A Lark Ascending

Should be a good read!

Mentioned in this month's Jazzwise: Jazz - 2.5m audience annually; 1.7m subsidy Opera - 1.7m audience annually; £73.9m subsidy Classical - 3.3m audience annually; £140.2m subsidy Given we are still (just!) a society that accepts the principle of state support for music etc, this remains glaringly inequitable. Be interesting to see what happens as the cuts start to bite.

If jazz life is accepted as existing east of Cape Cod:

Tony Palmer has just completed a film documentary on Holst, due to be screened in the UK at Easter (Easter Sunday, I think). Should be good - I loved his RVW doc of a couple of years back.

Bottom had dropped out of the market in the UK for this sort of music when this band appeared. I always got the impression Asia was designed to play the US stadiums. I don't know if it was lack of exposure in the UK or my dwindling interest in rock after '76 but they never caught my attention.

Easily my favourite Beach Boys album - perhaps because it came out around the time I first got really interested in music. I worked back from there (though I was aware of the singles in the background as a kid in the 60s). I've never shared the enthusiasm for 'Pet Sounds' - probably because I first heard it about 9 years after release. It never measured up to the anticipation (had the same experience with Sgt. Pepper). If I'd been buying albums in 66/67 (as opposed to half-hearing what got filleted for mainstream radio) I'd have probably reacted differently. I've grown into Sgt. P (though with reservations!) but I still feel distanced from 'Pet Sounds' apart from the two great songs that kick off each side of the record. 'Surf's Up' holds my attention throughout (even 'Student Demonstration Time'!!!!).

The version of 'Surf's Up' on the later album of that name has always been one of my favourite pop songs. The lyrics might be daft (or so coded as to be impossible to decipher without the code) but when was that ever a obstacle to a great performance (try some opera libretti!)? All the stuff about 'pop symphony' etc might be overblown, but that's more about the constructs imposed on it by critics and commentators. It may not be as direct as 'God Only Knows' or 'The Warmth of the Sun' but it has delicious melodies, a nice structure with contrasting sections and harmonies to die for in its final section. "I don't like it"...fine. "Isn't very good"...nonsense. I've never heard the Smile reconstruction; the fragments that got scattered elsewhere always struck me as just that. Fragments. Some of them sound delicious to me, but underdeveloped.

Not dumb at all. We all have music that just seems to hit all the spots, bang on target. 3 of the 5 tracks on 'Kind of Blue' do that for me. Though I'd argue that what is 'perfect' for you is not necessarily 'perfect' for me - I like 'Idle Moments' but it's never had a place in my pantheon. Others would disagree and argue there is an objective set of criteria by which perfection can be ascertained, applicable to us all.

The word 'perfect' suggests to me 'formally perfect' - everything in just the right place. But so much of the music I like deliberately distorts formal perfection (think how that works in architecture). Which would seem to suggest that perfect music has inbuilt imperfection. So to find perfect music you need to calibrate the degree of imperfection. At which point I jettison the idea of perfection. I'm not sure it accords with the way humans do things (though it might accord with the ambition of some totalitarian 'art'). ************** I suspect what you mean is music where everything seems to come off across a whole piece. I'm not sure that is perfection; and it's highly subjective (unless you believe in some classical ideal of absolute beauty). Vaughan Williams' 'Fifth Symphony' ia piece that I find 'perfect' for my tastes - it never loses my attention and echoes and overlaps across its length (and has great tunes!). But it is a long way from perfect in its structure and probably gives other listeners the willies.

"If I were a sculptor. But then again, no" Taupin's career should have been over after writing that line, although even more clunky is: "I'd buy a big house where we both can live." It's like a four-year-old child has written it. Nice tune, though. Well, if we eliminated all the popular songs with daft lyrics, we'd not be left with much! The tune is good, I like the whole performance and the romantic sentiment was perfect for a 15 year old at the time and can still give a nice fuzzy feeling. I believe it got overexposed in a film a few years back ('Moulin Rouge?') but I missed all of that. Recall hearing it sung in a folk club to just simple guitar by a chap called Derek Brimstone and it transferred perfectly there. Now, 'Rocket Man'.....

Costello and Springsteen are people who have songs I've really admired played by others; but I've never connected with their own music. Just don't like Costello's voice; and there's a tinny organ sound on the Springsteen discs I've heard that drives me nuts. But if June Tabor, Robert Wyatt and Emmylou Harris can rave about them, well there must be something there that I'm missing. Never got on with Elton John, apart from 'Your Song' which I think is wonderful. Had it on a single c. 1971.

Exactly. To be sung without vowels.

Not been there for a long time, but I do recall a nice display of the Bond Store's history. I think it was opened by Sir Edward Elgar. I bought the second Hatfield and the North album there in 1975. Don't know why that memory sticks.

'Uptown Girl' must be close to my most hated song. Though I'd like to hear it sung in broad Yorkshire. Once.

At the time I bought it - 1978 - most were not available in Britain (I had to wait for 6 weeks or so for copies of 'A Love Supreme' and 'Africa Brass' to be imported from somewhere abroad! That's how bad it was in the UK provinces). Some of those images are etched onto my brain!

I'm not one for 'critical opinion' either - I find people reading onto music their views quite tiresome. There can't be anything more tedious than the 'Why does everyone enthuse about Bottleheimer?; Porkenheimer's 1934 Wittenberg recording is infinitely superior' type comments you get in the classical critical world. What I do like are: a) Above all - people trying to articulate their excitement and enthusiasm for music. b) People with a knowledge of music who can articulate in lay terms (and with some humility) what is going on musically - Humphrey Lyttleton's two books on early jazz are superb on all of those counts. c) Historical accounts of the development of jazz that are based on rigorous research and an attempt to view it through the evidence rather than make it fit a preconceived theory. I think Chris A's 'Bessie' does this wonderfully (whilst also carrying off the difficult trick of communicating a) as well).

Oh certainly, lots of excellent musicians. Empirical were my highlight of last year's Cheltenham.

14.03. Soweto Kinch - excellent player but expect a fair bit of rap. 15.03. Get the Blessing - saw them a couple of years back and was a bit underwhelmed. It was very late at night! 16.03. Arun Ghosh Quintet - not a name I know 17.03. Kit Downes Trio - currently being trumpeted as a next big thing. Saw him last year - OK but not completely engaging. I'm trying him out at Cheltenham again in late April. 18.03. Jason Yarde & Andrew McCormack Duo / Trio Wah - I'd really recommend the first. Yarde is a superb alto player and these two have produced a marvellous duo disc. 19.03. Julian Siegel Quartet - another strong recommendation. Very exciting player, especially in the nouveaux jazz-rock band 'Partisans'. I don't know if it's just me, but the current wave of UK jazz seems to have gone into a bit of a slump. A lot of the 'next big things' of a few years back haven't really sustained their promise; and there seem to be a lot of crossover into indie-rock or metal type bands around. Maybe I'm just getting old.

Oh, I agree with all you say. The most annoying word on jazz boards (well, apart from 'AWESOME!!!!') is 'Essential'. It's just that I don't find either book to be an ultimate "generalist" guide. The first guides I used were the Joachim Berendt 'Jazz Book' (my primer of the world beyond jazz-rock back in '77) and Roy Carr's 'Illustrated Guide to Jazz'. I didn't buy a Penguin until the early 90s. It was far from 'generalist' because it only printed what was readily available in the UK; what is more it had a wide coverage of European jazz outside of the UK. By that time I had a reasonable idea of the orthodox version of jazz history and also of UK jazz; what Penguin did was give me some ideas about where to look in mainland Europe, especially Italy. By contrast, AMG (which I discovered later in the decade) was largely Amerocentric - which was ideal for what I wanted. Coverage of things like Hank Mobley or Bobby Hutcherson was pretty detailed, so gave me a steer on which of the many recordings to make a start with. I think publishers like to present these books as 'The Definitive Guide'. I'm not sure their authors see it that way; I'm certain most listeners just use them as a way of finding what might be on the menu whilst also visiting other restaurants. [Edit: For me the heyday of using these guides was the 90s. A ravenous appetite for jazz but pre-Internet. I don't think either has the same drawing power for me as it had then because the web has vastly increased the number of reference points. Even in the late-90s getting intrigued about a recording from Penguin or AMG was no guarantee you'd ever hear it - in pre-Amazon and its ilk days ordering recordings outside the norm was a difficult process.]

That's a bit like saying you'd rather people travelled around the country without a map - found it all themselves. Quite a nice idea but hardly practical. I know I gratefully valued the steer these guides gave me, but I never followed them slavishly. As has been said by many above, these guides get used as one of a number of influences - chance encounters on the radio, recommendations by friends, the fact a band turned up in your neck of the woods, magazine articles. I doubt if any but a handful of listeners treat them as the sole guide to salvation. I've never found either to claim an exclusive insight into what really matters (if you want that you'd be better off looking to the lectern carriers who frequent jazz websites). Cook and Morton can be passionate and, at times, belligerent and deliberately provocative - but surely those are the 'strong opinions' much beloved of this site?

Recall enjoying Kent's stuff in the NME in the 70s, even though he was on a different musical (and lifestyle!) path to my own. Read this very quickly over the weekend - a bit like reading an account of somewhere you once knew (the 1970s) from a very different angle. A pretty harrowing account of descent into self-indulgence and serious addiction. Good to read his completely unsentimental take on punk (unsurprisingly as he suffered a serious beating from Sex Pistols associates) and irritation at the way the history of the era has been written. He may have had no time for much of the music I liked in the 70s (though he does put a Yes track in his list of recommendations at the end!) but a real sense of musical obsession comes across.

It's the slow unfolding that really gets to me. Really like the uncelebrity characters too. The antithesis of contemporary, amphetamine TV. I liked the comment I read somewhere about the main female detective being unusual in that she didn't look like she was trying to solve a crime in a fifteen minute break from the catwalk.

'The Killing' (Episode 13/14) continues to grip. Seems like the version relocated to America is already in the offing. Trailers seem carbon copies of the original, but presumably in real-life places like New York rather than the fantasy country of Denmark. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637727/

I don't remember whole solos - but fragments of solos that I'll hum along and anticipate in relistening. I leave worrying about whether jazz is a 'music of substance' or not to those who feel the need to worry about such things. For me it's not the particular nature of individual solos as that overall sense of a music that creates an illusion of evolving organically, in the moment. As if the musicians had options to go somewhere else (however narrowly astray) but didn't. Very different from most classical music (or most pop or folk musics) where the same path is taken each time with minor variations of nuance, tempo etc. There's something about a record like 'Miles Smiles' that appeals because it appears to have been spirited out of the air rather than read from a page or walked through. Might be an illusion, but what an illusion. I had the same feeling listening to Stan Tracey's 'Captain Adventure' earlier in the week - live recordings from the 70s where my enjoyment came from that overall sense of hearing music being spun on the spot rather than from my following of any particular line with attention. Which is not to say that there are not brilliant solos that stand apart from others - but it would take someone with a better understanding of music and a better memory for melodic contours than me to explain.

Excellent point My view too. I find AMG useful but colourless. Has the most bizarre use of the word 'quite'.