Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-07-04 - 5:21 a.m.

Yesterday evening there was a gathering at HT. I wasn't sure about it - Regan had invited Ayesha to come from Glastonbury to lead an event. During the afternoon I had felt really tired and dozed for over half an hour in my office.

I chatted to Ayesha before most people arrived. It transpired that eighteen years ago she had discovered a Sufi chant - which is the one which opens the third section of the Plundafonix CD. I got it from Lynne Seymour who used it in an interfaith event she organised in October 2001 and in the general climate of the times I picked it up and pushed it around a bit. Ayesha and I decided that this was a good reason to swap CDs. I will mail Plundafonix to her today. We started to talk about drones and Sufi chnats just involving two notes.

The first chant she took us into was in Aramaic - the native language of Palestine about 2000 years ago. It is the first line of text we call "The Lord's Prayer" but in Aramaic it is much more like sound poetry. Not only that but the metaphysics of the language is much less dualistic and personalistic than the English that we know. Ayesha showed me 8 or 9 translations all of which had totally different resonances.

I played acoustic guitar mostly and the 14 or so people who showed up danced round me - doing these various chants. Ayesha has an interesting philosophy at the end of each dance-chant which is to emphasise the transition from movement and singing to silence. Of course the silences have a special character.

I hadnt reaslised that I was going to be the band for this event - but I didnt mind at all - especially as the whole thing was very loose and in the moment. People seemed to really enjoy the stuff - in fact there was a reluctance to stop doing it.

The root tradition seems to be Sufi - then transplanted to the West Coast. Other elements have been drawn in - Ayesha has recently been in South India collecting material.

E-mails from Robin and Mark about different bits of music that are bouncing around. So far so good. Also from Jon Cole partly about it switching his interest about twenty years ago from the music business to IT.

I started to read a short book about Edward Said's impact on how history is written. Said is also an amateur musicologist of some consequence. He has introduced the idea that performance is an "extreme occaision" which I think has a lot to commend it.

James has left for Spain with about 20 from his year. The big post A level release of tension in the sun.

I listened to the rework of Corrina Corrina which Miss Mitchell did with Wayne Shorter - WS does the birds which whistle and sing.

The dept has had a set of consultants in mapping its organisational culture on a 12 category map. Their results show that the culture which I tried to create in my area is in the categories which most people think are least salient more generally. Explains a lot.

Latest Wire has an article written on the 35th anniversary of the death of J Coltrane by someone who at the age of 14-15 heard one of the really "out" performances of the last two years of his life. I liked the bits discussing how people of that age and time reacted to a Love Supreme, Ascension and Live at the Village Vanguard Again. The fact of the matter is that this is very difficult music even today. I used to think that Miles Davis 1970-75 was in the same category but I now find that easy in comparison.

As I mention in one of the articles there's a bit in Patrick's ND biography which suggests that he parted company with JC at this point. The article confirms the chemical dimension in this shift - but I think one has to factor in too the kind of cosmological philosophy that it seems Wayne S and Trane got into. You can put those two factors together with Trane's innate artistic ideology of search - and that provides some kind of reason for why the music is as it is.

One of the quirks is that this stuff had more influence on experimental rock than jazz. There is an amazing quote from Rashid Ali - he took over from Elvin Jones in the last phase and took a lot of stick for it. Ali explains that he idolised Jones and Trane and quite simply did what he could in the circs -ie tried to take Jones style on to where Trane wanted to go. The really amazing thing though is that on many of the recording sessions Trane took the tapes away to consider privately and so Ali has only really got to hear them in the last few years - and still doesnt really understand them even though he was a key factor in their creation. He said that he often listens to some of the stuff nowadays before he goes out on a gig to get himself into the right frame of mind.

The Wire seems to have a corporate position on this music - I can remember an editorial where the editor said that he had deliberately spent a week listening to nothing else - and then writing his column about the effects.

I can remember debating with Mick Beck whether this kind of music was just an idiosyncracy of its time - not the view he holds at all. I see he is playing his bassoon at a club in London next week. Thats what you get for �3.20 - some uptodate info on some oldfriends/contacts, maybe an article on some major feature of the musical landscape of the last 50 years and a lot of info about stuff which one hasnt really come across and feel vaguely guilty about not having heard.

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