A Lark Ascending

Believe me, after the three crumpets you need that cup of tea.

Failed in both June and July. Managed a pretty low key gig in St Ives, Cornwall in August (a place with some of the worst sight-lines I've come across) which didn't do much for me. Tonight a beauty - Nikki Iles, Norma Winstone, Steve Watts, Jed Williams, Stan Sulzmann (depping for Mark Lockheart) and Mike Walker in a marvellous song based couple of sets drawing from the band themselves, a couple of standards and things by Fred Hersch, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell. As the usual Sheffield venue (The Crucible) is being renovated it was in a bizarre Unitarian chapel with very hard pews! I seem to have gone to gigs in all sorts of odd places this year...though the Lincoln Drill Hall remains the oddest. October will be Marilyn Crispell. Given what's possible in Lincoln, Nottingham and Sheffield I should make November and December.

What? No Zambia?

I've always enjoyed her 80s Decca recordings of Albeniz and Granados and her version of Falla's 'Nights in the Gardens of Spain' is heavenly. People who know about these things rate her earlier recordings but the ones I know do the trick for me.

I eat breakest (three crumpets and a cup of tea) over listening to music.

Nah, that's the Beatles remasters thread. I know roughly where you mean. There was an excellent, large classical shop in that area in the 80s. Can't recall if it did jazz...I was going through an almost exclusively classical period at the time with jazz being very slow to get to CD whereas the classical labels adapted to it very quickly.

The one I remember in Birmingham was just outside the city centre over one of the ring roads (don't ask me which...Birmingham's ring roads criss cross endlessly) at a place called, I think, St. Giles Circus (next to a large church, St Giles perhaps?). A jazz specialist shop with a hefty stock...I think it was the first place I saw Mosaics. Think its gone now. Another one it would be hard to find. Two shops which get high praise in the book and had a better than normal jazz stock are Record Collector about two miles out of Sheffield city centre and Jumbo in one of the big shopping centres in Leeds. I've not been to either in over a year simply because it's no longer worth my while treavelling the 15 and 40 odd miles to those cities because once I'd done those shops I'd be lost as to what to do next! Which is why I think there's a lot of wish fulfilment in Graham Jones's belief that the slide in record stores will bottom out because customers will want the physical product. I loved shopping in record stores as much as anyone...but I'm no longer prepared to lose so much time in travel getting to them. Like steam trains they were a joy when they existed, are a joy to look back on nostalgically, a few might even survive for a while longer. But I just can't see them competing with the new technologies.

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic..."

Yippee! You have been greatly missed, MG. Somewhere in a thread from last week called 'Last Shop Standing' you will see mention of your beloved Spillers.

Good to read the piece in Jazzwise about you, Alex. Law and criminology, eh? You could be put to good use here. And what's all this about having a thing about Jarrett/Evans imitators?

Very odd. I'm pretty sure he never played the Cheltenham festival in 2007 and it would be an unlikely place for an international jazz gig outside of festival time. Could be wrong. He did play this year with McCaslin though not with Caine. It was fabulous!

The BBC have always known this.

I'm in the 'change genre' when things sound jaded group as well. Though it's often enough for me to change within genre - after a few weeks on the hard bop a gear change to ECM or Ellington normally has the desired effect. Having bought far too many records over the last 40 years I can always find something to freshen my ear buds.

If you get the time, take a train out to Roskilde to visit the fabulous Viking ship Museum: http://vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/index.php?id=...cache=1&L=1 When I went around 1980 you had to catch various boats (the train drove onto the boat!) to cross between islands but there are bridges all the way now.

I only have the one disc, which would suggest that he's not exactly excited me. Just mentioned him because he's well known - had quite a high profile here in the late 80s.eearly 90s but I've not heard much fuss about him in rrecent years. So, dont worry, I won't have a strop, Jeff! (One of those smiley things)

It was always a Saturday or holiday time for me so it would have been tea-shirt and jeans. I loath suits!

John Harle is a saxophonist who is mainly associated with the classical/film music world. His recent discs seem to be heavily weighted in the film/TV music direction. There's a discography here: http://www.johnharle.com/johnharle/discography.html Most of the classical is contemporary classical. I have the Nyman/Bryars/Westbrook disc. Haven't played it for a long time. There's a disc of music by Debussy, Glazunov, Ibert, Villa-Lobos, Richard Rodney Bennett and Dave Heath on the list that might be what you are looking for. Though I suspect its OOP. You can hear saxophone used in some of Vaughan Williams' music. 'Job, a Masque for Dancing' and one or two of the later symphonies. Doesn't sound a bit like jazz sax - quite eerie.

Acorn gets a good write up in the Graham Jones book. There was an excellent shop in one of the lanes in Norwich when I briefly lived there in 1977. Bought things like Coltranes's 'My Favourite Things', Dexter Gordon's 'Homecoming' and several of the then contemporary Oguns there as my jazz interest began to pick up. I don't think it was 'Andys', a store I noticed there on irregular visits in the early 80s which expanded as a chain across the east of England before disappearing like so many similar ones (Our Price, MVC, Fopp etc). There was also a good independent in Exeter around '76-77, not far from the bus station. It got a fair chunk of my student grant in the year I did teacher training there. Gosh, even the cultural desert of Mansfield had a shop called Sid Booth's that stocked a wide range of music including jazz. I lived there when I started teaching in 1978 so my first pay packet was spent there - 'Happy Daze' by Elton Dean's Ninesense as I recall. I remember ordering 'A Love Supreme' and 'Africa Brass' there and having to wait six weeks or so as they scoured the world - neither were in print in the UK at the time. They did stock ECMs as they came out and those Blue Note twofers - I picked up the Gerry Mulligan/Lee Konitz and Gil Evans ones.

Decoy was a great shop. I used to go to teaching conferences at UMIST in the city - they used to let us out as 3.00 and I'd always sprint to Decoy to make a quick set of purchases.

The main record shop in Newquay in 1970 was just such. I bought my first record player there with money earned from washing dishes. In fact, in those days even a small town like Newquay that three places to buy records - that one, the place I pictured earlier and Woolworths (which had a broad selection in those days...I bought King Crimson's 'Lizard' there).

Bev, Hickies it was - I never expected to come across that name again! Grew up in Reading and occasionally looked in their racks when not searching for AC/DC records in Knights or the independent store on the first floor of the Butts Centre (the name escapes me - probably a good thing) Yes, welcome, mjazzg. I was at university there from 1973-6. I recall a pokey place that was on one of the alleys that ran between the two parallel shopping streets. Though my main haunt, because it tended to have the less mainstream records, was on the main street nearest the railway station at the Butts end of town. Bought my first Keith Jarrett's there in '75 which started the tilt away from rock. Sorry about the directions - I've only been briefly back to Reading twice since '76. My mental map is probably all wrong.

When in Bath I always pop in here: It's actually Duck, Son and Pinker (who sound like renegades from Beatrix Potter) and still looks like record/music shops used to look in 1970 (and probably in 1940!) - wooden floorboards, record/cd racks that have never seen the inside of IKEA etc. The jazz selection is a bit random - a lot of Gambit and Lonehill type things but you can hit on some goodies. Good folk and classical section. I recall a branch in Swindon when I lived there in 1972-3 (confirmed by the Last Shop Standing Book) - you could also get a good selection of LPs in Menzies, Bon Marche (where Andy Partridge of XTC worked around the time I was there) and another big department store (and I recall a new chromey type shop opening next to the Wyvern Theatre in the Autumn of '72). When I moved to Reading in late '73 there was a big store like the one pictured above...might have been Hickies...that had pianos downstairs and records upstairs. Ainsley's in Leicester was like this well into the late 80s and there was a place in Sheffield that was mainly a piano shop that had the same sort of layout until the mid 90s. Bath regulars will also worship this place an d hope it stays in business: [i always chuckle in a superior 'I'm normal' way when I see blokes (only blokes) photographing buses. What do people think of me taking pictures of record shops? Having said that, I wish I'd kep a photographic record of everywhere I'd bought records since 1970! Favourite shop? One in Dingle on the west coast of Ireland that sold books and records about Ireland and had a nice coffee shop before coffee shops in bookstores became the norm.]

I'd quite forgotten the paper bags they used to serve records in!

We're not the only codgerswith this sad obsession. These lot go back even earlier: http://www.charliegillett.com/phpBB2/viewt...4cc235787b2aa43

Just to prove that this is all now officially history: http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/English/C...ct&id=64652