Year: 2005

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Web links…

Links have obviously been the main traffic driving thing for the web ever since it began. You go to a page, the info there contains a link to somewhere else, and so it goes on.

I often get emails from musicians wanting to ‘swap links’ – they’ll put a link to my site on their if I’ll add one to theirs on my site.

Now, while I appreciate the thought process behind this, that’s never been what a links page has been about for me. A links page should tell you a lot about the person whose site it is. It’s one of the first places I head when I’m checking out a website – what are they into, who do they want me to check out, what’s important to them? Same with blogs – you can tell a lot about a blogger by the blogs they read.

So my links page is all about what I listen to, what I’m into, what I think is important, musicians and things I want to support, places to go to get more info about the stuff that’s already on the site. My blog links on this page are to blogs I read, not blogs I want people to think I read cos it would be cool, or links I’ve swapped with other bloggers.

There are very few people on my links page that link back to me – a few of the bassists do, some of the music equipment companies etc. They are they cos I dig what they do, not because I can get some more traffic out of them.

If you want to link to me, please do. If you’d like me to link to you, send a link over, I’ll check out the site, and if it’s something that becomes part of my webosphere, it’ll go up there, but not if you make linking to you a condition of linking to me.

So, head over to my links page, check out some of the musicians, or the political stuff, or just the fun stuff. It’s all things I like a lot.

Or just have a read of the links to other blogs on this page.

Soundtrack – Seth Horan, ‘Conduit’ (that’s another link to follow to check out a fabulous singing solo bassist); Spearhead, ‘Stay Human’; David Wilcox, ‘Into The Mystery’.

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weekend roundup

Lots of teaching yesterday, which was fun. Followed by lots of Edinburgh festival stuff – I was overdue on getting my press releases sent to the CVenues people, so needed to get those written – needed full press release, then 10 word, 20 word, 40 word, 50 word and 100 word versions of the blurb on the show! All needed for different types of advertising/promo/brochure etc. I got onto a bit of a roll and put them together pretty quickly. It remains to be seen what the press dept at CVenues make it them all…

Also sent them some photos for press useage – thanks to having had the photoshoot with the very wonderful Steve Brown, I have loads of very high quality pics to choose from. Edinburgh will, come August, be peppered with loads of pictures of me looking rather foxy (and slightly portly, worryingly…!)

Today was church this morning – fine preach for Pentecost Sunday drawing the parallel between the fragmentation of people through language at the tower of Babel and the reuniting of them through the disciples speaking in all the languages of those present at Pentecost – very nice link, not one I’d thought of before.

After church, it was off to celebrate the Bangla New Year in Spittalfields – was rather novel, and quite enjoyable, experience to be in a 2% minority as a white person at the celebrations. Lots of vibrant colours and happy people.

From there we (we being Steve photo-dude and his lovely wife Lorna, along with Paul and Rachel, Jazzy and Angus – Angus being my godson) headed over to Spittalfields market for a mezze lunch in that place that has the canope outside just along from Spitz, and then a stroll round the market.

Then home, knackered after lots of walking and carrying Jazzy (she’s 6, fortunately, so I wasn’t actually giving a full grown adult a piggy-back around all day!), but contented after a fun day.

Soundtrack – Spearhead, ‘Stay Human’; Joni Mitchell, ‘Both Sides Now’; Jonas Hellborg, ‘Octave Of The Holy Innocents’; Thelonius Monk, ‘Greatest Hits’.

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I'm in a composing frame of mind…

well, I’ve been recording stuff, anyway. After a rather long hiatus, the impetus to record came back with the duo project with Cleveland. We recorded the duo stuff, and I left my bass rig wired up to the computer so I could record some solo bits ‘n’ bobs. So I’ve been recording a couple of tracks a day for the last few days, and some of it’s rather good.

The format is as usual, in that I’m recording the stuff live, largely made up on the spot, but I’m then editing the tracks, and trying to get some kind of structure from the initial version, and then re-learn that to get a nice arrangement together. We’ll see how well it works!

The good thing is that I’ll have a couple of new tunes to premier at the upcoming gigs, which is nice, and will probably throw one of them in the direction of the street team, later this week. If they behave themselves.

Other news – the first of my show sponsors for Edinburgh has confirmed. Working on three more (if anyone reading this fancies sponsoring the show, you can email me for details). If I get all four, it’ll cover the cost of the venue hire, significantly droppping my financial risk!

Have also sorted out accomodation for while we’re there, thanks to hugely generous and lovely friends in Edinburgh. It’s all coming together!

So, life is good. Now I just need to get on with writing some of the teaching stuff that I’ve got to do, for musicdojo.com and BGM. Busy-busy!

Soundtrack – Zakir Hussein, ‘Making Music’; some old MP3s of unreleased stuff of mine; Tommy Sims, ‘Peace and Love’; Ani DiFranco, ‘Little Plastic Castle’; Orphy Robinson, ‘When Tomorrow Comes’.

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I'm on a charity compilation CD…

Back when the Tsunami happened in December, everyone was running around wondering what they could do to help. We all gave money to the various appeals, so much so that the DEC said it didn’t need any more money after just a few months. It was an astounding response, to be sure. One of the efforts that I was contacted about almost immediately was a compilation CD being assembled by people at BassTechUK – a website/webforum based in Manchester. the guy who runs the site had the idea of putting together a CD of tracks from bassists all over the place, and selling it to raise money for the appeal.

So the charity was chosen – SOS Children – a charity that works with orphans all over the world – and lots of bassists were approached.

The resulting list is pretty impressive – Janek Gwizdala, Jimmy Haslip, the Poogie Bell Band, Steve Jenkins, Mo Foster, Peter Muller, Stevie Williams, Lorenzo Feliciati, David Dyson, Laurence Cottle, Dean Brown and me – we all donated tracks, which are now available on the ‘As One’ CD.

It’s a nice idea, and one I’m glad to be a part of – as a musician, it doesn’t really do much good to turn up in a disaster area and play tunes while there are people who need feeding (after the event, it can be good to have musicians turn up – if you ever get a chance to hear Micheal Franti tell his story of his trip to Iraq, it’s amazing). But we can do what we do – sell music to make money – and then donate that money to the appeal. Every penny of this is going to the charity (to the point where we’ve all agreed to donate our MCPS royalties on the manufacturing when they arrive).

So go on, click on the CD cover and head over to BassTechUK and buy a copy…

Soundtrack – mainly bits of new stuff that I’ve been recording, trying out some new tunes to premier at the upcoming gigs.

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Congrats to Danny Baker – DJ Of the Year.

My only awareness of the Sony awards until a couple of years ago was that certain radio djs were introduced as ‘sony award winner….’. Then friends started winning them and I took more interest. It’s now grown to be the most important set of awards in UK radio, and I always look to see if anyone I know has one an award; not many of them have this year, though Sally Phillips got a bronze award for Clare In The Community.

My favourite bit of news though, is that Danny Baker got the DJ of the year Gold award. Much deserved, for sure – this house wakes up to Danny’s breakfast show on BBC Radio London every day, and he along with Amy and Mark mean that we wake up laughing. So congrats to Danny for a much deserved win. And if you’re in London, stop waking up to the Today Programme, or whoever is being dull on Radio 1, or Christian O’Donnel and his weirdness about horse cheese and super-powers, and tune into Danny instead – 94.9fm.

Soundtrack – Show Of Hands, ‘Dark Fields’.

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Two gigs this week (watched) and two days at LGS.

LGS being the London Guitar Show. I was there Friday to meet up with the nice peoples at Bass Guitar Magazine to chat about me writing a column for them, which I now need to sketch out a plan for, and then get writing. Caught up with a few other friends. Went back Saturday to see more friends, and was hoping to check out the Celinder basses which are amazing (Lowell brought one to my workshop in Cupertino , California back in January, and I wanted to see more), but the noise was so loud it was pointless.

However through the din I did get to listen to Laurence Cottle, jamming with guitarist Paul Stacey, and despite the noise and Paul having to play through a bass amp, they made a glorious noise. Fab musicians. Caught up with more friends. It wasn’t a bad show for bass stuff – the Bass Centre had a stand with all manner of bargains on it, EBS, GB Guitars, MarkBass, Celinder, the re-born Trace Elliot, Ashdown, Peavey and a few others were there with plenty of bass toys. It’d be unfair to compare it to NAMM as a) it’s open to the public, and all about selling stuff not launching new products and getting dealers and b) it’s in England.

The two gigs were Nitin Sawhney on Wednesday, and The Bays on Friday.

Nitin’s gig was a bit of a disappointment – the tunes he did with the Asian singers, Nina Bhardwaj and some guy whose name I can’t find online, were amazing. Great vocalists. The other stuff came over like a load of Urban Species mid 90s mellow hip-hop grooves with some OK tunes. Nothing special. Maybe it’s just that I had high expectations. It was enjoyable, just not the mind blowing experience I’d expected. Still, Orphy Robinson came with me, and an evening out with Orphy was enough to make it all worthwhile (and I didn’t pay for the ticket – ’twas a present from Dweez, who couldn’t go due to work commitments – thanks John!)

The other gig.. actually, there were two other gigs, as I went to see Roger Beaujolais play with his sextet in the Foyer of the Festival Hall before going to see The Bays in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Roger’s band were very fine – London really does have some fantastic jazz players!

The idea behind The Bays is that they play completely improvised club-tastic dance grooves. The feel can change from night to night – sometimes its more house-y, sometimes more Drum ‘n’ Bass-ish. Friday night sounded like Gong remixed by Daft Punk. Top notch. The addition of a third keyboard player and a guy playing synth stuff on guitar was fine, but hardly necessary, as they make enough noise as a quartet. Still, the gig was fab, and I’d recommend the Bays to anyone who can cope with the volume (it was loud!).

Soundtrack – Eric Roche, ‘With These Hands’ (Eric’s had to cancel a few gigs again recently due to being ill, so if you’ve been playing to buy this fantastic record, now would probably be a good time! Head over to Eric’s site to have a listen – he’s one of the finest solo acoustic guitarists I’ve heard, one of the nicest people I know, and an indie artist that you really ought to support by buying his marvellous CDs!)

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When spoofs get out of hand.

Right, now I’ve recovered from laughing harder than I have in quite a while, I’ll share this one with y’all.

In order to prove a bet, a guy sets up a fake BBC news story, just to show the friend he’s having the argument with. At which point, some other new source picks up on it, posts it and it spreads across the net.

The explaination page is almost as funny as the article itself. If you do email the guy in question, please let me know whether you think 40 unarmed ‘midgets’ could take down a lion… (you’d have thought that the use of the word midget would have given away that it wasn’t a real BBC report, as the word is rarely used by any of the groups associated with restricted growth/little people.)

Soundtrack – Michael Manring, ‘Soliloquy’ (just keeps getting better and better.)

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What, no mention of the election result??

What is there to say? Labour back in – no surprise there. Greatly reduced majority – good news, or it would be if the Tories hadn’t taken so many of the seats. Interesting that the Tories took those seats due to a swing from Labour to Lib-Dem, rather than Lab to Tory… Lib-Dems did well but not as well as some predicted. Took a couple of very key seats (Hornsey being about the highest profile of them).

It’s nice to see that Michael Howard is stepping down. Hopefully whoever takes his place will be less overtly racist in their policy formation. While I dread the idea of a Conservative government again, a weak opposition is really bad for democracy. Good riddance to Howard and his race-baiting immigration policies.

‘Tis a shame the Greens didn’t get in in Brighton – they did get a load of votes, and it bodes well for the next election. I just hope that some miraculous thing transpires where we switch to Proportional Representation – that way, we would have green MPs, a vote for the Greens wouldn’t be wasted, and the Lib Dems would just about double their number of seats… though it would also give the BNP a voice in parliment… hmmm, maybe we need stronger laws about racial hate-speech. Glad to see the BNP didn’t get any MPs, and their highest number of votes in any constituency was less than 5000… still, the thought that there are 5000 people in Barking willing to vote for a fascist party is pretty frightening.

Will Blair go? i doubt it. Nice to see some MPs sticking their heads over the parapit and calling for his resignation. Would Brown be any better? Who knows. Sad to see Blunkett back in – off the scene for 5 months, and now all is forgotten apparently. I haven’t forgotten his draconian insanity in his time as Home Secretary, so dread to think what he’ll do in his new role as Work and Pensions secretary.

Basically, it looks like being business as usual for president Blair – a few vaguely contrite words about learning from the election, followed by more of the same. *sigh*.

Soundtrack – Sheila Chandra, ‘Moonsung’ (I can’t ever imagine getting bored with this album, it’s perfect); Steve Lawson/Jez Carr, ‘Conversations’ (not listened to this for a few months, very nice to pull it out again and have a listen – I’d forgotten how lovely some of Jez’ playing on it is).

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Well, I voted…

I stood in the voting booth for a long time. Probably three or four minutes, deciding between Green and Lib Dem.

Eventually went with Green. for a number of reasons. Firstly, and most obviously, their manifesto is the one I felt the strongest affinity with – they certainly seem like the genuine left-wing option these days.

Secondly, Chipping Barnet has been a Tory seat for years, and the main players are Tory/Labour, so voting Lib-Dem would be unlikely to have a big influence. It also means that even if we get a tory this time round (old MP is standing down at this election), it doesn’t mean a gain for the Tories, just same ole same ole.

Thirdly, I hate the idea of tactical voting. I’ve done it in the past, I can see the reasoning for it, but it’s really shitty having a system where people don’t feel they can vote with their conscience. All the polls suggest that the Greens would get way way way more votes if they were all counted as with proportional representation. As it is, few people vote green before they don’t feel like it counts, so they switch to the one of the Big Three that they think is least odious. That’s a really rubbish way to do democracy. Dreadful, in fact.

So, I voted according to conscience. I did it. The greens won’t get in, but in the analysis, the powers that be will see that they got my vote, that I didn’t cave in and vote tactically, that I cared enough about the green way of doing things that I spent my vote on them.

Feels good!

Soundtrack – Michael Manring, ‘Soliloquy’ (very hard to get this one out of the player once it’s in, and not because of some manufacturing fault with the disc!)

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