Amidst all the logistical strain this week is imposing, two jazz coincidences cropped up yesterday. My colleague , Stefan, told me about hearing some music in the record shop � driving polyrhythms, expansive piano chords, compelling woodwind. He went and asked and they told him it was Paul Weller. Show me the box, he said. It was music that PW had chosen to go on his influences CD. The music was Ole by Coltrane J. When I was 14 an older friend hearing of my interest in jazz loaned me that along with Kind of Blue. I asked Stefan if he already had KoB. I think I ll lend S the Brian Priestley short introduction to JC.

Earlier in the day I was at Warwick University listening to speeches and I bumped into someone who I had met at a couple of similar events. During the conversation it emerged that she used to be a music teacher before getting into Skills Strategy Business and still sang jazz. I asked what numbers she did and she mentioned Joyspring. This is a Clifford Brown tune from the early 50s. Its first 3 8 bar sections migrate upwards in semi-tone steps and the bridge is a bit like Ornithology. It�s a tune which I use in foreign cities when trying flutes. I could have said that I�d played it on 42nd Street but I thought that was a bit over the top.

I have been thinking how tight the linkages are on the grand theory of composition � between Vienna, Paris, LA and New York. Schoenberg moves to LA and teaches Cage and Stein, Stein teaches Young. Cage and Young are both theoreticians and take their stuff to NYC. Their theory interacts with the grand theory of modern painting which Greenberg has perfected to take the modern art lead to NYC from Paris.

The Paris-NYC link has already been put in place by the movement of Duchamp and Varese before the 2nd World War.

Cage links up with Varese and Duchamp and introduces Varese to the modern artists. He also goes down to the Black Mountain College which is a direct transfer from the Bauhaus and it all starts to cook.

The NYC art vector leads to conceptualism and minimalism and it is at that point the traditions merge. �In C� is clearly a Cage-based compositional experiment. He might easily have dreamed it up but it happens to have been Riley.

Minimalism in art is a bid for fundamentals � in the way that Greenberg had been explaining the Absex in terms of fundamental formal engagement between the medium of paint and the picture plane. This sets a style of thinking and Cage keeps experimenting with the four fundamentals of music � pitch, duration, timbre, verticality. These experiments at one point take him close to the complexity of Boulez, Stockhausen etc.

Eventually logic of a retreat to fundamentals/core Gestalts takes over in composition � arguably it had been there throughout in Feldman. Classic Minimalism and experimental post-Minimalism in the 70s at the Kitchen and in late Cage see further exploration. It would be a bridge too far to suggest what this vector mutated to in the 90s. (If you don�t like cool don�t go near the Kitchen? )

The logistical grit is still clogging up my stuff � it must be a phase.