Jazzy D's Soul Notes

My favourite new artist in minimalism.

Organist Kali Malone: 'It was a point of departure for me to work with language' • FRANCE 24



I have ordered two more albums by her after selling quite a lot of stuff from eBay, Vinted and Discogs recently.

Joe Comarroe "Six American Poets: An Anthology" (Vintage)





Editor Conarroe distills the works of six unique American Poets in this 281 page volume. For each he provides a concise but enlightening introduction, but it is the poets themselves whose words speak loudest. Whether it is the rapture of Whitman, the surface simplicity of Emily Dickinson, the puzzles of Wallace Stevens, the plain truth of the observations of William Carlos Williams, the sober musings of Robert Frost, or the unforgettable impact of the lyrical prose of Langston Hughes (who seems incapable of even a single boring line), this book is a treasure you should give to somebody who has bnever read a poem or literature. Or you can kep it for yourself and, as far as I am concerned, it is a highly recommended introduction to these famous poets. .

Ursula K LeGuin "Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books" (Canongate)




A great collection of essays and book reviews, many of which I've never read, in which Ursula K Le Guin manages to talk about imagination in ways that are smart, unsentimental and never cornball.

These are prescient, as everything seems to be now, as the designer for this book must have realized when they excerpted "Hard times are coming... We'll need writers who can remember freedom," but none of these essays predict the future, they just demonstrate an extreme intuition for human beingsand the things they do, including the fact that every book benefits from animals in it. "Then the dog showed upand I knew everything was all right."

Wonderful lie-in this morning. Too cosy to get up early. In fact, I listened to the radio and got out of bed around ten. Never feel guilty, I say.

I did pop into town this morning, as there was chores to do, and some other items I needed. It was cold, but sunny and dry, and around 2 degrees centigrade.

I posted off one item and then headed towards my local pub. I met Ewart for a few drinks and gave him his late Xmas pressie. The present was the Guardian Yearbook in hardback. It was from 2025 anyway, and I remembered buying it from the Fleurs Bookshop.

When I arrived back home, I hit the decks and spun some vinyl. An excellent LP from Rare Vinyl had arrived. It was the classic 1974 album by The Crusaders called "Southern Comfort". Just £17 for a copy in near mint condition.



I just love really good jazz, jazz funk and fusion.

Rie Qudan "Sympathy Tower Tokyo" (Penguin)




Sympathy Tower Tokyo is a thought-provoking novel that begins with the presence of generative AI, but quickly reveals it’s not really about machines. It’s about people. While it may seem at first like Qudan is simply exploring the novelty of AI-generated language, the real power of the novel lies in how that technology becomes a lens for deeper questions. When a machine offers us words, does that reduce their emotional impact, or is it just another form of collaboration?

At its core, Sympathy Tower Tokyo is a meditation on the changing nature of language. In the neon-lit glow of Tokyo, languages blend as Japanese and foreign sounding imports mix in subways, menus, ideals, and inner thoughts. Generative AI, able to mimic tone and idioms, highlights how flexible language has become. But the novel goes beyond this. Language here isn’t just a tool. It’s a living thing, shaped by context, gesture, even silence. The AI’s fluent but mechanical voice contrasts with the messiness of human expression, showing that meaning comes not just from grammar but from emotion, memory, and history.

Although the story presents itself as forward-looking with themes of AI, emotional design, and restorative justice, it’s also shot through with more conservative undercurrents that complicate its message. These aren’t overt, but they surface in character dynamics, language choices, and ideological tensions.

The architect of the tower is a particularly complex figure. She’s a woman leading a radical project meant to reimagine criminal justice. Yet her thinking is steeped in cultural nostalgia and linguistic conservatism. Her dislike for katakana, for example, goes beyond aesthetics. It reflects discomfort with Japan’s shifting cultural identity. To her, katakana signals dilution, euphemism, even avoidance. Her preference for kanji isn’t just about beauty. It’s about control and preserving meaning within a fixed cultural tradition. This linguistic purism mirrors a broader conservative instinct, a desire to maintain clarity, hierarchy, and cultural specificity in an increasingly fluid world.

The novel’s central irony is that its most innovative elements, the tower, the AI, the justice model, are all created by people who hold deeply traditional views. This tension feels deliberate. Qudan seems to suggest that real progress often stands on the shoulders of older, sometimes problematic foundations. Even the most forward-thinking ideas can carry traces of the past. The result is a story that embraces empathy, technology, and change while cautioning us to examine the ideologies quietly embedded in them. The tower may rise high, but it’s still grounded in history, bias, and contradiction.

In the end, Sympathy Tower Tokyo isn’t really a story about AI, architecture, or even justice. It’s a story about language, how it shifts, how it connects, and how it fails to define. Through its layered narrative and philosophical depth, Qudan invites us to examine language and its cultural underpinnings more closely. I loved it.

Listening to some goth rock music followed by some opera music is just one of my quirks. I suppose I am a perfervid music lover who can switch genres at a whim. Perhaps not a whim, but juxtaposed to that, a desire to appreciate styles of music, and a journey to learn and gain knowledge.

I first listened to that goth music collection - all five CDs of it - and now listening to Verdi's Nabucco.






The possible idea of losing LJ makes me shudder. I really do not want to be on just DW - which I have reserved for my book reviews. Only time will tell.

Gabriel García Márquez "Until August" (Penguin)





10 years after García Marquez’s death, this novel is believed to be his last and according to the preface by his sons, a heroic battle against memory loss which he felt was the ultimate threat to his creativity. “Memory is at once my source material and my tool. Without it, there is nothing.” The book contains a sample at the end of his self-edited pages. The premise is Ana Magdalena Bach makes an annual overnight trip to place flowers on her mother’s grave on the anniversary of her death. One year she has a one-night stand fling with a man she meets in the hotel bar, and she makes this part of the yearly tradition too. She becomes almost predatory as she selects her man for the night, but it often is a matter of happenstance. She is able to resume her’ normal’ life with her husband Domenico when she returns, but ironically begins to suspect him of infidelity.

Because it is such a short novel and Ana is the focus, this relationship isn’t fully explored, but operates as a foil to her flings. We get 4 years of her ‘tradition’ and on the 5th year, when she has turned 50, something is revealed to her about her beloved mother and the ending has a dramatic turn that makes the story worthwhile.

Kevin Barry "The Heart In Winter" (Canongate)




Might seem an appropiate book to read this time of the year.

A quick summary of what this novel is about barely touches the surface. It is ostensibly the story of an Irish immigrant to the United States, come by ship to Butte, Montana, in 1891 with thousands of his fellows from a starved-out country. Also like thousands of other Irish, the promised land does not show him much promise. Most scratch out a living in the area copper mines. Recreation consists of binge drinking and fighting. Life is brutish.

Tom Rourke seems to rush headlong into the troubles that await him: poverty, alcohol, drugs, skimpy wages blown on prostitutes, opiates and card games. Often numbed by his favoured substances, he stumbles toward survival by using his skill with a pen to write matchmaking letters for other lonely and desperate men. He has no particular dream in that regard. Until he meets Polly Gillespie, the new mail-order bride of a local mine owner, leagues above him in status and wealth. They know immediately. They rob a boarding house safe and flee to San Francisco on a stolen horse, pursued by three hired hit men to avenge the duped husband.

In its bare outlines, then, this is a familiar story. New land, new life, new love, impediments to happiness, lawlessness, danger, and high stakes everywhere. But this story becomes something different in the hands of Kevin Barry, who is no ordinary writer. His earlier publications have received international acclaim and prestigious writing awards in his native Ireland. He captures the fine details of historical fiction, especially as seen through the eyes of an outsider, but the language here is more poetic than novelistic. There are turns of phrase, images and modes of speech, and humour both subtle and outrageous, so striking that you will want to write them immediately down to savour. Most important, for all its Wild West setting, and its boy-girl romance, this novel bursts through the usual confines of the immigration story and the frontier love story that it might, at first, appear to be. It becomes something of a meditation on the price of love, and the meaning of survival, and the relationship between what is beautiful and what is not.

Helen Garner "The Children's Bach" (W&N Books)




This slim novel is set in Melbourne, Australia during the early 1980s. The opening chapter presents a longtime married couple, Dexter and Athena, with their two sons, one of whom has a severe neurodevelopmental disorder. Husband and wife are close, and after a tiring day of work and caring for their children, the couple take long walks together after dark. The domesticity of this family begins to unravel with the arrival of external forces. These arise from of a chance meeting with a friend from Dexter’s past, Elizabeth. Unlike the couple, she leads a bohemian lifestyle, and soon she introduces them to a rock musician friend, Philip, and to her much younger sister, Vicki. With these new people now a part of their lives, Dexter and Athena’s relationship undergoes subtle changes, ones that threaten to fracture the foundation of their marriage.

There is no one protagonist featured in the book. Events as they take place are told from a shifting cast of perspectives, primarily those of Dexter, Athena, Elizabeth and Vicki. What makes this novel special is Garner’s precision in capturing the inner thoughts of each one. None are portrayed as good or bad; rather they are shown to be coping with life as best they can. The Children’s Bach is short enough to be read in an evening, but the lovely prose is worth taking more time to savor. First published in Australia in 1984, it has since won a growing audience worldwide. My description of the story’s plot hardly does it justice. Helen Garner is an author worth getting to know, and this novel would be the perfect vehicle with which to do so

Lol Tolhurst "Goth: A History" (Quercus)





This is the second book by Lol Tolhurst who was the original drummer for The Cure. Both Tolhurst and Robert Smith (lead guitarist and singer) were Catholic and raised so until their high school years when they saw the church as limiting rather than liberating both morally and culturally. They grew up in 1970s England, which was hard hit by unemployment during Margaret Thatcher’s term as Prime Minister. Tolhurst says The Cure arose in the first place from a place of Catholic guilt and longing and the emotional distress that came from that guilt. Technically speaking this book should have been titled Goth: A Personal History since much of the book comes from Tolhurst’s personal reflections. There is a name Index and Notes/Bibliography (which always love) but much of the book are his own recollections. This book has a forward by Budgie (drummer for the band Siouxie and the Banshees) who is also a crucial person at the origin of Goth as a modern phenomenon.

These two have worked together recently and the result has been a podcast and this book by Tolhurst. Tolhurst credits many artists who paved the way for Goth as it exists in various forms now: Shelly’s Frankenstein, T.S. Eliot, Camus, Sartre, Sylvia Plath, Joy Division, The Clash, even The Doors with “Moonlight Drive” and “The End”. Tolhurst says that many people claim that goth music came into being with “The End”. This book touches on a huge amount of topics which makes it formidable to argue against considering that Tolhurst speaks from personal experience almost on every page. The book ends with Tolhurst defining a new entity called “Elder Goths” which deals with self-determination. Elder Goth’s own personal decisions to live and dress as they please even if that means society (the general culture) mislabels them as strange.

The whole thesis by Tolhurst is that Goth is a valid and worthwhile subculture which deserves and must live on as a foil to authoritarian regimes which hold sway, as did the Punks in Thatcher’s England until the Sex Pistols flamed out. Tolhurst enjoys writing and I like his personal style and his consistent approach to his subject matter. Obviously Tolhurst has used this book as further self-discovery and self-healing and he shows himself as vulnerable in many places. Many memoirs are written by ghost writers, but you can feel that this is Lol struggling to be as truthful with his expressions as possible and determined with all his strength to be honest and sincere to the events and his feelings about those events. Wort hreading.