Ram Narayan recently, partly encouraged by the Oxford public library's decision to sell off its vinyl collection, where I've found some beautiful recordings of Hindustani classical music. (If you live anywhere near Oxford, don't go and check it out because I want all the Ocora records they're selling at a pound each for myself!) This beautiful video is from the excellent sarangi.info site, which is full of equally excellent stuff, including here full pdfs and accompanying audio examples from an excellent but sadly out-of-print book by Neil Sorrell that analyses Narayan's playing in detail, including a look at what he practices and a full transcription of a twenty-minute performance. I haven't finished studying it yet but it looks like one of the most enlightening looks at the nuts and bolts of this music that I have yet come across.

Still still here!

2008-08-22T16:58:00.003+01:00

Bit of a long time since any activity here, I know, and the projected new blog hasn't exactly taken off either! It is still in the pipeline, though, but I thought I should reawaken the monthly posts here so people don't start ignoring me entirely. It's been a good few months with some exciting gigs - plus I'm now the part-possessor of a bass that's going to live in Germany and has somehow ended up with the name of Hilda . . .

Anyway, just a couple of recommendations of things new to me. There's still three weeks left of the Cy Twombly exhibition at the Tate Modern. I finally managed to go this Wednesday. I actually have seen more of Twombly's work than most contemporary artists, now that I have seen the Tate show, because I also went to the exhibition of drawings at the Serpentine Gallery in 2004. I have long been impressed by the four large paintings based on the seasons that are in the Tate's permanent collection (and also in the current show), which are rich, beautiful and incredibly evocative of mood; I suppose if asked I would have listed Twombly as an artist I admire. But something hadn't quite clicked, for some reason. The same sensation continued walking around the Tate exhibition. Some of the earlier works are incredibly raw and sketchy; they interested me, but had someone challenged me to justify their reputation, I would have felt hard-pressed to do so. Then, later on in the exhibition are a series of green paintings that have almost the opposite problem, being so beautiful and accomplished they are almost decorative and facile. So I left the exhibition glad to have gone, interested and having seen some work I enjoyed, but untouched at a deeper level. And then, somehow, the next day reading the catalogue (I always like to buy the catalogue of art shows I've been to if I can afford it unless I really hate the work, ever since I didn't buy a Barnett Newman catalogue and then regretted it) somehow the click happened. Reading the essays and looking at the reproductions with the memory of the actual paintings and sculptures fresh in my mind, they suddenly made sense. I couldn't say exactly in what way; it has something to do with their mix of the imprecise and impetuous with the carefully considered. Also, maybe, that unlike much art related to Abstract Impressionism, they are somehow not very musical, but more about literature and the precise expression of emotion (which music may claim to be good at, but actually often fails to do). Whatever it was, it was a sudden moment, and quite a powerful experience - but really interesting, I thought, that it would happen not in the presence of the works, but afterwards. Now, of course, I want to go back and catch the show again before it finishes . . .

And speaking of literature, while in Germany earlier this month I finally got around to reading Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller. I'm sure many of you have already read it, but if not I cannot recommend it highly enough. Sure, it's cerebral, but not only that, it's also moving and gripping - I found the experience of wondering how he was going to sustain his opening conceit as arresting as any crime novel. And suffice it to say that he does so beautifully throughout.

Still here!

2008-05-08T09:39:00.004+01:00

Been quiet around here for a while, some of you may have noticed. Actually, this blog is soon to be going into semi-retirement. Not quite ready to announce the replacement but I hope it should be of interest, more predictably updated and a little different in some ways.

But some recent enthusiasms: this is witty and great fun, and this is an absolutely extraordinary novel; already planning to reread it.

I've enjoyed listening to the Arditti quartet playing the Grosse Fuge (lucky to find this and its sequel in one of those Notting Hill second hand record shops). Also stunning are Christopher DeLaurenti's field recordings of dissent and imperialism, available free here as a May Day present from UbuWeb. (But do also check out his brilliant website where there's much more to read, CDs can be ordered, etc).

And finally to provide something one can both look at and listen to, David Stent (electric guitar) and Bruno Guastalla (cello) providing a sterling rendition of my ongoing composition/improvisation project, Representations, in Abingdon (of all places!) a couple of months ago. Comments very welcome!

Representations Two (8/3/08) Part One

Representations Two Part Two

Bass connections

2008-03-27T23:55:00.009Z

In danger of missing my post-a-month rule here, but not sure I have anything particularly striking to say right now. Still, as I'm off to Germany for the weekend (from Heathrow Terminal 5 - fingers crossed our luggage will come with us!) first thing tomorrow I thought I should put something up.

So, just a little musical tidbit I spotted that may or may not be of any significance. In John Coltrane's Ascension, Edition 1, just before Elvin Jones' drum solo, there is a bass line that goes something like:

Then, more than twenty years later on Cecil Taylor's piece Involution/Evolution, from the CD Alms/Tiergarten (Spree), recorded in Berlin in 1988 by his European Orchestra, the two bassists (William Parker and Peter Kowald) open with a line resembling:

The two lines struck my ear as similar - possibly even a case of direct influence? It is probably impossible to prove either way, but I'd be interested if anyone has any thoughts.

Anti-Intellectualism and the modern piano

2008-02-09T10:59:00.000Z

Bashing the Archbishop of Canterbury is the sport of the moment. Or, rather, praising his intellect and then tearing apart a parody of his argument, as if theory and practice should be hermetically sealed from one another. I consider myself as an atheist and a Marxist (both awkward and slippery labels, but then all words are - that's the fun) but the Archbishop's view that what one believes should affect how one acts sounds to me like the classically Marxist idea of praxis - the way in which theoretical ideas are put into practice. The idea that people subscribe to networks of beliefs, which have complex and interconnected implications - rather than just choosing from various pop-up lists of equally irrelevant and privatized options - seems out of step with the public culture in Britain.

Tabloid misrepresentation of Dr Rowan Williams' recent speech (which is available here) is to have been expected. The level of Islamophobia in some of the responses has taken me aback, I admit - but much of this can I think be attributed to ignorance and misinformation. I am, therefore, if anything more concerned by what has been revealed about the woeful status of serious thought in this country's public debate. The Archbishop's speech is subtle and carefully argued. It is not, however, in the slightest bit woolly or obscure. It requires maybe half an hour's sustained concentration to read. On last night's Newsnight, however, Jeremy Paxman rather patronisingly said to the Bishop of Hulme, 'The paper is very thoughtful, it's very dense, it's very hard to understand in places to a layman such as myself. I'm sure you're quite clever enough to understand it ...' The Newsnight reporting gave no real sense at all of the way that the Archbishop carefully explored the nature of Sharia ('Universal principles: as any Muslim commentator will insist, what is in view is the eternal and absolute will of God for the universe and for its human inhabitants in particular; but also something that has to be 'actualized', not a ready-made system. If shar' designates the essence of the revealed Law, sharia is the practice of actualizing and applying it; while certain elements of the sharia are specified fairly exactly in the Qur'an and Sunna and in the hadith recognised as authoritative in this respect, there is no single code that can be identified as 'the' sharia.') or the fact that he explicitly rules out any possibility of a religious authority 'superseding' the secular legal system ('If any kind of plural jurisdiction is recognised, it would presumably have to be under the rubric that no 'supplementary' jurisdiction could have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights.' and 'Recognising a supplementary jurisdiction cannot mean recognising a liberty to exert a sort of local monopoly in some areas.'). Instead Douglas Murray - presented as the chairman of the laudable-sounding 'Centre for Social Cohesion' rather than the author of 'Neoconservatism: Why We Need It' - practically frothed at the mouth in his dismissal of all forms of Islamic law as barbaric and repressive.

As some have pointed out, Williams was in fact arguing through his discussion of Islam for a stronger role for religion in public life generally (though his evangelical critics who accused him of not stressing Christianity enough missed this point). He was not in any way endorsing doctrinaire fundamentalisms, but rather a greater sensitivity and public acknowledgment of the ways people relate to one another and the things they hold to be important. He was criticizing the position whereby it is claimed 'that to be a citizen is essentially and simply to be under the rule of the uniform law of a sovereign state, in such a way that any other relations, commitments or protocols of behaviour belong exclusively to the realm of the private and of individual choice.' Williams is not at all insensitive to the political implications of his position. Discussing - without mentioning it by name - the row over the Danish cartoons, he points out that 'offence needs to be connected to issues of power and status, so that a powerful individual or group making derogatory or defamatory statements about a disadvantaged minority might be thought to be increasing that disadvantage.' Quoting Maleiha Malik, Williams criticises the way that '[i]nstead of concentrating on the history of the individual or the origins of the social practice which provides the context within which the act is performed, conduct tends to be studied as an isolated and one-off act'.

In the conclusion to his lecture, Dr Williams acknowledges that 'is always easy to take refuge in some form of positivism'. What is really unsettling about the response to his comments (specifically that in the broadsheet newspapers and supposedly analytical television news programmes) is the way he has brought out more clearly than ever the deep-seated but ultimately shallow positivistic nature of contemporary British society, which clings to certain supposedly clear principles (such as the rule of secular law) as a way of repressing any serious discussion of the economic, racial and social vested interests which in fact dominate our society.

***

On Tuesday I went to hear the remarkable pianist Ian Pace give a recital in Oxford's Holywell Music Room. Apart from the five Ligeti Etudes that he concluded with (which I found pretty facile and tedious - maybe pianistically clever but musically vapid), the programme was exciting and thought-provoking. He opened with Eliot Carter's Sonata, a fascinatingly transitional work, where tonal structures sometimes gave way in priority to texture and timbre, and where the boundaries between slow and fast, continuity and disjunction, were all blurred so that one often turned unexpectedly into the other. The real highlight, though, was Stockhausen's Klavierstucke X. Beginning with immensely detailed and fast - but otherwise conventional - playing, the first forearm cluster genuinely made me jump. After that, the piece begins to alternate various types of activity with various forms of silence - or rather inactivity, for the pedal was often sustained and various resonances gradually died away. The relationship between these was fascinating. I asked Pace about the 'silences' during his post-concert talk, and he related how different they all seem. On a mundane level, some the resonances are very different (at one point powerfully rhythmic and two notes beat against one another), but beyond this Pace related how sometimes the silences seem like gaps - interruptions - sometimes they seem like the aftereffect or tail-end of the preceeding activity, and sometimes they seem (as Michael Finnissy apparently put it) like the sun passing behind a cloud: the music has been developing during the silence, we just haven't been able to hear it. This was the first music by Stockhausen I have heard live since his death and it reminded me powerfully how strong his work - particularly the early work - can be.

The other pianist I have been listening to a great deal recently is Cecil Taylor. What has struck me recently is how clear his work is. If one really listens, with a slightly disorientating mixture of total concentration on detail and abandonment to the music's momentum, almost every detail can be exciting, surprising but in no way muddled. I was inspired to this period of Taylor focus (I have one every year or two, as I do with various other musicians - Derek Bailey, Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker, John Coltrane and Morton Feldman being the main reoffenders) by getting my hands on Chris Felver's extraordinary film All The Notes. With no voiceover, but just skillfully edited footage of Taylor holding forth - both vocally and at the piano - one gets a powerful sense of his musical mastery, his obstinate idiosyncracy and most importantly his joy at life, music, the tree outside his window. I highly recommend taking the chance to see it if you get one. (The DVD is available here.)

***

And finally - I've been loving the Nicholas Gurewitch's Perry Bible Fellowshipcartoons in the Guardian for a while now, and I've just discovered they have a great website: pbfcomics.com.

Here's a taste, anyway, in case you haven't seen the strip (click on it to make it bigger):

And finally finally, from the beautiful South Bank Show programme on John Bird and John Fortune (their sustained friendship and sustained satirical anger were inspiring and unexpectedly moving), here is their excellent analysis of the causes of the current financial crisis:

2008-01-06T17:33:00.000Z

The new year has begun gloomily for the area of the music world I am a part of. Late in 2007 it became apparent that the London Musician's Collective has had its Arts Council funding cut by 100%, and that the Jazzgalerie Nickelsdorf in Austria, home of excellent regular gigs and one of the best improvised music festivals in Europe, is threatened with the prospect of closure. Then in early January it becomes apparent that the new owners of the Red Rose in Finsbury Park, London, have new plans for it and so the room with one of the best acoustics in London, home of the regular improvised music nights Mopomoso, Free Radicals and Back In Your Town, as well as countless other one-offs (sometimes the number of events in a single month runs to double figures), and the place where I have heard and played a disproportionate amount of my all time favourite gigs is no more.
The reasons for all these happenings are different, and complex, and clearly if I lived in Kenya or Burma, for example, I would have more pressing things on my mind. Nevertheless, I think evidence of an healthy situation when cultural events on the fringe are able to thrive - and that the opposite must be the case when they cannot. Still I know in all case that the audience and musicians involved are amazingly resourceful and dedicated, and I am sure we'll pull through.

***

On a positive note, the first new music I have discovered this year is not new at all: I found an LP recording of Boulez conducting his own Le Marteau Sans Maitre. I've heard a lot about this piece but I'd never heard it before, remarkably enough. What was really striking about it is how full of the features that people complain about as post-serialist cliches: nervous, dense, busy polyphony for example. It is also easy to see the influence of the piece on the first wave of freely improvised music, such as John Stevens' Spontaneous Music Ensemble. The rapid motivic echoes in the first movement are particularly reminiscent of this. But what is wonderful is that the piece really makes me remember how cliches only become so through derivative or thoughtless misuse of characteristic features. In this case Boulez's ear for timbre and sparkling independence of mind come through undiminished over half a century later.

One more

2007-12-31T14:34:00.000Z

The traditional end of year list post I'm afraid. My top ten records that I got this year should be up soon on the Oxford Improvisers site. In the spirit of Alexander Hawkins cheating by mentioning all the records that didn't get into his top ten, and the fact I've just bought quite a lot of music that didn't make this year's list but is obviously ineligible for next years list, honourable mention must go to Blind Willie Johnson, Kevin Drumm and Grinderman.
And for the lists:

Gigs of the year (I've allowed myself three because they were all so different):

Cecil Taylor/Anthony Braxton/William Parker/Tony Oxley [RFH, London, July 8th]

Prince aftershow [IndigO, London, September 9th]

Luigi Nono, La lontananza nostalgica futura utopica, performed by Irvine Arditti & Andre Benjamin [QEH, London, October 31st]

Book of the year: Herman Melville, Moby Dick - and honourable mention for Alan Moore's utterly astonishing graphic novel From Hell

Exhibition of the year: Callum Innes, From Memory, Modern Art Oxford

That's it I think - see you next year!

Seasonalness

2007-12-19T23:14:00.001Z

Quite by chance, I've just been listening to some music and reading a novel which seem appropriate to the season in the best possible way. Normally I try and avoid 'Christmasy' material like the proverbial plague (speaking of which, by the way, I recently discovered the song 'Darkness' by Scott Walker, part of a project based on the Biblical plagues of Egypt; absolutely gripping, and simultaneously hilarious and terrifying in best Walker fashion), but here it was satisfying to be listening and reading to these things at the relevant time of year.

The music was Derek Bailey's records Standards and Ballads, which were prompted when Derek played requests at a dinner party in New York at Christmas, 2001. The second record is the more well known, and was recorded in London, but Standards, released this year, is a slightly earlier New York session that was intended to come out as Ballads until Derek decided he was unhappy with the results and that he wanted to have another go. The result is a very rare and intriguing insight into his working methods. There is stunning playing on both CDs, but on Standards, Bailey plays in his usual way for the majority of the time, appending a brief run through a standard tune at the end of every improvisation. At the second session, the standards are interspersed much more regularly through the playing, giving rise to a fascinating middle ground when Derek gets close to a given tune, but before he has begun it in earnest. What is really interesting is that he did not hit upon this approach first time; which is not to say that the second session is any less improvised, merely that a different set of objectives was in place by then. The result of both sessions now being available is a great and beautiful lesson in the nature of improvisation, revealing its strengths but also warning us against any lazy assumptions about 'sponaneity'.
Speaking of Bailey, I discovered this week that my friends Samantha Rebello and Olivier Rodriquez live right around the corner from 14 Downs Road, Hackney, where Derek lived for many many years. I paid a visit there this Monday just to see the house, never having visited while Derek was alive. It was a moving experience, grounding Bailey's world for me in a place I can now imagine and visualise.

The novel in question was Ya! by Douglas Woolf, a writer I discovered through the printed enthusiasm of JH Prynne. ('This is the absolute prose of our time...') As with my visit to Bailey's house, this is also a kind of pilgrimage story, a semi-autobiographical road novel about the protagonist's journey across the United States to be with his daughter at Christmas. Full of acute observation, some quasi-Beckettian physical humour and a hint almost of magic realism, the novel is written with the lightest of touches but is one of the most affecting and funniest things I have read for a long time. I look forward to rereading it soon - highly recommended, if you can get hold of a copy.

Strung Out

2007-11-03T16:50:00.001Z

Sorry for the long break in posting - rather spectacularly breaking my self-imposed rule of at least one post a month. I had intended to write a long post about the weekend of the 7th to the 9th of September, which was in some ways probably the best weekend of my life! On the Friday night I heard some fascinating improvised music at the Red Rose in London from Richard Barrett, John Butcher, Adam Linson and Roger Turner. Then on Saturday my good friend David Stent had somehow managed to get tickets to the one day final at Lords between England and Sri Lanka (which we won - though Kevin Peterson deserved a severe karmic backlash for running out Ian Bell who was playing absolutely beautifully). In the evening after a great meal at another friend's place David and I went for a couple of hours to DMZ and caught storming sets from Digital Mystikz and Kode 9 - my first taste of live dubstep, which very satisfyingly rearranged my internal organs. And then on Sunday I went off to hear Prince at the O2 arena (a soulless venue if ever there was one, but things there at least work efficiently, I'll say that for it). The arena show was cool, but the real meat came in the aftershow gig - Prince and his band from 12:30am to 3! The man's rhythm guitar is absolutely awesome - his time is incredible.

All in all, probably best I didn't write a long post on all that - it would more than likely just been a tedious gush. Various things have been occupying my time since then, particularly string-related things. I am, this evening, going to play the last gig on what has been an ear-opening tour with Philipp Wachsmann on violin and Bruno Guastalla on cello and bandoneon. I have really enjoyed the developing musical relationship between ourselves, particularly as it centres on the issue of string sound. Things I knew intellectually have become very practically clear to me. One of those things is that cello, bass and violin are in some ways very similar instruments and in other ways hugely different. The colours and responsiveness are highly individual; though we can blend together we can also echo each others' gestures and come out sounding totally different. The subtlety of timbral differentiation that strings can produce (the slightest change of bow speed or weight having dramatic musical effects) and how this bleeds into issues of musical interaction, harmonic content and linear delineation has been a revelation. Philipp has produced some utterly inspiring playing (his solo in Liverpool on Sunday was a perfect combination of timbral detail and melody, and was very moving), as has Bruno (his directness and exploratory poise is always remarkable, and his very physical relationship to the instrument - he also makes and repairs violins and cellos - adds another level of embodied musicianship). I have tended, while obviously learning a lot from other bass players, to try and get my improvisational inspirations from other instruments so as not to get stuck too close to home - from saxophonists or guitar players, for example. But I will come away from this tour with a renewed sense of the bass as a bowed string, and whole new areas to explore.

Fitting right in with the string theme, I heard on Wednesday Irvine Arditti perform Luigi Nono's late work for violin and tape, La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura in the Queen Elisabeth Hall, with André Richard on sound projection. I must admit to not knowing a great deal about Nono's music but this often hushed, haunting late work had me hooked. The stillness and fragility of the musical fragments was engrossing, but the piece never becomes mood music - it is impossible to predict at any moment what is going to happen next. The musicians timed their performance to perfection, with some beautiful overlappings between live and taped violins. The movement of the live player around the hall (six music desks being spread out around the performance venue) worked without any sense of gimmickry. There was a beautifully understated piece of theatre early on: when Arditti first moved, he had a look at the music on the second set of music stands nearest him, but then carried on to a third desk further away; a Beckettian sense of being lost was conjured, but with the lightest of touches. Then, when he played from a desk at the very back of the hall, behind the audience, it became fascinating to try and distinguish the live from the taped violins. What gave it away very often were the very slight inconsistencies in tone from the live player - for example at the beginnings of notes, which often had to be played very quietly and hence with a very slow bow. Arditti played magnificently but always humanly - frailty was not "exposed" by this music, but rather revealed and allowed to be what it was, evidence of the real presence of a human being manipulating an instrument.

One Year On

2007-08-31T23:48:00.001+01:00

I just realized that I started this blog in August 2006, so I am now a blogger with one year's experience. Perhaps some taking stock is in order, but I feel no desire to write some kind of tedious retrospective. Recently endings seem to have been more common than continuings - as well as the deaths of Art Davis, Paul Rutherford and Max Roach I recently read on the I Hate Music messageboard of the death of jazz writer Richard Cook at the tragically young age of 50. I certainly did not agree with all of his judgements but he was an excellent, literate and thoughtful critic of the music, and through his work both for the Penguin Guide to Jazz and the Wire had a big hand in helping me to gain my initial bearings in the music. I have also, not consciously intentionally, been listening to music with an elegaic strain (just before hearing of Art Davis' death I finally got hold of a copy of John Tilbury and Keith Rowe's powerful album Duos for Doris, dedicated to Tilbury's then recently deceased mother) and reading about death (in the form of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's engrossing and disturbing take on the Jack the Ripper murders, From Hell). And, while not wanting to make this sound either portentous or pretentious, my first experience last Sunday of a really bad back (of the unable to get up out of bed kind of bad) has, I hope, made me a little less cavalierly unaware of physical frailty than usual.

I don't want to, or feel able to, draw any conclusions from all this. But it does somehow make the exciting new music I have been listening to seem all the more vibrant. This music has included a lot of largish ensemble improvising - the fORCH album spin networks and the Anthony Braxton 12+1tet nine CD plus DVD (!) box set 9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006. The fORCH set is in every way utterly remarkable; two CDs of music in impeccable sound, beautifully sequenced, and featuring utterly individual improvisers (Richard Barrett, Paul Obermayer, John Butcher, Rhodri Davies, Paul Lovens, Phil Minton, Wolfgang Mitterer and Ute Wasserman) creating a wholly original group music; where instrumental, vocal, electronic, and electroacoustic means of producing sounds combine to form an alien and in some ways abstract music that is somehow at the same time rattlingly physical, embodied and rhythmically aware. Highlights include the two 'fOKT' half-hour semi-scored pieces for the whole ensemble, an astonishingly fragile yet alarming duo of Davies and Wasserman, and a ferociously scatalogical trio between Minton and FURT (Barrett and Obermayer). I realize this reads as a bit of gush rather than an evaluation, but this is stunning music. Philip Clark's somewhat lukewarm review in the latest issue of the Wire is a mystery to me. The Braxton set I am not qualified to comment on fully, only having watched the DVD (brilliantly edited, and would only have been improved, I feel, through having interviews with the other ensemble members as well as Braxton himself) and listened to the first CD once. I admit to a small amount of skepticism at the thought of yet another extensive piece of Braxton documentation; would Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard have been a better record if it had been an 8-LP set? So I will report back when I get to the end, but I have to say that the first CD is utterly enthralling. In a manner somewhat analogous to much of Cecil Taylor's work, the music has a certain consistency of surface to it - in terms of note density, at least, which tends to be fairly high. Beyond this however, the variation of groups and subgroups within the ensemble; of dynamics; of timbre and colour; of rhythmic and melodic complexity or simplicity is enormous. Particularly fascinating are some of the backing figures cued in by various members of the band, which give the music a really perceptible foreground and background while still keeping an improvised openness and unpredictability at all times - something very rare for improvising ensembles of this size. I have not been so compelled on first listening to a large group recording (apart from fORCH, mentioned above) since I first heard the 1988 recording of Cecil Taylor's European Orchestra, Alms/Tiergarten (Spree) last year.

Music: worth living for.

Richard's Wise Words

2007-08-24T17:53:00.001+01:00

R.I.P.

2007-08-17T00:10:00.001+01:00

Art Davis

2007-08-03T09:30:00.000+01:00

Last Saturday another great musician died - the bass player Art Davis. Davis, owing to various circumstances, is not nearly as well known as he should be. Perhaps most familiar to most people through various two-bass set-ups with John Coltrane (including Ascension and the recently unearthed first - sextet - take of A Love Supreme) he was an absolutely monster bass player, supremely powerful and musical. His work with Max Roach is also fantastic. A talented orchestral player (and a practicing clinical psychologist!), he was one of the youngest musicians and very first African Americans to become a staff musician on network television in the 1960s. My suspicion was that were this not the case he might well have been Coltrane's regular bass player at that period (not to take anything away from the equally astonishing Jimmy Garrison, by the way). If you can find it, I recommend checking out the film Imagine the Sound, where Davis plays in trio with Bill Dixon - the music is remarkable, and the contrast in the interview sections between what looks like a four-foot tall and highly loquacious Dixon and the nine-foot and virtually silent Davis is priceless.

Masters at Work

2007-07-10T09:51:00.001+01:00

I have to post something about the concert I heard on Sunday - the much-hyped first ever meeting between Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton, with William Parker and Tony Oxley. As it is, everything musically I would want to say about the gig has been expressed with much more eloquence than I could manage here. (Reading this post feels rather pleasantly like having our conversation on the drive home all over again, though with somewhat less overexcitement!) So perhaps I can risk a couple of more personal comments on my own experience of the concert. In short, the gig was in all ways one of the best concert-going experiences I have ever had. I was late - I had a gig earlier that day in Taunton, and as we got closer to London (hearing Federer win Wimbledon once again, and deciding that tennis doesn't really work on radio) the roads got more and more clogged at every junction. My stress levels increased somewhat - more so when the South Bank Centre car park proved difficult to find. Still, in the end I arrived only twenty or twenty-five minutes after the scheduled start. There had been speculation as to who the support band would be - as I was shown into my seat and my eyes adjusted to the dark, I realized that what people had been joking about had happened - it was Polar Bear. I had never heard them live, so in a way I was glad to, but I am afraid to say that for all their musical skill I found the music utterly inocuous and often tedious. Perhaps I am being unfair to them because this was the wrong venue - perhaps one needs to hear them in a sweaty club. But actually they were a perfect support band - they heightened my anticipation for the main event no end!
The drama of the rest of the show was astonishing. I was hugely excited to hear Cecil perform some of his poetry (the highlight for me being the relish with which Cecil pronounced the word 'shrub') and dance to the piano - he had done neither the two previous times I've heard him live. The duos with Oxley were, it is true, a little musically odd - even tentative - at times (though Cecil's touch and harmony were enthralling) - but this increased my sense of anticipation, always wondering if Parker and Braxton were going to wander out and join them. Hearing William Parker - one of my bass heroes, I think it is fair to say - solo was a totally unexpected bonus. I have heard some people felt aggrieved by the lack of a second set by the quartet, and I certainly would have loved to hear one, but actually in terms of the shape of the evening I didn't feel short-changed. The set they did play was an epic journey itself. I don't think I have ever spent an evening where for the entire night I was literally on the edge of my seat, leaning forward to catch more of the music. I'm glad there aren't more gigs than this - I'm not sure my nervous system could take it.

Brass'n'bass

2007-06-18T11:59:00.000+01:00

I heard an extraordinary concert last night at the Red Rose in London, part of the Mopomoso series organised by John Russell. First was the duo of Chris Dadge and David Laing, two thirds of the Canadian group The Bent Spoon Trio. They had played in Oxford on Wednesday but I was out of town then so it was good to be able to hear their intense but sensitive free-jazz derived music. Mick Beck then played a solo set - one piece each on bassoon and tenor sax. As it happens, this was the third such set I had heard from Mick in as many weeks (he has been on a solo tour) and for my money it was the best - very focussed but unpredicable, intensely timbral, mostly abstract but with a rhythmic kick to it.
The main event, however, was the acoustic quartet of Evan Parker on tenor saxophone, John Edwards on double bass, John Russell on acoustic guitar and Peter Evans on trumpet and piccolo trumpet. A similar group to this, with Mark Sanders (on percussion) rather than Evans recorded the CD London Air Lift just over ten years ago. This has long been one of my very favourite and most often played CDs of improvised music. The music is often dense yet always transparent, with the musicians constantly interweaving their playing with each other so that nobody emerges as 'soloist' or 'accompanist'. I have heard Parker on a number of occassions with just Edwards and Sanders; these groups have been wonderful, but they draw on more free jazz - louder, more robust, and with more of a hierarchy of instrumental roles. I did once hear a trio of Parker, Edwards and Russell, which had had many of the qualities I love about the recording, but the dynamics and complexity of relationship available in a quartet are very different to those of a trio. And so, a quartet of Parker, Edwards, Russell and pianist Agusti Fernandez at last month's Freedom of the City festival promised much. Any yet Fernadez's noisy, dense and raucous playing pushed the group into a different area - Edwards followed the piano with powerfully muscular bass playing, Parker was somewhat obscured and Russell - except in a beautiful duet passage with Parker - often wholly inaudible. So I was intrigued to see what difference swapping one musician would make to the music.
And what a difference! Evans has been talked about a lot recently, largely because of the release of his solo CD More is More, on Parker's Psi label. I finally bought this CD fairly recently, and I have enjoyed it. Evan's technique and imagination are extraordinary, though what I really like about the album is that it doesn't sound as if Evans has worked out a defined solo 'concept' - he improvises naturally, according to his musical instincts. However, I hadn't been quite as gripped by the album as some people I have talked to - I have played it maybe four times since buying it. Anyway, the real test of any improviser is in how they play with others. Even my very favourite solo improvisers (Derek Bailey, John Butcher) I would usually on balance rather here in company. Did Evans pass the test? With flying colours and then some, I would say. Some of what he did required extraordinary technique, but he never flaunted it. The interplay was four-way all the time - in fact, apart from a very brief passage of John Edwards on his own towards the end, which became a trio with Russell and Evans, all four musicians pretty much played throughout. But there was always space, and even when it got spiky and noisy one could hear what each player was doing - they balanced perfectly between blending their sounds with each other and marking out sonic territories of their own, continually but coherently shifting the musical foreground and background. In such detailed, interwoven music picking out favourite moments is difficult but there was a remarkable passage where Evans and Parker tossed a phrase back and forth, blending seamlessly between audible gesture and response and an inextricable skein of high harmonics. I will stop here as I know gushes can be exhausting to read, but suffice it to say that I really hope that this group continues to perform, and also that there will be a CD forthcoming to take its place on my shelves alongside London Air Lift.

***

I'm still as into the dubstep as I was last time I posted. Another recommendation for information and comment about the scene and solid musical taste is Markin Clark's blog, Blackdown. The small scene/broad church aspect of the music is realy appealing to me - where else would kode9, a Scot with solid academic credentials who enthuses about Deleuze and Ballard, be seen as a peer to the 21-year old Skream from Croydon without anyone batting an eyelid? Informative and entertaining videoed interviews with both of them can be found here.
Small world synchonicities keep appealing to me and there have been quite a few in connection to this music - kode9's enthusiasm for Ballard, for example, when only in February I read my first Ballard novel (The Drowned World - which interested me at the beginning but lost me by the end, partly because of its casual 1960s racism); or for RZA and the Wu-Tang clan, who I first listened to properly at the end of last year, and whose hugely entertaining and thought-provoking Wu-Tang Manual I had just started reading when I got into dubstep. More weirdly, a friend of mine from sixth form that I haven't kept in touch with but have seen from time to time, Rowan Collinson, who used to work for radio production company Somethin' Else, I recently saw referred to in relation to an early (2003) BBC documentary on dubstep - a blog that archived the documentary commented:

"Massive props to Rowan Collinson, who produced the documentary for Somethin' Else. In fact Rowan was the first person to get dubstep played on Radio 1 - before Peel, before Mary-Anne Hobbes, before the lot of them. And where's his medal? Where's his parade? ;-)"

I second that and Rowan if you read this get in touch!

***

By the way, mentioning Deleuze as I did above, I always thought I didn't share a birthday with anyone interesting but I discovered today that actually I share one not only with Deleuze but with Cary Grant, A.A. Milne and Oliver Hardy. That's not a bad bunch - and who cares if Kevin Costner wants to crash the party?

***

I final recommendation - on Friday, prompted by having enjoyed the South Bank Show on him and having always meant to buy a Pulp record but never doing so, I got a copy of Jarvis Cocker's solo record from last year. Proper rousing, moving and puzzling rock songs, all of them immediate but with plenty of sonic and lyrical layers - and the hidden track at the end, 'Running the World' is my new favourite song. Check out this great karaoke version:

Lash's recent miscellany

2007-05-29T16:14:00.000+01:00

I've heard and seen some great performances recently. I had a gig in Kendal on the 13th of May, so decided to catch the music at the Music Lovers Field Companion festival in Newcastle the day before. (In fact, it was worth it just for the drive from Newcastle to Kendal, which is absolutely gorgeous. Sibelius [one of Joanna Lumley's choices on Desert Island Discs] has never sounded so good to me as it did when an orchestral swell coincided exactly with my cresting a ridge and seeing Cumbria laid out before me.) The music was excellent, and well captured by Richard Pinnell's post here. Two sets that I don't think Richard heard were by the new version of Ascension (Stefan Jaworzyn on guitar and Paul Hession on drums) and a New York free jazz duo featuring John Blum on piano and Jackson Krall on drums). Both were fine, energetic but complex and coherent improvisations, but both were hampered by the acoustics of the Sage's Northern Rock Foundation Hall. It's dryness had helped Angharad Davies, Tisha Mukarji and Andrea Neumann to produce music of startling clarity and transparency - here (combined with the flatness of the audience's response) it robbed the music of its wallop.

Richard notes in his post 'the apparent disinterest of a few of the Sinfonia players' while performing Radu Malfatti's composition. (Brief Lynn Truss moment - I'm sure what Richard meant to say was 'lack of interest' rather than 'disinterest' - disinterest would actually have been appropriate here . . .) I found the music enthralling, and was very surprised at the end to discover it had lasted as long as it did. But some of the players did do their best to spoil it by just not taking it seriously at all - which was highly unprofessional, at best. When I mentioned this to the composer later, however, he was much more sanguine, observing that with music of that type and a group of that size there would always be some who weren't into it, and that he was very pleased with the performance. I found the realism and perspective of a man often caricatured as a relentless musical extremist to be wonderfully refreshing.

Two days later I heard a perfomance by The Good Anna at the Port Mahon in Oxford. A brief but intense set. I will admit to missing the manic nature of Graham's guitar playing when I last saw the band three years ago, but his focus during this set was admirable. The way Patrick moved from skittering drumming to more extended timbral improvisation was excellent, and a particular highlight was an extended section of polystyrene rubbing on his drum skins - timed to perfection to keep it just this side of excruciating! Let's hear it for acoustic noise music.

Finally, three days after that the poet, sculptor and performance artist Brian Catling gave a performance at the Jam Factory in Oxford as part of Oxford Contemporary Music's Slounge series. I have known of Catling for a while as an associate of Iain Sinclair's, and was very struck some years back by his prose poem The Stumbling Block Its Index, which can be found in the Sinclair edited anthology Conductor of Chaos. His performances I had only read about, however. He began by slamming a small glass tealight holder onto a table at regular intervals, before slowly and with shaking hands removing his watch, glasses and ring. Standing before us, he then opened his jacket to reveal photocopied images (mostly looking Victorian or early twentieth century) of people with entirely hair-covered faces. Moving around the room, he began to slice these pictures in half with a cut-throat razor, occasionally handing them to audience members. (He had an excellent knack for choosing the people who looked most worried by the whole thing!) A few more activities intervened, before he found himself standing on a table on the opposite side of the room from where he began. He then began to cover his chin with shaving foam, but didn't stop there and continued to apply the foam until his entire head had disappeared in a mass of white foam. Then he slowly and methodicaly removed it with the razor. When this was complete, he vanished through an adjacent door, and a shaving foam-flecked hand emerged and for a long time banged a tealight holder on the small glass panel in the middle of the door. Only when Catling began banging on the table at the other side of the room did we realise this to be a piece of misdirection involving an accomplice. He put his accessories on again and then left.

I would not normally say that so-called 'live art' is an area I have a great deal of interest in, but this was a marvelously captivating performance. It's emotional range was large, from very funny moments to passages of real tension and intensity. The absolute focus Catling maintained throughout was very impressive. The memory of the event will certainly stay with me - it makes me think that for all of free improvisation's claims to heighten the moment, too often performances of improvised music fall short of the absolute focus and control necessary to really achieve this.

***

I am currently about three quarters of the way through CLR James' Beyond a Boundary, having finally taken Patrick Taylor's advice (see his comment here). It is a gripping and inspiring book - James' passion and clear sightedness, as well as his lack of false modesty, are very refreshing. His argument that sport for the ancient Greeks held the position that 'high' art (theatre, for example) does for us, and that it was Greek theatre that was the populist spectacle, are a very useful corrective to ingrained attitudes. It is also a great example of practical and realistic Marxism: 'W.G.'s batting figures, remarkable as they are, lose all their true significance unless they are seen in close relation with the history of cricket itself and the social history of England.' I wish I had read this book when studying Victorian literature at university - I don't remember there being much on sport in Houghton's classic The Victorian Frame of Mind, which James makes seem an egregious ommission.

***

Finally - my latest enthusiasm (I announce this at the risk of seeming desperate to appear trendy - but I know I've no chance!) is dubstep. I bought the Burial album early this year, feeling I should check it out after so many end-of-year polls (dangerous things though they are) included it. It's sparseness and melancholy did really appeal, and I also enjoyed the Kode 9 & Spaceape album, though it's cleaner production took longer to grow on me. But the real key has been discovering the music's web presence. Musically it does often sound to me most like an extension of drum'n'bass, but with sparser drums and ridiculously varied and extreme use of bass and sub-bass. I used to listen to a quite a bit of drum and bass - losing touch completely with the urban scene with the advent of Garage - so this really appeals to me. But what's great about the internet is the ease with which one can access radio stations - check out Sub FM - and download MP3s of DJ mixes (for starters, try the podcasts from FWD>> here). Sure, much of the hype is overblown, but the music itself is exciting - and the combination of the music with the sense of it as the representation of a living and changing scene more exciting still. Now to actually go to a dubstep club night ...

Practice PS

2007-05-06T00:28:00.000+01:00

I should have made clearer in the last note that the regime described their is neither recommended, nor even my ideal schedule. But it is what I actually do! Of course, I have all sorts of aspirations - I would love at some point to have, say, a year where I really focus on my instrument as my number one priority, something I have never done. But my current routine seems to work more or less, for the time being at least. . .

Practicing

2007-05-05T23:27:00.000+01:00

It has been requested that I post something about my practice regimen. I'm happy to do so but I'm not sure if I can really say anything that will illuminate the process of improvisation.

Derek Bailey said in an interview with John Corbett (published in Corbett's book Extended Play), 'I'm an obsessive practicer at home, but I don't think anything happens for me as regards development or picking up new habits or whatever you want to call it, except in the playing situation. And it's always from other people, I think.' I feel like that. Not that I'm an obsessive practicer, though. I try and manage about two hours five or six days a week. My regime also changes quite a bit but at the moment it's like this: half an hour of warming up, including all major and minor keys both arco and pizzicato, and touching up on certain extended techniques, particularly multiphonics and subharmonics. Then half an hour of pizzicato jazz work, at the moment focusing on the music of Thelonious Monk - mostly playing along with records. The third half hour is classical arco work - I'm working on Schubert's The Trout at the moment, which is interesting because I have no classical training at all! Then the final half hour is on improvisation - sometimes I explore particular preparations or focus on certain extended techniques or concepts for a while but usually I just play.

Once again Derek Bailey expresses it best (from his book Improvisation). The quote is lengthy but very apposite. Bailey refers to 'woodshedding' and observes that '[i]t is the bridge between technical practise and improvisation. As personal as improvisation itself, it approximates to it but is really quite different. Aurally this different might manifest itself in a greater
deliberateness, occasional stops and starts, and perhaps repetitions for obvious technical reasons. Or the differences might not be aurally apparent at all. But it will be there and it lies in the improvisor's relationship to what he is playing. He listens to himself in a different way. He might be much more analytical and much less involved in aspects of playing created by the impetus or the tension of performance. The playing might be much the same as when improvising but the focus of attention will be on the details of playing rather than on the totality, and what is being exercised is choice.'

So that's it, at the moment. A given practice regimen for me tends to last a few months before I rearrange things but the broad categories remain the same. Certain things I plan to do but only do sporadically - such as really investigating certain techniques systematically. But the regime has to feel fresh for me to feel excited enough actually to pick the bass up, and the best way to do this is change things about periodically. And I don't really practice improvisation - I don't think you can. You practice certain specific things (which have varying degrees and kinds of relevance to improvisation), and you improvise. That's it.

Blogging from a stationary position

2007-05-03T23:47:00.000+01:00

I'd intended to call this post 'blogging on the move' and write it on the bus between Oxford and London this morning - except that the wi-fi on board didn't seem to be working, so I couldn't and am instead typing this in the familiar surroundings of my bedroom.

Last night I had the very great pleasure of playing for the second time in a trio with the astonishing Lol Coxhill and the equally marvelous Alexander Hawkins. (Alex has written some very pertinent if somewhat labyrinthine musings about the gig on his blog here (under 'Timequake'), which incidentally I highly recommend you all check out anyway.) I greatly enjoyed playing but the special treat was a duo performance (the first ever) between John Butcher and Angharad Davies (depping at the last minute for an indisposed Dave Tucker). They only played one piece of, I would estimate, about 15 minutes, but it held me absolutely spellbound throughout. Sometimes their sounds meshed inextricably, at others one was reminded very clearly and beautifully of the difference between sounds made by blowing through a metal tube and the sounds made by bowing or plucking bits of metal attached to a wooden resonator. The pacing was marvellous - not that it was all cosy; there was a real tension sometimes waiting for a new sound to begin or wondering what action one of the musicians would take next. About halfway through a bit of a stupid grin developed on my face and I thought 'there's nothing about this music I don't like'. It's gigs like that that make one realize what we do it all for!

My parents have recently been in India, and brought me back a wonderful cornucopia of Hindustani classical music on CD which I'm gradually making my way through. While searching for a bit more information on the web, I came across sarangi.info, which is a real treasure trove I've barely scratched the surface of. But I would particularly recommend the pdfs and audio examples available here - pdfs of a book (and audio files of the accompanying cassette) originally published by Manchester University Press in 1980 - and long out of print - entitled Indian Music in Performance: A Practical Introduction. Neil Sorrell wrote the text and the amazing Ram Narayan provides the audio examples. The book is a general introduction to the topic but also a serious piece of analysis, including a transcription of an entire raga and an absolutely fascinating section (with audio examples) on the way that Narayan practises. Along with The Raga Guide, by far the most illuminating book on the subject I have encountered.

Finally a note on frequency. My friends Richard Pinnell and Joel Cooper (check out their excellent blogs by following the links) have brought it to my attention that I don't post here that often. I must admit I'm flattered that they want more of my ramblings and I do admit it is annoying repeatedly checking a favourite blog to find nothing new on it. I just don't seem to be one of those people with interesting things to say every few days! But I do promise at least one post a month - a kind of monthly newsletter if you will. Right I've said it now, I'll have to stick to it ...

For Kurt

2007-04-12T22:34:00.000+01:00

I heard on the radio this morning that Kurt Vonnegut has died, aged 84. In a way I feel like a bit of a sham fan of his - I've only ever read one book by him, and that his most famous, Slaughterhouse Five. But I can genuinely say it is one of the best books I have ever read. I was introduced to it probably eight or nine years ago by my then girlfriend. The combination of science fiction and autobiography is extraordinarily powerful - the fantasy and the comedy offset the horror and the tragedy, making them all the more affecting. I remember on first reading it having a strong sense of the author's whole life having lead up to the telling of that one story, being filled with the search for ways to adequately tell what had to be told. In a way, though they seem vastly different in so many ways, perhaps there is a link between Paul Celan and Vonnegut in their relentless search for adequate representation of the unrepresentable? I shall be rereading the novel very soon, and also looking out for more of his work in order to remedy the gap in my knowledge, as some small tribute to what he accomplished.

***

Having been good for a while I've recently been buying a great deal of recorded music, much of it on vinyl. Having never had a record player as a kid, LPs are still a bit of a novelty to me. Great finds have included an LP of Gagaku on the Everest label (which makes an excellent counterpart to the Ocora CD I already own; the koto and biwa seem much more present and punchy on the LP); Steve Lacy, George Lewis, Misha Mengleberg, Arjen Gorter and Han Bennink playing the compositions of Herbie Nichols and reminding you that jazz should always be radical, complex, puzzling and fun; and an LP I just had to buy entitled Late Fourteenth Century Avant Garde, featuring the Early Music Consort of London playing music from the court of Avignon during the Papal Schism of 1378 to 1417, some of which is absolutely barmy, in the best possible way!

The three best musical experiences of the recent weeks haven't been on vinyl, though. First, on the 25th of March my friend David Stent and I heard the Ulysses Ensemble perform at the Jacqueline du Pre Music Building in Oxford. The group, which is committed to performing 20th and 21st century chamber music without a conductor, were extraordinary - relentlessly precise yet full of energy and individuality. A long flute diminuendo dying steadly away to absolutely nothing at the end of one section was absolutely gripping, strange as that may sound. The group opened with Schoenberg's Kammersymphonie No. 1, Op. 9 arranged for five instruments by Webern - a beautiful piece, perfectly showcasing their talents, though the strain of reducing fifteen parts to five sometimes showed compositionally. They followed by Ravel's Chansons madecasses which I could not get on with at all - it seemed all decadence and exoticism. But this set off the main event beautifully, which was Pierrot Lunaire. I had never heard a live performance of it before, and had previously admired rather than loved it. But the group brought out the beautifully variegated colours of the score, and the soprano Julieanne Klein (whose French pronounciation during the Ravel had seemed a little odd at times) was perfect - intense, theatrical and funny. The ripeness of some of the verse seemed entirely knowing, and the whole thing was pulled off with a real bite.

Second, I have been listening to the music of Radu Malfatti on CD. Radu has become a bit of a bugbear these days, a byword for hyperaustere minimalist composition and improvisation. It is often enjoyable to spend time with figures that have been critically typecast, I find - the labels usually tell only half the story at the very most. (A case in point is my interest in JH Prynne, the 'incomprehensible', 'elitist' poet.) The CD Radu Malfatti, on the Edition Wandelweiser Records label, containing one composition for solo trombone and another for string quartet, is a case in point. Yes, the material is all of the breathy white noise variety, interspersed by pauses, but the variety within that material is extraordinary. The music often gets relatively loud as well, and the pauses are never so long as to lose the tension. This is very far from being inaudible concept music or intellectualised ambient music - it is full of light and shade, beautifully poised and in the right frame of mind I find listening to it actually very exciting. The improvised music on the CD beinhaltung (Malfatti with Phil Durrant on violin and Thomas Lehn on synthesiser) is totally different. At times there is continual low level activity, at others the sounds become quite lively. The sense of the space and of the musicians really listening to each (though not straining to prove to their bandmembers that, yes, they really caught that last lick) gives the music a warmth and humanity. For a taste of this area of music (the composed side rather than the improvised side), I recommend the Wandelweiser radio stream, available at the Wandelweiser website, www.wandelweiser.de. It is worth spending time with this music and listening to it in a variety of different frames of mind and with different levels of attention.

Finally I have managed to obtain a copy of Bill Dixon's legendary 1966 record, Intents and Purposes. I really rate much of Dixon's work (I even named a band after this record for a while, without having heard it!), so I am extremely pleased that it lives up to my expectations! Dixon's trumpet techniques were very far ahead of their time; in fact a lot about this record seems strangely contemporary. (My friend and colleague Taylor Ho Bynum has written some very interesting thoughts on Dixon from a brass player's point of view here and here.) Hearing Dixon solo over a pretty raucous upper medium sized band is wonderful, and the ensemble writing is extremely sophisticated. It is basically episodic, but everything given a very well judged space. Dixon's sense of timbre extends to his composing - some of the tutti chords, including cor anglais multiphonics in the middle of them, are extraordinary. There are also Mingus-like harmonic touches, and percussion that manages to be active and detailed and yet strangely static. Two of the tracks are overdubbed - unusual for 1966. And the whole thing is only just over half an hour long. One does not feel short changed at all, however. Many of my favourite albums are very short. I find that if the music is really great one does not exhaust it by re-listening - and how great to be able to listen to the same album twice in an hour rather than only once!

[PS - I've also been listening a lot recently to one of Dixon's colleagues. This has been linked to in a number of places already but if it points a few more people to it it will be worth it: absolutely priceless Cecil Taylor interview.

Multiple media

2007-03-14T17:20:00.000Z

I've been exploring an eclectic range of artistic pursuits over the past month or so. I finally got a copy of Basil Bunting's Collected Poems, including "Briggflatts", which I have been meaning to read for a while now. Based on the only other poem of his I had read, "The Spoils", I expected to find it 'important' but hard going. Instead I found myself totally bowled over by it. A beautiful music coupled to an iron grip on experience and reference. What made it even more exciting was finding this site, where Bunting reads the poem in its entirety. A vanished style of reading, to be sure, but what a fantastic voice - dig the relentlessness of his final consonants!

Modern Art Oxford is currently hosing an exhibition of paintings by Callum Innes, who was previously completely unknown to me. Originally a figurative painter, he has for many years now worked on large abstract canvasses, in various series. All tend to feature some removal of paint (usually by turpentine) after its application, which means critics tend to write about absence, loss and so on in in relation to his work. Of course, removal of paint is really just as much part of the process of producing a painting as the application of paint. What really struck me about the work was its dedication and focus, the depth with which he explores his various series, and the emotional power that results because of (rather than in spite of) the processual rigour. Particularly striking were two untitled paintings (a similar work can be seen here) where oil paint has been applied on top of shellac. The paint retains a three dimensional, tactile quality, while the compositions as a whole are suggestive of much without reducing themselves to any single explanation. Innes' exploration of colour is also a thorough as that of any other contemporary painter I know (which admittedly is not very many!). The exhibition is on until the 15th of April. I have already been three times (once to hear the artist himself speak), and plan to make a few more trips before it closes. It is a real treat to have the chance to visit a gallery regularly to explore a single artist's work - sometimes it is great to look only at one or two paintings on a visit, which one doesn't really feel able to do if one has travelled a distance (and paid quite a bit!) to visit an exhibition.

Finally, last weekend I almost had a perfect experience of Phil Niblock's work, finally. (I have seen and heard his work live twice before, and while both times were excellent, the first time it was in a quasi-concert situation that did not produce the right kind of 'endless' feeling, while the second time one of the DVD players was malfunctioning, which was distracting and irritating.) This time the work was presented in a basement gallery off Regent Street in London, next to a rather fancy restaurant. The room was largely white, with many white sofas and twelve projections, three to each wall. (For those unfamiliar with Niblock's work, this will give you some idea, though obviously the live effect is much more overwhelming.) For an hour it was perfect - the films unfailingly beautiful and fascinating, and the music (from Touch Works, for hurdy-gurdy and voice) at a perfect volume - not deafening, but immersive and loud enough to produce all the fascinating effects in the overtones that Niblock is known for. But then a waiter came in and, I suppose concerned that diners would be disturbed, turned the music down about half way! I toyed with asking him to turn it up, but suspected that this might be refused. At one point there was no-one in the gallery - I was just about to surreptitiously turn it up myself, when a waitress came in and nearly caught me. Foiled, I only stayed another quarter of an hour or so, but still, the first hour was a wonderful experience.

Happy birthday for yesterday

2007-03-06T23:07:00.000Z

Great minds . . .

2007-02-18T12:07:00.000Z

In a nice little example of synchronicity, Eric Hobsbawm wrote an article on the Spanish Civil War in the Guardian yesterday where he wrote that in arguments about the legacy of the war, "what was and remains at issue in these debates is what divided Marx and Bakunin". He doesn't offer an easy solution, though his sympathies clearly lie with Marx. Anyway, the article itself can be read here.

In a somewhat related area, my friend Alex Flach just sent me this link, a nice piece by an American law professor making a case for seeing large law firms as a classic example of Marx's theory of surplus value as laid out in volume one of Capital.

Recent ruminations

2007-02-15T15:08:00.000Z

Posts have not been very frequent recently, I know, but I'm loath to put them up purely for the sake of it. I seem to be posting about once a month, though, which is at least a digestible frequency!

I'm reading Tony Cliff's 'State Capitalism in Russia' at the moment, in a great 70s paperback edition with the pages falling out. Though he sometimes becomes entangled in dogmatic minutiae, generally the clarity of his analysis of the economic and political nature of the Stalinist state is commendable. Given that this book was first published in 1948, long before the crisis year of 1956, it concerns and puzzles me how many communists of good intellectual standing and integrity (such as Eric Hobsbawm, whose autobiograpy Interesting Times I have also recently read) could have remained in denial about the nature of Stalinism for such a long time. More broadly, I suppose, it comes back to the old argument between Marx and Bakunin, which I have been idly worrying over. Where to the priorities lie? Does the Marxist insistence on economic realism always risk paying only lip service to democracy, and hence have totalitarianism clandestinely built into it, or is the anarchist denial of the state destined to be nothing more than a fantasy, and hence of no use to revolutionary praxis? I know this is far from a new question, and I have nothing new to say on it at this point, but it is something that is concerning me - I would like at least to be able to position myself more securely on this particular spectrum.

Last night Marcio Mattos played the monthly Oxford Improvisers concert. The opening set was, for me, the highlight of the night. It was a duo between Mattos (on cello and electronics) and Pete McPhail (on flute and alto sax). The speed of response and accuity of accent and pitch was fantastic. The music was dense and quick but also (particularly when McPhail played flute) light and transparent. The rest of the evening was also gripping and often genuinely risk taking improvisation (particularly in a quartet between Miles Doubleday on samples and electronics, Roger Telford on drums, Alexander Hawkins on percussion and Nick Benda on oboe, where the players really had to work to carve out a piece of music from very disparate individual materials), but had the gig been recorded - what a shame it wasn't - the opening duo contained the music I would have liked to return to.

On tour last week it was a real pleasure to spend time with field recordist and improviser extraordinaire Lee Patterson. His recordings of pondweed are truly extraordinary - like analogue synthesisers battling with mixer feedback. Thinking about this returned me to Chris Watson's wildlife recordings on the CD Outside the Circle of Fire, which also often sound 'electronic' to people unaware of their origin. Of course, when recorded via microphones and played back through speakers or headphones, such sounds actually are electronic. I have read much comment about how the work of John Cage (in particular 4'33'') has made it possible to consider any sound in the same way we consider music, but I have not read anything about how field recordings are not really a return to directly listening to the sounds around us. Rather they surely evidence a dialectic between naturally occurring sound and the technology which allows them to be captured and replayed in the living room. The technology must be affecting our reception and interpretation of the sounds (as well as, in certain ways, the very sounds themselves). There seems much to consider here, and if anyone has written on this subject I'd be very keen to find out about it.

Funk Guitar Summit

2007-01-17T16:22:00.000Z

No wise words have yet been generated by me in 2007, but Taylor Ho Bynum put a link to the following clip in his blog, and I think it's one of the barmiest, funniest (& funkiest) things I've seen in a while, so more people deserve to have the pleasure.

Then I thought that probably needs to be balanced in some way, so keeping with the embedded YouTube theme, two more masters of the guitar (by way of not commenting on a current long thread on a certain discussion board).

Summing up

2006-12-25T16:11:00.000Z

Happy Christmas everyone. Unless anything amazing happens I doubt I will post again in 2006, so I thought I'd add just a little to the interminable 'best of 2006' lists that we've all been drowning in recently. No comments, though - just the details - some bright spots in what has been a very depressing year for those who think a state of peace is the desirable condition for mankind to inhabit. (Though it was fun touring with North Americans when the US Senate and House of Representatives elections were held and seeing their glee as the results came through.)

Record of the Year: Scott Walker, The Drift
Book of the Year: JH Prynne, To Pollen
Gig of the Year: John Butcher and Eddie Prevost at Freedom of the City, April 30th

and honourable mention for

Stage Announcement of the Year: Alexander Hawkins, the day after the American elections, for one night only changing the dedication of his composition Goodbye,Sir from Art Tatum to Donald Rumsfeld.

It is exactly one year since the death of Derek Bailey, so the great man should be in our thoughts. Why not go here as a reminder of his brilliance? (Thanks to the indefatigable David Reid for the clip.) But we've lost someone equally brilliant today - what can I say about James Brown - I guess only that without him all popular music today would be utterly different, and a hell of a lot more rubbish! He was on telly performing on a BBC Electric Prom not long ago, and aside from an ill-advised Georgia on my mind was awesome. They will both be hugely missed.

See you in 2007!

Googlies

2006-11-24T00:27:00.000Z

Great to have the Ashes finally started even if yesterday was depressingly familiar. Still, there's plenty of entertainment. The Australian commentator on Radio 4 just said that today "is going to be a warmer day, temperature-wise."

Teutonic dialectic

2006-11-21T23:18:00.000Z

It's been an age since my last post, it seems. Part of that has been work - I've just done a hugely enjoyable UK tour with The Convergence Quartet: Taylor Ho Bynum on cornet, flugelhorn & G trumpet (I'd never heard of one either!), Harris Eisenstadt on drums & percussion, and Alexander Hawkins on piano, followed by six performances of Catherine Kontz's hugely ambitious music theatre piece Mie.

Anyway, I decided when I set up this blog that I wouldn't use it to big up my so-called career, so I'll return to its usual format - as my friend Joel described it, 'Dom's book and music review'! (Though I hope some other things sneak in from time to time.) I've had a few enthusiasms over the last couple of months, starting with the wonderful Cecil Taylor in Berlin '88 box set. I've lusted after this for a long while now, so was incredibly lucky to find a friend who wanted to sell his, and who was willing to sell it to me for far less than he could have got for it on the internet. It's a magnificent object, and the book it includes is wonderful, including some fascinating writing and priceless photos, including of Cecil rehearsing his European big band seemingly by a walk in the garden! All the music is of course fascinating, and some of it truly astounding. The duos with drummers have garnered most comment, but my favourite right now is the first of the two orchestra CDs, 'Involution/Evolution'. Sure, there is wonderfully raucous blowing, but the clarity and the intricacy of the music is what really gets me. Cecil's melodies are bold and direct (there's a great bassline early on - it's not that often I cop a riff off a Cecil Taylor record!), his comping fascinating, and Han Bennink's drumming transparent yet propulsive in the best big band style. The colours are also beautiful - Gunter Hampel's vibes alongside Cecil's piano remind me of nothing so much as Milt Jackson with Thelonious Monk.

Speaking of bold melodies, variety of colour and structural intricacy, last Tuesday I found second hand copies of pocket scores for all Beethoven's late string quartets in Oxfam. I've been meaning to get into this music for a long time, so I took the opportunity, and also availed myself of the Emmerson String Quartet's 1990s recordings. I've only just scratched the surface of this music so far (a couple of listens to opus numbers 127, 130 and 133), but I'm gripped. So much of what came later is held in this music - the quartets of Bartok and Webern are clearly in there, while the first couple of the bars of the second movement of op. 127 seem to hold the seeds of Morton Feldman's music. And even though the influence I suppose passes through Schoenberg, the range of texture and the intricacy of rhythm and tempo seem to me to point clearly to Brian Ferneyhough's quartets, especially the second. Adorno wrote fascinatingly about this music, including comments that seem to apply to so much of the music I really value. For example, in 'Late Style in Beethoven', from 1937, he wrote that 'in general, in Beethoven's music, subjectivity - in the full sense given to it by Kant - acts not so much by breaking through form, as rather, more fundamentally, by creating it'. I find, by the way, none of the problematic approach to rhythm I find in Mozart and mentioned in a previous post.

And to come right up to date with German music, I have in the last few days been taken over by an enthusiasm for the work of Helmut Lachenmann. From being only vaguely aware of him, over the last year he has become a composer I respect; I am now a fully fledged enthusiast. There has been a festival of his music in London over the last week, of which I only caught one concert, but it was a particularly striking experience. His inventiveness in discovering new sounds from old and new instruments is very exciting, but more so than this is the fact that he refuses to stop there but always puts his sounds to work, refusing to operate either in a simple 'scorched earth' denial of musical history (a la John Cage, perhaps?) or merely assert that new, 'interesting' sounds let the composer off the hook of investigating the problems of music's relation to its own history by 'transcending' them. As he writes in the notes to the CD Schwankungen am Rand, on ECM, 'the initial fascination, were it to remain at that and not immediately be mitigated by capriciously critical reflection, would be more likely to lead to moderately "interesting" - i.e. boring - arrangements than to new sonical horizons'. Hearing the composer play his own piano piece 'Ein Kinderspiel' was engrossing, and I look forward to hearing some of the pieces from the same concert again this Saturday on Radio 3.

One final thing - I have just heard on the radio that Robert Altman has died. I couldn't claim to know his work particularly well, but I will be watching MASH again in his memory - some of the finest, funniest and most uncompromising satire since Swift, surely.

Lacing Up

2006-10-01T19:37:00.000+01:00

Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy is my most recent musical enthusiasm. I've 'appreciated' him for a long time but only now got really enthused. It was the first two tracks of a solo CD called Clinkers that really got me. The first track is a beautiful abstract harmonic line, full of suprises, taken at a measured pace. Then the next track starts with an amazing set of timbral variations on a single pitch. His technique for what he wants to do is absolutely immaculate, and yet he still pushes at the boundaries of his instrument. He seems to me to be the model of a real jazz musician - familiar with all aspects of the music and not dismissive of any, but without any trace of shallow eclecticism. After all, this is a man who worked extensively with Pops Foster, Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk, Musica Elettronica Viva and Derek Bailey, and yet maintained a stable group (with a couple of shifts of personnel) for well over thirty years, up to the end of his life.
It is of course a great sadness that I never heard him live. And also ironic that on Friday I played a run of the mill funk gig in Freuds, a bar in Oxford that was once a church called St Paul's, where Lacy played solo. (And also, come to think of it, Evan Parker's solo record The Snake Decides was recorded, twenty years ago last January.)

My dear friend Bruno Guastalla recently found a Lacy/Derek Bailey duo CD that I lent him about 18 months ago and am very much looking forward to hearing again! He also very generously gave me a ticket to a concert in the Oxford Chamber Music Festival last Saturday lunchtime. Sadly the advertised Thomas Larcher solo cello piece had to be cancelled, so we had a clarinet improvisation on a theme by Stravinsky instead which was beautifully played but not very improvised. The finale was Mozart's late string quartet, K. 593 in D major. I'm clearly a Philistine but this just reinforced my sense that Mozart and myself don't get on. Bruno remarked that rhythmically his music is very related to the breath, which I think puts its finger on the problem I have - I don't find the kind of rhythmic tension which I relish either in music based on a more steady beat (Max Roach, George Clinton, Steve Reich) or on the subversion of any regularity per se (Derek Bailey, Cecil Taylor, Morton Feldman). But opening the concert was a fascinating piece by Schumann: Andante and Variations in B flat major, for two pianos, two cellos and horn, Op. 46. It is a quite bizarre ensemble, but beautifully effective. The organic but unpredictable way the variations follow one another was one highlight, but what I really responded to was the way the horn was used in the earlier part of the piece. Hardly audible, it contributed just enough tone colour to subtly but totally change the familiar string/piano texture. It its way the effect was not unlike the 'acoustic tone synthesis' I heard violinist Angharad Davies, flautist Samantha Rebello and clarinetist Tara Stuckey engage in during a recent improvised performance in London. Part of music's excitement value is surely the discovery of new sounds, and it seems that they can be obtained by combining older sounds just as well as by any other method (much like colour in painting perhaps, but with the added dimension that on acoustic instruments multiple players are needed, which automatically introduces an appealling social element).

Checking In

2006-09-19T14:31:00.000+01:00

No posts for a while so I thought it would be good to check in. Recent mergers and acquisitions include JH Prynne's brand new collection, To Pollen, which is remarkable. It is a sequence of 22 13-line poems, beautifully published by Barque Press. I have read it through a few times so far, but intend to do a more thorough study soon. The metrical, sonic and semantic variety and, yes, beauty is amazing. It seems to carry on, in a more developed form, the exploration of political explicitness in the midst of modernist pyrotechnics that can be seen in Prynne's 2004 poem about Abu Ghraib, 'Refuse Collection'. What other poet could write a sequence including both this passage:

Agree fillet weld tournament at
whirling dared inscript, flaw in sand for a trial
worsened by braving outcry points, they assembled
in total yes to perform

and the following:

we see shots of a father racked
in misery and bearing like a gift his crushed and
bloodied son, a bare infant

?

Wheeling my double bass through Oxford the other day someone shouted after me 'Eric Clapton', which was interesting if mistaken. Better than the usual comments - of course I do wish I played the recorder. Not the best, though - that prize still goes to the guy who turned to his girlfriend on Little Clarendon Street and said 'Look, it's a midget with a violin'.

Against Common Sense

2006-09-04T01:54:00.000+01:00

Funny how you can use a phrase for years and never really consider what it actually says. I've just discovered Peter Ackroyd's fascinating polemic Notes For A New Culture in the Oxford public library. It's providing me with an great list of books I now want to read (as if that list wasn't long enough already!), and his argument is intriguing - though it suffers from omitting Marx's thought, I feel (Marxism as a critical method, that is, rather than an Althusserian 'scientific' Marxism which Ackroyd rightly dismisses). Anyway, he points out the origin of the phrase 'common sense' - a late seventeenth century idea that '[t]he truth of the Reason that [language] has been constrained to name instead of itself is primarily a social one, since it is founded upon a notion of shared responses and of a community of judgement'. A not at all foolish or ignoble idea, but one which followed in a straight line leads to commercialist arguments such as the idea that popular music must be wonderful because lots of people agree to part with their money in exchange for it, and by the same token any music without wide popularity must therefore be rubbish. So let's hear it for uncommon sense!!

This week I have mostly been listening to . . . The City Wears A Slouch Hat, which is a wonderful 1942 radio play by Kenneth Patchen with music by John Cage. I've had the CD for a while, but never got into it so much before. One of the great things about listening to a recording of the original broadacast of an old radio play is that it allows one to imagine one is really listening to the radio in the 1940s! The piece is very definitely dated, but wonderfully vibrant. The music is raucous and raw, while the play itself manages to evoke for me from moment to moment things as diverse as Raymond Chandler, An Inspector Calls and even the Goon Show while still very much holding together on its own terms.

I've also started looking into chess (a passion of Cage's, as it happens) a little seriously over the last few days, something I've been meaning to do for a very long time. Amazing how a very little study opens up so many things to one's attention - I guess I'm just pretty slow in noticing them otherwise!

And finally . . . just watched the Metallica documentary, Some Kind of Monster. At one point producer Bob Rock describes drummer Lars Ulrich as 'the Pollock of funnel arrangement'.

Come back George Orwell, all is forgiven

2006-09-01T00:19:00.000+01:00

BBC News, 31/8/06: Mr Blair told BBC News his government had made "massive progress" in tackling social exclusion but there was a group of people with multiple problems. There had to be intervention "pre-birth even", he said.

"If we are not prepared to predict and intervene far more early then there are children who are growing up - in families which we know are dysfunctional - and the kids a few years down the line are going to be a menace to society and actually a threat to themselves."

An outrage

2006-08-31T15:57:00.000+01:00

August 30th, 2006. BBC News: "UN clearance experts had so far found 100,000 unexploded cluster bomblets at 359 separate sites, Jan Egeland said."

"90% of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution."

BBC News information on cluster bombs: "Cluster bombs are controversial weapons consisting of a canister which breaks apart to release a large number of small bombs. A range of so-called bomblets can be employed to attack different targets such as armoured vehicles or people - or to start fires. . . They can cover a large area but do not have precision guidance. Dropped from medium to high altitudes, they can wander off target. . . There is a significant "dud rate" of about 5%. In other words, many do not explode but, rather like landmines, litter the ground with the potential to explode years later. There are said to be thousands in Kosovo. . . The 202 bomblets are yellow cylinders about the size of a drinks can - 8 ins long and 2.5 ins across (20 x 6 cms). . . When they explode, the bomblets cause damage and injury across a wide area. . . The explosive charge is capable of piercing armour to a depth of about 7 ins (17 cms). The blast has a radius of as much as 250 ft (76 m)."

Human Rights Watch: "A key United Nations clearance expert has expressed concern about the similarity of the coloring of the yellow BLU-97/B cluster bomblets and the small yellow food aid parcels being airdropped in Afghanistan, noting that people are being encouraged to pick up the food parcels, but that picking up a bomblet would be lethal. He said, "Our experience in Kosovo showed us that children and youths were highly susceptible to the submunitions". . . Human Rights Watch criticized NATO for use of cluster bombs in Kosovo, particularly in or near populated areas. Human Rights Watch believes there were nine to fourteen cluster bomb attacks resulting in civilian casualties during the conflict, causing an estimated ninety to 150 civilian deaths, or 18 to 30 percent of all civilian deaths, even though cluster bombs represented just 6 percent of weapons expended in the air war
. . . The civilian toll due to cluster bombs was even greater following the end of the conflict." (my italics)

The MySpace vortex

2006-08-31T00:17:00.000+01:00

Haven't been around here for a bit because I've succumbed to the allure of MySpace. I'd been (and still am to an extent) sceptical about how valuable it would really be, but in the end the usefulness of a list of upcoming gigs where one doesn't have to remove dates that have happened, having four MP3s hosted for free, plus the old drug-taking argument ('everybody else is doing it . . . ') have persuaded me. Still, I do have some sympathy with Kool Keith in this month's issue of the Wire: "You can't meet a girl and a guy and have a social conversation because people don't meet anymore. They just go on MySpace and all the Websites." I also began to feel things were conspiring against me when I went to my local university (where I sometimes work as a music technician) to record a few solo tracks I could upload as MP3s. For a start, when I got to the studio I planned to use I found it completely gutted, with the lecturer and other staff in the process of installing a soundproof recording booth! No worries, I'll go next door. No proper mike stand? Nevermind, I can improvise. DAT machine not working? OK, I can record straight into the computer, I'm not a hi-fi nazi. Finally, got some music - let's upload it. But the internet connection's not working . . . Still, I managed to get the stuff onto another computer and onto the site. I suppose three and a half hours work for ten minutes of music isn't actually that bad a strike rate - you could have an album done in record quick time if you could keep that up! Anyway, should there be anyone interested, you can hear the music I eventually set sail into cyberspace here.

A job well done

2006-08-23T23:24:00.000+01:00

A Scanner Darkly, I can report with relief, is brilliant. The animation effect works perfectly to enhance the paranoid mood, and lets them do the scramble suits excellently. Performances are sterling - pick of the bunch being Robert Downey Jr.'s Jim Barris who is disturbing and hilarious in equal measure. It's a very faithful adaptation of the book - not always a good thing - but in this case I think it does actually transfer, more or less. The best Dick film version so far, Blade Runner notwithstanding?

No Connection

2006-08-23T15:41:00.000+01:00

Our internet has been down at home for a few days. We were racking our brains as to what could have gone wrong (the help desk didn't, really) only to discover that my housemate who pays the broadband bill had defaulted on one of his direct debit payments a few months back when he was hard up, which led to us being disconnected - only we didn't know this because the person in question never opens any of his post!! Anyway, we're all up and running again now; I'm sure there's a simple moral somewhere in all this!

I have no idea how to link up the things I've been preoccupied with during my internet-free period, so I'll just list some of them (in no particular order). Perhaps I'll see the relationships when they're written down.

The still-appalling situation in Lebanon, in which a ceasefire appears not to apply to Israel if they don't feel like it, because of course all their actions are 'defensive'. While trying to fix the internet, I ended up inadvertently stumbling upon a way to fix my sound card, which hasn't been working, so yesterday I finally got to hear Mazen Kerbaj's recording of himself playing trumpet in duet with the Israeli airforce during the night of the 15th and 16th of July. I can't say anything about this, except that you must hear it. It's available here.

The Albert Ayler Quartet at John Coltrane's funeral. The sound on this six-minute recording is dreadful, but the performance absolutely searing, particularly at the end when Ayler starts vocalising. Of course, the emotional charge of knowing when and where this music was created plays no small part in its power, but it really is like he's about to break through music to something else entirely.

Peter Riley's extraordinary collection of prose poems, Excavations. They are meditations on 19th century accounts of prehistoric burial grounds, interspersed with fragments from 16th or 17th century English lyrics. Though deliberately disjointed and 'modernist' in form - Riley himself described them to me in an email as 'risk[ing] an unpredicated sequentiality' - the emotional charge and intellectual rigour of his attempt to explore the extent to which we can have any sense of common humanity with people who died many thousands of years ago is very moving.

The farcical end to the fourth test between England and Pakistan. I don't have a judgement on the rights and wrongs of the situation, but I'm sure the way it was handled was not the optimum solution. A bad taste is left in the mouth after what had been until then a fantastic series.

Synchronicities

2006-08-18T18:20:00.000+01:00

Well, my good friend the cellist Bruno Guastalla, whose day job is to make and restore stringed instruments, has mended the alarming crack on my bass, which is now back to its old self. If I really wanted it seen to, he said, I could get someone to take the front and back off the instrument and really give it a going over. I'd get wonderful results but also end up about £2000 poorer! So I think I'll stick to the patch-up job when needed.

As a resolute humanist materialist I'm suspicious of any talk of 'hidden forces' beyond human ken; nonetheless Hamlet's comment to Horatio was clearly correct. Synchronicity has long fascinated me - there was a day in Oxford about three or four years ago where on three occasions I thought I saw somebody I knew but hadn't seen for some time (a different person each time), drew closer and realised that it wasn't them, only to turn a corner and really see the person in question. Recently ideas of dead twins seem to be in the air. I have just read Emmanuel Carrere's fascinating book I Am Alive And You Are Dead: A Journey Inside The Mind of Philip K. Dick. Dick had a sister who died in infancy, but what really struck me was the account of Mark Twain's childhood. Apparently, Twain's twin brother and he were so alike that they had different coloured ribbons tied to their arms to distinguish them. One day they were left alone in the bath. One of the twins drowned, and the ribbons also came off. Hence, Twain said, he did could not be sure that he was actually himself. It reminds me of an old Peanuts cartoon, where Linus, I think, observes "'Never been born'? Why, the theological implications alone are staggering!"

Anyway, this idea bubbling around in my brain, I get hold of Scott Walker's new album, about which I gushed in my last post, and discover that track three is, partly, about Elvis's twin brother, Jesse, who was stillborn but to whom Elvis would apparently talk to 'in times of loneliness or despair'. If I were Iain Sinclair I would get the germ of a novel from these ideas; as it is I'll just put a couple of desultory comments in my blog!

Speaking of Philip K Dick, I think I will have to go and see the film of A Scanner Darkly next week. I am somewhat optimistic, though I have a fear (based on the previous examples) that Dick's work is analogous to that of someone like Alan Moore - that somehow the very elements of their work that seem to make them cry out for film adaptation are in fact so integrated into the form in which the work was originally conceived that these same elements undermine any attempt at adaptation. The blowing up of the houses of parliament to the tune of the 1812 Overture in V for Vendetta is a case in point. It resonates on the page but on screen just seems bombastic and crass. Still, perhaps this film will be the exception . . .

Encounters and Recommendations

2006-08-16T00:54:00.000+01:00

I've just returned from a great day recording a demo with a new trio featuring Tim Hill on saxophones - whose idea the group was and who also wrote the music - and Steve Harris on drums. We recorded in a beautiful little studio in Somerset, with Glastonbury Tor visible from the window, about 8 miles away. It was only spoilt by the discovery of a crack on the back of my double bass, which I will have to get seen to tomorrow. I only hope it doesn't need too major a repair.

On the train coming back, I met a most remarkable character. The station manager at Castle Cary asked me to make sure he got on the train, because he was profoundly deaf and might not realise it was his train. He was possibly in his mid fifties, wearing a thick red anorak over a camouflage jacket. Mostly bald, he sported an incredible set of whiskers that must once have been a fiery red and that would have been the pride of any seadog out of a nineteenth century novel. His facial redness showed him no stranger to the bottle either, but he didn't smell of alcohol at all, and his teeth were healthy looking and even; he walked very unsteadily with a stick. His hands were tattooed with various devices, including the word 'LOVE' across his right hand fingers. There was a word on his left hand as well, but I couldn't read it - though it clearly wasn't 'HATE'. He wore hearing aids in both ears, but claimed to be able to lip read - though he seemed to have trouble understanding me. He spoke with a strong Northern Irish accent, sometimes clear and easily understood, at other times descending into a incomprehensible mumble. He continually held my gaze with resolute firmness, particularly when punctuating a comment with lusty yet bitter laughter. I wrote down my recollections of what I could make out of his monologue as soon as he got off the train. I don't know if I can capture the impression he made, but neither Dickens nor Beckett could have written a better speech, it seemed to me at the time.

"I'm deaf, but I can lip read . . . they think I'm stupid . . . hearing gone in the Falklands, both of 'em, and my legs too, they give me gip . . . used to sing, but lost my tone as I can't hear myself . . . kicked out my stick once . . . can't stand up . . . can't get down and can't get up . . . they just give way under me . . . went down twice in a day once . . . lost my wife through drink . . . bottle and a half of whiskey a day . . . half a bottle for breakfast . . . I know where she lives, 'cause I bought the place . . . better off how I am . . . dreadful bedsit . . . two grandsons and three granddaughters . . . my youngest son punched me out once . . . I was pissed up . . . black guy . . . didn't punch me out but gave me a black eye and a bloody nose . . . "

When I got to Bath Spa my journey took on a very different mood as I sat waiting for my next train listening to Prince's new album, 3121. I got used a while ago to buying records without personal recommendations - I didn't find many who shared my musical tastes! But in the last week I've bought three CDs largely based on my friends' advice. And I'm very glad I did.

I've thought about getting most of the recent Prince albums but haven't done so, but the glowing acount the pianist Pat Thomas gave me of the latest convinced me. And it is a remarkable piece of work. The usual analogues are all present and correct (George Clinton, James Brown, Michael Jackson) and lyrically it's not exactly his most pentrating record - he seems to have had some trouble with the ladies, but towards the end of the album it takes an odd turn into Jehovah's Witness sex ballads. But the songs are all incredibly infectious and funky, and there's some great virtuosity from both Prince and his allies.

Also featuring great virtuosity, but not much funk, is horn_bill: reed solos on Matchless Recordings. I had steered away from this one because it documents a concert organised by ongaku: enjoy sound in Hackney in early 2005, which I attended. Sometimes I find it is nice to allow the memory of a great concert (which this was) to remain so. But saxophonist Tony Bevan and trombonist Scott Thomson raved to me about this one, and they were right. There is remarkable playing from all six musicians on the CD, but two stand out for me. Seymour Wright's subversion of the saxophone, deconstructing it and using various devices to elicit sounds from it, transfers very well to CD - highly abstract and yet somehow clearly saxophonic. A very 'embodied' music. John Butcher's piece is absolutely stunning. It displays consummate virtuosity, but more than that an almost tangible sense of exploration, and a wonderful musical logic, utterly inexorable and yet unpredictable.

Pick of the bunch, though, is Scott Walker's new album The Drift. Clarinetist Alex Ward and guitarist David Stent both spoke very highly to me about the album, David emphasising how it manages to be very funny while also often utterly terrifying. Much has been made in the press of features such as the sound of a side of pork being punched. These are certainly deeply powerful, but more amazing is the structural logic of the music, the way the musical textures are unleashed in abrupt, abrasive blocks, coinciding with the divisions of the lyrics - almost like scenes in a film. Indeed, rather than the cliched 'soundtrack for an imaginary film', this record is almost a work of cinema in itself - I certainly don't see how you could do anything else while listening to it!

Beginning

2006-08-11T23:11:00.000+01:00

I'd viewed the rise of the blog with scepticism until recently, but the fact that there are now a number of blogs I read regularly and find informative, stimulating and entertaining has led me to think that this could (just maybe!) be a little more than a vanity project. I'd love to come into contact with more people with similar interests and obsessions to my own. (Though maybe people with dissimilar tastes would be better for me!) Plus I'm really bad at writing in my real paper diary, so perhaps I'll do better electronically . . .