Tag: bass

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Calling all Brit musicians

OK, so it could just be another phoney exercise in pretending to talk to the people concerned before ploughing ahead with whatever crap policy they came up with in the first place, but the government are at least pretending to want to hear from people in the music industry about how to improve things for live musicians in Britain.

Here’s the page about it on the culture secretary’s page – all looks good. The email address to contact them is LiveMusicForum@culture.gsi.gov.uk – so let them know your thoughts.

For my part, I’ll be emailing about classifications of music and venue – the licencing laws for venues that require them to have thousands of pounds worth of restructuring work for safety reasons seem ludicrous when the act is a solo acoustic guitarist, or bassist, or a piano/sax duo or whatever – in fact, the audience is likely to be far more static and orderly for that kind of event than they would in an ordinary pub! Lumping together all music as a job lot for licencing is nuts – I think there’s still some sort of ‘two in a bar’ ruling that means you can have solo acts and duos, but I think the ruling changed… need to look that one up. Anyone with any insight, feel free to post over in the forum.

Soundtrack – Steve Lukather and Larry Carlton, ‘Live’; Gillian Welch, ‘Time (The Revelator)’.

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For anyone having a bad week

if you’re having a bad week, console yourself that you’re not famous for riding a fake ostrich…

What was Bernie Clifton all about? Did anyone ever find him funny?

Soundtrack – Green Day, ‘International Superhits’.

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Composition famine…

I’ve not written any new music for quite a while. It’s not a problem – most areas of music tend to happen in terms of flurries of activity followed by plateaus, whether it be technique, concepts, composition or whatever. And right now, I’m working on arrangements of other people’s tunes – something I’ve done very little of as a solo player. I used to do a short version of ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ to finish gigs, and these days do ‘People Get Ready’, and now have just worked out a lovely solo arrangement of ‘What A Wonderful World’. I’ve also been working on a version of This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody), the Talking Heads track, which sounds great, but is really hard to play!! I need to make sure it’s well hammered into my skull before I attmept it live. It involves some pretty tricky looping (well, tricky for me…)

So I’m having fun with other people’s tunes (and maybe I’ll finally get round to having a go at ‘The Fish’ – something I’ve had a number of people nagging me to do for a while (yes, you, Catherine Street Team and California Bob!)

And as an off-shoot, I’ve got the beginnings of a new tune. It might end up as a solo piece, or maybe in one of the collaborations. This Monday and I met up with a fantastic drummer called Andrew Booker. Andrew has his own duo/trio (recorded thus far as a duo, now have a guitarist as well) called , whose CD is really cool (bass and drums duo, with Andrew singing like a less-heliumed John Anderson).

Anyway, he plays a tiny electronic kit, and adjusts really well to the slight imperfections of my loops, so we’ll hopefully be launching said trio on the listening public before too long – playing the tracks from Open Spaces with a drummer certainly took them into a very different space…

So, despite the famine, much creative noodling is taking place, and many new avenues are opening up…

Soundtrack – , ‘Ghost Town’; , ‘Slow Life’; , ‘Live’; , ‘Stones’; , ‘Polarised’.

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Another perfect Jonatha gig…

Tonight was gig 3 for me in a month. Of course, she was fabulous. Played beautifully, sang like an angel, bantered with the audience and wore a particularly groovy pair of bright coloured boots!

This was the first of three consecutive Tuesdays at on Denmark Street in central london. Please please please go and see her at one of the next two (15th and 22nd March, just in case you couldn’t work that out!) – I’ll be there again on the 22nd. By that time I’ll have racked up about one healthy two hour set’s worth of material (though I’ll have heard a few of the songs four times!) Go on, I promise it’ll be a magic night out.

Soundtrack – , ‘Live’; , ‘Nothing But A Burning Light’.

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Another radio great gone…

So another one of my boy-hood radio heroes has died – Tommy Vance died this morning after a stroke.

His Friday Rock Show on Radio 1 was required listening when I was at school – you had Peel Monday to Wednesday, Andy Kershaw on a Thursday and Tommy Vance on a Friday. I’ve still got tapes of live gigs I recorded off the radio that he’d broadcast. I never met him, but I remember just how please I was when even years after I stopped listening to his show, I saw him in the audience at a gig – it felt like Tommy being there was a validation of my taste in liking Bruce.

So after Peel, goes TV, to the great Rock Show in the sky. Sad news.

Soundtrack – right now it’s John Scofield, ‘Up All Night’; but I think I’ll be listening to more Bruce Cockburn later and remembering many years of listening to Tommy.

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Five questions…

Right, Marvellous Liz – she of the quite remarkable organisational skillz and highly readable blog – has been doing this five questions thing – see her site for more on it. Anyway, I agreed to have 5Qs thrown at me (I think I need to do the same for five other bloggers reading this, so if you are, feel free to email me, and we’ll make it happen – you then answer them on your blog – sort of new millenial chain letter thingie i guess…)

so, here’s Liz’s Qs for me, answers below…
And five for the lovely Steve L:

  1. Where did you get that coat from (and are you sure no animals were harmed in the making thereof)?
  2. Is blogging all about narcissism and if so what makes you think it’s of the benign variety?
  3. The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, seems to have the basics covered, but there’s always space for one more – go for your life!
  4. Appearance wise you are clearly the bastard love child of Geddy Lee (the hair, the facial fluff) and David Beckham (the nail varnish, the sarongs), but to whom do you owe credit for your emotional, political and intellectual pedigrees?
  5. You can select a super-human power for the day – choose well my friend, choose well!

Answers –

  1. Long black furry coat was from the late-lamented C&A (£50), short blue furry coat was from some crappy shop on the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street (£25), and other short greyish furry one was bought in Zurich whilst on tour with Howard Jones!
  2. Blogging can either be about sharing information from across the net, or randomly inflicting the minutae of your life onto others. Mine’s a mix of both, with very little of the former and far to much of the latter. I think it’s a highly narcisistic persuit, but the benign-ness stems from the lack of harm that comes from it, I guess… I suppose you could use a blog to bitch about everyone in your life that you have a grudge against, then the benignity of it would be blighted!
  3. Human Rights – it’d have to be trade laws – make it a basic human right that the collection of humans in a particular nation have the right to fair and just treatment in international trade, and that the rich humans in other nations be obliged to keep the playing fields level.
  4. Two people, mainly – my mum, who’s a marvellous woman, probably mad, very clever, and who is basically a middle aged woman version of me (and the difference would be??) the other is The Small Person – I remember a bloke I once knew who made this insane defence of marrying thick people by saying ‘you can have fun with your friends and argue with your wife, or argue with your friends and have fun with your wife’ – that’s flawed on every conceiveable level, and I very much like having someone around who’s my intellectual superior, and challenges my rather too black-and-white thinking on a regular basis (I’m sure my Edward VIII faux-pas wouldn’t have happened yesterday if she’d been at home. And I certainly would never have had a journalistic career without her intervention!). So, heavy female influence on my life, to be sure.
  5. A super-power? I think I’d have to go with super-speed-reading-and-information-retention – I’d use that day to fill my head with all the things I really ought to be aware of if only I managed my time better and read more books – hows that for a topical answer on world book day?

Thanks Liz, very interesting questions! :o)

Now, time to get ready for tonight’s gig, I need to pick Theo up in less than an hour.

Soundtrack – John Coltrane, ‘Live At Birdland’.

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It's World Book Day

Today is . So in honour of that, let’s do top three book recommendations – head over to The Forum and post your own.

Here’s mine, in no particular order;

Long Walk To Freedom – Nelson Mandela
Crime and Punishment – Dostoevsky
Life After God – Douglas Coupland.

what’s yours?

Soundtrack – John Coltrane, ‘Coltrane’.

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I don't need cheering up…

… but if I did this review would do the trick! – a very nicely written review from one of the guys on Loopers Delight. Always good to get well written reviews, even if they are constructively ‘balanced’. This ones is completely positive so scores even higher. 🙂

Soundtrack – John Coltrane, ‘Coltrane’ (I’ve got more John Coltrane CDs that almost any other artist – it’s between ‘Trane and Bruce Cockburn. I don’t listen to him nearly as often as I should… might be time for a Coltrane-binge.)

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Random thoughts on royalty…

A thread on another website about Charles and Camilla got me thinking. Someone posted something to the effect that Chuck and Cam are the real deal, love that lasts etc. citing his being forced by royal convention to marry Diana as some kind of mitigation for him treating her like shit.

My thoughts on Diana are mixed, but largely she strikes me as someone with some pretty formidable in-laws in a grim situation who by and large made the best of it. While she was clearly ‘privileged’, she also did more for charity, and more to publicly raise awareness about certain issues that just about any other royal ever (homelessness and HIV being two of her main causes.)

Anyway, the thought about being ‘trapped by convention’ got me thinking about Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne to marry Wallace Simpson – here’s his abdication speech – what a class act. He carried himself with dignity, chose to follow love over some bogus duty to an archaic institution, and – apparently – lived for decades with his wife. That site says he died in 1972 – I had no idea he lived that long. I wonder how often the Queen rang to see how he was doing? Wallace lived til 1986.

So, Charles, instead of treating Diana like crap could have chosen the road less travelled – his great uncle had been there before, so it’s not like it was completely unprecedented, and chosen not to marry Diana, but instead married Camilla in the first place.

But no, he didn’t, he messed up Di’s life instead.

[EDIT]OK, I guess it was too good to be true that we had a royal with genuine conviction… aparently Edward and Wallace had Nazi sympathies and the whole deal was considerably more sordid that I thought 10 minutes ago – time to buy a book on the history of the monarchy![/EDIT]

So, I do wish he and Cam all the best, I honestly do (like they give a shit), but if they think we’re all going to forget the story of his first wife, he’s even more stupid that the rest of his hideously inbred family.

Soundtrack – Joni Mitchell, ‘Turbulent Indigo’.

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Life affirming music

So last night I went to see Gary Husband’s Force Majeure band play at Ronnie Scott’s. Unbelieveable. Truly marvellous, energising, inspiring, life affirming music. Very dense and complex and spooky at times, but never less than awe-inspiring. The quality of the musicians is one rarely seen on one stage – Matthew Garrison was obviously a big draw, being one of my favourite bassists in the whole world, a great player and a lovely guy. He played really really well, and the rest of the band, made up of some of America’s finest fusion musicians were all on top form.

The audience was chock full of lovely bassists, including Mo Foster, Dave Swift, Nick Fyffe, Oroh Angiama, Michael Mondesir, Nathan King, Dave Marks – it’s rare that we all get to meet up, so much fun was had.

If you can get to any of the gigs, please please do – it’s not easy listening, it’ll demand your attention and energy, but it’s a band not to be missed, playing Gary’s beatiful compositions.

Go on, go and book tickets!

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