I really enjoyed Robin�s and Jacob�s posts today � really makes this collective diary thing worthwhile to be able to bounce one�s own ideas around with people thinking their own thoughts that sometimes touch one�s own and are sometimes a million miles away. Three cheers for Cybermaster Mark!

Yesterday was a strange day. The threat of my arm dropping off on top of recovering from the �grand meeting� with Cambridge and MIT on Thursday was definitely system overload. So I started the day at less than full power. Looming ahead was a performance which was a bit on the underrehearsed side. In fact I had (foolishly) agreed to leave work a bit early � drive 120miles � rehearse and then perform. On top of that my boss was quite interested in the CMIT follow-up � what were our big ideas etc? The narrative drift is clear � that drive through the heat and rush hour doesn�t bare thinking about.

About 20miles out I phoned Margaret HB who was accompanying me as arranged and her husband said she had withdrawn with a migraine. I pressed on. Fortunately MHB�s migraines are manageable and generally turn around quickly and we played the thing through a couple of times in her relaxing lounge � which I hadn�t visited before. That was the turning point.

What was the music and why were doing it? It was an arrangement of Debussy�s En Bateau for flute and piano � the weird thing about playing it is that the second half is so much easier than the first � also that there is plenty of scope for the two participants to negotiate the musical sense of the piece.

The event design was a masterstroke. It was in St Mary�s � where Lewis Carroll preached under the Saxon tower and where I have performed and even premiered a fair amount of stuff. The aim was to celebrate the enhancement of the organ and a new stained glass window. And the form was somewhere between a party and a amateur concert. Yvonne said that she had spoken to someone who wasn�t especially looking forward to the programme and I shared those reservations. But that just shows how wrong you can be � it was full of surprises.

One really good surprise was that Gillian Lloyd, the organist and MD from the local URC church had been asked to help show off the organ and I knew some of the Bach she played quite well � I used to practice some of the lines. The acoustic in the place is quite dry and I was sitting pretty close and so I could really savour the new sonorities. Gillian was really the first musician that I got to know when I moved to Guildford and she started to teach my children. Her husband has built a full organ in their living room. He doesn�t believe in samples � all the timbres are made by analogue electric circuits.

The programme was full of people that one more or less knew doing interesting material not at all badly that you didn�t know they could do � for example David Carling who compered played a Duke Ellington piano solo from the time he ran a band when he was a National Serviceman � not precisely my interpretation of the thing but really interesting to listen to. What really struck me was the nice trade-off between mind-numbingly high standards on the one extreme and give everybody a chance to show what they can do no matter how bad it is � one is quite hard work to do as a performer � I tried it and decided that it was too much � and we�ve all sat through the other kind of event.

The fact that you could get a drink between numbers helped the informality along. Anyway it was a really good evening � a thought lots of people shared � and all the better for being utterly out of the blue. AND � to get back to Robin�s point � there was a surprising sense of community of artistic endeavour. I suppose my next step is to sift through the list for possible Lullabye contributors.

The stuff I have been doing on London and Detroit makes me very receptive to Robin�s point that artists need community. Some places it happens sometimes and in NYC it seems to happen all the time. I am trying to work out how much of the time it happened in Detroit and why.

I wrote a para for Andrew about how it suddenly seemed to happen in San Francisco in 1965 � particularly a cross over between folk � both Grateful Dead and Jefferson Aiplane have folk or jug band roots � and the John Handy band. This too came as a surprise.

Then you get to LA and there�s an enormously long list of influential innovative musicians who have sprung up there � Mingus, Dolphy and Lamont Young to start � but apart from the Lighthouse what�s the evidence of community. That�s not to say there isn�t any � you might look at Jim Morrison at film school picking up avant garde European ideas about drama and dropping them into the band rehearsing down on Venice Beach � but there�s so much other stuff which I don�t begin to understand.

Any way � back to En Bateau � it was a piece of shameless crowd pleasing � my strategy was that either it will be just dire or if we half pull it off people will �get� the atmosphere and semiotics and it will do down well. Fortunately the weather was on our side. Yamaha now feeling quite different from the Buffet.

Don�t really have time now but I want to write more about Jacob�s aesthetic as he explains it very clearly in today�s piece and the way Mark does stuff. I am quite up the Mark end of the spectrum just now � when I am not obsessing about semi-metatonal Coltrane changes.

Rough with the smooth � I got a summons for speeding on the M40 the day I flew back from Detroit � I thought I�d escaped � hey ho.

Paul W said he heard Gilbert�s band in Ghent and they were really good.