Music

I started to listen to Margrave of the Marshes—the autobiography of John Peel—on Radio 4’s Book of the Week, but turned it off after five minutes.

It wasn’t that the book was bad, or uninteresting; it wasn’t that Michael Angelis read it badly. It was, quite simply, that the voice was wrong. The words had the structure, the pace, the timing of the legendary DJ. The delivery did not. There was a disconnect between the words and the voice, a jarring inconsistency that grated on my ears and on my heart.

John Peel was different from, and better than, the legions of radio presenters in popular music broadcasting. He was different because not only did he come across as a real, genuine person, but because he really seemed to care. He was passionate about his music, diffident about himself, and always full of humanity and warmth.

I sometimes wonder why the BBC executives who pushed his Radio 1 show later and later into the night—trying to shove it under the carpet while being unable to get rid of it altogether—didn’t like him. Partly, I think, it was his unwillingness to be turned into a spokesman for the industry machine, churning out marketable rubbish by pretty young things.

That’s not to say that he never promoted any bad bands—he was legendary for it—but there was never an agenda beyond his own love of music, of new and interesting sounds. They may also, quite simply, have been jealous: jealous of a man who accrued fame and public adoration (though he never seemed to realise it) merely through being himself, through being a good and honest man.

Listening to that broadcast, I was caught in the space between my memories and the sad, stark reality. John Peel’s autobiography was being read out on radio, and he wasn’t reading it. At that moment, it finally sank in: he wasn’t coming back. At that moment, more than anything, I wanted to hear his voice again.

When Apple first announced their partnership with Motorola on an iTunes-equipped phone, a spirit of hope was abroad in some quarters. Apple was obviously leveraging Motorola’s handset technology and connections in the phone industry to create a co-branded phone: the “iPod phone”, as it was then almost universally known, would do for mobile phones what the iPod did for portable music players, injecting some much-needed design sense into a market packed with horrible interfaces and obese feature sets.

It was not to be. The Motorola ROKR turned out to be just another phone, albeit a phone with iTunes on. Sure, it’s another step on the road to what Khaled refers to as “the Digital Swiss Army Knife”, but it’s no more than that—a step. The ROKR raises more questions than it answers.

Why did Apple go down this route, of simply adding iTunes functionality to a phone that is otherwise entirely Motorola’s? Was it never part of the plan to make their own phone? Steve Jobs told the Guardian that Apple were “dipping our toes in the water”, which makes it sound like the ROKR was an experiment, but what were they testing?

The usual argument about the iPhone, as I suppose we’ll have to call it, goes something like this: the iPod dominates the portable music player market because of its manifestly superior interface and brilliant design. Apple are perfectly placed to do the same thing in the mobile phone market, or even go further and create an all-in-one device that does pretty much everything the plethora of portable electronic devices we cart around currently do.

I question the credibility of this claim, not because I doubt Apple’s ability, but because the current mobile scene is a very different place than the portable music landscape at the time when the iPod was first created.

The road to iPod domination

The iPod revolution took advantage of a profound shift in the portable music player market. Since the Walkman, portable music players—whether the medium was cassette, CD or MiniDisc—were designed around playing ten or twelve songs, accessed in series, and the interfaces reflected this. Play, pause, fast-forward, rewind—all were much of a muchness.

With the advent of hard drive-based music players, the market was changed utterly. Now one could have hundreds, even thousands of songs on a single device, with no need to change tapes. Moreover, access was no longer serial; one could skip around the contents of one’s music collection with far more agility than older devices allowed. Lastly, the broad acceptance of the mp3 standard and the proliferation of personal computers gave this new platform a huge potential userbase.

Apple’s attack on the market came on two fronts: the interface, and the beautiful design. The intuitive nature of the wheel, and especially the later click-wheel iterations, has been much praised elsewhere, and for good reason; it’s simply the best out there, a mile ahead of any competing device. Industrial design has always been a strong point of Apple’s, and the iPod is the perfect example of why design isn’t an optional extra, it’s a necessity. The iPod is iconic, in striking white and chrome, well-proportioned with subtle curves and textures.

Talk of two fronts is, in a sense, misleading; what really sets the iPod apart is the unity of form and function. You can play a few games on it, or add contacts or notes; even view photos. But what the iPod really does is play music: it’s a single-function device, and it performs that function superbly.

Phones are different

Speaking blithely of digital Swiss Army Knives is all very well; to make one is quite a different matter. Modern mobile phones perform a large number of tasks, not always well: sending and receiving phone calls and text messages; taking photos; browsing the internet; email. So, let’s say for argument’s sake that Apple was going to make a mobile phone that did all those things, and also played music. What would the problems be?

To begin with, there is a preexisting design paradigm: the 12-button interface. Originally designed to make phone calls easier, given our base-10 numerals, this design has proved remarkably robust, if not a little because of its familiarity. So, what to do? As far as I can see Apple have two choices: augment or modify the 12-button interface, or replace it altogether.

Modification is the most obvious choice, and as we can see from this leaked picture of a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, it’s what companies trying to pack all these functions into one package are currently going for.

Despite this, the latter option isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. When you call someone, do you use the number pad usually? No; you have their number saved, and simply select it from a list. I certainly wouldn’t mind using a click-wheel as a way of scrolling through people’s names. (I don’t mean that Apple could simply port the iPod interface to a phone; I’m simply demonstrating that there are alternatives to the current standard interface.) However, there are fundamental problems with the replacement approach.

Firstly, a phone is going to be rather crippled if you can’t add numbers, manually, without plugging it into a computer. Moreover, one needs this method to be quick and efficient; what if you’re in a club and want to take down someone’s phone number? Scrolling through digits and clicking on the right ones (a potential way to add a number using a click-wheel) just won’t do.

One alternative would be to use local, device-to-device connectivity like Bluetooth to add phone numbers. Just met someone? Search for phones within range, and issue an invitation from your phone to the one that belongs to the person you’re talking to. They then accept the invitation, and voila, contact details are exchanged.

The problem is backwards compatibility, and adding numbers on the fly for phones which are not physically proximate (for example, land lines). It looks like we still need those twelve buttons.

Speculation

Having outlined some of the problems Apple would face if they decided to get into the mobile handset game, here are a few speculations of mine. To begin with, Apple may not even want to get into the mobile phone game. An iTunes-equipped phone may be, to them, simply a way to safeguard their revenue stream and keep their options open. The revenue stream argument isn’t one I find particularly convincing, since the iTunes Music Store is basically a way for Apple to sell iPods, but who knows.

One way that Apple could streamline the phone interface is by having a nice big touchpad screen, as well as some more traditional button controls. They could then employ a ‘virtual’ 12-button interface that only appeared when you had to type in a phone number. The rest of the time, you get a nice big colour screen to… view photos on? Watch videos? The list goes on, but the question of whether the technology is there yet remains. Probably not, I’d judge, or at least not at a low enough price; if it were, I imagine someone would have done it by now.

In conclusion, then, the current mobile phone market is a very different place to the burgeoning portable HDD/mp3 player market Apple stormed onto with the iPod. There are plenty of problems and challenges to be overcome by someone, and a lot of money to be made. Whether that someone turns out to be Apple, we’ll have to wait and see.

The new Vortex Jazz Club is small, if not quite intimate—with the stage across one end of a longish room, I felt a bit distant from the Carol Grimes Trio, who we saw there last Saturday. Admittedly, due to arriving just before nine, we were stuck by the bar, at the back of the room, but a good venue should be able to fill right up and still give everyone a good experience.

That said, the atmosphere was good: the clean lines and high ceilings gave it a distinctly modern feel, quite different from the dim, smoky den of Ronnie Scott’s. Floating above a backstreet Hackney car park, next to a small arcade of low-rent business units, the Vortex glows blue and white, its full-height windows revealing the audience inside, like an oversized fish tank. The empty ground floor and long staircase, lined with portraits, make both entrance and exit an event.

North London’s quite a trek, but the prices were reasonable—£10 on the door—and it was nice to scout a new venue; I’ll be keeping an eye on their listings. Carol herself was certainly a good singer, and I admired the band’s versatility, but in the end their sets were too eclectic for their own good. At her best, singing blues and jazz numbers, her voice was engaging, even occasionally mesmerising. However, despite including an enthusiastic drummer and a pianist who could really rattle off the notes, the group’s penchent for melodrama (Australian birth poetry! Palestinian protest poems set to music of their own composition!) dampened my enthusiasm. Miles Davis’ ‘All Blues’ really didn’t need a vocal over the top, while caterwauling and spineless, floaty folk music distracted from what was, really, a good little jazz outfit. That said, the lively opening cover of Tom Waits’ ‘New Coat of Paint’ deserved its applause—it really got the set going, and gave a good impression that took a while to really dent.

I should probably mention that the expedition to the wilds of Hackney was actually in aid of my 23^rd birthday. My thanks goes out to those who helped organise the event, came along, bought me drinks, gave me cards, or just wished me well on the day. I’ll see if I can’t get a few pictures of cards and things up on Flickr. You can see photos of our little trip to the pub on my birthday proper here, and some shots of the trip to the Vortex can be found from this photo onwards. This one’s a personal favourite…

Today, the Scientific American republished ‘Drowning New Orleans’, an article that in 2001 outlined the danger posed to New Orleans by hurricanes and high water, and some of the possible solutions. They were never implemented, in part because of chronic underfunding, and in part because so much money was diverted to pay for the Iraq war. Will Punch at Editor & Publisher reports that the that the Times-Picayune had repeatedly raised funding issues, obviously to no avail.

[A]fter 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The [Army] Corps [of Engineers] never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security — coming at the same time as federal tax cuts — was the reason for the strain.

The politics don’t end there; the administration that blew the Gulf Coast’s taxes on the war and a tax cut to benefit the rich also denys that global warming is happening. We can’t say that global warming caused the hurricane—as RealClimate put it, “such attribution is fundamentally impossible”. What we can say is that as the global temperature increases, so does the deadliness of storms. I recommend going and reading the article in full. Billmon covers the political aspects in detail, and Crooked Timber have ongoing coverage, donation links and the like; they linked to this interesting piece by Alan Schussman.

A couple of years ago, I started planning and writing a series of science fiction stories set in the Delta. The world they described was that of a series of islands, taking their living from the sea that had swallowed the land. Dirigibles cruised through stormy skies, while cities built upwards, sea walls guarding against the encroaching waves, the lower strata being abandoned as rising water claimed its toll.

I was looking back to an apocalyptic landscape described by blues musicians like Charley Patton and Memphis Minnie (who were responding to the Great Mississippi flood of 1927), but I was also looking forward, to a future where sea levels rose and cities drowned. I can’t help but think that too many responsible people have been living in denial. Global warming is our fault, but even if it weren’t, then surely measures still needed to be put in place to protect our coasts against the rising water. The future was closer than I’d thought, and we’re going to need our wellies to survive it.

This isn’t a review; it makes no attempt to answer the question “What was Glastonbury 2005 like?”, except in the most circumscribed of fashions. If you want a broad overview, with a load of coverage, try the Guardian Unlimited special report. This is just my daily ramblings, mostly taken from a diary I kept whenever I didn’t forget, with a few more details courtesy of my somewhat selective memory. This was my fourth Glastonbury, and like all the rest, full of unexpected incident. A somewhat tough year to this point meant it took me until about Sunday to unwind; I think this comes out in the writing, which is pretty taut and contained until Sunday, when it spills out into this stream of impressions. I rather like this; it’s not meant to be great writing, just a scattering of random thoughts. I like myself better when I’m not trying so hard. Anyway, on with the show. The pictures are Glyn’s, not mine (I decided to go cameraless this year).

Read the rest of this entry »

• “May the Type Be With You” Scott Stowell of Typographica ponders the typography of Star Wars. Some interesting stuff in the comments too, especially when Suzy Rice, who created the Star Wars logo, joins in the discussion.
• “Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out” Continuing the Star Wars theme of today’s links, Neal Stephenson offers his thoughts on Revenge of the Sith in the New York Times.
• Andrew Rilstone has written up an excellent series of articles on Revenge of the Sith: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
• “Together We Can Rule the Galaxy” isn’t actually about Star Wars, despite sounding as though it ought to be. It’s actually John Gruber of Daring Fireball talking about Apple’s switch from IBM to Intel.
• “On Beethoven at the BBC” Tom Coates has some quotes and links on the BBC’s free downloads of performances of all Beethoven’s symphonies. The next step should be offering them as Torrents…
• Adam Greenfield is blogging again after an extended break from posting on v-2. Good news for those of us who enjoy his literate but readable writing about his “odd and fairly heterogeneous assortment of interests”.

After several years without a portable music player (my ailing minidisc player suffered a catastrophic fall from the top of a chest of drawers), the end of January brought me an iPod Photo. As it turns out, it was probably a fortuitous time to buy one: I was able to acquire the now-defunct 40GB model, with all the accessories that the new models don’t have, including a Dock, A/V cable, and Firewire cable. Sure, it cost a bit more, but when you buy something as expensive as an iPod it’s hard to justify spending loads more money on extras. As it was, I could simply get the product I wanted, with the accessories I wanted, without getting that sinking feeling of “accessory guilt”.

The Firewire cable is, I’ve found, far quicker at transfers than the USB one, and having the Dock is fantastic. It just sits there, on my desk, waiting for me to jam in the iPod to recharge and synchronise with my iTunes library. Moreover, I can simply remove it and take it downstairs, then plug it into the stereo system when I want to listen to some music while I work (I usually get more writing done when I’m away from the computer). I’ve not had occasion to use the photo A/V cable yet, but I suppose I might; one never knows.

The one thing I did splash out on was headphones. Although I couldn’t afford the Etymotic Research ER-4S earphones ($330 is a bit out of my league), I did get some very nice Sony MDR-EX81 earphones ($70, or under £40, including shipping). The only caveats I have are these: if you have small ears, as I do, you may have some problems getting the loops to stay in place easily. They can also be a bit overwhelmed by exterior noise when on low and medium volume: the noise cancellation is noticeable, but not as effective as real in-canal earphones like the Etymotics. Of course, while on the one hand this makes it slightly harder to shut out the rest of the world, it does make it somewhat safer to cross the road. In any case, given the tinny sound of the stock white Apple ones, buying some decent earphones was a very worthwhile investment, one I’d recommend to anyone getting an iPod.

It’s certainly changed my journeying a lot: killing time is easier, especially when I can stomp around Reading station in the freezing cold listening to Blonde on Blonde very very loudly. iTunes is a great piece of software, and I’ve been slowly making sure all my mp3s have the correct metadata, adding album art and so on (having an iPod photo makes this a worthwhile experience, as Khoi Vinh notes—his suggestion of using Walmart’s music section to get album art is a sensible one, too).

Perhaps more importantly, it’s changed my music listening more than anything has since… well, since I got the minidisc player. Listening on journeys, especially, when one can simply concentrate on listening to the music, has afforded me an opportunity to return to old favourites and encouraged me to listen to new music more than I have for some time. Recent purchases include PJ Harvey’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, Thea Gilmore’s Rules For Jokers, Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm (I’m nothing if not a bandwagon jumper) and a 22-track Yardbirds best-of entitled Shapes of Things. More reports on these and other noises to come, possibly.

A quick note on an unrelated subject: if you’re a LiveJournal user, you can pick up the syndicated feed of this blog here; I’ll try to keep an eye on comments there as well as here. Still, it’s really not that hard to just register a username and start commenting away here instead! Blogging is becoming even more of a distributed activity. Hopefully I can keep up the work on the templates, and get this place somewhat more shipshape.

America is defined for me by sound and space. I read the wrong kind of fiction at the wrong kind of age; now, books are bound up with science fiction and European history and mythology. Music, though, and cinema, belong to America.

The mythic landscape is a big canvas, and modern Britain is too small and squashed. I could never have survived here, crushed between Thatcher and Eastenders—so I escaped. The world was bigger, long ago, before concrete and steel compressed time and space, squashing it all together. I took refuge in the past—and in America.

This, then, is the difference between Britain and America: we live with echoes, memories of greatness and glory and battles and great darkness and great light, but those things are past. Only America is still alive as a mythic place. This is why they’re so weird over there—and why sometimes it feels like everyone here is dead inside. We have our little victories, our little escapes; we laugh at ourselves, and in the process create great comedy. The canvas is smaller, the defeats are smaller, but we have lost the power of greatness.

America is big. No one knows what happens out there, in the wilderness, the forests and the mountains and the deserts that seem to go on forever. The individual—the gunslinger, the blues singer—has power because the people are scattered, isolated. Out there, the balance of power can be swayed by one man’s conscience.

The blues came from Africa with the slaves, and England with the religion, but only in America could it flourish. Only there, it had room to breathe. All that empty space was waiting to be filled, wanted to be filled, with something new. A whisper can fill a silent room.

A big world attracts giants, and sure enough they came: Robert Johnson, John Wayne, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan. These are the storytellers, the patterners who weave together America for me. History and myth have a strange relationship, a feedback loop spinning out ethereal static. When you lose the myth, the world seems so sad and grey. The world I grew up in has no myths anymore, and I’ve always wanted to leave.

I’ve never been there, but America speaks to me, whispers to me from the pages of books and the landscape of cinema. There is an America inside me, but that’s not enough: I want to se the real thing, bigger and more grandiose than my imagined one, yet even more deeply flawed and human. I want to go somewhere big, and America is nothing if not that.

I have a hunger for myths: stories give my life meaning, and myths are the biggest and most mystical of stories. The mythos of America defines my internal landscape, and I need to find these mythic spaces myself if I’m to truly write. Out there, in the desert, I will find something. Truth, maybe, or a muse, or just emptiness. But even emptiness is something. Maybe it’ll be enough.

This is a re-hash of an article I wrote around this time last year; some recent experiences have led me to revisit it. I’ve been reading Ashley Kahn’s excellent A Love Supreme: The Creation of John Coltrane’s Classic Album; I’d read his book on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and was aware a new book on A Love Supreme had come out, but I was waiting for it to be released in a more affordable paperback format. Then I saw the hardback in Fopp for a fiver, and pounced. The title is truly apt: few other albums have so great a claim on the term ‘classic’, and it wasn’t just made, but created, springing fully-formed into existence from its inspired author’s mind.

The album is complex, spiritual, powerful in every sense—from Bob Thiele’s cover photo of a pensive ’Trane to Rudy Van Gelder’s meticulous sound work—and it remains potent. Like so many great works, however, it can be hard going. I heard the legend before I heard the record, and the first time I listened to it, alone in a tiny student room with a tiny window, I wasn’t quite sure what it was I was meant to be hearing. Still, the reputation persisted, so I listened again. The second time, I heard a faint few sparks of something—I didn’t know what. It was enough to keep listening. By the third listen, it was getting dark outside, but a bright tree of sound was growing in my mind, pulling the universe together and tearing it apart at the same time.

I got into a conversation with a red-haired history student once; she thought that jazz wasn’t something you could just get into by yourself, you had to be brought up with it. While I’m not sure how far I agree, the idea did strike a certain chord. We used to listen to jazz on the radio on Saturday afternoons when I was young; I have fond memories of toasting crumpets and chatting in the kitchen while muted trumpets trilled from our cheap little radio with its coat-hanger aerial (my cousin snapped off the original one by stepping on it, after my brother left the radio on the floor). Now that I’m older, I investigate it and enjoy it by myself, but I wonder if I would appreciate it the way I do without that early introduction.

Jazz in general, and Coltrane’s in particular (at least A Love Supreme), is hard to get into; it requires time and effort. You have to be prepared to listen, baffled, and perhaps not even like it that much at first; to pass through the stage where you think “Ok, it’s complicated and confusing, but what’s so special about a muddle? What makes people rave about it so?” and then persevere until suddenly it hits you like a blow to the head and you see stars.

You need, in other words, to be hardcore. This is why jazz lovers are such fanatics, and such snobs.

I brought this up with a friend once; his response was that jazz, like classical music, has a completely different syntax that must be understood (at least on an implicit level) in order to appreciate it, especially if you’ve been raised “listening to ‘regular’ (pop music verse chorus, three chords etc.)” It’s like learning a new language: it’s easier when you’re young. It’s necessary to be dedicated because you have to reach the point where you’re “vaguely familiar with the language” without being put off in the interim, and this is accentuated by the denseness of the music. He then suggested that if jazz was played 24/7, was the popular mode, then the three minute pop songs would be listened to in dark smoky bars like Ronnie Scott’s.

For my part, I believe this alternative world to be pretty far removed from our own. Pop music follows a simple, accessible format, and is given vast power over us by its use of the human voice. We are hardwired to respond to it; a lot more people get Nina Simone than get ’Trane or Ornette. Of course, the fact that jazz singers tend to follow the pop format to a certain extent also increases their accessibility.

Here’s the more refined version: jazz music, while adhering to the semantics of the western musical tradition (that is, the notes), has a very different syntax to both popular music and to the classical tradition, although it draws on and has influenced both of these. Combined—in instrumental jazz at least—with a lack of vocals, this makes for complex music that, like a new language, requires a certain familiarity in order for it to be appreciated. This can only be attained by listening to lots of jazz; if it’s just there, in the background, when one is young, then obviously the familiarity will be attained by osmosis in a natural way. If, however, one decides at a later stage of life to “get into jazz”, then a certain amount of determination will be needed in order to attain the necessary level of understanding required for true appreciation. Obviously this doesn’t mean you can’t get a lot out of jazz straight away; it just means the more you listen to it, the more you comprehend and appreciate its subtleties and complexities. All of this combines to produce a music that attracts fanatics, who in turn exude snobbishness and the manners of an exclusive club—which is off-putting to potential listeners, keeping the audience small.

I don’t view this as a positive thing by any means, but it raises the question of how to increase the audience without destroying that which makes jazz, jazz. The much-reviled ‘dumbing down’ is one option, and one which (unsurprisingly) I reject. While jazz influences on rock and pop music are to be welcomed as an enrichment of those genres (and something that I could point to numerous excellent examples of), to bastardise the music itself in the name of a larger audience share is simply unacceptable. This leaves, to my mind, only one option: evangelising. Make your friends listen to jazz. Take them to see it live, lend them your records; anything that will make them hear and understand and appreciate and, ultimately, love. Unfortunately I suspect all of this, while admirable, will not have a huge success rate and the audience will remain small and elitist.

There is, however, something else you can do. Make sure your children grow up bilingual. Make them listen to jazz.