walking with miles

ok, so i got hold of porgy & bess, the miles davis/gil evans one, which, now i remember it was one of the 1st cd's that dad got with his new cd player when he retired & i was either a late teenager or very early 20'ser...

a beautiful album, accompanied me through many different parts of my life...

i remember how neatly prayer (oh doctor jesus) & fishermen, strawberry & devil crab used to fit exactly into the cycle ride from my house to my work when i was working in that vast windowless room for directory enquiries in leamington spa...

also how the entire album fitted into the journey time from here to a past lovers house...

the way gil evans makes the musicians rise & fall so gracefully and seemingly without structure while miles floats over or plays his part within...

so anyway, i carefully didn't listen to any of it until it was all on my shuffle and then me & dinah went over manolis's where we were in a perfectly stupid laughing mood... i left her @ the busstop heading to college and put on my headphones and set off walking down tufnell park road...

strange mix of familiar emotional reactions to the music and contemporary sights & sounds...

i walked in a wide arc from there (walking away from ours) back round to our road and our house...

found this beautiful rainbow of leaves, similar to the leaves that turn so wonderfully red in our garden for a couple of weeks each year... but so many different hues in one place...

found myself taking loads of pictures and a few videos - all on my phone - greyish autumn day throwing up strangely satisfying dark glimpses of landscape and buildings...

then these wild flowers that i carried for awhile in my buttonhole, destined for a jar on dinah's desk...

all to that album, to miles & gil...

i was concerned that when i got to the main roads i'd have to cross to get home the cars would interfere with my listening pleasure, but crossing both holloway & hornsey roads was remarkably easy and natural, you know when you don't even have to stop walking, just drifting over in a gap when the traffic is stationery, or the traffic in both directions thinning out miraculously to let you cross...

and so i was about to cross over into our road when the album came to it's huge end and i'm very happy that it's back in my life...

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emotional

just listening to a CD i've made for an old friend who i don't see so often any more...

bo is the name i call her, and when i was going through the recordings of past gigs me & josiah had done i found a tune that we'd dedicated to bo, being as her mum had just died...

so i'm seeing bo tonight @ volupte, me & dinah are going out to celebrate dr K's birthday and many of that old circle of friends will be there and it seemed daft to just give her this cd with only one track on it, so i rummaged around and found a beautiful selection of tunes to give her and that's what i'm listening to now & it's bringing me quite close to tears...

last track now, allen ginsberg reading howl...

not so easy blogging while listening to his strange monotone voice...

but i wish to describe a couple of things from this last week... i intended to blog it yesterday but the rhodes got fixed and all else left my brain...

so firstly porgy & bess that godma G had free tickets for and which we went to after attending part of producerG's music forum on thursday night, (at which i sang my naked flame tune which godma G told me later had been tender as an autumn sky)...

i know porgy and bess from the miles davis/gil evans album, that great musical partnership which only gave us 3 albums (give or take a few reissues)...

it was a great production and i was pleased to hear what i thought were direct borrowings of gil evans arrangements in some of the tunes, great story, great performers, although a couple of the voices weren't quite up to the amazing gershwin songs in my opinion...

it's made me really want to find the miles davis version, which i have on minidisk and maybe even on cd but i'm trying to find on mp3 through soulseek so i can hear it on my shuffle (strange the way today's technology pushes me in strange directions - my computer so full i'm reluctant to import direct from the CD even though it would be exactly the same amount of memory that downloading it would be... hmmm... where is that cd?)

and then yesterday going to volupte to pay for my & dinah's tickets for tonight, placing me in the right part of town to visit the lebanese bakery that i used to eat at when i worked round there (farringdon) seeing F who runs it and who's opening line to me was how many years has it been? ... 8... 9?...

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home at last

sore hands playing beautiful chords...

the same hands i just used to screw back in those 10 screws in the side of my suitcase rhodes piano...

playing with that beautiful rich sound... the vibrato light blinking at me even now...

you can't believe how happy this makes me...

...

early on in mine & mars attempt to fix this beast he brought back a fuse for the plug from his house... just to check, because it would be mad to find out it was the plug after taking it apart...

anyway, even with the working fuse the rhodes remained steadfastly silent...

so i was reading this thread over on the rhodes site and it suggested i amplify my rhodes just like a guitar, leave it powerless and take an output from inside the upper half (the harp)...

so as an interim thing i thought well that would be nice... to be able to hear it amplified at least until we can fix it... so i pull over my mixing desk, feel around on the floor for a power lead and pick up the rhodes kettle lead... plug it in to my mixing desk and nothing happens...

because the rhodes kettle lead has something chunky and odd at the rhodes end of it... so while we checked the plug end we didn't check the rhodes end...

so i suddenly got very excited, plugged a different kettle lead into the poweramp bit of the rhodes that has been separated from the main beast... immediate red light and activity...

i lean the amp bit against the rhodes, plug in the speakers, go slightly mental trying to find the connector lead and eventually set it all up, switch it on again and my fantastic little rhodes piano is purring away being as sexy as it ever was...

albeit with potentially cat frying amounts of electricity open to the world so i write a quick post on the rhodes site to spread the word, settle down to screwing it all up again and that leads us back to where we began...

sore hands playing beautiful chords...

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post gin post

having a slow post gin day...

as opposed to a post sloe gin day which would perhaps be worse...

i've achieved almost nothing so far... cooked myself some breakfast, downloaded the new firefox 2 which has a built in spellchecker so my blogs will be getting better spelled...

been finding out about the rhodes piano online, found a fantastic recording by herbie hancock from the 70's extolling the virtues of the rhodes... my desire to have my rhodes back and working is tangible and it hurts slightly...

met with producerG on tuesday and we played through most of our tunes, making a first stab at a brand new one...

oh and i left nippy's band on monday, due to the tensions between me & edge...

last night W(floopy)shaman & dinah came back from a watts rehearsal and we drank said bombay sapphire gin which was floopy's thankyou for the recording... playing chess and also therapy - a board game...

and i'm going out in about 20 minutes to producerG's music forum @ londonbridge work, i'm going to sing a song and accompany one of the students... then me & godmaG are going to see porgy & bess @ the savoy - free tickets she's got hold of...

so i'd better just do this one thing for hammersmith work before i go, after all, it's there that i would be right now if it wasn't half term...

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chess improvisation

ok, so this is how many games i'm currently playing over on gameknot... notice the amount of them labelled 26th gameknot tournament, which i'm through to the 4th round of and i'm scared... we're down to 10 groups and the ratings of everyone else in my group range from 200 more than me to 350 more than me... not that that means i won't win, just a little scary that's all...

recorded the piece of piano music for W(floopy)shaman which i should have learnt at least yesterday but in fact learnt this morning, so it took quite a few takes to get enough usable material...

recorded the 18th weekly improvisation straight after... beautiful piano...

it looks like i'll be doing a gig on that piano around the weekend of the 2nd december... still need to finalise the date with my musicians but pencil it in if you fancy it... should be great... even though i say so myself...

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greek DVD

about to pack up various bits and pieces and go over to the landlord's piano to record a piece for W(floopy)shaman... recording this week's improvisation while we're there...

but more importantly manolis has recently had a DVD player put into his shop, me & dinah were there when it arrived last week some time, i was over there just now and he had an amazing DVD of greek singers doing greek classics on... which i really, really want to get hold of, absolutely packed full of amazing videos, men singing while strumming that guitar shaped greek instrument and sat opposite a grumpy looking man who has nothing to do with the music...

a woman in a stripy jumper dancing madly in front of about 20 men all strumming a mandolin style instrument...

a group of musicians on stage, one of whom is singing, accompanied by a woman with nothing to do who looks nervous and slightly annoyed...

i'm going to try and borrow it from manolis and rip some choice scenes destined for youtube...

unless of course some bright spark has already put it on youtube?

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journeys within

mars came round to orbit the fender rhodes again tonight, lovely man... that last recalcitrant screw just had to have his drill shaken at it to loosen...

and then we had that whole bit off and in our hands, spent a good hour or so puzzling over it, back and forth between the thing and the circuit diagram that rhodes helpfully supplied, and that i amazingly have, even though i never paid for it and it came to me through being left in a store room... previous owner was very sensible when he gave it to blewbury village hall, keeping all the papers within the lid...

this process that me & mars are going through would be so much harder without the circuit diagram...

so we move ever forward in our quest to fix the beast... he's taken the circuit diagram home with him and he's going to phone a friend...

it's been a really nice process, partly just marvelling at the way it's been put together, loved, can't work out whether it all dates from 1979, which would be the most obvious answer, or whether just the keyboard half of it is from then and the amp from later...

(the number stamped on it means it was made in the 29th week of 1979)

mars said '79 seemed early to have a solid state amplifier (no valves)...

so it's lovely seeing inside my beautiful beast, spending time with mars, as he said when he left, the journey as opposed to the arriving... even though i so want that arrival i'm digging this journey...

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broken fender rhodes improvisation

with voice, 17th weekly improvisation...

an experiment really, seeing if could record the unamplified rhodes, just with my audio technica mic right by the tines, using only an octave or so...

not wholly successful but a magical call to the universe to allow my fender rhodes to be fixed...



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imminent deflea

hanging out in the basement waiting for balthazara to show up so i can put this defleaing stuff on the back of her neck, which she'll hate, then avoid me for about 5 hours or so, then gradually forgive me...

completely ran out of money today, as planned, payday tomorrow... mars couldn't come round in the end tonight as planned to visit the fender rhodes and i didn't find out until late, but i realise that having no money at all isn't that conducive to going out, which is what i was planning to do if i'd have known earlier that mars would not be orbiting the rhodes tonight...

so kat i'm sorry to have missed you again, friday looking good though, as is monday...

ok, messaging through blogging,

which reminds me, i have no idea who left the arty arranging of my words in the comments last week...? please identify yourself arty one...

comments...

i get roughly one comment every now and again, so comments (plural) is not the best name for it... but it feels wrong to say - in the comment -

our set top box is not currently functioning so i'm currently downloading this week's episode of the soprano's, 95.9% & counting...

day off tomorrow, i hope to get some work done on those words...

but you know as well as i do that this post could go on forever... playing for time while that beautiful creature lolls around somewhere...

come on baby...

oh, and look at that, my beautiful girlfriend on the door ust as i typed that...

ok... i'll be chilling out with her... instead of inanely typing nonsense here...

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day off (look at this kitten)

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beat

in the american sense of being tired... rather than the ...poets or indeed the... (ska version of tears of a clown - oh yes please) nothing to do with a policeman's walk, or indeed the musical/rhythmic term...

no, just tired...

me & dinah watched the brother's grimm last night way too late... we are earlier birds than we used to be (a bit) now that she gets up weekday mornigs to go to college,

she didn't fall asleep about two thirds into the film, with me not waking her up to point out good bits to her...

i liked the film, terry gilliam after all, kind of silly but a good story...

anyway, the film finished, dinah was not sleeping away beside me and foronce, instead of gently not waking her up as i normally do i was more than a little sleepy myself and i let myself drift off into a nap...

now the film's finished there's no shame attached to falling asleep in that room, so i'll stop putting the italic negative's in front of dinah's sleeping state...

so every now and again i'd wake up, look around me, hold her a bit closer, drop off again, one time i got it together enough to take the DVD out of the machine... another time she woke up...

anyway, at 5:15am i woke up enough to wake her up and get us out of the TV room, into our respective abluting regimes and eventually to bed... and could i sleep?

could i chuff...

finally dropped off around 8ish, had a further 2/3 hours before getting up and escorting dinah to the amazon, she bought my breakfast for me, then home to get the keyboard before heading down to the south london pacific for another of T's rehersals, whole band this time...

rehearsed for 4/5 hours, chatted with the rhythm section & T for a little while and eventually strapped my keyboard to my back again for the return journey, and here i am now...

shagged...

really enjoying T's band, O & B on bass & drums great to play with, T himself a fiery ball of energy, M the guitarist a little green and not so disciplined but good, irritating in places, but we'll get there... the south london pacific bar never ceases to amaze me...

found a beautiful piano in a mad back room there... would love to go and play it a fair bit, especially as the landlord's piano is leaving my life relatively soon, which reminds me i must organise a goodbye gig for that piano... sometime in december i guess, you are all cordially invited, i'll let you know...

ok, exhausted ramblings, about time i wrapped up... loving these mp3's while i'm writing this...

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many pens

dropped off dinah @ her class... picked up a london paper for the sudoku... went to the bike shop to get waterproof trowsers and decided to get a new back outer tire...

it's been skidding a bit in the rain my back wheel, scary...

so i asked if they could put it on for me and they said leave it and we'll do it in the morning, so i strolled back home, throwing out most of the paper, just leaving the sudoku section, wandering along on this beautiful early evening without a pen, scrutinising the difficult sudoku, but numbers kept coming to me... difficult? i ask myself...

anyway i strored up number in my head and stopped random people in the street asking for pens, writing down the numbers i'd got in my head then moving on... 2 different pens before i got home, from asking about 10 people...

just completed it... not so difficult but pleasing none-the-less...

and then my fender rhodes...

mars came round again last night to fix it, he who had cancelled & rearranged several times and then made it round on tuesday without his circuit tester... came back last night, and we couldn't get all the screws off...

i found the bits from rhodes, the circuit diagrams, got hold of a screw driver and between us we got 7 of the 10 screws off... after he left i applied some WD40 and managed to get 2 of the remaining ones off but one remains...

stubborn as you like...

so it's proving to be a long project, the fixing of this beautiful beast... slightly concerned for mars who is a busy man, that it's taking several visits, and probably at least 2 more on top... maybe i'll make his myspace for him... last time he fixed the rhodes it was a one visit deal and i did a lovely recording session for him with the rhodes...

but we are planning a couple of social things, chess playing is one and pretending to need saving in that big church on seven sisters road is the other, just so we can see the interior...

hmmm... maybe i'll have a go at the recalcitrant screw right now...

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longcat organ & voice improvisation

but enough wingeing... i recorded this last night... week 16

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hard work

these 2 classes @ hammersmith really do me in... less so last week, somehow because i was hungover things fell into place easier... and this gave me a false sense of things working... today really did my head in, found myself getting annoyed at points in both classes and it's been awhile since that's been going on...

getting angry, but not expressing that anger in a good way,

oh well... over now, my boss is observing the 2nd class next week so it won't be as chaotic...

sorry, just a small moan...

good to express it

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another stab at the words

(for the film)

you can't see me...

you can't see me because i'm not there...

you can't see me because the angle is too narrow...

you can't see me because it's the wrong time of day...

walking, stumbling, carrying my bicycle over the rockier bits,

immensely impractical as it is, having a bicycle down there...

all about poetry, and nothing to do with practicality,

except that it was practical tonight, having cycled north from G's place in gypsy hill, wanting the darkness and the desolate nature of the beach, wanting to listen to a few john martyn songs while i rested from cycling at that midpoint on my journey home, walking from the tate modern to waterloo bridge where i got back on my bike and cycled home to finsbury park...

my own G in bed,

walking, stumbling, as you do on the rocks and the shifting sand,

you can't see me because my phone was dead and i didn't have my camera with me...

no visual record of that walk, only the mud & the sand on my bicycle tires and on my shoes when i got home...

my bicycle, which in a way, this film is all about, i started filming from this place because i passed it each week, cycling accross town between two different teaching jobs, it was one of two places where i put down my camera to film the same scene on different days,

this walkway covered in trees that you see before you, my main experience of this is cycling along it,

sometimes also playing chess with one of the booksellers underneath waterloo bridge,

the national film theatre on the left a useful toilet, and wrapped up for me in london, just before i moved to this city that late august day ten years ago when me & luke hedge caught the train in for the nottinghill carnival, my 1st carnival, wide eyed and foolish, luke leading us up to the national film theatre that night where by chance nick cave was providing the live soundtrack to a french surrealist film of joan of arc..

a few months later having moved here, finding myself by the river one night, sad & alone but revelling in the romance of this river, these skies, a romance that hasn't left me these ten years...

the poetry of this place... step by step, bridge by bridge...

something about improvisation, about that stumbling walk along the beach, carrying my bike at times, step by step, bridge by bridge...

millenium, blackfriar's rail, blackfriar's road, that strange bridge that doesn't exist, just pillars,

walking passed the jetty from which this is filmed, passed the side of this walkway... lowtide... the whole area only temporary,

something about walking there, in between the land and the water,

step by step,

about this being the improvisation...

improvisation not just the water... as i'd seen it before, but the graceful or clumsy steps between land and river, some solid sand some mud...

but my bed now, maybe more of this tomorrow, very glad to have found a way in to the words

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a story

i hope i have the energy to write this... i wanted to tell this story last monday but couldn't give away to dinah which shop i'd been to to buy her presents...

then i wanted to tell it on wednesday after she'd had the presents but had to wait until there was either a happy ending or not... all will become clear...

so, in parts:

prologue:

last saturday (over a week ago) i was rehearsing at the south london pacific bar with T, a couple of people floated in and out, it was my 1st rehearsal with T and it rocked...

part 1 - not recognising people straight away:

on monday (a week ago) i went to manolis's, at 1st i didn't recognise who was in there, ate my breakfast, then worked out that two of the three people in there drinking red wine i'd met there before, the inventor and the designer...

so i chatted to them for a little while, glad to have bumped into them again, but didn't stay too long because i was travelling down to radio days, a vintage shop near waterloo that producerG had told me about, to buy presents for dinah's birthday...

it absolutely chucked it down on the way and i got soaked... when i arrived in the shop one of the guys in there helpfully hung up my jumper which was very wet... i started looking around the shop trying not to drip too much...

i was buying the 2 items that i got from there (a magazine from 1948 & a silver brooch) & was listening to one of the two guys talking to another customer about music... i ask about it and he offered me a flyer... for the south london pacific bar...

i tell him i was only in there on saturday and it turns out that both men in that shop had been in the bar on the saturday... one of whom (who owns the shop with his partner) had dreamily complemented us on one of the tunes we were playing...

small aside - apple cathedral:

i left there, cycled into town to get the 3rd item for the birthday (black holes and revelations by muse) and to pop into the apple store to see about my ipod shuffle, broken...

in the apple store i see one of my new students and he takes my broken shuffle from me, woefully beyond it's warranty, and says he might be able to sort something out...

part 2 - the losing:

fast forward to wednesday, day of the birthday, my beautiful girl turning 25, she loves the presents and we go out in the evening to a pizza place in crouchend which has cocktails... she is wearing the brooch...

we have a delicious time, drinking and eating, the cocktails are great, the food lovely... we stumble out of there a few hours later and we're happily wending our way along the road when dinah notices that the brooch is gone... she had been aware earlier that it was a bit fragile...

so we went back to the restaurant but they can't find it, we go up and down the road about three times scouring the ground for it... dinah is upset... it's sad but there is more birthday frivolity ahead so i make her laugh as we get home, opening a bottle of cava... drinking more... completing the lovely birthday...

small aside conclusion - keyboard class:

i try and ring the restaurant each day but they don't seem to answer their phone, friday comes and i have a keyboard lesson with the student who works for apple...

he hands me a small package, my musical world is returned to me... happy day...

part 3 - conclusion:

so i finally got through to the restaurant tonight, just before M was coming round to have a look at my fender rhodes and they had the brooch... i cycled over there to recieve it, put it in the same box i'd originally given it to dinah in and left it on her table with a note to look inside...

the prodigal broach, now more valuable than before for having been lost and found...

there - you have my week of losing and finding... meeting people again... getting a new shuffle...

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15th weekly improvisation

talking about the post below in this one... wearing my shades, although you can't really see them...

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wet

crossing the seven sisters road coming up hornsey... whooping at the top of my lungs... probably noone hearing me except maybe that woman who was about to cross, i was catching the last of that green light...

the rain had been getting gradually worse but just before this it had got considerably wetter in one fell swoop...

i was soaked through...

it had just stopped being a pain and started being quite marvellous... glad to be alive marvellous...

of course the sun is out now, it's been a day of changing amounts...

i'd left the house this morning and the rain was fine and wet but still small... i got out on to hornsey road going south and it opened up... right in my face... really wet... then by the time i reached shoreditch it had almost stopped...

this journey home (with the whoop) had begun with almost no rain.. ending with every single item of clothing i had on being wet...

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cutup improvisations 2

that same old trick, updated to include all of the improvisations up until now... still in 3rd of a second bits... i may swap it around a bit next time...

(dinah turned 25 yesterday, many stories, just not yet)

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improvisation violence

made a new blog to record the nights i attack dinah in my sleep, as i did last night... stranger than normal because she wasn't asleep herself & so could see my eyes open and that nasty look come over my face...

i have a tickly cough which really does my head in when i'm trying to sleep, not in the rest of the day, just at the exact time that i'm losing conciousness, or almost... it keeps me coughing and reminding me that it's there and sleep takes that much longer to come...

and i've recorded this week's improvisation, uploading as i write to googlevideo, will hopefully be there so i can put it in this post...

took the mexican out into the streets today, it'll still take me awhile getting used to it... it will also involve shaving more regularly so maybe it won't stay that long..?

but maybe it will..?

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