A Lark Ascending

John Surman has been on ECM for ages and he's west coast too.

Seems to be still around, though doing more standards and the like. I have this nice disc with John Horler: In fact, I think I'll give that a play. Just seen this too: http://www.musicweb-international.com/jazz/2010/Jim_Richardson_ARCD1004.htm

I was listening to this one only yesterday: Always come across as less focussed than National Health or Hatfield to me - the tunes and structures less defined, a bit more noodling. But enjoyable, nonetheless. Phil Lee is a fine guitarist.

I love Stacey! I know it had me evicted from the Kool Kat Klub many years ago. I think my reaction to Portico might be over-reaction - so much fine UK jazz goes unnoticed in its own land. And then along comes this rather ordinary band who get just a bit of a spin behind them and they are everyone who never really thinks about jazz's idea of a great jazz band. It sounds like Starbuck's music to me - and there's nothing wrong with Starbucks music, it just doesn't need grand claims made about it. But then we've seen this happen again and again...

Wood distills many of these thoughts into one simple song here. Listen out for the killer 4th verse: There is something just a bit troublesome about his sense of people rooted to a particular soil. He's as far from right-wing as you can imagine (listen to his brilliant attack on the BNP, 'Spitfires', reappropriating 'icons' of Britishness from the right), but the argument for packing off toffs back to London because they have no genuine roots in the Cotswolds can be used in more sinister ways.

Lots of good songs scattered across the first few Fairport albums. 'Henry the Human Fly' is chock full of an English version of the Harry Smith Anthology strangeness. 'I Want to See The Bright Lights Tonight', 'Hokey Pokey' and, especially, 'Pour Down Like Silver' are superb. After that there are plenty of gems and fine performances - but also a lot of filler. Music that probably sounded exciting rocking out in a club but just seem a bit written by numbers. I'd not be without the records for the great bits, but... I think he needs to spend some time with Chris Wood at his summer school in deepest Gloucestershire! On Chris Wood, this is well worth a read: http://www.englishacousticcollective.org.uk/JMI/index.html I think he overstates his case but its a case worth making.

Well, I'm talking the RT who wrote songs that sounded 300 years old rather than the RT who writes songs to get American club audiences hollerin'. Though the latter seemed to have kept him in a job, where he had a real hard time making a living with the former.

Thanks for the tip, Bev. I've been flirting (musically you understand) with investigating Mr Wood since I heard him on the BBC Folk awards a week or so ago. His songwriting and it's subjest matter, the De Menezes shooting, stood out. Is there one particular album you'd recommend starting with? Work your way through his three most recent solo albums: The Lark Descending (my favourite album of the Noughties in any genre); Trespasser; Handmade Life (the most recent one with the De Menezes song on it). I'd also strongly recommend the album by The English Acoustic Collective called Ghosts - he is part of a trio with more instrumentals. He had an ongoing partnership with melodeon player Andy Cutting during the 80s/90s (recently revived) - more instrumental again. I'm a long time Richard Thompson fan going back to the early 70s - I'd say Wood is writing songs with the original-yet-rooted-in-English-tradition feel that Thompson pulled off in the late-60s and 70s. Great live performer too - unlike The Unthanks his profile is still in the folk world so getting a ticket to see him won't be difficult!

When I saw Nik Bärtsch's Ronin about 18 months ago they made little impression. But I've since listened to the discs and they've really eaten their way into me. Saw Portico at the same festival and wasn't impressed at all. Didn't seem to be alot going on (a bit of minimalism, bit of generic world percussion, bit of Garbarek on sax). They got a Mercury Prize nomination around that time and it got their records into the shops and a fair bit of attention from younger music fans (from outside of jazz). The concert I saw was packed. But half the audience did not stick around for the much more impressive Bojan Z quartet.

Nice interview. Anyone smitten with The Unthanks should, if they don't know him already, seek out the recent CDs of Chris Wood. That same sense of drawing off a long established tradition, yet relating it to the contemporary world.

March 14th here in Blighty.

I suspect you'd get a lifetime of pleasure from both; and once you have one, you'll want the other. I'd go for the Columbia - the voice is agile, the mood more upbeat. It can also be bought very inexpensively. I got a set for arounf £13 off Amazon just before Xmas. The Verve set is also marvellous though the voice is more constrained. Great instrumentalists though playing what was becoming 'mainstream' rather than the more peppy small-band swing of the Columbia. Don't know if it still sells in a silly biscuit tin with a cardboard concertina that holds the discs. Either way you'll get lots of joy.

My memory too.

And it is worth rememembering that it has never been easier to find the music you want, even if you do confine yourself to legal sources. You might not find it necessarily in your preferred format, but it's very easy to build up a representative collection of most players. The past is available in zillions; and I doubt if it's ever been easier for performers to get music recorded and available to the public* (wade through the daily new downloads on e-music and see how many you've actually heard of!). Getting them aware of it, interested, still as hard as ever, I suspect. The unknowns on e-music interest me. I get the impression that many of these are the equivalent of bar-room bands with a local audience. People who have had a good night out and want a memento no longer have to buy it at the door. One of the challenges for the online stores is going to be how to help the customer navigate all this stuff. At present the filtering methods are pretty crude. * I think of people like Stan Tracey, Bobby Wellins, John Taylor, Kenny Wheeler. Players I've followed since the mid-70s. Until about 2000 recordings were few and far between - their profile was mainly limited to the UK and mainland Europe (Wheeler was a bit wider). Wheeler and Taylor had releases on ECM but there were long gaps between them. Tracey was quite prolific on his own cottage label but that didn't sustain itself. In the last ten years recordings have tumbled out on small labels like Trio, Re-steamed, Camjazz, Edition etc.

The newly recorded classical CDs I bought in 1985 sound as good as those issued today, to my ears. It was the rush to get out the pre-existing catalogue that produced the poor sounding CDs. Though the record companies managed an Indian summer out of that by releasing them all again ten years later in remastered form. It's almost as if the companies are still dazzled by that golden goose moment and are still focussing on trying to repeat it. To me the current special-anniversary-edition-boxed-set fad is part of that. It won't save them.

The repackaging thing drives me nuts - pretty boxes, re-assembling material into different presentations. Seems to be as much an evasion of the realities of the potential of new technology as all the other errors the record companies made in the last 15 years. I also think it's a misnomer that young people buy downloads (or 'share' them) whilst older people need hard copies. I'm nor sure how you could compute this? I fall into 'older' (55) and only buy a CD if a download is unavailable. I doubt if I'm alone. I'm sure the record companies are also aware of the ageing population with free time, accumulated wealth, kids fled and overheads reduced, a desire to fill that time. It's a pretty big market!

The music 'industry' is clearly staggering, for all the reasons above. But I suspect that musicians will find other ways to work round the problems. And, unfortunately, at a later date, another arm of the industry will find a way to colonise them. Is the current collapse on a scale with the 1929 one that resulted from the combination of the Depression and the arrival of radio? The industry recovered from that. Or maybe...I hope not, but maybe...this is an even bigger paradigm shift. The point where music ceases to be of interest given the alternatives. My heart says that music is too powerful, too hardwired into humanity to every be abandoned. But....

Clearly a major factor. But equally, if not more significant, has been the sophistication of computer games. Albums are not interactive (statues, in Jim S's phrase)! When a new version of 'Call of Duty' came out last autumn it was the buzz in the school where I teach for weeks. 20 years ago it was a new Oasis album that had the same impact. 40 years ago, a new Led Zeppelin. May be a new Acker Bilk ten years before that! A colleague of mine even caught her husband sneaking in a copy having gone out to buy it at midnight on the day of release.

Take a look at this brief flirtation with single success: Worth it just to see the uncontrolled joy on the faces of the dancers. They'd clearly hoped to see T. Rex on Top of the Pops, not a bunch of hippy proggers!

Try and find this: The Big Idea: Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin It came out around 1990/91. Stewart was deep into synths by then but his trademark sound cuts through. The songwriting/arranging is superb. The whole album has a sort of Gothic grandeur, shot through with deep sense of disillusion with the Britain of the Thatcherite and then 'Loadsamoney' years. The CD collection of singles from the 80s is also very good - covers of everything for 'It's My Party' (which bizarrely made No. 1 in the UK) to 'Busy Doing Nothing'. Very sad that a musician of Stewart's instinctive talent had so few outlets in a long period of rock history where technical skill was eyed with suspicion.

A fair few assumptions about 'young people' there (they only listen to specific tunes, aren't learning things etc). I imagine music is being 'consumed' differently from the way older people 'consumed' it when there were limited formats and fewer alternatives. But even in the good old days the majority of people I knew owned very few albums and paid only passing attention to liners; it was a hard core of obsessives who were interested enough to want to find the context of the music. I suspect that such a hardcore still exists among 'young people' who will go on looking for that context...though maybe not in the musical areas we like to swim in. As for the concern about the reluctance to listen to historic albums as a whole, reminds me of those who bewail the passing of the 78 - now with 78s you really got to concentrate over the 3 minute span instead of being able to drift off with a 20 minute LP side (or, still worse, a 79 minute CD)! 'Young people' don't pay the attention they did in the golden 78 era! It's change, not the end of civilisation as we know it. The music industry has just failed to come to terms with the scale and pace of it and seems to have been overwhelmed. Something new will eventually emerge - but I doubt if genuflecting to the glories of past recordings or formats will be (or should be) a priority. I choose to spend a lot of time listening to 'old' music and am still wedded to the idea of the album format because that's the context of my listening life. But it doesn't mean an equally valid alternative might not be emerging. And it might be an alternative that does not include us.

Bouncing between two compelling reads:

Really looking forward to this - reviews so far are very good. Includes a version of King Crimson's 'Starless' - they definitely think sideways.

You seen how that guy on trumpet on Bitches Brew dressed? Every bit as daft as Dave Hill!

Sorry - misread that again. I thought you meant I was making a sweeping generalisation rather than that you were choosing to make one. If America didn't invent R'n R I'm not sure who did. 'Rock', on the other hand, seemed to take on a wider range of geographical influences.