Thursday 6 November 2008

Listening to this while having a skype conversation with Catherine Motuz this morning got my brain moving a bit. The music is carefully worked out, but it still sounds fresh: you get the sense that they're looking forward to hearing how each note comes out. It's also the difference between knowing how something's going to happen (good) and knowing what is going to happen (dull). Having a well defined musical process is vital - it stops you getting nervous for one thing - but deciding in every detail what it's going to sound like is not usually helpful. 

Healthy doses of improvisation in early music might also help to convince the jazz cats that there are vocabularies to improvise in other than the 1950s one ... and that going to Berklee to learn how to play in D flat might not be strictly necessary for musical freedom. Personally I've lost pretty much all interest in playing in keys that don't sound good in a nice unequal temperament: these days I like major chords to have credible thirds in them where possible.

I watched Top Gear the other night, partly to see how offensive Jeremy Clarkson was, and partly to enjoy watching him injure himself, and was struck by what an entertaining and generally well-crafted programme it is, and how engaging the presenters are. Unfortunately, everything the programme stands for stinks: bullying, casual misogyny, cheap stereotypes and pointless destruction - quite apart from the worship of fast cars. You don't have to smash things up to have a good time. Then I came in the following day and saw Susie watching Blue Peter, where they were blowing up a garden shed to demonstrate the Gunpowder Plot. Now that the IMF is telling the entire country that it's about to be completely skint, the attraction of smashing things to bits for fun might wear off.