A Lark Ascending

Nice comment about Charles Fox from John Surman: From: http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/89/ (Fox was originally from Newquay in Cornwall according to Wiki - hardly a thriving jazz centre when I lived there! Though with Surman, Westbrook in Devon, the south-west clearly had something! I suspect Stanley Cowell came from Taunton.).

Illusion Suite is on e-music for those prepared to sup with the devil download. One of the great things about Charles Fox's 'Jazz Today' programme of way gone by was that you could hear cuts from LPs like this one ('Cal Massey' being the track in question) and then promptly snap up the LP when it appeared in the racks. I remember rushing home from my first year teaching in order to catch that at 5.00 or 5.15. All sorts of strange things to be heard.

Illusion Suite is on e-music for those prepared to sup with the devil download.

It's only natural for humans to compatmentalise things to make sense of them - it only becomes a problem if those compartments are then used to box things in (which is what I imagine your three examples were alluding to). Yes Duke Ellington drew from all manner of influences ('beyond category', 'there's only two...' blah! blah!). But I don't think I'm doing him a disservice in having him on the jazz shelves. It certainly helped back in the days when I was looking for his records in record shops. Knew what bit of the shop to head for. Every morning I pass from Nottinghamshire into Derbyshire then back into Nottinghamshire and then back into Derbyshire and then back into Nottinghamshire again. Without the road signs there's nothing to tell you you've changed box and people, animals birds cross them without a thought. Doesn't mean the boxes serve no purpose. Now if you start putting up barbed wire, 'peace' walls and the like, well...

You'd be dead wrong on that - they were both very influential on jazz as well as being influenced by it. Why must their compositions be excluded from the 'jazz' canon? By that logic Vaughan Williams, Holst and Grainger become folk composers. Kurt Weill a tango composer. Influenced by and influential on. I'm not convinced it's the jazz-derived bits in Stravinsky and Ravel that had the biggest influence on jazz. Yes, it's all music. Like it's all countryside. But we each have our preferences (give me a Wiltshire rolling hill over a Lake District mountain any day).

Agree entirely. A bit like condemning Bruckner because he doesn't swing; or folk dance music because it just goes round and round without development. Though I suspect the problem starts when people who adore the musician in World A start making comparisons with the musicians in World B. It's not unnatural for listeners who live in World B to get a bit uptight. A bit like claiming Ravel or Stravinsky as excellent jazz composers. Though even there things blur - quite a few contemporary musicians do have feet in more than one World.

But only "jazz musicians", right? Because, to use the ongoing example, Wagner has absolute, eternally universal importance? I think you know that is not what I meant. It happens just as much with classical music. I've lost track of the times I've read people making grand claims for classical performers in particular - instrumentalists, conductors etc - when it is pretty clear their judgement does not come from having listened to a wide range of alternatives (let alone studying the score!). Someone has told them that X is a supreme interpreter and - hey presto - the magic shines through. Oh, the power of received wisdom. There is a way of writing reviews that involves expressing personal response as objective judgment. We bulletin board amateurs are too prone to imitate that. Context is all; and our contexts vary. Mike Westbrook is a shining star in my firmament and Bill Dixon a distant figure who has never caught my attention. One day that might change (unlikely); but until that point I'm not going to assert the superiority or greater significance of Westbrook over Dixon to those listening from a very different context. Though I'm likely to suggest that Westbrook might be worthy of other listeners' attention, if they are so minded. Now if someone wants to go away for ten years, study both men in depth and the milieu they worked in and return with a judgment, well I'm more open to the wider claims for their greatness or otherwise. Though even that won't banish the influence of subjectivity.

I'm surprised Sony/Columbia haven't latched onto this. A t-shirt for every Miles album! (I'm a grumpy puritan in all of this - refuse to walk round looking like a billboard. Maybe I should get one of these put on a t-shirt: ).

Finished watching the programme last night. Enjoyed it thoroughly. It's got a bit of a beating in some quarters: http://www.for3.org/forums/showthread.php?1871-Holst-IN-THE-BLEAK-MIDWINTER-film/page6 All the criticisms individually hold, but I didn't feel they took away from the overall success of presenting to a wider audience a composer who outside of 'The Planets' and 'In the Bleak Midwinter' is hardly known. [i have to say I did wonder as I was watching where all those mountains in the Egdon Heath sequence came from!] The one think I felt was seriously missing was the music from after the Great War. No mention of the big choral pieces (Hymn of Jesus, Choral Symphony, Choral Fantasia) or the neo-classical pieces that give a very different picture of Holst (though we did get a bit of the wonderful Capriccio early on and the Lyric Movement at the end).

The basic problem with these discussions is that listeners often couch the way they talk about music in a manner learnt from reviewers and writers. This tends to favour a rather absolutist stance - this is important, this is insignificant etc. Now that makes sense if you are talking about assessing a musician's place in the grand scheme of things. But if you are, you'd have better have done your homework and be in a position to relate the musician to the wider picture. Whereas, what really happens is that we base our judgments on reactions to a musician or music from our own personal context which, even with the vast collections we have here, is generally either limited or pretty skewed in one way or another. Putting most of us in no position to make those grander judgments. In which case, I'd say David is right in urging caution on making grand claims for jazz musicians about their overall importance. And Jsngry is also right in saying that in the end it does not matter - if the music moves you, that's what matters. Claiming where a particular butterfly should be pinned in a perceived hierarchy of musical significance requires a quite different approach from expressing an enthusiasm for that butterfly. Too often the two get confused.

Another issue with living outside the urban centres. You're usually driving. So the beer becomes irrelevant. And one of the advantages of going to a festival for a weekend. The car is irrelevant, the beer consumable!

Not too hard to work out. The audience for 'edgy' non-rock music is very small - in London there's a big enough population to make putting on such events viable. Elsewhere, it really is down to enthusiasts. I've been to many a left-field jazz event and rarely has the audience been huge. Only in London and at certain festivals do you get bigger audiences for such events - Bath and Cheltenham have in the past managed packed houses for things like the Henry Grimes concert that Sidewinder mentioned. (Appleby was always hilarious in this respect - absolutely state-of-the-'art(s)' in the Evan Parker Sunday afternoon Freezone. But they'd put one event on the main stage at 5.00 on Saturday and there'd be a mass exodus from from the marquee from the ageing boppers). It's very sad to see Cheltenham stepping further away from the edges (though it's never been a left-of-centre festival) - financial pressures more than anything, I suspect. Add that devil's compromise that you get hooked up into when you sign up with big sponsors. I've no interest in all the arts and aesthetes stuff; music is just something I follow for pleasure. But I do think maintaining a vibrant and ever changing musical scene requires representing as wide a reach as possible. Taking chances on what might appear 'difficult' can often unlock new areas for the individual; for the wider area of music it's vital - without the constant refreshing coming from the exploratory ends, the mainstream can do nothing but atrophy. Which is why 'arts' funding needs to be much more directed that way rather than propping up large buildings that promise cutting edge productions of Tosca!

Maybe in Huddersfield! Bit of hyperbole there, David. The choice is not as stark as cutting edge 'avant garde' and 'MOR toe-tapping fare'. Most of us need a bit of melody or at least some sort of harmonic anchor that we can hang onto most of the time (which doesn't stop us occasionally venturing out into worlds that have dispensed with or limited their involvement with those features). As for 'the arts'...oh dear. Are they still with us? Would have thought the movers and shakers would have turfed out that particular box long ago.

No Cafe Oto for we provincials (though we do now have a Costa Coffee in Worksop!). Seems to be exclusive to you south-eastern sophisticates! Saw Evans at Cheltenham last year, as it happens. Very impressive. Would love to see Fred Frith again - last time I saw him was in Exeter in 1977 towards the end of his Henry Cow days.

Never seen that before. What style is it in? Free (ish) jazz or something more rock based? Yes, a rare early excursion by Ian Carr into free-ish jazz. A route he didn't subsequently follow with Nucleus. These are mid-60s recordings which sneaked out some years later on the Budget Polydor label, sold a handful and promptly sank without trace ! Thanks. Always nice to see these odd things come out of the woods.

Not so much the cover as the band name - what on earth made a 'jazz-rock' band in 1971 call itself Trifle. Just in case that is a UK term, this is a trifle: Layers of fruit, jelly (jell-o?), custard, cream etc. No idea about the band. Amazon says: Formed in late 1969 the band comprised George Bean (vocals, guitar), Patrick Speedy King (bass), Barry Martin (saxophones), John Pritchard (trumpet) and Rod Coombes (drums). Trifle signed to Pye s Dawn imprint in 1970 and their only album was recorded for later that year, by which time the band were joined by trumpet player Dick Cuthell for the recording sessions. In the vein of similar acts such as Manfred Mann Chapter Three and Colosseum, Trifle sought to fuse jazz and rock, also touching on folk styles (as evidenced by the fact that Trifle covered The Dubliners Dirty Old Town as the B-side to their Old fashioned Prayer Meeting single).

So which one did you order? And what was the side dish? Very nice pictures. I rarely get close enough to animials to catch them like that. They generally run off.

Anyone going? As mentioned above, an increasingly weaker affair but I've managed to piece together a weekend, mainly of Brits: Friday Curios Saturday Outhouse Quartet Kit Downes Quartet John Taylor and Julian Arguelles Django Bates with large band Sunday Kit Downes Sextet Django Bates Trio Overtone Quartet (Moran/Harland/Potter/Grenadier - the latter instead of Dave Holland who has had to pull out) Big Air - acouple of ex-Loose Tubers meet Myra Melford and Jim Black and Oren Marshall on tuba - they put out an excellent album a couple of years back. Bath is even more disappointing - apart from an Evan Parker thing in the afternoon there's nothing there to catch my interest. It used to be so packed with events.

Never seen that before. What style is it in? Free (ish) jazz or something more rock based?

Yes...it includes a version of the title song.

And the obvious one:

Have a nice day with plenty of bunnies.

Spiral III - this has really shaped up well. Very bad-tempered (you can almost see the main character going 'Merde!' in that shot!) but engaging characters. Will have to seek out I and III on rent-a-DVD at some point.

Me too. It's not quite the same as being 14 when everything was new, even what came out of standard radio. But every now and then I'll bump into something that opens a door into an area of music I hardly realised was there. The difference today (partly a matter of technology and availability, partly having more money than I did at 14) is the ability to follow it up more quickly and widely. I'd not want to swap that for the thrill of the chase.

Not sure that is true. It might be 'available' but you need to know it's there. Kids are still going to be on very limited incomes ('free' downloads notwithstanding); and the range of music in the immediate public eyes, seems, if anything, to have narrowed. Lots of scope still for searching and uncovering personal treasures.