New Music...

 I've been sitting on a stack of new music while finishing the second part of The Vortex Trilogy: Butte Magic. With my usual embrace of the sporadic muse... these will hopefully be essayed across the internet from their relative Bandcamp sites... soon... 

The Avatars Of Paradise… almost there… last extract…

      Alice dreams. Snow. Sharp white. Disorientation in the field. A horse and rider appear. Black. She watches them move across the ground. A blank flat white landscape. Her vision shifts. From the window’s vantage point. Like a drone, swooping suddenly, point of view vertiginous, lurching. She is on the horse, clutching the rider hard to stay on the speeding animal. She looks forward over the rider’s shoulder, a juddering jumping like a hand-held camera jerking. Just the white ground. The sky at the horizon a slightly differentiated pale grey. Image of nowhere. She cranes her neck to try and glimpse the rider’s face. He turns and turns back. A face of nothing. She senses he is smiling. She does not feel afraid. Later when she wakes she shudders at the memory of the smiling no face. Sits up in bed and hugs herself tight as if to squeeze in the memory. Fix it hard. She thinks of death, of the deaths she has seen. Her son in the funeral parlour. A memory that recurred through so many nights. Now it seems at a remove from her present experience. The smiling no face - how does she know he is smiling? She doesn't, she senses it on some deep level. As she assumes he is a man. The memory of holding his body is still vivid. But he is a stranger. Tennyson's poem comes to her: ‘I want to see my pilot’s face/when I cross the bar.’

     

     Brigg regained consciousness. Or, he thought later, another consciousness. Coming back to the diurnal in a brilliantly white room, sunlight streaming through windows that overlooked the city. Sterile, static, the modern house of healing. On Heron's tab, of course. Who sat in an armchair, peering intently at him.

     ‘I owe you the biggest debt. Hush,’ he lifted a hand as Brigg started to speak, ‘I  know the Brit code of deprecation. It’s true. Whatever I can do, whatever you want. Medically, you seem in good shape, luckily. A few bits of shrapnel in your body, nothing serious, and easily removed. The bang on the head was the most worrying but your doctors seem confident there was no lasting damage. Your speed in reacting took us both out of range, it seems. Sergei was not so lucky, of course, the crazy old fart.’ Heron stood and approached Brigg, coming close and sitting in the chair next to the bed. Brigg lifted his head, replied, abruptly. 

     ‘I'd like to go home. Retire from your employ, get out of the whole game. Could that be arranged?’

     ‘Whatever you want. Retirement, no problem. All aspects, I can fix that. But I don't think of you as an employee. You're a valued member of our floating circus. And a friend.’ He put his hand towards Brigg who lifted himself to offer his hand in return.

     Stoned. She looks out at the early morning. She scans the view left to right and back. Woods. Hill. Irrigation ditch. Farmland. Machinery. Beyond, the village and church and tower. She sits down eventually. Considers the horseman and his mount. Could he be a hallucination? A ghost? A possibility I have conjured that bursts into the real. Related to my return from the desert?

The Avatars of Paradise… coming VERY soon…

 And all these characters.To celebrate them with sporadic scribbled memos into notebook or tapped into smartphone. Impressions grabbed in haste or brooded over, accompanied by beer and whiskey. Back home at night, he resisted the temptation to cram them into some over-arching metaphor and tried to remain true to the scattered ambiguities and improvisations and startling jumpcuts of the glimpsed lives on parade. Follow any one and you would have a deep narrative. A chaotic celebration of individuality.

     All the craziness in the world could be found here, looking inside and out. Extend. A networked planet connects all circuits. The new digital powerlines, sanctioned and otherwise, built on top of the old linkages, often and usually hidden deep in the natural world. He tried to visualise an image for Brackhage but was unable to create anything concrete. The A.I. eluded concept. Yet Sergei had seen something that he feared. Genius twisted into senility and paranoia? He tried diagrams, words, shapes connected by lines that grew into a complexity that defied interpretation. So many variables. He saw how someone could go mad contemplating the contemplations. Maybe that’s what had happened. Sergei overloaded his ageing brain. Maybe he had travelled back, to stand with his father and Makhno against the coming tyranny. Visionary or reactionary? But Brackhage, according to Heron, was far from being a murderous machine of enslavement. Sergei had got it wrong. And he had always trusted his former boss and friend.

The Avatars of Paradise… coming soon…

Murder

Attempted Murder

Art

Sex

Death

Grief

Temporal Disruptions

Small Town Follies

Wide World Intrigues

Artificial Intelligence Anarchies

Getting nearer to publication… another extract…

      

The perpetrators of the Italian airport bombing that killed his mother and six others were never found. Officially.

He lay half-awake in the late night, thinking about the informal speech that Alex Heron had given at Hi Step, just before the attempt on his life:

        ‘One of our main interests these days is robotics, A.I. Research. Alternate ways of looking at medicine, for example. To a certain extent, these are interlinked although the company structures are tailored to the individual areas of research, still, the one thing they have in common is the fact that they are interlinked. As is everything. This goes beyond into other areas of course. Which has given rise to some concerns... ’

     

     ‘Some concerns.’ That provoked a hand grenade tossed by a suicidal geriatric genius...

      Brigg: things always change. Nothing remains static, just the illusion of stasis, which is usually cheap nostalgia, a mood of fear that resists the inevitable movements of time, the contemplation of which sends me into trances where I think I could follow everything intermingling simultaneously until I am falling through a vortex into some swirling dizziness that seems the precursor to full blown madness so I surface, riddled with vertigo and disoriented to hell. Continually wonder at this yearning for intensity, the surging emotion that sweeps me towards these attempts at an almost mystical ecstasy spinning out of philosophical speculations. Traceable to the booze I have drunk, hooking into flashbacks. And the drugs I sometimes take. And the echoes of the bombs, linked across time. Rare but intense. 

ENCORE UNE FOIS… extract from THE AVATARS OF PARADISE

      Framed by two explosions. 

     The first blew him forwards savagely into the future. The second blew him back into the past. Shielding Heron from the detonation of the grenade that Sergei shakily threw in one final thrust of elderly wasted muscle. Instinct and training. Split second. Grabbed him crashed into thepartition which folded immediately taking them down and low in enough time to dodge most of the blast. Crashing into enough space to live. Possibilities opening. Possibilities closed to Sergei hit by bullets just after the explosion hit him peripherally. Which he may have survived even given his age. The crazy old fucker. But a bodyguard dived low and shot at the same time. Training. Instinct. Heron sustained bruises, a couple of broken ribs. A sudden reminder of mortality. Random madness on his home ground. Brigg limped away with Heron's heartfelt gratitude, some scars, some short term memory loss which may have been caused by a sudden connection to that airport blast years before and short-circuited his synapses in a violent psychic attack. Lying in the hospital bed in his jolted mind he fell in and out of a landscape where his recently dead wife frequently appeared to him. Standing in front of his mother. Mary in the shadows. Michele in the distance. Alice somewhere felt but not imaged. A long gone possibility. The dead he had encountered professionally were present somewhere but beyond his consciousness, felt like an obscure pressure of the circumstances of being and career choices. He had never been haunted by them before: awareness of the consequences of power had never troubled him, the traumas of violence all being personal even as they had been the causes of his entry into that world, a swirl of possibility and causation bound by metaphysics or blind chance.

     He woke to see Heron sat beside the bed.

     ‘Been there long?’

     ‘Long enough, my friend. We were getting a little worried about you. The external injuries came from bits of shrapnel, some of it caught your leg and chest, hence the bandages. Flesh wounds, superficial. But you hit your head when you took us through that partition. Which saved my life, by the way.’

     ‘What I'm paid to do.’

     ‘Above and beyond, Brigg, you’re much more than a bodyguard, always were. But training will come through. But how are you feeling?’

     ‘Don't know. Fuzzy, suppose it's the drugs. How long have I been out?’

     ‘Thirty six hours. Approximately.’

     ‘Sergei? It was Sergei, I didn't dream that bit, did I?’

     ‘Sergei.' Heron said, sadly, shaking his head. 'Didn't see 

that coming down the pike.’

IT’S HYPING TIME AGAIN… a random extract…

 

You step into a bar. You step into a charged space where fictions, narratives collide, dance, importune, seduce. A random encounter can suddenly become meaningful. Or dissipate into irrelevancy. When the door closes on the street outside you enter another universe. Stay long enough and your trajectory acts on the adjacent trajectories. Your narrative engages with the other narratives. Even by not engaging, your silence becomes a mystery to be noticed, a topic of speculation. Sooner or later to be named, tagged. In a sense there is no escape if you remain.

     The phenomenology of drinking/alcohol fuelled narratives.

     A table. A couple of windows. Alcohol. 'Interesting' clientele. Ext. Day Ext. Night.

     Memory. A street. A church. A tower. A plain. A river. Rolling hills. Flatlands. Sea.

     Sea. Flatlands. Rolling hills. A river. A plain. A tower. A church. A street. Memory.

Hyping time goes onwards… The Avatars Of Paradise…

 Zeitkrümmung…

Hyping time: The Avatars Of Paradise…

Soon I will publishing a novel as an ebook on Amazon, maybe following with a paperback version down the line. So it’s hyping time…

What’s it about? I placed the ms in the ‘literary’ slot as it had to go somewhere but I am increasingly resistant to labels across the board. 

Call it a ‘mystery’ why not?

An ex-army ex-spook, Brigg,  who was until recently employed by a reclusive billionaire, Alex Heron, still mourning his dead wife, who saves his boss’s life in an assassination attempt, who returns to his hometown on the death of his father. An ex-army ex-spook, Alice, who has also worked for the billionaire Heron in a similar capacity. Now divorced and living in grief after the suicide of her son a couple of years before. One time , in fraught and dangerous circumstances, Brigg and Alice nearly had an affair but both resisted the temptation as they were happily married. Now both are single, by death and circumstance. Neon McGhee. An eccentric painter who used to be a champion boxer, now on the verge of being an art superstar. Alex Heron, billionaire, visionary(?). An A.I, ‘Brackhage.’  A book title, which is the name of the last painting by Brigg’s late wife, Anna Bauer.’The Avatars Of Paradise.’ So they roll…

Murder, attempted murder, art, sex, death, grief, temporal disruptions, small town follies, wide world intrigues… artificial intelligence anarchies…

Murder

Attempted Murder

Art

Sex

Death

Grief

Temporal Disruptions

Small Town Follies

Wide World Intrigues

Artificial Intelligence Anarchies

Publishing soon: The Avatars of Paradise… A novel…

ARTSEXDEATHGRIEFZEITKRÜMMUNG

Small town follies

Wide world intrigues

Artificial Intelligence Extravaganzas

Continuing: Josh Abrams Natural Information Society (+ Evan Parker) and The Third Negative

Trying to get a fix on what's happening anywhere on the ground of the imagination is a vertiginous, off-balancing business (and perversely a frequent pleasure: for those who want to embrace the complexities of contemporary life). Music, for example. Deluged by issues, re-issues in all the formats analog and digital. How to select? Not having any great inclination to over-categorise, a failing, no doubt, but that’s the way it shakes out in my world, I tend to encounter music in bursts, sometimes seeking, sometimes randomly tripping over work which grabs me. Resurrecting this blog for a variety of purposes, the main one, perhaps, being the promotion of a book I’ve been working on for some time, ‘The Avatars of Paradise,’ a novel, in the time leading up to its self-publication I figured that the old platform may still have some energy left for promotion and future new work. That flexing the somewhat atrophied blogging muscles by launching a couple of pieces pre-publication may stimulate my creative intentions moving forward. If I’m spared, as my late drinking buddy and friend Mervin G used to say. Ironically, with hindsight… Didn’t He Ramble… The Asinine Plague hovers at my back, of course, accompanied by its bigger pal, our old friend the wingèd chariot. But onwards… 

Two musical encounters gave me the spur to commence: how about a critical foray? Unable to attend the Tusk Festival last year because of the AP (see above), journeying and physical event both nixed, ironically I saw more of it than I would have by actually being there, some small consolation. Sitting at home watching the various daily vidcasts enabled me to enjoy most of it virtually, rather than experience the usual festival conflicts of timetable, geography, energy levels, hangovers etc. Swings and roundabouts writ large. The variety of musics was superb, as was observing the disparate methods of performance under the strictures of the AP. One band I really enjoyed was Triple Negative. So I bought their latest release. I was playing it a couple of weeks ago and synchronistically had noticed a Wire review of a Joshua Abrams  album which I hadn’t read at the time, ‘descension (Out of our Constrictions),’ by his band the Natural Information Society plus Evan Parker . Played some of it afterwards via their Bandcamp site link. Here…Immediately grabbed. So that afternoon existed in a heightened sonic space. Fuel for the reboot. I sat down and played the musics again today. Scribbled a few notes. And proceeded to pummel this blog post into some shape… trying not to freight the content with over-interpretation and fancy, always a tricky balance. And possibly failed. As the late Thomas Waller used to say: ‘One never knows, do one?’

Hey Ho.

 

So: Live recording. (This section under review is part one of a 75 minute work). Music that consolidates without being reactionary. Recapitulation and extending the tradition. With ‘the anxiety of influence’ doing a ghost dance… A loping, staggering vamp introduces, Evan Parker enters on soprano saxophone with simple figures. Soon he extends his line looping outwards via circular breathing patterns, his signature technique, arguably his main route out of the influence of John Coltrane, en route to becoming a virtuoso/innovator. Interestingly, given the modal vamp structure and the keening use of soprano saxophone alongside a bass clarinet with echoes of Eric Dolphy, the work offers a channel back to Coltrane structurally with Parker embedded in an earthier environment than some of his more abstract forays. He holds a long e flat to change up. Change up again with a few notes decorating the e flat then longer patterns laden with riffs and variations, falling back to let the band come through, the vamp continuing, the ground of this work. There is a lot of space on offer: the vamp holds it together in a loose embrace, the instrumentation: drums, guimbri, harmonium, bass clarinet offer a fascinating textural scenario which, apart from the Coltrane resonations, hints at musics and traditions beyond ‘jazz’ with plenty of room to breathe and no hints of clumsy world music pastiche. A remarkable achievement. Parker takes off towards the end with long flurries of notes cutting between registers in an extended blast of exhilaration, the triumph of breath, will and imagination. Audience respond with appreciative applause as he falls out, ensemble taking it on with a slapping backbeat, harmonium and bass clarinet weaving in midrange sonority to the end of the section. A music that comes from the tradition, partakes of other traditions, expands the tradition with the additions, always moving, always looping back and, more importantly, forward. John Coltrane died in 1967, after all: one assumes the title ‘descension’ is a glancing reference to his recording ‘Ascension’  ( Further on in this long piece, Parker essays a sly quote from ‘A Love Supreme’ to no doubt drop in a bit of hommage… ). Music of wonder.

The Triple Negative as mentioned above, are a band I caught on the Tusk virtual festival. A few tracks considered from their album ‘God Bless The Death Drive.’ Tagged: rock, experimental, rebetiko, London, on Bandcamp. Possibly the word ‘rebetiko’ is the key to understanding this wild sonic mélange. A good overall definition of this outlaw music is here… 

Side One - Crane. The opener: ‘Bad Grace.’ A female transgressor, supping ouzo, ha ha? Or negative spiritual quality. Which seems more in keeping with the overall tone of the record. Lot of mystery here. The cover and inner sleeve have fragments of textual enigma such as ‘give me the Bad Grace never to accept what I can never change,’ a ‘triple negative’ riff on Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, famous for its use in A.A. /twelve step programs. Cheeky. Sharp clapping clicking that holds a sturdy, sprightly rhythm, voices gargling whatever, a scrawny riff repeating underneath, several layers, occasional electric guitar note/chord. It’s not an abstract music, although an initially alien sound world. Visceral, certainly, voices ‘singing’ in a take it or leave it fashion, instruments and implements seemingly grabbed at will. I stress the ‘seemingly’ - these people aren’t naives . Next track, ‘Bad Emotional Investments.’ Some rumbling around a tonic, scrapey guitar. Occasional fragments of song form appear sporadically. Participating sounds/voice/instruments jammed together in a metallic yet syrupy mix, a nice sonic paradox, a keening melody, Balkan/Greco/Turkish? in implication. ‘The Ingrate.’ The clicking clacking rhythm again, a two bar melody with those rebetiko hints repeating as the voices swirl in the distance. Cuts off. ‘Fine Cargo Of Lacquer.’ Harmonium vamp up in the mix and blurry vocal, Nico singing in the bathroom next door ha ha. Small interjections ticking over a deep counter melody moving in and out. Side Two - Lacquer. ‘Low moon (all passports are dirty).’ Sounds assembling, burly voice ruminations. A sharp metallic rhythm building as effect flanges across. Someone with a phone walking in and out of a noisy engine room on a steamy ghost boat. Fancy prodded into being by the visuals on the album cover. Rhythms clapped together as if using whatever was lying about. No obvious electronic mutated synth sounds.  ‘Nags Head Spools.’ Banging rhythm and sharp clacks herding the ‘instruments’ and voices into a form of its occasion. Processed voice/noise welded to a drone tied to a screech… yadda yadda…this is enough rambling…

I reread the above fragments and thought that they were too fanciful, a Coleridgean downer, and clumsy attempts to force meanings. Of course. Like most criticism of musics outside the norm. Self indulgence in the main. Like most criticism. Rather than scrap them, I’ll let them stand as heuristic shipwrecks, so segue more yadda yadda and overview: 

mentions of the Baltic Sea on the album cover, the maritime imagery, quasi-mystical statements: ‘He is too great for infinity, too small for a grain of sand,’ a spatial twist on Blake, it would seem? And/or a fragment of lyric? The sound, sourced according to the sleeve from 1, 4, 8 track cassette recordings and a two track audio editor, blends everything somewhat muddily but not into a sludge of dialectical synthesis, rather the components, voices, instruments, percussion, from whatever sources, hold their spaces and tensions. It’s a rough muddy democracy but one that respects its parts. There is a scouring, kinetic sensibility at work here. It defies easy analysis - or maybe encourages the listener to LISTEN and forget the analysis. On repeated hearings, memory at work, cues emerge for embracing it relatively more formally. 

The vinyl has a satisfying heft to it. The cryptic statements on the cover, the nautical imagery, references to immigration/colonisation, allied to the song titles which yield little in the way of lateral ‘meaning’ and the glorious sonic abrasions and free-falling trajectories between the lp grooves, laced with oblique humour - demand work from the listener. Amply rewarded, for this participant in the fandango… the music is part of the package in a smart artistic statement. It’s not puny sonic wobbling with apologias or facile sloganeering and refreshing because of this… 

As a comparison: the Glaxo Babies, a band described in one of those clunky genre placements as ‘post punk.’  Because I pulled an album at random from the stack and out came this…  Something about the balls to the wall splatter chimes, but in the case of the Glaxos, underpinned by snappy funky bass beloved of bands of the time, using tropes from black music to undergird the sonics. The Third Negative eschew this approach completely. Initially, few aural cues to go on, which is their value, for me. By placing their individual offerings where sonic/formal antagonisms stand adjacent rather than in a safe expression leading to resolution a space is created and a listening experience emerges where if the gambit is accepted a novel audio experience can exist, bereft of conventional musical cues. Making it new… 

Some explanatory sentences from the Bandcamp site:

‘ Literally taking off where the acclaimed Precious Waste in our Wake LP finished off, London based outfit Triple Negative return with another exemplary amplified jigsaw puzzle. The playback of this reality is garnished with humour, bedlam, beauty and a robust fear of the predictable. As payback for your acknowledgment our international line-up deliver a disparate mix of genres and histographies rendered into a devious dish of rhythm, song, balladry and nerve. 

This is Not This Heat. A.Kostis/Kostas Bezos’ ‘Stin Ypoga’ (1930) is the template for Bad emotional investments whilst the haunting Fine Cargo Lacquer takes flight from the morbidly on point novel The Death Ship by B. Traven. 

God Bless the Death Drive could be construed as a compass to navigate the wayward wonder we inhabit or it can just be enjoyed. This second full length steers into scathed realms of everyday junk and poignant punk, all pressed down on the lowest quality ethylene and chlorine. 

Triple Negative return with another stamped digest of hope as joke, noise and song, rollicking rhythm and seasick soul. 

Edition of 500 copies in high gloss sleeve with printed comic book inner sleeve.

‘…rollicking rhythm and seasick soul.’ Of these we dig…

And this is the set from the Tusk Festival. 

Conclusions. None really. Except to demonstrate the richness and depth of the contemporary field. Two bands snatched at random, one with a large weight of history flowing freely back and forwards, with the techniques and heart to handle it fluidly, the other: despite the Bandcamp tags, ‘rock,’ ‘rebetika’ etc, come back in five years if the desire is that strong to ‘place’ them critically. Enjoy. I certainly did. Often one reads that one ‘should’ listen to a piece of music, one ‘ought’ to, one ‘needs’ this etc. Words that flag imperatives I tend to resist. Recommendations will maybe or not be examined. As in all things. Whether anyone needs these musics referenced above? Who knows? Give them a listen if you want. Or not… 

Personnel: The Natural Information Society

                  Joshua Abrams-Guimbri

                  Lisa Alvarado-Harmonium and effects

                  Mikel Patrick Avery-Drums

                  Evan Parker-Soprano Saxophone

                  Jason Stein-Bass Clarinet

                 Triple Negative

                 Anja Buchele 

                 Dennis Debitsev

                 Matthew Hyland

Joshua Abrams and Natural Information Society live playing ‘declension’ (without Evan Parker). here...

Evan Parker with Alexander Hawkins here… interesting to compare his playing with an intensely chromatic partner…

Some rembetika…for historical context. Here … 

Ferdinand ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton:      Didn’t He Ramble here…

And his New Orleans Jazzmen      Sidney De Paris tpt; Claude Jones tbn; Sidney Bechet ss

                                                       Happy Caudwell ts; Ferdinand Morton p; Lawrence Lucie gtr;

                                                       Wellman Braud b; Zutty Singleton dr.

 

New music... Figure Of Outward: Blue Machine on Bandcamp here

 ... with one bound I was free... and back on the blog. A few years have passed, then the damned virus, the asinine lockdowns, the possibility of emerging back into the world. Some more grey hair, wear and tear. Sense of humour more or less intact. But still here, having been busy the last few months on finishing and editing my novel ‘The Avatars of Paradise,’ moving from my Lulu platform to trying out Amazon. Some new music under my Figure of Outward moniker due any day. As to what direction the blog will go in? I started out with no real plan, just a desire to write in what was then a new medium. This mutated into a lot of music reviews and putting up mp3 tracks for download with attempts at commentaries. An eclectic mix, deliberately. My musical tastes have hopefully stayed in tune with the times, broadened and deepened perhaps when I started buying vinyl again with the intention of never buying anything I previously possessed but exploring backwards across the territories. Now I have a lot of vinyl alongside all the other media, shunning genre labels as much as possible. (There are some areas I don’t explore but I enjoy discovering stuff I never really listened to previously). Lockdowns have kept me confined to the immediate area of home and God’s Little Acre so no art galleries, gigs and travel. What comes next then will remain to be seen... a toe back in the water, where will the ripples go this time?

Review: Alexander Hawkins/Louis Moholo-Moholo at the Studio, Derby, Sunday 16th November, 2014...

Fire music on a grey day...

The Studio is a small venue, part of The Derby Theatre, which the audience amusingly approach in a straggly line led by an usher, out the foyer and round the back via a carpark.  A Ballardian vista before entering - attending a gig there has a certain surreal charm... But the space is intimate, with good acoustics, perfect for an improvising duo whose collective sonic range will cover a large area. The players:  Louis Moholo-Moholo, a very spry, lithe 74 year old master drummer, well known as the keeper of the Blue Notes flame, sadly lone survivor of that seminal band.  In tandem with Alexander Hawkins, a rising star, improviser, composer, organist and pianist, here playing the latter.  Delivering two sets that delighted the audience who witnessed some mighty music this drab November Sunday afternoon.  Moholo-Moholo can whack it out when the spirit moves, in mighty reverberations from deep kick to high ride/crash, an awesome sight with right hand held high for several seconds before smashing his stick onto the surface of choice.  Hawkins has an impressive technical range that includes a tough two handed style so when they lock together in loud sequences the individual particles in the soundstream don't get blurred mushily but ring clean. Similarly, the almost microscopic details in the quieter passages have a wonderful clarity, faint trickles of high register notes, internal piano plucks and barely audible faintly struck/scrape finessing of cymbal and drum surface.  Benefitting the drummer especially, when he moves to delicate, filigree stick work that would be inaudible even in a club, perhaps, unless you were perched next to his kit...
     Louis M-M is, of course, a longtime, well-known musician with an illustrious pedigree, both in the UK and internationally.  What impresses here is his youthful energy and questing imagination, someone who still relishes the challenge of naked improvisation, no falling back on past glories.  His younger cohort, Alexander Hawkins, displays a similar joy to his playing, knows his traditions well but is not bound by them - he has developed a contemporary technique that accommodates the history and folds it into the ongoing moment without jarring transitions that can veer into pastiche in the wrong hands.  This is a major accomplishment for this listener, an organic movement of the music that consolidates what has gone before without being shackled to old and/or new orthodoxies.  His music contains plenty of dissonant fire but is intriguingly buttressed by a love of melody, rhapsodic lyricism laced with jagged stabs, delivered in long waves that ebb and flow within the ample spaces that his technique and conception provide.  Hawkins has achieved a confident maturity within a few years and with a drummer such as his venerable companion to free up the lines so that they can breathe easily, this means the performance can move between abstraction, dense chromaticism, sudden longer notestreams that spring out and hymn-like slow rocking evocations of South African tunes that reflect back on Louis Moholo-Moholo's musical heritage, with occasional humorous vocal interjections to mix it up - such as Hawkins wordlessly singing a phrase echoed by the drummer in one sequence.  Plus what might called the 'Yes Baby/No Baby' interlude.  (You had to be there... see below).  And a couple of bits of Monk chucked in, why not?  
     Music expands, contracts, changes to fit the ground of its performance, I suppose.  In concerts, finer details can get lost but are compensated for by broader gestures.  For me, improvisation is usually best heard up close and literally personal, where the audience are grouped together in a dynamic relationship with performers, their energies and attentions hopefully contributing in some small part to the creation unfolding and the Studio provided the perfect environment for another inspiring afternoon.  My second visit (first one a few weeks back to witness another cross-generational meet-up with Evan Parker and Seymour Wright blowing some mighty saxophones solo and duo).  A big shout out to the compere, Corey Mwamba, whom I sat behind and whose enjoyment of the music was obvious and Derby Jazz for organising.  More, please...

   Here's a vid of the duo from The Sage, Gateshead... Catch the No Baby/Yes Baby routine as referred to above about 13.30 minutes in...

Corey Mwamba compering...

Slight return...

Been a year or so... But feeling the urge to launch out onto the owld blog again.  Review of Alexander Hawkins and Louis Moholo-Moholo at the Studio, Derby, on its way...

Review: Keith Tippett at the Cafe Oto, April 30th, 2013...

Filling up pretty quickly, there was an expectant buzz in the room – whatever the reason(s), Keith Tippett rarely plays in town so this was a special occasion. For myself, I'd made the haul from God's Little Acre to City Road Travelodge (grab the bus over the road to Dalston and back at last knockings, an easy move) and was looking forward to seeing one of my alltime favourite musicians up close in a sympatico joint like the Cafe Oto.  Especially one equipped with a good piano. (My favourite club in the UK, anyway, puts on the stuff I like, wish I could get there more often).

Tippett, 66 years old and looking in good nick, a stocky man with a fine head of hair and still flaunting mutton-chop sidewhiskers that give him the air of a country squire, took his seat at the piano. Commenced with short bass runs, probing opening gambits, the piano lid raised and illuminated to mirror the interior, the objects he uses to augment/distort the acoustics clearly seen, bouncing and vibrating on/off the strings, offering a fascinating visual counterpoint to the music for those with a good sight line. A couple of high treble splashes for accent, some scampers through the middle, a wodge of thickly voiced chords, muffled as if emerging from a dense fog. Already, a wide variety of colours being laid out.

The performance unfolds... using various objects to damp and mess with the strings, he sets up repeating figures that slowly evolve, informed by strong rhythms, one moment a flickering pattern high up, like a stick rattled across a bicycle wheel, then a roaring low register storm. The pounding bass he is famous for is oddly reminiscent of Erroll Garner's left hand take on strumming guitar chording, cranked up high, savage treatments that fire off long resonating waves of overtones to overwhelm the air under the low ceiling. At one point this became a mournful lament that seemed to dip into 'Danny Boy' but maybe I misheard – although there is a waggish side to Mr Tippett. Who gave one unbroken piece in the first half (as he did in the second) that unfolded and spun out into many areas of sonics and genres, quietly coming to rest – to rapturous applause. The pianist looked pleasantly surprised at this affectionate response, a man with no side to him, as the old saying goes.

Second half started out with rattles and clunks, a toy being flicked across the open strings to give odd, dry little notes. Speculations at the high end of the joanna. Four square march rhythms, a thump thump to flick syncopations across, melodies refracted through the mechanical interference to give strange timbres, hints of East-European (or further East) folk melodies almost, Balkans to Gamelan and back. A couple of sudden left turns with sharp funky soul jazz phrases that would not have been out of place in a Bobby Timmons solo circa 1960. Longer cascades of notes that refer back to the complex linearities of the modern jazz traditions but keep on going through the remapped territory to spaces beyond. Tippett has evolved a seamless integration of classic and extended techniques, conventional keyboard yoked to internal disruptions. Added to the inclusive nature of his musical vision, this helps to create a new opened field where ghosts of boogie woogie in some of those loping bass figures tread towards complex note clusters and shifting timbres, spinning off into simple triadic movements, evolving and folding into denser complications. The scrapings, pluckings and distortions offering a ground on which he can pivot at will, where melodic/harmonic/rhythmic developments, however abrupt in their sudden occurrence, can occur without too clunky a transition, offering a dynamic, flexible but subtle binding of the whole. He creates an improvisational area where historical genre time is collapsed into the now, each discrete unit resolving quickly into that wider, deeper flow where foreground is background and the reverse and the distinctions probably irrelevant anyway.
Towards the end he produced a music box, tinkling out what sounded like 'The Godfather' theme - something he used on his Purcell Room concert a couple of years back, a fragile, almost plaintive counterpoint to the slowly ebbing close.  And funny, too...

Over the years, he has built up his techniques to offer a staggering diversity of sounds and surprises (to riff obliquely off Whitney Balliett ). He has always been musically ambitious and open-eared: on the train back I wrote and underlined, somewhat cryptically, 'Generosity' and that may well have been the word to describe the night. The audience, generous in their enthusiasm for a unique talent gave up a long and warm burst of applause, the artist having displayed his generosity of imagination and technique for that audience to savour. A superb gig. Hopefully he will return soon... (And a request to the Oto: what about Mike Westbrook, another great musician, spotted rarely these days?).

Here's a very brief vid of him in solo action a few years ago...  And a couple of reviews, here and here, Financial Times and London Jazz News, respectively.

Keith takes a bow through the murk of a crap photo from my phone...

Been a while...

They say that blogs have a natural lifespan... certainly I have neglected mine, due to being involved with other stuff, excuses, excuses.  But reluctant to nix it yet - So:

I was in London a few days ago for Keith Tippett's gig at the Cafe Oto and have more or less finished a review.  Based on the Wordsworthian definition of poetry, except at a lower aesthetic level (!) - 'emotion recollected in tranquility' - as took no notes and just scribbled down some reactions/observations the following day on the reasonably tranquil train back to God's Little Acre.  Tippett is one of my favourite musicians of all down the years so it was a great joy to see him up close - the last time I was in such proximity being a gig in Nottingham years ago, the gig at the Purcell Rooms with his wife Julie a more formal concert affair.  And was mind-sizzlingly brilliant, it has to be said.  But the combo of the Oto - my favourite venue - and their new grand piano offered a night of Tippettian solo splendour.  More later...

'Buskers - from the streets to the Royal Albert Hall 1968-9' - out at last!

It's been a slog, for a variety of reasons, but finally it's here.  Happy to announce that Pat Keene's photobook 'Buskers - from the streets to the Royal Albert Hall 1968-9' has been published.  An A4 glossy remix of the black and white photos Pat took years ago of old and young buskers on the streets of London's West End and at Don Partridge's Albert Hall Buskers' Concert in early 1969.  New material included: colour photos from the Albert Hall gig that Pat only found recently!  A couple of which I will preview soon...
More info: here...

Too long...

I could offer excuses... but it has been too long since I blogged here... busy with a book/music/ and ping-ponging off illness/fatigue (there go the excuses).  But it's 2013, I have a new music label to promote very soon, plus a book - the sequel, as it were to 'Don Partridge And Company,' 'Buskers' - a glossy photobook featuring Pat Keene's material from the aforesaid tome plus some added colour photos that he only found recently (!) - and I have to decide what to do with this blog.  I think I'll keep it rolling for a while.
Happy New Year... Back very soon...

John Ware R.I.P.

You get older and by the nature of the game, people fall around you, go before. It doesn't mitigate the shock and the loss, of course. Given my rackety health (no doubt mainly a consequence of: 'Drinking and gambling, night-sporting and rambling,' to quote the words of one of my favourite songs, 'The Banks of the Bann,'), it is an ongoing source of amazement that I have out-lived so many friends, bloodbrothers and sisters. But it still hits hard when another close one goes, very close, almost the same age and as far as I knew a damn site fitter than this old boy. But we are taken... this is the nature of things and we deal with it according to our various beliefs. I was in Liverpool a few days ago, having booked a very cheap hotel deal way back when I saw that the Tate were putting on their triple wham: 'Turner, Monet and Twombly.'  Late paintings by these three, the latter of whom is a big favourite so I had decided to go up north for a gander. Liverpool is a place I don't know very well but had good times in on a previous trek to see the mighty fire jazz saxophonist Charles Gayle a couple of years back. The exhibition was very good and I could see how they yoked it all together to grab late works by these three painters into the frame, as it were. But another story. 

Later, I was in a pub checking my emails and flicked onto Facebook, saw some odd posts about my old friend John, caught a message from his eldest son to put up my phone number. Rang my daughter for her to check what I suspected. Which was that he had died the day before. Later I spoke to his youngest son and then his wife who was obviously distraught. The rest is private stuff. But it was a fucking shock.

John Ware and I go back, as they say. I met him over forty years ago, early 70s, when I was ensconced busking in London and he arrived in town.  We met and got talking - he was stuck for a kip so Barbara and I put him up. Oddly, we hit it off straight away, as it has to be said that in those days John could rile people, because of his speed of thought, his intensity and his manner. Interesting people have grit which can rub the wrong way for the unwary (no pun intended). We started playing together and at this distance of years, after all the many musicians I have worked with, I can still say that there was something very special between us. I loved playing with him, really enjoyed his music and we managed to pull together an act very quickly. By that time, the London busking scene was getting overcrowded and many of us had already developed other circuits. So we played in the declining years of that phase – which I would measure from Don Partridge's Busker's Concert in 1969 as the high watermark – everything started to fall off after that. A few months after the Albert Hall gig, for example, I was travelling around Europe, in 1970 I went to Dublin for the first time and subsequently visited it frequently, at some point taking John over with me, a year or so after we met. He moved there eventually and even though he travelled extensively on the continent as all buskers did, Dublin became his base. Mine too for a few years but when I moved on at the end of the 70s John was happy to stay, especially as he had met his wife to be by then. They stayed together through all the vicissitudes and craziness that will come down on relationships with musicians and buskers especially. The road can be merciless and John had his demons, as did many of us. His courage in facing them down a long time ago now and choosing a life with a family - three boys, now men, a strong and beautiful wife - over cheap and easy thrills, has always impressed not just me but all who had the fortune to know him.

In later years, after finely honing his musical craft, he took a sudden turn and started painting. This was a man with talent and an urge for expression that now came out in exquisite and unusual watercolours. Some people have a special gift. He was one of them, whether playing and writing music (he was an underrated songwriter), or exploring this latest passion, art. He even founded his own gallery to flog his work – ever a busker!

The last time I saw him was at our mutual friend Don Partridge's funeral a couple of years back. I had been planning on visits over to Dublin to see him and Anne but never made it due to illness and circumstance. That's the way of it. I am still coming to terms with the fact that this brilliant, annoying, sparky and sparkling man is not around on this plane of existence anymore. He was always vibrant, alive. Now he has moved on.

And in writing this: I cannot alleviate any of the grief his family will be feeling. But I can bear witness to someone whom I knew very well and a friendship that lasted from the first day we met and is still strong in my heart. A small remembrance is the least I can offer up... My daughter Amelia and I offer our condolences to Annie and the boys, to all the family.