A Lark Ascending

It's been dreadful in the UK. After a few years when spring sprung in mid-February we've only just had a glimmer this week. I spent yesterday marching 14-15 year olds round a pile of old stones...sorry one of our cultural treasures...in drizzle and cold! Give me Phoenix. PS - I've just finished off a bottle of Fuller's ESB and a bottle of Young's Special London Ale. Very nice and mellow Friday night. Bet you don't get them in Phoenix.

Sorry! Didn't check the picture!

Here's a great contemporary double trumpet disc: Enrico Rava and Paolo Fresu. Don't be put off by the 'tribute' flavour. Its a thoroughly distinctive recording.

Most of mine are two deep. I have the high shelves too which means on top of the the verticle ones I have another dozen stacked in five rows. A devil to get at but I'd need to buy a bigger house otherwise. Which I can't afford to do because I spend all my money...

I really liked Allen's early 90s recordings but was very disappointed with 'The Gathering' which seemed muddy and confused (both in concept and sonically). I've got the new Andy Bey winging its way across to me at present on which she plays. I'm looking forward to hearing her again. She seems to have taken a low profile of late. The one time I saw her live was with Betty Carter at the concert that made the 'Feed the Fire' album. Excellent with Holland and De Johnette. Apparently she wasn''t well but you'd not have known it.

Celestion DL8 it says on the front!!! Nothing special. I think I paid about £200 for them ten years+ back.

Since childhood I've always loved: Proof that I'm a dumbed-down dupe of the processed 20thC!!!! I'm partial to flavoured cheeses - chives, apricot etc. They did a great Strawberry Stilton here a year or so back but it disappeared. Another cheese must is Welsh Rarebit (i.e. Cheese on Toast): Melted cheese on toast with a slice of hot tomato and plenty of Worcester Sauce. A once a week treat!

Are all your shelves always so well-ordered? Or did you tidy up specially for the shoot?

I like my free jazz in small doses; generally I prefer jazz on the edge of free that occasionally tips over rather than 100% free. The LJCO, Brotherhood of Breath etc. As a result most of my experience of Parker has been on more tonal discs - Kenny Wheeler's for example. It places him in a wider context which might not be what his hardcore appreciators want but suits me. There's some great Parker on Wheeler's 'Music for Large and Small Ensembles', 'Around Six' and the recently reissued 'Song for Someone' In a more blurred setting I really like his contributions to the Spring Heel Jack record, Amassed. Live he is quite stunning. As Impossible puts it "You won't believe how many saxophone lines you are hearing!" Two discs I really love are the two ECMs with Barre Phillips and Paul Bley - "Time Will Tell" and "Sankt Gerold". Cool, misty but quite beautiful.

Paul Dunmall, Paul Rogers & Hamid Drake - short UK tour in May An intriguining combination: Paul Dunmall, Paul Rogers & Hamid Drake Sat 22 May BELFAST CAC Mon 24 May BRISTOL Tue 25 May SHEFFIELD Wed 26 May BIRMINGHAM Thu 27 May STIRLING Details: http://www.mindyourownmusic.co.uk/

And, of course, if our collections get stolen, we get the joy of buying it all again! This time missing out the ones that sounded as if they might be good...

Roughly thematic shelves. But the themes get disrupted by recent enthusiasms. Norwegian/Finnish folk music and Australian jazz ended up with pre-1945 jazz!!! Swedish folk shares a spot with jazz vocals. I live in constant hope that they will cross-fertilise. Anyone for "Louis Pops Cobber Pohjonen"?

Yes, I can imagine thieves sitting down thinking, "Right, let's go for the big one this time. We'll scour the net, find some big jazz collections, discover where their owners live, rob the houses and then retire to the south of Spain on the fortune we earn as a result!'

And I thought you had your own personal filing clerk to organise your collection!

He! He! He!

Do you have individual CDs flown in by helicopter from your CD hideout when you want to play them? That's impressive!

Key can be obtained from Mrs Smith next door. Self-hire vans can be found at very reasonable rates in Worksop.

The music book shelf by the stereo which is slowly being invaded by new purchases, current listening etc.

The Proper shelf (I feel less guilty after seeing someone else has one!)

The living room Cupboard: Straight ahead case: UK classical, folk and odds and sods. Case in profile at side: several shelves of classical.

Area 2: Left of the patio door. Top: Various contemporary/avanty US things. Second shelf: Up to 1945-ish (and some Aussie jazz and Norwegian/Finnish folk music!) Third shelf: Miles, Coltrane, Mingus etc Fourth shelf: ECMs and similar Fifth shelf: Singers and Swedish folk Sixth shelf: Piano, guitar and Euro jazz that's not ECMish.

My God, you lot are a tidy bunch! Area 1: Right of the patio door. Top shelf: Latin Second shelf: US rock Third shelf: UK rock Fourth shelf: UK jazz Fifth shelf: Blue Notes, sax and trumpet US jazz Bottom shelf: Various boxed sets. Small bookcase - Country, bluegrass, blues.

One of the most powerful concerts I ever attended was a performance of "A Child of our Time" on the day in the late-80s when the apartheid regime in South Africa introduced draconian reporting restrictions to hide their attempts at repression in the townships. The piece seemed so immediate! I still recall the tears coming to my eyes as the choir sang 'Go down Moses, way down in Egypt land, tell old Pharaoh to let my people go!' In fact it gives me the shivers just thinking of it. I heard the War Requiem in Coventry Cathedral on the 25th anniversary of its first performance there. Another deeply moving experience. 'Gerontius' was the first big choral piece I heard way back in 1976 at the Festival Hall. When the choir hit 'Praise to the Holiest in the Heights'....whow!!!! There's a long amateur choral tradition in England going back to the 19thC and beyond. A great deal of the English choral repetoire comes out of that. Another goody is Schoenberg's 'Gurrelieder'. Pre-atonal and serialism it sounds like an overcurdled Richard Strauss!

Great disc(s). I too like it the best of the live releases.

I'm not big on choral music - choirs tend to sing in plummy accents over here, sounding like they all come from Eton - but some pieces do grab me. I think Janacek's 'Glagolitic Mass' is my favourite (it's hard to sound like you come from Eton when you sing in Glagolitic). Stravinsky's 'Symphony of Psalms' is nice and spikey as you'd expect. Lots of good choral Britten. The 'Spring Symphony' is a beauty for this time of year. And the 'War Requiem', of course, is very well known and very powerful. Holst's 'The Hymn of Jesus' is a marvellous piece, again with odd musical references. There are some beautiful recordings of his smaller scale stuff. His 'Choral Symphony' has glorious passages but always seems overlong to me and I've never really taken to his 'Choral Fantasia'. I love Elgar's 'Dream of Gerontius'...a bit heavy on the Catholic mysticism but fabulous music.