A Lark Ascending

I've a lot of time for those musicians/musicologists who use their insider understanding to try to inform those of us who don't understand the technicalities, without losing us in jargon. I owe a great deal to Anthony Hopkins in opening my ears to many areas of classical music - he has a way of explaining what is going on harmonically and structurally that doesn't lose the non-musician. Those who rabbit on in articles aimed at the general public with pure musicological jargon have a circle reserved in hell for them, shared with those who quote passages in a foreign language and don't offer a translation ('you mean you don't read French?').

I've only been back awhile, but I will say that, in my eyes, Jim A. is the model of a great moderator. Thanks for keeping this place running, even when you had more than enough on your plate, Jim.

Two pieces that seem to inhabit the afternoon world of that faun... The Bliss 'Pastoral' Lyra Angelica which is almost a harp concerto. I heard it first whilst driving, having no idea what it was - I assumed it was French and from the 20s. Turned out to be English. On Delius, I swear by this record: Delius played by Sir John Barbirolli (though Sir Thomas Beecham's recordings get the approval of experts in this area). 'Appalachia' on the first disc is a longer piece and a bit more dense than classic Delius - but wonderful nonetheless. The rest is pure, gossamer Delius. Perfect for that day in May when it seems like high summer, yet the plants are still saturated with colour. Manuel de Falla is another worth exploring - you can get all his major orchestral music on one double disc. 'Nights in the Gardens of Spain' has a strong Debussy-like feel. I think I'm right in recalling that Debussy spoke highly of him. The later works enter a more Stravinsky-like world - also superb.

Earlier in the thread there was a nostalgia for a time of a 'shared common culture' - when young (and old!) people shared a common mussic/TV/film experience, contrasted with today's fragmentation. But isn't that 'common culture' something quite unique to the mid to late 20thC? Look to the early days of jazz, blues etc and what you have is a vast regionalism. It was the technology of the radio, gramophone, cinema, cheap printing that allowed the emergence of a shared culture, probably starting in the 30s. And it could be argued that the earlier regionalism had a positive effect, allowing for the local variations in style and approach that mass culture tends to smooth out. So maybe fragmentation is a good thing - things developing in isolated pockets, then, at a later date, colliding with other isolated pockets to spark something different. I don't think the shared, corporate, common culture is going away - the technology is to powerful as is the motivation to make vast amounts of money from it. But I do think the technology has also allowed the things flourishing in the shadows to get an audience too, and not necessarily one living in the immediate geographical region. I actually feel we're moving into some interesting times.

Car boot sales? Is there a festival on there? Wasn't aware of that one. http://www.coventryjazzfestival.com/2008/index.html Have a look at the past programmes - some of the people who play Bath also seem to do Coventry the same weekend. Mingus BB and Henri Texier last year. That one is close enough for me to just go for the day. I'm not sure hanging round Coventry has the appeal of ambling around Bath!

Delius - although English, he lived much of his life in France. Although his music is very different, he has that translucent quality; he also evades that Germanic trait of having the structure showing through the music. As with Debussy, musical ideas arrive, evaporate and are not heard again - or only after being heavily transformed. I was drawn to both composers around the same time in the early 70s - they both have that dream-like, wool and water feel to them; themes that arrest you, yet seem to dissolve before you've grasped them. Or that's how I hear them! [Early Delius tends to be more Germanic].

Oh dear ! Looks like I'll be there on the Monday but not for much else. End of an era? (I always thought the Bath Fest was at its best in the mid 1980s when many of the events were in the evenings at the Assembly Rooms and Guildhall. Helped by the fact that I lived in the city at that time for some years. They served wine by the glass and not by the plastic cup too !) I only started going about 5 or 6 years back so don't recall the hey-day. With Appleby also ceasing trading it's all a bit sad. I'll have to see what Coventry offers for Bank Holiday weekend.

Bath programme arrived tonight - they seem to have scaled the jazz right back. Nothing on Friday night or Sunday afternoon in the Pavillion; Sylvie Courvosier, Jason Moran, and Richard Galliano/Gilad Atzmon are the only three concerts there. Ernst Reijseger and Eveyn Petrova in the Guildhall events. And Toni Kofi late afternoon on Monday with McCoy Tyner/Joe Lovano later on. I'd be interested to hear Moran; Atzmon and Kofi can be heard regularly closer to home. The rest doesn't grab me. I think I'll be gardening that weekend! The Bath Ales will have to come in a bottle!

I bet you could have your seat and some dancing, too - sounds like this one is all about dancing. Undoubtedly. The Town Hall is a Victorian/Edwardian thing, with an upstairs balcony. They have seats upstairs during dancy things but completely clear the main hall area. It's actually pretty soulless for concerts but works for the bopping gigs. Ornette Coleman played there a couple of years back and seemed to vanish the coldness of the place. But I've seen both Van Morrison and the WSQ there and found it hard to get engaged. I'll be in one of the other seated venues with my pipe and slippers!

I have to be careful there - or I sleep through late afternoon concerts!

Bev, if you clock that this is going to happen this year as well, do let me know. I might drag myself there. It's May or something, isn't it? MG How about: Heritage Orchestra with Bonobo Event J27 at Cheltenham Town Hall (unreserved seating) Town Hall Main Stage, Saturday 3rd May, 10pm (180 mins) Tickets: £17 Join us on a journey of orchestral beats and cinematic textures with the almighty 35-piece Heritage Orchestra, providing totally unique orchestral reinterpretations of world renowned electronic artist, Amon Tobin (Ninja Tune), as well as music by Plaid (Warp). Expect an explosive mix of beats, soaring strings, brass, wind, and percussion that bounces between jazz, electronica, classical, and other cross-genre forms. Not forgetting DJ host and Ninja Tune wonderboy - Bonobo, who's DJ'ing is rocking audiences all over the world with his mix of hip-hop, broken beats, latin, funk and soul. A clubbers delight! or Mr Scruff Event J39 at Cheltenham Town Hall (unreserved seating) Town Hall Main Stage, Sunday 4th May, 9:30pm (270 mins – finish time 2am) Tickets: £17 After his sell-out performance in 2005, the fantastic Mr Scruff returns to Cheltenham to perform one of his legendary sets of jazz, breakbeat, hip-hop and more. Keep it unreal! I'm not sure if these would be up your street - but they are clearly youth-aimed. The last one is 4 1/2 hours in an unseated venue...I like my seat!

I'm smiley-blind. But I got the irony.

Younger people are as capable of doing EVERYTHING as us Baby Boomers! Don't go there, Seeline!

That was my initial reaction - but when I looked more closely I found more than enough to satisfy my curiosity. The Jerry Dammers one could either be thrilling or a non-starter. I've no Two-Tone past and hardly know the chap but with people like Denys Baptiste, Jason Yarde, Larry Stabbins, Zoe Rahman and Finn Peters on board it has potential. I'm really interested in contemporary UK jazz so there are a number there of both new kids and established names, all performing music I'll not have heard. I've never heard of Roberto Fonesca but that one will provide a nice contrast with its Cuban focus. Cheltenham clearly has ambitions to draw in from beyond the hard core audience - this might explain it's less concentrated programming this year. Bath does look interesting - I was a little disappointed with last year's. Much as I applaud their to-the-border-and-beyond programming of European artists, I found myself craving more straight blowing. Rather too much Scandinavian mysticism - it was the relatively mainstream Mingus Big Band which gave me the biggest buzz.

Except... in the "dance underground"/Gilles Peterson/etc. camps, all of whom are primarily "young" by any reasonable standard (although none of them would be considered "mass movements" by any stretch of the imagination), there is a considerable amount of interest in "contemporary" music with a jazz "flavor". The nature of this flavor ranges from a superficial stylistic affectation to a deeper adoption of the jazz, for lack of a better term, "state of mind", although it is of course coming through a "young" POV and only partially related to what we know as the "jazz state of mind". The former has been with us forever, but the latter has me thinking/wondering if this is not how jazz will best "survive" into the 21st century, not as a "style", but as a "spirit", a motivator. Bury the body and let the spirit go where it will go & be had by whom it will be had in whatever form it will assume. Me, at this point, I'm ok with that. YMMV. Very true - every year the Cheltenham Festival organisers put on a more dance/techno/drum'n bass (apologies if that terminology is yesterday!) aspect to it, with people associated with 'core' jazz involved, and it packs the Town Hall. There's definately a big market amongst many young people for music that side-steps the commercial and does things differently, whilst linking to the music they know (as jazz-rock once did). What will not attract nearly such a large audience is selling it to them as a passage to something more authentic from the past. Get them thrilled about something that is part of the current culture and some might just want to find out where that sax playing or strange drumming came from, some might wonder about the strange names being dropped and seek them out - as those of us who came from 70s rock once sought out Miles, Coltrane, Messiaen because they were name-checked by the bands we loved. But it should never be about 'progressing' in your listening to jazz or classical or whatever. Exploring music should be about adding to the richness of your listening, not trading up!

I agree 100%. Look at the evolution of most things and you begin with an 'heroic age' where innovators stand like gods (or the history is simplified to give them greater prominence); but as things broaden it becomes harder to isolate the heroes as things develop in a thousand different directions at once. No-one is sitting around waiting for the next Shakespeare or the next Tolstoy, yet thrilling new literature gets written. But instead of having heroic 'must reads' we all carve out our own paths from amongst the multitude of possibilities. Waiting for a jazz Messiah is a bit like waiting for.....a Messiah! He's much more likely to be a very naughty boy (or girl)! *********** It almost seems to me as if there is a craving for a more united world with common values - governments claim to want this, commerce would love it (much easier to sell the work of commonly accepted heroes in bulk [how they must crave a Miles Davis!] than small units of a multitude of performers with more local audiences). Yet I doubt if that is where the future lies - I suspect we're in an era of increasing localisation where we're all carving out our own areas of interest from a massive amount on offer. What's interesting is that the localisation is not geographical - it's now possible to get a fascination with, say, Australian or Italian jazz from the other side of the world and follow it, without it being part of some overall trend or fashion. I very much like this.

It may have been that band (Saft was in it) who played this festival a couple of years back - all a bit heavy-metalish for me. I think I left early, which is rare for me. I know Previte has a huge range of contexts, but that one wasn't up my street. So I skipped this time.

There's always more than you can fit in. As it is I'll be doing a couple of 'Cheltenham Sprints' in the 15 mins between the end of one gig in one venue and the start of the next a couple of streets away. No relation to Dave Stapleton at all (we might share a Norman ancestor!) - saw him at Cheltenham 2 or 3 years back and his band were great. His record of last year is marvellous - with a fabulous Julie Tippetts vocal on one track.

Nice line-up again - 29th April to 5th May. I'm doing the highlighted ones: Eartha Kitt Carol Brewster Van Morrison Sara Colman Courtney Pine Maceo Parker with his band, featuring Dennis Rollins TG Collective Gwyneth Herbert BBC Radio 2: Tribute to Billie Holiday Colin Salmon Jerry Dammers' Spatial AKA Orchestra Han Bennink Gilles Peterson with Jose James, Elan Mehler and Tawiah Enrico Rava and Stefano Bollani Jazz on 3 Zoe Rahman Piano Masterclass Phil Robson's Six Strings and The Beat Outhouse Ruhabi Making Sense of Sound The Jerwood Interview with Soweto Kinch and Iain Ballamy Tim Berne's Science Friction BBC Big Band with Nicola Conte Dave Stapleton Quintet Imelda May Alias / The Jerwood Commission Gloucestershire Jazz Live Big Band Heritage Orchestra with Bonobo Soweto Kinch's Basement Fables The Breakfast Show / The Destroyers Family Fun Day Dan Nicholls Band Jack DeJohnette Bobby Previte's New Bump Ralph Alessi with This Against That featuring Ravi Coltrane BBC Radio 3 Jazz Library Pete Wareham: The Final Terror Ruby Turner Bill Frisell Mr Scruff Roberto Fonseca Jack DeJohnette Drum Masterclass Dave Holland Prize Competition Winners Andy Sheppard and The Lunatics featuring James Morton Blink Cleo Lane and John Dankworth

There was an article in one of the weekend papers asking 'Why do people no longer read Milton?' Would seem to come from the same way of thinking as this thread title. Could be summarised as 'Why aren't people exposed to/interested in/enjoying the things I like?' *********** I have no fears for the 18-28 age group. Many of the people I work with fall into the higher end of that category and they are better trained, more serious about their work than I recall my peers being in the late-70s. Only one has an interest in jazz - they all have informed and passionate interests in other things. In a recent report, the UK school inspectorate saw the real inhibitor to progress as not being young teachers but middle aged teachers who had lost their drive, weren't keeping up-to-date or suffering from burn out. That could be many of us!

There was definitely an attraction to Ralph Towner then, among listeners coming over from rock. Certain ECM artists seemed to be appealing for rockers coming over to jazz, and he was one of them. The Genesis idea is very interesting. Around the time I bought 'Solstice' I also bought Terje Rypdal's 'Whenever I seem to be far away' - didn't connect with it at all. I wonder if it was because it sounded too similar to what I'd been hearing in rock. Or even too similar yet not nearly as interesting as someone like Robert Fripp who seemed much less safe. The 12-string was one of the defining sounds of 'Nursery Cryme', less so the later records as the keyboard technology got more up front. I suspect the dazzling acoustic guitar of some of the folk music players - English and American - also paved the ground. But Towner's records sounded quite, quite distinct. One of those moments when you notice a door in the garden wall and open it into a further garden you never knew was there!

It's worth remembering why Towner was such a breath of fresh air in the 70s. To those of us who slid from rock to jazz we were used to mainly electric guitars, with the odd oasis of acoustic calm (McLaughlin knew how that worked!). Entire albums of beautifully recorded acoustic on pristine vinyl - a completely different world. Though, I wonder if the attraction of his 12-string - still the sound of his I love best - was founded on listening to early Genesis albums!!!!!

That's the way pop culture has tended to work but I genuinely think, for the reasons I've outlined, than anything 'new' will not 'kick in', at least not in the way that rock 'n' roll, punk, disco or hip hop kicked in. I wonder how many people expected bebop when listening in 1940 - the choice seemed to be between an increasingly settled swing or '20s revivalism.

Surprised no-one has mentioned '(When I'm Cleaning) Windows' - his all-ukelele tribute to George Formby (with guest appearance by Chick Corea on the title track). (This was recorded during a period when he was not making much money and so Bill Gates gave him a part-time job).

Gismonti is much more interesting than that disc would suggest. A nice enough record but I don't feel it even begins to touch the breadth of his music. Played this one tonight, one of his more 'classical' recordings: Something of a potpourri of 20thC classical styles - I'm not sure it hangs together but I enjoyed it. Everything from Stravinsky to Copland to Ives in there somewhere.