I belong to the circulation list of the Mela Foundation which sent me the following e-mail yesterday:

"Dear Friends of the Kirana Gharana,

We invite you to a concert in memory of Ustad Hafizullah Khan Sahib, sarangi master, Khalifa of the Kirana Gharana, and only son of Pandit Pran Nath's guru, Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan Sahib.

Khalifa-ji Hafizullah Khan Sahib left our earthly abode on August 11, 2002 in New Delhi, only two months following his beautiful sarangi concert in the MELA Dream House. During the week he stayed with us in New York we shared many inspired musical evenings and we will be forever grateful that he graced us with his exquisitely serene and deeply contemplative music .

We wish to honor him and perform in celebration of his life and his continuing journey. We will sing a concert of North Indian classical raga, accompanied by Jung Hee Choi, voice and Brad Catler, tabla.

Please come to the Dream House, 275 Church Street, 3rd floor, at 8:30 pm, Thursday, August 22 .

Donations of any amount will be ccepted to send to Khan Sahib's family in India. If you are unable to attend we hope you will join us in spiritual harmony.

With all good vibrations,

La Monte Marian"

It must be hard if someone travels all that way to make music with you and then two months later is dead. I wonder where Church Street is? I would guess its the Lower East Side. Here's a quote from the Mela website:

�What La Monte introduced was this concept of not having to press ahead to create interest. He would wait for the music to take its own course. You start a long tone, that tone has its own life until it extinguishes, and then the next one starts. So it was this kind of Oriental patience that he introduced into the music which created a static form. Even his piano playing and his saxophone playing, even if it was fast, always dealt with repeating the same notes over and over again. So the form is always standing like some kind of a mountain � like La Monte, the mountain � and not creating a real varied form. I think that without that there could have been no In C, because In C is a static piece in that same tradition.� --Terry Riley,

Angus Maclise was in a trio in the early 1960s with Marian and Lamont - in fact I think it was on this site that I discovered AM had studied about 10 miles south from here.

A little piece more of synchronicity. Having read and written about Steve Coleman's ideas on musical symmetry this week. I parked in a street in Leamington Spa this evening - to work out if it might be a good place to establish my West Midlands pied a terre. By chance I was outside a record shop - which was running a late promotional event. Inside they were playing a 1913 Vaughan Williams piece which has only recently been rediscovered. It didnt take long to find a Steve Coleman CD - 1999 - which of course I had to buy. I also picked up some Xenakis, Alice Coltrane and live recordings of the Miles Davis 5tet on the European tour of 1960 - I have a recording of Manchester concert - but this was the European leg of the tour. Looks like its got to be Leamington then. The built environment had its plus points too and there is at least one decent 2nd hand bookshop.

Here's a quote from Steve Coleman's biography on the M-base website:

1997-1999 saw a continuation of the projects involving cultural exchange with musicians around the world. Partially funded by a grant from Arts International (1997), Steve took a group of musicians from America and Cuba to Senegal to collaborate and participate in musical and cultural exchanges with the musicians of the local Senegalese group Sing Sing Rhythm. Using his own funds he also led his group Five Elements to the south of India in January-February of 1998 to participate in cultural exchange there with different musicians in the Karnatic music tradition. Steve and his group also gave workshops in the Brahavadhi Center headed by the renown musicologist Dr. K. Subramanian. The trip to India (along with a research trip to Egypt the preceding month) helped to confirm the knowledge of the ancient systems that Steve had been studying. These trips have already been helpful in supplying the additional information necessary for Steve to continue his studies which he hopes to express in his own personal manner. Steve's two Five Element's recordings, one entitled The Sonic Language of Myth (released in March 1999) and the other The Ascension to Light (released in 2001) are a direct result of these studies. "

The Asension To Light was the one I picked up. There are several parallels between Coleman's path and LmY's.

Great thoughts from Robin today on Jaco P. The Wayne Shorter compilation I got in the Hague has one of his solos. The last fan I discussed him with was the Dean at Guildford Cathedral. One of the signs of the width of his musicianship is the range of music roles that he performed well. He was a supremely effective interpretative player especially on albums like Joni Mitchell's Hejira. Obviously he followed a different path.