A Lark Ascending

Managed to put a package together of mainly UK performances for Cheltenham. Seems to be weak with non-UK performers this year - cutbacks. They also don't seem to be using the Everyman for some reason (faulty electrics????!!!!!!). A lot more seems to be being pushed to the 'party' area in the gardens. Went for: J10 TRIO VD (what an awful name. It's supposed to mean Valentine's Day...but...) J12 KIT DOWNES TRIO J14 NIKKI YEOH TRIO - with John Surman J16 FOOD - Iain Ballamy and Norwegians J20 STEWART LEE'S FREEHOUSE - Evan Parker and others J25 EMPIRICAL J27 CARLA BLEY - the Lost Chords. J30 FLY J31 FRINGE MAGNETIC

So you didn't dig the blues-based bands much at all, but you were born Ten Years After? Confusing! Ho! Ho! 'Love Like a Man' was one of the first singles I bought...more, I think, because I was trying to locate a taste outside the pop norm than any real liking for it (I also bought Black Sabbath's 'Paranoid' around that time...another dead end for me!). I know I soon found it repetitive and never followed up with an album purchase. Growing up in a house full of 'The Light Programme', Broadway/Hollywood musicals and light opera/classics (and in places that were all white-British [with a dash of Irish]) the whole blues/soul thing just had little soil to grow in. I suspect my compass is still steered by those early influences, regardless of the places I've chosen to visit outside their orbit. Maybe if I'd grown up on the back streets of Leeds or Newcastle I'd have been an animal!

It's right to point out how blues music mutated over here into something completely 'inauthentic' in many cases - by Led Zeppelin III there were large dollops of country and English folk starting to surface. And in Birmingham it was turned into Heavy Metal which owed little more than the song structures and lyrical content to the blues model. One of the most intriguing was Fleetwood Mac who seemed to be evolving a quite wonderful concoction that used the blues as a basis but with a rich and melodically broader approach around the time of 'oh Well!"...and then they split up and the band turned into something else. The other side of the coin was the reaction against blues based music. Many of the more creative bands of the early 70s quite deliberately tried to avoid blues based music (there's not much in Genesis or Yes, Caravan or Henry Cow) as did the folk-rockers. Very much a strike for independence from the model they'd all loved and grown up on. I learned to love the latter and had very little time for blues based music - it was Led Zepp's folky side that got my attention! I had to learn to love jazz before I could start to see the beauty and power that lay within blues based music. When I was first listening it seemed like a tired formula. If I'd been born ten years earlier...even five years earlier...and exposed to the blues/soul boom I'd have heard it all quite differently.

Do you take a 2:15 pop record over a 13 minute Coltrane solo? In all honesty, I take both, depending on what i want/need at the time, and if that means going back-to-back, then back-to-back it is! And sometimes, I take neither, for the same reasons. Me too! Which is why I'm impatient with those who would tell us that one approach is right, the other wrong.

Do you take a 2:15 pop record over a 13 minute Coltrane solo? My view is that it depends on the pop record and depends on the 13 minute solo! The authorised version of rock history has asserted, however, that the former is approved and the latter (especially if played by a white player) is not. My problem has always been an impatience with repetition - each verse being identical to the next with little variation. I recall being annoyed by this as a musically ignorant 14 year old. Now you can deal with that via composition or improvisation. With improvisation each chorus will automatically be different; pop/rock records that hold my attention tend to be the ones where each chorus has variation written in via added instruments, harmonic changes, a richer vocal harmony line or whatever (I don't think I could sustain my interest in 'Desolation Row' without the acoustic guitar obbligato!). Whether it is 2 minutes or 13 minutes is neither here nor there for me. But does it change, develop, vary. That's where I get my interest.

It was definitely the soloing that drew me to jazz. The hardest thing I found at first was the relative 'simplicity' of the tunes - early 70s (non-blues) rock modulated all over the place, strung different tunes together etc. I was hooked to key changes as to sugar! Jazz seemed to have a much simpler structure - obviously to alow much more complex improvisation to happen. I think what jazz (and classical and English/Irish folk, which I started exploring at the same time) did was introduce me to much subtler ways of using rhythm - but that was a side effect. It had enormous consequences as I now find four-square rock beats very hard to take. And if anything they've got more four-square and been pushed much further to the front of the mix. I think I have very European ears when it comes to rhythm. It's always been secondary. My ideal is Stravinsky rather than James Brown!

It's pretty much gonna be what each individual wants/needs it to be at any given moment. I think it's 'received wisdom'!

It also explains why quite a few of us rock fans of the early-70s became jazz fans in the later 70s. [i'm always amused by the way that the punks who reacted against early 70s rock but got successful enough to fill stadiums ended up playing 70s rock...without the guitar solos! U2, REM etc!)

Why when Coltrane plays 'My Favourite Things' for an hour is it a artistic and spiritual high; but when a white guitarist plays a 13 minute guitar solo it becomes a 'wankfest'? No particular axe to grind...I've never really listened to Johnny Winters and was never one for the blues-rock of the 70s. But one thing I do agree with Allen Lowe on is his frequent references to the 'received wisdom' that gets stated as fact. I like long solos in all sorts of situations - blues, rock, jazz, folk-rock (thank you Mr. Thompson..and not a blues-lick in sight!); by black, white, Asian or Saturnalian players. Yet I'm forever seeing them written off as as 'self-indulgent'. It's always struck me as a perfectly legitimate way of making music. Sometimes it can be dull; sometimes mesmerising. The inability or unwillingness of contemporary rock musicians to take off like Thompson or Hendrix or Emerson or McLaughlin is one of the reasons I'm not that interested in post-76 rock music.

Things were looking good a while back but Dutton/Vocalion seem to have slowed down. Seems sad the following are stil MIA: Frequently mentioned candidates: Dankworth/Wheeler - Windmill Tilter Ronnie Ross - Cleopatra's Needle Amancio D'Silva - Hum Domo Ronnie Scott - Serious Gold Things I have on LP that should be much better known: Stan Sulzmann - On Loan With Gratitude Ray Warleigh - Reverie The first two Loose Tubes albums Things I've never heard but would like to: Tony Coe - Zeitgeist Keith Tippett/Marc Charig - Pipedream Will think of more and add. Please add your own. Apologies to Peoria...this matters in Leamington Spa!

Thanks Jeff and Rooser. Both seem well out-of-print. I'd be interested to hear reactions to these 'new' releases.

I'm really surprised at this. I can understand record companies still pitching 'boutique' sets of Miles Davis, given his cache beyond jazz. But this music is insider stuff. It's available as CD and as download. Surely it would make sense to just get some good quality discographical information/notes together and have it available for download? I'd have thought all this fancy packaging was a thing of the pre-download age. Good lord, even the reactionaries on the Gramophone hi-fi pages are backing away from their anti-download stance.

And here are five recent UK releases that have kept a smile on my face: A mixture of jazz trio and solo with some almost Third Stream-ish duets with cello. A band I expected to be besuited beboppers but turned out much more interesting. Ornettish contemporay band linked up with drummers from Ghana. Utterly brilliant reconfiguring of the quartet - got me listening much more sympathetically to the original band. Yarde is one of the UK's best kept secrets. So good to hear him in full flow on this superb duo disc.

The US has been producing better 'middlebrow' drama for some time now. UK TV has become swamped with 'reality' TV, fly-on-the-wall docs, cooking and make-over programmes and 'talent' shows (where people pretend to be someone else). Most of the money left for drama goes into rather fey costume dramas. What I find really irritating is the habit of taking excellent books and reducing them to a 90 minutes zip through (Ian Ranking, Henning Mankell etc). I've loved things like 'The West Wing' (yes, I know it's not really like that) where stories evolve, characters develop or disappear over long time spans. I don't care for the Lost type things or sci-fi. But I've just started the first series of 'Mad Men' and it has me gripped.

I don't have any recordings of the 'Lost Quintet' but am intrigued. I understand we are in 'dubious provenance' territory here. What would you say is a good, reasonably well recorded (I find flutter and wow distracting, whatever the quality of the performance), reasonably representative recording?

Marty Feldman and Barry Took were of my time!

Very positive review of Roger's Ian Carr discography in this month's Jazzwise. Well done Roger!

Before my time, Daddy-os!

Sounds like a great night, sidewinder. Pity it wasn't on a Saturday! Nikki Yeoh is a very impressive player. Like Jason Yarde, someone who is sadly underrepresented on disc. I first saw her at Cheltenham about ten years ago and felt sure we had a new star; yet her profile has remained rather low. And that 'Northumbrian Sketches' piece is marvellous - I have the original CD and have always felt it made a really interesting, spiky use of an orchestra. Do you have the Gil Evans 'British Orchestra' record? Ray Russell plays a marvellous solo on the version of 'Little Wing' there.

This aforementioned combination of three early albums now has a late-March release date (in the UK):

Coming soon: Django Bates in rare piano trio format playing Charlie Parker tunes: 1. Scrapple From the Apple 2. Hot House 3. Puntuat-i'on 4. Star Eyes 5. My Little Suede Shoes 6. Laura 7. Chi Chi 8. Now's the Time 9. Plasticity 10. Moose the Mooche 11. Billie's Bounce 12. Ah-Leu-Cha Won't sound remotely like any other 'Bird' tribute, I would imagine!

Yes, despite more snow this week and gloomy mist this morning, it looks encouraging. My heating packed in again - just had British gas sort it out. But stirrings in the garden make it look as if this might soon be a thing of the past. I hacked at all the surplus foliage back in October. Pure guesswork. I'm curious to see what pops up. I've a nice patch of some sort of grass that grows tall and acts as a sort of divide half way down the garden. It's already bursting forth.

Listened to programme 1 and the first 20 mins of 2 on the work run today. Very well done! Donald Macleod...who you normally hear talking about Haydn or Berlioz...is there asking questions as the inexperienced but interested novice. What really impresses is the explanations of Geoffrey Smith. I've only heard him doing his amiable but rather scripted Jazz Record Requests. But here he positively bubbles with enthusiasm and shows a great knowledge of the music - not just the who/what/where but he talks authoritatively about what is happening musically. I always think it sad that programmes like these only survive for a broadcast or two and then vanish (I know - contractual, licence etc). Should be linked up for constant reference - perfect for a music student or someone coming new to jazz and wanting a primer.

Hi Manfred! Nice to see you!

Wonderful film and fabulous music. Love the dance sequences. And was fascinated this time by some of the orchestration in 'Cool'. Bernstein knew a thing or two!