Hope for happiness

Soft Machine live
Uploaded by nantrue

Nantrue uploaded this video of Soft Machine on DailyMotion. It says 1970, but must be 1968? Check his collection of different Wyatt-videos too.

Beeswing

Few things are better than a sad song. Nothing beats a sad Richard Thompson song. This might have been inspired by Anne Briggs.

Short news

Domino Records will reissue Robert Wyatt's "Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard" (1975), "Old Rottenhat" (1985), "Shleep"(1997) and "Dondestan (Reissued)" (1998). They will also issue a limited edition of a box of 5 EPs. You may find news like this on Eterni-Tea Forums.

Did you really have any doubt about Kevin Ayers' ability as a philosopher? The blog ENIGMANIA prove how close Ludvig Wittgenstein and our man Kevin are!

Nils Petter Molvær

We have not had too much on Nils Petter Molvær in this blog, so it's time to give you the big NPM blog post! If you need reasons for that: A new remix album is due in march (Re-visions), and Molvær is on the market with a record with Johannes Enders called "Dome". I wasn't aware of the last one until I read a (more than!) rave review in Norwegian magazine Jazznytt.

Solo albums and remixes. (The remixes are made by people like Herbaliser, Bill Laswell, Deathprod, Bugge Wesseltoft and see if you are able to find more here):
Khmer (ECM 1997)
Khmer. The Remixes (ECM 1998)
Solid Ether (ECM 2000)
Recoloured (Universal Jazz 2001)
np3 (Sula/Universal 2002)
The Hot Rod EP (Hot Rod magazine 2002 (?))
remakes (Sula/Universal 2003)
Streamer (Sula 2004)
er (Sula/Universal 2005)

I prefer the original albums to the remixes, and if you want my advice, start buying the new ones and work your way backwards. Lots of great music will come your way.

Play your own thing

Everton beat Brann with two goals in the UEFA Cup in Bergen today. Sorry, but I got a package from Amazon and was watching the DVD "Play your own thing. A story of jazz in Europe" (Dir. Julian Benedikt, Euroarts 2007), as the home team lost. This is a quite good documentary, and you get some more music than the cut and jump technique documentaries usually are made of. You get your American musicians in Paris and Copenhagen, and nice servings of German, Austrian, Italian and Scandinavian music. I think the British will have to make their own DVD, because I got a feeling they were underrepresented here.
So nice to see (among others) young versions of Albert Mangelsdorff and Niels Henning Ørsted Pedersen (his mother had to OK his playing in clubs) and charming sax man numero uno Dexter Gordon.
And surprise, surprise, Robert Wyatt talked a couple of minutes too! His opinion was that Europe's most important contribution to jazz, was listening to American jazz musicians (and constructing the saxophone).

All that nostalgia

Damn it! The nostalgia is really taking over these days, with memories of 1967 (the summer of love), 1968 (the cradle of everything) and next year it's 40 years since Woodstock. Not that I had much fun, I was a bit too young to be a hippie (13 in 1968) (and too old to be a punk!), but I am catching up on my reading these days. I was looking into some old cardboard boxes yesterday and there they were again: Jerry Rubin's "Do It" (1970) and Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (1968). Don't trust anyone over 30!

Shibusashirazu - At last i am free

Shibusashirazu's version of Chic's "At Last I Am Free" is a bit further out than Robert Wyatt's, but what the hell, it's monday!