Tag: london

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Too long in the wasteland…

…out of blog-dom. So let’s catch up.

When did I blog last? er, 25th, so let’s start from there…

Friday 25th was Rob’s leaving do – Rob’s a friend from church, moving away from London down to Devon (wise man, methinks), and it was lovely to see so many friends turn out to give him a good send off. He’ll be missed…

Saturday 26th – Masterclass at Colchester Academy Of Modern Music‘s Bass Day. Lesson number one in the Steve-makes-mistakes-so-you-can-learn-from-them book is always check the address of the venue – I got an address off the website for what I assumed was the college venue, but was actually the home of the organiser. Got there, rang him, and was fortunately only 5 minutes away. Lesson two is not to trust the RAC website’s directions to anywhere – very shoddy indeed, and resulted in a 45 minute detour on a journey that should’ve taken less than 2 hours anyway…

However, the masterclass went really well – seems like a great little set up at CAMM, run by good people. The questions asked were good, and we were able to talk a lot about the process of learning an instrument and how to apply practice material to real music… A fine day.

This week I’ve been to a couple of gigs – the first was G3 at The Albert Hall – G3 on this tour is Robert Fripp, Steve Vai and Satch. Fripp was up first, and was, as expected, remarkable, playing a beautiful beguiling, deep, rich soundscape, to an audience half captivated, half disinterested. Breathtaking stuff, but pearls before swine methinks for much of the audience. Then Vai came on – did a solo intro on a triple-necked guitar, before getting his band up on stage. Now I had high expectations of Vai’s set – I know he’s an incredibly gifted technician on the guitar and have heard some stuff by him that I really liked, but tonight was a bit of a disappointment. Actually a huge disappointment. Not helped by possibly the worst mix I’ve ever heard in a major concert hall – no drums, very little bass, a tiny bit of keys and second guitar and then Steve’s guitar ripping your face off. And it’s not like I had some weird seats up in the gods – I was not far behind the sounddesk, so apparently in a good aural vantage point. Anyway, the material didn’t grab me at all either, and the shredding got tired very quickly. Especially following Fripp, it seemed unbelieveably dated and teenage. It’s a shame, cos I really wanted to like it, but it so didn’t happen for me. That coupled with the fan on the front of the stage blowing Steve’s hair back… oops.

Last on was Joe Satriani – This is the fourth time I’ve seen satch, and the third time in 18 months, and by far the best. His current band of Matt Bissonette on Bass, Jeff Campitelli on drums and Gaylan Henson on second guitar is, IMO, his strongest ever, the tunes were there, the shredding was well placed, the mix was better, the interplay between the musicians was great, and Fripp joined in on some numbers towards the end of the set. The playing was a bit freer than before, with Joe giving Jeff and Matt a fair bit of space to play, deservedly so, as they are definitely one of the finest old school heavy rock rhythm sections I’ve ever heard.

The encore was matt and jeff with all three guitarists doing Ice Nice, Red (a King Crimson number) and Neil Young’s Rockin’ In The Free World – apart from the obviously surreal experience of seeing Fripp and the Shredders takling Neil Young, it was a great choice of tunes, and Free World an inspired choice of closing number. The aftershow was fun too, with a chance to catch up with Jeff and Matt and Matt’s wife, and see Jakko, Clive and a few other old friends too…

Wednesday night was an altogether more satisfying musical experience, watching Spearhead at the Jazz Cafe (thanks to Deb and Alice for the ticket!) – one of the finest live bands on the planet, they were well on form tonight, if a little loud. A heavier reggae content than the last couple of gigs I’ve seen, they were nonetheless as groovalicious as ever, with Franti’s tales of his recent trip to Iraq an inspiration to everyone there. Very late finish though – why on earth did they start at 9.30 if they wanted to play for three hours? surely starting an hour earlier would have made sense…

Which brings us to last night’s gig, an improv sesh with Filomena, Orphy, Dudley, Roger and Roland, along with some improv theatre and dance stuff. A slightly shakey start before the gig got underway due to a couple of misunderstandings about the nature of the gig, but the gig itself was fantastic – great players, lovely people, some marvellous music and surprisingly engaging dance and theatre stuff. All in all, a marvellous night. It’s always great to catch up with the lovely musicians on these gigs, and Fil gave me space to play a solo tune from the new album, which was a great plug (and I sold a few CDs afterwards too… :o)

anyway, in between all those events, I’ve spent the last week doing album/tour/promo stuff – emailing radio, sending out CDRs, ringing venues etc. all trying to get this bass-show on the road! Things are looking good!

Soundtrack – Cathy Burton, ‘Speed Your Love’; Muriel Anderson, ‘Heartstrings’; me, ‘Lessons Learned From An Aged Feline Pt 1’ and of course more of the new album.

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Like a Rolling Stone… With a Rolling Stone

So I’m sat listening through the lastest set of tiny tweaks on the new album, and the phone rings. It’s Harry Cellist offering me a ticket to see Bob Dylan at the Fleadh in Finsbury Park in 25 minutes! Quick chat to the small person to postpone prearranged domestic chores to a later hour, and I’m on the tube on my way to Finsbury Park to see his Bobness.

Bob has been on my list of ‘artists I really need to see before the drop dead’ for a long time, so I’ve very glad I saw him. There’s something very bizarre about Dylan – no-one else on earth would get away with singing simple blues tunes in the style of a punch drunk tramp impersonating Marge Simpson, and yet there’s something utterly compelling about his performance. Add to that the presence of the mighty Ron Wood on Stage (you can say what you want about jumped up rock stars, Ron Wood is one hell of a guitarist…) and it made for a pretty fine gig.

However, it was a gig in front of about 30,000 people, in a damp field in North London with the sound changing whenever the wind changed direction, not being able to see much and being bumped into by drunk people every couple of minutes.

Contrast that with Friday night’s entertainment, sat in a beautiful old church building in Reading listening to Brian Houston and Sarah Masen sing and play. Both exquisite singer-songwriters, Brian sounding not unlike Bob Dylan in his younger days at times, but with a Van Morrison accent. There were probably 35-40 people there, it was warm, dry, no drunks that I spotted, the sound was close to perfect, the drinks were cheap and the music of an arguably higher quality than most of what goes on on big stages round the country at all the festivals over the summer.

And you missed it.

The good news is that Brian and Sarah are playing in London tomorrow night at Bush Hall in Shepherd’s Bush, along with two other fantastic singer/songwriters, Cathy Burton and Duke Special. Shit, that’s four really really really great acts on one bill. In a lovely venue. In-doors. for about

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Eric Roche is on the mend

a few weeks ago I blogged about my friend, Eric Roche – a fantastic guitarist, who’d be diagnosed with cancer of the saliva gland, and was going in for an op.

Well the great news is the docs say it was a complete success (so far), and he’s back home! Thank God.

Anyway, you can send him messages via the guestbook on his website, and also find out how to order his CDs from there which are amazing – I’ve got all three, and love ’em.

Last night was the Grace Barbeque, followed by ‘grill the bishop’, where Pete Broadbent, the bishop of west london (not sure what his official patch is, but it covers Ealing), was there to answer some questions. And what a remarkably cool bloke he is too. Sadly didn’t wear any weird point hats, and to be honest, I can’t imagine Pete wearing one… Must see that at some point. Lots of questions about a new book that the Church Of England has publish about the nature of church, and its relationship with churches that meet in cafes or nightclubs are are mellow and ambient like Grace is… all good stuff – seems like the C of E is waking up to church not having to happen on a sunday morning with a hymn book and a dude in a dress preaching. Though I quite like that style as well… :o)

Having said I like it, I woke up too late today to go to St Luke’s, so will do some recording today instead.

Soundtrack – yesterday, I was listening to a lot of Peter Gabriel, ‘So’ and ‘Greatest Hits’. as well as Jaco Pastorius, ‘The Birthday Concert’.

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more great live music in London.

Given that he’s so supremely crap at ever letting me know when he’s got a gig on, it was a rare pleasure to see theo travis play with his quartet at Pizza Express on Dean Street (this distinction is an important one, given that Dean Street Pizza Express is a proper jazz club, as opposed to a pizza restaurant with a couple of blokes in the corner playing some jazz…)

Anyway, it was a double bill, with Aussie bossa singer, Karen Lane, who was very good indeed, helped along by having Andy Hamill on bass – one of my favourite double bassists anywhere…

Theo’s quartet also featured Andy, along with Marc Parnell on drums and Simon Colam on piano, looking almost exactly like Howard Jones did 20 years ago… Mixing Theo’s prog fetish with acoustic jazz, his is one of the finest jazz quartets I’ve seen in a long time. It’s mad that bands this good aren’t put on in double bills with the big american jazz stars that come over – it’d be a great way to expose the Barbican and SBC-going masses to some home-grown talent. There aren’t many of the american young jazzers that could keep up with Theo’s quartet, or Ben Castle‘s quartet.

So what else is new? Well, my copy of Adobe Audition 1.5 arrived this morning – which rather helpfully supports VST plugins so I’ve got loads more to choose from, which is nice… Just recorded a fun jazzy piece, with lots of backwards looping, which as with everything else I’m doing may or may not end up on the album. It’s track #25 to be recorded though, so the chances of it being a double album are pretty strong…

Soundtrack – mememememememe.

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A week at the old bailey…

This last week I was on Jury Service. By rights, I should still be on it, given that it’s meant to last for two weeks. If I was still on it, I wouldn’t be writing about it here. However, the criminals of London must’ve been on holiday of late as there just weren’t enough cases to keep all the jurors occupied. The one case I was offered was set to last for months, so I was excused, being self employed ‘n’ all.

Still, it was a fascinating, if fleeting, look at the mechanics of one small part of the english justice system, finding out how jurors are chosen, what the inside of the Old Bailey looks like (and that’s it not really called the Old Bailey – it’s the Central Criminal Court – Old Bailey is the street its in…) and discovering just how much sitting around reading is involved in jury service. I managed to finish a fairly sizeable book in three days for the first time in years! Also met some lovely interesting people – Justine, Jeffrey and Louis, who wasn’t really called Louis, but looked so much like Louis Theroux (clearly we weren’t the first to notice), that a re-christening was in order to keep everyone amused. Marvellous interesting people that made the whole process far less dull that it could have been.

Also alleviating the dullness was the book I was reading – Dave Gorman’s GoogleWhack Adventure. Dave Gorman was the chap who travelled round the world a few years ago looking for other people called Dave Gorman, based on a drunken bet. Well, two years and one more drunken bet further into his life, and he’s travelling round the world meeting people whose websites contain googlewhacks, as found by the previous googlewhack in the chain – doing know what a googlewhack is? go here. Anyway, it’s a supremely funny (as in spit coffee all over yourself in the old bailey funny), endearing, moving and engaging book. The man has a lust for life and a love of meeting new people that makes his hairbrained schemes highly desireable. Get it, it’s great.

Anyway, after being dismissed at around 1 or 2 each day with no cases on offer, it gave me the opportunity to get moving in earnest on this new album, and must material has been recorded. Not sure how much of what’s gone down so far will make the cut, but there are some marvellous ideas that seem to be bubbling around. It’s catching them that’s the fun.

Soundtrack – Iain Archer, ‘Flood the Tanks’; David Torn, ‘What Means Solid, Traveller?’; Pierce Pettis, ‘State Of Grace’; Eric Roche, ‘Spin’; Pat Metheny Group, ‘Quartet’.

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a view of CCM from the outside…

As some of you will know, my early playing career as a pro musician was spent almost exclusively within the gospel and ‘CCM’ scene. CCM stands for ‘contemporary christian music’ and largely represents slightly crap pop songs with words about Jesus… I still do the occasional gospel gig, and play at St Luke’s once in a while (one of my main reasons for choosing to attend St Luke’s when I moved back to London 7 years ago was that they didn’t have a band so I was unlikely to get asked to play bass every week, as happened at just about every church I visited around that time), but not with anything like the regularity I used to – the main reason being that Churches tend not to book instrumental acts to play at any of their gigs or functions…

So anyway, it was with much hilarity and a fair amount of surprise that I read this article from thescotsman.com, as forwarded to me by The Captain – it’s one of the few comments on Christian music I’ve ever read in the UK from outside the church; largely because, with a few exceptions, christian music in the UK is relatively poor quality, and most of the bands that are any good soon cross over into playing ‘normal’ gigs anyway (people like Cathy Burton, Beehive, Fono, Eden Burning, Airstar…) given that, unlike the US where CCM is huge business, it’d be pretty much impossible to sustain a sensible career as a musician in the UK, unless you wrote lots of worship songs as well for other people to sing in church and lived off the royalties.

Anyway, the article is pretty good, and surprisingly friendly.

Soundtrack – I’ve listened to ‘Crescent’ by John Coltrane, featuring Elvin Jones about 7 times today. Incredible stuff.

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mini-tour report.

Dropped Muriel Anderson off at Stansted airport this afternoon, after three gigs with her over the weekend, and three very fine gigs they were.

First up was Lauderdale House in Highgate, part of the acousticmasters.com summer concert series – it was especially nice to catch up with Mo Foster who dropped in to say hi before the gig, and to meet Terry and Hugh who organised the concert series. Performers on the small club venue level rely on a select group of dedicated, generous magic people who put lots of effort into making great music available to concert goers, and Hugh and Terry fit that category. Hugh’s a marvellous guitarist in his own right, and you can catch his at one of the future concerts at Lauderdale… Anyway, the gig went well to a ‘select’ audience, who were very generous in their CD and DVD buying :o)

Saturday was a day off, and a chance for Muriel to see a bit of London (after I dragged her down to Brick Lane for Sarda‘s leaving curry) – the small person and I took Muriel to see Trafalgar Square, Downing Street , The Houses of Parliment Big Ben, Westminster Abbey etc. before walking back along the south bank of the Thames for coffee in the National Theatre…

Sunday was the second of our gigs, this one was at the Ship Theatre, Sevenoaks in Kent, and was part of the Sevenoaks guitar festival, organised by another one of these marvellous promoter people, John Levett. The Ship is a gorgeous theatre, part of a private school, with tremendous acoustics and a lovely listening audience. Muriel and I got to do more duet stuff, experiment with a few improv things as well as playing on eachother’s tunes, and much fun was had by all!

And finally, Monday was back at Traders in Petersfield, promoted once again by the truly marvellous Stiff Promotions – if only every small town in the UK had its own Iain Martin, I’d be touring constantly. Thanks to Iain and Jeff who owns the venue, Traders has a fantastic program of live music, this being my third visit there this year, having played solo and with Michael Manring. As with both my previous Traders gigs, this one was sold out, and Muriel and I did even more duet stuff and improv, definitely boding well for future collaborative stuff.

So a marvellous three gigs. My new mixing desk arrived on Friday morning, so this gave me a chance to try it out, and my setup of Accugroove 110 cabs, QSC poweramp and Mackie Desk worked beautifully for Muriel’s guitar. I’ve never played through another bass rig that could reproduce the sound of an acoustic guitar as faithfully as this!! Amazing stuff.

On the bad news front, Muriel and I found out just before we started the tour that our mutual friend, Eric Roche has just been diagnosed with cancer of the saliva gland. Eric is an oustanding fingerstyle acoustic guitarist, teacher and music journalist, so our careers have followed similar paths in lots of ways, Muriel and I visited Eric today, and he’s doing really well – he’s an amazing guy (his marvellous music makes even more sense when you meet him). Please pray for him, if that’s something you do. And to aid you in your prayers, you should get his latest CD, ‘With These Hands’ – I’m listening to it at the moment and it’s beautiful. He’s playing in Brighton tomorrow night, and has a few other gigs around before he goes for surgery in a couple of weeks time, so catch him live or get the CD, or both. His new CD can be bought here from Amazon (sorry, couldn’t find a small shop that had it listed…) and his site has details of his other CDs. Go get ’em.

Soundtrack – right now, Eric Roche, ‘With These Hands’. earlier on, Denison Witmer, ‘Philadelphia Songs’ (he’s playing in London this week, hoping to catch him at the Windmill in Brixton on Sunday); Nick Harper, ‘Double Life’; Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle, ‘One From The Heart’; Ralph Towner/Gary Peacock, ‘A Closer View’; Joni Mitchell, ‘Travelogue’; James Taylor, ‘October Road’.

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two fine gigs in one day. (oh, and a really hideous guitar show…)

So last night (well, actually two nights ago now, seeing as how it’s 1am Thursday…) – anyway, on Tuesday night, The Cheat and I went to two gigs in one night. Firstly to see Iain Archer supporting Paddy Casey at Scala in Kings Cross. Scala’s a really nice venue – I’ve seen Spearhead and the Dum Dums there before – and Iain was on top form. He had Paul and Phil Wilkinson from The Amazing Pilots on bass and drums, and the trio was incredible. Loads of energy, big grooves (I’ve been a big fan of Phil’s drumming since I first saw the Pilots play, and he just gets better and more inventive…) And Iain’s guitar sounded particularly good. He’s a megastar in the making. It’s been really interesting to watch his music evolve, from his days as a gentle acoustic pop songwriter (his debut album, ‘Playing Dead’ is marvellous, but very different from where he’s at now), through a mid period of experimentation, to where he’s at now, absorbing all kinds of interesting influences and being genuinely brilliant. His new album, ‘Flood The Tanks’ is just out. I’ve got it on order, and from what i’ve already heard, it’s great stuff and highly recommended.

After that, we walked up Pentonville Road to ‘Bar Academy’ in Islington. Got lost twice (once due to me, once due to The Cheat), to see Nick Harper. Nick’s great. I was introduced to his music by Catherine Streetteam (thanks!), and then saw him play at Greenbelt last year. His is the highest energy one man acoustic show I’ve ever seen. Great guitar playing, great voice, hilarious stage presence, and apparently, tourettes syndrom (someone who swears more than me – is this possible??). Anyway, he was bloomin’ marvellous.

All in great contrast to Sunday – The London Guitar Show was on at Wembley. In case you don’t know, the basic premise is that lots of big companies pile in there, and loads of apparently dreadful guitarists and bassists arrive and playing badly, loudly and incessantly for a weekend. The joke is that people go there to buy guitars, even though trying one out would be like sound-testing it on the hard shoulder of the M25 in rush hour. there’s no way to check things like sustain, quality of tone, noise floor etc. You just can’t hear anything.

The various artists actually playing on the stands had a hard time being heard, so turned up and just became part of the general mush.

Still, it was nice to see some friendly faces – Franck Vigroux, Stuart Clayton, Dave Marks, Bernie Goodfellow, Martin Simms, Svetlana Vasileva, the Bass Centre people, BassTech people, Bass Guitar Magazine People (who got me in for free as well – thanks very much!), and a few old friends.

Also managed to catch a few minutes of the Scottish Guitar Quartet, who even with the din in the background were fantastic. Well worth checking out.

Soundtrack – Peter Gabriel, ‘Up’; Jonatha Brooke, ‘Steady Pull’; Calamateur, ‘The Old Fox of ’45’ – this last one is fantastic ; I’ve posted about Calamateur before, and this is just released – great new album, reworkings of some of the tracks that have been on EPs before, and some new stuff. Andrew’s songwriting, singing and production just gets better and better, and it’s no wonder he’s had airplay from John Peel and The Late Junction, amongst others… a lo-hi gem, highly recommended.

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London Guitar Festival

Two days of London Guitar Festival involvement – yesterday, I went down to see John Scofield first do an interview, then a gig.

The interview was interesting, not least of all because it showed how little thought John has had to give to codifying what he does – admittedly, a lot of the questions were inane in the extreme (for example, ‘What kind of things would you play over, say, a Cm7?’ – as though he’s going to list a few notes that would make you play like him…), but even still, his explainations of what he does were much more from a visceral, intuitive place rather than a schooled detatched techie place.

The gig was breathtaking – the band were all pretty much perfect. Adam Dietch on drums was outstanding, Mark Kelly on bass a groove monster, Avi Bortnick on guitar and samples was like Nile Rodgers evil twin, and John – looking for all the world like Robert Duvall, as student nick pointed out – playing on top of his game. I’ve seen him twice before, and neither held a candle to this, in terms of freshness, invention, interplay. Genius at work.

Day two at the festival, and it was my turn to play. I did a 50 minute set on the foyer stage at the QEH, which was great fun. Always nice to see lots of familiar faces in the crowd, and always fun to get a chance to mess with things a little – this was my first solo gig since getting the second MPX-G2, and the new sound options were really really inspiring, so even the tunes that I’ve played before didn’t end up anywhere close to the record… Lots of fun!

After me was Jim Lampi, an incredible Chapman Stick player, and one I’d have probably gone to see anyway, even if I hadn’t been playing.

And in other news, today – oops, sorry, it’s yesterday now – was the anniversary of Dubya declaring ‘Mission Accomplished’ in Iraq. I really hope he’s feeling like a complete twat today, thinking back to the crass display that he put on under that banner on a warship. unless the ‘Mission’ in question was to destabalise, start a civil war, generate hatred and mistrust and generally fuck things up royally, I think we can safely say that far from being accomplished, things are as bad as they’ve ever been. Yes of course the Iraqi people wanted rid of Saddam, but I don’t think they wanted an abusive occupying force in his place.

And now, in a stoke of US military genius, the situation in Falluja has been handed over to one of Saddam’s former generals! Que? did I miss something?

Meanwhile, US (and possibly UK) soldiers are acting in a way more commonly associated with the third reich – torturing, mocking, debasing and abusing prisoners… ‘operation ultimate justice’ my arse – ‘operation ultimate balls-up’ more like.

Still, at least my gig went well…

Soundtrack – just been listening to some samples on Avi Bortnick’s site. Good stuff!

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Is the world really in meltdown??

I dunno, it seems like just about everything has gone to shit of late… Here in the UK, the Police force has been exposed as full of racist scum, the postal service is full of credit card fraudsters, the houses of parliment is populated by the most extreme bunch of uber-losers this side of the white house, bnp euro-candidates are working as school teachers, social services departments fail to communicate and little kids get shot as a result, illegal music downloads are on the increase, 50% of all video file sharing online is now porn, murders in London are up 8%… is the world falling apart? has it always been this messed up, we’re just better informed now? Have I been taken in by the scare-mongering losers at the daily mail?

I mean, very little of this affects ‘me’ on a daily basis – how much of it is happening, how much is blown out of proportion to try and create a story to sell papers in order to get the advertising revenue in? We know most of the reporting on asylum/immigation has been utter bollocks of late (the BBC ran a great story the other day about the amount of people moving in the opposite direction into the new countries joining the EU – not something you’re likely to read about in the mail…), so how can we believe the rest of it. The Channel four doc last night about the postal service was pretty damning – very little staff vetting, crims working on the shop-floor, people with no training delivering letters to places they’ve never been, and up to a million letters a week going missing. Is this yet another example of just how screwed up the selling off of the royal mail has been, or has it always been this bad?

But anyway, at least I’ve got my new webcam to play with – check this out –

a very cool toy – I’ve already taken 200 pictures with it… er, maybe this narcisism is becoming slightly less benign and borderline obsessional… I’m sure it’ll wear off….

Soundtrack – in preparation for recording my new album, I’ve been listening through lots of my old unreleased stuff, as well as some things I recorded yesterday… more recording to happen this afternoon…

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