A Lark Ascending

That was one of the funniest bits - when he admitted that their concept album ('Trick of the Tail'? - I'm not into Tull) was a p-take with its 40-odd minute single track and intended as a sort of 'Spinal Tap'. I think he was reinterpreting the past to suit himself there (The album was 'Thick as a Brick'). I was never much of a Tull listener, but I did have 'Thick as a Brick'. They followed it with something called 'A Passion Play' (I think) which got absolutely slaughtered by the critics. I think it was where the reaction against that sort of music really started...Summer '73 if I recall correctly (a good three years before punk exploded). A few months later they went for Yes' 'Tales of Topographic Oceans' in the same way, an album which is still wafted as the prime evidence to condemn prog-rock (it's actually a very good record, probably the last decent one they made!). So I find his arguments a bit disingenuous - Jethro Tull were huge c.1972-3 and just as prone to giganticism as many of the others. Tred carefully with King Crimson - they are most definitely a rock group. And their records are so diverse (expect near heavy metal chording, whimsical pastoralism and abstract improv...but not always on the same record!) - the first one would probably sound hopelessly bombastic to a listener today; the 80s band has more in common with Talking Heads. They are probably the band of that era I return to most frequently - there's a long thread about them elsewhere. Edit: Re: Jethro Tull, this is interesting: NME item from 1973 As for Jethro Tull being above pretension: NME Concert Review

I recall watching a rebroadcast of that in the late 70s at a time when when I was just starting to teach the First World War (and take trips out to Ypres and the Somme). Very moving and influential. But... You might find this book interesting: It discusses the huge influence the series had along with things like 'Oh, What a Lovely War' (and in the context of Vietnam), drawing much of its interpretation from the perspective of the war poets. Sheffield puts together a very strong argument that it misrepresents the reality of the Great War based on the values of the 60s and bears little resemblence as to how it was seen in the 1920s and 1930s. I found it a really challenging read because it upset so many of my preconceptions drawn from learning about WWI in the 60s/70s. But he convinced me!

We may not be tuned into that, but I think younger people are much more comfortable with sifting the enormity that is out there. They accept a TV that has a zillion channels (most of it of little interest) as the norm - yet still some things emerge as very popular; and some things become central for particular 'tribes'. In much the same way as we have gravitated to a place like Organissimo as a 'portal' for jazz information so their are 'portals' for hundreds of other areas of interest. I suspect the 'local' thing will still matter because live music will inevitably be mainly local - most UK jazz musicians, for example, don't get much opportunity to play abroad until they reach a certain level of visibility. So having a download of your music available after a local gig is going to be important. I'm always amazed by the rush at the end of concerts to buy the CD...and even more amazed by the musicians who don't have any or have left them in the last hotel. Unless you are a big name your performance will figure in an audience's brain for at best a few days before other interests crowd in. If you want to make a sale you have to be ready then. If the listener can go home, log on, download some recent recordings of the songs they just heard to get to know them better, then you are going to get your music more widely known. Though that does pose another question...is the current practice of recording the new compositions and then gigging them artistically the best way of doing it? The uncertainty of the industry can be seen in a label like ECM. Their music is now up on the commercial download sites, most of the back catalogue is on e-music (in some regions) where it can be acquired for a fraction of its former cost (and this from a label who until very recently did not do budget priced reissues)...yet they also launch the physical CD Touchstone series. But the recognition is there that the electronic route cannot be ignored. I'm going to be very interested to see how Blue Note play it. There are a lot of Blue Note albums on iTunes and elsewhere. With a major batch of deletions of CDs due I wonder if they will leave them there (i.e. move towards permanent availability) or withdraw them from there too (keeping to the traditional model of withdrawing material to allow a new demand to build up). Finally, an interesting development with Naxos. Their initial downloads were at the much derided 128 kpbs. They are now/have converted to 320 kpbs. But instead of inviting everyone to buy their downloads again in higher resolution (the 'remastered edition' approach of the 90s in CD) they are allowing customers to upgrade free of charge. It's going to be a very different world and I don't think any of us can know how it will eventually pan out. But I'm pretty sure it's all going to happen much more quickly than we imagine.

Nice, balanced programme. Instead of repeating the usual received wisdom (pretentious, bombastic etc) it recognised the excitement, range and aspiration of the music that was retrospectively plonked under the 'prog' label. At the same time it pointed out one of its central flaws...girls didn't like it! And how the energy that had once gone on making music outside the norm had, by the mid-Seventies been squandered on stage sets and the sort of megalomania ELP seemed to indulge in. Having lived through that era, cut my musical teeth there, I always find it sad that lazy journalism focuses in on the bloated '75 era and the emerging stadium type shows. Most of us heard this on record without visuals (beyond the record covers) or in bare student union halls where the 'show' part was minimal. The appeal of a a band like Genesis might escape listeners today who just see the daft costumes and the synth-drenched mega-group they became; but around 72-3 they were a breath of fresh air in a musical world where music beyond the charts was generally leaden blues-rock. Instead you got rippling 12-string guitars, flutes and oboes and a slightly twisted Englishness. I can still recall being horrified when I bought my NME in late '72 to see a picture of Peter Gabriel dressed as a flower. Surely it was all about the music, man! The hour of BBC clips before made me chuckle. Two things stood out: a) How the marionette dancers of Top of the Pops (did they ever smile?) carried on regardless, even though the Jethro Tull and Atomic Rooster records were quite undanceable! b) The leering antics of Ian Anderson....then cut forward to the end of the documentary to Johnny Rotten doing somethng very similar.

Brits of a certain vintage should tune into BBC4 over the next week for a number of programmes on 'prog'. Some are things I'm sure I've seen before but at 10.00 pm tonight there's a new 'Prog-rock Britannia' programme with repeats next week. Get the cheese cloth shirts and loons out!

I'm not surprised!

Clearly this all means bad news for lots of people whose jobs depend on the traditional way of circulating music; and to those who like to buy a physical product and/or feel that download quality can never equal the quality of a physical CD (in much the way some feel a CD can never equal the quality of a vinyl LP). But there is so much opportunity lying here, once we've got past our loyalty to the old model. Two examples: a) I stumbled upon an argument somewhere on a rock site arguing that the new model might inaugerate a return of the single song. Now that a band does not need to pad out an entire album they can spend more effort getting a limited number of things right and then put it out. Might not have much meaning for jazz where we think in longer stretches (be it LP, CD sides or live sets) but could help other areas. b) Once people have really got their head around these changes it should allow a much swifter access to new music. On the old model a new piece of classical might get a premiere and then disappear from sight. With orchestras now recording much of their own work and releasing it through their own websites it shouldn't be too hard to sort out the liscensing and when a new composer gets his/her work performed it can also get out there for the people at the concert and a wider listening public to hear it again very soon after creation. And without the burden of some coupling they might not require. I downloaded Thomas Ades Violin Concerto off iTunes last week - just that. No need to hang about waiting for him to write a clarinet concerto. In that case there seems to have been a 2 year gap between premiere and release as a download. I'm sure that margin can be significantly cut, greatly helping newer music find an audience. I think we have to be careful about mixing up the current economic downturn with the transfer from CD to electronic distribution. To my mind the new technology offers fantastic possibilities - although the big players seem too obsessed with protecting their existing assets rather than looking to the potential in the changes. We could be entering one of those phases in the endless cycle where the initiative passes to the little chaps. Edit: The idea the downloading will lead to everything being reduced to single tracks also seems mistaken to me. Long before music was even recorded (let alone collected on long playing records) composers were organising music in longer sequences - suites, song cycles, symphonies etc. They did not need an artificially imposed time limit to decide that it was a nice way of structuring music. I'm sure musicians will carry on putting out 'albums' of music as an expression of their creativity.

Happy New Year, y'all.

Here's another lucky winner from the fringes of British music: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/norfolk/7805305.stm

Agree. Not my style of music but he's always promoted jazz in an open and unaffected way.

With Sweden left littered with corpses I thought I move somewhere else Nordic. If anything this one, set in Iceland, is even more gloomy!

A whoppin' £50 for 131 pages? At that price I'd expect Monk-inscripted gold leaf on vellum. But then it would be in Latin and you wouldn't be able to read it. Well, I wouldn't!

Despite not being Olympic athletes both chaps were picked out of the hat for one of Britain's strangest rituals: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7804822.stm Though, thinking about it, Plant has a sort of Olympics connection. Maybe Her Majesty was rather taken by the double decker/hedge performance in August. Bet Jimmy's miffed. Courtney joins the likes of Stan Tracey and Johnny Dankworth as jazzers sprinkled with establishment fairy dust.

I'm very attracted to this idea of local community as the driving force of real experience. Except... I'm a classic example of a late 20th/early 21st person quite divorced from any community. I grew up on RAF camps all over the world, have a strong draw towards the south-west (through living there quite a bit and my father's Cornish origins) yet have lived in the Midlands for 30 years and still feel no emotional bond here. The reality of the last 100 years....maybe much longer...is that those of us in the 'developed' world have little option to live our lives from a local community. Culture will/has been reshaping accordingly. I have a feeling that more and more we will choose our cultural contexts from a global drop-down menu. Will this be 'real'? Well, when I listen to Aussie jazz it's much more affecting than anything I've heard of Nottinghamshire jazz.

Really enjoyed a Steve Lacy/Roswell Rudd/Misha Mengelberg version of Blue Chopsticks on Jazz Record requests this evening. I don't own any Nichols - just one of the Herbie Nichols Project discs (which I'm playing now). The Blue Note box always scared me off, being both pricey and full of a/ts. Just out of interst I looked on iTunes UK and there it was for a very reasonable £10.99 (30 masters, 18 a/ts) making it both affordable and easy to split up into two main discs and two with the a/ts (they don't quite fit on one). Brits who are happy with downloads might be interested. All the session details can be got from here: http://www.jazzdisco.org/blue-note-records.../session-index/ The Lacy/Rudd/Mengelberg (Regeneration on Soul Note) is lined up when e-music refreshes tomorrow.

Well, I'm very much of the new audience (I too got interest in classical music via ELP (well, The Nice actually!) and other prog-rockers) and I'm glad its there. There are always a dozen copies for sale in the main news outlet in my little market town (there's not a single jazz of folk magazine) so there must be others who want it. The traditional audience is clearly still buying it - you'll find them grumbling about this or that or squabbling about which is the best Brahms' Fourth in the letters pages.

Are you using the right site, bvy? The old one is still up (with a co.uk suffix). This one is on a totally new site.

I've been reading it since the late 70s - the biggest change I've noticed in recent years is that the writers are as likely to have become interested in classical music as a result of listening to Emerson, Lake and Palmer as from the what they heard in the music room at Eton or at Mummy's soirees. When I first started reading it there was an assumption that you already knew certain things - it had a rather gentlemen's clubby atmosphere. Today its writers seems very aware that the person reading the magazine might be right at the start of an interest in music, with a very limited background. Some can still be snooty at times but thankfully most seem more concerned to share an enthusiasm for music rather than show off how hard it is to impress them. Its changes reflect the social changes of the last half-century in Britain where interest in classical music has broadened beyond the social and intellectual elites who once saw it as their exclusive domain. ********** I seem to recall the jazz reviews were there in the late 70s, disappeared in the 80s, came back again for a short time (can't recall when), then vanished for good.

It wouldn't initially accept my user name as two words (a space might be not accepted). As one word it was happy! Might be worth trying.

The UK classical magazine 'Gramophone' has a new site which it claims has every word written since 1923! A quick registration and you are in. Should be a mind-boggling resource! http://www.gramophone.net/

If we're all more or less forced to buy online by the disappearance of the CD shop the question for the producers will be 'why bother to put it on a physical product at all if you can remove all the storeage, distributions costs just by streaming it (music and packaging)?'. As long as they know there is a large body of consumers who will not accept downloading they'll stick with the CD. But a tipping point will come where enough of even the more traditional recording buyers (e.g me!) start to accept downloading. At that point the physical CDs will start to disappear (apart from some vanity labels (a bit like those who continue to put out vinyl for a niche market)). I think it will happen very quickly - like the LP/CD changeover in the late 80s (which followed an initial period of suspicion). And as with LP there will be a small body of collectors who will continue to feel that the new format is inferior to the old. But I suspect the bulk of people who want to buy music (not just kids and people with cloth ears) will adapt. For me the disappearance of the Fopps, Zavvis etc is of interest because I grew up and lived most of my life buying from record shops. On the rare occasions I visit a big town or city these days I find it strange to not have a place to browse for recordings. But I'm happy to forsake that for the greater flexibility of downloading. I know I'm in a minority on a board like this with that outlook. We'll just have to see how things play out.

I'm likely to see in the New Year with a lot of lesser known Sibelius. Andrew Barnett's bio has really piqued my interest to explore beyond the symphonies/violin concerto/tone poems/Kullervo that I've known for years. Fortunately this has been extensively recorded on Bis and Bis are on e-music!

I always found Fopp a bit random - you could find complete surprises, could rely on a wide range of Blue Notes and Fantasy stuff at cheap prices. Yet full price was more expensive than the main shops. But it wasn't the sort of place you could go into expecting to find certain core recordings/performers represented. The little I saw of Zavvi in its short life was pitiful. They seemed to have classical, folk, blues, jazz etc all jumbled up as 'specialist' music. The choice was limited to things that had made some sort of splash via awards etc. That just leaves HMV which has gone the same way as Zavvi. There were dire warnings about them last Xmas. I wouldn't be surprised to see them go in the current cull, wiping out CD sales from not just middling but major towns in Britain (apart from the supermarkets and ahandful of independents). I don't think it was the deciding factor but I wonder if 'diversification' has been a contributory cause of these collapses. Instead of concentrating on what they know, these stores have tried to get involved in DVD, mobile phones, books, tea shirts etc - one-stop entertainment shops - in search of bigger profits. That has taken away their distinctiveness and put them in direct competition with all the other stores who have 'diversified'. They were bound to lose out to the supermarkets.

Risorganissimento 'The Revival'

It seems a middling British chain is going under on a daily basis at the moment. The Woolworths collapse (a big chain) has an interesting implication for physical CDs. For some time Woolies and WH Smiths have been the only places you'd find CDs in the centre of a middling market town like Worksop. Only a small selection of popular recordings but at least a place for young buyers to start. With Woolies gone that just leaves Smiths. Soon, if you want the latest Abba Compilation or debut CD by a TV talent show winner, you're going to have to head out to the supermarkets on the periphery. The end of the CD may be much nearer than even I've predicted.