Wyatt Riot

I've been listening to this excellent podcast from The Wire, where Robert Wyatt talks to Tony Herrington about...well, everything, really. There are few people on the planet who appear as sincere, honest, self deprecating and insightful as Mr Wyatt, and he's one of those musicians who inspires something approaching love in my withered old heart (not just because we're from the same neck of the woods). His music seems to have been with me for ever, which I suppose it has.

I was going to write a long rambling post about my favourite Wyatt moments etc but instead I'll just quote Andie, who said the other night that his voice reminded her of 'an Autumnal hug'. I think that just about sums it up. Gawd bless 'im.

two recent things

a couple of weeks ago myself and Paul May were booked in to the excellent Onecat studio for a session with Wigdump, a new quartet put together by saxophonist Julie Kjaer with trombonist/euphonium player Ian McLachlan. I was quite excited about this as it's a corking little ensemble and one of my current faves, but sadly Ian was ill and couldn't make the session, leaving Paul and I with some studio time on our hands. Julie refused our offer of a trio for some reason, so we drafted in pianist Mark Ball who's a regular at our Stockwell jazz extravaganza. A set of rather peculiar unplanned improvs emerged, which I've been toying around with on one of those computer things.

The first thing happened while we waited for Mark to arrive, and we had no idea it was being recorded. It features my nice new Fender Precision, which I am starting to fall in love with a little bit. I added more stuff later.



The second thing was recorded about 7 seconds after Mark arrived and sounds like EST on some horse tranquilisers. The double bass was added later and replaced the Precision as it needed something slightly more vague sounding...



Apologies in advance but there may be more of this...