A Lark Ascending

Amazed to find no thread on these marvellous musicians. This new release seems an excuse to start one: Keith Tippett, Julie Tippett, Gary Boyle...there's a blast from the past...(guitar), Mark Hanslip (sax), Adam Sorensen (drums) and Fulvia Sigurta (trumpet, horn), Ben Lamdin (production) and Riaan Vosloo (bass). A real surprise - both have worked mainly in the free jazz arena since the 70s, but this is a song based album with the musicians very much supporting the vocals. Julie Tippett (once Julie Driscoll of Brian Auger and Oblivion fame for those unaware) has one of the great voices and the years seem to have taken nothing off the power or tonal variety. Keith basically supports but in his very distinctive way - listeners of a certain vintage will be thrown back to the 70s Ogun albums or even three of the King Crimson albums (where I first bumped into him). Even though some of his free stuff can lose me, Keith Tippett has always been my favourite jazz pianist. Good to hear him again in a more structured context; and to hear Julie in conventional song format (anyone who knows Working Week's 'Storm of Light' will know what to expect; a cameo on a recent album by pianist Dave Stapleton also pointed towards this record). I'm not sure what Nostagia 77 is all about - seems to be a production or concept team working with various musicians. Worth seeking out - should be easy as it's on e-music. ************** Hoping this thread will provide a point for comments on other Tippett-related releases etc.

You might find this is localised. There is a famous example of a pressing plant in the UK that did something wrong in the processing - I think it allowed the ink from the printing to penetrate to the disc. This led to 'bronzing' and, sometimes, pinholes. It's proved an issue with some of the discs I have on the classical Hyperion label, bought around the early 90s. Hyperion are up front about it and have a way to exchange defective discs: http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/bronzed.asp I doubt if this sortof thing would be isolated to one plant, so maybe your disc comes from a similar situation.

Very wise. I think over the years I've rebought most of the classical music I enjoy on either CD or download. But that had more to do with wanting to hear it without the clicks and scratches. In the end we all have different levels of tolerance for different things. I don't really notice differences in sonic quality a great deal - I'm driven hairless by any physical interruptions which I know others can listen past.

I think that's a matter of perception rather than fact (much like the debates over the quality of different download rates or downloads and CDs). Maybe the difference is more noticeable on a high end system. I associate vinyl with surface noice, off-centre pressings, flutter and wow etc (most of my vinyl buying happened between 1970-the late 80s when the quality of the vinyl used was poorer so I might just have had bad experiences). Quite. For me the real point about Lyrita was its making available for exploration a whole area of music that had been marginalised by critical fashion. I bless it for allowing me to listen to Frank Bridge alone.

I have a fair bit of the vinyl. Can't tell the difference between it and the CD/download version. Maybe I could if I had an expensive system but that isn't going to happen. I'd hate to see people scared away from exploring Lyrita's wonderful catalogue, that is available in the newer formats, by the usual 'it's not as good as the vinyl' assertions. For most of us listeners choosing one format over another is just a lifestyle choice.

Have just booked a ticked for the BBC Friday show. I'm usually knackered on Friday after a day at work, the drive and one concert. But I realy want to hear your band, Alex. Looking forward to it. Good luck with the tour.

Most of the Lyrita catalogue has been issued on CD in the last two or three years. A substantial amount of it is available for download from e-music. http://www.lyrita.co.uk/ http://www.emusic.com/browse/l/b/-dbm/a/0-...00156301/0.html Not of much interest to those for whom vinyl is a premium medium; but it's there in other formats. I've replaced most of my 1970s/80s Lyrita LPs from one source or the other (preferring to listen via CD).

Finished this - highly recommended if you like an exciting telling of the story of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes and the collision with Athens and Sparta. The author looks very young, almost punkish and his style can be a bit breathless and and tabloid-ish with lots of use of contemporary terms to describe these events (part of his aim - to indicate the relevance of these events to our world). I imagine lovers of 'fine writing' will be outraged and immediately turn to their Herodotus but everyone else is promised a good time.

The one he did of music by Fred Frith and Bjork is marvellous too.

No, it's hardly quantifiable. But imagine a society where all non-vocational courses were abolished in favour of those of proven economic or social service use. I know there are many who would like to see educational courses justified on just such grounds. Maybe society would be no different. I'm not sure what I would have done at 18 in such a system. I'm comfortable with my taxes being spent on allowing young people to pursue a discipline with some system and rigour in as wide a range of areas as possible. Following something that fires you makes really want to go at it and I'd hope you get a 21 year old with a range of transferable skills (which will almost certainly need more specific honing). In my view society always benefits from breadth and variety, a willingness to follow paths that might not lead anywhere. Rather than a narrower, more closely targeted approach which can only ever target what looks today like it might be important tomorrow. Idealistic and unaffordable in our credit crunch world? Perhaps. It's interesting that in the UK such utilitarianism has always been thought a good thing for 'the masses'; private education has always insisted that the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful embrace a much broader curriculum (where do most of the Ancient Greek and Latin scholars at university come from?). Which is why I'm all for giving kids a chance to study music, even if the jobs are not there in music at the end.

Not the way to become a target for one of their hot dates!

They did...Rothenberg went over my head but Angeli was astounding. A fourth Italian was due to play but he got lost at Dover and never made it!

Can't speak for the States, but when I hit the UK jazz festivals its usually the new, 20-something musicians that make my ears perk up. They strike me as just as inventive as the youngsters I was hearing thirty years ago. It's also worth remembering that the great individualists of the past that we can admire on CD are the wheat; the chaff got blown away long ago. Can create the illusion that it was all wheat. I bet there were plenty of big bands stuffed to the gills with identikit players. In fact I suspect most big bands wanted that. I take the point that the playing/social conditions were such to provide a much more intense live training. I'd echo the earlier point about limited employability being not just a music thing. Most people studying history or philosophy don't expect to make their living that way. In a totally utilitarian curriculum these subjects would all be pruned and replaced with ones of proven economic benefit. I'd like to think that having young people educated in music, history, philosophy etc and then becoming lawyers or accountants would have an overall enriching effect on society and rather than narrowing into pure, hard practicality. Just as long as music students are aware that after three years learning an instrument they might have to look for a different career path. They'll still have a set of skills that will enrich their lives and stand the chance of bringing pleasure to others in a social situation. Probably works better in a music like folk music. The opportunities for amateur jazz musicians to play together must be limited, except where you get these very outward looking collectives. In folk music the 'everybody-all-join-in' type session is much more common. Go to a folk festival and alongside the professional paying gigs you'll find pubs full of session players, often of great skill. Some never pay any attention to the commercial events.

You touched a nerve! It's like some people get worked up about flutes or soprano saxophones! (I love both in jazz and elsewhere). Don't worry...when I become world dictator I intend to be benevolent. I won't ban them (though I might have ownership severely restricted).

Even if they're analog??? I'm not sure I could tell! I just hold them guilty for all those records where the space gets filled in with an anodyne wash. Mellotrons could do it with some character (sounding all the time that they were about to break down). I'm not too fond of the monophonic synth either - growling away like at the end of the first ELP album was quite fun but the Jan Hammer-type soloing sets my teeth on edge (maybe I can just recall seeing him writhing around as if he had been electrocuted). The ARP thing King Crimson used in the early 70s sounds interesting - gives the impression you needed to be a muscle man to get anything out of it at all and even then what came out was not all that predictable. If you hear it on one of the live things that have come out from soundboard tapes it really does sound like an erratic beast. Sorry - synths have always been a blind spot for me. I've never heard a single recording where I'd not have preferred a different instrument...except perhaps the end of that ELP track and, maybe, the bizarre background whirrings on 'Abbey Road'. My loss entirely - apologies to synth lovers.

I know of Mount Hawke, though not Skinners Bottom - looked it up on the OS map - though I've passed by Blackwater I don't think I've been to your metropolis. Apologies for disruption of thread. Back to polyphonic synths (may they all rot in hell!).

Where would that be? A cousin of mine lives in Porthtowan, just as you go in off the Portreath to St Agnes Road. I spent last summer up at the campsite at Scorrier. I did my teaching practice at Redruth School back in 1977, staying with an aunt who lived in Portreath. My father's family, although they ended up in Tregony, come from round there - Illogan, Portreath, Towan Cross. Small world!

Strangely enough I did live in Swindon in 72-73 - it actually seemed might sophisticated after Cornwall! I read a bio of XTC a few years back and Andy Partridge mentioned how he worked at the record counter of one of the big Dept stores there. He may well have served me! Anywhere would seem sophisticated after Cornwall, even more so back then! It was suggested that they should put a sign up at the county boundary saying ' You are now entering Cornwall - put your watches back 25 years'. Cornwall - the land that Starbucks (almost) forgot! After spending the Easter weekend zooming between Truro, Sticker, St Ives, Porthcowan, Newquay and Padstow I have to say I'd move back there tomorrow, given the chance.

I went to university in October 1973 - the hall I was in had full heating all day, cleaners in on a daily basis, sheets changed once a week. My how that all changed by the end of the first academic year! I also recall my father commenting that, with the prospect of a Labour election victory (which materialised), if the Queen asked the military to step in and stop it he and everyone he worked with would have acted for her! The ramblings of a right-wing military policeman, but...

Yes, I've heard that from a number of sources. You certainly wouldn't have got the extremes of London in a Darlington Top Rank. Yet it's amazing how widely it spread. In 1967 I was at a RAF grammar school in Changi, Singapore - the hip young 11 year old girls were painting peace and love posters in art class and worshipped Sergeant Pepper (I was still more interested in Airfix planes and minature soldiers!). It got there. From 1968-72 I lived in Newquay, Cornwall and although I experienced little of the lifestyle of the 'Sixties' the full force of the musical changes were wide open to me. I don't think it was because Newquay had a slightly boho reputation (there's a great documentary from the early 60s of folky type pre-hippies hanging out there to the fury of local councillors!) because I never moved in those circles. That period was more 'On the Buses' and 'Dad's Army' than happenings for me! Strangely enough I did live in Swindon in 72-73 - it actually seemed might sophisticated after Cornwall! I read a bio of XTC a few years back and Andy Partridge mentioned how he worked at the record counter of one of the big Dept stores there. He may well have served me!

The radio news item mentioned the 305 independents in that BBC article but also contrasted it with well over 2 000 outlets in the 1980s. A real sign of the change. I know I live 30 miles in one direction and 16 in another from my nearest independent. Neither specialise in the main areas of music I enjoy. But I wish the survivors well - I always look forward to visiting Sounds Good in Cheltenham and Music Matters and the Bath Compact Disc Shop when I'm in those areas.

Kennedy might have been a trigger (sorry!) - the Profumo Scandal and the fall of the decayed Conservative government are often mooted as the triggers of the Swinging Sixties in the UK - but I'd say the causes are the same ones regularly touted for all the other social ferment of the period. In particular, a young generation with a higher level of education (and one spread across a wider social base) than any previously, money in their pockets, no war (in most cases) to go to and a general sense that a system based on authority and obedience had failed in the first half of the 20thC and had to be questioned. It's that willingness to question anything and look down alternative paths that marks the era. Throw in the technological innovations that made it so much easier to explore - cheap printing, TV, long playing records, cassettes, satellite connections that made news instant etc. And finally, a world watching the space race, especially the race to the moon - that really did give the feeling that human potential was limitless. When did that optimism end? 1968 or Altamont the following year? I don't think so - it was still going when I really clicked in from 1969 onwards. I'd place it around 1973 with the Yom Kippur War and the oil crisis, a time that (in the UK at least) was even more frightening than the present financial crisis. Suddenly the limitless expansion of affluence was put into question, paving the way for the conservatism of the Thatcher/Reagan years. Which is certainly why prog started to look so outmoded in the UK in the second half of the 70s. Long rock suites and spangly capes did not fit with the growing dole queues and the sense of political and social disintegration of those years. ************ On where prog started, I'd go with the Beatles too. A recent UK doc went for 'Whiter Shade of Pale'. I'm not sure when the term 'Progressive Rock' was first used but I recall reading about it c.1970 where it was very much a term to try to distinguish one sort of pop/rock (serious music played by skilled musicians) from another (bubblegum music played by paid-by-the-hour session musicians with pretty boy/girls up front). Of course the reality was much more mixed. But if anything distinguished Progressive rock it was a self-belief that what it was doing was not ephemeral and just might court consideration alongside more respectable musics like jazz or classical. In that sense you could trace it back to something like Dylan's 'Desolation Row'. Although I miss the speed of change and breadth of reference of that time, I don't miss the self-importance which probably proved the music's Achilles heel in the end - by 1975 the grandiosity was not being matched by musical development. With jazz-rock/fusion you are getting two quite different things colliding. Jazz musicians like Miles, Ian Carr, Coryell etc becoming attracted to rock rhythms and features as a way of keeping their music developing; and rock musicians like Chicago, B, S & T etc, Cream etc picking up on aspects of jazz like long solos to give their music more gravitas. Though, again, that is more complex as some had feet in both camps. I'd still argue for the likes of Graham Bond and John Mayall as one of the key sources.

Though he doesn't mention the BBC specifically, he does have a real go at the Arts Council with its emphasis on upholding 'artistic standards' (i.e. Covent Garden, the big galleries etc) rather than promoting active involvement in music, painting etc. Cultural elitism is very much his target - he seems to have it in for Jeanette Winterson big time! I first came across him in a TV documentary based on an earlier book 'The Intellectuals and the Masses' where he charts how the cultural elite strove to distance itself from the growing literacy of the mass population by creating an increasingly obscure art world. Must read the book now. I haven't seen the TV prog, Bev - is his position that 'difficult' artistes like Picasso, Schoenberg, Beckett, Rothko, Corigliano, Bellow etc etc deliberately created their works in the hopes that virtually no one would get anything out of them? I don't think it's that simplistic. He doesn't challenge the right of anyone to enjoy any of those 'artists' - merely their right to be telling others that they ought to be enjoying those artists above other things because they are 'better'. He basically denies the existence of objective artistic truths in a non-religious world (he accepts that in a world with a God then you can have a supreme arbiter who will decide what is and is not worthy). Most of his argument in 'The Intellectuals and the Masses' is based on English literature with the Bloomsbury group as a major target. He basically argues that up to the mid 19thC culture - literature, art, music in the 'art' sense - was the exclusive preserve of the wealthy. But with the advances of literacy in the later 19thC the cultural elites, who assumed that their love of art was another way of proving their superiority over the masses, found their territory invaded. So their arts evolved to take them beyond the common herd, thereby retaining their sense of superiority. I'm half remembering this from a programme a few years back so can't comment on the detail of his argument - but in both that programme and the book I mention above he's able to quote limitless examples of the snobbery of the arts establishment. I'd be suprised if he was arguing that elitism was the only thing that drove 20thC arts into increasing abstraction; but he is arguing that this was a major part of the appeal of 'difficult' art. I don't know what it is like in the US but in the UK control of the arts still lies very much within the influence of a small social/political elite - the Oxbridge crowd. Thus the constant preference given to opera and classical music over jazz (and to jazz over even less 'respectable' musics). Edit: Nice synopsis of 'The Intellectuals and the Masses' here. And a balanced biographical article here. I can see why he appeals to me so...I'm from that same first-generation-university-educated lower middle class 'sort'.

I think you need to define pretentious - this is a frequently levelled assertion at the music (and lyrics) of the early 70s (much of which falls outside the label prog.) Would Fairport Convention singing traditional lyrics to rock beats (or in some cases, contemporary lyrics written like traditional lyrics) be pretentious? Is an ambiguous lyric like John Martyn's 'Solid Air' pretentious? Should rock musicians confine themselves to 'My baby done left me' ? I'd also question how important the sophistication in rhythm and rhyme is to most listeners who are not going to subject them to critical analysis. I'd imagine that the lyrics of Lorenz Hart are pretty unsophisticated when compared to T.S. Elliot or Wordsworth (I'm no expert there). Doesn't stop a listener accepting them on their own terms. While I'd agree completely that we can all enjoy music on many levels, I'd not accept the jazz lyrics = sophisticated; rock lyrics = riff-raff division. I think you'd find both in both musics. Perhaps the real difference between rock lyrics and American songbook lyrics lies in the fact that the latter had evolved over many decades, often written by professional lyricists; the former were a part of a culture that was barely ten years old and generally written by youths who were also writing and/or playing the music. That whole genre had more or less died before it got the chance to evolve. They were also being written in the wake of Bob Dylan! I wouldn't say UK "survived". They did one American tour when Bruford and Holdsworth were in the group. I don't know of any other American tours. I'll defer to you there - I don't think I ever heard Asia or UK. Oh... So you're one of those high brow artsy blue collar morons. I am too. I suspect I'm one of those nasty middlebrows!

I was out of the loop by the time they appeared. They were known and their records came out here but I don't think they had a big following. The only commentary I recall about them was negative - but the UK music press was generally very negative about US AOR. 'Supergroups' like Asia and UK had very little support here - I think they relied on the States to survive. It might also explain why King Crimson have played so rarely over here since the early 70s.