Iain Cameron's Diary
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2003-04-28 - 8:25 a.m.

Went round the M25 to see Sarah and Geoffery in Halstead. Sarah�s sister is getting married in Scotland in the summer and S&G and family have hired a cottage just south of Torridon. We looked on the map and I remembered being obsessed with that area around the end of the 1980s. It�s a kind of wilderness unlike anything else in the UK. In fact one year we all managed to meet up at a place on the coast a bit further North and Geoffery and I managed to do an ambitious wilderness trek for a day.

We went out for a walk on the chalk downs to look at the bluebells. Last year Geoffery discovered a new hybrid plant in a claypit in Cornwall and he has just finished the process of getting it registered and named. He has found a latin adjective to do with clay in Pliny which forms the basis of the name. He showed us one natural orchid on our trip

We played some duets � much freer jazz than we sometimes do. I told Geoffery about my current enthusiasm for Coltrane changes and showed him the basic pattern. In fact we played Have You Met Miss Jones which some say is the source of this progression. The bridge goes:

Bb Abm7 Db7 Gbmaj7 Em7 A7 Dmaj7 Db7 Gbmaj7 Gm7 C7.

Clever to write a singable melody through that lot.

I left a copy of Slightly All the Time with Geoffery � who is a Mingus fanatic. In fact I mentioned the Mingus-Alexis Korner link and he pulled down a couple of biographies. It seems Mingus may have been in London to do a film which was a kind of jazz Othello. A couple of years earlier he had collaborated with the black renaissance writer Langston Hughes in NYC. When he was in London he seems to have played a bit with Harold McNair who plays flute on some early John Martyn albums. He also liked Joe Harriot who like Davy Graham was a very early UK pioneer in mixing jazz and Indian music.

I also picked up a Dolphy biography in Geoffery�s library. It seems that Dolphy played the Ann Arbor ONCE Festival just a matter of weeks before he went into the studio to do Out to Lunch � that was the Dolphy album which brought him to the attention of most of my generation. Dolphy had also been playing with Gil Evans a few weeks before that.

I very much agree with Mark�s comments on Blue Flame and Smokin. Blue Flame especially seems to have got into the tune machine in my brain

I mailed Robin about some of the follow-on ideas to Slightly All the Time. This made me think that maybe the way to tackle this stuff is to write about Detroit first. It is the prime example of a city outside LA and NYC where things really get mixed up. At its simplest you have to explain why there were a coterie of jazz musicians there who were good enough to be the session core for Tamla by the early 60s � what was the pre-existing musical infrastructure. About a million years I once backed a folk singer with a black bassist who said he he had stopped doing Tamla sessions when they stopped paying fees and offered a share of the profits. He could see the funny side of this fortunately.

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