A Lark Ascending

Autumn in Cambridge. A very wet day suddenly burst into light an hour before sunset:

I saw an LP 'fair' advertised as 'The Vinyl Countdown' at the weekend. Bath's jazz shop, 'Music Matters', says it all.

Going out tomorrow on BBC Radio 4 (and available on the replayer for a week after): http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nf3kr

Been following this thread (and mentions elsewhere) with curiosity - so many references to the music I cut my teeth on 35+ years ago. I listened to a little on Spotify in early September - liked much of what I heard but wasn't sure I could cope with the Zepplinesque riffing (much as I still enjoy Zeppelin!). Took the plunge this week and downloaded 'Stupid Dreams' and 'In Absentia' (after really enjoying a couple of pretty bottom heavy latterday Crimson albums over the last week). Gosh! What have I been missing! Brought back floods of memories of what it was like to stick on a well crafted rock record for the first time and melt to the wonderful melodies. So much of this hits all the spots I recall - good songwriting, interesting playing, solos (!!!!), tracks that go on for a long time, spacey things, mellotrons (or pseudo-mellotrons!), the beauty of the electric/acoustic contrast, vocals that don't sound pseudo-oikish, guest flutes etc. For me the trump card is the skill at building really memorable choruses - layered vocals and that 60s/70s trick of shifting into an unexpected key part way. Pink Floyd, Genesis, King Crimson, Zeppelin, Gong (yes, Gong! in their 'You' phase) all came rushing back. Whilst in Cambridge on Saturday I also picked up the most recent album - for the first 10 minutes I was disappointed - seemed more grungish with repeated vocal lines that always drive me nuts but it then opened out nicely. So many thanks to all who flagged this up. I hardly touch contemporary rock these days...the last band I enthused about were XTC in the 80s/early 90s! I think I've found a band here I can really engage with. Incidentally, would I be right in guessing the critics loath this lot? Porcupine Tree seem to celebrate everything that critical orthodoxy has condemned since punk kicked in.

They may be OOP (you're more likely to find Alan Titchmarsh's guide to the classics these days!!!!) Anthony Hopkins The Concertgoers Companion Does what it says - takes some of the most commonly played music in UK concert halls from Bach to Shostakovich - and gives you a brief rundown of what is going on. I suspect it is based on his long running BBC radio series of the late-20thC. The Nine Symphonies of Beethoven A much more detailed exploration but still understandable to the non-musician. I think I really learnt to love Beethoven whilst reading this and listening to the symphonies alongside each chapter. ************** Give an ear to 'Discovering Music' on Radio 3 on Sundays. Stephen Johnson does a similar thing, analysing a piece of music in an accessible, non-arty-farty way.

More Autumn Leaves this afternoon - this time ten minutes away in Clumber Park.

Just as long as they keep it off the wireless until December.

A pity the M62 wasn't around in the mid-15thC. Maybe the Wars of the Roses would not have taken place all over the country, just on that corridor! [Completely inaccurate, historically, I know, but...]

Not to mention the occasional places where he plays inside a 'straight' context without losing anything of his character. A fair few Kenny Wheeler records and this completely straight yet enormously entertaining disc: I've seen Parker many times and have always found him mesmerising - he hits a point in those circular breathing marathons when you can almost hear two musical lines shaping. I don't know if this is intentional or fantasy on my part but it sounds like he veers from low to high notes very rapidly and eventual the lower and higher notes seem to take on a parallel life of their own. Evan Parker is one of the musicians who keep me trying with the free/abstract area of jazz. I'm not a natural listener in that area but something really clicks with his music. Such a pity that the Appleby festival had to fold. The 'Freezone' Sunday afternoon he ran in a deconsecrated church there brought together a wonderful range of improvisers.

I suppose you mean a great sense of distance from you to here. Yes, I agree. There's also an an astonishing contrast of terrain/environment within very few miles. My Greater Manchester senior citizen's free travel pass takes me in 30 minutes by electric train from Manchester's teeming city centre to Hadfield (where League of Gentlemen was filmed!!) on the edge of wild Pennine country. The direct route from here to Manchester - over the Peak District - always seems an awful long way (it's actually only a couple of hours, traffic permitting). I'm reasonably familiar with Leeds, so expect the distance from there to Lancashire to be equally daunting, yet it's actually very close (and well connected). I'm a southerner by birth (and instinct) and have never properly explored West Yorkshire (let alone Lancashire) - my sense of geography completely escapes me northwest of Huddersfield. I was awestruck by the amazing countryside I saw yesterday. Coming out of Huddersfield and under a bridge there was an amazing view as you dropped down to Halifax. I was a bit caught out yesterday - expected a journey of about an hour; it actually took 1hr 45 mins. Glad I did it and will be exploring some more. I just need to remember to set off earlier!

Yes, it was in 197? when it came out - I like the cash register at the start! But it has suffered from mind-numbing over-exposure over here. For two months if you step into a shop, shopping centre, supermarket, pub or any public place you are hit over the head with it. However, I'm being grumpy. The kids I teach love it and see it as essential to the Xmas spirit as plastic antlers and Santa hats. Maybe they'll love Dylan's Xmas treat as much in the near future. I've got visions of him dressed as Santa in a grotto giving out toys to terrified little girls and boys. Oh, Bobby, can this really be the end, to be stuck inside of Yuletide with the Rudolph blues again.

Where are the other regular snappers? I was hoping to see some pictures of the legendary New England Fall. Not to mention Russia!

Tony Robinson (Baldrick) reckons the Yorkshire border area around Barnsdale with the bandit raids on the old A1 road - and that his clan may have originated in Hebden Bridge (which, by some strange coincidence is where my direct ancestry goes back to, o dear ). Apparently his house was where Wakefield bus station now stands . More than likely he was an amalgamation of a few different Robin/Robert Hoods in the North. Friar Tuck was real and lived down in Sussex apparently but was nothing to do with Mr Hood. That remote farm house under the storm clouds looks like a good candidate for the family ancestral gaff. Yes, it's all very complex and largely based on extrapolating theories from slithers of evidence (not that that has ever stopped anyone!). There is a scholarly study from the 70s by one J.C. Holt (who lectured me when I was at University) on the evolution of the legend. I read it a couple of years back - found it pretty dull, to be honest. Holt pushes Robin Hood well up into Lancashire but also down to Northamptonshire. I don't think the Sherwood/Nottingham connection became established until the 14thC.

Indeed. Sylvia Plaith is buried somewhere near where I walked...though I got lost at one point so missed the spot. Funny, I thought of you when I was there, Bill. Saw a sign saying 'Manchester, 25 miles.' I always think of Manchester/Lancashire as being another planet, yet it's very close - the Pennines create a sense of great distance.

Save this for November 25th (the official day on which Xmas music is allowed to be broken out): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Zt6Ot8WLHw...feature=related Alternatively, continue to live in Paradise and just make sure you never visit Britain in November or December.

I believe he's recording his version of the St. Matthew Passion for Easter. Well it could be intended as a fun release or it could be Dylan again growing weary of someone praising his every burp. I'm far more amazed that people are listening to Xmas records in mid-October. Even the shops haven't started bombarding us with Slade and Wizzard yet. Come November 1st.....

And I still say he's taking the p**s out of his fans. Not for the first time.

I haven't read anything by Keegan for a long time - but he's very good.

Ferguson is a bit notorious for his right of centre viewpoint. In recent years he has written about (and done TV programmes on) how the British Empire was actually a jolly good thing. I'm fully expecting him to be put in charge of the history curriculum in British schools when the Tories win the election next year! Although, if by some fluke, Labour hang on, there will be no history curriculum outside of private education! If you want a very convincing revisionist view of World War I I'd recommend this one: Does a good job at demonstrating how the popular 'lions led by donkeys' image of World War I was actually quite a late construction, only really becoming standard in the 1960s.

More trees. This time from West Yorkshire around Hebden Bridge. There's a longstanding feud between this area and Nottingham as to who really owns Robin Hood. An amazing place. One of the starting points of the Industrial Revolution, with the fast flowing streams able to power the waterwheels of the new textile factors (and coal just downstream once steam power took over); yet right up against rugged, blissed-out countryside. Not far from where the Brontes lived. Instead of Errol Flynn think 'Heathcliffe!', 'Cathy!' [Word of advice to anyone thinking of visiting Britain at some point: skip London. The regions are much, much better!]

Congratulations, Jim. I expect you'll be posting on that 'wide awake in the middle of the night' thread quite a bit!

Probably forgotten, although it might have survived in some form in those area where a 'tradition' still existed. An awful lot of traditional British music was rediscoveded by way of American variants. I think 'Matty Groves', which became a Fairport showpiece, might first have become popular here via Joan Baez. Subsequently, British folk musicians often sought out manuscripts or broadsides of these songs in the archives and came up with variants; or from older singers who had learnt the songs through their family or community where it had been locked up until interest really grew in the 50s and 60s. One of the strangest things lies in Irish traditional music, which was largely marginalised by the mid-20thC. It was recordings of emigrant Irish musicians like Michael Coleman in America that kick started the Irish folk revival. I've read lots of accounts by people considered 'traditional' Irish singers and players who talk excitedly about first hearing a piece on a 78 brought back from Chicago or New York.

Never really cared for any of the post-Beatles stuff apart from the odd individual track. I find the whole 'Imagine' album mawkish (especially the title song) and the Lennon-worship more wish fulfilment than reality. To my mind, the best post-Beatles albums were made by XTC in the mid-to-late 80s.

Interesting observations, musicbox. My Dad also had an automatic respect for classical music (though he'd never have used the term 'high art'), always ribbing us for listening to pop instead of 'the classics'. I think in his case classical music was a sign of upward mobility - he came from a pretty impoverished, dysfunctional family but was shot through with a need to better himself. Having left school at 12 or 13 and gone straight on the farm, he spent his military career just trying to build a stable, nouveaux-middle class lifestyle - the story of so many in the post-War years. Classical music gave that sense that he was part of what he aspired to. His love of light classics was genuine but there was no 'cultured' understanding - and I know when I got an interest he pretty quickly became as scathing about Stravinsky and Mahler as he'd previously been about Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin! I know exactly what you mean about learning your way into the music by playing the records again and again. I can distinctly recall sitting down with Mahler 6 one afternoon and writing down a sort of plan of what was happening - when themes reappeared etc. In the end I'd roughed out some idea of structure - it was a while yet before I got to understand what things like 'sonata form', 'first subject', 'recapitulation', 'rondo' etc meant. But I'd worked out that this music was put together according to some sort of system and was not just 'one damn note after another.'

On Fairport Convention's 'What We Did On Our Holidays' there's a trad song called 'Nottamun Town' with the same tune as 'Masters of War'. I don't know if Fairport took the song intact from a folk source (I seem to recall a Davy Graham version) or just the words, applying the tune they knew from the Dylan. Though they were Dylan obsessives I suspect the former. This source suggests Dylan got the tune from 'Nottamun Town': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nottamun_Town The letter from Jean Ritchie to Roger McGuinn here is interesting: http://www.ibiblio.org/jimmy/folkden-wp/?p=6932