Iain Cameron's Diary
"Click here to access the Fruitful Album" - Click here to visit Music for the Highveld Project


The Highveld Project

Get your own
 diary at DiaryLand.com! contact me older entries

2002-05-16 - 5:33 a.m.

There seem to be few options on the USB interface. It seems the Creative Labs Audigy box doesnt use USB but an alternative standard which they have defined themsleves and which they believe is technically superior. There is no real alternative to paying around �250 for a box with a decent range of functions. Maybe I should think about getting a bottom of the range unit over the nest from the USA.

To help keep uptodate I bought a copy of Future Music on the way to work. They have some interesting regular features - one is about people who collect old synths. They are interviewed on topics like why they started, which their favourite is etc. This week's trainspotter had a kind word about the CZ101. In another article from a practitioner there was an enthusiasm for the reliability and clock-accuracy of the Amiga. Maybe this is about to progress from terminally underspecified by today's standards to being a classic.

I only just discovered in time that I had a meeting in Queen Anne's Gate with Engineering and Marine Training Association with Graham. I got there in time (just) for a very positive discussion on the new project which they will strongly support. I also picked up an excellent training survery which they have carried out with useful data on training budgets as a percentage of salary spend in different sectors. Normally you have to pay through the nose for that kind of data.

After the meeting I went to Trafalgar Square to suss out the Waterstones there. The Blackwell's music section is much better at the moment. But in the art section I found an utter gem. Roger Dean has written another book on the theory of improvisation. He was another jazz playing medical student a year or so ahead of Steve P and Dave Mitchell at Cambridge. About a decade ago he wrote a really serious study of the improvisational structures used in 60s jazz - there isn't another book like it - he brings the practitioner's view but as a medical professional he is also rigorous and quite analytical.

The latest book aims to cover improvisation in all media since 1945 and is co-written with an Australian academic. The broad thesis is that during that period improvisation has become more common in artistic endeavour. There has been a trend for technology to be used to an ever greater degree and for the artwork to span more than one medium. I would agree with all of this - the surprise is that he and his cowriter have managed to do enough research to identify the key points and trends. In terms of where I ended up yesterday - what on earth am I up to at the moment? - this book is a godsend. For a start very few of today's technological improvisers do it full time - because it is still a second class artistic practice in the eyes of the culture police.

Maybe I should explain (if I haven't earlier) that my Moral Sciences Final Year Disertation was on The Aesthetics of Improvisation. I will always be grateful to my teachers for encouraging me to take this more risky option. Actually I now think that because it was original it lifted the final class of my degree by one step. This was really my second "big" hack at an issue - my first was a prize-winning essay called An Analysis of Personal Pleasure that I did in the lower sixth. The success of this persuaded me that it was a viable option to study philosophy. The aesthetics thing tried to get somewhere by applying the techniqes of analytical and linguistic philosophy - and there is a way in which I feel it allows me to claim some of the territory which Roger and Derek Bailey have marked out with their later books - coming as it does in the early 70s when improvisation was just beginning to diffuse more widely within artistic projects. Anyway enough"ego".

Roger has a good hack at what post modernism might be in improvisation. the best critical use of this term prior to this comes in the final section of Ted Gioia's book on the history of jazz. When I read this I felt that he had unified in a single discussion dozens of different jazz perfornmers which I had seen in the 70s 80s and 90s. There was no longer a single avant garde defining the leading edge in the way that Taylor Coltrane Coleman and Shepp (say) had in the 1960s and it was this absence that made the period post-modern.

Roger goes further than this - he comes up with a set of characteristics of the POMO and suggests that there may be a pomo avant garde who for example mix styles, use technology to mix media and have a sceptical attitude towards the grand narratives which underpinned the Enlightenment and the Modern Era such as communism, humanism, liberalism, the ideology of progress etc.

I wasn't surprised to get a call from John Gambles earlier in the day. We ended up talking about the artistic giants whose careers span really major change in the artistic landscape they work through - Picasso, Dylan and Miles immediately suggested themselves. John is very keen on Dylan and he mentioned that he had over 600 bootlegs. He had been to see the man a couple of times recently. His view is that he shouldn't be trying to reinterpret the old material - and that any one performance varies from the pretty average to the magnificent. John had seen the Nightingale book but hadnt got round to reading it. We agreed that the scale of Dylan's achievement was such that it may be several decades before people had properly mapped it out - we touched on the idea that Dylan had continued to use the studio in an anachronistic way - rather as Bach continued to write music in an anachronistic style into the 18th century. This was all such fun we decided to meet up for a beer in a fortnight at Shad Thames.

Vita had some really difficult maths homework to do with fitting hexagons together and the number of internal and external sides in the figure as you increase the number of hexagons. I got there in the end but my first solution was very inelegant and it took me a while to get something better. It was interesting how she could quickly see the patterns in the diagram which I couldn't - she said that it was because I was old and fat and she may be right. But I could see the patterns in the numbers and had a repertoire of techniques to shake down the intuitively perceived pattern to a concise result. We decided it was a draw.

Didnt listen to Sarah Dunant on Radio 3 - she and I come from the same part of London and were in the same Footlights Review - doing utterly different things.

previous - next