The weekend very much went downhill.

On Saturday there was a half hour programme about the piano player Richard Twardzik - a gift in a game of Jazzscrabble. He is mainly remembered for playing with Chet Baker and he died of a heroin overdose in Paris at the age of 24, I think in 1954. He was very innovative in terms of the form of his composition and improvisation - moving further ahead from Monk towards Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea. In the interimn came Bill Evans who was very innovative, very influential but impressionsist - T was more expressionist.

I generally don't have a lot of time for Chet Baker - too much image and too much self-destruction. But you have to hand it to him in terms of getting good partners. His recordings were used in early tape loop works by Terry Riley about a decade later.

A piece in the Guardian today about jazz being over-concerned with its own history and not enough concerned with its present. But it has always been difficult some very able and "advanced" jazzplayers to make a living - I was reading that Eric Dolphy didn't really make enough to live on from jazz.

Paul Bell phoned and we discussed the reappearance of another 40% of Wild Oats the student band that we were in together.

Vita lobbyed me to buy the new Red Hot Chilli Peppers CD which is out today. She likes the way the bassplayer in this band does his stuff.

FACT - at the end of Millenium the 400 richest US citizens were worth more $1000 billion in total. I suppose they won't be very happy at the impact of the stockmarket fall on their asset values. Its an ill wind.

Gilbert Isbin has mailed with some feedback on Plundafonix - he seems to be up for a crack at Fifths. I am not sure anyone except me likes the recurrent theme on this CD. But for some reason I really want to have yet another crack at it. The reason is that I want to do some more thematic improv - where I take the theme and transform it into different keys, a kind of coward's way into free atonality - at the same time as sharpening up on the rhythmic dimension of my playing.

Perhaps its time for a quote from a German Professor:

"The attack by literature and literati on sociology, almost without exception inspired by anti-Enlightenment motives, is always succesful when sociological thinking overwhelmed and carried away by the possibilities of reason and obstinate in its desire to imitate the natural sciences claims to be able to replace metaphysics and religion, sensitivity and faith. Where the way back to such beliefs is blocked new alternatives are sought and disastrous ones found."

We can guess which alternatives Wolf Lepenies has in mind. I used to be able to get articles like this on the firm. Those must have been the days.

The Stanford Philosophy site explains Kierkegaard (the anti-rational advocate of the absurd) as follows.

" Unless the SELF acknowledges a "power which constituted it", if falls into despair which undoes its selfhood. Therefore to maintain itself as a relation which relates itself to itself, the self must constantly renew its faith in "the power which posited it"."

Is improvisation an activity where the self relates to itself and sustains its identity thereby? If so the inner wellspring might be sustaining flow. I react to the phrase which has just appeared through me and therefore I sustain my selfhood. Descartes was snappier but that was all in the mind.