JohnJ

Nice to see England finally play some decent football. The 3-0 win against Russia was the best I have seen them play in a long time.

That is the consensus (one that is well-nigh unanimous). True. It is widely considered his best but there are others that I am probably more likely to reread. Novels such as 'A Wild Sheep Chase', 'Norwegian Wood' and 'South of the Border, West of the Sun' are less ambitious but hugely enjoyable.

Am currently reading Murakami's latest short story collection 'Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman'. Thought some might enjoy this extract from the story 'Chance Traveler.' As a kind of preface to a tale, then, I'd like briefly to relate some strange experiences I've had. I'll stick to the trifling, insignificant ones. If I started in on the life-changing experiences, I'd use up most of my allotted space. From 1993 to 1995, I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was a sort of writer-in-residence at a college and was working on a novel entitled The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In the Charles Hotel there was a jazz club called the Regattabar Jazz Club, where they had lots of live performances. It was a comfortable, relaxed, cozy place. Famous jazz musicians played there, and the cover charge was reasonable. One evening the pianist Tommy Flanagan appeared with his trio. My wife had something else to do so I went by myself. Tommy Flanagan is one of my favorite jazz musicians. Usually appearing as an accompanist, his performances are invariably warm and deep and marvelously steady. His solos are fantastic. Full of anticipation, then, I sat down at a table near the stage and enjoyed a glass of California merlot. To tell the truth, his performance was a bit of a letdown. Maybe he wasn't feeling well. Or else it was still too early for him to get in the swing of things. The performance wasn't bad, it was just missing that extra element that sends us flying to another world. It lacked that special magical glow, I guess you could say. Tommy Flanagan is better than this, I thought as I listened--just wait till he gets up to speed. But time didn't improve things. As the set was drawing to a close I started to get almost panicky, hoping it wouldn't end like this. I wanted something to remember his performance by. If things ended like this, all I'd take home would be lukewarm memories. Or maybe no memories at all. And I may never have a chance to see Tommy Flanagan play live again. (In fact I never did.) Suddenly a thought struck me: What if I were given a chance to request two songs by him right now? Which ones would I choose? I mulled it over for a while before picking "Barbados" and "Star-Crossed Lovers." The first piece is by Charlie Parker, the second a Duke Ellington tune. I add this for people who aren't into jazz, but neither one is very popular or performed much. You might occasionally hear "Barbados," though it's one of the less flashy numbers Charlie Parker wrote, and I bet most people have never heard "Star-Crossed Lovers" even once. My point being, these weren't typical choices. I had my reasons, of course, for choosing these unlikely pieces for my fantasy requests--namely, that Tommy Flanagan had made memorable recordings of both. "Barbados" appeared on the 1957 album Dial J.J.5 when he was pianist with the J. J. Johnson Quintet, and he recorded "Star-Crossed Lovers" on the 1968 album Encounter! with Pepper Adams and Zoot Sims. Over his long career Tommy Flanagan played and recorded countless pieces as a sideman in various groups, but it was his crisp, smart solos, short though they were, in these two particular pieces that I've always loved. That's why I was thinking if only he would play those two numbers right now it'd be perfect. I was watching him closely, picturing him coming over to my table and saying, "Hey, I've had my eye on you. Do you have any requests ? Why don't you give me the titles of two numbers you'd like me to play?" Knowing all the time, of course, that the chances of that happening were nil. And then, without a word, without as much as a glance in my direction, Tommy Flanagan launched into the last two numbers of his set--the very ones I'd been thinking of. He started off with the ballad "Star-Crossed Lovers," then went into an up-tempo version of "Barbados." I sat there, wineglass in hand, speechless. Jazz fans will understand that the chance of his picking these two pieces from out of the millions of jazz numbers out there was astronomical. And also--and this is the main point here--his performances of both numbers were amazing.

Pretty good buy yesterday. The Complete Sarah Vaughan on Mercury Vol:4 1963-67 (6 CD's). Picked up a used copy of this for around US$ 17, prices on Amazon Marketplace start at US$ 295!

Three from the UK that spring to mind. Bryan Ferry - Slave To Love Style Council - My Ever Changing Moods Sade - Your Love Is King

A classic. DS9 remains my favorite of all the series.

I don't think the Celts are a lock to make the conference finals, but if their big three stay healthy it won't be that hard in a conference where the two best teams are Cleveland and Detroit. Guy Reading a Q+A on ESPN this morning, the majority of their "experts" pick Chicago as the best team in the east.

You beat me to it, am i the only one to consider it an upset. Will Dubya sent them a congratulary letter. Along the way they have beaten credible oponents like Australia, South Corea and what seems to be a strong Saudi Arabia side Too bad none of the games were available for us North-Americans Watched the final last night. A very enjoyable game that Iraq thoroughly deserved to win. Even when leading 1-0, they never stopped attacking.

Addictive bloody game, I really should be working. Anyway, can't seem to get much beyond 60 meters. Any tips?

Nice article from Fridays Guardian 'He took it further than anyone' It's 40 years since John Coltrane's untimely death. John Fordham celebrates a jazz legend, while below saxophonists young and old chart his unrivalled legacy Friday July 13, 2007 The Guardian The plumbing of a saxophone seemed like too cramped a channel for the river of emotion John Coltrane sought to drive through it: he always sounded as if he were trying to expand the metalwork with the sheer force of his feelings. Coltrane's huge, yearning tone, sermonising intensity and revolutionary technique allowed him to sound like several saxophonists rolled into one; but for all that, he always sounded as if he was striving for what still lay out of reach. It wasn't just the search for more music, or a different music. It sounded like the search for another world, and another life - which is why Coltrane is revered more than ever, inside and outside jazz, 40 years after his premature death from liver cancer at 40, on July 17 1967. Marginalisation and both music-biz and high-art economics oblige jazz musicians to be realists - often very funny ones - which is part of jazz culture's downbeat appeal. But within that pragmatic climate, Coltrane was perhaps the nearest thing to a guru or a saint the music has ever known. He looked serious, soulful, sometimes haunted. He had profound religious convictions. His sound could be witheringly beautiful, and the contrast of his frantic urgency with the yielding delicacy of his ballads seemed to encompass a very wide span of what it means to be human. He had spent much of the 1950s battling addictions, and a combination of his faith and his music - which he was convinced was a healing force - had been the route out. Coltrane combined the cry of the blues with the social role and meditational murmur of the Indian classical forms he studied as meticulously as he studied European classical music and jazz. The chemistry worked so well that, late in his short life, he briefly found himself both a guru and a pop success. His classic, prayer-like 1964 album A Love Supreme made the charts, influenced rock and fusion players and a very large number of hippies, and earned Coltrane Grammy nominations for both composing and playing. John Coltrane was born in Hamlet, North Carolina, on September 23 1926, and moved with his family to Philadelphia after high school. He played alto sax in pre-rock "jump" bands in the 1940s, joined Dizzy Gillespie and the Ellington saxist Johnny Hodges' bands as a tenor player, and then Miles Davis's legendary first quintet in 1955. Both Hodges and Davis had trouble with the young Coltrane's heroin and booze addictions, but as a former user himself, Davis cut him more slack. In the trumpeter's band, Coltrane blossomed from a somewhat stiff-sounding hard-bop student of the leading tenorists Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins into a saxophone visionary. Frustrated - as Davis and Ornette Coleman were - by the limitations of improvising over pop songs and Broadway hits, Coltrane sought an alternative. Davis and Coleman looked for simplifications, more lyrical melodies released by pared-down structures like simple modes or spontaneously shifting tonal centres. Coltrane went the other way: harmonic mazes like the hurtling Giant Steps that changed chords almost every beat; multiphonic techniques that allowed Adolphe Sax's single-line instrument to play several notes at once. It could have been an arid technical exercise. But Coltrane's tireless practice regime was devoted to the guiding cause of increasing the sax's intensity and emotional range. With the almost telepathically sensitive partners he gathered around him from 1961 to 1965 (pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones), Coltrane turned the jazz recital into something more like an emotionally heated collective trance, often with headlong tenor-sax solos that might continue unbroken on a single theme for an hour or more. Coltrane also popularised the lighter, somewhat oboe-like soprano sax (mostly unused since the days of the great New Orleans swinger Sidney Bechet), and the breadth of his musical and cultural references widened the audience for jazz. As British saxophonist John Surman has pointed out, jazz was world music right back at the beginning of the 20th century, when musicians from around the globe crossed paths in the seaport of New Orleans. But its rapid early developments soon hardened into styles, from which the music needed to be rescued if its improvisers' spark was to stay alive. Coltrane heard that need, and split the music open for new influences to pour in, as they still are. A substantial slice of what's considered world music today might never have happened without him. Where would Coltrane have gone next? Soweto Kinch Saxophonist, rapper, composer He was somebody with a rare amount of integrity and sincerity, which is matched only by great leaders of that period such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. One of the biggest losses of his passing was his ability to influence people in a political sense, to enfranchise black people in America in a particular way. I think he would have gone on to spawn a load of new music - obviously jazz, but beyond that as well - and given people a different sense of empowerment. We're feeling the loss even now of somebody that great, somebody that iconic - especially now, actually. Just look at the state of modern black American music. He was somebody who explicitly realised the power of musical notes to transform society and was busy on that as a project. He practised scales based on ancient Vedic traditions and scholasticism, which could evoke prosperity in somebody or, if they were sad, could bring them out of their sadness into mirth and merriment. That very conscious and deliberate understanding of the power of music is something really important. I think he would have - almost like a Vedic medicine man or a West African griot - been able to transform people's moods and sense of self-worth through the music. I think we would have seen a lot more self-awareness on the part of black Americans and the African diaspora. Andy Sheppard Saxophonist, composer There was no stopping him. He's a total inspiration for all musicians. All the stuff he was doing in the Giant Steps period, in those hard-bop bands, it's extremely complex music, with the lightning ability to improvise in a seemingly completely free way over ridiculously hard chord changes. He was a spiritual force, his music was so intense. He was going further and further out with his music towards the end, but I'm sure [had he lived] he would have been writing for orchestra and performing with contemporary classical musicians. He probably never had any time to write. Those guys were working all the time because that was the way it worked. They'd play every night in a club: to sit down and write some music is not easy. Because he was becoming successful, he would have had more time on his hands to compose. Ingrid Laubrock Saxophonist, composer In a way he really screwed things up for all tenor players to come after him. It was a bit like Bach in the baroque world. What do you do after that? If you go in the same direction, you're just not going to get as good. It still sounds so much deeper and so much more amazing than anything after. Jason Yarde Saxophonist, producer, composer You could take just one aspect of Coltrane's music - Giant Steps or even just a part of it - and that in itself could be a lifetime's study for the average musician. It's quite feasible he would still be around playing. I would hope that he could have got back into a more big-band kind of sound, which then, I could imagine, would lead into orchestral things. Finn Peters Saxophonist, composer It's a question of how much innovation he displayed as a sax player. He took it further than anyone. People are still catching up with what he did - in 2007. He was using a lot of books to inform his playing, and he was bringing other languages in that hadn't been used before; a lot of eastern modes and Indian music. People hadn't really incorporated that into jazz before - the whole modal thing and traditional folk melodies. He was like Bartok in that sense. Whatever he would have done next it would have been pioneering, leading the way for other people - he was like that all through his life. I think it is likely that he would have gone on to do something electronic - the sort of stuff that he was already doing but adding electronic instruments. John Surman Saxophonist, composer There's no one single factor that makes Coltrane so great. He did what all pioneers do: broke boundaries. He changed the sound of the music, and that in itself is quite extraordinary. The harmonic progressions he came up with - no one had toyed with them, no one had even heard them. He was a master craftsman and a ground-breaker but he was also an amazing communicator. Everybody wanted to be around Coltrane. He was in the strange situation where his music in the avant garde was selling hugely - it was popular music. Finally, in his last works, he started to come back into the melodic and clearer, simpler stuff. So it would indicate to me that he'd gone out on a voyage of discovery and he would come back in and re-explore a lot of the early work that he did. It happens to quite a few artists: they'll go out there but then, later on, with maturity comes looking back - a retrospective thing. But who knows? He may have gone on even greater leaps than Giant Steps. He may have gone back and said, "That was quite good but I'm only halfway there with that." Lol Coxhill Saxophonist, improviser No one can know where he would have gone. If he'd carried on from where he was, he would have developed that. I can't imagine any other direction except him just growing and growing on that level. What he had was perfection in itself, but he could have developed that area anyway. I don't think he needed to go somewhere else. We just naturally develop, we don't think about where we're going. We just keep going - and never arrive, I hope. Denys Baptiste Saxophonist, composer There's never really been anybody who has covered so much ground and made so many developments within the music, particularly in such a short space of time. In just 10 years, he made all those important stepping-stones in his career. To be not only developing new ideas but mastering them and then moving on to another idea, then mastering that - nobody's ever been able to do that. Most musicians would be lucky to master one thing within their entire career, never mind the number of innovations and developments he managed to facilitate. His journey through the last 10 years of his life was driven by one epiphany in 1957 - a spiritual experience that made him want to give up drugs and begin pursuing his career in that direction. He felt that God had charged him with a mission. Given this motivation, I don't think he would have done what Miles Davis did and got into electric music or become somebody chasing those popular areas of jazz. I think he would have continued his spiritual journey because he seemed so serious about it. As far as he was concerned, music was a gift from God. God intended him to play music and communicate through music.

Love 'Gentle Jug'. What a wonderful ballad player he was.

Alessi- Oh Lori

Agreed. The first two Roxy albums are classics and very influential. Even though most of the credit probably belongs to Bryan Ferry, Eno's contribution is clearly significant. Just listen to the third Roxy Music album which is less experimental, although still great.

Fighting talk Kenny! When did you go over to the dark side. Anyway, it seems to be true that traditional coffee shops, in Tokyo at least, are rapidly disappearing while Starbucks, Tullys and their many Japanese equivalents are now everywhere. With over 600 stores Starbucks has been a great success here, despite their no smoking policy, which many had predicted would never work in Japan where drinking coffee has always been associated with smoking.

Agreed, for me at least, the search function generally works fine.

Wow, at first I thought OOP meant 'out of politics'. Different Berigan I guess.

Review from the Daily Yomiuri Hiromi's Sonicbloom Time Control Telarc/Universal, 2,500 yen Now firmly established in the media as Japan's brightest young jazz star, pianist Hiromi Uehara has just released her fourth album, Time Control, which as the title suggests tackles the theme of--or an obsession with--time. As with previous Hiromi albums, Time Control contains some complex and dazzling gems that will wear well, and while there are still many interests pulling her in different directions, this is perhaps her most cohesive release to date. The opener, "Time Difference" makes clear the addition of guitarist David "Fuze" Fiuczynski to Hiromi's "Sonicbloom" unit along with regulars Tony Grey on bass and drummer Martin Valihora. Hiromi has commented in the press that she wanted a new voice to add to her existing trio and the slightly overbearing intensity of the first tune suggests she also wanted to start this CD with a Big Bang. Luckily, the rest of the album holds more interest. The addition of Fuze has clearly pushed Hiromi's fusion numbers in the direction of jazz-rock. There's less of a funk muse here, but each track still bears Hiromi's hallmarks: unusual arrangements involving sudden changes of time, feel and, especially in the case of Hiromi's keys, timbre. She's as likely to change from acoustic grand to distorted virtual Wurlitzer mid-number as she is to change from classically imbued motifs to smoke-filled dancehall tinklings. This is particularly noticeable on the track "Real Clock vs Body Clock Equals Jet Lag," on which she pulls off a more accessible impression of time travel than she does on the track she calls "Time Travel," which itself suggests time travel to be far more frightening than exhilarating, with its ultimate end in heaven. Fuze, too, flits from whimsical talking guitar to surf rock tremolo to fusion hero with remarkable ease and his presence pushes Hiromi on to greater intensity. "Time and Space" deals with time and--much more--space while "Time Control or Controlled By Time" makes conceptually interesting points as it veers from the almost uncontrollably frenetic to moments of respite when time is no longer the driving force. There's nothing as wacky here as the funked-out martial-arts-on-piano that was "Kung-Fu World Champion," but there's still plenty of intense, humorous and emotional material shouting out loud and clear who Hiromi is. And that's enough to leave some Japanese major label jazzers blushing.

It ain't necessarily so! http://cgi.ebay.com/MOSAIC-CD-BOX-Ike-Queb...1QQcmdZViewItem

Isn't he a big Lou Reed fan, I know Reed played at the White House during Havel's state visit several years ago. Then there's the 'Velvet Revolution' although that is probably just coincidence.

Interview from last Friday's IHT. Music: An insider's trip through the '60s By Ben Sisario Thursday, March 15, 2007 NEW YORK: The 1960s had a single, precise climax, Joe Boyd says, and he was there. In a new memoir, "White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s," Boyd, a veteran record producer whose résumé includes Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention and R.E.M., ignores the conventional high points of the decade — Woodstock, the moon landing — and instead asserts that a set by the psychedelic rock band Tomorrow at the UFO Club in London shortly before dawn on July 1, 1967, was the big moment, when drugs, political activism and far-out music had their purest convergence. "On one level, obviously, that's a self-satirizing statement; it's ridiculous," Boyd said during a recent visit to New York, where he was beginning work on a new record by a Cuban pianist, Adonis González. "But then behind that there's another level in which I'm secretly thinking: 'Well, yeah, actually, that is when and where it all peaked, that's where it all changed. That's about the time that the wind shifted.'" Reminiscing about the glory days of rock may be the pursuit of anyone with a beer and a decently stocked iPod, but Boyd has unusual authority in this area. As he recounts in "White Bicycles" he has a knack for being in the right place at the right time with the right job. Born in Boston, he vowed at 17 to be a producer, which he defined as "listening for a living." A year out of college, in 1965, he served as the stage manager for the Newport Folk Festival, where Bob Dylan played his epochal electric set. Setting himself up in London, Boyd was one of the founders of UFO, the center of Britain's fledgling psychedelic scene, booking early shows by Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine. He produced Pink Floyd's first single, "Arnold Layne," and helped shape British folk rock with albums by Fairport Convention, the Incredible String Band, Nick Drake and Vashti Bunyan that have directly influenced the current generation of neo-folk avant-gardists like Devendra Banhart, Espers, Joanna Newsom and P.G. Six. This week Boyd, 64, will be at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, where he might also encounter bands inspired by some of his later collaborators, like 10,000 Maniacs and R.E.M., or by the world music released on his former record label, the pioneering Hannibal. In "White Bicycles," which came out in Britain last year and will be published in the United States next month by Serpent's Tail/Consortium, Boyd serves as a kind of invisible narrator, tracing a serendipitous musical life through a vivid cast of characters, each rendered with a disarming candor. (His explanation for his lucid memory: "I cheated. I never got too stoned.") Recounting the Newport festival, he describes not the familiar legend of shocked crowds, but the backstage consternation of Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel and Alan Lomax, who demanded that Boyd turn down the volume. (He didn't.) Pink Floyd enters the story a year later, as a Cambridge band "looking for some London exposure." Nick Drake, who had little success before his death in 1974 but has since become the model of the wistful, self-effacing male singer-songwriter, is introduced via his manner of answering the phone, "as if it had never rung before." Boyd's unobtrusive storytelling style mirrors his recording philosophy. "As a producer you have to listen with such energy and with such attention and with such love for what they're doing," he said, "that you give them at least a fraction of the kind of energy they'll get back from an audience." Richard Thompson, who began his career as the guitar prodigy in Fairport Convention, remembered the crafty wisdom of that approach. "Joe's great talent was being transparent," he said, "allowing the artists' personalities to come through. From what I've seen of the great producers, the ones who say, 'Now it's time for a tea break,' or 'That's enough of that song, let's move on' — this is great producing, not 'I've got this vision in my head.'" The records Boyd made in the late '60s and early '70s with a circle of British bands including Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band were innovative in ways that those by most American groups of the time were not. Pastoral in tone and with deeper roots in traditional song, the British music tended to be less topical, and largely avoided the self-referentiality of the singer-songwriter style. As an American who had a curiosity about British traditional music, Boyd was also a force in pointing many British musicians to explore their folk roots when that music was not particularly in vogue, said Bunyan, who made one record in 1970 with Boyd and then quit music, returning two years ago after fans and young musicians sought her out. "Joe was the encouraging outsider," she said during a recent tour stop in Brooklyn. It is a role that Boyd relishes. Hannibal, the label he founded in 1980 and ran until 2001, specialized in world music, releasing albums by the Malian kora player Toumani Diabate and the band Cubanismo. "White Bicycles" is in part a tragedy, as drugs destroyed lives and high- minded idealism crumbled. The UFO club in London, site of psychedelic concerts and film screenings, of visits by Yoko Ono and clothing-optional Happenings, lasted only about nine months: a microcosm, Boyd said, of the inevitable end of the '60s counterculture. The title of the book refers to both a song by Tomorrow — played at that predawn UFO show — and the plan of the Provo anarchists in Amsterdam to leave bicycles throughout the city for free use by citizens. "In Amsterdam almost all the white bicycles by the end of 1967 had been stolen and repainted," Boyd said. "So white bicycles became a kind of symbol of the spirit of that age, and that inevitable doom for that innocence and naïveté." But he is reluctant to blame drugs; some, he said, were particularly useful in making records. "People who were smoking joints could make great music in the studio," he said.

In a little local store, among a bunch of Jpop dross, a used TOCJ of Baby Face Willette 'Face to Face' at the equivalent of a little over $3. Great CD.

I think she lives there now right? Havent heard of her performing in the states lately. My understanding is that she lived in Tokyo from 1967-72 and has lived in New York City since then.

Monday was part of a crowd I used to hang out with in the early 90's and she certainly never struck me as geeky. She was always very friendly and approachable though, not to mention one of the most beautiful women I have ever met.

Saw her friday night at the Tokyo Blue Note. She was clearly enjoying herself and sang with a lot of emotion in front of a very enthusiastic audience. The Blue Note is pretty large but was almost full, there is a lot of love for Helen in Japan.

Looks correct. Web site is: http://www.bluenote.co.jp/