Tag: guitar

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and on a lighter note

Had a fun weekend, though not got as much work done as I should have.

Starting Friday lunch-time, it was yet another ‘last ever’ gig for the RFH Foyer as booked by JazzShark. It was a particularly fitting booking, as it was Rebecca Hollweg, a fabulous singer/songwriter, with a great lil’ quartet, featuring Andy Hamill on bass – one of my favourite bassists in the country. It was a lovely gig, with yet another ‘thanks, Sue!’ speech at the end, and a great rendition of ‘How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You’, with Winston Clifford changing the words to ‘How Sweet It Is To Be Booked By Sue’!

Friday night was a Soul Space meeting, planning the next service, which I won’t be at. They’re doing a Labyrinth service, which are always fun – see labyrinth.org.uk for more on what they are (and do the online version – it’s very chilled and lovely.)

Saturday started with teaching, and then in the afternoon it was Malcolm’s ordination at St Paul’s Cathedral. Malcolm (and his other half, Meryl) have been at St Luke’s for ages, and have had a pretty huge influence on the way the church looks, feels and thinks. Very lovely peoples. Malcolm has been at Vicar Hogwarts for a couple of years, and was ordained on Saturday. I got there 10 minutes before the service started and already all the seats were gone – seems there are lots of people in London who like the high-camp of some C of E pomp and ceremony on a Saturday afternoon. So I stood at the back, gave Malcolm a wave as he came in, and left after about half an hour, and headed over to The RFH, to go to the Patti Smith gig at Meltdown.

Was there very early, so was following the score in the Tennis. Murray was two sets to love up, looking good for another upset. Fell apart in the third, lost it 6-0. Was a break up in the fourth, all going v. well, but the length of the match got the better of him, and he still lost. It was a very odd experience just following the score – no news, no report, no audio. Just the score changing on my phone screen as I hit refresh… Very sad to see him lose.

Anyway, Juliet turned up, and we went in to see John Cale – who was on startling form. The opening tune was a spooky surreal monologue in the style of Velvet Underground’s ‘The Gift’, which some fantastic spacey noises.. and a very recogniseable bass sound… …which I soon recognised as being Flea from the Chili Peppers. I’m still not sure if I really dug what he was doing… it was a lot more pentatonic/obvious lick-based stuff than the rest of the band, but maybe in needed that to ground it… hmmm

Anyway, the rest of the set blended so many fantastic elements, from the spookiness of the opener, to some really straight ahead piano-playing singer-songwriter stuff through to full on Neil Young stylee guitar-rage in the last track. A sublime set. Always good to see the old guys rock out!

during the break, we realised we were sat next to Roy Harper, a genial chatty bloke, for sure, who amusingly kept throwing plastic cups at the losers in front of us who kept blocking our view by standing in stupid places.

Patti’s gig was very fine too – she played through the whole ‘Horses’ album, start to finish, and then did ‘My Generation’ as cover at the end, not wholly convincingly, with a ‘rise up and take the streets’ rant in the middle… A fine sentiment, but a tricky one to deliver in the middle of a song without looking like a raving polemicist. Discourse works better than shouting, methinks. Or am I just getting old?

Anyway, I was very pleasantly surprised by her set – most of Rock’s sacred cows have no place, in my humble opinion, being on the throne they are on, but she was entertaining, engaging, intelligent and captivating.

Sunday – church in the morning (sermon was way too long and I can’t can’t handle full-on exegesis on a Sunday morning…), followed by coffee in Highgate with Steve and Lorna, after which the three of us meet up with Harry, Karen and Juliet for more cakes. Too much cake.

And finally, last night, called round to Orphy’s to drop off a copy of Jazz Review (he does the blindfold test this month), and ended up helping him register orphyrobinson.com and getting orphyrobinson.blogspot.com set up as well, so he’s now got a news page, and an atom feed – here.

Soundtrack – Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder, ‘Talking Timbuktu’.

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CD piracy…

So, 1 in 3 CDs sold worldwide is a pirate copy. I wonder how that stacks up against the percentages of money made by record companies vs artists. Are the pirates ripping off the labels more than the labels are ripping off the artists? I suspect not.

From the article –

“Jorgen Larsen, president of music producer Universal Music International, said the livelihood of the artists and music industry workers was at risk if piracy continued to rise.”

I think the livelihood of the artists is put more at risk by signing to Universal than it is from piracy. I very much doubt anyone is bootlegging my CDs. In fact, I’d be slightly flattered if they were. I’m sure there are some CDR copies kicking around, and I hope that they inspire the owners to turn up to gigs. There’s certainly enough MP3 material of mine around to make up a whole CD of extras (moreso if you’re in the street team), but people still buy the CDs, come to the gigs, and everything’s ticking along quite nicely. I’m certainly more scared of one day having a breakdown and accidentally signing a record deal than I am of discovering 100,000 copies of Grace And Gratitude for sale in a Delhi street market – in fact, if they did, I’d probably just go and do a gig there!

Perhaps the markup on CDs is to blaim? If the labels are still trying to charge £16 a CD to music buyers in India/China/Mexico etc, how on earth do they expect them to come up with that kind of money? Maybe they should look at ways of making it more attractive to buy the real thing, rather than just blaiming the pirates for filling a gap in the market. If the record companies weren’t so obviously rapacious in their dealings with artists, and such a rip-off in terms of what they charge the end user, then people might feel more generously disposed towards them. How about if they started to give away 20% of their profits to arts projects in developing countries?

No, instead they blame ‘organised crime’ – I’d be interested to see the evidence for this. It’s quite possible that ‘organised crime’ units are somehow involved, but it’s equally possible that there are a bunch of opportunists who see a gap in the market created by the greed of the majors.

It’s like the Metallica/Napster debacle – I, along with 10 million other people, found it very hard to feel much sympathy for the multi-millionaire Lars Ulrich in his claims that he was being ripped off by Napster. If every single item of Metallica merch was fair trade, if they were pressuring their record company to encourage staff to unionise and putting pressure on for fairer wages around the world, if they implimented a scheme in Metallica PLC where the top paid person could only earn 9 times what the lowest paid person could earn, I’d be feeling a little more generous towards his claims that kids in colleges downloading Metallica albums were destroying his livelihood.

Soundtrack – Ali Farka Toure with Ry Cooder, ‘Talking Timbuktu’ (heard a piece on Radio 4 last night about Ali, and dug out this CD again – fantastic stuff – brings back marvellous memories of sitting at Rick Turner‘s house in Santa Cruz, discovering amazing new music from around the world, and listening to Rick’s remarkable stories.)

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Edinburgh Fringe Programme now online!!

Got back from a weekend in Berwick On Tweed (more on that later) to find the Edinburgh Fringe programme had been posted out. And it’s also now online for your perusal!!

Obviously, the first place to go is to the entry for my show, where you’ll want to buy tickets for multiple nights for you and your friends.

Then, from blog-world, there’s Richard Herring’s show, from bass-world, there’s guy pratt’s show, from jazz-world, there’s Julie McKee’s show, from RFH Foyer gigs-world, there’s The Big Buzzard Boogie Band show, from last year’s showbiz pals-world, there’s Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden’s show, from guitar-world, there’s Antonio Forcione’s show and from unmissable gig-world, there’s Spearhead.

So, spread the word, tell your friends and get them to come to the show, and I’ll have flyers for you to download everso soon!

Soundtrack – Prefab Sprout, ‘From Langley Park To Memphis’.

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Weekend of musical friends

So, Friday was the last commuter jazz gig (or ‘computer jazz’, if you’re the chief exec. of the South Bank) before the big refurb kicks in at the end of Meltdown at the end of June. Peter King was playing, and was marvellous – very fine saxophonist, even if he does play alto (not a big fan of alto, generally – it’s just a tenor sax for kids) – and the aforementioned malapropism-prone chief exec. did a lovely speech about lady jazzshark who as previously mentioned has been booking bands at the RFH since prehistoric days, and will be much missed.

So, naturally, sharky person had a big party afterwards, at a friend’s GORGEOUS flat overlooking the Thames along by Blackfriars bridge. That’s one hell of a view to wake up to each morning, for sure. Much celebration took place, and by all accounts no small about of debauchery, though I left at 10.30, so thankfully missed all that.

Saturday was a fun day – started by meeting up with the wonderful Todd Reynolds – an outstanding violinist, and truly lovely wonderful person. Todd and I have exchanged emails and been reading eachother’s posts to Loopers Delight for years, but hadn’t met, so it was great to put a face to an email address and spend the day filling in the gaps. We went back down to the RFH Foyer for the last Saturday gig before the closure (and therefore JazzShark’s last saturday gig) – many fragile hung over people there from the party the night before (fools… ;o) ) – and a lovely short film about a couple in their 70s who meet at the free gigs in the foyer to dance together.

After that, gave Todd the shortened tourist trip round central London (interesting that my tourist trips never take in Buckingham Palace – maybe my anti-royalist sentiments are spilling over into my appreciation of what’s valuable to see in town. I always take people past Downing Street and along Whitehall (the seat of our sham-democracy) and Trafalgar Square (site of many a kick-ass protest) and down to the South Bank (home of the arts), but ignore any of the Royal nonsense, unless it’s for a quick walk round St James’ Park.

I digress… A fantastic day spent wandering round with Todd, all in. Top bloke, fun day.

Then home, to pick up TSP to head out to Lizzie’s leaving do, only TSP is behind on writing work (TSP is high powered celeb journo, interviewing the great and good about all things healthy), so I leave cinderella at home and head off to the ball on my own.

Lizzie is one of life’s lovely people – a fantastic photographer/photo journalist, and very funny lady. Party was full of lovely people, naturally, with no repeats of Friday night’s debauchery (totally different group of friends here…) So good send off for Lizzie, but crap that she’s moving (only to Bristol, so we’ll still see lots of her, but still…)

Sunday – head off to church, but it’s an ‘away match’ (meaning that a family from outside the church are having a christening – though it turns out they were from the church, I just didn’t know them – major black mark against my name for not having said hi to them!!) anyway – decide to go for fry-up at nice cafe on the Holloway Road was Gawain instead. Gawain is a marvellous producer/programmer/musician who has got heavily into community music education and is doing amazingly well. Very inspiring to talk to, with lots of plans for collaborative stuff.

Then home, domestic stuff, drop mixing desk off at St Luvvies to be used at Soul Space service before heading to Finsbury Park tube to meet up with BJ and Juliet to go to Joe Jackson/Todd Rungren gig at Hammersmith homebrew Apollo or whatever it’s called this week.

The reason BJ and I are at the gig is that the lovely Todd Reynolds who I met up with on Saturday is playing with his amazing string quartet Ethel as opening act and collaborator with Joe and Todd (BJ played with Todd in John Cale’s band in the 90s). Juliet had a ticket anyway, so Todd got her an aftershow pass and we all piled down to the gig together.

Ethel kicked out – wow. Incredible energy and performance, and great gig. They looked great, played great, the music was magic and the audience were captivated.

Then Joe Jackson came on – now I’m quite a fan of Joe’s singles collection (playing at the moment, in an attempt to rescue my memory of his music), but the gig was poor. Very poor. The sound was very compressed, and solo voice and piano versions of his uptempo stuff didn’t, to my ears, work at all. The new material was particularly bad. Some of his piano playing was lovely, but the overall feeling was one of big disappointment.

So a lot was rest on Todd Rungren’s shoulders. And he didn’t rise to the occasion either. The songs all sounded thrown away, I couldn’t remember one snippet of melody at the end of any of them, his guitar sound was possibly the worst I’ve ever heard at a ‘big’ gig, and again I was left contemplating self harm as a more pleasant sensory experience than the assault my ears were currently being subjected to.

Then, all change once again. Ethel come back on, and we’re back to the gig being amazing – a Gilbert and Sullivan tune, a couple each from Joe and Todd and an encore of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ (after Todd’s solo set I wanted to rename it ‘While My Guitar is Gently put through a wood-chipper’) – I’ve never seen a couple of aging rock stars so outrageously upstaged by a string quartet in my life. If the gig had been 40 minutes of Ethel, followed by 80 minutes of all five of them on stage playing a mixture of hits and misses, it could have been a breathtaking gig. As it was, it was two hours of dire self-indulgent horse-shit topped and tailed by two exquisite but far too short sets.

Ethel were a revelation, and are destined for hugeness. Please go and buy their CD, I guarantee you won’t regret it.

After all-too-brief chat with Todd after the gig, with just enough time to introduce him to Juliet and blag a copy of the Ethel album, it was time to hop on the last tube home.

Soundtrack – Joe Jackson, ‘Stepping Out – The Best Of’.

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Musos, check this out…

The Cheat just sent me a link to this fantastic new pedal –

It’s designed so that you can use an expression pedal to change the parameters on any normal FX pedal – it just attaches to the pot in question, and moving the pedal turns the pot! What a genius idea. This really ought to win design awards. Very very useful indeed. One of my gripes with pedals for years has been that you can’t tweak them in real time, or change them easily from song to song. Now you can.

Genius.

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Another fine Darbucka gig

So last night I was back at Darbucka, which, contrary to previous knowledge is no longer underneath India EC1 – they’ve taken over the upstairs part now, and the whole place is Darbucka! How cool is that?

Anyway, ’twas my third gig there, and I love playing there. The atmosphere is fab, the seating very relaxed and the owner, Ahmad is a good friend and supporter of live music.

Last night was extra-specially fun due to my two special guests, BJ Cole and Cleveland Watkiss.

The slightly surreal air that seems to drift around at my gigs began even before the show started, with George Galloway being in the venue when we got there… …sadly, he wasn’t there for an evening of mellow bass noodling, and left not long after we arrived to set up.

First set was just me, doing my thing. It was fun to play a slightly longer set, and get to play a couple of old tunes I haven’t played for a while – Highway One, and No More Us And Them, as well as a couple of new tunes – one slow country-ish thing so far called ‘What Happens When You Listen To Too Much Gillian Welch Late At Night’ (subject to change), and another untitled one, dedicated to Eric Roche a great friend and genius musician, going through a bit of a rough patch. (speaking of Eric, he’s playing at The Troubadour in Earl’s Court tonight, and is unmissably good – please go along and support him, you’ll thank me afterwards.)

Response to both old and new tunes was good, and Cleveland arrived during the last song of the set, so that was good!

Second set began with me on my own doing on tune (No More Us And Them, I think), and then BJ joined me for the next world premier of the evening – it was the first time BJ and I had played anything that was pre-written together. Usually, we just start playing and see where it goes. This time, we did a tune that BJ had joined in on in my soundcheck, a new tune called ‘So Long And Thanks For All The Thumbs’, and he added a huge amount of loveliness to the track! We then followed that with a bleepy, trippy improv, which ended with BJ in fine industrial soundscape mode, wringing all manner of weird and wonderful sounds from his knitting machine. What a fab player!

So I then kicked him off the stage, and brought up guest #2 for world premier #3 – Cleveland Watkiss. This was the first time Cleveland and I had played together on stage – we’ve played together twice before, but both times in my living room. He started us off with a clicky vocal percussion track, which I looped, slightly out of time, and we glitched it into a really really cool percussive soundscape with layers of oohs and aahs, and some dubby vocal samples, just him singing and me tweaking. At one point I was tempted to join in, but it didn’t need it, so I carried on tweaking and he carried on singing, and that was tune #1.

The second tune we did I started it off, funky thing in Am, which built up with layers and layers of fantastic beatbox into a full on clubby dancey thing, wah-wah guitars, clattering drums, dub vocals, all from just he and I. Another big success.

To finish off, I closed the main set with ‘People Get Ready’, then got BJ and Cleveland back for a mellow country ballad improv thing which just topped off the evening perfectly. A resounding success!

Hopefully I’ll be back at Darbucka before too long, I love it there!

if you want to get BJ’s or Cleveland’s CDs, you can get BJ’s here and Cleveland’s here (BJ’s newest album Trouble In Paradise is fantastic, as is Cleveland’s duet with Nikki Yeo)

If you were at the gig, please post your thoughts over in the reviews section of my forum.

Soundtrack – Maxwell, ‘Embrya’; Lewis Taylor, ‘Lewis Taylor’.

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Some thoughts on live music in the UK…

Recently, The Mean Fiddler, one of the largest groups of music venues in the UK, were
bought out by Clear Channel – the american media giant, who have begun to take over the US airwaves and gig scene. There’s been a pretty vocal backlash to their activities in the US, but the complicity of a lot of big name bands and labels has lead to them getting a serious stranglehold on the american live music scene.

The ramifications in the US are pretty scary – Clear Channel sign exclusive deals with acts to handle all their live work, so only book them into their venues. They promote them on their own radio stations, and no doubt work with other ‘media partners’ for greater exposure. It’s the live equivalent of a major record label deal. They also only book support acts signed to them, and so become the only apparent option for a lot of bands trying to ‘make it’ (a misnomer if ever I heard one, but still…)

In the UK, The Mean Fiddler already have a pretty dreadful reputation for not treating bands too well. They are a big player in the London live music scene, owning The Mean Fiddler, The Astoria, The Jazz Cafe, The Forum, The Borderline and a handful of other venues. They also have a fairly large stake in the Glastonbury Festival, as well as the Reading and Leeds festivals. All that is now in the hands of Clear Channel.

The situation here doesn’t look quite as grim as the US in that there’s some competition. The biggest competitor to the Mean Fiddler Group is probably Carling – the brewery that now have a series of ‘Carling Academy’ venues around the country. However, the problem for musicians is that Carling are, not surprisingly, primarily interested in selling beer. So, they’ll book music based on its beer sales potential, and set venues out to maximise traffic to the bar, not to make the listening situation ideal. I saw Nick Harper at the Bar Academy in Islington. Now, Nick’s a pretty high energy performer for one bloke and an acoustic guitar, but he’s still just a bloke and an acoustic guitar. The venue was standing only. No seats, except stools at the bar. It didn’t look like seating was an option. Why? Cos people sat in rows in seats don’t get up to go to the bar mid-gig. They wait til the break. That’s no good when you’re not concerned with the music, just selling beer.

This is not good news for people who play quieter music. Particularly those that are signed to labels who do deals with certain venue chains. You turn up to the gig, thinking it’s a gig, and realise you’re playing in a bar, with a low stage, the room isn’t really set out to focus on you, rather to filter people towards the bar. You play louder to try and keep people’s attention (a standing, drinking audience is never going to be as quiet or attentive as a seated one), and all of a sudden you’re thinking ‘maybe next album I need to put some more uptempo songs in there for situations like this.

It doesn’t affect me all that much, given that there are loads of really cool little venues in the UK, most of them provincial theatres and dedicated music clubs that lap up interesting original music, and still manage to make money over the bar. But I fear for my musician friends who end up getting sucked into the circuit of these venues – it’s pretty demoralising when your audience are getting steadily more hammered, and corespondingly loud…

Have a look at clearchannelsucks.org for more on what Clear Channel have done in the US.

Soundtrack – The Bears, ‘Live’; Maxwell, ‘Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite’; A Mighty Wind, ‘OST’; Roseanne Cash, ‘ Rules Of Travel’.

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One busy day in the studio!

Had a really fun studio session today. It was with Andrew Buckton, a singer/songwriter who lives in Bath. I’ve played with Buck for years, and been on his last two albums. We did Greenbelt together last year.

This was his first recording project for about 4 years, and was designed to be very low maintainance – one day to record everything, just him, me, Jez on piano/keys and Tom Hooper on drums.

So we set up in Jez’ home studio this morning and got to work. We’d not heard any of the songs ahead of time, so the form with each track was for Buck to play it, or at least a bit of the verse and chorus, we chat about possible arrangement ideas, sometimes try out a few bars of a particular idea, then hit record and go. Lots of the tunes were first take, one take jobs, which is particularly satisfying. Only one actually had an edit in the middle – we re-did the instrumental playout on one song to change the chord progression we were playing to. On most of them, there’ll be the occasional bar of bass/guitar or keys that needs cutting ‘n’ copying from elsewhere in the song just to tidy up the timing, but for the most part it was all done there and then – solos were recorded live, Any track that needed bass note and chords from me was played that way in real time with no looping – i just came up with ways of voice the chords to be able to play both. It was a very fun challenge.

Bass-wise I used all three Moduluses, and just for fun wedged a bit of foam under the strings near the bridge on the four string – it sounded amazing! I’m definitely going to keep the foam in my bag for studio sessions in future. Made the bass feel very different to play, and the sound was fantastic – much more old-school sound.

A couple of the tracks had fun slidey fretless lines, one had a really incessant fast 16th not octave pattern (which was the first time I got to try out recording this thumb-down, thumb-up, index finger, middle finger sequence on someone else’s music, using it to play two notes on the low note then two on the octave, playing 16s at about 120bpm, which was harder than if we’d been doing it at 180, as it’s a technique that lends itself most readily to daft-fast playing.)

I took my whole live rig with me – loopers, mixing desk ‘n’ all. Didn’t use any of the loopage, but did need the mixing desk to set up monitoring for myself and buck, and used a couple of the channels on the desk as preamps for acoustic guitar and keyboard. The moral of the story is TAKE EVERYTHING to a studio session. I always take whatever I might possibly in my wildest imagination need. If you don’t use it, it’s good exercise carrying it to and from the car anyway. Be prepared – I was a cub-scout, and a crap one, but I do try and stick to that bit of the motto…

The arranging side of the session was as much fun as the playing – Buck, like most singer/songwriters, tends to favour certain kinds of feels and guitar strumming patterns, so the challenge is finding ways to subvert that into another style that a) suits his voice and the melody and b) says something about the subject matter. Buck’s songs are often pretty bleak, sometimes with a redemptive twist at the end. Others are more devotional spiritual songs. Lovely stuff that requires and deserves sensitive arrangements. I think today we did the best job we’ve done on any of his albums. Tom Hooper played beautifully on drums, and was a delight to play with – very relaxed feel, fantastic timimg and a great sound. And he’s a nice bloke – what more could one want from a drummer??

So now it’s down to jez to do the mixing – tidy up the audio files, get the levels sorted, add reverb, compression, EQ and any other processing that might need doing, and probably add a keyboard overdub or two. I’m really looking forward to hearing the finished product, and of course, I’ll let you know when it’s available!

Soundtrack – Lucy Kaplansky, ‘Ten Year Night’.

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Blogless and desperate!

Ah, blog’s back online – was blogless for a long time, thanks to a crash on Sarda’s new server, but it’s all back now. Phew!

Right, onto blog-things –

Went to a gig last night – M83 (be warned, the website plays loud unwanted music at you) were the headline attraction, who I’d heard of via The Cheat’s scrobbler list, and actually heard thanks to the lovely Lizzy at their record label, who sent me CDs to hear. Their sound is kind of big ambient meets punked-up rock beats. Quite an overwhelming sound, on the new album especially, relentless huge synths and wall of noise guitars, but in an anthemic soundscape kind of way. Most enjoyable, if a little oppressive. The live experience was pretty much what you’d expect – the same thing only louder and noisier. They played lots of stuff from both albums (I prefer the first one – ‘Dead Cities, Read Seas and Lost Ghosts’).

The support act was Pure Reason Revolution – whose bassist Chloe is an occasional student of mine, and who I have a few mutual friends with, so it was great to get to see them play at last. Their sound is VERY mid-70s psychedelic prog-rock – think Hawkwind, early Floyd, Blue Oyster Cult, with a touch of Rhiannon-era Fleetwood Mac. They even look like the product of a fight between The Bay City Rollers and Flock Of Seagulls – rarely have more mullets been seen on stage since the mid-80s. Still, their set was great, and if they’d been around when I was 16, they’d have been my favourite band in the world ever. I’ll hopefully catch a headline set of theirs soon.

So inevitably, after a gig like that last night, I’ve been recording big proggy soundscapes today – I’ve done two, following a similar theme on each, we’ll see whether either ends up being releaseable… Might have to do a download-only soundscapes album soon.

Soundtrack – M83, ‘Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts’; Kings X, ‘Live All Over The Place.

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I'm in a composing frame of mind…

well, I’ve been recording stuff, anyway. After a rather long hiatus, the impetus to record came back with the duo project with Cleveland. We recorded the duo stuff, and I left my bass rig wired up to the computer so I could record some solo bits ‘n’ bobs. So I’ve been recording a couple of tracks a day for the last few days, and some of it’s rather good.

The format is as usual, in that I’m recording the stuff live, largely made up on the spot, but I’m then editing the tracks, and trying to get some kind of structure from the initial version, and then re-learn that to get a nice arrangement together. We’ll see how well it works!

The good thing is that I’ll have a couple of new tunes to premier at the upcoming gigs, which is nice, and will probably throw one of them in the direction of the street team, later this week. If they behave themselves.

Other news – the first of my show sponsors for Edinburgh has confirmed. Working on three more (if anyone reading this fancies sponsoring the show, you can email me for details). If I get all four, it’ll cover the cost of the venue hire, significantly droppping my financial risk!

Have also sorted out accomodation for while we’re there, thanks to hugely generous and lovely friends in Edinburgh. It’s all coming together!

So, life is good. Now I just need to get on with writing some of the teaching stuff that I’ve got to do, for musicdojo.com and BGM. Busy-busy!

Soundtrack – Zakir Hussein, ‘Making Music’; some old MP3s of unreleased stuff of mine; Tommy Sims, ‘Peace and Love’; Ani DiFranco, ‘Little Plastic Castle’; Orphy Robinson, ‘When Tomorrow Comes’.

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