David Ayers

The revolution against data-overload begins here!

Gunther Schuller. A Proms concert this summer conducted by his student Oliver Knussen and meant to celebrate his 90th year became a memorial. They played his Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee. I hope some other of his compositions get revisited in concert soon.

I am taking the possibly radical approach of listening to this album. Wish me luck.

I'll MAKE the time....

I'd like to do it with a steamroller.

I wonder who you are writing and playing for, if anyone? I heard Evan Parker saying words to the effect "we are doing something to satisfy our idea of what to do, and if other people are interested then that's good".

Thread gone woolly again.

I'd been thinking it had been simply surfeit of recorded music that had caused me to stop buying CDs, but a couple I took out to play recently reminded me of something else. Both had been new purchases; the one which arrived by mail order had broken teeth, the other bought in store had a cracked cover from carrying it home. So, although new and premium price, these CDs had been transformed into tat before I even played them. It happens all the time of course but...how long are people going to go on paying premium prices for pre-broken plastic? We all know that old CDs just look like a pile of junk, but so do the new ones... PS Freddie Starr did not eat my hamster

I did like that one which was just a two-hander between Lennie James and his mentor in less-lethal violence. Made a change from the Rick et al. lecturing the other lot about 'not being ready for the real world' yet sort of stuff.

This series goes from worse to worst. There was a point when it seemed no-one making it was interested enough from episode to episode to make anything of it. Now it's as if they aren't interested from one minute to the next. Oh, a character. Oh, a zombie. Oh, a fight. Oh, somebody is a bit upset about something. Oops, somebody get deaded. Next, please!

Haven't folks graduated to Apple Music yet? In any case, the more easily available recorded music gets the less I want to hear it.

I was expecting a different Bridge!

The Mariinsky play in the Tony Palmer RVW film, and he does feature on their programme from time to time, I've noticed. I haven't heard a Russian conductor do any RVW here, but Jurowski has done some, I do know. Seems likely that Rozdhestvensky is the only one to do a whole cycle in Russia - it's remarkable.

So are most of us. But - I like it. Out here.

Satisfied my yen for this with a fine performance by Storgårds and BBC Phil this summer at Proms. They also did this percussion concerto by Gruber - it has to be *seen* really but youtube does at least have the audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T32qDQR7QrA

It's a whole other world!

That would be Leap Before You Look, an exhibition of and about Black Mountain College, at Boston ICA, last week. http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/leap-you-look-black-mountain-college-1933–1957

I'm pretty sure that keeping things for best has some deep cultural roots in poverty, where the model was that manual workers would seek to keep an area of quality and cleanliness, such as they could afford, separate from the grime and tattiness of everyday. So working men would enter through the back door and never through the front which was rarely opened. All the nice stuff would stay in the living room which might rarely or never be used, but the things there were on display - to the neighbours, as much as anything else.

Notwithstanding the sneering from the usual quarters, it's a revealing listen.

Maybe your parents or grandparents did it, maybe you do - stuff you 'save for best' and as a consequence never use. Sometimes its clothing, sometimes the best crockery and cutlery. I'm guessing the habit usually has an economic component...but not only. I was thinking about recordings I have saved for best. Not so much the unopened Mosaics because they are a big commitment so some I never got round to. But I have some others, four I think. There are two double LPs of Cecil Taylor on tour in Europe, Bologna and Vienna I think. Since I attended the Rome concert I saved the records for later and that special moment never comes. The other two are Japanese CD releases, one with Bailey and Hano,the other with Haino and Brotzmann. They were so hard to find at the time, and so pristine-looking when I got them, that I 'saved them for best' and to this day haven't removed the cellophane. Ahem. What have you saved for best, music or otherwise?

Indeed. And where are Oto on this? Eh? Eh?

In the meantime, a European tour that frustratingly does not take in the uk. Are our promoters asleep?? Kris Davis' Capricorn Climber European tour Kris Davis (piano) Ingrid Laubrock (tenor saxophone), Mat Maneri (viola), Eivind Opsvik (double bass) and Tom Rainey (drums) 11/6 Club Manufaktur, Schorndorf/Germany 11/8 Vrijstaat-O, Oostende/Belgium 11/9 Strasbourg, France 11/10 La Dynamo, Pantin/France 11/11 Marburg/Germany 11/13 Improviser's residence/ Moers 11/14 Spielboden, Dornbirn/Austria Meander round Europe, settle down for a good meal, then bleat about the cheap hotels...

When I asked what such a discussion would look like it was a rhetorical question. Musical criticism has to begin with a proper and proportionate evaluation of someone's endeavor, wherever else it may subsequently turn.

The things you guys are saying about Laubrock just have nothing to do with her aesthetic, which you clearly don't know about, and which is shaped to address the very kinds of questions you raise. The comparison with what Chapin was doing in the 90s are just out of date. Wheeling out Roscoe and Braxton who have 30 years on Laubrock... I dunno. At that point just bring out Boulez whose handling of harmony, sonority and time knocks those guys dead... but then what kind of conversation would that be...?

Oh sorry if those really are climaxes! I thought it was a continuous piece and I just dipped in at the points you indicated- I didn't have a half-hour to listen through (can't find the 'embarrassed' emoticon but you know which one I mean). Yes lets set aside Laubrock who across work of hers I have heard is quite evidently trying to avoid (masculine-style?) climax 'jazz'. Part of the question is about how people are developing in this (broad) tradition and what are the incentives and opportunities to do so. If we take the net difference between energy players and the much more composition-conscious who have been mentioned (a gap that is not new and has always been there) then the contrast between someone who can turn out an ok or even exciting gig and someone developing the means of doing things and an oeuvre is plainly pretty great. The big names who have been mentioned have stayed in a long time and have held or hold positions as composition instructors, so they have over time developed not only methods but infrastructure to sustain themselves. How much of that is still to come from younger performers? I guess one thing is to cut some slack and take account of what people are trying to do. I do know that a lot of what I hear misses the mark musically and aesthetically. I accept it in a bracketed way and as entirely commendable human endeavour. To my way of thinking there are objective limitations (e.g. economic) which shape these things, as well as (be it said) the limitations or, if we prefer, the specific and very evident problematics, of improvisation as such.