A Lark Ascending

One of my desert island books! Some wonderful ruminations on history in its pages. Highly evocative of the Fenland region of East Anglia where it is set. And very good on eels too!

That might explain his dress sense from the late 60s!

And hopefully lots of blues! I'm looking forward to a set of discs that go where most comps don't. That's why your jazz sets are so good, Allen.

I look forward to this. 'That Devilin' Tune' is easily the most enjoyable set of CDs compiling early jazz that I've come across. 'Blues' is a much foggier area for me so I'm hoping for an education!

Here's another interesting new one: For All We Know Nica's Dream The Sound of Music I concentrate on You Ruby My Dear Monk's Dream Sarabande Joy Spring Henry Lowther has only recorded a few solo records so it will be good to hear him...especially doing Julie Andrews! Also nice to see a new release on Andy Cleyndert's Trio Records - they seemed to go quiet for a while.

One of those very personal reactions. I've always loved Neil's voice - vulnerable, very, very distinctive. Though I can also see why he sounds like fingernails on a blackboard to some. A bit like Dylan or Robert Wyatt who just sound like bad singers to many people, yet are deeply affecting singers to others (Wyatt is one of my all-time favourites). I think Neil maintained his songwriting skills and took them down unusual routes for a much longer period than Stills. Stills was writing some great things up to the early 70s but seemed to completely lose his touch. Neil was also more prolific (and there were a fair few dull songs but a bounty of good ones). Perhaps Neil's style was a bit simpler, closer to country or blues standards. [a sideline, but I always thought David Crosby was the most original of all three - but he wrote even less! You really hear the jazz in Crosby's songs). Equally, his guitar sound was highly distinctive and, again if you are attuned, highly emotional. I love listening to chorus after chorus of him on 'Cortez the Killer'. He never struck me as that flash but he could build a solo up and take it down beautifully. Can't say I've cared for much by him since the early 90s; but in the period from the late 60s to mid-70s he is one of my touchstones.

Me too! Now waiting for disc 3 to arrive. I'm really enjoying this series.

Would like to see this on the Westbrook front: One I've never heard. http://www.westbrookjazz.de/d1_f.html

Anyone ever tried the burgers of Calais?

My bank manager is keen that you say nothing!

I enjoyed my days as a scourer of record and then CD shops. But that was then and this is now. Having weened myself off the hunt through record shops I've found I'm more than happy with the new technological model. One of the things you can do now, which it was hard to do then, is download the specific tracks you want and then assemble the album as you require (especially useful when collecting earlier pre-LP jazz). Of course you could do that with a tape recorder but would need to buy (or borrow) recordings that frequently overlapped. All that glitters is indeed not gold...including our warm fuzzy nostalgia for the past.

'Tropic Appetites' is available on iTunes. Agree, it's a marvellous album - anyone who could never bite off 'Escalator' might like to try 'Tropic' - it's like a chamber music version of that 'opera'. Julie Tippetts is in amazing voice on some of the tracks. Don't know 'Lifelines' but if Kenny Wheeler is aboard, then I'd like to see it too.

I agree - love the thread for either getting ideas for new things or getting your mind jogged about things buried in your collection. I too prefer it when people say why they are enjoying the music. Doesn't have to be erudite or an extended essay. Just a one liner communicating enthusiasm or an interesting observation can get you curious. The "Parochial US Politics" threads seem the most time-wasting (if you are not living in America)! 'How's the weather' is time-wasting but an essential expression of British character.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Richards had been - until he got the opportunity through fame to be other! I seem to recall reading somewhere that Ritchie Blackmore - a one time wild man of rock - spent his teens practicing the guitar instead of partying! Pure party animals would be more likely to seek music where the girls are. Which is unlikely to be in any purist camp!

More to the point, if he was that purist he could never have written 'Wonderful Tonight'! I've broad ears but thats my 'non plus ultra'!

Can't wait for the boxed set with special liner notes and a DVD about how they did the remastering, not available elsewhere.

From what I've read, for every purist Eric Clapton (as he admits he was at the time) there was a Small Faces (who seemed well on top of R+B). I wonder if the purest thing was particular strong amongst the more introverted type, stuck in his bedroom listening to records (that was me later on!); where R+B struck home with those who went out and partied. There's probably an element of class there too in the UK experience! There's a distinct difference with having a personal 'non plus ultra' based on what sounds right to you; but trying to generalise that into some objective limit, well.... I think it has something to do with a human desire to tidy up the past and present it in clear boxes. You often have to do that in order to get a shape with which you can deal with it (something I've always found with learning and teaching history). Sometimes people forget that those arrangements are just there for convenience and that the past is much more overlapping and messy and open to an infinite variety of perpectives depending on where you are standing. One of they joys of the 'Devilin' Tune' series is they way you get jazz, country, blues, MOR on top of one another. Just as you would have heard them at the time.

Yes, have my eye on that too! Glad the Pavillion is back - I hated Komedia last year. Felt like an impostor being neither twenty-something nor a possessor of cool shades or an iPhone! We must say hello at some point this time! I'll promise you a pint of Barnstormer or Golden Hare (which you can now buy in Worksop in bottles!)!!!!

Managed to put a package together of mainly UK performances for Cheltenham. Seems to be weak with non-UK performers this year - cutbacks. They also don't seem to be using the Everyman for some reason (faulty electrics????!!!!!!). A lot more seems to be being pushed to the 'party' area in the gardens. Went for: J10 TRIO VD (what an awful name. It's supposed to mean Valentine's Day...but...) J12 KIT DOWNES TRIO J14 NIKKI YEOH TRIO - with John Surman J16 FOOD - Iain Ballamy and Norwegians J20 STEWART LEE'S FREEHOUSE - Evan Parker and others J25 EMPIRICAL J27 CARLA BLEY - the Lost Chords. J30 FLY J31 FRINGE MAGNETIC

So you didn't dig the blues-based bands much at all, but you were born Ten Years After? Confusing! Ho! Ho! 'Love Like a Man' was one of the first singles I bought...more, I think, because I was trying to locate a taste outside the pop norm than any real liking for it (I also bought Black Sabbath's 'Paranoid' around that time...another dead end for me!). I know I soon found it repetitive and never followed up with an album purchase. Growing up in a house full of 'The Light Programme', Broadway/Hollywood musicals and light opera/classics (and in places that were all white-British [with a dash of Irish]) the whole blues/soul thing just had little soil to grow in. I suspect my compass is still steered by those early influences, regardless of the places I've chosen to visit outside their orbit. Maybe if I'd grown up on the back streets of Leeds or Newcastle I'd have been an animal!

It's right to point out how blues music mutated over here into something completely 'inauthentic' in many cases - by Led Zeppelin III there were large dollops of country and English folk starting to surface. And in Birmingham it was turned into Heavy Metal which owed little more than the song structures and lyrical content to the blues model. One of the most intriguing was Fleetwood Mac who seemed to be evolving a quite wonderful concoction that used the blues as a basis but with a rich and melodically broader approach around the time of 'oh Well!"...and then they split up and the band turned into something else. The other side of the coin was the reaction against blues based music. Many of the more creative bands of the early 70s quite deliberately tried to avoid blues based music (there's not much in Genesis or Yes, Caravan or Henry Cow) as did the folk-rockers. Very much a strike for independence from the model they'd all loved and grown up on. I learned to love the latter and had very little time for blues based music - it was Led Zepp's folky side that got my attention! I had to learn to love jazz before I could start to see the beauty and power that lay within blues based music. When I was first listening it seemed like a tired formula. If I'd been born ten years earlier...even five years earlier...and exposed to the blues/soul boom I'd have heard it all quite differently.

Do you take a 2:15 pop record over a 13 minute Coltrane solo? In all honesty, I take both, depending on what i want/need at the time, and if that means going back-to-back, then back-to-back it is! And sometimes, I take neither, for the same reasons. Me too! Which is why I'm impatient with those who would tell us that one approach is right, the other wrong.

Do you take a 2:15 pop record over a 13 minute Coltrane solo? My view is that it depends on the pop record and depends on the 13 minute solo! The authorised version of rock history has asserted, however, that the former is approved and the latter (especially if played by a white player) is not. My problem has always been an impatience with repetition - each verse being identical to the next with little variation. I recall being annoyed by this as a musically ignorant 14 year old. Now you can deal with that via composition or improvisation. With improvisation each chorus will automatically be different; pop/rock records that hold my attention tend to be the ones where each chorus has variation written in via added instruments, harmonic changes, a richer vocal harmony line or whatever (I don't think I could sustain my interest in 'Desolation Row' without the acoustic guitar obbligato!). Whether it is 2 minutes or 13 minutes is neither here nor there for me. But does it change, develop, vary. That's where I get my interest.

It was definitely the soloing that drew me to jazz. The hardest thing I found at first was the relative 'simplicity' of the tunes - early 70s (non-blues) rock modulated all over the place, strung different tunes together etc. I was hooked to key changes as to sugar! Jazz seemed to have a much simpler structure - obviously to alow much more complex improvisation to happen. I think what jazz (and classical and English/Irish folk, which I started exploring at the same time) did was introduce me to much subtler ways of using rhythm - but that was a side effect. It had enormous consequences as I now find four-square rock beats very hard to take. And if anything they've got more four-square and been pushed much further to the front of the mix. I think I have very European ears when it comes to rhythm. It's always been secondary. My ideal is Stravinsky rather than James Brown!

It's pretty much gonna be what each individual wants/needs it to be at any given moment. I think it's 'received wisdom'!