Tag: christmas

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Illness and website woes

Bugger, I’m ill. Been fighting off a sore throat for days, and this morning it’s finally taken hold. Was woken up in the night every time I tried to swallow – v. painful. And it’s affecting me ears too. So guzzling lemsip and throat-comfort tea, and staying dosed up on Echinacea, Sambucol, Zinc and Vit C.

Was meant to be going to see my grandparents today with my mum, but instead have had to lend mum our car to go on her own, which is crap.

Added to that, there’s been a balls-up with my webspace which is telling me I’m over my bandwidth allocation. Which is balls. it was initially 6gig, I then paid an extra tenner a year for an extra gig (when I first put downloadable albums up and had a rush on those), and then let that extra gig lapse last month. And now it’s dropped to 3gig/month!! Big mistake somewhere along the line, and not what I need in the run-up to christmas at all….

grrrrr. bah humbug.

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dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Our present to ourselves last christmas was a DVD player – it had just got too annoying to go to the local video rental place and find that they had it on DVD but not video, and that the DVD had loads of cool extras. So we gave in.

This year, our pressie to ourselves is a Freeview box – like cable or satellite without the millions of shit channels. You just get the free-to-air stuff that’s worth watching – BBC 3, 4 and News 24, More4, E4 and some other vaguely interesting stuff. And all in digital loveliness… which is great til the signal drops, then it goes mental… Anyway, lots of TV fun to be had – from this evening’s viewing, More 4 and BBC four seem to be showing a lot of shows that are like TV versions of Radio 4 shows, which is just fine by me.

So that’s our chrissy pressie to ourselves. And this is my christmas present to you – enjoy.

Soundtrack – Gillian Welch, ‘Time (The Revelator)’.

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Ingrid Laubrock at the Vortex

Last night was my third time at the Vortex in a week – fourth time in two weeks – this time to see Ingrid Laubrock, who was there with her quartet – Seb Rochford on drums, larry bartley on bass and Barry Green on piano.

It was a much more ‘jazz’ gig than anything I’ve been to for a while, a ‘ting ting t-ting’ gig, but with plenty of interesting moments and some really interesting compositions. It’s really nice to hear a tenor player who’s not gone the Coltrane/Brecker route – Ingrid’s sound seems closer to a Dexter Gordon/Joe Henderson sound, which her compositions are more like 70s-miles mixed with 60s Wayne Shorter and a fair dose of avante garde weirdness. All good stuff.

The main attraction for me was seeing Seb Rochford play – I did a gig with Seb a while ago ( thought it was three years ago, he says less than two years… will have to check back into my old blog…) down in Brighton, with Tess Garroway, which was a fantastic experience. He was clearly a remarkable player then, and it’s been in my mind to get him involved in something every since (I haven’t worked with a drummer on a me-project since, so it still hasn’t happened…). Since then, he’s gone on to come one of the emerging stars of the British jazz scene, with his bands Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland – Polar Bear having been nominated for the Mercury Music Award this year, and Acoustic Ladyland having been on Jools Holland’s show.

His play with Ingrid was fabulously inventive, deconstructing the implied rhythm of the tune into shards of time that bore little metric relation to the initial pulse but carried the intention of the tune forward in a way that ‘normal’ jazz drumming just wouldn’t have done. Really inspiring playing.

Both Polar Bear and Ingrid’s band are playing a Christmas party on 15th december at “The Others”, 6-8 Manor Road, Stoke Newington. Sounds like it could be an amazing night.

[edit – the gig with Seb was Sept 17th 2003…]

Soundtrack – Peter Gabriel, ‘Up’.

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wise and learned ones, I salute your solo bassness…

Just taken a big-ass pile of CD and t-shirt orders over to the post-office. Seems like solo bass goodies are this year’s must have christmas pressie! I salute your musical taste and sartorial discernment!

For those of you still stuck for what to buy your Gran, head over to my online shop – if she’s already got all my CDs (highly likely), then a Michael Manring or Trip Wamsley CD, coupled with a ‘bass: the final frontier’ skinny tee should keep her happy well into the new year.

Go on, shop til you drop. 😉

Soundtrack – John Martyn, ‘Solid Air’.

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the patience of a toddler at Christmas.

This morning I was woken by a delivery man, with a big box for me.

Inside the big box was this –

It’s a ‘looperlative LP1’ – a new loop-box that I’m beta-testing. The feature-set thus far is unbelievable. It’s going to be the coolest hardware looper ever built that’s for sure.

The only problem is, I haven’t got a UK power supply that’ll work with it yet! I’ve got one on order but it’ll be a couple of days… so I have to wait, itching to try it out, to get looping, to make some lovely music.

It’s rather exciting, so it is.

Soundtrack – Free, ‘The Free Story’.

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home from the vets

The Fairly Aged Feline is home now. The vet gave him a chemo injection which has reduced the size of teh tumor considerably already (cats are amazing creatures – far better at getting better than we are!), and a steroidal anti-inflammatary to reduce the swelling in his stomach, and bring down the fluid levels in his body cavity.

And now he’s here, lethargic, but seemingly happy. Picking and choosing when he wants cuddles and when he wants to be left alone. Complaining about the lack of v. tasty food. He and his fellow fairly aged feline are now reaquainted after much sniffing and some tentative mutual washing.

He’s currently sat behind me on the floor of the office, probably waiting to see what strange bass students I’ll be bringing in for him to sniff today. Straight back into his usual routine then.

Soundtrack – Eric Roche, ‘With These Hands’ (not bought it yet? put it on your christmas list!)

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And it's goodnight from him

Ronnie Barker, star of The Two Ronnies, Porridge and one of Britain’s best-known comedy actors and writers, has died aged 76.

What a sad sad loss. Without a doubt, one of the finest comedy actors and writers Britain has ever seen. When they recently brought back the best of the Two Ronnies on BBC1, the thought that they might be gearing up for some new material was fantastic – That Ronnie Barker hadn’t been writing comedy for 15 years seemed like such a waste. His love of word play, and remarkable facility with language meant that it was comedy that often required focussed listening, and it was justification for their writing when the ‘Four Candles’ sketch was recently voted the nations favourite comedy sketch. (It was that sketch that inspired the titles of two of the tunes on Lessons Learned From An Aged Feline Pt II)

So he’ll be hugely missed, and we’ll now never have that one last Christmas special. Just endless hours of Two Ronnies and Porridge videos to remind us of one of the funniest people any of us have ever seen.

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and in junk-box # 2…

mainly old school books sadly. Very dull, all now in the recycling. A large pile of old christmas cards, many from people I have no recollection of whatsoever, a handful of 20 year old letters, my 10 metres swimming certificate (acheived on 6th Oct 1980 – that’s getting framed and put on the wall!), my A Level project on pearl mussels, which might make an interesting read before I recycle it (hey, it was the only A level I got!), some of my college certificates (still stained with puke from where someone in the house I lived in at the time threw up in the bag they were in just after I got them, and before I could find out whether or not I’d acheived any sort of qualification at college – I still have no real idea to this day whether I passed my second year… not that I care, obviously, or I’d have rung the college to find out at some point.)

Oh, and a pile of old comics that I’m hoping are worth something, but probably aren’t.

All in all, a fun if not that revealing box of junk.

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As one year ends…

This is a great time of year for me – Christmas, then my Birthday (28th – you missed it) and then New Year – lots of time for reflecting on a year gone by, and looking forward to the year ahead. Time to compile daft lists of favourite things from the last year, and make resolutions about things to do in the coming year. To count my (many) blessings, and resolve to see the good things as they happen in the year ahead.

A couple of books that I find useful for this kind of thinking – Proverbs, attributed to King Solomon in The Bible, here translated by Eugene Peterson – some marvellous advice for living. The link starts you off at Chapter one.

And the Tao Te Ching. taoteching.org is an online version, though not a particularly inspiring translation. (my favourite translation that I’ve looked at so far is This one, by Ralph Alan Dale – definitely worth reading.)

So, anyway, I’m 32 now – not that it really means much; you see all those lists in magazines about ’50 things you should have done before you’re 30′, and I’m usually very relieved not to have done three quarters of them – most seem to involve a high risk of either death (yours or someone else’s), disease or at least a serious loss of dignity… No thanks, my life’s quite exciting enough. You never see ‘do a solo bass gig at the Royal Albert Hall’ on those lists…

One of my ongoing resolutions every year is to practice more, and for 2005, I’ve started early. Been practicing quite a lot in the last few days, hoping to keep it up into the new year. Not writing any new music at the moment, strangely, but I am working on a couple of new technical things that I’m happy with…

Soundtrack – Jonatha Brooke, ‘Plumb’; Brian Eno, ‘Music For Films’; Terje Rypdal, ‘Skywards’.

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Christmas TV gets it right for once…

Usually, Christmas TV is all about blockbuster films, climactic soap storylines and the Queen’s Speech.

This year, Channel Four presented what is arguably the best ever bit of Christmas Day TV – a documentary entitled Who Wrote The Bible?, presented by Robert Beckford. A fascinating look at the origins of the Bible, it’s writers, the earliest manuscripts, the relationship between written word and oral history and the various agendas at work in what was kept in and what was left out. Fabulous viewing. Robert Beckford is a speaker I’ve heard a few times before at Greenbelt – engaging, interesting and massively well researched.

Well done Channel Four! For a self-confessed BBC fanatic like myself, it was interesting to see them being totally outclassed in the quality programming for christmas day this year.

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