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

2003-02-25 - 9:26 a.m.

It�s a bright sunny morning here in NYC � the best of our stay yet. Yesterday the weather had brightened up enough for us to do the Staten Island ferry � we didn�t get off but just came right back. Its free � its amazing.

James was talking about universal experiences and infinitely reproducible nostalgia. I had said that you could transport people from the rock club in Cambridge where we heard Fellthru to the Knitting Factory and people would hardly notice the difference.

On the ferry you see Manhattan from a geographic perspective in which absence looms large.

Next stop was the oldest home in NYC � on 4the Street � a rich merchants house. The family lived in it for a 100 years and then they had the wit to give it to some kind of national trust. Its like terrace a house in Brighton � two rooms end to end and a corridor stairwell up the side � on three floors. I was very taken by the gothic bookcase of 1845 � not an interpretation of Gothic that you see eg amongst the pre-Raphaelites or Pugin.

It chimed with the 1820s churches that I had seen in Boston - they are like Georgian buildings in England - but on a larger scale - every dimension is up bny 20 - 30%.

I dropped in a specialist record shop nearby and got a David Tudor collection of pieces written and recorded in the 1950s, Inside the Dream Syndicate Vol 3 and some Stefan Wolpe music from the early 1950s. Wolpe took over from Lou Harrison (who has just died � there is an obit by Kyle Gann in the Village Voice) as Aubers partner at the Black Mountain College at the end of the 1940s. He like Aubers had been at the Bauhaus � he had also worked on the club & cabaret scene in Berlin in the 1920s. Like Kurt Weill he was taught by Busoni and he managed to grab a few lessons from Webern in Vienna on his escape from Berlin � so maybe he even met my old music teacher Emile Spira. It is said that like Varese he is one of the people that Charlie Parker talked about studying with. Morton Feldman did study with him. One of the pieces on the CD is a trumpet/sax quartet from 1954 � also a much longer violin sonata of 1949 which is his clearing out of his Europeanism. I guess you have to say the plot thickens. The Dream Syndicate has Tony Jennings playing soprano with Cale on organ and Maclise on percussion � May 1967 � an absolute gem.

Talking of dreams � the Lamont Young dream chord is C F F# and G. Someone has created some grand jazz theory of such chords � non diatonic chords with at least two semitones. He starts with the question of how polytonality is used by leading jazz figures like Trane, Ornette , Shorter and Cecil Taylor. He makes the interesting observation that in Trane rather than an ornament being a chromatic note it is a chromatic chord. In Shorter like Debussy the harmony is deliberately decentred, in Taylor it is like Lizst but played faster, in Ornette it is the narrative that counts. I got this treatise for 14 dollars on Time Square � very timely.

I also had a look at Fender Bronco � only 500 dollars � on the lower East Side. Prices are shifting � a mid 70s SG even though it has been altered for 500 pounds is now cheap by NYC standards. But I saw a new Danelectro U2 for a lot more than I paid in Leamington. There was an English guy in the shop who had been in a touring band in the US for eight years (he said it was good fun) who couldn�t believe that I had got mine so cheap � he said that they cost even more on 48th Street which he explained as being the equivalent of Denmark St in the UK. They had a very strange double neck version of the same guitar � I didn�t even think about that. There was also the most decayed example of a Fender Twin Reverb I have ever seen in my whole life � you know it�s a classic amp when an example like that is on life support. Even Selmer valve combinations which we used to think were the pits are cherished now.

We went up to Empire State in the dark � I liked the view over mid town � Vita said she liked the view South down to the Financial District.

A day or so ago I caught some of the Burns jazz documentary series on Channel 13 � they were talking about classic Bix and Armstrong solos from the late 1920s � especially West End Blues and especially the introduction. About 15 years ago I committed that to memory � if anyone wants to start somewhere I suggest there. Learn it by heart and then learn to play it in every key.

previous - next