Iain Cameron's Diary
"Click here to access the Fruitful Album" - Click here to visit Music for the Highveld Project


The Highveld Project

Get your own
 diary at DiaryLand.com! contact me older entries

2002-07-12 - 8:47 a.m.

The Mandela/Parkinson programme came across pretty powerfully to me and had a lot of content about Grace Sikebo and the Kwase-kwaza project. We could not really have hoped for better coverage. Peter has got a good digital copy of the programme and is going to take some stills from it onto the site. I was coming back from Holland when the local radio phoned here for an interview � but I will get some CDs to the journalist so maybe we will be able to leverage some airplay eventually.

The Dutch visit was interesting � the people were very pleasant and had some original ideas and methods. They are also close to German thinking on future fuels which was a special pluse for me. I was struck by how much Expressionist architecture there is in the Hague. Today I am going to a design engineering company in Worthing � there is more automotive activity on the South Coast then you might imagine especially with Ricardo at Shoreham, Rolls Royce at Goodwood and Ford Transits made in Southampton.

There are some interesting issues raised in the diaries just now. Robins� question �why bother� is a good one and in my case there is an added risk that people find the idea of someone over 50 still playing electric guitar risible. I am sure Robin is right about the strong satisfaction taken in the finished product. The questions about the process are more to the point. I have been deliberately shaping activity so that the process is less trying � its one reason why I have cut back on doing live performances of classical music. The process of getting material to performance standard is not all that much fun. The much more interesting part was making �cutdowns� of the works eg for practice purposes � that led in much more interesting directions.

I concluded in one diary that it�s the sound that keeps one using the electric guitar. The tools for manipulating the sound getting cheaper and cheaper and ever more powerful. As far as the D-Horn is concerned, sound is important but also the fact that this instrument uses skills I already had � fingering, breath control, knowledge of harmony � but offered new horizons.

I am slightly surprised at the drive that I have at the moment to record flute improvisations � there�s a set of formal ideas which I am keen to try out in practice. At least in jazz there is a tradition of people keeping going � Les Paul doing gigs when he is well over 80 � Yusef Laseef is another important innovator who has kept on finding new areas to explore.

For a long while I wasn�t sure about the compositional stuff � I had the urge to keep exploring the technology but I ran out of ways of getting people to hear it and I wasn�t sure whether it deserved an audience. I used to talk about this to Rob a lot � it was a really big issue for me.

When I was in Holland I got a couple of Wayne Shorter CDs for the very decent price of 10 Euros each. One was a French compilation of material from the 70s and 80s � it includes a track with H Hancock and Milton Nascimento which is quite a combination. The other is the classic �Miles Smiles� in a digital remaster. A good thing about these SONY reissues is the �second thoughts� notes. I hadn�t realised that this album had been quite so classic in terms of Miles methodology. He called the session and got people to try the tunes. He took to master each first complete take. So there might be a few breakdowns as the band learned the pieces but he didn�t bother with any second takes beyond that. You might say that Miles trusted his own process pretty much by that stage.

previous - next