Good Night

Good Morning

Thursday Thoughts

It is certainly much chillier these mornings alas. However, despite the forecast for rain, it was a dry but generally overcast day.

Most of the day has been spent listening to all my recent acquisitions musically speaking. I also found another cheapie today whilst in town. Another version of the two piano concertos by Chopin as I have already a version by Nikolai Demidenko.

Lunch was anther pasta dish filled with garlic, cheese, shredded mushroom shawarma style in a bechamel sauce. Totally a yum fest.



And yes, I love mushrooms!

I was digging out an old copy of the Wire magazine from their online database and noticed the front cover of the issue from 1991. It had Micheal Jackson on the front and  I rember being this was the first issue I bought of the magazine.



I also remember the editor’s reason for the cover. Richard Cook was the editor then and he was a great jazz aficionado. Cook and Brian Morton compiled the massive thousand page plus The Penguin Guide To Jazz which I have. Both contributed to The Wire.



Anyway, here is what Cook said -

"Michael Jackson? Elvis Costello? What the hell's going on here?

Nothing that we haven't done before. Maybe the scales are tipping a little differently as from this issue, but The Wire (and yes, we've restored the definite article - since almost everyone we know has called it The Wire from the beginning) is essentially the same argumentative, alternative, demanding music magazine it's always set out to be.

The words that used to appear at the top of the cover were "Jazz, improvised music and New music". Later we simplified that to Jazz and New Music". The implication ought to have been clear enough: we were never merely a "jazz magazine", and we've never tried to confine ourselves to the cut-and-dried marketing of music which the business and our several contemporaries have chosen.

Jazz has always been a cornerstone of our coverage, and it will continue to be so. But the trouble with using the word 'jazz' is that people tend to think that that's all you do. Even though we've had Karlheinz Stockhausen, Anita Baker, The Fall, David Sylvian, Peter Maxwell Davies, Frank Sinatra, Frank Zappa, Harold Budd, Jimi Hendrix and many others in the magazine.

So, the word from now on is 'music'. Excellent music. No teen-pop phenomenons, no fashionable fads: music worth hearing, worth talking about, worth documenting.

The spread of music contained in this issue - Mozart to Costello - should give you a fair idea of what we are attempting to do. What we’re not trying to be is an adult rock magazine as there’s enough of that going on already. Nor is this the facile and cursed eclecticism which is making so much of the world’s music into a flavourless soup. Instead, we aim to be ever more discriminating as well as more diverse in our coverage. None of us have the time for nonsense or the merely second-rate. You can read about that stuff elsewhere, if you want to. But if you also think that Michael Jackson is some addled freak making music for ten-year-olds, and not one of the creative masters of today’s black music, we would like to suggest a different perspective.

Our crusade on behalf of the margins isn’t over. It is changing. We will continue to insist that Albert Ayler should be honoured alongside those musicians whose names mean far more to record-company accountants and Our Price stock buyers. And because we are opening up to the world, that insistence will resonate a lot further."

WHEN I READ THAT I THOUGHT YES - THIS IS THE MAGAZINE FOR ME!

And I have never quavered away from it ,and it still gives me pleasure and invites me to music I have never hear before.

Thursday Music Selection - 1991 Wire Winners

So, in the established quality of the magazine that is The Wire here is a selection of tunes I have been playing today. All the selections are Wire Winners from the June issue 1991 and in my expanding collection.

Elvis Costello - Broken

James Brown - I Know It's True

This was on the four-CD box set that was a Wire Winner. Still have this as well.



Nat Adderley Quintet - Plum Street

From the album "Talkin' About You" (Landmark)

Niels Lan Doky - Friendship

Simon H. Fell - Part VII Drumset (For Paul)

From the album "Compilation II" (Bruce's Finger)

David Murray Octet - Hope Scope

Dmitri Shostakovich - 24 Preludes and Fugues op 87 9Prelude and Fugue 22 in G minor - Prelude)

Frank Zappa - Heavy Duty Judy

ENJOY THIS LOT!!!