A Lark Ascending

An e-mail tells me the Winstone is in the hands of the Royal Mail! I notice another promising vocal disc: Wardell is actually from NZ but has worked here for ages. I'd never been that struck until her wonderful vocalese album 'Noted', so this one looks good: 1. I Gotta Right To Sing The Blues 2. Loose Bloose 3. Little Girl Blue 4. Learnin' The Blues 5. The Wrong Blues 6. The Meaning Of The Blues 7. Limehouse Blues 8. Teenies Blues 9. Parker's Mood (Blues) 10. Born To Be Blue The Amazon blurb: There's also a new Tony Kofi quartet disc due - hopefully with more baritone than his initial disc: This one looks interesting too: And, if the disc with this months Jazzwise is anything to go by, a disc of Julian Siegel's trio with Greg Cohen and Joey Baron cannot be far away. [And a new Christine Tobin is due abit later in the Spring].

I suspect we've shared enthusiasm over Jazz Today many times - I recall coming home from work to my bedsit in 1978 (my first year of teaching) and having my ears opened to that programme. I'd just like a regular 1 hour weekly review of new releases - new and reissues. I'm not sure I need a jazz station - in the end I listened to TheJazz irregulary. I think a station that catered for all those non-commercial musics that have passionate enthusiasts would be the best option. I'd be happy to share a station with the reggae, blues, folk, world etc enthusiasts. Might help the Oxbridge lot too - they could clear the schedules of all the funny stuff and have none stop Palestrina! BBC Radio 2 does this after a fashion (I have little interest in rock'n roll or reggae, but Mark Lamar always sounds so enthused....it's great!) but ends up going for the more commercial end in most cases (Humph being an exception though he's now gone - their folk music programme is terribly conservative and hosted by a sort of 'celebrity'). I could do without the celebrity enthusiasts - give me people who love the music and communicate that love, known or unknown. Sadly the Beeb, like the rest of the media, think people won't pay attention if it's not a known name. It can only be a matter of time before Tamsin Outhwaite, Amanda Holden or that Robson bloke are hosting Building a Library or This Week's Composer! And there are a host of past-their-sell-by-date politicians waitung to follow Mellor. Can't wait for Geoff Hoon's Mozart hour!

Tristan und Isolde from the Met, by any chance? That's what we're running here. That's the one. Great music, but...

I sincerely want you all to find happiness. To help out, can I suggest you all spend your money on me.

JRR is 'enjoying' a 9.00 pm spot for a few weeks. Ever tried raising this issue on the Radio 3 classical board? I did once and got treated as if I was a lunatic. Cut back on classical to allow a more egalitarian treatment of a wide range of non-commercial musics? Their trump card was classical needed all that time because it had a 1000+ years of classical music to represent!!!!! Oxbridge/ruling class preconceptions still rule OK at the 'public broadcasting' end of the BBC. Rampant free marketism at the other end! Jazz, folk, reggae, blues, world etc get squeezed (and shunted around) as a consequence.

Must try it. Thanks for the link! I was impressed by Gwyneth Herbert's comments - she's marketed in such a commercial manner that you get the impression she must be all surface. But she comes across as knowledgeable and enthusiastic in the discussion. Books, covers, judging etc.

Alyn Shipton's Jazz Library programme (BBC Radio 3) about Anita O'Day. A good listen - and on the replayer for another 6 days: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/jazzlibrary/pip/9g85b/

Some of the smaller classical companies are already well ahead of this - Gimell and Chandos are offering downloads in three forms from MP3 to higher quality with price differentials. Gimell in particular offer superb album art in addition to brilliant recordings. Although they offer the choice of 'cherry-picking', everything is offered in a conventional album format - in fact pricing encourages you to buy that way as individual tracks work out far more expensive. If anything, a creative development of download presentation should be able to offer a far more imaginative range of ways of presenting music, no longer stuck to the amound of time available on a particular format. I just wish more companies would explore the possibilities with the integrity of those labels. I think CD will naturally wither away as a result (with, I'd imagine, 'audiophile' pressings of some releases by dedicated companies for those who find it hard to accept the changing technology). They just need to get on with it - the record store as we know it is dying rapidly. It makes little sense to go to all the trouble of making, packaging and then distributing CDs to an Amazon warehouse where it will then be ordered online - why not cut out all those stages and just download from source? The crux is, of course, the sound quality. My experience of the labels mentioned above is that we are already at a stage where downloads are of a quality that the vast majority of people (myself included) can tell no difference. It's time to shift over wholesale. It makes no sense to be hanging around with older technologies because a small group of niche listeners have convinced themelves that the new technology can never be as good as the old.

It does make you angry. And Fisk is not afraid to show his anger, especially about the way politicians and the media gloss over complexities. Two other sections of the book really unnerved me - the description of the carnage on the road out of Kuwait as the Iraqi army retreated in 1991; and his lengthy account of the impact of the 1990s sanctions on Iraq. And I really knew very little about what has been happening in Algeria.

Still plenty underground. Two things happened: a) It proved cheaper to import surface deposits from mainland Europe for power stations than to extend underground mining. b) The Thatcher government had a vendetta against the miners because of previous political humiliations and essentially set out to destroy the industry - which is why I think so little surface evidence has survived. What is ironic is that in the great strike of 1984-5 most Notts miners carried on working, partly out of resentment towards the mining union leadership, partly out of a sense that the Notts pits (as modern' pits) had a good future. Thatcher encouraged them in these beliefs...and then, once the union was defeated, wiped them out as well. If you've not seen the movie 'Brassed Off' try and borrow a copy - a romanticised tale but a wonderful story of the triumph of the human spirit over adversity during the days of the closures. Interestingly, there was an article in the Guardian last weekend about one of a handful of local collieries that have survived and how, with soaring energy costs, it is taking on new workers! http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/mar/15/2

Easily the most powerful book I've read in many a year - a doorstop I read in two rapid chunks during 2007. A harrowing read - Fisk presents horror after horror and then piles on another. What amazed me were the things I'd completely forgotten - the shooting down of the Iranian airliner in the 80s, for example. Fisk is amazing. Two things particularly stick in mind - his flying into Baghdad in 2003 just before the attack! And the amazing story of an Israeli rocket attack on a vehicle - Fisk got a bit of the casing of the missile with the serial number on, smuggled it to the States, booked a meeting at the missile manufacturers under a pretext, listened to the execs talking in sanitised jargon about their 'product'...and then produced the fragment out of his bag and told them what it had done to people! ********* A fine novel about a young lad growing up in the States in the 50s and 60s trying to reconstruct what happened to his parents in Czechoslovakia during WWII - centred round the Heydrich assassination: ********* Really enjoying this - it's had me exploring in all sorts of places from the 20s to the 50s. Not so interested in the Miles/Coltrane/Mingus chapters I've got to at present, simply because I've read so much else about this period. The last few chapters will be interesting, seeing his interpretation of more recent music.

I'm still not sure how to do this properly - tried to post some larger versions, so I suspect that caused the trouble. I've put the smaller ones up. This is how Bentinck Colliery is commemorated...the site is now an industrial estate - modern warehouses etc (thus the strange multicoloured things behind): Not much to show for what once looked like this: When I came for interview here in 1977 from the 'soft south' I can recall being awestruck by these giant collieries. I suppose a similar tale can be told in Pennsylvania and many other places in the world.

I was in Birmingham (UK) today for work reasons and popped into Borders, which occupies prime space in a relatively new flagship shopping centre. The music section was pitiful. But then Zavvi (what used to be Virgin) was as bad; only HMV had some out of the ordinary stuff (I picked up a Shorty Rogers disc and a Brew Moore 2CD). I really think the record companies should just give up on making CDs. Either digitalise it themselves or licence it to someone who cares and get it out there. Once done, they can forget about it yet it will slowly earn them a steady stream of income. Very little seems to be finding its way into stores, if the UK is anything to go by. I won't be going out of my way to go record shopping in the near future.

Many good recommendations above; I'm immersed deeply into the Kubelik set that Bev mentioned at the moment. Also, on Monday I found this: a very good insight into what made the man tick. De La Grange wrote a huge multi-volume bio of Mahler. I bought the first and read it c.1980 - it took years for the translation of the second volumeto come out and I seem to recall they reformatted it with overlaps. Maybe I should track down a complete set and save it for retirement. Mahler seems to bring out the elephantine in writers - Donald Mitchell has written a series of exhaustive analytical books on Mahler. I've always been scared off by the 'flyshit'!

I don't know what the situation is now but back in the 80s/90s the First was the one Kubelik Mahler that used to get frequently cited as a top recommendation. The Sixth is quick - again, the desire to get whole movements onto a single LP side, I suspect (my LP had it spread ovr 3 sides with the Adagio from the 10th on the fourth side). The strange thing is that having heard that version first, it's how it's lodged in my head - the opening march in particular. I have the Karajan version and it always seems to plod for me - I stress this is no comment on that or other versions, which are probably correct. Just how my brain has been influenced by my initial hearing.

A bit different from glitzy Manhattan: Just over 30 years ago I moved to this area. 16 year old lads were going down the pit as they left school. Today this is the only headstocks surviving - and a housing company has a request in to demolish it to 'develop' the site. The mines were wiped out in the 80s and 90s - an almost Stalinist expunging of history followed, with virtually all visible remains removed. Just the odd half a pit wheel. Very sad - the whole shape of this community was created by 100 years of coal mining.

I have that one and it works for me. I wouldn't get too worked up by the 'who recorded the best version' school of classical music comparison. It always seems to me that there's as much projection as revelation going on there. Fine, if you want to go into that sort of detail, but not a prerequisite of enjoying the music. I've always focussed on the composer, rarely buying alternative versions; I'd rather spend the time/money on exploring someone/thing else. Where I do have several versions I tend to find I enjoy the ones I started with most...not always. I 've returned to this set over the years: [The title is misleading - it only has the first movement of the 10th; don't be put off by the fact that the existing full 10ths are posthumous reconstructions. The music therein is stunning!]. I don't make any claims for it in relation to other versions - it's where I started on LP and where I've ended up back at. Somehow the different speeds of the versions I bought on CD bothered me. I'm not saying Kubelik is right - I believe he adopted some quite swift approaches in order to fit things on disc. It's just how it's lodged in my head now.

Or next! (actually, I was in today doing a revision school, in Brum tomorrow on an A Level course and will spend most days doing work stuff (though at a more leisurely pace!). I suspect MG is more likely to have got lost in Tonypandy. Though, as an Englishman, he might be being held by Welsh fundamentalists.

Sad indeed--I'm pretty sure the HALF NOTE cd is now oop as well. Not sure that any of Konitz's Verve catalogue is domestically available...some of it as downloads, perhaps. (Single disc of MOTION still in print? That Verve Elite edition is a killer!) I got the TRANQUILITY and VERY COOL cds through Mr. Tanno; the Giuffre and Half Note purchases date back to my record-store clerk days in the 1990s. I was able to reconstruct that original album (along with 'You and Lee') by downloading from e-music the collection Lonehill put out under Bill Evans name (I know - lunacy! I assume they assemble them this way to get round the copyright issues). I'd have preferred the 2CD Verve reissue with the 'third stream' compositions, but there only seem to be a scattering of these at high prices. 'Palo Alto' is an amazing theme! Really enjoyed the Peggy Lee programme last night.

Well, try his later in the week. Cabbage and scallions: Colcannon: http://www.vegsoc.org/stpatricks/stpats1.html I've eaten it in Oirland but never made it.

Then add these:

No scallions?

Miltown Malbay, home of Willie Clancy, the Charlie Parker of the uilleann pipes: http://www.setdancingnews.net/wcss/wcsst.htm I was there a couple of years back.

I thought he was Welsh. Anyway, St George was Greek or Turkish! St Andrew was born in the Bronx.

I had similar problems on the PC I gave up on in September - I've had no trouble with the new one. I suspect drives have greatly improved in a short space of time. I use Winamp which can be downloaded in basic form for free; upgrading to get a choice of burning speeds is inexpensive. Its big advantage is that it doesn't leave gaps between tracks. You still get a space between discrete tracks - but where music flows continuously from track to track the join is inaudible. I'm sure there are many other alternative programmes.