James was 19 yesterday. He came back from Rome last Wednesday. Rob, Wendy, Lawrence and Lucy came over to help celebrate. Lawrence is studying bass at the Guildford Academy of Contemporary Music from next October and they were looking at some digs for him. They live in Melbourn between Royston and Cambridge and so there is an irony that James will be moving in their direction to study at the same time. Lawrence has a trip planned to Tokyo before then and I gave him a few thoughts on landing at Narita � it is just the most fantastic fun to get the coach from the airport into central Tokyo � every time its great but the first time is especially brilliant.

For his birthday James got history books and money. I bought him an enormous tome on the history of Russian culture plus one on Renaissance Italy. Yvonne bought him Simon Schama�s book on the French Revolution. Vita thought that this was absolutely terrible and warned us not to do anything similar for her birthday.

James liked Rome especially the Mannerist stuff but found the early R stuff in Florence a bit insipid. His mate Traff who is a ND fan and is studying classics from next October was more into it � partly because of the E M Forster links. I thinked they both liked Venice and who can blame them.

I have been thinking of a new algorithmic piece. Here�s a rough draft. � Pick a note. Play the dominant seventh ninth thirteenth on that note as a broken chord. Play the major triad on the note a semitone below the first and then play another major triad on the note a tone above that. Repeat the process eleven times � each time on a different pitch.�

Rob and I began to sketch a venture walking from Leamington to Oxford a long the canal. My original plan was to include the Thames path from Oxford to Weybridge and the Wey navigation to Guildford. Rob has done all the Thames path and indeed I did the bit with him between Henley and Maidenhead which is in the middle of that section. So we decided we ought to concentrate on the new territory. The complete trip is the route you would take from Guildford to Leamington if you wanted to go by boat.

I made a CD at the weekend which has the latest electronic pieces plus a strange piece which I found on the MD that had the Seachanges demos on it. This piece is is Dhorn and synths � played in a single take mostly monophonic but at some points lines diverge. I think I must have played keyboards with one hand and the horn with another.

It was nice of Robin to mention the long piece on the emergence of abstract blues based music in the 60s. I did a bit more work on the NYC end of business � there is a good quote from Dylan in late 65 on what the shift away from �folk� means. Basically he is saying that he has realised that the material is broader than he used to think � that all songs of any consequence are deeper (maybe more Jungian) than you might imagine � more violent and more mysterious. This is quite a reasonable theme � electrification is part of a broader inward artistic exploration � say not unlike Pollock.

A key figure emerging is the New York Post journo Al Aronowitz. It was his account of the Hendrix funeral that I posted recently. He had introduced Ginsberg to Dylan and Dylan to the Beatles and in late 1965 � just as Dylan is going electric AA elects to manage the emerging Velvet Underground � the one which has produced the Ludlow Street demos and which still has Angus Maclise on drums. Al gets the band a gig and Angus Maclise can�t face the idea of playing to order and leaves the band � enter Mo Tucker whose favourite drummer is Charlie Watts. The VU do a gig in December 1965 and AA observes that they have a very polarising effect on audiences. He concludes that they need a club residency. They get two weeks at the Caf� Bizarre in Greenwich Village. Barbara Rubin hears them there and bring Gerald Malanga to hear them. Malanga sees that the band are doing the same thing as Warhol is doing on film and introduces the boys to the Pittsburgh genius.

Wendy has just been to a conference in Pittsburgh and said the Warhol museum was great.

There is some refocusing going on in the www.kwase-kwaza.org news section. I think I have spotted the new angle I want to take � I am not sure I can put it into words exactly. Saturday�s volumes were pretty good � I was worried that March might be some kind of peak that would be hard to sustain.

AA seems to have been friends with Dylan and used his power as one leading music journalists to introduce him to the Beatles in August 1964. By this time he was convinced of BD�s importance. He was a fan of the Beatles and together with Suzie Rotolo (the girl on Freewheelin) they would nag Bob about them. According to AA Lennon�s �Ill Cry Instead� is the first song to bear the BD imprint.. (AA may also have known Aldous Huxley and he certainly knew Miles and Billie Holiday.)

Another interesting figure is Scott Ross who was married to one of the Ronettes and was also a friend of AA. Jimi Hendrix was in the Ronettes band at one stage as Jimi James Ross also worked in a nightclub called �Ondine� where both Dylan and Hendrix would hang out. Ondine is also a Warhol character of course. Ross remembers first seeing Hendrix play at the Ondine and it was maybe here that Chas Chandler first heard him. Its seems that the Doors played the Ondine less than a year later in early 1967.

I suppose the grand theory might go: When Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes are at Cambridge with Dick Heckstall Smith (future Korner/Bond/Bruce/Baker collaborator) the outside music is represented by forms of jazz and indeed DHS plays in the Cambridge University jazz and that wins a national competition. However this music is quite heavily coded and inaccessible. So, the only musical expression for the Plath-Hughes emerging primitivist-expressionist aesthetics are traditional English songs. Indeed these songs in their Appalachian manifestation are one of the resources that Dylan is working on at the same time in Minnesota along with a great long list of electric blues and country blues artists. They are part of the emerging blues diaspora which inspire the Davy Graham and the emerging Ealing crew who musically manage to bring the jazz aesthetic into a more accessible soul-blues frame.

Dylan eventually comes round to the Plath-Hughes point of view and realises that folk material is part of a deeper violent mythic agenda � the kind of agenda that allows you to compare your father with a Nazi Holocaust perpetrator and get away with it (more or less) . (Cf The White Goddess which puts the case very well and is published hereabouts).

Inspired by his meeting with successful British electric songwriters Dylan expands his instrumental approach and incorporates an electric blues based musical aesthetic because it has the power to match his lyric vision.

As is well recognised, BD pushes back the limits of the genre along way towards abstraction. There are underlying Pollock-based ideas here � that by digging into yourself and embracing and riding the unconscious and giving yourself a big enough canvas you can express some kind of global truth. Desolation Row is one such global canvas . Buried deeply in this is a view about how �form� arises. This is clearly a dangerous game and the bodycount mounts.

A similar path from the primitive towards abstract expressionism is followed by Cream on roughly the same timescale � they too are a fusion between the existential archivist of the blues craft and free flowing formal innovators. Songwriting and expression has reached a high level of generality � free jazz meets the blues to Ginsberg lyrics with apocalyptic intent.

Effectively a poetic agenda has converged with a musical one at this point and within the tight crucible of NYC an audience exists who support emerging practitioners within this paradigm eg the Doors Hendrix and the Velvet Underground. The geographical compression of NYC forces linkages meetings and innovations jumping from one person to another. Hendrix carries the agenda to the UK � his practice encompasses performative aspects which are (at the very least) similar/related to Dine/LmY �happening style� avant garde performances. If you eat your guitar how close are you to the lecturer at St Martins who took Clement Greenberg�s writings (a celebrated Pollock interpreter) and pulped them and distilled alcohol out of the mush. (He lost his job for insolence � the resulting work is now on show in MOMA).

Really the next step is try to do LA � Lamont Young, Mingus and the Doors. The easiest part is Jim Morrison at the film school working off the Theatre of Cruelty � very Plathian. � and quite a lot like Lou Reed too.