Saturday 5 January 2013

A Good New Year to you. This humble blog has been going in fits and starts since 2000 but I couldn’t let the new year go past without noting that a far more comprehensive blogger since 1998 has just decided to call it a day (or stop calling it one). James Kochalka has been drawing his daily strip American Elf with only one interruption of service, and has been refreshingly honest as ever with his mixed feelings about packing it in. It takes more guts to stop an artistic enterprise than it does to start one, as you have other people’s expectations to deal with, so much as I will miss the strip, I applaud his decision-making.

The holiday season was quite busy here: we fitted in another ballad trio rehearsal between Christmas and New Year, and in the last few days I’ve finally made some headway with musical sketches for the next (and final) series of Skins. One side of this room is now a makeshift studio for the first time in a couple of years.

Amble, Alasdair and two pianos (not in this room)

On a short trip to Lismore this week (thanks to Susan, Hop and Miranda for letting us gatecrash their holiday) I had time to visit some favourite places and get quite excited about the new edition of Robert Burns by Robert Irvine. I was choosing some songs to perform with Thomas Walker on Radio 3’s Music Matters (recording on Tuesday) but I got caught up in the excellent introduction to the volume which ignores Burns’s legacy and puts his work simply in the context of his own literary, political and social world: it’s a great piece of writing.

looking south west down the island

Two tenors and a soprano had a fascinating conversation and listened to some interesting records on The Early Music Show today. Having worked with two of them, and finally about to work with the third, it was great to eavesdrop on them all at once.

And I’ve only just caught up with the latest album from Maria Kalaniemi & Timo Alakotila – I tried to buy it from Amazon and they sent me something else, so get it direct from Maria here … two musicians of astounding calibre overcome the unforgiving mechanics of piano and accordion to do something really exceptional, as usual. Timo’s brass arrangements are pretty amazing too.