Next in this series of posts of my 2017 cultural highlights is music. This was the year in which sanity eventually overcame parsimony – I gave up on the mind-numbing adverts obligatory with a free Spotify account, and started paying for the service. It has been a marvellous year of discovery. What Spotify does, atRead More
The first jazz record I ever bought was a triple-LP avant garde jazz opera. I was seventeen years old, and pretentious, but there were good things to be found among the shelves of second-hand discs handed in by impecunious hippies to Rock Bottom, Whitstable’s peerless record shop, in the late 1970s. It was in thatRead More
Some shows you just don’t expect to see. The Art Ensemble of Chicago is a group so bound up in legend and an aura of uniqueness, that having them turn up in Hackney in 2017 feels almost absurd. I’ve listened to them, and read about them, for years, but had no inkling of their stillRead More
I’d listen to a lot of jazz and bebop records, too. Records by George Russell or Johnny Cole, Red Garland, Don Byas, Roland Kirk, Gil Evans – Evans had recorded a rendition of “Ella Speed,” the Leadbelly song. I tried to discern melodies and structures. There were a lot of similarities between some kinds ofRead More
I’ve only collected three autographs in my lifetime (getting friends to sign copies of their books for me doesn’t count). The first was when I was aged 10 or so. It was Bertie Mee, the manager of Arsenal football club. I forget the circumstances, and I lost the autograph long ago. The second was theRead More
Death makes strange bedfellows. The obituaries columns are marking the deaths of Ian Carmichael and Johnny Dankworth, rightly praising each for their contributions to art and culture. Yet though there is no obvious connection between the two, they do share a paradoxical relationship to British film – what you might call invisible significance. Ian CarmichaelRead More