(This is the first time in many, many years that I’ve reproduced a ‘tweet-thread’ on the blog. Only this time, it’s from Bluesky, not that other hellscape. For those of you who are new-ish round here, I used to quite often brainstorm on Twitter, then move it over here. I’m not known for my brevity, but the Twitter format made me process things in a different, less rambling way. So here’s that:)

just found this amazing chronological list of everything Coltrane ever recorded:

https://rateyourmusic.com/list/wizardjoe/john-coltrane-a-complete-life-and-recorded-chronological-discography/

Coupla things worth noting:

1. VERY few albums took more than a day. A lot of tracks were the first and only take.

2. Many of them weren’t released until years later. Our sense of what Coltrane was about at any stage in his career is at least partially shaped not by his development, but by the order in which things were released.

3. Our relationship with greatness has absolutely zero connection to how long things take to make. Anyone who talks about the value of art because of the time or money it takes to make is missing something essential about audiences. Those stories can be leveraged for value, but it’s not inherent.

4. Sometimes the significance of a record is there in the music. Sometimes it’s in the story about the music. We have absolutely no idea what ‘Trane thought was significant as he was making it. He wasn’t the one deciding what was released. The auteur nature of many musicians is way over-exaggerated

5. (and this needs unpacking at much greater length) Improvisation happens through time. The end of a piece of music is dependent on what happens at the beginning, at the choices made, at all kinds of messy human things. It’s the exact opposite of AI generated anything. Process > product.

6. Music that is the document of a process takes time to understand. The beginning may not mean anything until you hear where it goes. Then you listen to it again and are expecting the evolution, the denouement, the resolution. Again, obviously, AI has no mechanism for this, BUT…

7. …BUT… neither does most pop music production. Which is why it’s so susceptible to AI cloning. If you’re making a thing that is finished, that has no human responsiveness in it, no decisions made AS IT IS BEING MADE, you’re in the business of constructing a product, not documenting a process

8. It’s really tough to graduate from pristine aesthethics to a live, evolving, interactive model of music making. It requires a very different skill set, and also exemplary technique. Not to mention the discipline to STOP EDITING EVERYTHING. Sound human. There’s a reason why we love Tiny Desk Gigs.

9. If you’re looking to work out how this fits your music making, try doing both. Make a live version, film yourself making it, invite your audience into your process, rather than hiding it and presenting them with an edited, polished, inhuman product. Embrace your humanness, your momentary decisions.

10. My recording career seems insanely prolific. But it’s entirely intentional. I realised early on I wanted to make more music that the prevailing industrial model for releasing CDs allowed. I started out putting out extra CDs for early ordering, doubling my output.

11. Then I came up with the very first iteration of what became the subscription; uploading additional digital recordings for my ‘Street Team’. Just a folder on my server that may have been password protected, which a bunch of extra stuff that I loved but couldn’t fit into a CD release schedule.

12. Every iteration of my live rig was a step towards refining the fidelity of the recording of everything. By 2008, my live set-up was my studio. Total parity, every gig recordable, and if I liked it, releasable. That produced Live So Far with Lobelia, and 10 Years On: Live In London.

13: It all stepped up a gear when I started playing with Daniel Berkman – our 10 album set, FingerPainting, came out as downloads but also on a USB Stick. That changed a lot. All the way through, Coltrane, Miles, Prince and Prefab Sprout were the artists I was inspired by.

14: Coltrane and Miles because they made albums in a single session. Prince and Prefab Sprout because they were emblematic of just how poorly served prolific recording artists are by the mechanics of the mainstream music industry. Subscription economics cuts through all of that.

15. I find it odd when people use subscriptions just for demos, bootleg-quality recordings, documenting process without ever embracing the joy of actually making that stuff sound amazing by practicing how to do it. It takes a lot of effort to convince people that my 10 albums a year aren’t demos.

16. But in the history of jazz, 10 album recording sessions a year was/is nothing. As Ralph Towner said to innerviews.org:
“The ECM format is very intelligent, but it’s very demanding in that you have two days to do a record in most cases and then you have one day for mixing.” So you prepare well.

17. Lastly (cos this has turned into a blog post in a shit format), practicing with the intention of playing release quality music every time you pick up your instrument will completely change your relationship music. You’ll be way way better on gigs, a better improviser, have better ears. win/win.

(as I said, I need to unpack the relationship between Improvisation and AI-resistant art more. Watch this space.)

Some thoughts on the joy of surprising myself

One of the joys of being an improvisor is that my own music surprises me all the time. Let me explain…

If you write songs and make recordings of those songs, there’s usually a sense of what those songs are supposed to sound like. Sometimes that sense is INCREDIBLY precise and a huge amount of time and energy and money goes into making it sound exactly the way the artist and/or producer envisage it sounding. Other times it’s a little looser and the musicians that play on it bring surprises and new stuff to the process, but what they do still usually fits within the shape of the song as it was intended (not always, but usually). So listening back to it mostly happens with the anticipation of what it sounded like when you went through the hundreds of listens while the track was being constructed under a microscope. (this wasn’t always the way, at all, and you’d be amazed at how many of your favourite records from before approx 1985, and a few after, were mostly one take backing tracks and one take vocals – recording a lead vocal at the same time as the band has been a rarity since the 60s unless it was a literal ‘live’ recording and labeled as such). The joy is in making a thing that lives up to the vision you had for it. It’s an incredible process that I’ve been involved in countless times and is also the process behind most of my favourite music in the world.

But I’ve heard significant numbers of artists say in interviews that they rarely if ever listen to their own recordings because they never live up to the vision they had for the recording in their head as it was being made. Everything is a disappointment. Sometimes those are records that changed my life, and the artist still feels like ‘nah, that’s not what I had in mind’

So when I get to ‘just play’, to hit record and see what comes up, sometimes only moments after adding or changing something about the pedal board – sometimes big changes, sometimes subtle ones – the music that comes out is entirely new to me. It has the familiarity of being born from the combination of my interests, skills, the things I’ve practiced and the things I’ve perfected over the years, but the combination of elements especially considering all the ways in which I build intentional surprises into the pedal-board are always new and are always far too complex in their relationship to one another for me to remember them with any degree of clarity once they’re ‘done’.

Which means that I get to listen to my own work repeatedly and be surprised by it over and over again. The music itself gets to be way more complex than it would be if I were trying to write parts that I could play the same way repeatedly (sure, it’s possible to go down the Boulez/Zappa route and conceive of and write shit that was insanely complicated and get expert musicians to play it repeatedly, but it’s so, so far from anything I’m interested in as a fan or creator that we’ll leave that to one side for now )

If things are being recorded, I can play them once in all their glorious complexity and that’s it, done. There are no edits, no ‘fixes’, no new layers added, no mistakes taken out. There is no ‘should’ only ‘is’. What you hear is what I did, and what I hear is what I did as well. Perpetual surprise and delight, as well as the inspiration to build on what one-month-ago-me did as well as what two-decades-ago me did.

140+ albums in, I’ve got a body of work that’s unknowably huge – there’s a ton of it you could play me and I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what it was called or which album it came from. But all of it offers up beautiful surprises every time I listen. And for that I’m deeply grateful x

(I’m also, before anyone comments, hugely grateful for songwriters, especially those who include me in their songwriting and recording adventures, so this isn’t a matter of one way being ‘better’, it’s just the perfect path for my solo work).

So, if you’re a full or part-time student, if you’re a full time musician who’s just trying to work on their craft while hustling to pay the bills, if you’re a disabled musician, from a minority background, unemployed or on a low wage, send me a message and we’ll see if we can work something out. It’ll be on a sliding scale, depending on the circumstances.

Lessons can be weekly, every other week, or monthly, and can be scheduled for either daytime or evenings. As well as bass, I offer tuition in improvisation and looping/live sound design. 

If you’re interested in lessons and aren’t in the category for subsidy, that’s OK too – just head to my teaching page for more info and we’ll get you booked in

OK, before reading or watching this from me, I’d recommend reading Dr Stacey Patton’s thoughts on this both on her Facebook and on Substack. She’s has a PhD in African American History, and has studied protests as part of her work. So yeah, way more qualified than me to speak on this…

This is part 1 of two versions of basically the same idea – the other one is a video that’ll be in the post after this (once I’ve got it off my phone and uploaded it to Flickr) with a transcript…

But here’s the blog post I wrote initially as a script for a video, but realised I was no good at reading scripts so just freestyled the video and ended up with two versions

_O_O_O_O_O_O_O_O_

I’ve been thinking about protest marches, and in particular yesterday’s march against The Far Right.

I think it’s important to define what it is, ultimately, that we are marching against. I think it comes down to three things:

• Patriarchy
• White Supremacy
• Capitalism

The “far right” and even fascism are labels for the impolite manifestations of the above. As a number of scholars have suggested on social media, fascism can perhaps be best understood as a method, rather than an ideology. A brand of violent authoritarian control that can be attached to any or all of the above. So while there is absolutely a resurgent far right in British electoral politics, the “far right” behaviour that well-meaning liberals are now marching against has been there all along, it’s just that now it’s impacting white people. 

So the question of where the outrage is at stop and search, at racism in employment, entertainment, the music industry, advertising, in microaggressions, the housing market, social services, medical care, education… Those things have been there all along and “marching against the far right” does nothing material to fix them. It can, in fact, trick white liberals into thinking we’re doing way more than we are, to see peaceful marching in the safe cocoon of our whiteness as enough…

So when you hear black and brown commentators say that these performative, gestural marches don’t achieve anything, and you push back, it is understandably heard as “why aren’t you GRATEFUL?” which in turn is another manifestation of the micro-aggressions of racism embedded in liberal discourse.

It’s important to say that the march wasn’t monocultural – not only were there black and brown people marching, there were Caribbean, Arab, Jewish, Muslim and South Asian organisations with delegations involved. It’s important not to undermine what their commitment to an event like this represents, and to see that responses to this aren’t monolithic. Just as there are whites on the march who’ve been involved in solidarity struggles for decades, there are those who did it for shitty reasons of absolving their conscience, who still won’t deal with their racist relatives and coworkers. Performativity that is worse than useless.

So was the London march a good thing? Yes. As a piece of improvised street theatre, designed to counter the same from the flag-painting “patriotic” racists who filled London a few months back, it was very good. It shows (to who? good question, reader ) that racism cosplaying as patriotism isn’t perhaps a pervasive as the BBC coverage would have us believe. Indeed, alongside the recent dip in the polls for Reform and the political insurgency of the Greens, it helps put a celebratory, colourful face to that shift. The nature of the march was also important. Instead of drunk, angry white people daubed in red and white, we had a rainbow coalition, both in terms of race and in the colour of the flags and banners being waved. It also provided a way for the handful of Labour MPs who aren’t falling in line behind Starmer’s Labour party’s pivot towards authoritarian racist, transphobic policy making to be involved in something that marks them as separate from that. The ‘against the far right’ framing removing the awkward questions for them about their own party’s complicity in White Supremacy, Patriarchy and the Capitalist movitivations for so many of their current policy shifts.

But it’s important to acknowledge that the UK doesn’t have a good history of political change happening in response to peaceful, polite protest from white people. If it had been a majority black or Asian protest, the police response would’ve been different, the news coverage would have been different. Marching like this is easy. It was to all intents and purposes a lovely day out. Claiming allyship because you and your mates made banners and walked though London’s streets in the sunshine is pretty thin gruel.

So what do we do with it? Where does real change happen? I think that is perhaps best seen in who was represented on the march – trade unions representing millions of workers, faith groups, political parties and organisations – in short, the social structures that we interact with on a daily basis. Marching is fine, but deal with your bigoted colleagues, your family, friends, neighbours. We need to be allies when it’s difficult, when we’re the ones who feel isolated, when it’s awkward, when you need to call out people who’ll accuse you of disloyalty for it. And – crucially – to sit with the discomfort, dissatisfaction, suspicion and cynicism of those who’ve been watching this shit unfold for generations, who are tired of trying to work out who the “good whites” are only to find themselves turned on when they aren’t sufficiently grateful, aren’t the right kind of black, or are just sick and tired of inaction and ineffectiveness from those who are looking for a pat on the back and an invitation to the cookout.

To go with a gaming analogy, marching with people you agree with is political action in Minecraft Creative Mode – there are no real points to be scored, no real change to be had, and zero risk to yourself, but if it goes well you’ll start to formulate strategies, arguments and methods to counter not just right wing street theatre but the manifestations of patriarchy and white supremacy in the behaviours and utterances of those closest to you. Change is really hard. Marching galvanises movements but it doesn’t, on past evidence, convince anyone of anything.

So, I advise you listen to the critique of those who see marching as achieving nothing. They have reasons for saying what they say that we as safe white liberals and progressives need to listen to and not push back on. Sit with the discomfort of not doing enough and start to think about what “enough” might look like. Cos it sure as shit doesn’t look like complaining about black people not being grateful enough…

I’ve been trying to work out where the best place to host them for longer term access is, and realised that Flickr will host video up to 10 minutes, so have put this on my account there to test this out. Here’s some thoughts on why Social Media algorithms interfere with the way we communicate as musicians with our audience… Would love to know your thoughts in the comments x

(here’s a transcript, for those who can’t do video – loosely edited from the autogenerated closed captions in the Edits App…)

Why do we have to talk weird just to have a conversation with our audience?

This is a thing I like to think of as the tyranny of the algorithm. Or it could easily be Pavlov’s algorithm, because the algorithm that decides what people get to see sorts it based on a bunch of really, really bizarre criteria.

What happens is that there’s this drip drip effect on the way that people talk, the way they present, the way they manipulate video in order to expand their audience and their reach

But what dies in that is.. Nuance is expansive cultural expression is the opinions of people who are unsure that everybody is wildly confident and comes across as though they’re just making these massively declarative statements about the world and edits out all the gaps see me i’m stumbling on my words because i’m not this isn’t scripted i’m just chatting and

And I think part of it is that we’ve lost the joy of not going viral. I don’t want this or anything else that I do particularly to go viral. I want to reach people who actually want to have a conversation, I want to reach the people that I already know. Even reach is kind of an odd word – I just want to have a conversation. I don’t talk about reaching people by going outside. I don’t reach my students. I just talk to them.

But we have this really odd relationship with the robots that intervene between us and the people who might get to see what we do, so we’re making video – and music as well, but that’s a whole other question – we’re making video and editing pictures to please robots because they might then go and show them to humans.

That’s a mess! That’s a total mess we shouldn’t be doing that.

I’m gonna try and do more video on here and I hope that you get to see it if you are watching this you’ve got this far what with two minutes 15 into this if you get if you’ve got this far please do go and join the channel on my Instagram page I don’t post it very often but I will forward these kind of things to it so you actually get it as a message I’m not going to abuse that I’m not gonna I’m not I have no interest in posting to it honestly daily basis, I don’t think that’s a really healthy thing to do because your attention should be elsewhere. I don’t need and I certainly wouldn’t thrive on you sitting there waiting for me to post nonsense on Instagram every day

However, I do want to have a conversation and I’m not going to suddenly start shaking my phone in front of my face in order to convince a robot that somehow I’m exciting, I’m not going to put makeup on as a performative thing, I just, I suppose it’s important to say at this point, no shade on the people who do – I get that if, for whatever reason, content creation is how you make your money, pay your bills, or get a political point across. I get why you’re doing that, but I’ve always had a problem with the reduction in what, the metaphor that I always use is biodiversity

Our options are narrowing, that content is all becoming more of the same and that people won’t work ideas out in public anymore because everyone’s declaring their truth and we sort of surf between ever more shouty whatever. I don’t like the idea that we are getting like that.

and you’ll notive I’m not holding a microphone – I’m not sat here with something like a tin of sugar free mints talking to it like it’s a microphone. Maybe I should, maybe then the algorithm will start to listen to me… I don’t want the algorithm to listen to me!

My camera has a mic built in, my phone does, I’m sat in a very quiet room in my hose. It’s fine.

Anyway feel free to reply to this either in the channel or int he thing if you’re more interested in having a conversation than you are in having people shout at you and pummel you in the face with their big hot takes while shaing their camera and editing it to shit

This is a FB post from Feb 13th 2014 , it just came up on my stories and felt worth sharing here.

It has implications for those of us who teach and our conversations around influence and originality, how we guide students towards the ingredients of their best artistic self.

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

some thoughts bobbling around inside my head this evening.

Everything is synthetic.

At least, in the sense that word means ‘born of synthesis’. Language, ideas, art, progress, stories… the degree to which we fetishise the false notion of ‘originality’ as an objective reality, and as desirable over and above the thing itself, is not helpful. At all.

Let go: if a thing looks or feels ‘original’ it just means that no one of its constituent influences is more apparent than any other. Or that you haven’t experienced those things that influenced it. The perception of originality is a subjective observational position, not an extant embedded reality in ‘the thing’.

We build ourselves from the beauty and strangeness around us, choosing to process the things we see and experience towards our own end. Make great things with what you have, don’t freak out about the things that aren’t in your palette for building YOU. Seek out the experiences, situations, people and influences that will make you the person you need to become. None of those require fame/success/riches. All are contextual, everything is meaningful.

Being an extraordinary stay-at-home parent is way more impressive/important than being a mediocre stadium rock superstar. the metrics of synthesis are about What You Do With What You Have. And even then, the perception of those things is wholly subjective.

But let go of the pressure for everything to be new! exciting! original! unique!

Instead, be good. Be kind. Be Generous. Be thoughtful. Take every opportunity to make the world better for those around you.