Phew, that’s a relief – after a few days of having very little info for my entry on the Edinburgh Fringe website, they’ve now updated it, with full dates, photo and the chance to order tickets.
So get to it click here to view the page, and book tickets – forward this to all your Scottish friends!
Soundtrack – Kris Delmhorst, ‘Songs For A Hurricane.
So, I was just fiddling around on audioscrobbler.com, wondering who people were listening to, and ended up searching on a whole load of bassist’s names, to see who people were actually listening to.
As I’ve mentioned before, The Scrob is a really interesting chart in that it’s not what people are buying, or what they own but what they are actually listening to – what it is that people are taking down from the CD shelf, or dialing up on their ipod and choosing to listen to. The membership is, I think, a couple of hundred thousand, and largely, I guess, a young, tech-savvy slightly geeky bunch, on the whole…
So here are the bassists I searched on, in order.
Jaco Pastorius – 4306
Victor Wooten – 2608
Marcus Miller – 2466
Stanley Clarke – 1002
Jonas Hellborg – 499
Tony Levin – 399
John Patitucci – 388
Stuart Hamm – 342
Michael Manring – 318
Dave Holland – 275
Billy Sheehan – 274
Brian Bromberg – 244
Eberhard Weber – 233
Wayman Tisdale – 168
Avishai Cohen – 141
Renaud Garcia Fons – 126
Jimmy Haslip – 100
Adam Nitti – 100
Mark King – 94
Bass Extremes (Wooten/Bailey) – 88
Reid Anderson – 74
Alain Caron – 64
Doug Wimbish – 59
Jeff Berlin – 54
Trip Wamsley – 51
Steve Lawson – 49
Seth Horan – 47
Randy Coven – 42
Abraham Laboriel – 37
Bill Dickens – 28
Gerald Veasley – 27
Mo Foster – 26
Mark Egan – 22
Percy Jones – 18
Michael Dimin – 10
Matthew Garrison – 7
John Lester – 7
Glen Moore – 7
Laurence Cottle – 5
Fieldy – 5
Janek Gwizdala – 3
Now, bear in mind that this relies on them being entered into the iTunes/CDDB data base under their own name – some of these players maybe be listed as ‘the such and such band’ or something else. Feel free to have a browse at audioscrobbler.com and see who else you can find. Lemme know, and I’ll add them to the list…
Soundtrack – John Goldie, ‘Turn And Twist’ (jazz trio, with the marvellous Ewen Vernal on bass).
Culled from this post on Jyoti’s blog, have a look at No2ID.net – a site setting out the case against the governments proposed ID card system.
It does sound like a gargantuan waste of money, and just another level of possible fraud for large scale criminal organisations to indulge in.
Given the instability of computer systems the world over, surely storing everyone’s data on some central computer is fraught with the possibility of being hacked, not to mention the hideous Big Brother-ness of the concept.
We already have the provision for checking someone’s ID, without having further ID cards – are passports and driver’s licences not good enough? I know that when I want to or need to demostrate that I am who I say I am, I don’t seem to have any trouble finding enough forms of proof, whether I’m applying for a mortgage or a Blockbuster card.
The whole think comes across like another balls up in the increasingly bogus and flawed notion of ‘the war against terror’, coupled with some nonsense about stopping ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘bogus asylum seekers’. No mention of it clearly penalising anyone who either doesn’t understand the system, or whose english isn’t good enough to grasp what they need to do.
The list of reasons for it is flimsy at best. The list of reasons against it is huge. Sounds like another New Labour screw up to me.
So other than the G8-related politics, the biggest news of Live8 so far has to be that Pink Floyd are going to play, with Roger Waters back in for the first time since 83.
An infamous rock falling out, of Spinal Tap proportions, with all the dialogue via lawyers that usually accompanies these school-boy squabbles, made significant purely by the sums of money involved.
But they’re doing the gig, and it’ll be interesting to see the result (though fly-on-the-wall footage… or should that be fly-on-The Wall footage? from rehearsals would be more interesting.)
Anyway, today’s Guardian has a nice profile of David Gilmour – I have a few friends who know him, who testify to his all-round good-egg-ness. Seems like a nice bloke.
Soundtrack – lots of my duo stuff with Cleveland Watkiss and Andrew Booker.
A lot of stuff gets said about Bono. Some people think he’s smug, self-important, an ego-maniac, etc. etc.
However, it’d be tough to fault his campaigning to bring world poverty, and particularly the disastrous situation in Africa, onto the global media stage.
This article in the Guardian talks a bit about what he’s been up to lately. I doubt there’s a person on the planet who has the kind of access that he has, the kind of left/right influence that he has in the US or the size of platform.
Obviously with that kind of appeal comes some compromise (He’s not, as far as I can see, been as critical of the war in Iraq as he might have been if he wasn’t hanging with the president), but it’s tough to fault his resolve to use his pop-star profile to make a difference. He’s said a number of times that it’s nuts that he should have access to the G8 leaders and finance ministers around the world, just cos he’s a pop star, but he’s taken the challenge seriously, done his homework, and will no doubt go down in the history of our lifetime as one of the most tireless campaigners for justice issues.
So hurrah for St Bono.
here’s a couple of piccies from the NT Foyer gig on Tuesday with Theo –
Yesterday was spent recording with Cleveland Watkiss again – more lovely layered improv stuff and a gorgeous version of ‘Black Hole Sun’ by Soundgarden. It’s shaping up to be a very creative and productive duo, so we’re going to be setting aside a week or so soon to really get stuck into it and see just how good it can be! It’s all rather exciting!
Soundtrack – John Patitucci, ‘Now’.
Sean O’Kane, a ‘race relations worker’ who lives in Liverpool, who has been in California for the MJ trial, to lend his support to Michael
A couple of choice quotes –
“I came here because I couldn’t believe the injustice of it all.”
er, right… I wonder if he also went to Iraq to be part of the human shield, or has his flight to darfur booked…
“People have been talking about the similarities between Michael Jackson and Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.
I think that’s fair.
Martin Luther King got his message across through his speeches. Michael gets his message across through his music.”
Do I need to comment on that one?
“He’s a martyr – but the thing to remember is he’s still alive.”
So he died for his cause, but is still alive – nice logic there, loser-boy.
I’m still not convinced that all the muppets hanging around outside the courthouse weren’t paid (though it’s not like MJ has got any money left…!) – after seeing the way the Labour Party used fake crowds during the campaign in the run-up to the last election (more complete losers!), I’m willing to believe that anyone could hire themselves some flunkies to hang around and make it look like they have public support.
Is anyone so daft as to turn out to show their support for a singer they don’t know who may well be guilty? That’s really odd behaviour.
And to fly across the world, and then compare MJ to Mandela and MLK? Me thinks Mr O’Kane needs help. Fast.
Soundtrack – Egberto Gismonti, ‘Magico’.
So the plan for this evening was to do my gig at the National Theatre, come home, drop off my stuff and shoot down to the Borderline to catch Jonatha Brooke’s gig there.
The gig at the NT went very well – lots of friendly faces in the audience, some very fine improvs in the set, and nice versions of all the album tunes too. We finished at 7.20, then chatted to people in the audience for about another 20mins/half an hour (this is where I could have saved time, but would have been very rude to all the lovely people who came to the gig to run off), then go and get the car from the carpark, load up, drop Theo at home, head back up here and unload.
The small person had rung The Borderline to find out what time Jonatha is on stage, and they said she goes on at 9.15, will be off by 10.30 – I was expecting it to go on til 11. So I’m not ready to go out til 9, ergo, no gig for us this evening.
Bugger.
This is Jonatha’s first ever gig with a band in the UK, as far as I’m aware (I don’t think she brought a band with her when she played here in 95…) and certainly the only chance we’ll have to see her with band for a while (unless it’s a storming success and she comes back!)
I’ve got a whole load of texts on my phone from people who are there asking if I’m going…
Ah well, at least our gig went well…
I’m a big big fan of The New Statesman – it’s the only magazine I subscribe to, and read it avidly every week.
They don’t tend to put much of the content on their website, prefering to tease people and get them to buy the mag, or pay for online access.
Anyway, I was just reading some stuff on Mark Thomas’ website, and he’s a got a fairly big archive of a lot of the things he’s written for them on there – click here to read some – he’s a very good columnist, and his site is a great resource for political action links.
Soundtrack – Charlie Haden, ‘Nocturne’.
thoughts on the Michael Jackson trial (as if there aren’t enough ill-informed opinions out there about it).
Celeb trials are always fraught with danger of things going wrong, being unclear or getting sidetracked by issues of fame and celebrity rather than than law and criminality. The bigger the star, the more potential there is for it to go wrong.
We’ll never know what really happened with MJ. His behaviour was certainly bizarre, troubling and served as a red flag to any right thinking parent regarding their kids. But clearly it wasn’t ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ – the burden of proof is a very difficult thing to establish when you’re dealing with any celeb as there’s always the likelihood that the motives, feelings and behaviour of the victim is going to be affected by the fame of the accused. The main kid in this trial was clearly a troubled lad, from a pretty screwed up family, behaving in a bizarre way and totally taken in by celebrity.
The problem is that screwed up, lying, fame-obsessed, money grabbing sons of screwed up, lying, fame obsessed, money grabbing parents can still be molested. When it comes down to his word against MJ, the jury are going to try and establish who seems the most truthful. MJ’s a performer, has been all his life. The kid was just a screw up dealing with cancer, who had parents who wanted to milk it.
Will we ever know? Clearly not, unless he was guilty and does it again…
