Iain Cameron's Diary
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2003-02-24 - 1:20 a.m.

Shopping in mid-town and then the end of Broadway where the best skate shop in NYC is.

First thing the idea of graphic scores came through very strongly - an obvious avenue to explore.

I made it to the Knitting Factory. I had planned to see the No Neck Blues Band - but I found the support band too much - a complete time warp. The bass player looked like Rich Fry out of the White Unicorn.

Instead I went down to the level which is more like Les Cousins - or the club in Desperately Seeking Susan and listened to King Missile III who were excellent. The lead is a poet who declaims. The bassplayer also plays violin and the drummer can do keybds if necessary at the same time. It was kind of post-punk but terribly well done and extremely funny. Much more what you expect in a downtown club

Then there was Roger Manning - a singer-songwriter in his 40s and an associate of Gary Lucas who played with Jeff Buckley and Captain Beefheart. This music seemed to me like Bob Dylan's Talking NY Blues - and none the worse for that.

Finally I bumped into a hard-bop drummer called Abdul Zahir Batin who was basically hussling me but by that stage I just didnt care. I promised to send him a copy of 10SS.

So the lesson is - if you are ever remotely in the area and tempted dont resist for a second - its like a mixture of Middle Earth, Bungies, Cousins and the White Hart on four floors - and provides suitable space/time windows for you to drop forward and backward in musical time.

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