A Lark Ascending

Good to see you, boyo.

One I've mean to read - there's been a spate of them on cod, nutmeg, coffee etc. I really enjoyed this one by Kurlansky:

Well if that's what salt did to someone's mummy I'm quitting as of now. I've been in the Halstadt one - you had to dress up like one of the Smurfs in order to go on the slide. Lovely place with fabulous mountains and lakes. The place where Celtic civilisation began, they say.

Salt can be fun.... http://www.austria-hiking.eu/regenbogenprogramm/salzwelten/ And culturally rewarding: http://www.saltmuseum.org.uk/ Those who have grown tired of jazz can take up a new hobby: http://www.saltmuseum.org.uk/more-friends.htm

Not over here. They roll into the Proms or the Barbican once a year and that's it. Minimal influence. Smooth jazz also has very little influence. I don't think I've ever heard Kenny G! Some would have it we're under a mind control from Munich, however.

I wasn't aware I threw anything out. I said there was a place for academic analysis - clearly it has benefits for society as a whole. And I'd fully expect academics to engage with real life. I've no quibble with academics - just academics who look down on those who lack their higher sensibilities. If a listener is really moved by music then they can add to the pleasure gained by reading what people who have studied have to say. But as with anything else, they should be read sceptically, particularly with regard to their ultimate judgements. Even the most cursory exploration of historiography reveals an endless run of scholars who, despite the most meticulous research and analysis, remain prisoners of their own time period, social class, political persuasion or personal prejudice. Which is what is happening in the more catty posts in this thread. I don't see much academic rigour - plenty of unsupported assertion.

The vast majority of listeners pay no attention whatsoever to where a performance or performer or recording sits in the grand hierarchy of things. The go out, usually after a hard day/week of work to enjoy themselves. Their response to Brad Mehldau, Joshua Redman, Chris Potter or whoever has nothing to do with where they sit in the tradition - it depends on if they are excited or moved by them. The analysing of music - be it musicological or historical analysis - is something quite separate. There's a rightful place for it, it matters, it's interesting. But I think the two get confused. We read about music in reviews where critics believe they are expected to do the latter when most readers are seeking guidance on the former. It's then all too easy for the ordinary listener to feel as if responding to music requires this sort of analysis. I can drop into a pub and hear a local North Nottinghamshire blues band playing a Muddy Waters tune they probably learnt off a John Mayall record. Should I sit with my notebook in hand tut-tutting at how derivative it all is? Or should I let go and just enjoy? The tenor of some of the posts earlier in this thread suggest the former. I'm afraid I do the latter. I come out of most concerts I attend completely duped by the forces of commerce; but I have a big smile on my face. Rather that than having the sharpest critical faculties in the universe and being perpetually miserable and judgmental.

I loved mellotron's...and there is a Mk VI in production. They don't catch fire on stage these days, so I'm told (I'm not sure if thats a + or -). http://www.mellotron.com/ I think the time is right for 'A Mellotron Tribute to Art Tatum'

Mine was much slower than usual. Nearly 3 weeks.

If Stalin had known this he could have just fed his enemies TV dinners instead of having to devise all those camps in Siberia.

I teach 17 year olds with a greater understanding of the difference between interpretation and truth, subjective opinion and objective fact, than some of the self-anointed 'intellectuals' on this thread. How does anyone get beyond 25 still believing that their view of the world is how it is?

A favourite of mine for many years. His 'On Loan With Gratitude' is one of the great lost discs of the 70s. The opening track used to be the theme tune of 'Jazz Today' at one stage. His surname is also impossible to spell - I have to check every time! Sulzmann....I want to insert a 't' or dock an 'n'.

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.