Back on the Birmingham Business Park and feeling a bit shattered. I drove up the M40 this morning through the mist. Fortunately there wasn�t that much traffic around. I listened to my trophies � 5 tracks of Laurie Anderson, 1972 Stooges demos and Trans Europe Express (on which they refer back to Iggy Pop).

The Kraftwerk is pretty spacey not least for 1977 and despite the Iggy reference I can�t hear much of the influence from the Stooges that they claim. Stooges sound to me (as the MC5 of this period does) like post psychedelic Stones. There�s a common inheritance in Chicago and maybe some kind of common heritage in elements of jazz � this is when the Stooges were hanging out with Miles.

The Stooges track that Bob Sheff plays on is very very very rude. I suppose that�s another Stones parallel � not the rudeness but the use of high out of tune percussive keyboard..

I played the piece which currently goes by the name �Nineteen� and thought perhaps it did sound like a piece after all.

When I was in Milan I had a thought about integers and intervals. If you want to find if a prime can be used microtonally in a way which gets close to a well-tempered interval you have to find a power of that prime which brings it close to a power of two. For example the fourth power of 19 is 130321 which is close to the seventeenth power of 2 which is 131072. This links 19 to the minor third because four minor thirds yield an octave. 17 to the power 12 is close to 2 to the power 49. This relates 17 to the semitone because 12 semitones make an octave.

You might expect 7 to the sixth power to be close to some power of two. The seventh harmonic is normally thought to yield a seventh note (whole tone down from the tonic). Six whole tones make an octave. But the fifth power is much better . 7 to the fifth is 16807 which is quite close to 2 to the fourteenth which is 16384. This shows that the harmonic seventh is close to an interval which we don�t use � which you get if you divide an octave equally into five parts.

This approach can be developed � when you divide a frequency by three you get close to the frequency that is a fifth down. So the ratio of 17 to 3 � a semitone up and a fifth down gets close to a tritone. The ratio of 17/3 squared is 289/9 which is close to 32 or 2 to the power 5.

Maybe jetlag is a psychological as well as physiological phenomenon. I woke very early in Milan and to pass the time I went down to the PC in the lobby and read most of my ND articles on the �files� site. I have been wondering whether they need serious revision partly because I have done so much work on related themes. .

In �Jazzin with Nick� I make the link between the US and the UK in terms of known listening habits, personal contacts especially back through John Cale and Lamont Young to the pioneers and traces in the works themselves. If I was writing it now, I think I would add that the blues in Britain in the early 60s was much more in a jazz frame than most people knew. For example the blues pioneer Alexis Koerner was good friends with Charles Mingus and used Mingus methods in his pioneering blues bands. The blues �ethos� was partly a construction from the mindset of pioneer collectors post War NYC. The real musical culture in the UK involved a much more intimate blend of jazz and blues than the ideas about the music that may have been in people�s minds. .

On the blues front, though,. I would emphasise that moving to songwriting from reconstructing the blues was quite common and in some instances led to some great songs being written eg by Tim Hardin. However, the number of great songwriters who were mesmerised by the Coltrane 4tet was even larger than those I mentioned in the original article � Joni Mitchell would be one, Paul Weller another. And as far as JM is concerned that involvement helped shape harmonic complexity and sophistication in her work. .

I was toying with the idea that this �jazz/blues infusion� stopped with MC5 and the Stooges. After the end of the 60s jazz stopped being so strongly part of the cultural inheritance of emerging musicians. Maybe advanced artistic ideas took over � say Mike Kelley and Brian Eno as examples. The idea of �the spectacle� was very salient in the late 60s and rock began to incorporate that perspective and in constructing its own spectacle it began to discover its own history. Sometimes this discovery involved apparent opposition � the attempt to construct a decisive break. So punk was a kind of trangressive spectacle. .

These latter points would be more relevant to a treatment of Pink Moon. I have quite a terse unpublished article about that album which is about structural and formal features, especially the third and the seventh. Sometimes I bump into a copy and wonder whether I shouldn�t give it more of an airing. .

One link that is currently on my mind is the way that the Four Tops song Reach Out uses the third for quite similar purposes to some of tunes in Pink Moon. Suppose we treat the song as being in G, then at first sight it starts with a series of Am7 D7 changes. If you look carefully you will see that the Am7 is followed by a first inversion tonic (G) � giving a rising bassline. The third in the root of this chord is actually quite destabilising. .

As the song progresses, this provocative third becomes more intrusive. When the Am7 D7 resolves into G it is destabilised because James Jamerson starts playing that B again and when the harmony shifts up to the dominant of the relative minor, he further destabilises by playing the third of that � the D#. In fact the chord loses its root and becomes the enharmonic D# diminished seventh. We find this kind of thing in some Lieder perhaps. .

A lot depends on how you read the relative minor tonic/dominant relations in the chorus. � especially whether the harmony really resolves the dominant pressure. I am not at all sure it does. As the song cycles round the semantic framework of the song gets more and more intense. The first section of the song describes the position of �the other� with insight �when your best just aint good enough�. The �other� is encouraged to reach out but the harmonic destabilisation through the bassline questions how successful this is going to be. It�s a nice question whether this harmonic innovation came from the arranger or was imposed as a trope by Jamerson in the session. .

The chorus emphasises the presence of the first person � a kind of existential affirmation � but its in an unresolved dominant of a foreign key. For me this makes me wonder how much use that is going to be. Within the framework of the song we never get to know. Think of the enormous dominant at the end of Things Behind the Sun. .

The decentred third is a common feature of songs on Pink Moon especially as starting note of the songs. The harmony of Harvest Breed is a good example of a song where the third in the line, diminished harmony , barely resolved dominant and obsessive cycling add up to pretty much the same outcome � �no end to your troubles with things you can say�. .

This Reach Out paranoia and the serene surface of those Pink Moon songs with their existential chasms come together in the Philly masterpiece The Backstabbers. �They are smiling in your face and all the time they wanna take your place.� Maybe I�ll write a piece comparing that with Poor Boy.