A Lark Ascending

You are right. There is no single score. We improvise. We have a cloud constitution, scattered across god knows how many documents and legal precedents. If we had a written one, what would the lawyers do? There are all sorts of reasons the monarchy doesn't go away. Whenever they have an informal vote, the public significantly vote to keep them. As if abolishing the monarchy would undermine our national character like abolishing Yorkshire Pudding or oak trees. We're about to vote on changing the electoral system - my bet is we end up sticking with what is there. And there's a strong argument to be made that it deflects attention from the real scandal of the hereditary nomenklatura who still control the major power bases in the UK. My solution: a) Evict the Windsors. b) Have an annual monarchy, elected on a 'Britain's Got Talent' type Saturday TV programme basis (or absorb it into the National Lottery). The winner gets to do Sandringham, Balmoral, state opening of Parliament, Ascot, trips to watch traditional dancing in former colonies etc for a year. Then someone else gets a go. c) Have the Windsors and all who sail in them retrained as teaching assistants to be deployed into inner city schools.

Every time one of these things happens I assume that finally it will be clear that the whole monarchy thing has been dumped in the dustbin. Yet the last big one - the Queen Mother's funeral - saw people pouring out to pay their respects and reporters I admire usually, falling into craven sycophancy on the BBC. So I imagine much the same will happen here. I'll be travelling to Cheltenham for the jazz festival and when I get there avoiding the 'right royal' gala concert. Oliver Cromwell (or more to the point, John Lilburne and Gerrard Winstanley) rules!

A lot of notes, photos and the patrons list too, that have been omitted from the new booklet, have been put online on the Westbrook website. I have a blown up version framed and on the wall in my chateau.

Ending with an all-time favourite - the Miles Sextet version of 'On Green Dolphin Street'. The Jimmy Guiffre really caught my ear - I have that somewhere and will play it now. Really liked the Dizzy G too.

Can Record Shops Avoid Extinction? From the BBC News website

Ha! Think you're referring to 'Ruote Che Girano' (which turns up on other Westbrook recordings under different names) - I think he's playing up his Torquay roots rather than cockney there! Glad you enjoyed it. I played it again for the first time in ages a week or so back and it sounded wonderful.

Read that myself a couple of weeks back. Unbelievably bleak! Really enjoyed this tale of a relationship with its stresses and strains over the 90s: Just started the fourth of Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels: Think they are filming or TVising the first (Case Histories).

Good lord! I assumed this was from the early 50s! It's contemporary with the Stones 'Let it Bleed'!!!!

Spring is most definitely with us. Sherwood Forest leaps into life:

Me too! Be what the devil was "Neville Dickie — The Robin’s Return"? Sounded like Mrs Mills. I'm as bewildered as the chap who requested it said he is about most of what they play on JRR.

Give it time to work its way in - though there's plenty to jump out at you on first hearing. I first heard it in Nottingham when it was toured prior to the recording - utterly compelling concert. We got the chance to sign up in advance and about 9 months later got the recording through the post. It has my name on it as a 'Patron of the Mike Westbrook Orchestra' which sounds very grand! Not sure if those credits will survive to the reissue.

tried to spring as thought it was time I had something by them (always steered away because of the vocal element) but noticed this, 'This item is currently not available' just in time. Released 28/3, sold out by 7/4? Seems to be at Amazon for £8.99. There are vocals on this but lengthy instrumental and soloing passages. Don't get put off by the long 'Berlin' track early on which sounds like a Second Viennese School lied! Guy Barker is superb on this record - I've always found him a bit knitted cardigan elsewhere! If you get a chance to sample, try 'Lenador' - utterly thrilling soloing on that one. Special praise for Brian Godding too whose guitar textures throughout are mesmerising.

I notice 'The Cortege' is getting a new, lower price reissue. http://www.jazzcds.co.uk/artist_id_644/cd_id_710 If you don't know it, spring! One of by all time favourite sets (it originally ran to 3 LPs).

No obligation whatsoever. And I'm not talking about explaining everything away - part of the fun is the mystery and ambiguity. But if a musician is going to make music that is obtuse and have no consideration for an audience, then expect to remain on the margins. Just don't bleat about not being understood or blame the audience for not trying hard enough or having low expectations. Most audiences want to be moved, engaged, sometimes challenged - they don't want to be presented with a mathematical puzzle without even the first indication of how to decode it. If the musician has chosen the difficult path, it's up to him or her to convince the audience that it's a path worth following. Alternatively, they can simply follow their own path and just wait for the audience to catch up. This seemed to happen in classical music up to the early 20thC. The story from serialism onwards should be a warning though - the wider audience has still not caught up. Much mid to late-20thC music remains the preserve of the academic. I'd suggest the reason for that is that despite all its musical and philosophical merits it fails to address the most important expectation that a wider audience has of music - to be emotionally moved (something such music seemed to quite deliberately reject).

When jazz had a wider, general popular appeal its language had much of its syntax in common with other popular musics. Even when I first got interested (mid-70s) it no longer shared that syntax - jazz sounded strange, old-fashioned. The only connection was through the bands who attached rock rhythms. I had to suspend my disbelief and consciously 'learn' to like jazz (as you have to learn to like alcohol or stilton). I'd imagine the syntax is even further adrift from popular music now. No amount of attempting to lighten it up for popular consumption is ever going to make it sound 'now' in the popular sense of the word (beyond brief nostalgia fads, often tied in with films). Like other non-popular musics its appeal will be to those who tire of what is flooding the mainstream and who want something different. And they too will have to learn to like it (either by being lucky enough to hear enough played around them by parents, friends or by sheer faith that there is something there worth striving for [like persevering with Shakespeare when you could be watching a Hollywood blockbuster)). Having said that, I've little patience with musicians who produce enigmatic music but don't even try to explain what they are doing ('man, its in the music, if you can't hear it...'). Make your music as obtuse as you like, much of the jazz audience relishes a challenge. But at least come part way to the audience who have come to hear you rather than go to the much easier fare on offer elsewhere and give a bit of an explanation as to what you are doing.

There must be scope for something along the lines of Nick Hornby's 'High Fidelity' based around the strange creatures who hang about jazz bulletin boards.

My memory of being a mid- to late-teen is of being very conscious in even the most wonderful of situations, that the thing was finite and going to end. Whether wittingly or not, a lot of Beach Boys music seemed to capture that bittersweet sense of new wonders opening up coupled with an awareness that it couldn't last. The worm in the bud, perhaps.

I doubt if they had a huge influence on subsequent jazz. But they certainly had a big influence (along with others) of alerting a rock audience to jazz (Joni Mitchell was having the same impact around the same time, sometimes with common musicians). I can't be sure, but I suspect 'Pretzel Logic' was the first place I heard Charlie Parker's name. I am certain that the version of 'East St. Louis Toodle-oo' got me curious about Ellington.

'Spiral' - third series of a French detective TV programme. After the slowly unwinding 'The Killing' this seemed quite manic - but it was engaging. Back to the sedate tonight. The start of the new series of...

Very sad. Though not surprising. Last time I was there two years back it still looked like a record/musical instrument shop from the 70s. With CDs instead of records.

For your average British rock listener of the time this was just their music of 'now'. For most there would have been no interest in looking up the sources anymore than they'd have studied the stylistic origins of their frilly shirts. But many did get interested in the source material, including many of the players. Most, I suspect, (eventually!) got round to acknowledging the primacy of those sources. I'm sure there was more than a little irony at work when that first appeared on walls - and certainly when repeated. Having got interested in rock music in the dying days of the blues boom I can only agree about how uninspired most of it was. One of the reasons what was subsequently labelled 'prog' was so interesting to me was because it seemed so much more colourful than the standard Brit blues-rock. Having said that, in certain hands, what started as second-hand copying of US blues did mutate into some interesting and attractive variants. Clapton might not be God, Peter Green might not be 'better' than Freddie King, but I'm still listening to and thoroughly enjoying 'Layla &...' and 'Then Play On'.

I've had little interest in rock music since the 70s (XTC being the honourable exception), apart from occasional projects from people from my own youth. Porcupine Tree, however, I've found interesting, exciting and emotionally engaging. Worth persevering with.

That cuts will bite is inevitable. It's the inbuilt refusal to even acknowledge the enormous discrepancy between the use of public money for opera and classical compared with jazz that gets me. It's as if there is still this belief that jazz is really pop and therefore a) able to support itself; and b) not as 'aesthetically' significant, therefore not deserving even a close fair share. And I like classical and opera (well, the latter every now and then)!.

Wonder why the jazz issues are seen to sell so poorly whereas Dutton's equally obscure series of lost and forgotten British classical music (the wonderful Epoch series) gets added to every few months?

Final episode of 'The Killing'. Wonderful to the end. Second series due some time later in the year.