Gavin Gribbon mailed me today a propos some stuff about Tony Conrad which I sent him:

�Interesting. How does this sit with your thinking on LaMonte?

It brought to mind something that interests me, those musicians who appear at crucial points and energise others who then produce an even bigger effect. Two examples, the Jansch biography talks about a guy called Len Partridge who was a pivotal figure on the Scottish folk scene in the early sixties and apparently a fantastic guitarist. He left the scene when he felt 'commercialism' was creeping in and left only a fragment of recorded work.

Another is Henry Sloan, supposedly the first blues singer, that is one who produced a particular type of personally based music reflecting the society around him. He taught Charley Patton how to play but never recorded anything. He migrated from the Delta to Chicago after the First World War and was never heard from again.

There's an article here somewhere. �

Or maybe even a book? A brief answer on Lamont would be that he knew which ideas to pick whether they were his or someone elses. He made it an axiom never to credit anyone else even though the founding principles of the Theatre of Eternal Music were a lot more communitarian

I have not heard of Henry Sloan � I have some Charley Patton though. An idea (not mine) which I like a lot is that the great bluesmen are all individuals who each evolve an utterly distinctive style and interpretation of the form. In some traditions you have to be like the masters before you qualify � the blues isn�t like that � its more like, say, Britart where the binding principles are quite diffuse and the common element is a commitment to individuality and some elements of an outlook on the world. Len Partridge is news to me as well. MOJO ran some stuff about Ann Briggs who comes from the same network and who is also lauded as a powerful individual performer. You can�t help but wonder where on earth these pioneers get it from.

The Abstract Expressionists get a fair treatment in today�s G2 � a big de Kooning reproduction goes with the article. The Barnett Newman Ex opens at the Tate Modern shortly. These artists are obviously metaphysical � BN actually studied the subject and particularly liked Spinoza. Rothko thought the colour fields were real existant entities that he revealed rather than created � if that�s not Platonism what is? The idea that everyone who follows is distancing themselves from the AbsEx is given the kicking it deserves.

I started putting stuff in boxes in my office today. I was really cheered up by Gilbert�s reaction to the CD. Mark�s explanation of how he builds a track really shook me � when I say I work gesturally I really mean it � maybe I need a producer who doesn�t.

Peter has circulated another group of contacts about www.kwaze.kwaza.org - his first mailing is really paying dividends. I put the Schama article up there and a picture of Derek�s new granddaughter � Ella � who looks amazing. Imagine being born on day0 and on day1 running into the Twin Towers Fest � she must wonder what on earth she has been let in for. Siblings are people who disappear into roaring clouds of dust and miraculously appear behind you hours later. Mothers are people who can�t understand where all the bits of you might have ended up.

The afterburn of the TV imagery is quite strong � stronger than I would have thought beforehand. Heaven knows what its like if you were closer to the original cataclysm.

I have been gradually trying to work out where the Duosonic has ended up after its set-up. It has a little bit more edge � and I wonder whether some middle has gone. It seems happiest on the dirty channel of the Deluxe 112 with the gain at about 8 o clock and the contour at any point between 6 o clock and 1 � a fair amount of reverb. I don�t think I am gonna look for a Vamp setting for a bit.

Wowww � I didn�t think even Damien Hirst would go this far:

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Hirst, who is no stranger to controversy, said many people would "shy away" from looking at the event as art but he believed the World Trade Centre attack was "kind of like an artwork in its own right".

In an interview, Hirst told BBC News Online: "The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually."

Describing the image of the hijacked planes crashing into the twin towers as "visually stunning", he added: "You've got to hand it to them on some level because they've achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America. .

Referring to how the event changed perceptions, he added: "I think our visual language has been changed by what happened on September 11: an aeroplane becomes a weapon - and if they fly close to buildings people start panicking. Our visual language is constantly changing in this way and I think as an artist you're constantly on the lookout for things like that."

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Rooting around on the Guardian site I came across Jonathan Friedland� spiece on the big M. Here�s an extract:

�Wilson explains that, like all art, minimalism should be seen in its historical place - that it was a reaction to, and an advance on, what had gone before. After the war, abstract expressionism was all the rage, typified by artists such as Jackson Pollock, who saw painting as an emotional, existential act. The minimalists were a bunch of downtown 1960s New Yorkers keen to replace that human, subjective quality with logic and order. Where there had been Pollock's paint-splatted canvases, now there would be straight lines and mathematical precision. Instead of impulsive spontaneity, grids and repetitions.

Suddenly the works before me begin to make some sense. The 10 blue steel-and-Perspex boxes stacked against a wall (Untitled, by Donald Judd) do indeed look like a statement of cool, Zen design that might rebut the "hot" passions of the painters who went before.

Wilson explains that minimalism often took to an extreme credos pioneered by previous waves of abstract art. Those artists were tired of art as an illusion, a trick by which one object represents something else. They wanted the work to be stripped of such artifice, pared down to the bare essentials so that the viewer looks only at the thing itself (rather than a picture or sculpture of something).

Minimal art took that notion and ran with it, serving up objects that could not be taken for anything other than what they were. Frank Stella, whose pin-striped paintings feature nothing but straight lines running parallel to the edges of the canvas, delivered a soundbite of minimalist philosophy when he declared there was nothing "besides the paint on the canvas" and "what you see is what you see".

But looking at it, I surprise myself: I don't feel conned. On the contrary, once I understand what minimalists' goals were, I see how skilfully they realised them. Wilson leads me to the definitive minimalist work, Carl Andre's Equivalent 8 - known in the press of the 1970s as "the pile of bricks". They spawned a thousand cartoons and fuming opinion pieces when they came to the Tate in 1972, but now they sit serenely on the floor: 120 of them, arranged two layers thick, six down one side, 10 along the other. They are a pleasing sight, neat rows of pale sand-lime.

They are not a representation of another thing; they do not try to mean anything. They do have a Zen calm about them. And they comply with another of abstract art's demands - "truth to materials". Wilson explains that originally that slogan applied to sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, who wanted to stay true to the inner beauty of wood or stone. The minimalists merely extended that logic to manufactured materials: bricks in Andre's case, or fluorescent electric light bulbs for Dan Flavin. The latter never modified his bulbs at all. He would not shorten or lengthen them, nor even peel off the manufacturer's sticker.

While we contemplate the bricks, I ask Wilson what qualities he sees in the work, after all this time. He is protective, having defended it for so long. "Order; it is extremely ordered. Purity, because it is perfectly stripped down. But, above all, truth because it doesn't pretend to be anything else. And, like Shelley says, truth is beauty and beauty is truth."

In this new spirit, I take against Donald Judd's bronze wall piece (Untitled, I'm afraid) which looks too finely crafted and polished for my tastes. I suspect Judd has not done as little work as possible, and that he is not quite letting the metal speak for itself. Flavin's fluorescent tube is fine when it's on its own, but his "Monument" for V Tatlin, in which seven bulbs of differing lengths are used to form a shape that could be a rocket ship or the Empire State Building leaves me feeling cheated: it seems to be trying to represent something.

I do retain some scepticism. There is something cold about minimalism: it's thought, rather than felt. I'm puzzled that such a cult of order and neatness came out of the hippy chaos of 1960s Manhattan. Nor do I quite buy the idea that minimalism's refusal to represent anything in the real, material world makes it a spiritual genre. On the contrary, I think its emphasis on truth to real-world metals, bricks and junk makes it all too material. That's not a flaw, but a strength, making you look at the physical, industrial world anew.

I leave Bankside emboldened to listen to musical minimalism with different ears. Lebrecht says the genre's defining quality is the protracted repetition of a very small phrase, sometimes ad nauseam even when it's not ad infinitum. Does Lebrecht consider it terrible? "Not terrible at all," he says. "It's like a warm bath. It neither hurts nor harms."

I start soaking it up, from Reich's Music for Mallet Instruments to Glass's soundtrack to Dracula. And here's my second minimalist shock: I really like it. I find the repetition not just soothing but inescapably meditative. I can imagine the repetitions are numbing to play - and Glass admits some musicians have walked out on him mid-performance - but they add up to something mesmerising and ultimately transcendent. A small amount of musical information, repeated and rearranged in different permutations, should not be so moving, but somehow it is. It is boring at first, no doubt about it. But the US composer John Cage was right: "In Zen they say, if something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, 16, 32 and so on. Eventually one discovers it's not boring, but very interesting." There's something in that.�

Never trust an artists who say they are giving you whats�s there unmediated � that is always a trick � a ploy, a pose. Switching to an extract from the same series article on jazz:

� But why should jazz only be compared to itself, when so many clues indicating a much wider sense of its place in culture were left by its practitioners? Ornette Coleman gave away a pretty big clue when he put a Jackson Pollock painting on the cover of his improvisational recording Free Jazz.

And Bill Evans, Davis's piano player and key collaborator, leaves an equally large clue in his 1959 sleevenote for Kind of Blue. He compares the recording, with its improvisations in response to simple structures devised on the day by Davis, and handed to the participating musicians at the studio, to abstract painting. "There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break the parchment."

To anyone in America or Europe buying the record in 1959, the image that would have come to mind while reading this would surely have been the flowing lines and improvisational brilliance of Jackson Pollock, who in the late 1940s started to place his canvas on the floor and loosely, rhythmically move around it, flicking, throwing, pouring paint. Like the great jazz musicians, he was able to loop, stretch and twine his thread of improvisation so that it was both free and somehow structured.

This wasn't coincidental. Pollock was a passionate jazz enthusiast, and yet his affinity for jazz is always treated casually, while every supposed literary allusion in the titles of the paintings, by a man who may never have read a book in his life, has been teased out. Perhaps art critics would rather not see America's greatest artist as being profoundly influenced by black American music. Jazz belongs over there, in its section (which cultist fans are only too happy to preserve) instead of at the heart of modern culture. Yet Pollock's interest in jazz was arguably the essence of his aesthetic.

Which brings us back to that hurdle. Jazz has seemed too good, too aesthetic for this world. Some critics and art historians feel the same about Pollock. Today's art owes far more to Warhol than Pollock, emphasises deathliness, and has a violent insistence on the real and the grotesque. It's a nasty world, as we've just been reminded. Like Pollock, jazz believes in beauty, a defiant insistence on life, a fluid human spirit in the midst of modern violence. Perhaps the sound of John Coltrane desperately blasting My Favorite Things into an abstract masterpiece is exactly the music we need to listen to here, now. �

What would a jazz aesthetic of gesture mean in a pared down essentialist minimalist context? (Bearing in mind the original big M 4tet were nuts about Trane.)