Wilderness Festival: Cutler and Wyatt

At the Wilderness festival (Cornbury Park, Oxforshire August 6th - 9th 2015) there will be talks about Ivor Cutler and Robert Wyatt!

Y’hup! The Story of Ivor Cutler - "Following his performance as Ivor in the critically acclaimed The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler (Vanishing Point/NTS), actor Sandy Grierson will trace the meanderings of both the man and his music..".

Different every time: writing the authorised biography of Robert Wyatt - "Marcus O’Dair talks about Wyatt and the experience of writing his biography".

Jono McCleery: Age Of Self

Ooh, check out this beautiful, folky version of Robert Wyatt´s "Age of self" by Jono McCleery.
The track taken from his third solo album 'Pagodes', released October 2nd via If Music.

I found the info over at Clash.

Robert Wyatt Symposium

Richard King will be chairing a Robert Wyatt Symposium with biographer Marcus O´Dair and Robert Wyatt´s A&R Andy Childs at the Port Elliot Festival (St. Germans, Cornwall) on Friday 31 July.

The Unthanks - Starless (Glastonbury 2015)

OOOPS! We had a nice video here - but it seems to have vanished from YouTube. Hope some of you managed to see it.

The Unthanks perform King Crimson´s "Starless" in the BBC Music Tepee at Glastonbury 2015.

The track is taken from their 2011 album "Last".

Live at Roulette: 3 Degrees of Robert Wyatt

In June we had a blog post on "Spinning on Air Series: 3 Degrees of Robert Wyatt, Curated By and Featuring Invisible Familiars (4 June 2015)".

Now you may listen to the highlights from this concert tribute to Robert Wyatt held at Roulette in Brooklyn, lasting for almost an hour and presented by David Garland.

I don´t know how long it will be available, but there is no reason to wait. Just have a listen!

The following is stolen from the Spinning On Air site:

"Jared Samuel and his band Invisible Familiars coordinated the concert, "3 Degrees of Robert Wyatt," which featured Joan Wasser (Joan As Police Woman), Oren Bloedow (Elysian Fields), Adam Minkoff (The Machine), Charlotte Kemp Muhl (The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger), Michael Leonhart (Steely Dan), Greek singer Monika, and Jordyn Blakely and Noah Berman of Invisible Familiars, as well as Spinning On Air's own David Garland".

Concert photos on Flickr.

The Thing with James Blood Ulmer at Moldejazz

Moldejazz 2015 is over and here is a video from one of the highlights from the festival:
The Thing with James Blood Ulmer!

As usual the weather was shitty and the music was great! The festival economy has been pretty strained the last years, and after this year we might see a change, since they have decided to end the outdoor concerts. These concerts were supposed to draw huge audiences that probably wouldn´t turn up for the regular jazz concerts and finance the other stuff happening (and perhaps get some to attend other concerts they didn´t mean to visit). They have had Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Antony, Leonard Cohen and Stevie Wonder (to name a few) but the tactics have failed these last years (due to weather, programming, higher costs and so on), and D´Angelo not showing up for his concert Friday last week due to disease (on extremely short notice) was probably what did it for the festival.

Perhaps we will get a more focused festival the years to come. Might be a good thing in the end.

This year I attended The Thing + Ulmer concert (what power!), Zanussi 5 (please check out this band!) , Trondheim Jazz Orchestra with Espen Reinertsen doing a "Forgaflingspop" project (sweet!) and artist in residence Mats Gustafsson´s tribute to the Norwegian skier Petter Northug (crazy!).

Witold Bolik - Tribute to Robert Wyatt

"Muddy Mouse X" and "Muddy Mouse Z" [Fred Frith/Robert Wyatt] recorded in February/March 2015 for L'Oreille Absolue and "O Caroline" [Richard Sinclair/Robert Wyatt] taken from Witold Bolik´s album "Covers" (Bandcamp 2014).

Different Every Time - Paperback

Just in case you still haven´t got Marcus O´Dair´s wonderful "Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt" (Serpent´s Tail): It is out in glorious paperback today (9 July 2015)!

Easy to carry in bags and suitcases for the holiday.

And yes, we have mentioned this book a couple of times before (here after reading it).

Miniatures

Megaphone/Knock´em Dead recently re-issued "Miniatures" - A sequence of fifty-one tiny masterpieces edited by Morgan Fisher (originally released in 1981 - or was it 1980?).

What a collection of (no longer than) one minute pieces!

Robert Wyatt was recorded at home in 1980 doing "Rangers in the night" with tape manipulation by Morgan Fisher.

We also find friends like Ivor Cutler, Lol Coxhill and Fred Frith, Frith doing no less than "The entire works of Henry Cow"!

And how about David Bedford playing "Wagner´s Ring in one minute" and Pete Seeger doing "Chorale for Beethoven´s 9th Symphony" for banjo? On the same album!

Now pressed on 180-gram vinyl with 23" x 23" foldout poster, and you will find the track list over here.

(And I wrote almost the same when a CD version was released in 2008).

Greece

Street artist Argus has been out in Bergen the night before the Greek election.