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According to friends and collaborators, the pedal steel guitarist, improviser & composer Susan Alcorn has passed quite suddenly. I was lucky to see her in wide-ranging contexts from Jandek to Mary Halvorson. A fascinating presence on the experimental music scene, she will be missed. The first record of hers that I heard was "And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar." It's excellent, and there's a whole lot more where that came from. RIP.

Will give it a go. I'm never sure about Collier but there are some records on which he's been very good.  Thanks for bringing it to the attention. 

Agharta is a big one for me, for a complex net of personal reasons. The first record I listened to on vinyl. A favourite of my secondary school russian teacher, who used to bring the conversation around to "avantgyard djyaz founkt" during oral tests. A big obsessive record for my elder son, aged 5 (sadly since overtaken by Iron Maiden's Piece of Mind). One of my jazz loving aunt's most hated records (she walked out of the London show of the same tour). But generally such a great record. I fell in love with it long before I enjoyed fusion or even electric Miles more generally. It is such a big aggressive soup.  I'll give the birthday boy a spin tonight.

The afternoon and evening concerts at Osaka’s Festival Hall turn 50 tomorrow (February 1st 1975). Ive been listening to these albums for more than 25 years.  It’s taken me a long time to appreciate them.  (And I’d still say that I like some of Davis’s other electric music better - though I like them a lot.) Some things I’m interested in:   1/ “this was just one day in the life of the band”.  My sense from lightly grazing recordings of other concerts from this Japanese tour is that these 4 LPs weren’t even the best performances.   2/ On a similar theme, a lot of our received history of post-1965 Miles Davis is because of a few releases.  So for a long time folks thought of these as the last word.  Now it’s more apparent there was a steady evolution from On the Corner to the summer of 1975 (final recording we have is from July).  It’s interesting to imagine what would have happened if Davis had not retired due to health/drug issues - maybe there would have just been a smooth transition to the more commercial early 1980s music. 3/ I remember listening to “Bush Baby” from Arthur Blythe’s Illusions for the first time and thinking, ok, that’s an obvious nod to this music!  A lot of Julius Hemphill’s stuff, too.  Though maybe just convergent evolution.