Charon and the gibbering spirits of squeaks past

   Reading an interview with Jan Gabarek, he mentioned that he never had much interest in geeking about with possible sax/mouthpiece/reed combinations; he had used the same somewhat standard (and a bit  unfashionable) MkVI-Berg Larsen set-up for years, in the meantime creating one of the iconic (and most copied, after Brecker - and it's interesting to speculate whether Brecker had been influenced as well) sax sounds of the last quarter of the twentieth century.  I remember sitting in the Jazz Workshop in Boston in the early 70's, waiting to listen to him, determined to disapprove of some unknown Scandinavian interloper (with the strange "I-come-from-the-planet-Vulcan" haircut seen below) who had replaced my fave guy of the moment, Dewey Redman, in the Keith Jarrett Quartet.... and then he just played a simple, soaring line...




He talks about never giving his gear a thought until  rather recently, when he started getting involved with the Internet. He referred to his sax as  a tool, a 'hammer' something which he not particularly interested in and was invisible to him as long as it did his bidding. This saxophone-as-hammer  is similar  to the idea of Heidegger's hammer (I know, there was the unfortunate business with Adorno, who was down on this guy)  ; an object that is invisible as long as it  fulfills its function. Garberek was happy for years playing in his preferred manner without thought of mouthpieces , reeds or particular instruments .But, of course, Theo Wanne promises everything, and once Gaberek started messing about on the internet, the chimera of a better world hovered just beyond his reach; one where everything spoke effortlessly from low Bb to an altissimo double F... balanced, in tune, rich in timbre. Squeaks are sent to a specific circle of Hell, or perhaps just on Charon's ferry across the Acheron to accompany the wailing of souls on their final journey to damnation...I think all reed players would like to think of that as the last outing of all their squeaks down through the years. One would faint, and find that all the squeaks had been banished upon awakening on the other side. Here is Delacroix's take on Charon, Dante and the Damned (not the band) hearing all the squeaks from the mortal world while crossing the Acheron on the barge, such as all those Parker out takes....

So term is over, marking and deadlines fulfilled, and after a day or two of staring at the walls, chauffeuring the Cruel Mistress of my Heart on a 14 hour round-trip to Aberystwyth (which I can now spell) and going for long cycle rides, my headspace clears enough to start thinking again about being a musician and organizing the quartet. As always, I realize that a lot of stuff has slid all the way down the hill in the last two months, so instead of sitting in the hoped-for sunny uplands of  practicing/writing, as I kept promising myself through the dark moments of being surrounded by mounds of unmarked portfolios, I find myself making numerous phones calls  and emails trying to get things moving again. Inertia is always such a difficult thing to deal with, especially with a project, as everyone else just assumes that it has gone away and needs a thorough prodding in order to take interest again, never mind trying to get a few decent gigs.

I made the mistake of thinking "....oh, hey guys, it would be fun to do a gig in Cambridge when stuff calms down this summer..." so, innumerable phone calls and calendar negotiations later, I find that there is a film crew and a professional photographer involved, along with a nascent re-vamped website made necessary by a  new CD launch, various band health issues, venue problems, and I'm lying awake thinking about stuff and another recording session...and it's goddamn July already; there's the second song of the Holy Goof to write over the summer.

and, for limited time only, a whistle-stop tour of the new tracks....



So along with all that, I've been changing the way I think, soloistically, over the last 6-9 months; and, moving differently while rippling (I'd like to think it ripples) through triads, creating inadvertant shifts and sheets of sounds with sort of fishy (Pisces, after all) lateral motion - plus having the usual who's-the-Daddy issues with Riley the Wonder Dog

Spring is on the Way

Spring, apparently, is on the way. I can tell this not because of the goldfinchs once again decimating the early blossom on the plum tree (and actually, doing far more damage than the original practice of decimation  in a legion; that was only a clubbing to death of every tenth legionnaire), but the fact that I am staring sullenly at the pair of Dell'orto PHF 36's sitting on my chaotic workbench, after having stripped and reassembled them (twice) to prove that there is nothing amiss with the various weeny bits, which I live in dread of losing in the gravel each time. So why won't the Guzzi tick over nicely whereas I am so idle?

Cycling, likewise,seems to have fallen off a cliff, despite the feeling in my waters that this was going to be my year; up at dawn, 100k before breakfast, that sort of thing. Some serious miles. Unfortunately , crap weather, mild bronchitis and the allegedly urgent need to be elsewhere every (damn) time the weather breaks has put that plan on hold. soon, however. Dunwich Dynamo, WSW Sunday runs, and some serious audaxes beckon.

Not unlike the carbs,  we're now just messing about with the mixing of the new Cd; it's kind of interesting trying to figure how to chop it up, a la  Miles and Teo. the idea of having purposeful and obvious cuts, like Stravinsky's block form, is becoming more attractive. the idea of using abrupt transitions, brick wall stops, and cinematic cuts could work, especially if they are overt. Not like the endless  overdubbing of a pop session with vertically constructed episodes and auto tune, but the use of juxtaposition; pulling together and ordering of disparate blocks of sound, themselves untouched and autonomous,  to create something that didn't exist before.  That's the plan, anyway; a way to use the takes with good solos and crap heads, or vice-versa. I'm always struck, when sitting in a studio mixing, how many interesting fragments there are, but that don't quite survive as stand-alone takes.

The usual jazz aesthetic, as far as recording goes, is, as much as possible, try to re-create the live experience. the idea behind this is that the music is a process, something that occurs only once in real time, with a privileged listener as part of the event, blemishes and all. This is partially because of the emphasis on the moment, the process of improvisation, and its ir-reproducibility in the next occurrence; each of which, although broadly similar, is unique. (the question as to how this uniqueness carries over into still having an authorial continuity, as in we always instantly know it's Miles, is another topic altogether)  This is why the apparent outcome is so different to that of pop, with its need to be an infinitely reproducible commodity. Even though a jazz recording is the also just another manufactured item once recorded, and subject to the same market forces, there seems to be a need to maintain the illusion that this hasn't happened and the listener is present.; a hairy-chested we do it in real-time aesthetic. Which is more honest?

Of course, having organized everything, found the funding,  booked everyone, written the music and practiced (I thought) the shit out of my parts, I found I was anything but centered.  In the session, I wanted to try some of the stuff I had been working on, in terms of moving my improvisational language forward...as usual, some stuff worked, and some wasn't quite ready; we probably needed three days instead of two, with another stab at things a month later once the dust had settled. Funnily, after 6 weeks of practicing the ideas after the fact, I now know what it is I want to do.... a little too late.  As it is, it's the normal complaint of lacking the time to get things to a satisfactory state, and knowing that you'll have to work with what you have at the moment.

So, a nice 80k roll on John's old Peugeot fixie through the Suffolk borders this weekend, watching the road spin out before me, puffing a bit harder than I should be at this point of the season. It brought to mind Hockney's talk about his new large canvases and their relationship to classical Chinese scroll paintings, which don't represent a moment, but a journey, as they spin out across an entire 50 foot wall.

Dark Dogs and the Dance of Death

As posy as it sounds, after teaching ended and prior to the post-Christmas recording session for Riprap, we (that is, myself and the cruel mistress who rules my heart, not the quartet) went to Madrid to visit a friend and get some R&R. The general plan was, to keep everyone happy, to alternate days in the surrounding hills with hard-core gallery-hitting days.

To that end, while Jane went all enlightenment, checking out the Ruebens, I wandered through much of the darker side of things (as usual). After an extended, cheerful period in a deserted room with Goya's Black Paintings from his late years of gathering madness in the Quinta del Sordo (typified by light-hearted themes such as this painting of a drowning dog on the right, which makes an intersting contrast to Hokusai's Kanagawa oki nami-ura), I found myself standing speechless and shaken while touring the Late Medieval sections of the Prado, looking at the Bruegel, Bosch and Fra Angelico paintings.

The thing I noticed in most of them, as in this detail below of Brueghel's (and the title brightens your mood just hearing it) The Triumph of Death, was that music usually had some very unfortunate outcomes in the grand scheme of things. As we can see here below, a fool plays a lute accompanied by a figure of death on lute as well, playing a counter-line, as the army of Death sweeps across Kings, Fools, and Beauty alike, disturbing the banquet, and the skeletons with scythes and swords literally reap the living, who, distracted by their little pleasures such as music, sex and drink, are oblivious to the approaching Apocalypse.

Hmmm.... not good, not at all the way I had planned things in my somewhat erratic career as a musician to shake out at all. I had always thought of music as something that would affirm life, (or at least get me some girlfriends) and, in a sense, could even be said to have transcended it for a privileged few, like Bach or Stravinsky, whose art is still tracing some kind of narrative arc, complete with unseen outcome, through our culture. Although it has to be said that it is questionable whether it makes any difference to their current state of being. Instead, I was presented with the stern Northern view (mostly Flemish) of the frivolous arts distracting us from the proper contemplation of memento mori, and that inevitable and inescapable conclusion of our affairs. Our time is short - don't waste it. Yeah, like I said, a short holiday. Check it out in detail online; especially scroll over to the lower right-hand corner in the link. Happy Days.

Anyway, I have been reading a couple of books of Hubert Dreyfus after an oblique recommendation by a local spiritual leader and generally lower-register guy. While sitting in a self-catering flat in Madrid, being too cheap to go out to eat every night, I was slowly working my way through All Things Shining, one of his most recent books, and came across the chapter on Melville's Moby Dick (which, by a strange coincidence, I also was in the middle of one of my bi-annual readings). One of his points is our loss of any sense of connection with wonder, exacerbated by our post-Cartesian mind/body concept of duality. He specifically un-picks the chapter where the crew has to collectively break down the finest oil of the sperm whale, the head oil or spermaceti, by plunging their hands together into casks filled with the cooling oil, and, as it starts to crystallize, to squeeze the lumps and break them up. Melville describes how, because of the many pairs of hands working in the still-warm, slippery oil, he lost any sense of his individuality with the others and they all created this spreading sense of well-being as they pressed lumps of oil and each others hands indiscriminately. This brought me back to the experience of the group of bass clarinets and low-pitched ambient noise we created, where I couldn't, for at least the last 10 minutes, tell whether I was making a sound or not; like the loss of self in the gentle pogo-ing within a mosh-pit.

We finally got a Riprap recording session done, and got some good, usable stuff after two solid days of playing. It could be that we need another, but that remains to be seen, and will depend on what the mix-down sounds like. It was strange, as my soprano sounded great, but I just couldn't get going on tenor, never mind bass clarinet. And we never got around to the Rameau rip-off. I might try to organize another day to try and re-do three or four tracks. It was the usual set of recording compromises, with great intros ruined by mistakes in the head, or superb solos rendered useless by a crap one (usually mine) following on its heels. I'm going to go into the mix-down to try and see if we can create some musical Frankensteins, perhaps grafting intro 2 onto take 5 sort of thing, or losing a section here and there.

The thing that seemed to work the best was, of course, one of the last things we decided to do for the sheer hell of it. Instead of doing the piece Old Year as a brittle, minimalist (more in the La Monte Young sense) twisted children's song we started from a Late Miles On the Corner inspired ride, and just blew the hell out of it. So much for being art-y.

 http://soundcloud.com/kevin-flanagan/old-year-final-mix

Albanian Escapades

I just did an excellent gig in the Ruskin gallery to accompany the David Ryan film on Scelsi, as part of a forest of licorice logs (as opposed to the old licorice sticks; actually, only three bass clarinets), one of whom was a serious Mr. Bass Clarinet Guy. It was interesting as we were spread around the gallery to coincide with the three differing simultaneous cuts of the film. Our mission was to amplify any ambient sounds in the soundtrack, and to play around with the 'resultant tones' that come about from the slight differences of pitch between everything involved. This set up an unearthly beating in my chest as I played, and after twenty minutes I couldn't tell whether I was actually the one making a particular sound or not. The only problem was having to stand there beside Mr. Serious Bass Clarinet Guy, clutching my plastic (or ebonite, as the ads have it) Yamaha student-model special and occasionally squeaking. But it was kind of sad the way I kept trying to bring the conversation post-gig to saxophones to try and retrieve some dignity: "...actually, you know, if I was doing this on sax, where I'm more comfortable, I would...." He was, of course, ever so understanding.....

I had been suddenly plunged into one of those moments when one is revealed as a fraud (at least mildly). It was not unlike trying, as we all have at a party full of strangers, to pass yourself off as an Albanian with a contrived Mittel-Europa accent, (even though Albania is properly Südost-Europa) complete with monocle and a sharp hat at what feels like a jaunty angle at the time (such as Erich here on the right), fabricating adventures based on half-forgotten Franz Lehar operetta scenes out of the Die Lustige Witwe, only to find out that you are in fact speaking to a descendant of King Zog himself (cutting a gay, dashing figure to the upper left), and haplessly find yourself drawn inexorably into a gun-running plot aimed at his restoration... it's the sort of thing that always worked for Da Ponte and Mozart? But the enduring attraction of Ruritanian escapades never really fades - and you can get a very good dose of the Hollywood version of the fantasy in Erich Von Stroheim's 1925 silent version of The Merry Widow below...it is not to be missed:



and who doesn't sometimes wish to channel the Hussar look from old Vienna? Von Stroheim had it down: dueling scar (check) (those Heidelberg mensur clubs), monocle (check), plus fours (check), riding boots, lots of medals...and to complete the picture, one should be able to refer to the arguments made in Richard Burton's Sentiment of the Sword, a fascinating Victorian equivalent to Musashi's Go Rin no Sho or The Book of Five Rings.

Apart from that, the last few weeks have been spent doing the boring stuff; getting all the charts ready for rehearsals for the CD recording, it's all just wildly time-consuming. And of course the first run-throughs, while exciting, have, as always, thrown up a number of minor problems and corrections to be addressed.

Anyway, so it's early Sunday morning; and, sitting balanced on the zafu, the rain spatters against the window's glass with a tinkling sound while a bolt of glaring pink light crosses the room horizontally from the low rising sun, ruffling the edges of awareness and filling my all-too-always-ruffled mind with intrusive questions: fixie with mudguards or road iron? 3/4 length bibs or roubaix longs? Hot chocolate/mocha or a nice pot of tea when I hit Finchingfield in a couple of hours time? Cancellara (in red) didn't need anything but shorts here; watch his break at about 2:20 over the pave, complete with Belgium commentary:



All this was originally going to be about David Foster Wallace and my hard-as nails late Father-in-Law, along with some observations about pictures of the beer chair... strange how things drift sideways? More a kind of dérive, I suppose

Spacing out at this year's Monad Festival? or trying to look out of a house without doors and windows

When I'm sitting around at the piano messing about, up to no good with Seeger's ideas (not Pete, but Ruth Crawford) of dissonant counterpoint in a not-very-organized fashion, I often seem to create opaque structures that are a bit like living in a house without doors and windows when then trying to create ways to improvise over the material I compose. If I was on the case, each object would call up its own set of rules. But these bits, apart from being great for twisting the First Year's comp class heads around like in the Exorcist (I suppose that's why they hate me, at least for a bit), it usually leaves me in a strange state of suspension, like the moment of focus in doing bamboo breath when you disappear. (unfortunately, googling this phrase tends to bring up quite a bit of very dodgy New Age Music; just don't do it)

What I am usually faced with is a series of autonomous gestures; one or two bar fragments that create a tiny brittle world of their own, without much reference to outside stylistic models. In a sense, these things are art-object monads: opaque, small, self-contained totalities that contain a number of contradictions reflecting the larger world around us. (damn, did I just say that?) I know it's a bit of a cliché to refer here to the Rachel Whiteread work, but the image seems apt as I stare at a couple of bars of music, and trying to see out of it into the world beyond.

In a way, it's easy to create these things; the real difficulty arises as you try to do something with them... some kind of over-arching architecture that is so elusive, at least for me... especially one that is porous enough for improvisation. I tend to start with these frail ideas and little sense of where they're going to go. And then, I try to take Birtwistle's advice (admittedly stolen from Klee), and "take a line for a walk". But that's not enough: it seems easier to compose them out for, say, a trio or quartet reading exactly what you have written than to devise a plan that allows the gesture to inform and shape an improvisation. Life was so easy with Hard Bop: II-V's, tritone subs, IV-bVII, the occasional II-III-I or even the Trane turnaround exploiting mediant motion. (that's mediant, not deviant... oh those crazy cancrizons thirds...just do it - bust the cycle 5's butt)
See what I mean?.


So what the Hell do I do with that gesture? Just two dyads; life was simpler when the structure was supplied by a poem's narrative line, as was the case with this. we would play it, Malcolm would read, and we'd move on to the next gesture reflecting his text, ornamenting the gestures as we went. But now I'm sitting trying to turn this into something stand-alone the Riprap quartet can use without relying on a text.

Anyway, something will happen, I suppose - maybe I'll ask Mr. Chu

Other stuff? Well, it's Thanksgiving and I've just been sitting here marking and practicing all day - no turkey in sight... I think I'll make some pasta and wash it down with a strong rioja. Went out for a cycle this afternoon, and encountered a cygnet in some kind of mild distress, wandering in the middle of the road with a crocodile of cars in tow. Tomorrow I'm doing a gig with three bass clarinets to accompany a nearly silent film on the composer Scelsi, by Dave Ryan. Should be interesting; he was a very unique voice. After that, Riprap starts rehearsing next week to get ready to record the next CD, in order to have an epic push to get a few gigs in what's left of the jazz scene. Hence the composer's block.


And here's the track from Mifune and Paul recorded last Month. They did a great job on the re-written and expanded duet at the Cambridge Festival gig in October; I was really glad they decided to revisit it so I re-worked much of it and added a piano cadenza; you can hear the gig below..
Piano&violinduet by kevin flanagan

damn, it's been a long time, or, no time at all, or something

Damn - it has been a very long time for this blog, but it seems to start up just where it left off: after a summer of composing some material for the quartet, I got back home for a summer break up north in NH. Though, to be honest, that's nowhere near as far north as here at the Lazy K (51 degrees as opposed to 43-44-ish). I suppose it's a state of mind, what with the mild weather and landscape here, versus the space, hilly bits and real winters there, that still makes me think of home as up north. I suppose, because when I was young and hitching or gigging in the lower 48, the final leg of any journey would always be northeast-ward. Checking out the live Mt Washington webcam , I can already see the snow along the top of the Appalachian trail, even though the trees below haven't started to turn yet.

One of those highways would be Route 6, the one that Sal Paradise gets stuck on (although he was headed in the opposite direction) in On The Road:

"Five scattered rides took me to the desired Bear Mountain Bridge, where Route 6 arched in from New England. It began to rain in torrents when I was let off there. It was mountainous. Route 6 came over the river, wound around a traffic circle, and disappeared into the wilderness. Not only was there no traffic but the rain came down in buckets and I had no shelter.

Finally a car stopped at the empty filling station; the man and two women in it wanted to study a map. I stepped right up and gestured in the rain; they consulted; I looked like a maniac, of course, with my hair all wet, my shoes sopping . . . . But the people let me in and rode me north to Newburgh, which I accepted as a better alternative than being trapped in the Bear Mountain wilderness all night. "Besides," said the man, "there's no traffic passes through 6. If you want to go to Chicago you'd do better going across the Holland Tunnel in New York and head for Pittsburgh," and I knew he was right. It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearth-side idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes."

Although I never got much further on it than mid-upstate New York (roughly where Kerouac maroons his protagonist), I often got stuck somewhere, late at night, in the middle of nowhere. My being there at all usually had something to do with a woman, and nothing that ever ended well. It nevertheless had the delicious (?) feel of a one way ticket to Palookville, starting and ending nowhere in particular; (Provincetown, Mass to Long Beach, California?) and religiously avoiding anything anything of note.... (much like most of my career) - a real meander through small-town America.

So back in NH for a couple weeks at the end of the summer, 80+ degree weather; this time I mainly cycled the back roads heading west every morning; as the temptation is to always ride the coast road, but in the summer it's just wall-to-wall tourist blockage - endless lines of chunky tourist couples in SUV's or Harleys (with straight pipes to advertise their presence) on a mission to sample 'real New England seafood', blatting slowly up Route 1a in between meals of over-generous portions. God bless overweight Harley owners with suspiciously shiny over accessorized bikes that only come out on sunny Sundays (..."only 3,000 dry miles..", as the ebay ad will say in a couple of years.)

"Like a siren's song, the sea beckons you to explore New Hampshire along Historic Route 1. Roll down your windows, breathe in the ocean air, and listen to the crashing waves and crying seagulls. Mingle with salty characters [such as me ed.] on picturesque beaches and in colonial villages — some of which are nearly 400 years old. Discover a charming brew of history, theaters, restaurants, and shopping."

yeah, right....they've bought into it - especially the fresh hell of olde-time-y over-fried seafood and charming sales-tax-free outlet malls; who believes this shit? Route 1 (not 1a), once a sequence of small town greens, the usual white Churches, orchards and dairy farms, is now just a long line of half-dead mall attempts, that, and as one dies, another keeps bursting out of the chest of the local landscape like the little creature in Alien. The area was destroyed by that kind of small-town-estate-agent-who-also-sits-in-the-planning-committee-greed mindset. You drive by vast empty parking lots with a dozen cars or so in them, full of boarded-up attempts at the alleged American Dream - each one a dead-end franchise someone squandered their life's savings after a high-pressure sales pitch in the hope of ' being their own boss'. I could weep. One of the ramshackle but still beautiful old farmhouses, set in orchards and rolling, stone enclosed pastures near the Great Bay that I used to live in with a loose musician's commune was bulldozer-ed for this kind of lapse of taste; a mall surrounded by 10 dead acres of asphalt which has collapsed and re-opened several times already under different guises. Once something's gone, it's gone. Historic Route 1?

So instead of the tourist-choked coast roads, heading west from my folks house rapidly takes me into quiet, wooded back roads. I love it that you can still find a few village stores in the small towns with porches with a bench, squeaky screen doors and cold sassafras-based root beer to allay the stifling heat when you stop after a couple of hours, hot and mildly lost.

So I sat on the back porch, listening to music and reading in the afternoon, beer in the evenings with friends. The shoulder (damn torn rotator cuff, since you asked; weird and painful - no, I had never heard of it before either) is getting better, and I've been been doing more than a moderate amount of composing.

I re-wrote my piano-violin duet, which just had an excellent performance. (youtube link soon) And then started work on a choral setting of the Diamond Sutra. I've also now got most of the material done for the next album, modifying about a dozen sketches for the poetry events and turning them into full-blown-stand-alone pieces. The main problem there was converting dozens of sketches and individual gestures making up the poetry settings into viable quartet instrumental numbers without the structural crutch of a spoken narrative. The whole project has been hanging for the last 5 months, waiting for Russ's back to get better, but we're going to start rehearsing in the next couple of weeks. I'll stick more of the usual cheesy synth-ed samples up soon, but here's one I made earlier....Sighting the Tiger

And finally, I had a busy-ish summer gig-wise, and along with that there's a general feeling of returning to 'player' status (no, not that kind of player, as shown here in the Def Jam trailer). The cycling is recovering, and with that my general mood; although I lost out about 2 months of training through bad scheduling, attitude and weather. - I'm only just now returning to something like the form I had this spring, which is not saying much; and chickened out of the Mildenhall 200k, as the shoulder was freezing up after 3-4 hours, but that seems to be going.


Last week, back in Blighty, a huge cloud of swallows milling noisily over the meadow announced the end of the mild weather, and eventually disappeared to the south; back to work.

mai nichi, mai nichi

mai nichi, mai nichi...The back has slowly gotten better, I'm through marking the mounds of portfolios in the yearly academic cycle, and the summer beckons; I can make believe I'm a musician again for a couple of months. As well as that, I had hoped at this point to have done more than a couple of 200k runs on the fixie, rising at 5am once a week to get back from a 100k all smug for breakfast, with a view towards a couple of big ones around the lengthened days, along with a bash at the Dunwich Dynamo, an overnight run of 220k, not so bad in itself, but then after a breakfast of egg and chips at the cafe and quick snooze on the beach I'd have to turn around and ride home. As you get older, since you can't ride any faster you start riding longer distances, it seems. Still, all is not lost. You could go along with Clark Kent here recommending a proper breakfast to get you through it.



But anyway, I'm back on the bike, the Guzzi squeaked through its MOT, (must work on the brakes) and the only bad thing left from the back episode is a stiff neck. I'm going to try a WSW club run early tomorrow for the first time in a month and a half... and I'm sure I will suffer.

Although I should be doing something serious and finishing up the Holy Goof, or a couple of solo pieces I've promised, I find myself instead sitting at the piano going through some Ralph Towner solo pieces, and listening to a lot of Saariaho. The economy of Towner's writing for guitar is beautiful, most of the harmonic infill and middleground comping being suggested by just a few dyads instead of full ten-fingered textures that writing on a piano would normally result in. And the Saariaho is completely otherworldly - I've just gotten a DVD of her opera; must get some scores. There's a lot of stuff I like there, and more than a bit of Takemitsu. As far as my own sorry efforts go, I've finished about half the Neal Cassady piece anyway, and the concert has been put back to January, so no pressure - just another 10 minutes to write. I just need some words.



And it's been a fairly busy couple-three weeks; the John Clare Festival went well, and I've just been having a run of local gigs: jazz trios, funk bands, backing up singers and so on.
So time to get my finger out and harass Malcolm to get me the second aria. Just spending a bit of time trying to hustle a few gigs for next year, and start writing some stuff for the Chuck Perkins gig in October.

But here's a bit of a gig with Malcolm:

living in a gursky world....

So, I'm standing in a Gursky world; a deserted, hanger-like 'local hardware store' near closing time staring dully at a chaotic galaxy of wall-plugs, which is slowly moving in and out of focus as the happy pills I'm taking for a sudden re-occurrence of sciatica create a soft edge to my vision - almost (but not quite) counteracting the constantly changing spiderweb of electrical spasms that are pulsing up my lower back whenever I move from the hips to turn at look at something instead of rotating my entire body, locked zombie-fashion, to change my field of vision. All I need to do now is gurn a bit and groan to complete the effect of being a renegade from Night of the Living Dead





How could things get worse? I slowly become aware of the badly amplified tinned musak being piped, in an echoing, almost indecipherable state, around the store. Of course, it's Elton John singing I'm Still Standing.... sounding like the nasal, arch temper tantrum of a spoiled and successful multi-millionaire affirming his 'wretched' life of shopping hasn't broken him. The hook is followed, like Beethoven's 'Hammer of Fate' , with a tripartite avowal of the aforementioned fact...."yeah, yeah, yeah.." Three affirmations taking up half the space in any hook is a confirmation that the lyricist is in fact Dead On Arrival in the world of the creative. And then it got stuck in my head for the next three days.

Reading back through that, I can sense that I am quite ill-humored at the moment, but flashing back to a couple of weeks before, everything had started so well.





After a week walking the coastal path in Devon over Easter, I was well back into things - composing, upping my mileage, practicing... we were sitting by the wood stove (bit of a cold snap - almost lost the spuds we had just put in) watching the sunset and listening to re-mastered recordings Rubinstein play Chopin in his prime; hiss and all. It's all just incredibly moving, in a way that a lot of technically better modern performers don't quite reach. Everything seemed possible after a couple of riojas.

But now here I am, twitchy back, happy pills, plowing through all the freshly arrived coursework as the semester has finished and now it's the annual sprint to finish in time for the award boards. Missed the long audax rides I was going to do, no more zazen, and had to stop playing tenor a couple of hours a day- I am just halfway between two seats at the moment, trying to play standards after a long period of modal playing, and trying to bring in a fresh vocabulary into my more traditional playing; I tend to have two separate hats at the moment, which feels increasingly false. It's exciting and frustrating at the same time; The Great American Songbook (all respect) tends to force me back into a somewhat tired sounding bebop-based vocabulary instead of being able to approach it in a no-mind fashion. Soon.

Still, I got to ride as a motorbike marshal for the regional pro bike criterium (the only way I'd ever be able to keep up with them; that's me on the guzzi in front) .... a good laugh

the hero moves a thousand leagues in the wrong direction

Spring is upon us: (apologies to SJH for the photo), and after taking more than a few offs on the black ice over the last couple of months trying to keep my pod at bay, (plus after that wussing out with riding with a bunch; just going solo about midday when there's a chance the ice might have melted) it's as if someone has just suddenly thrown a switch....crocuses, daffs and the Guzzi is back on the road. Up till a week and a half ago, I couldn't even get it down the driveway rubber side down. Now it's back...





Anyway, After recently helping to set up a masterclass with some excellent players, (which went really, really well, and I learned a lot from the other guys involved) we later all had a quiet private grizzle over crap coffee as the dust settled. And it suddenly struck me how we (and I mean old gits such as me) are dangerously close to being wildly (repeat that word a few times) out of touch in terms of our expectations of what constitutes a young player. Not the wild as Snyder defines it, either. The conversation revolved around issues of core repertoire, 'young guys today', run before they walk, and so on.

But, of course, a moment's reflection would reveal that calls to master the bebop language allied with the 'Great American Songbook' are even more out-of-sync in terms of time then the original 'Dixieland' revivalists were in the 1950's. After all, they were only 30-so years past their sell-by date; if we think of bebop, we're more than 60. Twice that distance, and we're still kvetching. It had only been 20 years for the New Orleans guys since the 'territory band' sounds coming out of Kansas City had begun to undermine the prevalent two-beat sound for dancers with a more flowing (but less obvious for punters) democratized four-beat feel, which in turn begot bebop.

Scary. So we must constantly look very hard at how the canon is changing over time, and how that changes for our practice. And I have to admit I was feeling more and more uncomfortable with the drift of the conversation, that of established players trying to preserve the thing in aspic. Sharks move forward, or slowly suffocate while sinking in lazy circles into the ink-blue sunless, crushing depths. So goes bebop.

And these guys talking were the ones who were very hip and a bit dangerous in their time - touring everywhere, the best gigs and festivals; but now we're sitting here sounding like the clarinetists who used to mercilessly ride me because I didn't know 'Nagasaki' when I was first coming up. (and those two dancing in that previous video are nothing on these two, the Nicholas Brothers) Always, in whatever era, and somewhat necessary of course, you would think, to keep these young folks in their place.

But the title of this essay comes from Zeami's 13th century book of Noh techniques, this being one of two main types of plays, the other dealing with the supernatural. Things feel vaguely (and for no good reason) as if I have spent the last few years marching furiously, if not in exactly the wrong direction, perhaps in need of the guidance of the sages to find a another path up the iron mountains and silver cliffs which stretch out in the distance...

I just saw John Adams conduct the LSO doing his recent orchestral adaptation Dr.Atomic, plus some Britten and Sibelius, which was inspiring. I've been diligently bashing away at the Holy Goof, plus starting to think about setting some of the John Clare pieces for the festival this summer.



I really must get back into studying some of his scores, so I've just been going through Nixon in China - an excuse for a lecture.

holy goof

Buried in a long interview (originally in the New Yorker, I think) with John Adams, is a description of how at one point the interviewer looks over at Adam's work desk and casually notices the sketches for a new opera. He seems surprised, because all he can see is a single long vocal line interspersed with a few piano chords stretching off into the distance. And with just that, goldfish-like, his attention wanders somewhere else and the interview continues. I sat there staring at the article, whacking my forehead repeatedly, trying to will him to go back and investigate it further.

One of the most difficult things is try and discover is just how someone starts. Most composers seem to be amazingly cagey about this, even between friends (and I frequently ask). To somehow articulate the beginnings of a piece would seem to rob the process of all the magic it might posses; and one suspects that everyone sits there in the same half-assed way, mucking about with a few notes or sounds they have in their heads before they start to structure it. To admit this level of haphazard working-out of ideas (or lack of) would fly in the face of the reductive view of analysts and the quasi-scientific use of instrumental reason that it is hoped to give a musical piece any legitimacy. And it is strange that of all the arts, only contemporary music seems to labor under this need for something mapped against the physical world rather than in the intentional.

But back to that quote. The picture above is that of the switchyard at Escobedo. So I've been sitting here most days with the lyrics that Malcolm fronted me a month ago sketching out an opening aria for Neal Cassady, with his final journey one winter night on the Altiplano (up at 7000 feet in central Mexico), walking the railway tracks on a cold rainy night in just a t shirt after partying in San Miguel De Allende for days, planning on getting to the next town, which was Escobedo. Legend has it that he counted the railway ties as he went, and it was the last thing he said while delirious from exposure when they found him the next morning. "Sixty-four thousand nine hundred and twenty eight." But his departure that day, February 3, 1968, was just that bit too soon for him to pilot the Magic Bus to Woodstock, where it was all going to change. Well, for a while, anyway.

So that quote about Adams workbench precipitated the onset of The Great Doubt , but not in a good way; or maybe it is.. I'll have to go back to Hakuin about this. So out went a couple of months of work; 6 minutes of a full orchestral realization, and I started again with a blank page: a pair piano staves beneath a vocal line. So here we go. This is where I sort of endeavor to violate the law of the excluded middle. And the painting by Hakuin below would seem apt, not only featuring a long thin line, but the subject matter of the bridge with the blind attempting to cross it.








But it's not all work; well, Jane's been in India, and I've just been having wild bachelor parties here all month, full of girls in bikinis with beehive hairdo's twisting till dawn around the pool while a crazy Modern Jazz Quartet platter is on the turntable... man.



You know, who doesn't love those those cocktail parties full of safari suits and A-line mini skirt-suits in 60's films...so just go out and large it. But now I've got to tone it down a bit. Just kind of chill out with some MJQ vibes and a dry martini. Just like at Lupo's, which I visited again over Christmas. Lupo himself was going from booth to booth, recounting (again) the DEA raid to any customer who would listen while they wearily tucked into their fried clams and onion rings - he just always seems a bit unnaturally bright for whatever time of day it is; probably too much coffee. But be sure to get there on Wednesdays.

I'm out of here

So it's that time of year again, I'm heading off for a few weeks of R & R and Eastern European soul food back home in New Hampshire - I've got my red checked jacket and Herman's Survivors packed and ready. The picture is a bit disingenuous; the slowly deepening purples of a mountain sunset... I'd like to think it's always like that, sitting at the diner in Center Eaton next to the lake.



But my view should be more of something like that of Hampton Beach - full of empty white clapboard summer houses, over-accessorized SUV's, chubby people walking their dogs and slightly crap restaurants. But I will spend some time up in the hills.

Locally, however, the bad news is that my local dump of a bar, Lupo's (picture a nautical motif of plastic lobsters and Christmas lights suspended in the fishnets over the bar here) has just been raided by the DEA. This should surprise no one, as you would expect of a beachfront bar that usually puts plywood over the sea-facing windows in order to keep the sun off the TV running non-stop Bruins and Celtics games over the bar. And, of course, it's not the first time that Lupo (yeah, that's his name - but let's be honest: didn't you always want to have your very own bar named after you?) has had a petite contretemps with the local 'protect and serve' guys.

Anyway, a fitting end to the year was my pedal crank breaking on my way home from a ride near Lidgate; the crank sheared clean off as I was out of the saddle honking up a long gentle incline on the way home from a 50. The next thing I knew I was all over the road having winded myself on the handlebar stem as I almost launched over the top. That's the trouble with running 'classic' 25 year old campag stuff on your winter fixie road iron; it's just a war of attrition on the way to a hiding to nothing. I also discovered it's really hard to ride a fixie with one pedal uphill as there's nowhere to put your other foot. The only solution was a gentle roll a mile back down into the village.

So while sitting outside the Star pub nursing a half pint (I only had 2 quid on me after the hot chocolate in Newmarket; I know - wild) in the alternating weak sunshine/hail (the Spanish staff kept trying to beckon me inside, concluding I was obviously well mad) waiting for 'she who toys with my heart' to come and rescue me, I felt strangely at peace.

the snow beckons.

my original face

Coming out of Cambridge the other night on the Guzzi, a bit late after an interminable student ensembles session, I was suddenly confronted by a sea of weaving blinky lights ahead on the way to Stow-cum-Quay. As I approached, with not a little apprehension, rolling off the throttle and digging my knees into the cylinder heads as the engine braking spun the speedo backwards, I was suddenly engulfed by a local flowering of hipsters, my first real sighting en mass. And even better, most of them were on over-accessorized fixies, many brakeless. It was a suburban attempt at an 'Alley Cat'. Damn - I now know how birdwatchers feel spotting that elusive corncrake.




I suddenly felt old, watching them all huffing along in the dark (somewhat slowly) with all the wrong gear - I wanted to flip up my lid (...not, like, 'flip my lid, daddio', but the one on my helmet) and say something like " ...hey guys, I've got one of those things and I've been riding them for 30 years, thanks to my dear departed (and hard as nails) Father-in-Law...", but that would just be sad. I will post up a few bits about my Father-in-Law John's riding at a later date.

And, once again continuing with the "stuff brings happiness" tangent, I have to admit that I seem to have reached a slight impasse. ("oh no?", you say? "Who could have foreseen that?") What I haven't mentioned thus far was that the bass clarinet I had been hoping for (in a fashion not unlike those fervent TV evangelicals in the US) arrived about 6 weeks ago, and I have been messing about with it daily since (thus proving the existence of higher powers, albeit in a lower register). When, the previous summer, I played a concert of semi-free improv at Kettles Yard with two laptop guys I know, I had snagged a bass clarinet a couple of weeks before, practiced it a bit (I used to have one 25 years ago, along with a clarinet) and was perfectly happy to just let my fingers and instincts do the walking. And, to my surprise, it turned out pretty well. I fell in love with it.

But, now after 6 weeks of diligent scales and arpeggios with a metronome, I now feel completely inhibited by the thing, (especially when I put it down and pick up the sax), and the contrast is scary. I'm much, much more fluid on the damn thing then I was the last time, but now I'm thinking about it. I'm trying to do very simple versions of the sorts of relatively complex patterns that I use on sax and just freezing, totally falling on my face. After the years of practice in improvising, you just need to do it; taking a line for a walk with an almost blank mind, no preconceptions. That seems to stem either from having no inhibitions on an unfamilar medium, or being supremely comfortable and totally detached from whatever is found in your hands: one thought and you are lost, utterly and completely. Quickly: what is your original face?



However, I'm back into tenor big time, and I'm going to drop using alto on the Riprap gigs. A decision.

And other things, the violist seems to be getting on with the piece, she said she was going to play it for her chamber group - hopefully the news will be good. Here's the usual cheesy synth fragment in lieu of the real thing; just click on Viola piece.

however,as far as important things go, there is now the rebirth of the old Sturmey-Archer 3-speed fixed hub of legend to consider for us sad-assed fixie riders.

cult of stuff.

It is strangely wearying, this restless search for a better life through the acquisition of objects; although we now know happiness can be bought. As outlined in the last post, I had it in writing from a local spiritual leader that a fixie titanium audax frame would cease the endless slow but exceedingly fine grinding of the wheel of karma, and help me lose my pod, all for just £899. And now it has happened again, with the discovery that after callously abandoning my first love, tenor sax, for the last three years to play alto, mainly because I "... just wasn't, like, hearing it any longer, man..." (what was I thinking? like someone who throws over his whole life; job, relationship and family, and ends up waking up in a fly-blown motel with an excruciating headache to find that a fickle piece of tall Estonian brass has left him sans wallet or car keys when his money finally ran out....)

please, please: Newk, Trane, Prez....forgive me.

So after my tenor sat, sullen and accusing in the corner of my room for a couple of years, I guiltily gave in and started practicing the damn thing again after purchasing a new (and pricey) mouthpiece a couple of months ago. This is not unlike couples who hope an expensive holiday will help them find the magic they lost somewhere. And because these kind of hopes always prove foolish and desperate, I've always fought shy of getting involved in the 'new mouthpiece' arms race that all players can succumb to; all too often they end up with bags of expensive mouthpieces that they thought were going to change their life at some point. My stand was always this: buy something decent and learn to use it. Like bicycles, it's the man not the machine.

However, my tenor sound had been getting woolier and woolier, and I seemed to have trouble projecting when compared to anyone standing next to me. Ultimately embarassing for someone whose one-time point of pride was scaring guitarists with a 1960's duckbill Brilhart Level-air. (sorry, very obscure, I know, but once the last fucking word in 1960's rock and roll space-age sax technology; complete shite to play)




This is all caught up in sad guy stuff; such as almost keeping senile Italian motorbikes running, and, with a tight smile and a little self-depreciating chuckle, gamely taking on modern 200 mph carbon-festooned Japanese rockets at the lights (and always losing, plus having to go back and collect the trail of small bits that vibed off when I revved too hard)
Or stomping my aging converted fixie up a hill without getting out of the saddle trying to drop tri-guys riding with the latest pricey kit, jabbering about their iphones and playing with their 'on-bicycle sat-nav'. Sad, sad, very sad aging guy stuff, I kept telling myself. Not very good at all; girls are so not impressed - time to let that stuff go and grow the hell up, for Christ's sake.

But surprisingly, the new mouthpiece was good, and did change my whole sound - my old set-up must have been quietly becoming crap over a number of years. Now to address the underlying problems: the fact that my rhythmic accuracy has also slowly degenerated over the last few years when I made a conscious decision to let my playing slide a bit to finish my post-grad studies. This is not entirely a bad thing - I have now come back both in a wildly different mindset, and realizing that the idea of purely virtuoso playing is not quite enough. But we are talking hours of metronome stuff; wildly boring. The real excitement is in the composing and realizing of new textures, trying to break from being the "...the fastest tenor player..." (which I never was) and think about compositional issues, which is far, far more interesting and engaging. (Or so I tell myself?)

Ted Gioia points out in his excellent book The Imperfect Art, (after which he sadly never followed up some of the points he raised, concentrating since then on history rather than aesthetics) namely that jazz has long been, aesthetically, a somewhat immature art form because of its over-reliance on virtuosity at the expense of structure; the cult of the virtuoso soloist over the that of the composer. When younger, I could never see what the problem was, but after years of gladiatorial pick-up gigs and head-to-head tenor battles, you start to realize that the attraction of what is primarily spectacle begins to pale; this insistence of technique over content has long been banished from the aesthetic of other art forms.

but hey, none the less, I can now play really loud on tenor again, and that feels good - for all the wrong reasons. Now to get a new set of wheels for the fixie. And now that I've more or less finished the cello piece and my weird singing piece for solo viola + voice, I can start messing with The Holy Goof again, and prepping up for the Ruth Padel gig on the 30th.

a cessation of the world of desires.

Andy and I, standing in front of a trade booth at a recent track cycling meet, were confronted by a highly polished vision of another, more perfect world. It was as if we were able to look beyond our present situation where our feet are stuck in the lower realms of animals and hungry ghosts, and have a brief vision beyond our human realm to that of devas and bodhisattvas. We both knew, at that moment, possessing it would still the ceaseless working of samsara. Spooky.

It was a very, very lightweight titanium audax bike frame with the option of fixed or geared riding. So, in short, everything. Gears - or not; mudguards - or not... club runs, forest trails or towpath bashes; long audax runs or light, quick continental touring via magic plastic.

Andy, being a man of the cloth, confirmed my suspicions that the purchase of such a frame would mean my life would be suddenly fulfilled - no more frustrations concerning work, unfulfilled personal goals, male pattern baldness or tribulation in relations with the rest of humanity. And all that for just £899 (I'd still have to fit it out, though; campag?). How often does that happen in life? How rare is it that you can buy happiness and also banish middle-age spread? I rest my case.

So, I've just finished a cello suite for a friend from Slovenia, hopefully to be premiered this year. I have to say that I really enjoyed it, and I'm getting into the idea of writing for particular people. So I've also started working on a solo viola piece for a friend in Sweden - I'm really not sure how she's going to react to that one, as I've specified that she must hum/sing as well as play.... could be wildly embarrassing for all concerned. I still haven't heard back from her after a rough draft; she's probably agonizing about how to be polite, and just regretting she agreed to do it.

I sort of got into it while thinking about double-stopping, and listening to my own tuneless vocal drone as I was messing about at the piano trying to sustain lines. The dog was so not impressed. I had been been spending time juggling a little pitch matrix I had constructed and turning it this way and that trying to see what vertical and horizontal possibilities it might hold, and wishing parts of the line, the third voice so to speak, would just carry on. But, of course, a string player can only really sustain lines on two strings for any length of time; hence the humming. I'll put some bits up next post, although there's an ominous silence from the party it's being written for, so that idea might have to go.

I was down in London at Kings Place to watch my old supervisor, Martin Butler, play with the ensemble Notes Inegales. The entire program was mostly based around Peter Wiegold's compositions which were all based on various improvisational strategies. Martin, a classical pianist, has for some time been heavily getting into Miles in his Bitches Brew phase, and is working hard on becoming a jazz-ish improvisor, filtered through his own composing style. The best part of the day was hanging at the pub afterwards with a group of players and composers. Must do more of that sort of thing (the hanging bit, not the pub...)Anyway, here's a clip of Miles from that era.




Lastly, a beardie guy picture....complete with my own personal doppelgagger, a kind of reverse Dorian Gray thing; it's a painting made of me the last time I had a beard, about the age of 24; unfortunately, I had just lost the braid.



That is now so gone, with the impending start of term....although there was an intermediate stylish goatee phase, after which Jane threatened divorce.

back from the not-so-frozen wastes....

Another inexcusable silence on my part, partly caused by a 3-and-a-bit week camping holiday in Sweden,(no sniggering; as I know that anyone of a certain age tends to equate this sort of thing with a naughty Sid James - ' Carry on' state of being...blonds, volleyball, healthy outdoor pursuits and high jinks in the sauna) and partly by an almost crystalline stasis of any of my higher mental functions, i.e., almost anything above lizard-level brain stem function.

This could be in part caused by me having become beardie guy over the holiday, as I didn't fancy shaving for three weeks with cold water (..I know...wuss...). No doubt the effort of forcing hair though the skin of my lower face took almost all of my psychic energy, not to mention creating a dangerously yang state of mind. And, to be honest, another contributing factor could have been my recent temporary abstention from any sort of strong waters in the evenings, which usually contributes to a state mildly reckless euphoria and well-being; a welling of hope and a readiness to share my lot and reach out to other seekers of the ox. This was precipitated by my sifu suggesting a temporary cessation of caffeine and the oil of the sun would result in a much better circulation of chi.. this, however, remains to be seen. I have mostly become very dull. (how can you tell the difference, you ask?)

So I had secretly hoped the beard would give that kind of slightly dishevelled George Clooney look as seen in The Perfect Storm,





or perhaps even the steely U-Boat commander looked sported here by Jurgen Prochnow from Das Boot



But it didn't quite work out like that. It was more of a 'Papa Hemingway' look as he progressed towards the bitter end:




Anyway, this sort of thing is all clearly explained at the mandatory website for guys

I really have to raise my game, among other things. There's been a lot of composing and cycling occurring as well, a solo cello piece, a prospective viola piece and now some settings for John Clare poems for a festival next summer.









more soon...

Job 2:7 metaphorical boils

Again, another hiatus in the progress of this blog; I've just finished term, had a run of good gigs, and done the TS Eliot festival. I had spent the last month and a half composing for that, and had arranged a rehearsal and recording session for the material with Ruth Padel and Grevel Lindop so as to release some of the current repertoire after the gig in Little Gidding.

It was not to be... more a rising crescendo of tribulation to try a Job, although the word YHWH never passed my lips. Nor did I think it was directed by Satan....(and of course you knew there had to be a YHWH.com) But do read the bizarrely lame exegesis relating the trials of Job to 'Chippy' the parakeet and his ordeal with a vacuum cleaner on the Job link...my life is more like that, really.

Ok - so this is how it went:

First, 5 days before the session, Russ did his back; ...badly, he was now out of action, and didn't know whether he could play the actual gig in two weeks, let alone the session.

Then Roger had a problem with the times on the day due to a misunderstanding; my fault. But there was confusion as to when he would actually be around, although I had someone to cover.

Next, the mixing desk at the ARU studio was still AWOL; there was a clumsy portable fix, but it is the sort of thing that makes engineers mutter dark thoughts and maledictions under their breath, especially when pressed for time.

Finally, the day before the rehearsal/recording, one of my poets bailed - there had been a major crisis (public rather than personal) and they felt it was impossible to go ahead.

ha ha ha .... all in all, interesting times. Session cancelled.

I had written, as threatened, a lot of stuff for bass clarinet. good stuff. Like "Forests are Falling"
and " Sighting the Tiger" for instance, to go with two of Padel's poems, along with a Rameau rip-off and other stuff. But it all went well on the day, as Grevel and Malcolm contributed to a great gig.

The one last thing that finished off this series of minor trials was getting run over very slowly while commuting into Cambridge one morning. I was on my old touring bike, purchased from John Pavey 20 years ago. we went back a long way, touring all over the continent... Alpine passes, the Mont Ventoux - and never mind the Pyrenees and the Tourmalet



... I was sitting at a junction next to a car on his left (as you would) preparing to go straight on. He, on the other hand, decided to try and take advantage of a very short break in the traffic coming from the right to make a rapid, clever left turn. He started gunning the engine (no indicator) and suddenly my front wheel was disappearing under his wheel arch, along with the rest of the bike as he started to roll... I flopped off as this was happening across his hood and started thumping it, while making observations to no one in particular about sexual congress, genitalia, procreation outside the church's sanction and his possible position on those issues. We then had a frank exchange of views which ended up with him giving me his phone number and driving me to work as I sat in a quiet fury. Of course, he was an Estate Agent.

hey - but the LeMans is taxed and on the road, Le Tour has started, and I've cycled 250k so far this week