Charlie Alexander has just called - I wrote to him over the weekend about the Plundafonix CD plus some of my recent adventures in Detroit and NYC. Charlie is a jazz guitarist who also runs the Jazzwise magazine and jazz resource distribution service. All of these are excellent. I first met Charlie playing with Steve Pheasant on Friday nights at the White Hart Drury Lane. This was one of those wonderful gigs that went on and on for years. I had met Steve in my first year of university when we formed a band called HORN - this would be 1968.

The first tune we played together was On Green Dolphin Street.

Coming back to London in 1975 Steve invited me to play in his band in Drury Lane - a real life saver. Charlie was a mainstay on guitar. The other guitarist at the White Hart was Bob Brierly who I had met in 1967 when I studied jazz with Owen Bryce - one of the true British pioneers - during my "year off". Bob invited me to jam after one of the classes and we started gigging with a US serviceman on bass - wierd East End clubs for example. I introduced Bob to Steve when I went to Cambridge - and the two got on because of a mutual obsession with bebop. Bob is my route to Charlie Parker - Bob was taught by Peter Ind who studied with Lennie Tristano. Peter played some gigs with Parker. I used to use Peter Ind's solo bassline albums as a practice resource.

Both Bob and Charlie are amazing players but in their way illustrative of how different a life dedicated to jazz can be. For Bob it is a monastic calling in pursuit of a kind of purity - he studies the harmony of Bach chorales and incorporates those voicings into be-bop comping. Charlie sees jazz as a community which needs to be serviced and supported. But he also has a profound knowledge of jazz guitar - he wrote and narrated the Radio 3 series on the subject!

When I was in NYC I stayed on 52nd Street - across the road from Roseland where Parker would play to earn money. Looking out from the 30th floor it suddenly struck me that the geographical relationship of 52nd St to the theatrical centre of NYC is the same as that of Drury Lane to the theatrical centre of London. Just typical of Steve to casually pull that off.

The other main harmony player in the Steve Pheasant band was Nick Sinclair Brown who runs a Cambridge College now and goes to war crimes trials. Last time I spoke to him a couple of months back he had this crazy story from the 70s when he was going out with Maggie Nichols the avant garde jazz singer. She belonged to the same left wing group as Vanessa Redgrave and to please Maggie, Nick ended up doing a gig with two members of Jethro Tull accompanying VR's daughters singing Long Haired Lover from Liverpool - these daughters are famous now of course. Nick plays in a kind of McCoy Tyner stacked fourths manner - or he did then. He has also backed Vic Reeves - that would be a gig to have witnessed. I wonder how Nick met Steve? I really ought to know that.

Charlie was saying that Jazzwise, the mag is about to celebrate its 5th anniversary - thats well worth three cheers.

Its worth mentioning another HORN member who graduated to Drury Lane - Geoffery Kitchener who plays bass. At the moment he is actually playing piano studying Chopin - he has an unruely piano technique but he is an amazingly quick reader. He is also a worldwide expert on grasses. When he visited us a couple of weeks ago we were up on the Hogs Back - behind my house and I mentioned to him that neighbour had told me that the wood we were walking through might have been coppiced since Saxon times. He showed me the evidence that supported this conjecture - many different trunks emerging from a broad base of tree in the ground.

Anyway that brings me back to geomancy.

Having brought up the allignments in London area I looked on the net today to see what was available on this subject. The main allignments that are mentioned are the very clear ones - eg from Shoreditch church through Charing Cross and Buckingham Palace down to Fulham Palace. I am never sure about the Buckingham Palace part of that. The Shoreditch part is good - an ancient crossroads and the start of the Roman Road leading north which is also the medieval road to Cambridge. This includes the strange chalk caves at the crossroads in Royston - just down the road from where the bassplayer of Fellthru lives.

Fulham Palace is a Saxon religious site. Apparently this line has been followed down into Surrey - including Horsell Common - the fictional site of a Martian landing in H G Well's War of the Worlds.

But there was nothing about the line South West from London Bridge - a Roman Road with a lot of good things on it. This includes Merton Abbey (which gave its name to Merton College Oxford) and Ashstead Church which is one of the few churches in Surrey located in an Iron Age earthwork. I have always thought this line was quite strong.

Anyway I went back to the St James Palace line - its bearing is approx 341 degrees/ 161 degrees. It strikes the Thames on the bend just upstream from Vauxhall Bridge. I have suddenly become very interested in this part of the river - it contains the oldest manmade artefacts in central London yet found - some Bronze Age piles which the erosion of the river has not long uncovered. There was TimeTeam project on TV about them recently. I was especially interested in the reason why that part of the river was thought to be significant. Two streams enter the Thames - one on each bank. On the Northern bank it is part of the Tyburn which forms the lake in Hyde Park and flows over Sloane Square District Line in an iron box. On the Southern Bank it is the Effra - a really interesting river on which it is said Queen Elizabeth the first travelled to Brixton. I have spent many hours looking for the source of the Effra - but I will save that for another day,

These two streams entering the Thames are thought to have created special local features eg with both of them depositing gravel in the main River. Maybe there was an island in the middle of the stream - anyway it is thought that the Broze Age piles carried a causeway into the Thames towards some such feature which had both practical and symolic significance. The bearing 161 degrees down from St James Palace hits the River at about that point - a fact I hant been aware of until today.

I also found out a bit more about the orthogonal line today - bearing 251 degrees/ 71 degrees. Yvonne had been to meet an old friend at the Festival Hall and had picked up leaflet about the Southbank - from Tower Bridge to Westminster, where there is ever more to see and do. It transpires that Southwark Cathedral is both a Roman Pagan site and a Saxon religious foundation. The White Tower and this point plus Thorney Island are not at all bad.

But I still haven't cracked the point of intersection. The entrance to Tothill Fields was at the point where Tothill Street turns into Petty France. I have often wondered whether the intersection point isnt the park on Victoria Street just next to New Scotland Yard - Victoria Street was cut through slums in the mid 19th century and I think a church was demolished for this - the park is what is left of the churchyard.

The other bit of history to turn up today was Chris Wallis. He and I were in the same year at a grammar school in West London just off the Great West Road. I owe Chris a lot - when we were in the Lower Sixth he introduced me to his Polish friends in Ealing. One of them had Judy Collins In My Life - this would have been 1965 probably. I have never really recovered from hearing the version of Suzanne on that album and that stupendous descending guitar part that Eric Weisberg plays. I remember when I met Linda Peters' brother a couple of years later he kept going on about that part. That album and its successor were an introduction to where songwriting was going - Dress Rehearsal Rag, I Think Its Gonna Rain Today, Chelsea Morning. You just had to look at the songwriting credits and wait until each of the songwriter's first albums came out to be reviewed in Melody Maker. I got Tintagel to do Suzanne at the Middle Earth in late 1967 for example - and that generated quite a lot of interest in the Band.

Chris now has a production company and you will often hear his name on Radio 4 as the producer of the Book at Bedtime. He mailed today to say he had got the rights to some strange gay cowboy musical. He puts his success down to having produced the Archers at the end of the 1980s.

So I managed to sell copies of the Plundafonix CD to both Chris and Charlie which is really cheering. But I'll have to write Charlie some exculpatory notes for some of the jazz guitar playing on it - mine - not Gilbert Isbin's who is in an entirely different league. I expect Nick can be persuaded to stump up as well.

I thought Mark's piece about his hospital porter experiences was stunning - do read it.

I was going to engae with Andrew over the question of musical modernism and US composers - but that can wait for another day.