stevelawson.net

yesterday was one year to the day since we got the Fairly Aged Felines. One very fine year of them bringing much joy into the house, and us building up their trust, them learning how to get us to feed them when they want, dealing with a couple of health scares, and feeling grateful every day for their presence in the house.

Happy Anniversary, boys!

Despite being a huge cat-fan, I’ve long been concerned about the numbers of birds and tiny mammals killed by domestic cats in the UK. So this article in the guardian, forwarded to me by BDB, was scary in that it puts a figure on it – up to 300 MILLION birds killed a year by domestic cats! That’s a terrifying number, especially when some of our song birds are endangered.

So what to do? Well, there’s some obvious advice in the article about not feeding birds in places where the cats are going to jump on them. It also talks about belling them, but there are counter arguments that it’s pretty distressing for the cat to have a bell tinkling away round its neck all the time (as it would be for us, I’m sure).

The best alternative for cat lovers is to a) get all their cats neutered – there are too many cats around anyway, way more than there are responsible owners – and next time you get a new cat, instead of getting kittens, adopt an older cat, preferably a ‘house cat’ – one that for whatever reason needs to stay in-doors, or is a proper aged feline and thus can’t catch anything anyway. They are harder for the rescue centres to home, but make MUCH better pets than kittens do – more mellow, friendly, cuddly, less skittish, less likely to destroy curtains etc.

While the Fairly Aged Felines do go out, they don’t go out much and certainly don’t go far, and in the year we’ve had them have so far brought in one bird between them, which was most likely dead before they found it. In the winter, when birds are most likely to be feeding in our garden on the bird feeders, the boys stay inside anyway.

So, there you go – aged felines are not only the cat-friendly choice, they’re the bird-friendly choice too…

Soundtrack – Mark Lockheart, ‘Moving Air’.

Uh-oh, the moment we feared has arrived… One of the Fairly Aged Felines brought in a dead baby sparrow last night!

There are few possible scenarios here – obviously, worst case is that he caught it, and is getting into hunting. second worse is that it fell out of a nest and he killed it when he found it on the ground, least worst is that he found it on the ground dead. The Sigfried and Roy logic suggests that he brought it in so that we could adminster CPR, but was too late and is now distraught at the demise of his tiny feathered friend.

We’re SO hoping this doesn’t become a habit… it’s the first time any of our Fairly Aged Felines have brought in anything like that. Usually they bring in lots of leaves, stuck to their fur, but never carrion…

Ah well, time to go get ready for tonight’s gig in Guildford – see you there!

(written 25/705 11.28)

just waiting to get a cab from the hotel to the airport, having spent the last hour talking with Maurizio Rolli (fab Italian bassist) and Hiram Bullock (guitarist with Marcus Miller/Jaco etc.) discussing their drummer problems. I love conversations like this – it makes life as a solo artist seem even more appealing, and also shows me just how easy the people I work with are to deal with. I’m feeling very lucky right now both to be able to play solo and to with lovely people like Theo and Jez and Cleveland and Michael and BJ and Orphy and the other friendly low maintainance musical geniuses that I spend my days making noises with.

The rest of the day yesterday went v. well – the Jam For Klaus went really well – I started it with a ebow ambient loop to set some kind of context for it, and each of the bassists added different elements that all complimented the whole and seemed to work as a fitting musical tribute to this local bassist who’d been so tragically killed.

After that jam, a whole other kind of jam – over at the BassZone stand in the expo bit of the day, I set up to play, and was joined by a couple of other Italian bassists, for a version of Highway 1, which worked really well.

And then the last two bits of the gig were Michael playing solo, followed by him guesting with the Maurizio Rolli big band in a tribute to Jaco, playing arrangements similar to those on The Birthday Concert. Maurizio is a fabulous bassist, and the arrangements were really well done.

And now I’m heading home, looking forward to seeing TSP and the Fairly Aged Felines, and getting back on with the process of sorting out my Edinburgh promo. the C Venues art dept. have come back with a whole load of changes to my poster and flyer (layout stuff rather than changing the design, but still a fair amount of work shuffling things around the screen, which needs to be done tomorrow), and I’ve still got to chase up some press and radio contacts for the fest, as well as playing in Guildford on thursday and Berwick On Tweed on Sunday, and fitting in as much teaching as I can in between… it’s all go in StevieWorld!

Today’s Independent has a story stating that 70,000 cases of animal cruelty were found in Britain last year. The sad news is, it only led to 1,507 prosecutions, leading the RSPCA to call for a new animal welfare act that places a duty of care on all animal owners.

The weird thing with stories like this is, why the hell doesn’t that exist already? Why are people not legally bound to provide their pets with sufficient food/water/shelter? What kind of barbaric ethical wilderness are we in as far as animal cruelty is concerned?

Across Europe, the Brits are seen as being crazy about our pets, and there are, thankfully, a heck of a lot of concerned loving pet owners, who make sure their pets are looked after, feed them properly and take then to the vets when they get ill. Sadly, there are also a bunch of morons who lack the basic human function of compassion, and so mistreat their pets – why on earth do they have pets in the first place??

But it’s more than that – keeping pets is pretty expensive, so we need some sort of mechanism in place to encourage pet insurance.

On the up side, it’s great to see the mainstream pet food companies doing junior/adult/senior cat ‘n’ dog food now – taking note of the high instance of kidney problems in cats, caused by the wrong food. Please get your cat/dog’s to have a blood test (they might need some convincing – our boys aren’t into the vets much at all), and find out if they need to be put on a renal diet, or some other kind of medical diet (the special food doesn’t cost much, it’s just tasteless so it takes a while to convince them to eat it at all!)

So, if you’re a cat owner, get thee to CatChat.org for muchos good advice, and don’t forget to read Gemini and The Colonel’s diary while you’re there….

…and if you’re thinking of getting a cat, I can HIGHLY recommend aged felines – far less skittish than kittens (which grow up pretty fast anyway), harder to rehome, but just as in-need of love and attention. And if you get them from a decent rehoming centre, they often come with pet insurance already in place so even if they fall ill, you’re covered.

Yesterday, the original aged feline would have been 20. We had high hopes of him reaching that most prestigious of cat-landmarks at this time last year. His ongoing chronic renal condition got rapidly worse through August, and he died in September, a couple of months after his 19th Birthday. Which is not to be sneezed at. It makes him a bit of a Yoda amongst felines.

But we now have charge of the fairly aged felines, who are getting along just fine. The new challenge we face is trying to prevent the long-haired-ginger-one from resembling a moving shrubbery by combing him about five times a day to remove the myriad leaves, twigs and sticky seed-pods that he picks up whilst squirrelling through the ragged forest that is the extensive grounds here at Stevie Towers.

Both the boys have increased in bravery and friendliness, greeting new people in the house with curiosity and a request for cuddles rather than hiding under the sofa, which was their prefered reaction for the first few months.

They love their food, love cuddles, but are complaining a little about the heat of the summer. Well you try wearing a fur coat in this weather (I have tried it, it doesn’t work. Even for gigs.)

So raise a glass to the memory of The Aged Feline, and all the lessons he taught me.

No, we haven’t just got a Dog (the fairly aged felines are particularly glad about that) – it’s the title of the new album from The Works, who used to be known as Woodworks, and are the brainchild of keyboard/guitar genius, Patrick Wood. Pat and I have played together a fair bit – it was fun getting him into my method of ‘spontaneous composition’ and we ended up with some fab stuff recorded, that still needs to be mixed and edited properly.

Anyway, this is his quartet, with Mark Lockheart on sax, Neville Malcom on bass and Nic France on drums – all major players on the London jazz scene – and it is, almost without doubt, the best album I’ve heard come out of that scene for ages. Actually, it’s on a par with Theo’s last couple of albums – which are equally amazing.

The compositions are quite Zawinul/Shorter-ish in places, but with a really strong singer/songwriter sensibility to them, which obviously connects well with me. It’s beautifully recorded, perfectly crafted, and has all four players playing right at the top of their game.

If anyone ever suggests that BritJazz is somehow inferior to US jazz, this is the album to play them to prove them wrong. If Patrick was from New York, this’d be selling tens of thousands of copies.

It’s fab, and you really need to get it. I’m going to talk to Pat about stocking it in my online shop.

Talking of which, I’ll have John Lester’s CD up there before too long.

Soundtrack – The Works, ‘Beware Of The Dog’.

Well, OK, not quite, but it is the first proper day of sun this year in London. It’s warm out! Like, proper spring weather. I actually went out into the garden, without having to empty the kitchen compost bin into the huge compost bin outside! Amazing.

Two other residents of this house are enjoying the sun – The Fairly Aged Felines have been allowed out into the garden for over a week now, ever since I expertly fitted a cat-flap to our back-door (well, OK, I fitted it, expertly or not.)

Much fun to be had exploring our garden, and the neighbouring gardens, to be sure!

Soundtrack – still Pat Metheny/Charlie Haden, ‘Beyond The Missouri Sky’ – this is such an outstandingly gorgeous record, once it goes in the player it’s bound to be there for a day or so… I think I’m on my fifth or sixth listen in a row.

So The Small Person took the Izzard test and scored 90!! Which leaves me no longer the top rated in my age group, but also not even the top rated in my house. Still, I’m rather proud of TSP for her remarkable knowledge of all this Izzard-esque.

I think it’s safe to say that the Fairly Aged Felines (who are doing really well, thanks for asking) won’t score quite so highly, as they haven’t watched Circle or Dress To Kill yet. Whenever we go to put one of those on, they complain and want to see Glorious or Definite Article again…

The Fairly Aged Felines wish you a happy, warm, snuggle-filled year of mouse-dreams and giant laps.