Saturday 22 October 2005

OK, I haven't written anything here for ages, but it doesn't mean that nothing's been happening. It's just been a bit dull on the whole and without obvious declarable outcomes. I've been negotiating moving  concert dates, working out where we can rehearse, fixing, dealing with tax, contracts, notation and budgets: all essential to running a group, but not the kind of thing to leave you with the satisfaction of a job well done or an adrenaline high safely negotiated. All around my desk are piles of paper waiting to be dealt with.

This week I will be borrowing a portable SADiE on which to finally complete the editing of the Lion CD. About time too. Unless it's sitting in the corner of my study staring at me, I suspect I'll keep finding other less creative things to do instead.

I was a practising audient at couple of lunchtime concerts here in Glasgow this week: once for Barry Guy and Maya Homburger, who were great fun in a yin-and-yang kind of a way, and then for Artur Pizarro and Vita Panomariovaite - Artur greeted me with 'I haven't been in your diary for ages'. [He has now!] They were playing Mozart 4 hands repertoire, and I'd forgotten how much fun it is to watch people playing piano duets well. It also gave me a chance to suss out some music for a gig that Gary Cooper and I seem to have in summer 2007 playing fortepiano duets. When I was in London a couple of weeks ago, we nearly managed to meet to talk about it but not quite. 

I also picked up a bass guitar yesterday for the first time in years in an impromptu jam session at the RSAMD: 15 years ago I had a beautiful black 1979 Fender Precision with maple neck (the classic punk bass!) on which the notes, apart from tenor E flat, would sustain for ever, and I stupidly sold it to buy a dodgy Hohner fretless thing that wasn't so heavy to carry or wear. Duh.

Made it to the opening of an exhibition in town today - go along and see some of Joe Davie's latest work. Even better, take a fully-loaded chequebook, Joe and Sandra now have four kids to support! Joe is of course responsible for the cover art on all our Linn CDs.  On a similar note, I got an email out of the blue yesterday responding to a diary entry here from a year ago about the painting Unidentified Aircraft by Edward Baird - the painting's owner lives just up the road ...

And I also got a copy today of Chris Ware's newly published compendium of the frankly astonishing Acme Novelty Library. A thing of great joy.