Greaves Verlaine

John Greaves' latest CD is a Paul Verlaine project. This is mellow and beautiful music. Unfortunately I don't understand a lot of the poems (will translate later), but I start too feel a bit French, and that's good (isn't it so?). Karen Mantler is on it, and the cover is cool! You will find some of the songs on MySpace. Buy another Greaves album with French lyrics too ("Chansons"), and you'll have one more album with Robert Wyatt participating.

Kate Bush 50

All the ladies are just getting older! Today Kate Bush turns 50 too! I don't really understand why I only own her first album, but it might be because some of my female friends (just friends!) played a few of the other ones to death. My copy of "The Kick Inside" from 1978 (with the hit "Wuthering Heights") has got quite a special cover compared to the one we usually see. I think it's an US edition with Harvest label. Two of the songs on "The Kick Inside" were recorded in 1975, with David Gilmour as executive producer.
Norwegian blogger Steinskog celebrates with a collection of her videos, if you'll like to join.

KNOL and CUIL

Google fights Wikipedia with Knol. You'll find signed, authorative articles, and people may suggest changes, but not change anything themselves, like in Wikipedia. Knol does not look too cool right now, but might end up being a killer encyclopedia in some years? I'll stick to my blogs, but you now have the chance to write an authorative article on Robert Wyatt or Canterbury rock!

Others want to beat Google (!!), and have developed Cuil. Here is what they say about themselves: "The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.
Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency."

Birth of the Cuil?

Live at The Lyceum returns

Elastic Rock made a new cover to the live recording from The Lyceum with Soft Machine (1969).

Shockadelica

Any Prince fans around? Check out the wildest cover project in Norwegian record history (I hope). Christer Falck managed to get Norwegian artists to record 81 Prince tunes on 5 CDs, to honour him at 50! 5000 copies of "Shockadelica - 50th anniversary tribute to the artist known as Prince" are made. This is overkill for me, but there are a lot of great versions here (not that I'm a Prince expert). What about these artists: Maja Ratkje, Susanna and The Magical Orchestra, Kornstad, Bendik Hofseth, Jacob Young, Anneli Drecker & Bugge Wesseltoft, Kaada and Nils Petter Molvær feat. Sissel Endresen? You'll find the rest of the artists here, and will also be able to listen to parts of the tunes and shop the digital version (only the whole package!).
There are a lot of corny greetings for Prince's birthday in the booklet, but I love Fitts For Fight's way of saying happy birthday (starting like this): "We don't know who Prince is. We were born in the 90s. We always thought of him as the dude who played in Batman."
And what about Prince? He hates the project of course.

Say Hi to the Rivers and the Mountains

Author Jonathan Coe and Sean O'Hagan from High Llamas (and Microdisney) worked together to make "Say Hi to the Rivers and the Mountains", where Coe's text and O'Hagan's music was performed at Analog in Dublin about a week ago.
Jonathan Coe is the author of the Canterbury-titled novel "Rotter's Club", and he also remembers Robert Wyatt in The Guardian ("Moon Tunes" 12 July): "Microdisney's sound was distinctive: it came from the friction between O'Hagan's strong, accessible melodic sensibility and the furious political radicalism expressed in Cathal Coughlan's lyrics. In pop music, perhaps only Robert Wyatt understood the new economic energies of the 1980s as thoroughly as Coughlan seemed to; and, like Wyatt, he remains one of the music world's most brilliant and underrated lyricists."

Evan Parker: "Conic Sections"

Of course you need a solo album with soprano saxophone! I bought Evan Parker's "Conic Sections" (PSI 2008) at the Townhouse Orchestra concert in Molde. This is some incredible soprano blowing from Parker, but I admit I take it in small doses. "Conic Sections" is recorded in 1989, and this is a reissue.

Break of Day in Molde returns

Break of Day in Molde (last part of the performance) with Marilyn Mazur, Arild Andersen, Krister Jonsson and Karin Krog, at 07:00 AM 19. July, The Molde International Jazz Festival.

Hal´s

Through Strongcomet I found Hal´s Progressive Rock Blog. Hal is blogging a lot of concert recordings of Robert Wyatt (at least a tribute!), Kevin Ayers, Henry Cow, Peter Blegvad and others. And that´s OK I guess?

Marshmallows for the barbecue?

Wyatt almost shortlisted

Rachel Unthank & The Winterset's "The Bairns" is shortlisted for The Mercury Prize. As we have mentioned before, this great album has a beautiful version of Robert Wyatt's "Sea Song".

Atomic Schooldays: “Distil” (2008)

After one of Paal Nilssen-Love's performances in Molde, I picked up the double CD ”Distil” (Okkadisk 2008) by Atomic Schooldays . Atomic Schooldays is of course a band with the people from Atomic and Schooldays (!), and this is a great record! You get some free stuff, some straight jazz, and it swings! The band is Ken Vandermark (US) (sax, clar), Fredrik Ljungkvist (SE) (sax, clar), Magnus Broo (SE) – (tp), Jeb Bishop (US) – (trombone), Håvard Wiik (N) – (p), Kjell Nordeson (SE) – (vibraphone), Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (N) – (b) og Paal Nilssen-Love (N) – (dr, perc).
More on Atomic, School Days and Atomic Schooldays on Paal Nilssen-Love's site.

ENO at Punkt

A few seconds after I posted on Eno and singing, I remembered that I had heard talk about him coming to Kristiansand (Norway) in the beginning of September for the PUNKT Festival, and believe it or not, they published their program this morning. Brian Eno will be there with "77 Million Paintings for Punkt" and concerts. John Hassell and Gavin Bryars will be there too, and a bunch of Norwegian jazz and traditional musicians.

Want to sing with me?

Just kidding. I always tend to be embarrassed when I'm among people who want everybody to sing along to some home made song for the birthday person, or some old religious traditional song at Christmas. I don't know how it is in the rest of the world, but in Norway everybody seem to sing in an amateur choirs too, and they want you to come to their concerts!
But what now? Brian Eno wants me to sing too! He writes about singing in Resurgence, and argues (pretty good too) that we should start small groups of singers, but not perform (puh!). Listen to Eno: "I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, increased self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness, and a sense of humour." Heh!

BBC Jazz Awards 2008

Yesterday the BBC Jazz Awards 2008 were handed out. I have to admit that I don't know a lot of the artists, but let's turn that to the better, and look forward to start listening to them.
Album of the year: The Blessing "All is Yes".
Best vocalist: Christine Tobin.
Best instrumentalist: Tony Kofi.
Jazz Line Up Band: Curious.
The list of all awards here.

River Mouth Echoes

Don't forget that Maja Ratkje's album "River Mouth Echoes" is out (since this spring) (Tzadik 2008). It contains 6 works written between 1997 and 2005. Partners in crime are (among others) Frode Haltli, Rolf-Erik Nystrøm, Torben Snekkestad, Christian Eggen, Oslo Sinfonietta and John Zorn (executive producer). I'm not going to pretend that I own a language to evaluate, and describe this music more than the usual "I like it, check it out". I would prefer some more vocals, and more noisy impro, but that's my problem (I think). Maja Ratkje is composer in residence at Nordland Music Festival, Bodø, Norway 1.-10. august.

Henry Cow subscription

9 CDs, 1 DVD and a book! You need more Henry Cow, don't you? Subscribe at ReR. None of these recordings have been released before, except on bootlegs. One of the recordings are from Trondheim, Norway (1976?). Is Robert Wyatt on some of these albums, or the DVD? I just wonder.
Here are your choices: SUBSCRIPTION EDITIONS: STOCKHOLM only £11.50, VOL 1 - 5 CDs , box, book £45, VOL 2 - 4 CDs, DVD, box, book £50, THE ENTIRE SET, in two boxes plus a free, third, specially designed, solid matching continuous-artwork empty box in which to keep the already released 5 studio CDs. In a numbered edition, with a special additional subscription item. £99".
ReR is not your standard capitalist company, so just ask if you're not able to pay all of it in one go, and if you only buy the Stockholm album, they'll reduce the price on the rest if you change your mind, and want all of it.

Midnight moon over Molde

I think Molde need some peace and quiet now, after a full week of jazz of various kinds. Here is the moon over Molde, some minutes past midnight.

Armageddon concerto

The wildest jazz festival booking ever? Shining and Enslaved on the same stage. We got a 90 minutes specially written piece of jazz, metal, rock and prog. A bit too much for me, after a long festival, but I really enjoyed parts of it. I'll give it another go, if they cut it down to 60 minutes.

Fred Frith & Lucia Recio

Fred Frith guitar and "stuff" with Lucia Recio vocal at the Molde Festival. Yes! It was intense, dramatic, noisy, beautiful and fun! Frith plays the guitar with drumsticks and brushes and Recio sings, grunts, screams and make tic toc sounds. They were unbelievable.
After the show they were nice both to crazy bloggers and young fans.

Sea Song

tomerico.m123 made two new sleeves for an imagined edition of Robert Wyatt's "Sea Song", and put them on Flickr.

Break of day in Molde

The Molde Festival organizers have gone completely nuts! Today's first jazz concert started at 07:00 AM in a park. Marilyn Mazur, Arild Andersen, Karin Krog and Krister Jonsson started the concert with Molde's own jazz signature song "Break of Day in Molde".

Arnold Schwarzenegger

I met Arnold Schwarzenegger at the Molde Festival. He was on a used double sampler with Soft Machine's "Out-Bloody-Rageous" and Robert Wyatt's "To Mark Everywhere". Oh, and I found one more version of this Soft Machine record too.

Townhouse Orchestra

Townhouse Orchestra played the small Forum venue in Molde today. What a band: Evan Parker (saxes), Sten Sandell (p), Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (b) and Paal Nilssen-Love (dr). I will never quite understand how musicans are able to improvise like this, and serve lots of energy and great solos for 75 minutes, but what do I care. (I wil not understand why a small venue like this is not packed for these guys either!).
As far as I remember, this was the first time ever I heard Evan Parker live, but I certainly hope it was not the last. Wow, what a great performance!

Circulasione Totale Orchestra

Frode Gjerstad invited old and new friends to join him in a free jazz happening at the Molde Festival Thursday, with a superband version of Circulasione Totale Orchestra. The house was not packed, but what can you expect? Gjerstad walked the stage, directing his troops, and the band was great. We got a lot of noise, but enough quiet moments to gather strength. Memorable moments were Bobby Bradford's beautiful cornet solos and Anders Hana and Lasse Marhaug's industrial background sounds to reeds in free flight. When the concert was over, Bradford couldn't keep himself from improvising a Molde blues for cornet and vocal. Nice one!
The band said we could take pictures as we liked, but they better be good! Check out my good and bad festival photos in my Molde-set on Flickr.

This night's Circulasione Totale Orchestra:
Louis Moholo - drums
Morten J. Olsen drums - electronics
Anders Hana - el.guitar
Frode Gjerstad - sax, clarinets
Nick Stephens - acoustic bass
Paal Nilssen-Love - drums
Børre Molstad - tuba, electronics
Kevin Norton - vibraphone, conductor
Bobby Bradford - cornet
Lasse Marhaug - electronics
Sabir Mateen – sax
Ingebrigt Haaker Flaten – acoustic bass

Marilyn Mazur Group

Marilyn Mazur Group jazzed and rocked (and maybe jazzrocked) the small venue Forum (160 seats) in Molde today. The group is Marilyn Mazur (dr, perc), Fredrik Lundin (sax, flute), Krister Jonsson (g) and Klavs Hovman (b, colourful shirt and husband). This was much more an everyday, down to earth setting, than the magic scene on Monday's concert with Mazur. The Forum is so intimate, that you are almost on stage, and the music was almost too big for the venue. Mazur may look small, but she could drum for Metallica.
What is happening with the drummers in Molde. Monday Joey Barron was one big smile, and Mazur seems to be smiling all week long.

Armageddon concerto

I'm really looking forward to saturday (at least I think so) and Armageddon in Molde. Shining og Enslaved will perform a new 90 minutes Armageddon concerto, and let's cite Shining's site:
"The newly hatched piece of musical art describes the process from the present state to the inevitable downfall of this world - through Ragnarok and a following period of vacuum and nothingness, a brief and painful post-apocalyptic era, and finally through the rise from ashes to a new beginning in a distant time and space. The work draws inspiration from Old Norse apocalyptic sagas, along with prophesies from more modern doomsday prophets and cults".

Robert Wyatt reissues

Twisted Ear has news on Robert Wyatt reissues. All solo albums from Rock Bottom to Shleep are scheduled for release, starting this october. Do we get some extra material, and are they on Domino? I don't know.
Or this might still be Wyatt's leftover stock? See comment here.

New info added, thanks to Alfie:
"No, these are not leftover stock.
They will all be new digipaks from Domino.
They will also be available on vinyl(except for the EPs box set)"

Free Jazz

After a lesson on Free Jazz at the Molde Festival Academy, guided by Bjørn Stendahl and Paal Nilssen-Love, we were ready for the first concert this year at Reknes, the festival's smallest venue. Small venue, but at least it was packed for Bobby Bradford (cornet), Frode Gjerstad (clarinette, saxophones), Ingebrigt H. Flaten (bass) and Paal Nilssen-Love (drums).
With Nilssen-Love and Håker Flaten driving, Gjerstad and Bradford tok off in free flight. I could see nothing but smiles, both on stage and among the audience. I heard something like this at the academy: "Free Jazz is the new Dixieland".

Tuesday at Moldejazz

My first concert on tuesday was Brad Mehldau Trio. Damn sofisticated guys, with improvisations going far out into the countryside. There were origanal tunes, standards, some Monk and Sound Of Music, and towards the end Sufjan Stevens' "Holland". It was a great concert, and they got a standing ovation. But why so serious (with capital S)? If they saw someone taking pictures, they would probably go off stage and not come back. I was dead nervous for the first twenty minutes, and just waited for the first flash, but then my photo finger started to itch.

A message to the female part of the loving couple in front of me, who kissed 400 times: You have to leave the guy alone for some minutes. No kissing when he's listening to the drum solo.

Around midnight Elephant9 got going. Ståle Storløkken (keyb), Nikolai Hængsle Eilertsen (b) and Torstein Lofthus (dr) made groovy keyboard jazz. They started off with Joe Zawinul and continued with their homemade brew, perfect for late night jazz clubbing. I even observed some young people dancing. Pretty tough, but I could handle it.

Joey Barron smiles

Last night I attended a midnight concert with Steve Kuhn Trio and Karin Krog in Molde. Steve Kuhn (piano), Davis Finck (b) and Joey Barron (dr) played beautiful versions of jazz standards, Karin Krog was everybody's "National Treasure", and they ended the concert with the song "Break of Day in Molde" (a world famous song here in Molde, based on Cara Bley's "Ida Lupino").
I just love to watch Joey Barron play the drums. I've seen him a couple of times before (with Bill Frisell), and the guy is just one big smile (and a great drummer)! I wouldn't mind more smiles on the jazz stages, thank you very much. You get the strange feeling, that Barron really wants to play for you.

Marilyn Mazur

The opening concert of the Molde International Jazz Festival is over. Artist in residence, Marilyn Mazur (dr, perc), hand picked Eivind Aarset (g), Nils Petter Molvær (tp) and Dhafer Youssef (oud, voc) for this concert. Relaxed and beautiful pieces mixed with heavy rock and world and jazz. The lights and the sound were perfect, and even if I heard some people complain about the sound level, I observed people sleeping in the concert hall. And this is the first day of the festival! Me? I think it was great!

Molde is a small town (around 24000 inhabitants) in Norway, but the festival visistors increase the number of people more than 5 times for one week. Today I watched the parade, and even visited a class at the "Festival Academy". Today's topic: "Local jazz history". I sneaked out before the tests were handed out.

Molde

I'll be blogging from The Molde International Jazz Festival the next days. So far I have tickets to the concerts listed below. Check here for the concerts I may be missing.

Monday:
Mazur, Molvær, Youssef, Aarset
Karin Krog & Steve Kuhn Trio
Tuesday:
Brad Mehldau Trio
Wednesday:
Bradford, Gjerstad, Flaten, Nilssen-Love
Thursday:
Marilyn Mazur Group
Circulasione Totale Orchestra
Friday:
Townhouse Orchestra
Christian Wallumrød Ensemble
Saturday:
Break of day in Molde (07:00 AM!)
Fred Frith & Lucia Recio
Shining & Enslaved

Tape Recorder

My first machine to collect music on! This old Tandberg tape recorder stays at my parents house, and looking at it makes me remember all those radio programmes and borrowed singles I taped. It's a nice piece of work too, but unfortunately out of order.

Soft Machine at Breda

At Catasto's they have even more Soft Machine live stuff for the summer. This time it's a recording from 1971 called "Het Turfschip, Breda Netherlands, March 1971". The band is Elton Dean, Mike Ratledge, Hugh Hopper and Robert Wyatt. This is not the same concert as "Breda Reactor".

National Health

I'm still trying to become a Canterbury man, and the time has come to listen to National Health. Since I'm mainly a fan of Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers, early Soft Machine, Matching Mole and Gong, some of the other stuff is a bit too much prog rock for my taste, but I'll keep on trying.
National Health was started by Dave Stewart from Hatfield and the North and Alan Gowen from Gilgamesh, and a short story of the band members (copied from Calyx) look like this: "The band's original line-up consisted of Dave Stewart and Alan Gowen on keyboards, Phil Miller and Phil Lee on guitars, Amanda Parsons on vocals and Mont Campbell on bass. A fulltime drummer, Bill Bruford, wasn't found until a couple of months later. In the meantime, Pip Pyle helped out, until finally replacing Bruford in 1977. The final regular line-up included original members Phil Miller and Alan Gowen, with John Greaves on bass and vocals and Pip Pyle on drums. When the band briefly re-formed in 1981 and 1983, the late Gowen was replaced by the returning Dave Stewart."
Peter Blegvad is on the album "Of Ques and Cures".
Watch this recording from YouTube if you have got the nerves! You get National Health with John Greaves "crawling" on the floor.

A nice summer to all of you!

Have a nice summer! Don't forget to check the blog, when you're back from all your travels. I'll be close to a computer most of the time.

Kiss

Image from the beautiful South Korean movie "Bin-jip", by ARAM.

Supersonic

Old record buyers like me were never in doubt, the covers, the posters and the visual images are all important parts of the music. That's nothing to be ashamed of. Take a loook at "Supersonic. Visuals for music" by Robert Klanten and Hendrik Hellige (Eds) (Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin 2007). Here they present several modern artists/designers who make record covers, posters and so on. I have to say, I just want to buy more records, so watch your money. Several Norwegian designers are presented here,like Kim Hiorthøy, Martin Kvamme, Made, Halvor Bodin, Skin Design, Grandpeople and Rune Mortensen.
How about this old memorybook with album covers?

Cuckooland

Six years after the fantastic record "Shleep", Robert Wyatt's "Cuckooland" (Hannibal/RYKO 2003) was ready. Here you mainly get original songs by Wyatt, Benge/Wyatt and Karen Mantler, 16 songs all together. After the beautiful "Lullaby for Hamza" you even get a 30 seconds long break, and it is quite Wyatt-like to call the two parts of the album "neither here..." and "....nor there". Friends on the album: Karen Mantler, Brian Eno, Paul Weller, Gilad Atzmon, Annie Whitehead, Phil Manzanera, David Gilmour and more. You get both the finished lyrics, and copies from Robert Wyatt's sketchbook. You just have to buy this one too.

39. Deutsches Jazzfestival Frankfurt 2008

Tickets are now on sale for the jazzfestival in Frankfurt 30 October -1 November, and please note that Friday 31 October they have "The Wyatt Variations- An evening curated by Robert Wyatt". On this evening these artists/projects are on:
Max Nagl "Market Rasen" (Max Nagl as, Klemens Wenger keyb, electronics and Herbert Pirker dr).
Dondestan! – The Wyatt Project (John Greaves voc, p, Sylvain Kassap cl, Hélène Labarrière b, Jacques Mahieux voc, dr, Karen Mantler voc, org, harmonica, Jef Morin g and Special guest: Michael Mantler tp).
Annie Whitehead's "Soupsongs" (Annie Whitehead musical director, tb, Jennifer Maidman g, voc, Sarah Jane Morris voc, Cristina Donà voc, Harry Beckett tp, flh, Mark Lockheart ts, ss, Steve Lodder p, keyb, Dudley Phillips b, Liam Genockey dr and Special guest: Gilad Atzmon as, ss, cl).
Whether Robert Wyatt himself will be there, is not certain.

There are lots of great artists the other days of the festival too, among others John Surman, Gilad Azmon, Bill Frisell and Uri Caine.

Shleep

Some records just keep growing, and are getting better all the time. Robert Wyatt's "Shleep" from 1997 is one of them. It has beautiful songs like "Maryan" and "Free Will and Testament" and more strange stuff like "The Duchess" and "Blues in Bob minor". Wyatt is working with Evan Parker (will be at The Molde International Jazz Festival and The Oslo Jazzfestival this summer), Paul Weller, Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera , Philip Catherine, Annie Whitehead and (of course) Alfie. Just buy this one.

Three trios

We arrange a minifestival in WyattAndStuff today, and give you three great trios: Elephant9 (Ståle Storløkken (keyb), Torstein Lofthus (dr), Nikolai Eilertsen (b)), Scorch Trio (Paal Nilssen-Love (dr), Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (b), Raoul Björkenheim (g)) and The Thing (Mats Gustafsson (sax, electronics), Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (b,electronics), Paal Nilssen-Love (dr). The sound may be rotten, so I suggest you go and see these people live, if you get the opportunity.

Clutch

We haven't had too much hard hitting rock and roll in this blog yet, but we might get going now, because yesterday I heard Clutch at the Ole Bull Scene in Bergen. This is a band I knew nothing about, but something caught my attention, and made me buy a ticket. And damned good they were too! Singer Neil Fallon behaved like a preacher man, and the audience just loved the hard, blues based rock. In my opinion they were best when they were quite straight, but these guys didn't say no to a long drum solo during the extras, after two sweaty hours. Oh so nice to be at a long haired concert again.

Word of Mouth Marketing

Several newspapers and bloggers (see jill/txt) in Norway have been writing about young bloggers "making millions" on advertisements and hidden marketing in their blogs, getting paid to mention brand names. Damn! I could have been stinking rich now, from pushing all those Robert Wyatt albums, but just as I see the possibility, I realise it's not fair play (and probably strictly forbidden).
I'm not against marketing and I'm not against making money, but I think the beauty of the internet is the possibility to share and cooperate. The more blogs without advertising, the better.

Numusic Festival

Artists ready for The Numusic Festival in Stavanger 3-7 September (no date and venue yet):
A Certan Ratio (UK)
Kaada (NO)
Kiss me I'm electric DJ´s (NO)
Krazy Baldhead (FR)
Lindstrøm (NO)
Next Life (NO)
Nouvelle Vague (FR)
Planningtorock (UK)
Son of Dave (UK)
The Fall (UK)
The festival states: "West Coast Festival of Numusic is fast becoming one of Europe’s leading club based festivals dedicated to promoting new music and urban art".

Puma

Don't forget Puma. They relased a new album called "Discotheque Bitpunching", and this one is almost as good as the previous album "Isolationism" (and might even grow to be better). Both records are on Bolage, and Puma is Stian Westerhus, Øystein Moen and Gard Nilssen.
I've been calling this music powernoiserockprogjazz and "impronoiseprogrockjazzcallitwhatyoulike", and their MySpace site call them "electroacoustic noise-rockers". The conclusion? You just have to take a listen yourselves.

The Thing “Now and forever”

Earlier this summer The Thing released a box with 3 CDs and one DVD (Smalltown Superjazz 2008). The material is ”The Thing” (issued 2000), ”She knows” with Joe McPhee (issued 2001), ”Gluttony” (new material, recorded in 2005) and ”Live at Øya” with Thurston Moore (DVD from the Øya Festival in Oslo 2005).
The Thing is Mats Gustafsson (sax), Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (b) and Paal Nilssen-Love (dr), a trio hard to beat.
I don’t own the first two albums, so this box is perfect for me. The Thing jazz the rock and rock the jazz, and when Thurston Moore comes along (one track only) they produce some decent noise too. Great band, great music and great film. Great box!

Høvikodden LIVE 1968-2007

In connection with the concert series Høvikodden LIVE (autumn 2007), and this year's 40 year jubilee for the Henie Onstad Art Centre in Oslo, a book called "Høvikodden Live 1968-2007. Henie Onstad Art Centre as cross-artistic arena" was released (Henie Onstad Art Centre 2007). The book contain short chapters on the history of the centre and a lot of great pictures. As I've mentioned before, Soft Machine played there in 1971, with lights by Mark Boyle. This was towards the end of Robert Wyatt's period as a Soft Machine guy.
In the book they have made an almost complete list of exhibitions and concerts held at the centre, but for one reason or the other, Henry Cow's concert from 25 July 1975 is lacking. The proof is on "Concerts" (Compendium 1976) (see inner cover), and just to make it perfectly clear, we also bring a picture from "The Henry Cow Book" by Chris Cutler and Tim Hodgkinson (1981). (Clicking on the pictures will enlarge them. The magic!). They probably sell the book in the art centre, but really it should be on the net.

Richard Thompson and Bonnie Raitt

A Richard Thompson group on Facebook had info on a radio programme where Richard Thompson and Bonnie Raitt performed together. Listen to "A Prairie Home Companion", particularly Thompson's "Dimming of the day". Beautiful.

The Richard Thompson page "Beesweb" obviously choose their reviewers from the top shelf, at least when it comes to Bergen concerts.