Tag: art

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quick misc. update

Er, what since last week?

Saturday was Gawain the DJ’s wedding – very nice bloke, very nice wedding. bit of a 50s theme. Even more heartening is that he’s even taller than me, and his now-wife is even smaller than the small person. Good to know we’re not the most mismatched people on the planet!

Sunday went to see Masse play at The Foundry in London’s East End. The venue has a very varied and interesting program of stuff on, but is a bit of a dump… Anyway, Masse – bass and drums duo, both looping, processing, improvising, very good stuff indeed. bass-man jeremy was on top form – lots of Echoplexing, and a great tone from a rather special homemade bass cab. If you get a chance to see them play, jump at it.

Monday was more recording with Theo Travis – the best thing about playing with Theo is that we’re never quite sure what it’s all going to end up sounding like. We re-did one of the ideas from a very early session (when we were recording in mono), and it came out sounding completely different anyway… very nice. We’ve now got about an hour and a half of quality stuff towards the album. We’ll keep going until there’s no filler material at all, though it’s feeling pretty consistent already… We’ve got a gig booked, at the National Theatre in London on June 17th, which you really ought to be at!

Monday night was Jude’s leaving do – leaving do? she’s only going to the US For a few months. But anyway, it was a fun time, catching up with Sarda and The Cheat.

And yesterday was spent teaching and editing the stuff that Theo and I recorded.

That’s all really dull – what else is happening? well, Donald Rumsfeld has finally admitted that they are unlikely to find any WMDs in Iraq – no shit sherlock! Isn’t that what Scott Ritter and Hans Blix said months ago, before you bombed their world to pieces????? Clearly this was realised even before they went to war (why else was the notion of ‘freeing the people of iraq’ only brought in as on of the aims just before christmas when getting rid of WMDs had been the expressed sole intention for the year or so before that???) Anyway, seems that the illegal invasion will soon be recognised for what it was – Blair will spin the whole thing, talk about moral responsibility and all his usual BS. Sincere perhaps but sincerely wrong, sorry Tony. Meanwhile, iraqi kids are stepping on undetonated cluster bombs (possibly containing depleted uranium), and the cleanup is going rather slow. Add to that the Brukheimer-esque makeover given to the ‘rescue’ of Jessica thingie, and you’ve got yourself one seriously morally dubious world situation… Now, who was it who veto’d the instigation of an international criminal court again?

Soundtrack – lots of me and theo, obviously. Right now, I’m listening to Medeski Martin and Wood, ‘The Dropper’ – had heard them before and liked what I heard, but BJ Cole recommended this as the one to get. And very fine it is too… What else? Michael Manring, ‘Book Of Flame’ and Morphine, ‘B-Sides and Otherwise’.

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Show Me Heaven…

…Maria McKee’s biggest hit by quite a substantial margin, was not in evidence tonight… there can’t be many artists who’ve had world-wide #1 hits that they completely ignore when they play live (does Jeff Beck still play Hi-Ho Silver Lining? probably not…) Anyway, it was a fine gig – Maria’s got one heck of a pair of lungs on her, which can be slightly overpowering at times, but she’s a fine performer – when she straps on a guitar, it’s like seeing Neil Young channelling Maria Calas – huge voice, chaotic squealing guitar. a highly compelling combination.

It’s not often I go to a gig when I only recognise one song that the artist does – in this case it was the title track from ‘Life Is Sweet’, Maria’s mid-90s solo album, which was very fine. Would have liked more Lone Justice stuff (Maria’s pre-‘Days Of Thunder’ band with Bentmont Tench – who was, I think her husband?)

Maria famously wrote ‘A Good Heart’ for Fergal Sharkey, allegedly about the breakup of her marriage. Her ex-hubbie (Bentmont Tench I think, but could be wrong) also wrote a hit for Fergus The Shark, about the same subject matter, called ‘You Little Thief’ – differerent perspectives on the same event…

…I might be wrong about that, and it wouldn’t be the first time this week. On Saturday night at the Kashmir Klub, I managed to successfully confuse singer/songwriter Geoffrey Williams with former Shalamar front man and inventor of Michael Jackson’s BAD-era persona, Geoffrey Daniels… an easy mistake to make… ;o) I just hope that Kathy didn’t go bowling up to him making some bizarre reference to ‘making this a night to remember’ – he might have completely misunderstood where she was coming from!!!!

soundtrack – been listening to some stuff from Andy West’s forthcoming project, fwap, which is very good, and also more of the dum dums.

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lots of interesting musical things…

…but first, I must tell you that there are 453 deleted emails in my outlook express right now – I’ve just gone through my inbox, which had near 600 emails in it, and replied to or filed all but 24 of them!! yippee, what a liberating feeling. NOTE TO SELF – must try to stay on top of email from now on…

anyway, music stuff – lots of exciting things. Saturday night was a sad event, the last night of the Kashmir Klub. so I went along with evil harv, sarda and cap’n-birdseye-pirate-ben. we were promised lots of special guests, but no-one was expecting Rick Astley to play. Yup, 80s pop legend, who quit music years ago, was there playing guitar for a friend of his, and was talked into doing a song. So he did ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, just him and an acoustic guitar, and it was GREAT! His voice sounded marvellous, and the song, stripped of the cheesey late 80s SAW production stood up remarkably well, sounding every bit the multi-million seller it was… For an 80s obsessed pop-fiend like myself, it was a real treat. Also in attendance for the evening – Lewis Taylor, Keith Emerson, Kiki Dee, and a few other celebs…

Then Monday night I went round to see BJ Cole – awesome pedal steel player. Pedal Steel is such an evocative sound anyway, but in the hands of someone with BJ’s skill, it soars. We had a bit of a jam, and listened to lots of tunes, and are getting together again next week – how exciting!

And last night was the best of the lot – went to see alex cook singing ‘The Pirates Of Penzance’. Alex is a drummer I toured with for a few years in the mid 80s, and a very good friend, so the thought of him dressed as a pirate singing light opera was too tempting to turn down. Sad thing was, he was actually really really good. Far too good to be funny. I was hoping for classic am-dram silliness – people falling off the stage, kids crying, out of tune oboes. But alas the singers were great, the band very good, the staging excellent. Far too good for an amateur production. Next time, rehearse less!

So tonight, I’m off to see Maria McKee at Shepherd’s Bush Empire with Evil Harv and Radar. Should be lots of fun.

Soundtrack – Prefab Sprout, ‘From Langley Park To Memphis’; Pat Metheny, ‘Imaginary Day’; Marc Johnson, ‘Sound Of Summer Running’; Rain Tree Crow; The Dum Dums, ‘It Goes Without Saying’; Theo Travis, ‘Heart Of The Sun’; Stevie Ray Vaughn, ‘Texas Flood’ and some forthcoming tracks from BJ Cole’s next album, which are fabulous!

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Strongbad the good

Ok, if you’re on broadband (and perhaps even if you’re not, I’ve not tried it on dial-up), get thee to www.homestarrunner.com – some very bizarre and surreal cartoons, but totally addictive, especially strongbad’s emails – one of the characters answers emails from the public… Truly brilliant.

What else? Had another gig last night with Tess Garraway and Joss Peach in Brighton, which was fun. Due to a misunderstanding with the venue, it was a shorter gig that had been planned, but was much fun nontheless, especially as I had a line from Tess’ voice into my loop set up, so could layer up loads of vocal stuff…

Yesterday I received a copy of Andrew Buckton’s new album, Rocket Ship, which is marvellous. It was recorded at the tail-end of last year, with me on bass, jez carr on piano and buck on guitar and voice. Tom Hooper then added some drums and percussion. There’s a fair bit of E-bow and looping from me, providing lots of atmospherics, including one tune where I do loads of looping and SFX, while Jez plays the actual bass line (as has been noted before, Jez is not only a mighty fine pianist, but a stellar bassist too…) The album is fantastic. Really great songs, very personal moving lyrics, and I don’t sound bad on it either… 😉

Hopefully it’ll be available online somewhere before too long.

What else has been happening? Ah yes, yesterday before the gig with Tess, I was recording more stuff with Patrick Wood – if you have a look at the MP3s page, you see there’s a duet track with Patrick. He’s very good, very very good, and we get together every few weeks to make a good noise. More mad loopy stuff, as you’d expect. Will no doubt be releasing a duo album with Patrick at some point. Still editing the stuff I’ve recorded with Theo… there really ought to be lots of this stuff online, but at the moment, I maxxed out on my webspace, so really need to change servers before I get to add any more. Was all set to move to a new host when sarda said he was planning to get a server. So now I’m waiting for that…

Anyway, when it finally happens, you’ll get to hear lots of what I’ve been up to.

Oh, and on the subject of me and Theo, we’ve got a gig at the National Theatre in London on Tuesday 17th from 6-7.30pm. And then on the same day at 9pm, Rick Walker – the percussions that I play with in California – has got a solo gig at The Klinker, so it’s a fine evening for music – well worth coming to see us, grabbing some food, and heading over to Rick’s gigs. I’ll be at both, anyway!

Er, what else? ah yes, Matthias Grob came to stay. Who’s Matthias? He’s the inventor the Echoplex, that rather amazing looping tool that I’ve got four of. And a great musician in his own right. And an all round top bloke. We’d arranged to meet for lunch with a friend of his up town, but he was late, so I had a very nice lunch with Jenny at the ICA, and then Matthias turned up at my place a bit later on. We went for curry. and he gave me a copy of his brand new CD, which is coming out on my label! Yup, Matthias is the first non-me Pillow Mountain Records release. How does that work? for someone who doesn’t like record companies… well, he’s using the name. Doing all the leg-work himself, but using the Pillow Mountain name out of recognition for the fact that our music bears a similar meditative quality I guess. The looping connection, and just that he’s a top bloke. I’m sure people who like what I do will like what he does. So he’s on PMR. It’ll all be official soon, and on the website etc…

Soundtrack – right now, it’s Andrew Buckton’s album ‘Rocket Ship’ (see above) which has been on all day. It’s great. you need to get it when it’s available. Yesterday I was listening to the new album from Andy Sheppard and John Parricelli, ‘PS’, which is great – guitar and sax duets, some looping/processing from John. All good. Recommended.

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Sometimes we just don't know we're born…

A few days ago I commented on the passing of Rana Ross – a fabulous bassist and larger than life character from LA, who I’d met at the NAMM show a couple of years ago, and stayed in email contact with…

This was posted to TBL (a bass discussion list) – an open letter from her husband about Rana – time to sit back and count blessings, methinks…

“To give you an idea of what she overcame over the years we were married on
Sept 8th, 1988 but – before she would allow me to marry her – she went to
have an AIDS test done. She grew up in Brooklyn, NY and spent a wild time
(sex, drugs and rock & roll) during the late 70’s/early 80’s. She stopped
the wild side around 1982 but it was too late. The HIV test came back
positive in 1988 and at that time it was a death sentence with no drugs
available to treat the disease.

“I talked her into marrying me anyway, because it’s the person that you love,
not the disease. I was and remain HIV negative, and in fact never had any
fear of contracting the virus from her – can’t explain it, but somehow I
knew that she would never pass it to me.

“The medications that eventually came out over the years worked for her, but
it was like taking chemo-therapy year after year. One result was the erosion
of the sheaths that cover the nerves in her feet and hands, developing into
a diabetic-like peripheral neuropathy. She described it as feeling like
someone has driven red hot nails into her feet and sent her walking across
hot coals. How she performed and danced on stage I’ll never know, but she
never missed a step. Know one knew that many times I literally had to carry
her to the car from the pain, but she would never allow this to interfere
with her career or jeopardize any band’s performance. She was amazing like
that – and how she played when her hands were so numb that she couldn’t feel
the strings I’ll never understand, but she did it and only very very rarely
missed a note. She was a consummate performer.

“Over the last 7 years she has been in and out of various hospitals over 50
times, but never once did she miss a performance, regardless of how ill she
felt.

“Last year we found out that she had Hep C, which caused the cirrhosis of the
liver that eventually killed her. Basically, the decomposed liver allowed
blood to back up into the inflowing veins, which caused bleeding in the
abdomen and stomach. Unknown to us she was bleeding internally over the
weekend and collapsed on Monday. She was taken to the hospital ER where she
coded, but they brought her back to life – comatose. That was always her
biggest fear, to be on life support.

“I went against her wishes and told the doctors to do everything they could
to keep her alive so that her family, who are all on the east coast, time to
get out here to Los Angeles. I felt that her mother had to have a chance to
say goodbye to her daughter, there was no way I was going to not allow that
to happen.

“She had several cardiac and pulmonary arrests, the last one very severe.
That was the day I had to insist that she be taken off life support. She
passed easily, opening her eyes and looking at everyone in the room and
squeezing the hands of those holding onto her and simply stopped breathing.
For the first time in months she looked peaceful. No more pain, hospitals,
doctors, needles, medication. It was simply time for her to rest. She had
told me many times over the last few months that she was tired of fighting
and being in constant pain, and that the only reason she was fighting and
staying with us was she was afraid to leave me alone. Her body started to
shut down after I held her for hours, telling her over and over that I love
her and if she wants to fight I’ll be right along side her all the way but
that I know she’s tired and that I’ll be OK if she wants to stop the battle.
I think I finally got through to her, convinced her that I’d be OK and
please not to stay in pain for me. I told her it’s OK to just let go, and
her body started to shut down – kidneys, etc.

“I hope she gets the long rest that she deserves so much. But my God, I miss
her so much my bones ache.

Peace,
John Ross”

And here’s me feeling put upon for having to practice each day…

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A gig, a wedding and some very sad news

So what’s been happening?

Well, friday night was a very fun gig. Remember Ragatal? Possibly not, but it was a quartet that I played with for a time a few years ago.. It was started by Jason Carter and Nick Beggs, along with Steve Bingham on Violin and Sanju Sahai on tabla. Shortly after that, Nick became too busy to continue for a while, and I took over, recording the one album that the group did – Fragments Of Grace – on ARC (it’s not bad, though I’d advise against getting the re-released version, titled Elements, as there were a load of additional percussion overdubs by Hossam Ramsay that don’t add anything to it, IMHO…) Anyway, Friday night was Steve Bingham’s birthday, and he had a gig to celebrate, including some ragatal tunes! What a treat it was – it was great fun to get back playing with all those guys, especially Sanju who is quite possibly the most outstanding musician I’ve ever sat on the same stage as.

Saturday was another fun day, and a fine friends reunited success story. About two years ago, I got in contact with an old school friend, Dawn, met up for a drink, and then she arranged a bigger get together of old chums. Andrew came to that one. He’d always fancied Dawn, and apparently the intervening 17 years hadn’t dampened his adour at all. fast forward 18 months, and yesterday I went to their wedding! What fun! It was a fine day, they both looked great, and everyone seemed to have a great time. It was fun meeting up with some other old school chums too…

On an altogether much different emotional plane, I got an email today from the husband of Rana Ross, a fine bassist and someone I’d met at the NAMM Show in LA and emailed ona few occasions, to say that she’d been in an ICU after a series of heart attacks, and they were switching the life support off. I can’t even imagine what he must be going through – even at this stage he was giving thanks for the time he’d had with her, and described himself as the luckiest man in the world. She was only in her 30s, was working on a new album, and had a whole life ahead of her. what a terrible story. There are various threads on the bass discussion groups around the web, if you want to post condolences to John…

So what’s coming up? More recording with Theo, who came round last week to listen to rough mixes of the duo stuff so far, which are sounding spiffing! And hopefully some more playing with Sanju very soon…

soundtrack – right now, I’m listening to ‘and nothing but the bass’ – was teaching one of the tunes to a student earlier and it’s stayed on. Before that, and most of the day yesterday, I was listening to Athlete, ‘Vehicles and Animals’, which is great – best new british band I’ve heard in quite a while. The gig last week was great, and the album lives up to expectations. Also been listening to more stuff on kvmr.

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two weeks of theatre, gigs and puke…

Blimey – it’s ages since I last got to write anything! I’ve now got a broadband connection, so hopefully it won’t be quite so long before I blog again (not that it’s any quicker with BB, as it doesn’t take long to connect anyway, but I’m online more than I was so may be able to get 5 mins here and there to talk rubbish on here…)

So what’s been going on? Potted history of life since the 15th (last blog date) –

went to the theatre to see The Madness Of George Dubya again, which was marvellous again – it’s transfered to the West End (The Arts Theatre in Leicester Square), and is being rewritten daily to keep abreast of current events, so it’s more topical than ever. Vital viewing, especially as there seems to be a lot that’s going unsaid about what’s now going on in Iraq – more shootings were reported this morning, that american guy who’s been put ‘in charge’ doesn’t seem to have much of a clue, and the looting still goes on…

Then it was easter weekend, which was surprisingly un-churchified – an unusual easter for me in that sense, partly cos I was just busy and didn’t plan anything in time, and partly cos I was at a wedding on Easter Saturday. Made it to church Easter Sunday morning, but it’s a while since I last missed a good friday service – anyone would thing that easter was when a rabbit got nailed to a cross, but was a nice rabbit who rose again and gave everyone chocolate eggs… I know that the timing of easter is a hi-jacked ancient solstice or something, but it does seem odd for it to have kind of stuck with some sort of christian significance in the media, but mainly it’s all about eggs and bunnies… the world is a might strange place…

Easter Sunday I went to a very fine gig – Three Blind Mice – featuring Lyndon Conner, the keyboardist who played with Level 42 on the Greatest Hits tour last year. The mice are a three piece – two guitar/vox and Lyndon on keys/vox, and feature some of the finest harmonies I’ve ever heard. Great songs, great delivery in a lovely venue (some pub near Paddington)… Well worth investigating. And after all that guff in the paragraph above, I did eat rather a large number of chocolate eggs at said gig.

Wed 23rd was a gig in Eastbourne with Tess Garroway and Joss Peach – more lovely improv, made even more fun by feeding both the piano and the voice into my loop setup to I could loop and tweak both of them as well… Small crowd, but cool venue.

The trip home wasn’t quite so much fun (this is where the puke in the heading comes into the story – turn away if you’re sqeamish) – I had a headache brewing through the entire gig, which got gradually worse and worse as we were packing up, bordering on migraine as I got in the car to drive home. It may have had something to do with not having eaten since about 2pm, and having had a beer when I arrived at the venue in the evening, but whatever, I wasn’t a well bunny.

Stopped once to wretch, didn’t puke. Stopped again, puked a bit. Was then doing 70mph along the M25 and vommed all over myself, the windscreen, the steering wheel, dashboard, seats, floor, everything. Tried catching it in a cardboard tissue box, but that just succeeded in funnelling said puke down both my sleeves (no, really, it is the most disgusting thing that has ever happened to me, which is why I just had to share it with you…)

One week previous to this, I’d been up to my armpit in blocked drain and thought that that was the grossest thing I’d ever done. This topped it, driving 35 miles covered in my own sick was really really nasty – the kind of thing that one usually associates with recovering smack-addicts…

The following day was a bit of a cleanup day, following my projectile experience of the day before.

Friday I was conducting an Echoplex clinic for the UK distributors, showing them a little of what’s possible (for lots more of what’s possible, see Andre’s site), which was great fun. I also picked up a couple more echoplexes, taking my tally to four – three are now in the rack, trying to work out how to wire the fourth one into the desk to give me a stereo main loop… hhhhhmmmnnnnnn

Friday evening was spent installing my broadband connection, which I’d got wrong somehow, and then Saturday required much rescuing as I’d downloaded too much stuff from Windows Update and had buggered up my machine, so with the help of evil harv, we got it going…

Last night, Jez and I went to see Carleen Anderson at the Jazz Cafe – we’re trying to get out to see more gigs, and were going to go out on Sunday, but there was bugger-all on in London. Boy, am I glad we waited til Monday – Carleen was brilliant, as were her band – Ben Castle on sax, Andy Hamill on bass, Mark Edwards on keys, Winston Clifford on drums and Jules someone on guitar – they are on again tonight and tomorrow, and if you can, you really ought to go… Carleen’s acoustic encore of ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ was worth the ticket price itself (and you can stream it from her website – high res with Broadband of course…)

In between all that stuff, I’ve been mixing the tracks that I recorded with Theo Travis, which are sounding great, and may well end up being my next album… It’s time for a duo album (last one was solo, before that duo, and first one was solo), and these are just fine ‘n’ dandy. Hopefully we’ll have something to listen to v. soon…

And obviously I’ve been indulging in the download delights of broadband – fave site at the moment is launch.yahoo.com, a music videos and streaming radio site which is very cool. Go there and watch some of the Bruce Cockburn, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos and Johnny Cash vids – all great stuff. Also been listening to radio on line, including kcrw, kvmr and bbc london.

Soundtrack – other than the online stuff, been listening to lots of Ron Miles – both ‘Heaven’ and ‘Laughing Barrel’, and listening to Paul Simon, ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’, Bill Frisell, ‘Have A Little Faith’, Alex Skolnick Trio, ‘Goodbye To Romance’, Frank Gambale, ‘Resident Aliens’ and King’s X ‘Manic Moonlight’.

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Stations Of The Cross

Last night’s ‘gig’ went really well… The event was called ‘UpLate’ and is a sort of alternative worship service at a lovely old church in Thame, Oxfordshire. Once a month they take a theme and set up a whole load of different artistic/musical/poetic ‘stations’ for people to wander round and look at/listen to/read/meditation on, etc. All very inspiring stuff – it’s a great building, and the quality of the art is top notch – it’s kind of like a themed multimedia art-gallery, with good coffee, and a glass or two of wine… ;o)

Anyway, last night, with it being their easter edition, Evil Harv, Jez and I were asked to come up with 14 improvs based on the stations of the cross to soundtrack the whole evening, we were set a time, and given 14 works of art to help inspire us – well, scans of them anyway… The list of station titles is –

(1) Jesus’ agony in the garden
(2) Jesus is betrayed by Judas and is arrested
(3) Jesus is condemned by the Sanhedrin
(4) Jesus is denied by Peter
(5) Jesus is condemned by Pontius Pilate
(6) Jesus is scourged and crowned with thorns
(7) Jesus is made to carry the cross
(8) Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus with His cross
(9) Jesus meets with the women of Jerusalem
(10) Jesus is crucified
(11) Jesus promises paradise to the repentant thief
(12) Jesus speaks to John and Mary on the cross
(13) Jesus dies on the cross
(14) Jesus is buried in the tomb.

So for each of those we did an improv. As you can tell from the subject matter, it wasn’t going to be a happy-jazz sesh, and some of what we played got really dark and atonal – trying to express in music the image of Jesus being whipped and having a crown of thorns rammed onto his head is always going to be a pretty brutal sonic experience! But it’s amazing the way having a concrete theme like this can focus the music way beyond just noodling. Often Jez and I when we’re doing duo stuff will latch onto a particular mood and work with that, in a more abstract, but still just as compelling (for us) way. This time, it was obvious to all three of us what the theme was before we started, and the beginnings of some of the improvs were particularly interesting while we settled into how we were going to tackle that particular image – was the music going to be mournful, confrontational, pain-wracked, hopeful. etc… the tension worked really well at dealing with the many many mixed emotions that the easter story brings up…

The good news is we’ve got some of it on minidisc. The band news is that the batteries ran out after about half an hour, so we didn’t get enough… We played for about two hours (only overran by about 45 minutes! :o) – and it would’ve been great to have it all, as there were some really special moments, so hopefully we’ll be able to do it again next year in a different setting…

Soundtrack – last night and this morning, I’ve been listening to some new recordings by a fabulous bass playing singer/songwriter called John Lester. John’s a californian, who until recently was living in Paris, but is now in London, and will hopefully be gigging all over the place pretty soon. He’s great, check him out. And before that yesterday, was listening to Michael Jackson’s ‘Thiller’ – another tune that was being done in a lesson (PYT), and then staying on the turntable (ahhhh, vinyl) for a few hours… It really is a very good album indeed.

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Two steps from greatness…

Have you ever checked out cdbaby.com ? It’s a very cool indie music sales site, based in Oregon, with a great website, cool search functions and a lot of support for artists… Anyway, they have a system where CDs are linked from different pages, and one of them is the ‘Other CDs you will love’ section – Ron Miles is a very fine trumpeter extraordinaire, and dueter with the mighty Bill Frisell on his new CD… which is for sale at CDbaby… and who’s album should be in the ‘Other CDs you’ll love’ section, but me and Jez – Conversations! So there you go, just two steps from Frisell… don’t believe me, see for yourself…

Soooo, what else has been going on here? Currently working on the artwork for a CD by a Danish girl band called Desta – Jez is producing it, and last night I went over to see him and take some piccies of the band, and today I’m putting it together. It’s looking rather good, though I say so myself. It’s amazing what you can do with a fairly crappy digi camera and a bit of experience in photoshop…

Other than that? Been sorting out some upcoming gigs (see the gigs page), and also getting some dates arranged for Rick Walker when he comes over to Europe – Rick is a fine percussionist from Santa Cruz, with whom I’ve toured a couple of times, and whose friendship and musicianship I’ve enjoyed ever since my first solo gig in the US, which he organised back in Jan 2000… I’ll post more details about his Euro-dates here at some point…

Soundtrack – did lots of driving yesterday and listened to more of the Disposable Heros album, which still sounds amazingly fresh and inspiring 11 years after it was released. Then I had Paul Simon’s greatest hits on – I do love greatest hits albums, they are sort of a summary of where people have got to, it’s like recapping for those who missed the first half of a conversation, and Paul Simon’s GH is one of the most consistently outstanding bodies of work in the pop world. He’s amazing, and still making brilliant music, as You’re The One bore witness to. At home I’ve been listening to Ned Evett – ‘Circus Liquor’, Bill Frisell Live, Matt Garrison, and various projects featuring me!

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The World We're In

…is the title of a book by Will Hutton, one of the finest politcal writers in recent times (it’s the follow up to The State We’re In, which is great…)

Anyway, there’s a great article by him in yesterday’s Observer, about just what a mess Blair has got himself into, and a very constructive critique of American Conservatism. Have a read, it’s very good… And there are links to a few other articles by him about the current situ. at the bottom of that page…

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