Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-04-08 - 11:48 p.m.

Cassandra Wilson came zooming over the horizon - shows how good her marketing team must be. There was an interview with her in this month's Jazzwise. It refers to her roots in M-base - something I have been meaning to find out about for a while. Then it lets slip that she sings the Jobim song - The Waters of March - on the new CD which turns it into a must-have for me. This song has such wonderful lyrics even translated - and its so unlike the mainstream of Jobim's writing. Then as I was waiting for my son outside the gym at Charterhouse - (not where he goes to school - he attends the same comprehensive that John Renbourn went to) - they played a track from this CD on Jazz FM. Now I'll even pay full price for it.

Jazzwise says that the guy who wrote the book about the making of Kind of Blue is bringing out similar on A Love Supreme in September. Didn't get the Miles one - there's plenty of good documentary evidence on that elsewehere. But there' so much to learn about Trane's life. Is it really true that when Dolphy died Trane didnt do much at all until he got into the studio to make that album? Was that the time he was reading A J Ayer? Or trying acid?

A while ago Andrew K explained to me what a hexachord is - its one half of tone row - hex=6. This idea has stayed with me and I have been looking for tonal hexachords to do serialism by stealth. Bm11 and Fm11 are two such or in triad terms Bm and A plus Fm and Eb. I like symmetrical hexachords. Yesterday I reminded myself that if you take a major seventh arpeggio C E G B and add the notes required to include the major seventh a major third up - in this instance E maj 7th - then a symmetrical hexachord results. C E G B Eb Ab is symmetrical with Gb Bb Db F A D . Both hexachords contain three major seventh chords.

Each hexachord is also three sets of intervals of a major fifth eg CG EB AbEb.

Ever since I heard the extraordianry music Lamont Young made at the Barbican with his cellos and muted trumpets I have been trying to get similar effects to the mesmeric ones he has achieved .

The perfect fifth on a well tempered keyboard is just short of the Pythagorean ratio of 3 to 2. On my old Casio CZ101 you can adjust intervals by sixtieths of a semitone - so I can set it up to get close to the Pythagorean fifth. So I can play the hexachord with two fingers as a series of major seventh chords each made up of two (near) Pythagorean fifths.(Unfortunately the major thirds aren't Pythagorean) To make the transition to the other hexachord I use a chord which different people call by different names - CGDA in its most stretched form - its the second chord in Riverman.

Anyway tonight I programmed the CZ101 with a wave envelope that gradually unfolded its complexity over time and jammed something slipping through the major sevenths onto a Minidisc via a setting on the Behringer modulator - hopefully to bring out the emerging Pythagorean harmonics. And I have started to think about some lines to go on top using the Digital Horn - maybe this will be my next piece. If so I will follow on from a simliar thing called "One point Two" - one point two or six over five is a kind of Pythagorean minor third. My D Horn is also a Casio - I must tell the story of how I came by it another day.

I was rather unhappy to see in a review that Andy Sheppard is currenly using a Yamaha WX horn. I have one of these too but the Casio has a lot of advantages as far as I am concerned. Last year I saw Courtney Pine use an Akai windsynth and I felt much more relaxed about that.

Peter Chatterton who has a Yamaha plus the tone box (which I dont have) emailed today to say that he thought this site was excellent and that he liked the Plundafonix CD - which has a quantity of D-Horn on it. Peter was originally an acoustics professional but is now a very creative IT consultant who sets up systems to help groups of people communicate and learn. He is very kindly doing a site for the Highveld project which I hope soon to have linked to this one.

Jazzwise also had a review of a biography of Warne Marsh. I saw him in the 1980s with Peter Ind and Lee Konitz in a piano-less quartet at a hall near Kings Cross. This was about the purist Lennie Tristano quartet on the planet and it was extraordinary. The reviewer talks about the monkishness of Marsh - I think thats right in terms of how Tristano theory can take people.

One final bit from Jazzwise on CW

"by introducing the likes of Joni Mitchell Neil Young and U" into her act she has made it easier for Any Bey and Me'Shell N'degeocello to bring together Sting Nick Drake Hendrix and Coltrane in their work"

Must start pulling on these threads.

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