Ashgate have just published their new volume of essays on Jazz, edited by Dr. Tony Whyton. The volume includes a reprinted version of my essay “Style and the Improvised in Keith Jarrett’s Solo Concerts”. Details here

Sometimes listening to music seems like a luxury to me - and I mean really listening, listening ‘properly’. I suppose I’m lucky enough at the moment to be doing something where I have to listen to a lot of music, and great music at that. So just recently, this is what I’ve been indulging in (or at least, indulging is what it feels like):

Kurt Rosenwinkel. I find it quite staggering this gentleman doesn’t seem to be better known in this country. Not only is he a wonderful player, but the music he and his groups produce has a sense of energy, and control.

Yaron Hermann: again, why isn’t this guy better known? There’s definitely a Jarrett-esque slant to what he does, but also what I think is a completely distinctive voice.

Django Bates: haven’t got the album of Parker stuff yet, but heard the radio 3 broadcast from the Vortex, and it’s just intimidatingly good. He can play these inside/outside lines with complete rhythmic freedom, bring it all back whenever he wants to. It’s an incredibly virtuousic treatment of standard forms....

John McLaughlin: never been a huge McLaughlin fan actually, but listening to a lot of the Heart of Things band with Matt Garrison, Gary Thomas, Dennis Chambers, Otmaro Ruiz.

So, here we are once again, running an upgrade to the latest and greatest Ubuntu. However, previously the beta has shown the same old Pulseaudio problems which seem to plague a lot of Ubuntu people like me. For me, it means that it just can’t talk to my M-Audio soundcard. And so that means hacking around to use esound again, but then I lose the nice new Ubuntu sound menu. Oh dear.

Tomorrow night at Hulljazz, the Jazz Aesthetic present ‘Directions in Groove’. The Jazz Aesthetic is a group I direct made up of students studying Jazz and Popular Music at the University. And I have a great time doing it, which is why I’m looking forward to this gig so much.

The trio tracks are available again in the Soundcloud Player on the right hand side. Musicians are me on piano, Paul Tilley on drums, and Geoff Chalmers on bass, all compositions are my own.

As we speak, I’m running the upgrade to Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 on my Linux box. I’m jumping early onto the beta instead of waiting for the stable release. So far it’s been a little problematic in install terms, but it looks like it’s getting there. Of course, there’s no sound playback on boot up, but I’m well used to that already.

So, this is the first entry on this new page. Content is still under construction, so it may take a while.