A Lark Ascending

Just appearing on BBC news site: BREAKING NEWS: Music retailer HMV to suspend shares and appoint administrators, BBC understands http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c4096aee-5e82-11e2-a771-00144feab49a.html#axzz2Hz9a7mKt

Clearly Cold War vintage. It's a clarinet, not a rocket, Bev! Ah! I see it now! Blinded by work preoccupations. Clearly an Immense Clarinet Bigband Musicalinstrument.

A year old, but this article looks into the reasons for the elephantism. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/dec/22/rise-super-deluxe-box-set The article is more balanced than my deliberately lob-sided extract.

I've seen Empirical a couple of times; last time they were electrifying. Kinch came out in a blaze of glory 5 or 6 years back and I saw a great performance by him; but I can't warm to the hip-hop/jazz mix. I have a couple of his albums - the second I only played once. The other group who don't do it for me is Get the Blessing - saw them do a couple of numbers at a BBC radio recording a few years back and it was rather dull; tried one of their albums and it seemed very earthbound. I think they share some musicians with the electro-rock outfit Portishead so they are inhabiting that worlds that is trying to have a foot in both jazz and indie-rock. Perfectly legitimate place to work but it's not a region that has kept me engaged. The pick of the bunch for me is the Mark Lockheart - not just a good tenor player but a careful composer. King, Tracey, Winstone are all sure fire concerts but I've seen them many times. The Winstone has a great line-up (probably unknowns beyond the UK/Europe) - Norma Winstone: voice; Nikki Iles: piano, accordion; Mark Lockheart (again!): tenor & soprano sax & bass clarinet; Mike Walker: guitar; Steve Watts: double bass; James Maddren: drums.

Clearly Cold War vintage.

'Look! No hands!'

My grandmother went to school with John McCormack! Remembered him as a snotty nosed kid eyeing up the sweets in the shop window in Athlone, Ireland where they both grew up. Bet he never told the Pope about that.

Another thread aimed to focus on the pleasure in the music rather than who is playing it. Night Music - lots of tremendously atmospheric pieces. Which ones get you and why? What got me thinking about this was watching a DVD of Tristan and Isolde a couple of weeks back - the whole of Act II takes place at night with night having all sorts of symbolic allusions (the usual Romantic death obsession). But the music is extraordinary - from the early part where the main action is ofset with the sound of the night hunt in the distance, to the love scene with Brangane singing her warning from a tower nearby. Also Britten's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' has a magical night Act II where everything is turned upside down, all accompanied by evocative music. The three middle movements of Mahler 7 has some extraordinary night music - I love the Italianate 4th movement with it's serenading mandolins. And several of Bartok's central movements evoke the eerie business of the night. There's some of mine. Which night music pieces do you particularly enjoy?

Very nice run in Sheffield coming up: Gilad Atzmon’s Orient House Ensemble Stan Tracey Octet Karen Sharp Quartet Empirical Liane Carroll Trio Mark Lockheart’s Ellington in Anticipation Paul Booth Quintet Get the Blessing Soweto Kinch Trio Peter King quartet Alex Hutton Norma Winstone’s Printmakers Will try and overcome the temptation to flop on the sofa on a Friday night and get to some of those.

Love Duet from Act II of Der Rosenkavalier in a couple of versions. Reduces me to glook every time.

You are saved, my son.

Very nice to read! I'm not completely bonkers.

Started this last summer - got as far as World War II and then got distracted by Napoleonic sea-going books. Picked it up again last week and am well into it. Not what you would call a rip-roaring read but a superbly written and measured bit of historical biography. Gaddis clearly loves his subject (he knew him) but this is no hagiography. It's as much about where Kennan completely missed his mark as the famous point when everyone ran with his ideas. You probably need to have an outline knowledge of the Cold War to get much from it; but what I'm finding fascinating is the other directions Kennan kept pointing in. Helps make the whole thing more three dimensional. Looking forward to seeing his reaction to Vietnam - the blurb suggest he was highly critical. He was a guitar player too!

No 'Dad's Army' and Stanley Baxter then? Can't imagine many 60s-90s British Saturday night staples making it back for re-runs given current police investigations!

The return of the traditional British activity of spending Saturday night with a Scandinavian drama: First two episodes of Borgen series 2 - excellent. And you could play spot the actor you previously saw in The Killing.

Jazz Record Requests - January 5th A 'Tribute to John Cage' edition.

I recall seeing Tommy Smith and the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra recreate 'Such Sweet Thunder' some years back (the same team also do Miles Ahead and Birth of the Cool) and enjoying it greatly. Did it push the envelope? Of course not. It was musicians getting a chance to enjoy playing music they clearly loved. And for listeners who like that music to get to hear it in a live setting, fully aware that it was not the real thing. From a marketing viewpoint it had a label to make it draw in a wider crowd than might have been achieved otherwise. I wasn't aware of a different 'type' of audience at that concert.

Most people who go to concerts like to hear something familiar. Notice the temperature in an audience rise when something they know is played. When Ornette Coleman played Cheltenham a few years back it was mainly unfamiliar music, gaining the reverent applause of an engaged audience. When he started 'Lonely Woman' the excitement level in the audience jumped up a notch or two. Check the bills of your nearest classical concert hall - I bet most of what is played will be at least 50 years old, probably 100. Concerts with a 'tag' on them - 'celebrates the music of', 'a tribute to' etc - provide a convenient marketing focus that can connect to that desire for familiarity. I'm not sure someone going out to hear Wynton playing Louis or Alan Barnes playing Art Pepper is actually that different to those of us who prefer to listen to 10, 20, 50 or 100 year old jazz records. We know we're going to get to listen to something we have a strong chance of connecting to, that we have a historical and critical context for. That's easier than listening to a set of musicians that we're totally unfamiliar with. I've been to 'past themed' concerts like this which have been dull, others that have brought the music really alive and sent me home wanting to listen to the originals, and others still that, whilst using the music of the past as a starting point, have taken it somewhere else. It does reflect a particular focus in our contemporary culture on the past - you see it in cinema remakes, period dramas etc, endless box sets of past masters etc. But in the end the high profile of such themed concerts should be judged on whether they provide you with an entertaining evening. No-one has to go to them. And they are not stopping other musicians with an eye on the future from making music in that direction.

A short piece that is on that Scandinavian themed disc above. Sibelius: Rakastava, Op. 14 - an early piece, but has all the Sibelian melancholy and sense of vast spaces that you expect.

At the end of the day we tend to go with what our ears are telling us and for many of us, that's vinyl (when we can afford the time that is, to change LP sides). Heck, even jazzbo's switched. Well, hopefully your preference for vinyl will continue to be serviced for a long time. I have nothing but bad memories of my vinyl years - distortion, skipping, flutter and wow, off-centre pressings, warped records etc, arguing with the shop owner who couldn't hear the faults that were driving me nuts. Not being anything close to an audiophile CD was the answer to my prayers. Downloads do the job even more conveniently for me. The two things I did like about records were: 1. The 20 minute sides - a bit annoying with some longer classical pieces but in general better for focussing; and led to some real creativity in structuring an album with 4 dramatic points as opposed to the CDs 2. 2. The 12 inch sleeves - they were nice. I have a record deck but only for transferring old records to CD-R. I don't think I've bought an LP since the late 80s.

Mingus seems very popular with British musicians: