Music on Monday: Champion Jacq DuPre

It's huge, stirring, uplifted and dramatic. But get past Daniel Barenboim's hair and you'll notice that the lady scrapes a good fiddle.











Massive thanks to markvogue who posted these on YouTube.

Spotlight But No Kid.

Don van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, whose music was Howlin' Wolf heard down a lobster telephone, has left the building.

Seasonally Adjusted

Cheviot Foothills, Autumn. Oil on board, 18" x 12".

New painting of the country around the Cheviot foothills, North Northumberland. It has a companion piece (below). I like the idea of returning to a place to observe seasonal changes, so there might be a third, snowy one sometime.*

(You'll also spot that between summer and autumn it's not just light and colour that change but hills, trees, field layouts, horizons ...)

*Might not be, though. Part of me thinks that for all the work I put in on these, especially the autumn one, they're just a bit boring.** Working on a sea/sky painting now. I like these. Sea -wallop. Horizon -wallop. Sky - wallop. Clag it on and scuffle it around.

**You see, it's comments like this that make me think I'm maybe not the best person to be in charge of my own publicity...

Music on Monday: "Those That Have Ears, Hear - Those That Don't..."

From now on, for no real reason other than it's alliterative, Mondays are Music Mondays.

Post one, and on the one, is probably my favourite James Brown song. Talking Loud and Saying Nothing was recorded October 1st 1970 in Macon, Georgia and it's funky as a week-old sock. This is the extended seven minute version: I was overjoyed to discover that there's a complete, unfaded version on the Motherlode compilation that clocks in at a magisterial fourteen minutes.

The band, and this is about nothing if it's not about the band, was the legendary J.B.s:

Clayton "Chicken" Gunnells - trumpet
Darryl "Hassan" Jamison - trumpet
Robert McCollough - tenor saxophone
St. Clair Pinckney - baritone saxophone
Bobby Byrd - organ, vocal
Phelps "Catfish" Collins - guitar
William "Bootsy" Collins - bass
John "Jabo" Starks - drums
Johnny Griggs - congas

The improvised stop/start set up from about 5:00 is the industry standard definition of 'tight.'




He didn't play on Talking Loud... but Clyde Stubblefield was the Funky Drummer. Here he gives an insight into how the Brown band worked. And there's some funky drumming.



And while we're at it, Bootsy and Jabo explain the one. To Lenny Henry.

Cinema Paradiso: Ushers With Powers of Arrest.

It's all true and right and good and must be implemented immediately for a better world.

Santa Claws

The magnificent Simon's Cat. Anyone who has or had cats knows that every frame is true.

It's a measure of the appeal of Simon's Cat that I'm happy to shill for his merchandise for free. Now that's success.

Fail Better

I caught this last night by accident, and it was serendipitous, given my own perennial fretful brainfizzings and the recent sacking of Chris Hughton.

It's screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce's talk The Joy of Failure on Radio 3's Night Waves. His thesis is that failure is not something to be fearful of, rather that progress (and Post-It Notes) depend on mistakes.

"Is this pathology-ward level cheering and waving really encouragement? Or is it a strange new morbid dread of failure? Boyce ... makes a passionate plea for the traditional enemies of happiness - error, disappointment and, above all, failure. Bad ideas have often led to great discoveries, he claims, and human knowledge is dependent on our ability to continue making mistakes."

45 minutes of thoughtful, funny and interesting.