Category: Updates

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Back to political blogging….

So, with all that Edinburgh festival stuff, I seriously curtailed my newsfeed reading, and thus blogged v. little about stuff that’s going on in the world. So to get us back in the swing of things, dear bloglings, here’s one that made me rethink my position on one of the upcoming pressing decisions of British politics – the next Conservative party leader.

George Monbiot points out in this article that most lefties would be hoping that, if the worst were to happen and we were to end up with a Tory leader at the next election, at least it could be someone who seems a bit more moderate, like Ken Clarke.

But he points out that as deputy chairman of British American Tobacco, Ken has presided over all kinds of hideously inethical decisions, pressing for tobacco importing and advertising regulations to be softened in order to make the shareholders of BAT richer, and the people of some of the world’s poorer countries more likely to get addicted to ciggies. All this while he’s in charge of their frankly risible ‘corporate social responsibility group'(here’s a tip, BAT, how about not making cigarettes at all, if you care about social responsibility? oh sorry, you don’t, it’s a whitewash. Well done.)

The tobacco industry is one of the great evils on the planet. The crop itself destroys the ground it grows on, the workers end up with all kinds of illnesses thanks to the pesticides that are put on it, and the end product, according to the World Heath Organisation, is responsible for the deaths of half the people who smoke – currently, that’s 650,000,000 people.

Here’s a quote from the WHO website –

“Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death in the world today. With 4.9 million tobacco-related deaths per year, no other consumer product is as dangerous, or kills as many people, as tobacco.”

In contrast, have a look at the Social Report page on the BAT website – the most ridiculous load of psuedo-concerned horseshit I’ve read for quite a while. What a great industry to invest in!

Any of you green-lefties who smoke but want to make the world a better place, the single biggest step that you can make to start that process is to give up smoking, and start encouraging your friends to do the same. There’s no such thing as a fair trade cigarette, and as the ban is hopefully going to come into effect soon, it’ll become even more of a social blight to be the smoker in the group. So go on, give up now, tell everyone it’s for ethical reasons, store up some social capital and feel smug about yourself!

In the meanwhile, read the Monbiot article, and rethink your possible good feelings towards Ken Clarke. He’s sadly as much of a scumbag as the rest of his tory counterparts…

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not one but two Amy Kohn gigs in London

One of the best things about Edinburgh is meeting up with other performers. Sometimes it’s a fleeting yet encouraging chat outside a venue (I met Alan Carr outside the Assembly Rooms where he was performing, and had a lovely chat and swapped encouragement for the fest) and other times it’s people who become top chums and you stay in touch with.

Amy Kohn is a friend of JazzShark‘s, who was playing up at Edinburgh, and who stepped into the role of Echoplex footpedal on Fringe Sunday and jammed along on accordian, on Amo Amatis Amare. She was down in London this weekend playing a couple of gigs so we went along. First up she was at The 12 Bar – an acoustic venue in central London, playing at an accordion night (oh yes, it’s not just bassists who get together for a geek-out once in a while!). Obviously for this gig she was just playing accordion and singing, but was fab. She writes very quirky songs, with lots of really odd harmony in them, and it takes a while to get drawn into Amy-world, but when you catch up with her, it’s beguiling stuff.

Monday’s gig was at Ray’s Jazz in Foyles – just a half hour in-store. But they had a piano, so I went along to see what Amy was like with piano instead of accordion. Damn, she’s a fantastic piano player! Scary stuff indeed. The Accordion is a great live tool, in that it gives her freedom to move around, it’s pretty original for a left-field singer/songwriter and is just makes a nice change, but Amy’s piano playing is on a whole other level. There are nods towards Tori and Kate Bush, but that’s just a tiny part of what Amy does. She’s as much Charles Ives as she is Tori Amos, and her background in musical theatre definitely creeps in there too… I picked up copies of both her albums, and have listened to the brand new so-new-it’s-only-an-advance-copy one, which is marvellous. Really really original and lovely. Top stuff.

Today’s been a day of two halves – the first half was spent shopping in Enfield with my auntie Babs. Well, she’s actually my third cousin Babs, but has always been auntie Babs… (maternal grandmother’s cousin). Anyway, I think I’ve probably blogged about Babs before – she’s 80 (I think), but looks about 20 years younger, has a more active social life than most people half her age, a great sense of humour, and is much fun to go out for lunch with. Today she needed the batteries in her smoke alarms changing, so that was a fine excuse for us to go out for lunch before heroic me shimmying up a ladder to swap said batteries over.

And now I’m listening to and playing through the songs for Duncan’s greenbelt gig. Lucky me – what a charmed life. 🙂

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What is this, how you say, 'Kassett'??

So, I’ve got four days to get my head round Duncan Senyatso‘s tunes for Greenbelt, so time to have a listen to them… hang on, that’s not a CD. What is it? It this some new technology I’ve not seen before? A small plastic box, with a long ribbon inside wound round two spools.

Ooh, I remember – cassette tape! Blimey.

It took me about half an hour to find a cassette deck in the house (actually, there’s one in the kitchen but I didn’t want to bring that into the office). Eventually I found the cassette player at the bottom of a dusty box under a pile of records (records!!) behind the TV. It hasn’t been used for many years, but it seems to be doing OK thus far..

The sound quality is dreadful – how did we put up with this for so long? What a rubbish way to listen to anything. It makes low res MP3s sound positively high-tech. Maybe we should blame the inventor of the walkman – there’s no way cassette would have survived without it…

Thank the good Lord for CD, CDR, MP3 and Minidisc!

though sadly I don’t think even those lovely new technologies would make Duncan’s marvellous music any easier to play!

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One fab night out in London

With Jeff Kaiser still in town, tonight was the last chance to head out for a curry. When Jeff first came to a gig of mine in Ventura (a clinic at Instrumental Music), we went for curry afterwards, so it was time to return the favour.

I made a couple of phone calls this afternoon to find an indian restaurant in town that would cater for vegans, and one of the places I called was the Malabar Junction on Great Russell Street – just chosen at random.

So after we met up in Ray’s Jazz Store, we headed over there to check it out. Good guess, Stevie! It’s got to be one of the nicest indian restaurants I’ve ever been in – gorgeous interior, massively helpful staff, and fantastic food. What’s not to love?

Along for the evening also was trumpeter Ian Smith – one of the founders of the London Improvisors Orchestra – a very nice bloke indeed. Evenings spent talking bollocks with musicians have to rank on my favourite nights out. From curry house to Bar Italia and home again. All in all, a fine way to spend an evening.

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The rancid end of the music industry

OK, this is really really screwed up. Garth Brooks has signed an exclusive distribution deal for all of his work… WITH WALMART!!

How scummy is that? I mean, it’s not like I’m going to miss being able to get his records, I’ve never bought one, or listened to one for that matter (though he did once record a Pierce Pettis song – I think I’ll stick with listening to Pierce’s amazing CDs, and avoid the be-hatted loser), but the idea of someone being so screwed up in their view of the world that they would want their CDs to only be stocked by a supermarket chain… and Walmart at that. It beggars belief quite what brand of decaying faecal matter his brain has been replaced with, but I’m sure Walmart stock it and sell it cheaper than anyone else.

The world of supermarkets is getting progressively more horrible – I went to the Tescos in Corstorphine last week, while staying with the lovely Gareth and Jane, and was amazed to find ‘self-checkout’ facilities – you just scan your own stuff and leave, with one person watching over 6 or 8 tills.

Now, I wouldn’t relish a job on a checkout, that’s for sure, but the net jobloss whenever a supermarket opens in a town that previously didn’t have one is well over 200. If you then take away what few shitty jobs there were in the supermarket, you destroy the local trade infrastructure and don’t even replace it with a poor imitation of itself. You replace it with a void. For some people, the option to work an overnight shift in their local supermarket is their only realistic chance of employment due to family commitments or whatever.

So Walmart are becoming exclusive stockists of shit country CDs and carry on destroying communities across the US. Meanwhile, they’ve bought Asda. Our local supermarket is an Asda, which we studiously avoid. Now we’re back from Edinburgh, it’s time to sign up to an organic box scheme and leave behind supermarket veggies for good.

But for now, Bollocks to Garth Brooks and his new distribution deal – I hope it fails miserably for all concerned.

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Goodbye Mo

Mo Mowlam died this morning.

I’m so upset by this – Mo was an amazing woman, one of the few New Labour politicians who never seemed to toe the party line at all. She will forever be remembered as the woman who told Ian Paisley to ‘fuck off’, something a lot of people have been wanting to say to him for a long time.

She spoke at stop the war rallies, she was openly critical of much of the Blairite agenda, and spoke up about the victimisation she faced in parliment – a situation I’m sure many more people have to deal with but never have the balls to go public on.

Her death is a huge loss to British public life, to the personality of British politics, and the surrounding press will be another reminder to Blair that he can’t shape public opinion. Just as Robin Cook will be remembered more for his ethical stance against the war than for his affair, so Mo will be remembered as a woman who didn’t take the shit that New Labour tried to throw at her.

The good ones always die first…

other links – Guardian Newsblog, the Indie, news.bbc

TAGS –

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Gig last night…

Despite being exhausted, the promise of a chance to play a set with Orphy and a couple of friends from the States last night at the Red Rose was too tempting, so I headed off out again.

I took a much scaled down rig with me, as I knew I was only going to be playing for about 10 minutes, and really couldn’t be arsed to take the whole lot out again after setting it up and packing it down 12 days in a row at Edinburgh!

the Americans in question are Jeff Kaiser and Andrew Pask playing trumpet (jeff), sax and clarinet (andrew) through lots of delicious electronic processing (Andrew works for Cycling 74, so has written some glorious loop algorythms for Max/MSP).

They did about 25 minutes, and then Orphy and I joined them for a 10 minute improv thingie, which sounded lovely from where I was sat.

The rest of the evening was fun too – a solo trombone set from Alan Tomlinson was a mindblowing mixture of virtuosic free improv and clowning. Very funny indeed.

Then Evan Parker and John Coxon did a lovely guitar/sax duet, which ran the gamut from outnoisemadness to a bluesy mellow jazz bit in the middle and back to freakoutland. Very fine stuff.

And finally a quintet of Tony Bevan (bass sax), Mark Saunders (drums), John Edwards (bass), Ashley Wales (electronics) and Orphy (percussion etc.) finished off the night with more craziness.

And what’s more there was a huge crowd in – by far the biggest I’ve ever seen at the Red Rose, which was great especially for Jeff and Andrew, coming all this way. It was lovely to catch up with Jeff – he came to one of my gigs a couple of years ago in Ventura County, California, and loved it and we’ve been in touch ever since, so it was great to finally get to see him play live.

The London Improv scene is fascinating – it’s got a pretty unique sound to it, and a fairly broad spread of contributors. There are elements to it that come across as over-zealous in their rejection of all things tonal, and other players who seem to embrace just about anything and everything. It’s not a scene I could inhabit all year round – I’d start to feel guilty about playing so much inside music, and that’s insane – but it’s one that I feel enriched and inspired by whenever I get a chance to see those guys play. The time and energy and focus that players like John Edwards and Tony Bevan have put into exploring the outer reaches of what’s possible with their instruments is awe inspiring.

And now I’m exhausted. Today I’m going to have to tidy up the mess from Edinburgh – my office looks like the stock room at a badly organised high-end bass shop, so I need to whip it into shape before teaching tonight.

Soundtrack – Avishai Cohen, ‘Lyla’ (a pressie to educate me from JazzShark – and a fabulous album it is too!)

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maybe my homie has seen the error of his ways…

So, after me highlighting the ridiculousness of his set at Live8 each night in my Edinburgh show, it seems that news has filtered back to my homeboy Snoop and he’s trying to put things right by starting a junior football league – apparently his league is cheaper than the one that has been there for years and he’s stealing all the players from.

Snoop gives it up for the poor kids. He must’ve heard a bootleg of my show!

Word up, dawg.

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