The Guardian review complained about Kate Rushby�s projected persona � a practised naivety. I can see what they were getting at. But the music was very sophisticated for supposedly traditional music and I suppose in that sense the projection and the content were in tune. She had a five piece band � string bass, guitar, accordion, flute/whistles and the MD who played violin, a guitar like instrument � maybe double stringed and flutes. I thought that at times they sounded like the early 20th century English composers who worked with folksong. They would drop most of the instruments out and then on the next tutti do a little harmonic trope.

Travelling to London was a good idea � I was getting slightly under stimulated staying at home the while. The first lesson was to remember how annoying the trains are � and how useful it is that my new job doesn�t involve them. The second benefit was � pause � buying a new book on the history of Minimalism. Honestly I thought long and hard before I got my credit card out .

On the way there I read Matthew Collings on the evolution of Britart � he sees the great postwar artists in the UK as Bacon, Gilbert and George and D Hirst. In this world Minimalism is a kind of joke now � it re-enters as for example Hirst�s vitrines as just one more bit of his portfolio of irony. The new book is by Keith Potter, published about eighteen months ago and is well researched eg gets to Howard Skempton by page 3 and goes back to early Cage, Barnet Newman and all the chums.

The thing that really won me over was that there is a lot more info on Lamont Young especially on his teens in LA. For example he studied one, not two pupils of Schoenberg. Besides Stein with whom he took some private lessons, his first harmony teacher at the John Marshall High School was also taught by Sch. Marshall played Young a recording of the Op 19 Little Pno Pieces. At the LA City College (1953-55) he and Eric Dolphy were first and second clarinets in the College Symphony Orchestra.

His first recording was �All the things you are� and he was drawn to the �Tristano School� playing of Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh. He jammed with Ornette Coleman around LA as well as with two other members of his revolutionary 4tet � Billy Higgins and Don Cherry.

By the time he moved to UCLA in 1957 he had already evolved the obsessive approach to the blues that went into the Forever Bad Blues Band project � maybe he first devised this with Terry Jennings � Terry Riley remembers it becoming the only way that he ever played the blues. The origins of Young�s dream chord maybe the bridge of an arrangement he did around 1954 which drew on the famous Miles Davis Capital 9 piece band arrangements.

Previously the best source of this kind of detail had been Strickland�s book on the Origins of Minimalism. Potter has taken this and dug deeper � and revealed a great deal more to explore. His big thesis seems to be that Minimalism is a dialectical move from Serialism � that you have to see how all the founding fathers in Mmusic became disengaged from S as a dominant ideology. It�ll be interesting to see how he works Cage into this theory.

Anyway this all certainly cheers me up � esp vis a vis the forthcoming collab with Gilbert on DayIn Dayout. It kind of puts the Boulez bashing in context but I am beginning to wonder if this isnt too easy a target