A Lark Ascending

The Black Saint/Soul Notes have just rolled into town!

My experience too...of most music. I wouldn't go as far as to say it bores me, but I lose the desire to listen to it. Time elsewhere always refreshes the ear.

After really enjoying several of his late 90s albums I was really disappointed by a London concert around 2000 - he did the singing with headpiece thing there. A year later I saw him at the Iridium in New York and was just as underwhelmed. Nothing I've heard on radio or read has rekindled an interest. A pity because the late 90s records were wonderful.

Read this over the last fortnight. Marvellous book - the love for both the music and Bessie herself shines through. And very good history - great care taken to point out variations in the telling of a tale when recounted by several witnesses. In fact, what I like most is the constant care with which myths are examined. I think I understand a bit better Chris' annoyance with the 'Jazz' TV series now. Something to depress (though not surprise) you, Chris. A few years back I was at a teaching conference and attended a workshop on teaching Civil Rights. The teacher running the session introduced us to what was, in teaching terms, an excellent way of gaining student interest, using Bessie Smith as a point of human interest to explain the wider social situation. Sadly, the passage used was one that recounted the story of her being refused a white hospital after her accident. There's a better lesson lying in that story - how, despite plenty of evidence proving otherwise, a strong myth will survive and be repreated regardless. Thanks for your work on the book, Chris. A great read and one that gave me a feel for the 20s and early 30s in the States that I'd not experienced before.

Fish and chips are widely offered in restaurants and pubs across the UK and are normally quite pleasant. But there's something a bit different and special about those served in a dedicated fish and chip shop. When I was young we used to have a fish and chip van come around the RAF camps I grew up on. They were wonderful fish and chips. I suspect they'd be shut down under health and safety today.

I can recall when Tangerine Dream were not old! There was something exotic about synths (or should that be the Moog) in the early days. I recall being overwhelmed by the bit right at the end of the first ELP album where it wheezes into life - sounded like 21stC music then!And if you listen careful to Abbey Road you can hear one whirring away. One record I'd love to hear again is one called 'Zero Time' (I think!) by Tonto's Expanding Headband. Never owned it but it was played a lot on late night radio here around '71/'72. I remember really enjoying it but was too poor to buy a copy.

I bet you don't get mushy peas in the States. Something of a north of England delicacy, served with fish and chips. They sometimes serve them in pubs on their own with mint sauce! Not being a northerner I've failed to take to them, despite living in the marches of mushy-pealand for 30 years. Details here: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/blog/008-mushy-peas/ (worth reading!)

It does seem strange for a chippie to sell booze. Maybe that's common in Ireland. Never been to a chippie there. MG The ones by the sea are as good as the ones you get at Whitby and places in the UK. I went to a great one in Galway a couple of years back. Could you get booze there? MG Not that I recall. But being Ireland you could probably buy nails and curtain hooks and possibly even arrange a funeral. This is the pla(i)ce - it does wine! http://www.mcdonaghs.net/

It does seem strange for a chippie to sell booze. Maybe that's common in Ireland. Never been to a chippie there. MG The ones by the sea are as good as the ones you get at Whitby and places in the UK. I went to a great one in Galway a couple of years back.

When in London, you should always have your fish & chips at The Laughing Halibut, Strutton Ground (I DO love that street name, doncha?) which runs south from Victoria Street, just east of Artillery Row. Truly, it's good enough for Jehovah! MG I will remember that!

I doubt if any American would want to eat fish and chips more than once, let alone open a chippie in the States, if their first experience is one of the outlets at our major tourist sites. I made the mistake of catching lunch in a chippie on the corner of Tottenham Court Road/Oxford Street back in May - it was dreadful. Cooked in oil that had clearly overheated. £9 for fish, chips and a cup of tea! Incidentally; what attracts so many Greeks to run British fish and chip shops (apart from a native skill in making kebabs)? My local (which is excellent) is Greek run, like so many.

I've never heard of Jimmy Buffet!!!! Would I be right in thinking that I should not be ordering the Mosaic?

I recall reading an interview with Bill Bruford a while back where he maintained that the shifting of rock into large halls and stadiums meant that any subtlty in drumming just got lost in the acoustics. You had to hammer out a beat to hold the music together. Of course, once people had thrilled to that in a stadium they wanted it on a record. A good illustration of what I find hard to take is Eric Clapton's "Journeyman" from the late 80s/early 90s. There's that whole wall-of-sound approach where every space is filled in (usually with an anodyne synth wash) and the beat is punched out. Some of those songs turned up on the 'Unplugged' album, a record that I love. The music breaths again. ********* The mention of Queen here is interesting. Not a group I ever cared for. But I'd hazzard a guess that, alongside Abba, they are the most listened to oldies band by younger people - moreso, I'd suggest than The Beatles. I don't know how many staff socials I've been on which end with drunken younger colleagues gathering together to sing 'Bohemian Rhapsody' or 'Dancing Queen' word perfect. I've never plucked up the courage to ask if anyone knows anything off the first Soft Machine album.

Six Winter + Winter albums appeared today - Uri Caine to Fred Frith. The ECM strategy continues to mystify - some more appeared a few days back, even though they took most of their first batch off. And a large number of Carla Bley/Steve Swallow discs have shown up.

Strange, but the production values that I started to notice around 1976 were one of the things that turned me away from pop/rock almost totally at that time. Everything sounded like it had been recorded in an aircraft hanger - boomy drums, an immense, multilayered sound, a simple beat right up front. When it comes to how rock records sound my heart lies very much in the early 70s - the loose, freewheeling feel of so much of my favourite music of that time. A record like 'Sticky Fingers' might still be obviously that of a 'beat group' but it slipped and slid in a way stadium rock could never emulate (and who slipped and slid better than Little Feet?). Give me Free over Bad Company any day! Of course, that perspective is totally a result of cutting my teeth on music between 70 and 76. If I was five years younger I'd have probably found loud, boomy drums exciting.

Not so (at least over here). The Beatles were the loveable face of pop music - things like 'A Taste of Honey', 'Yesterday', 'When I'm 64' etc could link to pre-rock listeners. My parents and their friends ridiculed my musical tastes but they always qualified it with 'but The Beatles are good.' Probably explains why I resisted buying Beatles albums for so long!!!!

What is often forgotten is that there was a lot of very harmonically adventurous music being made in the wider world of popular music - think Bacharach or Jobim - but which was not considered all that 'hip' to a pop/rock audience because it was cloaked in the sort of string drenched arrangements associated with 'easy listening/MOR'. One of The Beatles successes from around '65 was to bring some of those more complex chord sequences into pop/rock whilst keeping the sense of being a pop/rock group. They were, of course, quickly emulated, leading to the rich period of music that stretched to the early/mid-70s. Harmonic adventurousness was one of the qualities jetisoned by the back-to-basics movement that took control at that point. The later group who most effectively, to my mind, exploited some of the Beatles experiments were XTC. Yes, there are some great songs there - 'A Day', 'It's Getting Better', 'Fixing a Hole' (marvellous, almost jazzy feel to that one). And I'm partial to the overly sentimental 'She's Leaving Home' (which I first heard as a stimulus in a Religious Education lesson!), the cod-eastern 'Within You, Without You' and the two upbeat non-rockers ('With a little Help' and 'When I'm '64'). I don't care for the title track, Lucy, Rita or Mr Kite.

I take your point there. Though much depends how you heard them. I didn't buy an album by anyone until mid-1970 by which time they were all over. I don't recall hearing 'Abbey Road' as an LP until late '72 and didn't own a full Beatles album until c. '74. So my experience of them was via individual songs (not always singles...a lot of album tracks got played on the radio). I'm not trying to make any general case; but I think the way they were/are perceived varies enormously - I suspect how most people heard and remembered them bears little resemblence to the text book analyis that tries to position their cultural or artistic significance. I don't much care for Pepper either - when I first heard it, after reading so much about how great it was, I felt rather underwhelmed. Revolutionary for its time, no doubt, but I'm not convinced it has their best collection of songs (Rubber Soul, Revolver) or their most successful experiment (I'd go for side 2 of Abbey Road there).

I hardly think of The Beatles as an albums band. Yes, 'Rubber Soul' through to 'Abbey Road' have a certain unity about them (though I've always found 'The White Album' a bit thrown together - a hodge-podge of whole songs, experiments, and half-thought-through ideas. Sacrilege, I know!). But it's as a singles (or individual songs) band that I remember them. Having said that, I was always annoyed when contemporary singles were not on albums. The album would be around for a few years; the singles gone in six months. 'Best of' compilations with the singles took a few years to come out in those days. Now the second album of a new starlet is a 'best of' (I'm sure I've already seen Norah Jones and Katie Meliahyaahyuhhhhh?????? 'best of's and they only released their first albums around last month!

I saw her earlier this year with the band on this record: Very enjoyable. The pieces on the record were the ones they played in concert.

Really enjoyed tonight's programme - especially the Anachronic Jazz Band doing a trad version of "Joy Spring" and the Mulligan track at the end.

Great two part interview with John McLaughlin. Sadly, part one vanishes in a couple of hours but included: DISC 1 Title Extrapolation Artist John McLaughlin Composer McLaughlin Album Extrapolation DISC 2 Title Binky’s Beam Artist John McLaughlin Composer McLaughlin Album Extrapolation DISC 3 Title These Boots are Made for Walking Artist Gordon Beck Composer Hazelwood Album Experiments with Pops DISC 4 Title Allah Be Praised Artist Tony Williams Lifetime Composer Young Album John McLaughlin Compact Jazz DISC 5 Title Grass Is Greener Artist Graham Bond Composer Bond Album Solid Bond DISC 6 Title Emergency Artist Tony Williams Lifetime Composer Williams Album John McLaughlin Compact Jazz DISC 7 Title In ASilent Way Artist Miles Davis Composer Davis Album In A Silent Way DISC 8 Title Right Off Take 10 Artist Miles Davis Composer Davis Album Complete Jack Johnson Sessions DISC 9 Title Meeting of the Spirits Artist Mahavishnu Orchestra Composer McLaughlin Album Inner Mounting Flame DISC 10 Title Thousand Island Park Artist Mahavishnu Orchestra Composer McLaughlin Album Birds of Fire Part 2 will be up on the replayer for a week from 8th Nov.

Wow. I understand what you're saying, but I wasn't able to cut the flow that abruptly. That said, I would recommend All Things Must Pass, though I understand most of the songs were written during the time the Beatles were still together. Well there wasn't really a flow to cut. The Beatles had been there in the background as I grew up. I can recall as a 7-8 year old around '64 finding Beatlemania all a bit of a joke - the plastic mop-top hairpieces etc. The music was there as a backdrop to growing up but I wasn't a big listener. What they'd done is cut right through to musically unaware people like me. I have no memory of the Stones records of the same era. I became a music obsessive around '69 - I recall Abbey Road coming out and be played in full on Radio Luxembourg, I think. So the Beatles were breaking up as I got interested in music. They were really peripheral to what I was listening to in the early 70s. I liked the old hits I knew but saw them as yesterday's band. The Lennon, Harrison, McCartney records that came out seemed very plain compared with a group like Yes who had picked up on some of the things that caught my ear in the 60s - the melodicism, unusual key changes, overall colour of the music. I don't think I heard Sgt Pepper in full until 1972 (I recall really liking 'Lucy in the Sky' until the chorus which seemed to throw away a dreamy build up with a nursery rhyme). I think it was around the time of the two double LP singles LPs (1973) that I started to listen back in earnest. So, in some way my Beatles years were the mid 70s! I get the impression that both as a group and individually the Beatles almost took a deliberate decision to cut back from the flamboyance and experimentation of their mid to late 60s music. It all seems to base itself on a much more simplified approach. Which seems to be almost the history of popular music - lines of development that lead to increasing complexity and then suddenly...'well, we're really just pop groups'...and a rapid retreat to ground zero and rejection of what went before as pretentious.

Something else I've always found odd. There are lots of Beatles songs that have the same sort of melting chord changes that send a tingle down my spine - the same sort of thing you get from a Kern or Rodgers tune. Neither Lennon nor McCartney wrote anything like that afterwards. The melodies of things like 'Imagine' or 'Band on the Run' seem extremely unadventurous compared with even an early tune like 'If I Fell' (and yes, they did write equally dull tunes like Yellow Submarine in their heyday), not to mention the extraordinary second side of 'Abbey Road'. Many new Beatles songs sounded magical when they first came out; I can recall feeling really disappointed as the ex-Beatles songs rolled out in the early 70s, having none of that magic. I don't think I've ever owned a post-Abbey Road ex-Beatles record.

Early rock - in various degrees of dilution - wears its black roots very clearly. The Beatles may have started out playing Chuck Berry but around 'A Hard Days Night'/'Help' it's the songs that draw on a more 'European' harmonic or melodic tradition that are best remembered. Whether this came from the American songbook or the 'light music' of the 60s era, I've no idea. But I think it's what sets them apart from the generlly blues based nature of most pop/rock at the time. Of course they frequently directly referenced their love of black musics - everything from 'Got to get you into my life' to 'Get Back'. But your 'Fool on the Hill's and 'Penny Lane's come from somewhere else. My Dad - a great fan of light classics, Vera Lynn, Sinatra etc - hated pop music and hated soul/gospel/blues type sounds (without knowing what they were). All he heard was screaming. Yet he loved many of the Beatles songs. They connected with the tradition he was used to that was pre-rock'n roll. And as a ten year old with little conscious awareness of music I immediately loved things like 'Hello, Goodbye' where Motown left me unmoved - mainly, I suspect, because the former fitted with the Radio 2/MOR/Rogers and Hammerstein musical world I grew up in. The magpie nature of their music certainly gave it great range and variety - the string quartet sound on 'Eleanor Rigby', baroque trumpet on 'Penny Lane' or avant-garde sounds on 'I am the Walrus'. One 'magpie' example I never realised until recently was 'Lady Madonna', which was based on Humphrey Lyttleton's 'Bad Penny Blues' - an example where the black influence is clear in the boogie-woogie piano, though the middle eight seems to go somewhere else.