Lazy Sunday

Sod's law applied to an aspect of today. After finishing off three reports for the visits i did in Eastbourne yesterday i then decided to get some sunbathing done. The morning was gloriously sunny but these reports needed to be completed and the pub report took longer than expected as the research company wanted quite a few long comments on the report.When i finally went outside to top up my tan ,within the half hour the weather clouded over, and the sun disappeared behind them. The rest of the afternoon stayed much the same with only occasional peeks from the sun.

Still, it has stayed dry if a little humid again.

I must have slept very well last night, gone out like a light,after the long journey back from the Sussex coast.

I have no long trips planned this week until later on. Monday, as it is bank holiday,i shall be relaxing at home,and Tuesday,so far, i only have a Faversham and a Herne Bay to visit. At some stage i will be visiting Hastings and Brighton but these two are not due till at least the third week of June, so i have plenty of time to get these out of the way.

Lunch today was pizza - a new flavour for me - hoisin duck pizza! It was delicious with three slices of garlic bread.

The meal i had at the pub in Eastbourne was a very spicy tasty beef madras with pilau rice,poppadom and naan bread. All paid for by the research company.

Meanwhile, i have caught up with a few of my TV shows.

Recent Pics

I have some pictures to post from this week just gone -



A jazz band playing in Tunbridge Wells yesterday.

( More pics here. )

What Have You Done Bill?

So -now i am up to date again with my TV series.
The endings to the current series of Supergirl and The Flash was tinged with safeness. Without giving anything away it was sad to see Kara's boyfriend having to leave Earth, and that Barry stepped up ,became the hero,by ..well you just have to see it.

In the Whoverse meanwhile, we see Bill becoming more assertive and yet what she did at the end against the strong wishes of the Doctor will resound into the next episode with consequences as yet unforeseen. Was her decision right? Well it cane from the heart and hence was a pure reason for what she did. I can safely say that Missy is back and it was her the Doctor was guarding in that chamber.

Post truth

Thanks to mirabile_dictu fornoticing this Guardian article.

​'Bullshit is a greater enemy than lies' –​ lessons from three new books on the post-truth era'

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/22/post-truth-era-trump-brexit-lies-books?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+main+NEW+H+categories&utm_term=227245&subid=12557390&CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2

Sunday Music Selection - Reverie

Today's musical swim will be on the calm waves of cool jazz, samba and the voice.

Duke Ellington - Prelude To A Kiss

( More music here )

Enjoy.

Wire 400th

I mentioned in a previous post that the current June issue of Wire is its 400th.The magazine has been going since 1982 when it was just a bimonthly or even less magazine.it was not til 1990 that it became a monthly one.



For many years this was my bible, and again it still is.It introduced me to so many genres since i stated reading it way back in 1990. What i do like about the mag is the absolutely absorbing and intelligent discussions about music,the culture and politics if any behind it, and the theories generated from disparate analyses such as ethnology, psychology,philosophy, feminism, aesthetics, and cultural studies.

Here is a sample of the writing -

The Wire #250, In Praise Of The Riff, 2004: David Toop “Riffs, Resolutions and Clusters”

It’s hard to isolate just one entry from this issue – it’s all about the cumulative effect, just like its subject matter – although if I had to I might pick David Keenan’s appraisal of the riff that transforms Roxy Music’s “If There Is Something”. In Praise Of The Riff consists of short entries, each one of which draws you to a different music, and to a different definition, or different framing, of what a riff could be. Looking back on it now, I wonder whether it decontextualises traditional Balinese music to compare it to Bo Diddley, or if it does the riff a disservice to hear it in Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke. Maybe, but at the time I just thought it was great that Simon Reynolds had picked “Ruckzuck” as Kraftwerk’s choicest riff (it is!), and I have a feeling that this issue is where I first came across Takehisa Kosugi’s hypnotic Catch Wave. The themed section concludes with an essay by David Toop on the riff in free jazz, which explains how hypnotic repetition helped to channel the explosive energy of 1960's free jazz; something I’d sensed from listening but now could put into words. Reading it today, I notice that David references Alice Coltrane’s Huntington Ashram Monastery, which I didn’t hear until some years later, but it is now my favourite of her recordings, not least because of Ron Carter’s bass riffs.


https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/the-portal/wire-400-archive-portal-frances-morgan

Catch Wave

Blissed out rare album from 1975 -

Takehisa Kosugi - Catch Wave (1975) Full Album

Takehisa Kosugi - Catch Wave (1975) Full Album

Track 1- Mano Dharma '74 00:00
Track 2- Wave Code # E-1 26:33

Freedom Principle

More Wire related stuff - another piece of writing by staff and ex-staff members.

The Wire #270, Freedom Principles, 2014: Emily Bick Rockin’ In The Free World

The Wire has always covered music that engages with the difficult idea of freedom, whether that’s freeing oneself from traditional musical structures, striving via radical music towards freedom from oppression, investigating freedom by exploring its obverse of power and control, or just freeing the body to dance in the liberatory space of the club. In the process it can’t help but romanticise – as I’ve just done! – music’s potential to free the mind, the ass, society and so on – and so one of my favourite essays in the Freedom Principles issue is the one that reminds you how easily ideas of freedom can be co-opted. Emily Bick’s chose to write about Freedom Rock, a classic rock compilation that came out, as Emily writes, during “the height of Reaganite swashbuckling”, in 1987, with a cringe-making advert (“Turn it UP, man!”) often broadcast during re-runs of shows from the 1970s. Emily writes, “Freedom as an adjective, especially attached to anything so tied to obvious marketing and exhortations to consume stuff, has a special American capitalist realist ring. Like freedom fries or shopping for freedom after 9/11, it’s never about freedom, but the idea of selling freedom as a means to soothe and control.” She ends the piece connecting the Reaganite 80s with the all-seeing algorithms of YouTube and the invisible workers of Amazon. I’ve made it sound like a downer, but honestly it’s really funny.

Oh and here is a cover of a Leonard Cohen song -

Thalia Zedek - Dance Me To The End Of Love

Derek Bailey interviewed by David Keenan, #247, September 2004

This interview was made the year before the guitarist's death from Motor Neurone Disease, but he's at his ornery finest: “I think improvisation's great era is over, its time is gone...for any music to be really vibrant it lasts about seven or eight years. That's all of music, every music period". He reiterates his view of free improv as non-idiomatic: "You have no guide, you don't start from an idiom, like jazz or rock, you start from nothing and see what happens...I think of non-idiomatic playing as an aim. I've never thought to play freely you can associate with a style, at least for me.” Here he describes his remarkable late recordings Standards and Ballads: “I used to improvise on the chords before but this time I just played whatever it was I wanted to play from the tune...I don't know what I was improvising on. I wasn't improvising on the melody or the chords”. Writer David Keenan is on good form, describing Bailey's unlikely hook-up with DJ Ninj, “a Junglist from Birmingham who laid down a tape of cracked beats as anchor to some of Bailey's most disobedient electric guitar”.

Derek Bailey - Guitar, Drums N Bass (FULL ALBUM)

1. N/Jz/Bm (Re Mix) 0:00
2. Re-Re-Re (Up Mix) 3:33
3. Dnjbb (Cake Mix) 5:05
4. Concrete (Cement Mix) 18:01
5. Ninj (De Mix) 25:58
6. Pie (Amatosis Mix) 37:27

I Love Wire

More ramblings from the Wire -

Steve Lacy interviewed by Brian Case, #1, Summer 1982

Saxophonist Steve Lacy is The Wire's source on the philosophy of improv, from the very first issue – the magazine was named after his composition of the same name, a homage to Albert Ayler. Lacy's interview discusses what he called improvisation's "leap" into the unknown, and the free improvisor's idea of "just playing". When Don Cherry arrived in New York in 1959 with Ornette Coleman, Lacy was bowled over: "He'd say, 'Well – let's play", and I'd say 'OK – what do you want to play?' – and he'd say, 'No, let's just play'. This was revolutionary to me at the time because I was into Monk tunes, and thought you had to have a structure and chord changes, the whole thing”. Lacy eloquently expresses his cultural isolation as an improvisor – on his current UK tour, he comments, “I was walking by the university here, and I heard some ordinary rock they had coming out of a party...I got sick to my stomach...It's just like everything I do is against what this is. And that was current normal stuff with loads of people having a good time to it, no problem – except I was walking down the street and I was suffering...You have to consider that you're a specialist, you're a freak – and you have to live with it”.

Steve Lacy Sextet - The Wire (1975) [full]

1. The Twain 00:00
2. Esteem 06:34
3. The Owl 15:16
4. The Wire 19:45
5. Cloudy 24:49
6. Dead Line 31:01

Masahiko Satoh: piano
Masahiko Togashi: percussion
Keiki Midorikawa: cello, bass
Yoshio Ikeda: bass
Motoharu Yoshizawa: bass