Vita completed her massive walk across the Marlboro Downs � it�s a practice for the main Duke of Edinburgh�s Award walk in about three weeks time which will be in the White Peak. She wanted to know if the Duke of Edinburgh was mad and if so why was it that they made teenagers do these crazy things. One of those questions is easier to answer than the others.

She has just got the White Stripes CD � more blues based music from Detroit.

I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of the second of the weekly editorials on www.kwase-kwaza.org site. We decided we could get more value out of the news pages if we invited different people to comment on a week by week basis. As the person who puts up the news stories everyday, I very much welcome this development, It is as if I actually talking to somebody although I know from the stats that the news section is the most frequently read page on the site. I have locked myself into this daily task � but most of me doesn�t really mind. I try to make it the first thing I do everyday. The forthcoming editorial will be written by Frances Evans who works for the DTI in the West Midlands.

I bought Rolling Stone a couple of weeks back � and then wished I hadn�t done � it all seemed to me to be attitudising. Well all except for one article on the reissues page about the Drake oeuvre by James Hunter. On Time has Told Me: �Drake�s voice is astounding � rounded, alert, full of posh intensity � there�s a rhythmic intensity and a lift which recalls the most fluid Brazilian singers�. Also �Poor Boy� with its �unfaked jazz combo setting and gospel choir backgrounds�. He might have said Brazilian there too.

Talking of modulation, I have been trying my hand at writing more progressions with heavy modulation using Giant Steps principles � major sevenths and rootless thirteenth chords voiced with a second in the middle. Yesterday�s went

Cmaj 7 Ab13/C no root

Dbmaj7 Bb13/D no root

Ebma7 B13/D# no root

Emaj7 /B Db13/F no root

I like the way that the thirteenths plunge into the unknown out of the stability of the major sevenths � the first pair of chords have a C pedal, the second pair a C top voice; the third pair an Eb root � it�s the first progression up a minor third � and the final pair have share a leading note in the root to say that the sequence is really �in� C. Formally the sequence is A-B-A-C.

I am trying to teach my left hand to do the four note voicings on the piano while my right does a line � it�s the only way I know how to play the piano. I have tried looking at the voicings on guitar as well � a different physical competence especially when one is trying to think through less standard progressions. Its much easier to see the commonality between the guitar, the flute and the piano in terms of the single line.

On the piano, this kind of music sounds a bit like Herbie Hancock or Bill Evans from the mid 60s � which is I am sure where it was developed. Also Keith Jarrett playing in Charles Lloyd�s band at the same time.

I mentioned Lloyd in a note I wrote for Andrew Keeling on the John Handy band � dawing on the material in Nicholson�s book. The interesting point about Handy (besides the fact that the 1965 live album is brilliant) is that we was a San Francisco bridge between Mingus, Sun Ra and Coltrane and the emerging acid rock scene. He had worked with Mingus, employed Sun Ra�s violinist and refined the Coltrane quartet formula so that it would sit on the same bill as The Jefferson Airplane and the Fugs and appeal to the same audience.

These three were famously on the bill for the first concert that Bill Graham organised in November 1965. This echoes what happened in the UK where Alexis Korner (who knew Mingus and tried to copy his approach) employed people like Graham Bond (who was compared with Trane and Dolphy as an alto player) and John MacLaughlin (who understood the new jazz) preparing a platform for serious improvisational rock music at almost precisely the same time.

Lloyd was part of this same San Franciscan scene and was initially very successful � although the music, particularly Forest Flower, used different Trane elements � in harmonic terms, the fast modulating Giant Steps approach that I have been fiddling about with. Lloyd couldn�t handle the pressure of success and until the last few years when he had made a successful comeback, had been dismissed as a quirk of psychedelia.

It seems there wasn�t enough a jazz market on the West Coast to support local musicians playing conventional jazz � and so this prompted the mutation of the form to fit into the emerging gigging environment that was there.

I suppose the heart of my current enquiries is about the cities and gigging arrangements which bring together and cross pollinate the different genres � I have written a version of the London story and I am part way through Detroit. I had an inititial run through the New York scene in the longer article which I abandoned

after it fell apart under the weight of its own complexity. John Handy highlights San Francisco as another one to add to the list. Nicholson understands the importance of having somewhere to play for the music to evolve � which means that his book is a good information source for me. One of the secrets if you want the music to develop is to have local strength in at least two or three genres and opportunities for musicians with different backgrounds to play together.

I played Mark�s Rumsfeld music again following his entry yesterday and having heard it at close quarters in the Frakctured Cybercentre. He is certainly onto something here. Its important not to ignore the power of the underlying sequence that Mark has written which sounds to me like French film music and intensifies the poignancy of the whole. I downloaded the file with a vaguely plundafonic intent.

I snatched some words from a Wavfile which I found sitting on a CD of a recording done in the mid 70s by John Greaves, bass player Henry Cow. The CD has quite a strong conceptual content � one track is about especially meaningful objects � and the words that I have snatched from the WAV are about the fountain pen that Nijinsky designed after he had gone mad with all the effort he put into Diagelev�s ballets, I have looped this up and dropped over the top a version of �Time of No Reply� which has taken the initial guitar riff and turned it into a tone row.

I had wondered whether this approach was just too like Steve and Dusty�s Bloody Valentine on Plundafonix. Maybe the take on the tune justifies a bit more work.