Iain Cameron's Diary
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2003-05-25 - 6:50 a.m.

A slackening pace of activity in diaryland seems to be felt here too. Can�t imagine why. There isn�t really a shortage of things to write about. For example I have been listening to selected tracks from Blue Flame thinking just how good they are. I like the depth and intensity of the artistic vision especially.

There seems to have been a surge on www.kwase-kwase.org this week although I can�t quite track down why. Yvonne wonders if it is caused by Bono and Bob going to see Blair. This is a possibility and indeed I have been posting material about the summit in Evian in early June which was the reason for B&B meeting B. It looks as if France and the USA are to quarrel about support for HIV-AIDS next.

Stuart Nicholson�s book on the History of Jazz Rock is just brilliant. You can�t spend �13 more informatively if you want to try and fit some shape to the evolution of music over the last 40 years. And it has a stupendous discography by John Newey who now works with Charlie on Jazzwise � an endless list of discs that one wants to get round to listening to properly.

SN observes that jazz had to get round to a more constructive relationship with popular music in the 1960s � the existing situation was dire and meant that good musicians made limp cuts to try to bolster their popularity.(This point was confirmed by Charles Shaar Murray in his discussion of Wes Montgomery on Radio 3 - to make a living Wes made some pretty indifferent semi pop records towards the end of his career.) Once people tried out rock instrumentation one of the first consequences was that the beat moved off the cymbals � the place that Count Basie�s drummer Jo Jones had put them. Loud cymbals just became a blur. This opened up a space to fill with new musical ideas.

One of the truly innovative bands that SN highlights is Ornette Coleman�s Prime Time. I went to hear them around 1980 and I can remember thinking how �out� they were � this was at a time when I foolishly thought that I had heard everything going in that department. They gave that stimulus of stumbling into the excitingly unfamiliar that I had had when I was a teenager. They seemed to be playing in several keys and several rhythms at once and there was a punk-rock dimension to them. Over the top floated one of the truly great masters of improvisation. They were loud and they were nasty and they could obviously play pretty well. Smooth jazz they weren�t.

SN picks out the arrival of Zorn�s band with Fred on bass as another absolute high point. Apparently they were the first band to cause a queue outside the Knitting Factory. SN dubs Zorn a �conceptualiser� � although he is not the only person who gets this title. Conceptualisers seem to be people who think of new means of organising music � usually so as to create opportunities for improvisation. I suppose the core conceptualisers may have been people like Cage and Cardew. I saw David Murray � the saxophonist from the World Saxophone Quartet � doing a thing in front of a big band which I subsequently discovered was called �conduction� � a kind of realtime compositional sign language. That could have been the first bit of conceptualising I came across. There was also Dave from Dyp Experience � I think I probably really caught the bug from him. Mick Beck and Gilbert have just made it worse.

I have been doing a bit more work with En Bateau which gets performed next Friday � with a bit more rehearsal beforehand. This is a chance to understand better how Debussy makes it happen. One point of extremity is where he is working up to returning the main theme and he has a whole tone run � within the scale of the dominant seventh � and underneath he puts in the third and the sharp fourth � a tone apart. One of those nice moments where you can say he is anticipating Charlie Parker.

On Thursday Rob came over and we walked from Leamington to Kenilworth via Old Milverton and Woodcote along The Coventry Way � a circular walk round the town. As ever when you walk through a landscape that you mostly know from driving through it we learned a great deal. One of the big discoveries was that King John created a vast artificial lake around Kenilworth castle by creating a causeway across the valley that it sits in. We followed one of the streams that helped create the lake down from its source on the plateau on the northern side of the River Avon � this stream spends a lot of its early life going North East. Finding this out helps clarify the shape of the watershed between the Avon-Severn system and the Trent river system which is just over the skyline. We thought our next walk might be to see how the Grand Untion Canal gets over that obstacle..

Vita phoned last night to say she had survived a 26km walk with pack � part of Duke of Edinburgh�s Bronze Award. We are pretty impressed with this � double what Rob and I did without packs on Thursday � but we did managed quite a bit of history and geography.

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