Lawrence � bass player Fellthru � see www.kwase-kwaza.org - the music section � they are on Plundafonix after Cathy doing V Wms - has been offered a place at the Guidford Academy of Contemporary Music to do bass gtr. Hooray.

Having let the battery on my PC go flat � it wouldn�t recharge with my spare transformer � a small chain of unwanted consequence followed on. But it set me off on the wrong foot and reminded me of those awful days at DTI when a classic performance by South West Trains would trigger a dayful of frustration.

I have been listening to the second side of Travelogue to try to unlock it � especially the two songs from Hejira which run back to back about a third of the way through � they are the final songs from each side of the LP � except she reverses the order � Refuge of the Roads and then Hejira. One day someone will write a thesis on Wayne Shorter and animal mimicry in his work with Joni Mitchell � there will be the bird which whistles and sings and there will be the white deer running down the road and there may well be more.

Later on � there is a sequence involving Cherokee Louise, The Dawntreader, The Last Time I saw Richard and the Borderline. Mark was saying that in his house the Detroit song is regarded as streets ahead of the original and that has just got to be right. Now there is genuine cussedness as she sits at the table and blows the candles out. The Dawntreader is also light years on from the original � even more magical coming out of the blurred and terrifying tale about her childhood friend Louise. The Borderline echoes Sweetbird from Summer Lawns � �out on some borderline, some line of in between, I lay down golden and woke up vanishing�.

I really wish they�d done Sweetbird � but I hadn�t heard Borderline before. It�s a bleak song about the pointless defence of boundaries out of pride and little else. She finishes with the Circle Game. I think they half do the job on it � in the sense that they half ignore the harmonies. Clearly they should have completely ignored them � they should have got John Cale in and asked him to treat the harmonies the way he treats Nico�s on the Marble Index or the way he treats them in the viola part on Fly. Actually its not a million miles from the Fly philosophy of sometimes staying close and sometimes being a mile off and absolutely not caring � playing the song closely but outside the bounds of the harmonies

I would rather she had finished with Both Sides Now � because it was one of the first songs of hers I heard sung by Judy Collins before Miss M had even entered the studio with Dave Crosby behind the glass. (There�s an even more inconsequential point that I actually quite like performing BSN but that�s neither here or there). More important is the fact that when she does it on her 2nd album she already moves it on from the defining version which Collins/Rikin cook up � they have a happy harpsichord but she has a heavy drone.

She already pushes the song in the direction of Pink Moon . It would be a good exercise to show that that was where it really belonged � trapped in the ignorance of life�s illusions � after all it does anticipate the featherlight balance between faithful continuation � Betty maybe prays for the sky to stay (maybe) � and romantic disillusion that makes River Man a masterpiece.

I see the Circle Game as being close to Tom Paxton � someone who deserves a lot more attention than he seems to get just now. TP seems to me to be the first singersongwriter � after Peter Seeger � but before Jackson C Frank, Paul Simon, Al Stewart etc. His stuff sounds like it really might have come out of the Smokies.

TP writes about a lot of the same themes that she does to start with - the Bohemian love-style. I suppose one parallel is Dylan in say One Two Many Mornings ( before he gets to Its All Over Now Baby Blue.)

In the Circle Game there is a neatness, a knowingness and excessive control in the writing � the picking is too obsessive for my taste. Been Smokin Too Long is exactly in the opposite place and quite rightly if you ask me. Can�t wait to hear where Robin takes it in the 21st century.

Did I mention that I was going to play �Who Knows Where the Time Goes� last Wednesday? I had never learned how to play it before � anyway I didn�t use it � instead I used an African tune � maybe the only one that I know. Also I did a version of Old One Hundred � this was a completely stolen idea � from a programme of favourites that I heard on Radio 3 three weeks ago. But it is a great jamming tune � the harmonies are so emphatic � when you change them it really stands out and you make your point.

Over the intervening period I got mugged by Thugs Mansion � I was recording some stuff off digital radio and I got a version that�s done with acoustic guitars � rather as Craig David might do it. I was floored by the bits about Billy Holiday and Marvin Gaye and especially by the rhyme of �Miles Davis� and �save us�. There�s no way round that. Anyway I had worked out a way of overlaying Dhorn on this doing both Old 100 and Marching on the Breath of God. But I didn�t have the bottle to lay this before the burgers of Gfd � well not yet � I think they�ve got it coming.

Appel�s points about Rhythm are so good � it doesn�t rhyme � it�s the demotic articulation of the joy of the moment � and so it rightly becomes a defining template for 25 years. The 1st great Miles 5tet is playing tunes based on rhythm as it establishes itself as the post-Parker paradigm.

(In fact there�s a link here � attention to surface detail and absolute conviction at this point in time.)

Appel has it in a nutshell when he takes Rhythm and then takes Jo Jones redistributing the rhythm round the kit. I once saw Freddie Green in person � heaven knows how that happened � the rhythm is Jo Jones� cymbals and FG�s rhythm guitar. I once made the cardinal error of confusing that JJ with the drummer in Miles� 5tet � Philly Jo Jones! Ashley and Charlie Alexander set me straight on that before you could say lets get another round in. The original Jo Jones is immortalised in Clint Eastwood�s Bird film � the one who threw the cymbal.

I am running the digital broadcast stream through the 6 band graph with the top two bands accentuated. Maybe its because years of abuse have wrecked the top on the head set?

I am working up to writing about tigers. We have gold � we have �fool�s gold�. We have tigers � might we have �fool�s tigers�?

Over to Miss M: � David was very enthusiastic about the music � he was twinkly about it . His instincts were correct � he was going to protect the music and pretend to produce me. So we just went for the performance with a tiny bit of sweetening. Without David�s protection the record company might have put on a producer who tried to turn an apple into an orange. The net result was that the engineer (Henry Lewy ) and I made 13 albums together without a producer�.

Staking all his silver on a promise to be free?

Woooo - here's a funky new version of the parking lot streaming out the ether