Well that was a great gig last night. I mean Andrew asking for the bass to be turned up (with the resulting trouser flapping around the ankles!) A cover of Temptation and a syn drum solo from Wes! What more could you ask for?
More BC gigs / live tracks I've recorded (that have been tweaked by Andrew from the band can be found...)
I paint in watercolor because it scares me. I love its quirky unpredictability. I love the twinge of anxiety I feel every time I put down a color, knowing that I've often only got one shot to get it right. Piggybacking on my Instagram addiction, I paint from my own photographic reference material.
I typically pick my subjects based on perceived level of difficulty; if it's something that I’m not sure I can successfully reproduce in watercolor, then that's the one I want to paint next. I am a control freak, and it's this combination of subject matter and medium that make for an overachieving, perfectionist’s dream, providing just enough of a challenge to make the whole process a tension-filled whirlwind of creative excitement.
I start painting first thing in the morning, and the next thing I know it's mid afternoon. Hours have gone by, but to me, no time has passed. My anxieties about everyday trivialities simply fade away and I'm transported to a place where nothing else matters but light and shadow and color… and it is SO GOOD.
So that's where I'm at right now. Welcome to my encore
Rickie Lee Jones emerged into the pop world fully formed; her début album was nominated for five Grammys, in 1980, and she won for Best New Artist. One of the songs on that record was “The Last Chance Texaco,” and Jones has made that the title of her new memoir. The song evokes a service station on a long stretch of highway, and Jones’s book reflects on her almost obsessive need to travel and uproot herself at almost any cost. “All I wanted to do was leave” from a very young age, she says.“When I talk about it from here, it seems like it was so horribly dangerous.” She adds, “Suddenly I’ll [say], ‘I think I’ll go to Big Sur,’ and I’m in a car, going. But the chaos and trouble that brings to a life!” The producer Scott Carrier, who hosts the podcast “Home of the Brave,” interviewed Jones near her home in New Orleans
I really like this. I know nothing about her and at the moment this video has 52 viewsWell I just googled her and found this film for the song above and even this only has 630 views after being up for acouple of days shy of a month.Crazy
I met the remarkable photographer John Fell thru Norman on Facebook. For personal reasons John is leaving FB and going to be using Instagram as the place to see his wonderful photographs. Can I suggest you join him there?
There's no shortage of great percussionists in the brief history of free improvised music but on the strength of Dart Drug alone Jamie Muir deserves among them. Unlike for example Han Bennink and John Stevens, though, you can't hear echoes of any particular jazz drummer in Muir's playing, even if he has expressed appreciation for Milford Graves. What on earth did Muir's kit consist of? Some instruments are clearly identifiable (bells, gongs, chimes, woodblocks), while others could be anything. Old suitcases thwacked with rolled up newspapers? Tin cans and hubcaps inside a washing machine? Who cares? It sounds terrific, but if you're the kind of person who faints at the sound of nails scraping a blackboard, you might want to nip out and put the kettle on towards the end of the title track.
Dart Drug is consistently thrilling, and often amusing, but it's certainly not easy listening. In music we talk about playing with other musicians, whereas in sport you play against another opponent (or with your team against another team). Why not play against in music, too? That's often precisely what happens in improvised music, and Bailey was particularly good at it. How can a humble acoustic guitar hope to compete with Muir in full flight? Sometimes Bailey's content to sit on those open strings, teasing out yet another exquisite Webernian constellation of ringing harmonics and wait for the dust to settle in Muir's junkyard, but elsewhere he sets off into uncharted territory himself.
"The way to discover the undiscovered in performing terms is to immediately reject all situations as you identify them (the cloud of unknowing) which is to give music a future," Bailey evidently concurred with this spoken statement by Muir, including it in his book Improvisation (1980). Derek Bailey is no longer with us, of course, and Muir gave up performing music back in 1989; all the more reason for seeking out this magnificent, wild album."
- Notes for the Honest Jons reissue in 2018
"For the uninitiated, Jamie Muir was percussionist for King Crimson during its Larks' Tongues in Aspic period. Since that time, he has concentrated on playing in the free improv arena, and has interacted with just about everybody on the British side of things. This date with guitarist Derek Bailey is in many ways quite remarkable. In these four improvisations, Bailey himself attempts to become a nearly lyrical player, sensitively looking for timbral elements within his already sonant tones, and Muir moves to underline that aspect of his playing. This is not to say that dynamics and violence are not found here -- quite the contrary, they're just more closely observed. The title track, clocking in just shy of half an hour, is for practical matters the hinge piece of the album, though it comes last in sequence. From random plinks and plonks, where Bailey accompanies Muir as a percussionist in the way he uses his strings and Muir dances all over the mix, a kind of pattern develops where dynamic threads are woven and carried forth into others, always leaving the fully articulated one as the process begets the creation of another. This systematic approach is different for both men, and results in a kind of ideational clarity that lesser players would love to emulate. The result is as open as silence itself, albeit a more playful gazer into its open mouth by this pair of yobs who are winking and laughing."
This is the first track from the A Luta Continua album and apart from Stevens on drums and Martyn on guitar and vocals it features Paul Rogers and Ron Herman on double bass with
Andre Holmes on electric bass. Mark Hewins, Martin Holder, Nigel Moyse, Tim Stone as well as the aforementioned John Martyn on guitars. Paul Rutherford on Euphonium. Francis Dixon on percussion and Elton Dean, Lol Coxhill, Trevor Watts, Robert Calvert and Jon Corbett making up the horn section and finally Pepi Lemer also on vocals
In the second edition of the new Denkraum series key_concepts, Mathias Maschat talks to synthesizer player Richard Scott about his experience in the legendary workshops of the London drummer and pioneer of free improvisation John Stevens.
John Stevens (1940–1994) met Paul Rutherford and Trevor Watts in the mid-1960s and together they founded the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in 1965, which was to become one of the nucleuses of British free jazz and European free improvisation. Especially in the late 1960s, the SME, like the evening concerts he organized at the Little Theater Club in the City of Westminster (London), became a point of reference for the young generation of British jazz musicians – from Evan Parker to Derek Bailey, Paul Rutherford, Howard Riley, Maggie Nicols, Julie Tippetts to Barry Guy and Jamie Muir.
Stevens developed a series of participatory pieces that enabled people with very different musical backgrounds and abilities to engage equally in creative improvisation. The pieces were published under the title Search & Reflect, creating a valuable manual for mediating and teaching improvisation. He tried out and used the pieces in countless workshops, which enabled him to train and significantly influence many musicians.
One of them is the composer and interpreter of electronic and improvised music Richard Scott, who attended Stevens’ workshops in the 1980s. He has been pursuing the idea of publicly reporting on his time with John Stevens for some time, which will now be the first occasion. Music-historical thoughts are supplemented with general considerations for teaching improvised music
Musicians, critics and friends celebrated the legacy of drummer John Stevens (1940-1994) reflecting on his teachings and visionary spirit with talks, workshops and performances throughout all day last Saturday 22 November at the EFG London Jazz Festival 2014. Here's an excerpt from the afternoon talk between Alyn Shipton, Victor Schonfeld and Steve Beresford
