A Lark Ascending

Hall was the first 'real' jazz guitarist I came to love back in the 70s. What really won me over was the Commitment disc mentioned above: A very arranged disc with deliberately varied tracks with different musicians but compelling from start to finish. With the Live A&M disc appearing recently there's hope this will get out too. I've seen Hall a couple of times in trio settings and he's always been totally absorbing. It's great to see a player so far into his career still taking risks and being open to different ways of doing things.

You'll find it on page ten!!!

I am not...nor have I ever been...a guy. I'm a bloke!

I once saw The Move....get out of a limo in Newquay, Cornwall and walk into the nightclub they were performing in. I was way to young for nightclubs (I'm way too old now). They'd just 'gone heavy' and had a hit with 'Brontasaurus'. Must have been 1970.

From the list 'The Byrds'. I only knew them at the time via the singles on the radio. But I discovered them on disc in the 80s. I think I return to them more than any other of the listed bands. I'd also suggest they were the closest to jazz on the list! Off list...well scores of examples. I love so many of the groups from that time and the start of the 70s. But my personal choice would be: Fairport Convention.

Tracked this down after much searching to CD Baby: Excellent disc.

Brian Morton must be a very busy man at present. What with the new Penguin and a forthcoming book due in August: From OUP site: http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-284092-4 Plenty Plenty Rhythm Brian Morton (Presenter of Radio Scotland's arts programmes The Usual Suspects and The Brian Morton Show) Price: £14.99 (Hardback) 0-19-284092-4 Publication date: August 2004 176 pages, 216mm x 135mm A novel and stimulating introduction to the subject Avoids orthodox chronologies by homing in on key moments in jazz's past Morton is a leading international name in the jazz world with a proven track record - author of the very successful Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD Explores jazz's origins, its ethnic identity, and its social and political nature Description: Brian Morton looks at the history of the 20th century's one entirely new musical form, jazz - and asks, what has jazz become? and what does jazz do? rather than try to define what jazz is. Readership: General readers interested in jazz - its origins, its ethnic identity, and its social and political nature Since his major falling out with the BBC in Scotland a year or so back I'd imagine he's had more time on his hands. One of my favourite broadcasters - this volume might well surprise some readers. His personality seems to get a bit lost in the "Cook and Morton" mix.

I'd recommend "Jan Johansson - Den Korta Fristen". Johansson was a major Swedish pianist in the 60s who was killed in a car crash in 1968. This disc is a large ensemble disc - quite challenging, suggesting some associations with contemporary classical music. I got interested in Johansson as a result of a trip to Sweden last year and CD Baby was the place I found the disc. He produced an album called Folkvisor which is apparently the best selling Swedish jazz record of all time. CD Baby sell it (with a second LP, two on one), though every time I try to order they are waiting for a new supply. I'd imagine Johansson was one of the ancestors of the current wave of Swedish jazz pianists.

Give 'Magnification' a go, Mike. I was a huge sceptic, dismissing everything after Topographic Oceans. What I like about 'Magnification' is the fact that it is melodic, with those great key changes mid-song that gave much of the 70s era tunes their distinctiveness. With regard to Bruford's comments I think he was generalising about the genre. What he says certainly holds true of Genesis - and the dozens of similar groups of the time like Camel and Greenslade. Emerson could certainly do the jazzy thing, especially with the Nice and on the first ELP record, but the pomp tended to dominate afterwards. Bruford commented somewhere else how playing in stadiums tended to reduce rock drumming to a very simple pounding time-keeping. Anything else got lost in the dreadful acoustics. Perhaps this explains why ELP got increasingly coarser. Pomp fills stadiums better than twiddly jazz bits. I suspect he would agree with regard to parts of KC even before he joined; though there was a fair dollop of Anglican pomp on the first two records alongside some jazzier moments (the middle of 'Schizoid Man' for example or the wonderful free-form section of 'Moon Child'). I don't think he'd include Soft Machine in his definition of 'prog-rock' (he hints as much and has good things to say about Dave Stewart, a fellow traveller of the Softs, elsewhere in the article). That whole Canterbury scene - Matching Mole, Hatfield, Egg, Caravan, National Health etc - were always a few steps away from the much more successful prog bands. Perhaps their jazziness stood in the way of wider acceptance. I can certainly recall, as a 17 year old, moving actively in their direction as a way of drawing a distance between myself and a music that had become mega-popular. It was much cooler to like Hatfield and the North than Genesis!

I started buying some of these as they disappeared. I have three. I'm gradually filling in the spaces with Jazz Chronological Classics discs. A pity. This is the sort of package that should never be OOP.

This one has yet to really excite me. Pleasant but not something I'm rushing to play again. Maybe with more listens something will take a grip.

Voila!

The one I remember - and it absolutely terrified me as a 10 year old, giving me nightmares for years - was the one about the chap on the plane who kept seeing an horrendous rag doll figure outside his window on the wing. Every time he called someone to look there was nothing to see. Everyone assumed he was losing it. He was eventually carted off having gone gagga. The final shot panned in on the wing which had been prised up. Still gives me the chills forty years later!

'Good News from Africa' is beautiful. This is another goody:

Well done, y'all. (as we say in't deepest Robin Hood Country).

I was quite a young fuddy duddy when "The Young Ones" came out! Hated it then! In addition to the two full series "The Office" also has a couple of Xmas episodes broadcast a couple of months back. After that. Its finished! Quitting while ahead. Very sensible.

God how I loathed 'The Young Ones'!!!! Have you had 'The Office' over there yet? Now there you are talking top rate UK comedy. Beg, steal or borrow!

I half remember that song! I think it might have topped the charts here at the time!

I recall this hitting the UK screens in early 1978, just as I started doing my teaching practice. All the girls in my classes were in love with David Soul. At the time it was denounced as a sign of the 'dumbing down' of culture [though obviously not using that term!]. Strange how it is remembered now with such affection! 'Batman' got a similar greeting in the mid to late 70s! And seems to have legions of apologists now. I look forward to the 'Pop Idol' nostalgia in 20 years time.

Congratulations Victor. Old world morality dictates I must finally call off those hit men! Enjoy spoiling the grandchild!

I have this one. Very nice if, as you put it perfectly, a little cheesy on the heads. I'd recommend the slightly later 'Gyroscope' as a stronger disc. Available from the same source. He also did around this time (and I'm not making this up): Details here: http://www.gordonbeck.net/gbdiscog.html Becks discs are always worth checking out. The one I really want to hear is: 1. Waltz For Debby (5:33) 2. Orbit (8:41) 3. Five (7:00) 4. Twelve Tone Tune 2 (6:03) 5. Turn Out The Stars (6:25) 6. Peace Piece (5:18) 7. Peri's Scope (4:05) Personnel: Gordon Beck: Piano Ron Mathewson: Bass Tony Oxley: Drums Stan Sulzmann: Tenor Saxophone, Soprano Saxophone, Flute Kenny Wheeler: Trumpet, Flugelhorn, Cornet Released in 1980 on MPS Records.

I wonder if Welch's caution about these two albums might be quite personal. He went from being one of the frontline rock journalists to a ridiculed supporter of the 'dinosaurs' very quickly during the UK punk revolution. I wonder if standing up for those records still brings back tough memories. There's a great interview with Bill Bruford in the March Jazz Review, full of his usually stand-offish perspective of his prog-rock associations. I found this interesting. "I imagine that without jazz, art-rock or progrock or whatever you want to call it wouldn't have happened, would it? Wasn't it an extension of the pursuit of complexity in jazz? Well, I think you're probably mistaken there. My understanding is that jazz was the one element that really wasn't there at all. Not in terms of improvisation or complexity or harmonic wilfulness? Well, the harmony's all Anglican church harmony. And improvisation? No, there wasn't really improvisation. There were extended rhythm and blues guitar solos, Eric Clapton style over a pentatonic scale. There wasn't really improv. So I think jazz was the only element that wasn't there, and I was the one token guy in those groups that knew a bit about jazz and was still trying to make my drums sound like Joe Morello, Art Blakey and Max Roach. So prog was perhaps more a blend of rock, folk and classical music? Correct - that's exactly where it came from, and particularly from the extended song form of classical music - which all the middle-class guys learned at school anyway. They all wanted to be Sibelius. And they tended to be choristers too, so church and classical music was in their blood. I mean, Rick Wakeman, to this day, hasn't got a note of jazz in him. It's absolutely uncanny. He could sit here and play something for half an hour and you wouldn't hear one note of jazz - pure as the driven snow. It's all white-note music and there's no jazz phrasing in it. Not only is there not a flattened fifth or a seventh, it's all arpeggiated, like classical music - it has no jazz phrasing, no call and response or anything of that sort. And he was typical of the genre - there was no jazz in those groups at all. And take a look at this interview with Anderson from last July if you want evidence that Anderson is off with the faeries! 'The idea is to unravel the onion' In his quest for answers, Jon Anderson has worked with angels, ducks and a cardboard cow. Alexis Petridis meets the man who gave us Yes, the proggest rockers of them all Wednesday July 30, 2003 The Guardian Anderson: less a wide-eyed hippy than a hard-headed operator. Photo: Eamonn McCabe Jon Anderson has kindly decided to explain the meaning of life to me. "Right, this table," says the lead singer of Yes, gesturing towards the coffee table, "is the world as we know it. There are mountains, valleys, animals and interdimensional energies that we don't know about." He pauses. "Or maybe we do. Actually, I know a lot of people that do. Interdimensional energies," he nods sagely, "are a very powerful thing." But back to the table. "The human experience is as big as that," he says, picking up an ashtray, "compared to everything else that's going on. The horrible stuff, the terrible daily shit that you read about, is as big as that. The people that live in Seville or Detroit - although it's tough in Detroit sometimes - or Calcutta - kinda funky! - South America, South Africa, all these people are getting on with life." He grabs a box of matches and rattles it. "This is the media, CNN, everything that's happening in Israel and Arabia. It's a very small part of life, but because we're connected to the media we think that's what life's all about, and it ain't." He's completely lost me, so he tries a different tack. "If you start wondering about birdcalls and, erm, why birds are alive and what they seem to do around us, and trees and nature and so forth, which me and my wife Jane do... We're just such bird-lovers. We were there in the park today, just feeding the ducks. We were loving the baby ducks. And what's wrong with that?" What indeed? Nevertheless, we seem to have strayed from the whole meaning of life issue. "Well, it was a beautiful moment. And you think life is a beautiful thing and you've got to live accordingly. You've got to magnify all your better feelings and better urges and better conscious ideas and that's your life's evolvement. There's only one reason we live. It's very simple. To find the creator. That's just my understanding," he adds quickly. "I'm still working on it." I'm growing to like Jon Anderson - it's hard not to warm to someone who is willing to let you in on the meaning of life within minutes of meeting you - but he is a rock star from an entirely alien era. His conversation is pitched somewhere between David Icke and Smashey and Nicey. He is wont to say things like "In the early 90s, a lovely lil' lady from Hawaii came by who was able to ignite my third eye" with a deadly earnestness. He also claims to have been visited by angels in a hotel room in Las Vegas. They told him to remember William Blake. This was, understandably, "a very sobering experience". His personal philosophy ("I say to my beautiful wife Jane, I wouldn't have met you if I hadn't gone through my whole life to get to you when we met") can be as inscrutable as his lyrics, which in Yes's early-1970s heyday spawned a cottage industry in explicatory pamphlets. If Anderson seems a little peculiar, it's nothing compared with the music of Yes. At a time when it is frequently claimed that progressive rock is back, in the shape of Radiohead, Elbow and the Mars Volta, it's certainly instructive to listen to the genuine article. A quick spin of early-1970s albums such as Close to the Edge or Fragile reveals that rumours of prog's resurrection are premature. No current band bears even the remotest resemblance to Yes. Their songs appear to last for months, packed with tricksy, neurotic riffs, lurching shifts in tempo and time signature and twiddly keyboard solos that stretch into the middle of next week. That's before you get to the words, which beggar belief. They somehow contrive to be completely incomprehensible and deeply portentous. "As the silence of seasons on we relive abridge sails afloat," pipes Anderson on The Remembering: High the Memory, from 1974's Tales From Topographic Oceans, his Accrington vowels adding perhaps an element of pathos to the purple prose. "As to call light the soul shall sing of the velvet sailors course on." And that is one of his more accessible lyrics. Unsurprisingly, Anderson is still big on their mystical significance: "I'm still working it out myself as my consciousness evolves." Yes's keyboard player, Rick Wakeman, a beer-and-skittles character who famously ate a curry on stage at Manchester Free Trade Hall during one of Tales From Topographic Oceans' more recherché passages, has cruelly suggested that Anderson didn't have a clue what he was singing about. Either way, the overall effect makes Radiohead sound like Bill Haley and the Comets. You can scarcely believe that anything this arcane ever found an audience. But it did. Formed in 1968, by the mid-1970s Yes were vastly successful, particularly in the US. They still hold a record for selling out Madison Square Gardens for seven consecutive nights in 1977. Their success bred staggering indulgence. Capes were worn on stage and mansions were bought in the countryside. Steve Howe would fly his Gibson guitar in its own seat on Concorde. When Yes could not decide whether to record an album in London or "in a forest at the dead of night" (the latter, it scarcely needs explaining, was Anderson's idea), a compromise was reached: the album was recorded in a Willesden studio decorated with bales of hay and a cardboard cow with electrically powered moveable udders. Nevertheless, despite the loon pants, the mystical lyrics and the third eye, Anderson emerges from Yes's history as less a wide-eyed hippy than a hard-headed operator, perhaps as a result of a tough childhood spent working as a farmhand. He may be the only rock star in history to have been compared to three different dictators. His nickname within Yes was Napoleon, but departing drummer Bill Bruford went further, noting Anderson's similarity to Hitler and Stalin. When I mention this, he looks momentarily nonplussed - "Stalin?" - before sternly defending himself. "I just wanted to build and grow and develop, so that there was a reason for why we became successful. Because I believed and still believe that success is only part of the story. It makes you want to get better and better so as not to let yourself down and not to let the people down who like what you do and you don't waste your success. So I would be very, very hard if I saw anybody in the band not having respect for their talent. I hated that. There's a lot of people out there with more talent, but just didn't get the break. I've seen them. I've heard them." He reels this off as if he's said it many times before. You suspect the other members of Yes may have heard similar monologues. However, not even Anderson's cheerleading could stop punk rock, which left double concept albums based on Paramhansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi looking slightly de trop. In its aftermath, as Wakeman once put it with characteristic delicacy, Yes "were about as welcome as a fart in a Chanel factory". The subsequent years have been an endless cycle of acrimonious departures and reformations fuelled by financial necessity: in their pomp, the members of Yes apparently spent most of their money as quickly as they made it. Although their music has never undergone the kind of critical reappraisal afforded Pink Floyd, they can still pack stadiums with dutiful fans who subscribe to Homer Simpson's philosophy of music: "Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It's a scientific fact." "It's tough at the moment," says Anderson. "Everybody in the band wants to be appreciated for who we are, enjoyed by the media for what we are - 35 years is a long time to be a band. We'd love more people to come and see the band, and that takes good publicity and good promotion. Wheels are very slowly turning in that direction. There's going to be a 'Best of' coming out. The wheels are in motion to try and reassure us that we didn't spend the last 35 years going downhill." Anderson suddenly sounds rather reflective and glum. Then, perhaps remembering one of his many "experiences with other conscious energies that have instilled a realisation that all is well", he brightens. "Still, we have survived. Nobody's dead yet. I'm amazed at how well we play on stage every night. It's a continuation of growth. It's part of a natural understanding that we went through the hippy 60s in order to enter the 21st century, in order to have the golden age, if you want to call it a word. We're still growing into that place of higher consciousness, we are becoming a global conscience. The idea is to unravel the onion and let go of the ego and evolve to that place where you perceive everything to be a beautiful experience rather than a daunting experience." He's lost me again - we appear to be heading inexorably back towards the realms of interdimensional energies and loving the baby ducks - but Anderson seems happy enough. "The state of things at the moment," he smiles, "is incredibly beautiful."

Yes were my favourite band as a 16 year old in their early 70s heydey. I loved Topographic from the off and have never been part of the disowning of it. I really think it just suffered for being a very long piece put out in lavish style and promoted with over the top stage sets at the very time when the critics were ready to rip into the musical style it represented. Topographic was just in the wrong place at the wrong time (if it had come out a year earlier it would probably have been hailed as an artistic masterpiece - which would have been equally misguided; its a very good, very imaginative rock record...with silly lyrics!). I bought the remaster. One thing which is different is the opening. Instead of the sudden start with Andersons vocal you get a long fade in that was never there on vinyl. 'Relayer' bored me and 'Going for the One' sounded half-baked so I lost sight of Yes at that point. I did buy a CD of there's in the mid-90s but found it dull and forgot them again. However,... I read on this here board some great enthusiasm for 'Magnification', their last CD. So I took another chance...and I love it. No keyboard player so no squiggly synths. An orchestra to fill out the sound which does so without sounding like cod-Tchaikovsky. Really good songwriting, on a par with the glory days. I'd urge anyone who things Yes are Yes-terdays men to give it a listen. A very entertaining record. .................... Chris Welch has written an interesting bio of Yes. He was a Melody Maker writer who championed the band in their heyday. As a result its a bit cloying but is a solid account of their rise; and of the wars of the 80s and 90s!!!! Hell hath no furry like a peace-loving hippy spurned. There is a wonderful account of a manic day in their lives when they were still a struggling B-list band that I posted here in another context a while back: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=4880 Worth a read if you want an idea of Yes before the costumes and fancy stage sets!

The Atomic CD 'Happy Feet' is one of my favourites of the last few years. About time its follow up got a release beyond Norway! Schooldays London Jazz Festival concert was broadcast by the Beeb a few weeks back and made me invest in the CD - great music. As a consequence that "double cd, Nuclear Assembly Hall, by the ATOMIC/SCHOOL DAYS octet" is one of the releases I'm really looking forward to this spring.

I'm very much in the pro-Betty Carter camp. One of the performers who helped ease me in when I returned to jazz listening in the early 90s after a few years off. Her version of 'Stardust/Memories of You' is a magical reconstruction. I have a special love of 'Feed the Fire' because I was there in the audience that night. In these days when jazz singers are pouring out of every major label I just wish one or two would show her daring and willingness to really take liberties with the song. Having said that I can understand totally why some listeners find her hard to take. I don't get Sheila Jordan...she always sounds flat to my ears!