Yet another reminder to back up regularly…

One of the forums I visit most regularly online is The Dude Pit – a bass-related forum, hosted by Steve ‘Dude’ Barr. It’s a fun place, with some amazingly knowledgeable bass peoples, some really good friends, and a fair few scary mad people as well. But good scary mad people, I’m sure.

Anyway, the forum is hosted by ezboard – a pay-to-use service that hosts thousands and thousands of boards. They appear to have been hacked on Monday and have lost loads of data, and lots of the money that people had paid in to keep their boards running. All stuff that really ought to be easy enough to restore from their backups, if they had any, which it appears, they don’t.

So, I’m reminded once again to back up everything regularly. All the content on my main website is generated by my PC, so the original copies are all still here. But I do need to remember to make backups of the blog and the forum once in a while…

SoundtrackBill Frisell, ‘The Willies’.

Searching, Finding

here’s the latest crop of weird things people have been looking for when stumbling into this ‘ere blog –

armstrong
steve on jerry springer show
danny baker resignation
do nothing til you hear from me
dude etymology
feline concussion
ism jbk download
janek gwizdala
racist hall of shame
strongbad good
%22whale rider%22
albano italian singer photos
andy gangadeen drum rack
avashai cohen and the international vamp band
bbc news lion midget
belouis some imagination lyrics download
bill frisell wild thang
brian houston petersfield
britian’s piano man
can’t get motivated

Blimey there are some weird surfers out there in net-world!

First signs the drought might be over…

Yippee, I wrote my first bit of completely new solo music this evening, for about 9 months! I guess the practice I’ve been doing over the last few days has paid off… I got a rough version of it demo’d (just me getting to know the two sections really, not a proper arrangement or anything), and even that sounds lovely.

here’s hoping there are more tunes on the way!

(oh, BTW, the site should work properly in IE now…)

SoundtrackBill Frisell, ‘Before We Were Born’; Ron Miles, ‘Heaven’.

Composition famine…

I’ve not written any new music for quite a while. It’s not a problem – most areas of music tend to happen in terms of flurries of activity followed by plateaus, whether it be technique, concepts, composition or whatever. And right now, I’m working on arrangements of other people’s tunes – something I’ve done very little of as a solo player. I used to do a short version of ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ to finish gigs, and these days do ‘People Get Ready’, and now have just worked out a lovely solo arrangement of ‘What A Wonderful World’. I’ve also been working on a version of This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody), the Talking Heads track, which sounds great, but is really hard to play!! I need to make sure it’s well hammered into my skull before I attmept it live. It involves some pretty tricky looping (well, tricky for me…)

So I’m having fun with other people’s tunes (and maybe I’ll finally get round to having a go at ‘The Fish’ – something I’ve had a number of people nagging me to do for a while (yes, you, Catherine Street Team and California Bob!)

And as an off-shoot, I’ve got the beginnings of a new tune. It might end up as a solo piece, or maybe in one of the collaborations. This Monday and I met up with a fantastic drummer called Andrew Booker. Andrew has his own duo/trio (recorded thus far as a duo, now have a guitarist as well) called , whose CD is really cool (bass and drums duo, with Andrew singing like a less-heliumed John Anderson).

Anyway, he plays a tiny electronic kit, and adjusts really well to the slight imperfections of my loops, so we’ll hopefully be launching said trio on the listening public before too long – playing the tracks from Open Spaces with a drummer certainly took them into a very different space…

So, despite the famine, much creative noodling is taking place, and many new avenues are opening up…

Soundtrack, ‘Ghost Town’; , ‘Slow Life’; , ‘Live’; , ‘Stones’; , ‘Polarised’.

maybe it's time to learn php…

So, I’ve spent most of the afternoon and evening battling with the software on my webshop, trying to impliment a new payment processing thingie via . Paypal have finally made it possible to pay for things through their site without having to sign up for a paypal account, which means that my shop can now handle payments from loads more people – all those people who previously didn’t want to get a paypal account in order to pay!

So, , the lovely open source programming community that came up with the shop interface I use, have implemented a new payment module that allows this new ebay functionality to dovetail nicely with the shop, and with a secure transfer of info, using security certificates, and all that jazz… the problem is, the information on how to actually get all that jazz to work is written in geek-speak, and while I’m reasonably computer-savvy, I’m largely self-taught, so don’t know all the terminology.

Which means I’ll just have to wait to The Captain or Sarda have a spare 20 minutes to help me sort it out. ‘Til then I’ll just keep wasting the hours trying to find new tweaks that will fool php into working.

So maybe it’s time I got a book on php (the language that all these pages and scripts are written in) and found out how to do all this stuff…

Soundtrack, ‘Speed Your Love’; Free, ‘The Free Story’; Bill Frisell, ‘Live at Pizza Express’.

Big achievement

OK, so I’m blogging this a week late, but last weekend, I managed to get my email inbox down from over 1200 to 7! The main upshot of this was that I was able to ditch Outlook Express and switch over to , which also allows me to have all my news/blog feeds in the same programme as my email. which is nice. One more step away from Microsoft stuff.

On the subject of groovy free software, I mentioned a few days ago about , the free photo management thingie from Google. Well, I’ve been toying with it, and it’s even better than I first realised. It’ll generate webpages with your photos in, movie files of your photos as a slideshow, and all the edits are non-destructive, so you can do as much editing as you like, and then save a copy later… It’s great. Seriously, I’d have happily paid £100 for a piece of software this logical and useful. I’ve hardly opened photoshop since I started using this.

Soundtrack and Elvis Costello, ‘Deep Dead Blue’; , ’10 Cent Wings’ and ‘Back In The Circus’; , ‘Entremundo’; , ‘Legs To Make Us Longer’.


Oh how times change!

Was flicking through some old photos the other day, and came across this passport photo, which I think dates from ’91… blimey, the years really do just disappear. To think, 13 years ago, I could have been KD Lang on Stars In Your Eyes.

Anyway, I’d better go, I think Timmy Mallet wants his glasses back…!

Soundtrack – The Pixies, ‘Doolittle’; Kris Delmhorst, ‘Songs For A Hurricane’; Talking Heads, ‘Stop Making Sense’; Bill Frisell, ‘The Willies’.

A questionaire…

I quite often get sent mini-interviews by students studying music who are doing a project on solo bass. Here’s the latest one – feel free to add to it over in the forum…

1) What is the biggest problem with young (18-30) bass players? What is the main obsticle that hinders young players from becoming well rounded musicians?

I think the biggest single factor is the shift in the west towards a culture of immediacy. Closely followed by the cult of celebrity. Becoming a ‘well rounded musician’ requires years of dedicated and focussed practice, a lot of unglamourous work, crappy gigs, rehearsing, jamming, mistakes, expense, lessons, books etc. Before you really get anywhere. There are no shortcuts, and there’s no ‘secret’ to it. It just takes effort.

Couple that with the tendency with the entertainment industry to value celebrity over integrity, fame over talent and exposure over experience, and you’ve got yourself an uphill struggle to ignore all the millions of distractions and do the work required, then keep doing it, never stop learning. That’s tough.

2) What do you see as the future of solo bass?

I think the music made on bass will continue to develop as more people see past the restrictions of the ‘function of the bass player in a band’ and see it as an instrument full of unexplored potential. The bass guitar has very few fixed physical properties in terms of what’s possible design-wise with the classification ‘bass guitar’ – and those limits are always expanding. I think we’re going to see a lot more hybrid instruments that go beyond the standard divisions between guitar, bass and other stringed instruments.

3) When you pushing the musical envelope on bass, are you thinking musicality or “is this even possible to do on bass”?

The purpose of pushing the envelope is to find the music that’s behind the limitations… pushing limitations is fun, but unless the quest is meaningful music, it doesn’t really hold that much interest for me. I love working on new ways to access sound, process sound and peform music on the bass, and seeing what new textures, sounds, ideas, and compositional processes are facilitated by that exploration.

4) What is the average time you put in per week for practicing?

Not enough. I guess it ranges from about 6 hours up to about 20 hours, depending on what else I’ve got going on…

5) Who has been the single most influential player for you musically?

Michael Manring. As much conceptually as sonically. The feeling of reading an article by someone who was able to articulate a lot of the thoughts I’d had and was already forging ahead exploring that territory gave me a lot of encouragement to head down a similar path. Our music doesn’t really sound all that similar, but the thought process behind it shares a lot of territory.

6) Why do you push yourself musically? What drives you to expand your musicality?

All sorts of things – boredom and frustration are great motivators, as is the need to come up with new material for different projects. Hearing new things that move me and trying to conjure up the same emotions in my own music is a big one for me. Lots of things outside music inspire me to play – nature, cities, people, relationships, faith – big things, small things. There’s a corresponding soundtrack to most of life’s events, and I’m perpetually exploring that space.

Soundtrack – Paul Simon, ‘Hearts And Bones’; Paul Simon, ‘One Trick Pony’; Bill Frisell, ‘Blues Dream’; Wheeler/Konitz/Holland/Frisell, ‘Angel Song’; Theo Travis, ‘Earth To Ether’.

10 things UKIP don't want you to know

I’m not usually in the habit of cross-posting from my own forum, but Cryptic posted a link to a fantastic article in the Independent about UKIP.

Most days there’s some choice morsel of info posted in the ‘Everything Else‘ forum by Mr Cryptic, and all are worth checking out. Feel free to comment on them too (or anything posted here – that’s the place to do it!)

Soundtrack – today I’m mixing tracks for the album, so lots more me, as well as reference material such as Pat Metheny/Charlie Haden, ‘Beyond The Missouri Sky’; Talk Talk, ‘Spirit Of Eden’; Bill Frisell, ‘Ghost Town’; Michael Manring; ‘Book Of Flame’; David Torn, ‘Tripping Over God’.

3 gigs, 7 bands, 2 comedians and a couple of lovely new bass cabs

Boy, it’s been a busy weekend!

Teaching all day Saturday, on Saturday night I went up to Hoddeston in Hertfordshire to drop in on the Greenbelt Angels Weekend – the Angels are the year round financial supporters of the Greenbelt festival – an arts festival that means so much to people that they will give a monthly donation, and buy their tickets a year in advance, and bring their friends, and then turn out for the angels weekend. Which is largely a mini-greenbelt affair, but with greater emphasis on the organisers of the festival letting the angels know about what’s happening, and brainstorming new ideas.

Anyway, Saturday night was all entertainment – first up Old Solar, a very fine band from Scotland, featuring my very good friend Andrew Howie, who also records solo under the name Calamatuer. Both acts have been played a fair bit by John Peel and had rave reviews, and were rather good, a few guitar tuning problems not withstanding.

Following them was Cathy Burton – angel-voiced singer/songwriter, and another good friend. Cathy’s great. Marvellous songs, lovely stage manner, will be huge soon (musically speaking…!)

then comedy stuff – Jude Simpson was new to me – comedy poet, very funny indeed, runs a comedy/poetry club in Hammersmith, well worth going to hear. She was followed by John Archer – northern comedy magician, and one of the funniest people I’ve ever seen do a gig. Think Peter Kay taking the piss out of Paul Daniels but actually being really really good at sleight of hand… He’s great, and it’s always a treat to see him do his thang.

Sunday morning I was playing bass in church (first time in about two years), and Sunday evening I went to see Bill Frisell at the barbican. He was playing with Djelimady Tounkara, a Malian guitarist I’d seen him with before. Also on stage were Greg Leisz, Jenny Scheinman and Sidiki, er, someone (can’t remember his surname), on Percussion. It was a fine gig, but I do tend to go to Bill Frisell gigs with such extraordinarily high expectations that I found some of the two chord jam tunes just a little too long and twiddly for me. Bill was brilliant as always, so I guess I’m just not a huge fan of Djelemady’s guitar playing. Greg is a god-like genius of the pedal steel – an instrument I’m very quickly falling in love with the sound of (playing with BJ Cole obviously doesn’t hurt!!). Jenny was fine, and Sidiki laid down some rather groovy rhythmic things, but the overly long I – IV – I – IV jams in the first set kind of spoilt it a little for me…

Monday night was another ‘Bob Harris Presents…’ gig at The Stables in Milton Keynes. this time featuring Julie Lee, Vigilantes Of Love, Dolly Varden and Show Of Hands.

Julie Lee is amazing. I’ve played with Julie on a number of occasions, and she’s a gem of a person. She’s also an incredible singer and songwriter. I get this buzz just before she starts whenever I see her play in front of an audience hitherto unfamiliar with her, knowing that they are about to discover something very special indeed. Like the first time you sit someone down and play Hejira by Joni Mitchell to them…

The Vigilantes are another marvellous band – their song ‘Resplendent’ is in my ‘perfect songs’ list (a virtual compilation that’s ongoing in its construction), and they’ve got quite a few other truly wonderful songs. Bill Malonee is a great singer, and Jake (does Jake have a surname, or indeed need one?) was splendid on guitar and vox.

Dolly Varden – husband and wife duo from Chicago. I liked ’em, but will reserve judgement til I’ve heard a full set at The Borderline on Wednesday (VoL overran, as is Bill’s habit, so their set was cut short…)

And finally, Show Of Hands – they played greenbelt a few years ago, and I gave it a miss. WHAT A FOOL!!!! they were amazing. Truly truly remarkable. Brilliant, splendid. Repairs any lost belief you might have in the power of folk music. Steve Knightly on voice, guitar, mandola etc. Phil Beer (great name!) on vox, violin, guitar, mandolin etc… just a duo, but a HUGE sound. Great songs, great voices, amazing stage presence (it’s not at all surprising that they just won the ‘best live act’ award at the british folk awards). I can’t say enough good things about them, they were amazing, and are playing at the Borderline on Tuesday 9th March, so go if you can (I’m teaching til 9 that day, but will find out what time they are on stage, and see if I can race down after teaching…)

And then today, to cap a marvellous weekend, my new AccuGroove bass cabinets arrived!!! Yippee. And a day early – bravo FedEx. These are the passive ones – my signature powered cabs are still in development (we want to get them perfect), so I’m using these for now. I’ve plugged them in, and they sound incredible. Lovely, clear, full. I’m a happy bunny.

soundtrack – right now, I’m listening to ‘The Free Story’ – a much underrated band, with a killer bass player. Guy Pratt asserts that Andy Fraser is more influential in real terms in the rock and pop world than Jaco. I’m inclined to agree. Amazing stuff. And Paul Rogers voice is killer.

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