Iain Cameron's Diary
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2003-03-07 - 12:50 a.m.

The transition back to the UK is bumpier than I expected. Maybe this is because I have to reconnect not only with the family home in Gfd but also with the flat in Leamington. I slept longer than I planned and then I drove back to Leamington in pretty bad weather only to find that I had forgotten the password to my portable. I could remember the last two passwords but the current one just would not come. Anyway at least I managed to get up to Toyota in Derby and back in the Spring sunshine today

At Guildford, before this grand trek, I managed to do some stuff on www.kwase-kwaza.org. The volume figures for February are encouraging. Peter has put some new material up about Short stories and the Lullabyes project. There is also a whole new section about a building project in Mozambique that Alan Coombes at the University of Hertfordshire is supporting with a big concert on April 6.

On the plane back I had a chance to go into another element in the heart of Minimalism. (Whilst I was away I had an idea about merging a Nick Drake song and the first major piece by Philip Glass- Two Pages - which was actually completed in February 1969. So there are synchronous grounds for merging the two. Apparently this is one of the most thoroughly analysed of all minimalist pieces. I can intuit but not yet fully explain certain similarities or parallels between Nick�s approach and how this specific tune is worked. This idea is a step beyond Horn Under Water.)

When I was at the Whitney I got a set of interviews between Richard Duckworth and major US composers. I looked at the one with Lamont Young and Marian Z on the flight. LMY explains the root of the dream chord in number ratios - 12 to 16 to 17 to 18.

12 to 16 is the Pythagorean fourth while 12 to 18 is the Pytho fifth. Lamont admits that these ratios are not far from equal temperament. 16 to 17 and 17 to 18 are ways of playing the semitone asymetrically between the fourth and the fifth � these slight deviations must have that strange effect that everyone notices. A classic metatonal chord linked to number theory - that really is a piece of work.

The interview clarifies the chronolgy from 1953/54 - when Lamont is hanging out with Eric Dolphy, Don Cherry and Billy Higgins and they are playing a mix of Lee Konitz, Miles, Warne Marsh and Lennie Tristano.

The Tristano link is very important � he conceptualised amd extended the bop discoveries and pushed onto atonality. He taught March Tristano Konitz and Peter Ind. Peter Ind taught John McCartney who lives in Leamington and Bob Brearly who I met in my first jazz class when I was 18 and who played right the way through the White Hart years. Bob is a kind of jazz monk.

Konitz influenced Miles especially about the time of the 1949 Capitol showband and he played on the Birth of the Cool. So here is a distinct starting point - representing harmonic purity and linear sinuousness plus a tremendous respect for Bach�s formal integrity. I have seen Marsh and Konitz jamming fugues in London for example and indeed Bob got a point at one stage where he could use chord voicings and progressions that he had taken from the Chorales and drop them into bebop tunes. That really was something - on the guitar.

Lamont starts there and incorporates the input of not one but two of the pupils of Schoenberg � Sorenson his teacher at the John Marshall High School and Stein at the City College in LA. The result is the Five Small Pieces for String Quartet in 1956 which is the only one of his pieces cheaply easily available on CD. In Lamont�s own words � this is where jazz and serious music coexist in his life. At the John Marshall High School, Robert Sorensen played Lamont the Six Little Piano Pieces which this pointed him at the succinct early Webern music and so to the Five String Quartet Pieces.

From reading that I went onto loop the first of these short LMY SQ pieces and play the CZ101 against it � possibly in the spirit of Detroit � and capture that stuff alone as 4 minutes of MD - this is a methodology that has come out of the recent stuff with Gilbert. I have been listening to that recording today thinking about the next step.

At the Whitney - when you buy coke in the caf� it comes in green glass classic shaped bottles. Vita was very taken with these artefacts and has carefully carried them back across the Atlantic. They now stand on the mantlepiece in her newly decorated bedroom at the front of the house. Tonight she showed me how she was using the late 19C stuff we saw at the Met in her current course-work.

I mentioned this to Stephen at the House of Commons this evening. His room was across the corridor from mine on D staircase in the first year. B Wells was on C. Stephen now runs a kind of arts and crafts interior design and wood working business. The other person at the Hoggwarts reunion was Alan who is now a Dean at the Open University. They both read English and went to tutorials with FR Leavis together with Sally, 2Janes and Sara � who was going out with Imac � plus Richard from Coventry who was especially charismatic and died of AIDS. They seemed to think the other Moral Scientist John was also dead � he was really into Bruckner and introduced me to Bunuel and Godard and Last Year In Marienbad.

I mentioned to Alan and Stephen that I vaguely knew how to get in touch with Sally and Sara. There was a lot of speculation about one of the Janes. I said I dated her first but Alan said he I was definitely wrong about that � well at least I took her to Cousins � or was it Bunjes. I recalled that Paul Bell always had a certain interest and then a couple of other names came out � one of which is now of international reknown. I said I thought Sally knew where this Jane was.

Its hard to emphasise how weird this was � we were drinking wine on the House of Commons terrace surrounded by the Liberal Party�s candidate for Mayoral Competition in London and a room full of ghosts. Well worthy of Bunuel. I said to Stephen that the more the ghosts crowded in the more that I was determined to record my stuff � he said that he saw the priorities differently. I said I would send him the CDs and he gave me his address.

When I got home I just caught the final chorus of Jackson singing Jamaica Say You Will � more than enough in the circs.

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