A Lark Ascending

I'm still lost. In the UK 'ham' is a cold meat you'd eat with salad or in a sandwich. Although it can be eaten hot too. I'd always assumed bacon came from a different part of the pig! Incidentally, do you have ordinary and smoked bacon? To say nothing of 'maple cured' and other variants.

Well as a Brit I think I'd agree with your assessment - though I've not been to Ronnies and can't really comment on comparative audiences. Explain the bacon bit though? When I had bacon for breakfast in NY it was frazzled streaks! Oh, and if you really want to experience lack-of-air-conditioning hell get on Swedish public transport! All set up for all that winter can hurl...so in a heatwave... (Incidentally I was in a hotel in Gramercy Park two summers ago during a NY heatwave - I've never been so hot - and the air conditioning didn't work!). Glad you had a good time. Brecon's a nice festival, though I'm not that keen on the Market Hall as a venue. I'm assuming that's where you played. A bit boomy from an audiences point of view.

I love 'Sweet Old World' - the songs are so strong and then delivered with that swaggering guitar rock style. Her three since have impressed me less - great vocals, marvellous playing but the songs don't seem as memorable. I seem to recall reading somewhere how she claims to deliberately avoid the obvious in her song writing. But this, to my ears, seems to involve leaving out middle eights almost all the time now, which reduces the contrast within the song. And an irritating habit of repeating the same set of lyrics...particularly annoying when she's come up with a startling image (or expletive!) which catches your attention first time and then loses its impact by being repeated. Alot of her 'choruses' seem to be just repeated lines with no melodic variation. I'm probably just listening with an ear tuned into more conventional songwriting. But as yet I've not been able to fathom anything particularly innovative about Williams recent style! Pity. As I say, I love her delivery!

Traffic always evoke a certain era. I didn't really listen to them at the time but found myself buying their recordings (like the Dead) at a much later time (80s, 90s) in trying to call back those youthful days. The one problem I have with Traffic is Chris Wood's sax playing. I always find it very colourless, four-square. When they set off on the jamming bits the music seems to go nowhere. His flute playing seemed to take flight but the sax seems earthbound.

Pasta brought to Britain from Italy. There's no PhD in that, however long ago. But pasta brought to Italy from Denmark.... The bookshops are full of histories of nutmeg, ice transport, cod and the like at present. I'm thinking of doing an Erich von Daniken on it. "Spaghetti of the Northern Gods" perhaps. Even better, "Spaghetti of the Northern Gods and the Blood of the Holy Grail: The Culinary Origins of the Templers, the Freemasons and the Mafia"

Well, Bev, I don't think you realize this is Rooster's vote, not the poll results. Many, many apologies Rooster! It's hot, I'd just got in from work, the beer was working too well! I thought this was the actual Downbeat result! I would never question anyones personal choice (American, Italian, British or Icelandic!). I just despair at the blindness of the critics poll (people who pronounce on jazz as their job and thus have a duty to listen a bit more widely!). I suppose I'm guilty of rushing to condemn...though I suspect my comment will remain apposite when checked against the real poll! Sorry again! Nothing remotely wrong with your choices. ************** I'm not sure I could list musicians of the year by category. I'm not a great fan of sticking musicians in hierarchies. I've enjoyed new piano recordings by Tord Gustavsen, Mal Waldron, Enrico Pieranunzi and Fred Hersch (to name a few) this year but wouldn't even know where to begin trying to decide who deserves the 'player of the year' award. I think such things are better left to athletics. Quite happy to mention recordings I've really enjoyed or performances that have grabbed me. I've still heard nothing to beat Simone Guiducci's Chorale this year (Chris Speed is on it!).

Once again, spot the non-American! John Surman and Elvis Costello as far as I can see.

Perhaps the Scandanavians invented lasagne! After all the Vikings invaded Britain (thus the recipe above) and Sicily and southern Italy. Any ancient lasagne recipes in Normandy? I feel a PhD comng on!

'Fotheringay' is sublime! Here's a list from AMG of artist who have recoeded versions of 'John Barleycorn' - there are different tunes. I think the Traffic version may be their own tune. The Fairport version uses the same tune as 'We Plough the Fields Scatter' (a very popular hymn in the UK; not sure if it is as well known in the States). Looking at the list Traffic probably got the song fom the Young Tradition, A.L. Lloyd, The Watersons or, possibly, Fred Jordan (a genuine 'folk' singer as opposed to professional or revival singer.) Or maybe the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs which was very influential at the time (I'm not sure if it's in it). I'd be interested if anyone knows where Windwood got it from (he's credited with the arrangement)? Alexander, Heather Wanderlust [94] Armstrong Family Wheel of the Year: Thirty Years with the Armstrong Family [92] Baker, Kenny [1] Baker 16 Down Home Country Classics [98] Baker, Kenny [1] Baker/Sprouse Indian Springs [89] Baker, Kenny [1] Baker/Sprouse Masters of the Folk Violin [1989] [89] Baker, Kenny [1] Baker Masters of the Folk Violin [1995] [95] Boggins Haxey English Customs and Traditions [00] Bok, Gordon Bok/Brown And So Will We Yet [90] Carthy, Martin Traditional Byker Hill [67] Carthy, Martin Traditional Carthy Chronicles [01] Carthy, Martin Traditional Child: Carthy [01] Carthy, Martin Traditional Sweet Wivelsfield [71] Crooked Horn Home Brew Fairport Convention Traditional 25th Anniversary [94] Fairport Convention Traditional A T 2/The Boot [00] Fairport Convention Traditional Bonny Bunch of Roses/Tipplers Tales [92] Fairport Convention Traditional Cropredy [99] Golden Bough Traditional Celtic Music from Ireland, Scotland & Brittany [98] Golden Bough Traditional Golden Bough [81] Gordons [2] Gordon/Traditional Time Will Tell Our Story [02] Jamison, George Shorelines: Irish Shores [00] Jethro Tull Traditional 36 Greatest Hits Jethro Tull Traditional Little Light Music [92] Jordan, Fred They Ordered Their Pints of Beer & Bottles of Sherry [99] Knights of the Occa Traditional John Barleycorn 2000 [01] Laing, Robin Angels' Share [97] Langstaff, John Water Is Wide: American and British Ballads Anthology [02] Lloyd, A.L. Traditional English Drinking Songs [98] Morton, Pete Traditional Mad World Blues [92] Primitive Magic Benfield Miracle [97] Renbourn, John Traditional Collected [99] Renbourn, John Traditional Maid in Bedlam [77] Revel Players Wild Mountain Thyme [93] Revels Chorus Revels Celebration of Spring Summer & Fall [98] Scum Eat Your Head: 80's Melbourne Punk [97] Sprouse, Blaine Baker/Sprouse Indian Springs [89] Steeleye Span Traditional Below the Salt [72] Steeleye Span Traditional Collection [92] Steeleye Span Journey [01] Steeleye Span Present: Very Best Of [03] Steeleye Span Traditional Spanning the Years [95] Traffic Winwood 20th Century Masters -- The Millennium Collection: Best of Folk [02] Traffic Traditional Feelin' Alright: The Very Best of Traffic [00] Traffic Traditional/Winwood Folk Routes [94] Traffic Traditional John Barleycorn Must Die [70] Traffic Traditional John Barleycorn Must Die [bonus Tracks] [01] Traffic Traditional/Winwood Live at Santa Monica [72] Traffic More Heavy Traffic [75] Traffic New Electric Muse: The Story of Folk Into Rock [96] Traffic Traditional Roots of Rock: 60's Folk [95] Traffic Traditional Smiling Phases [91] Traffic Traditional Troubadours of British Folk, Vol. 2: Folk into Rock [95] Watersons Frost and Fire [95] Wild Oats Traditional Weed 'Em and Reap [01] Winwood, Steve Traditional 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection: The Best of Steve Winwood [99] Winwood, Steve Winwood Best of Steve Winwood [02] Winwood, Steve Winwood Classic [01] Winwood, Steve Traditional/Winwood Finer Things [95] Wylie, Anne Traditional World of Irish Folk [96] Young Tradition Galleries [68] Young Tradition Galleries Revisited [79] Young Tradition Traditional Galleries/No Relation [02] Young Tradition Traditional Ticket to Transatlantic [97] Young Tradition Traditional Young Tradition [1989] [89] I've recommended it elsewhere but if you want something very strange and associated seek out 'Bright Phoebus' by Mike and Lal Waterson. All self-penned songs from musicians associated with unaccompanied traditional singing - a guest list drawn from the Fairports with Richard Thompson and Martin Carthy in major roles. Just as 'John Barleycorn' evokes a rural world where magic is part of the means of controlling nature, so these songs enter that slighly chilling world. The song 'The Scarecrow' will send shivers down your spine! Wonderfully done by June Tabor on her album 'Abyssinians.' If you get a chance to sample some of this stuff try the lengthy Martin Carthy ballad interpretation - 'The Famous Flower of Serving Men' - I think this might be what you are looking for in your search for the world of John Barleycorn.

Try Nick Drake's first two LPs - not purely acoustic but with a strong acoustic sound up front (his third album is wonderful but a very strange affair, better heard after the first two). Same era as 'Barleycorn'. You might want to try something by Martin Carthy who normally plays in a very stripped down, acoustic format. Demon guitar player too. I'd strongly recommend 'Because it's there' from the late 70s. Or take a big leap and get the marvellous 'Carthy Chronicles' 4CD retrospective. Carthy had a huge influence on making traditional English music respectable to the 60s generation. Winwood and friends would have known of him and possiblly borrowed from him. Everyone else did! (it must be said that Carthy is an incredibly modest fellow and would simply point to the source singers who influenced him) Robin and Barry Dransfield were taking the English folk world by storm at the time of the Traffic CD you mention. There's a very good 2CD compilation called 'Up to Now' that inhabits a similar sound world. Sandy Denny's 'North Star Grassman and the Ravens' might also be of interest. And, of course, the great John Martyn LPs of the time - Bless the Weather, Solid Air and Outside In. The run of Richard Thompson LPs from 'Henry the Human Fly' through 'I Want to see the Bright Lights Tonight', 'Hokey Pokey' and 'Pour Down Like Silver' are also quite similar. Oh, and take Simon's advice on those Fairport titles he mentions. They are magical. Once again electric bands but with lots of acoustic high up in the mix. I grew up with this music in the 70s and it still excites me today. Well worth investigating. There is a whole world there!

One of the 'bridge' records that tipped me into jazz. I bought it in a sale in a military store in Germany c.1974 on the back of the Mahavishnu Orchestra who were huge on the rock scene at the time. Didn't get it at first but over a couple of years it really ate its way into my consciousness. Little did I know that the saxophonist, who sounded very strange to my rock trained ears, would go on to become one of my favourite musicians.

Here's the details of the forthcoming disc of the current tour from http://people.zeelandnet.nl/flipfeij/news.htm: NEWS: "Ducknapped!" = "Live" album of current tour starring Richard Thompson Band (with Christine Collister and Judith Owen extra on vocals), due mid July at start of new US-leg The (thru' Internet and at gigs-only) album - is RT's 4th new cd-album release in 2003, which hasn't been done before - and contains 14 songs: 1. Gethsemane 7:23; 2. Pearly Jim 4:17; 3. Outside Of The Inside 6:58; 4. Missie How You Let Me Down 4:36; 5. A Love You Can't Survive 5:20; 6. One Door Opens 4:29; 7. I'll Tag Along 3:53; 8. Bank Vault In Heaven 5:41; 9. She Said It Was Destiny 4:12; 10. I Misunderstood 4:42; 11. Valerie 3:41; 12. Can't Win 9:17; 13. Jealous Words 3:59; 14. Word Unspoken, Sight Unseen 5:25; Total time: 73:54 Mixed by Tom Dube The above site also says: NEW: Adds RT:"In the future there'll be more and more things available in terms of back catalogue and hopefully some obscure stuff we might have on tape that no-one else has" Looks good. 'Rockin' in Rhythm' off 'Strict Tempo' is marvellous. I recall that disc coming out around 1981 on a tiny label, the first recording we'd had from him for about three years following the end of his deal with Chrysalis.

Oh, he played the old stuff well. I suspect its just that I've heard him play those songs rather too many times...and personally, I think 'Shoot Out the Lights' is well due for retirement! I was just more engaged by the newer stuff. And I like it when he plays the less obvious old stuff. There's a great version of 'The Angels they took my Racehorse Away' on 'More Guitar.' I'd like to hear him do thing's like 'Night Comes In' off 'Pour Down Like Silver', a restrained and spacious tune that cries out for extemporisation. Minor reservations. A great performer still playing like a demon and writing marvellous songs.

I recall being glued to this back in the 80s. Marvellous, quirky comedy with a plot that goes off at tangents and oddball characters.

1130 Azimuth - The Touchstone ... is available as part of a 3CD set made up of their first three recordings.

Mock Tudor really grows on you. At first I wasn't too taken by it but I've come to really love it - especially 'Cooksferry Queen.' I strongly recommend the 'Semi-Detached Mock Tudor' CD available from the Thompson website which really gets this material moving. Industry I'm not so keen on - there are one or two good songs there but the instrumentals seem a bit tame. I saw him tour this in the mid-90s and it was a bit cold. 'Last Shift' is a goody, however. Saw Thompson last Friday with a great band - his current drummer is superb. Wonderful playing all round. One thing I did find was that I was most excited by the newer material. When he did 'I want to see the Bright Lights' or 'Wall of Death' it was almost a walk-through-by-numbers. I suppose someone seeing him for the first time would have been delighted by these. Picked up the two new privately issued discs there. 'More Guitar' is a tremendous 1988 live show - some very good performances of tunes that suffered from overproduction on the Froom era albums. I've not listened to '1000 Years of Popular Music' yet (though the item he played in the concert - a 16thC Italian tune - bodes well). Everything from Medieval songs to 'Oops I did it again!' As if that isn't enough he's putting out a live disc of the current tour in the next few weeks (again on the private label) - his fourth release this year! And we're only half way through!

I recall hearing a track I really liked from a Liebman ECM called 'Lookout Farm' which has never reached CD. One of his ECMs was reissued a year or so back. Maybe one day...

A guess actually! The Franklin expedition clearly made a big impact across the world. There's a folk song called 'Lord Franklin' that turns up all over the place - I've heard English, Irish and American versions.

I'm sure I've read it somewhere in the past but it completely slips my mind. The Franklin voyage? Please tell us. I'll be whizzing up the Jutland peninsula on my way to Sweden in a couple of weeks. Sadly I'll not have time for a Friedrich (and Gustavus Adolphus 1630) pilgrimage!

And another:

Another favourite:

Here's a review of another book (Caspar David Friedrich - Werner Hoffman) from the Amazon UK site that puts Friedrich in context: A splendidly illustrated book supported by intelligent text, 20 February, 2001 Reviewer: A reader from Stockton-on -Tees, North East England I have sought high and low for a decent book about Caspar david Friedrich. At last my prayer has been answered! This is a splendidly illustrated volume supported by intelligent and informative text about "the graphic artist-in-residence to the German Romantic Movement". The pictures, familiar and unfamiliar, are beautifully reproduced and the text,translated from the German by Mary Whittall, is scholarly but accessible. It sets the painter in the context not only of German Romanticism but also that of the wider "European" movement. It contains writings by the artist himself and by his contemporaries. Deeply unfashionable for much of the period since his death in 1843, apart from a brief flowering under Hitler, who liked his work for the "wrong" reasons, appreciating his representational style but failing to understand the irony and symbolism beneath it, Caspar David Friedrich has been "rediscovered" in Germany during the past thirty years. Until now, however, he has largely been neglected in the English-speaking World, except for the use of his pictures as on the covers of CD's of German Romantic music.(Paul Nash's famous wartime painting the "Totes Meer" or "dead sea" was, however, undoubtedly an homage to , or pastiche of, Friedrich's "Sea of Ice") This book and the forthcoming exhibition at the National Gallery in London should remedy this. The book is one to treasure. Its subject is a landscape painter who did not, rather than could not, "do faces", preferring his usually diminutive human subjects to be seen from rear-view gazing enigmatically into the far distance - a distance usually of mist, mountain, impenetrable forest or cold Baltic Sea. His principal theme was the alienation of his human subjects against a background of unconquerable nature. He was a revolutionary, not in his deceptively representational style but in what he chose his landscapes and seascapes to represent. His paintings resonate with the angst of the German Romantics. The book quotes von Kleist when describing Friedrich's Seascape with a monk: "There can be nothing sadder or more desolate than this place..." A diminutive human figure or that icon of the gloomier German Romantics, a crow or raven, set against on of his vast landscapes conveyed deep meaning in a few brushstrokes. To quote von Kleist again: "....yet this painter has undoubtedly broken an entirely new path in the field of art, and I am convinced that, with his spirit, a square mile of sand of Brandenburg could be represented with a barberry bush on which a lone crow might sit preening itself." This sumptuous book captures it all. An unreserved five stars! That line - His principal theme was the alienation of his human subjects against a background of unconquerable nature. - would seem to take us back to the comparison with ECM covers. Have a look also here where there are a lot of online images: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Museum/4782/...cdfriedrich.htm He can also be found at: http://www.geocities.com/Area51/2229/Friedrich.html http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Arc/5340/frame.htm

Friedrich's painting's have been used a great deal on book covers and on classical recording sleeves. I have a marvellous book called "Caspar David Friedrich and the subject of landscape" with lots of good colour reproductions. It's a pretty intense read, especially if, like me, you're not used to the terminology of artistic aesthetics but rewarding nonetheless. There's a lot to decode in those painitings from religious imagery to romantic nature worship and comments on the nature of human existance right through to direct links with the liberation movement of the Napoleonic years. One of the things that fascinated me about Friedrich's paintings when I first saw them in Berlin was the way they made me think of early Disney cartoons!!! Look at the Abbey in the Oak Forest above and think back to the Ave Maria scene in Fantasia! Yes, most of his stuff is in German museums. He's a big name in Germany. He just doesn't seem to have penetrated the wider European and American consciousness until quite recently.

Or this:

Or this: