On An Overgrown Path

I don't believe in magic, I don't believe in I-Ching,I don't believe in Bible, I don't believe in tarot, I don't believe in Hitler, I don't believe in Jesus, I don't believe in Kennedy, I don't believe in Buddha, I don't believe in mantra, I don't believe in Gita, I don't believe in yoga, I don't believe in kings, I don't believe in Elvis, I don't believe in Zimmerman, I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me That litany of rejected influences comes from the track God on the 1969 John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album. John Lennon dismisses two elements of Christianity, the Bible and Jesus, and five of Eastern traditions, I-Ching, Buddha, mantra, Gita and yoga. But intriguingly Lennon does not reject Islam as an influence. There may well be a simple explanation for this: namely that Vedanta and Zen Buddhism but not Islam were the esoteric traditions of choice for the the 1960s counterculture. But there is another possibl...

Thanks go to those who publicly empathised with yesterdays post about the denouement of black conductor Rudolph Dunbar's career. But the generally muted response to that disturbing tale of discrimination in classical music prompts me to propose an alternative scenario. Let's imagine for a moment that the story was about a woman whose meteoric career trajectory in the post World War II decades took her to conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, and to reach the dizzy height of becoming the first woman to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic. But the story then tells how in the 1980s that woman conductor found the invitations to conduct leading orchestras had mysteriously dried up, and she died a forgotten figure at the end of the decade. Now let's also suppose plausible sources allege that her career was derailed by the machinations of a misogynist at a senior level in the BBC. Now I wager if that alternative scenario had provided my story, Twitter would ha...

It is pleasing that the very talented black cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason 's debut album has been released by Decca and is receiving the full attention of Universal Classics' spin machine . Sheku Kanneh-Mason's career has also received major support from the BBC: he was winner of the 2016 BBC Young Musician competition and has made a well-deserved well-deserved BBC Proms appearance . So it is appropriate to revisit the BBC's role in the career of another very talented black musician. Those header and footer images of Rudolph Dunbar are stills taken from a 1962 film on the RTBF/Belgium website. Guyanese-born Rudolph Dunbar wrote the definitive text book on the clarinet and had a flourishing conducting career in the 1940s. He conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra and in 1945 became the first black conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. But a 2007 Overgrown Path post profiling him explained how in the post-war period Dunbar's high profile career went into mysterious...

A few years ago I had a brush with mortality while travelling. When I felt well enough in hospital to listen to music, the first album I chose from my iPod was Onirica by veteran be-bop pianist René Urtreger , who is seen above. That compulsive choice of music in Perpignan Hospital reflects my very high regard for jazz. On his 1956 Columbia spoken word LP "What Is Jazz?" Leonard Bernstein championed jazz and argued against critics who preached that jazz is loud, has low-class origins, and is therefore not art. Despite this jazz is still a grossly underrated art form. Which is wrong. Because as the African American poet Yusef Komunyakaa explains : "Jazz has space, and space equals freedom. A place where the wheels of imagination can turn and a certain kind of meditation can take place". Header photo from The Blue Moment 's nice appreciation of René Urtreger at 80. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, a...

Last week I caught on Moroccan television one of the most extraordinary music performances I have seen for years. It was Mohammed Al Bakri and an orchestra from Bahrain - where Sharia law is a principal source for legislation - performing Bob Marley's No woman no cry as seen in the photo. Copyright owner Tunes Arabia has blocked embedding of the performance video. But it can be viewed on YouTube via this link ; do watch it all the way through as it becomes progressively more extraordinary. As Ian Whiteman declared in a recent guest contribution: " No big bearded imam was going to tell me music was haram ". Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

After releasing their first album in 1966 the The Incredible String Band split temporarily with Robin Williamson and future band member Licorice McKechnie travelling to Morocco, and Clive Palmer taking the overland trail to Afghanistan and India. Their experiences of unfamiliar cultures with different musics had a major influence on subsequent Incredible String Band albums - particularly The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion seen above - and also on the development of art music. Although the music from this period was incontestably influential, the counter culture that produced it is all too often dismissed as ephemeral and irrelevant. But there is an alternative interpretation that is at least worth consideration. The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion and numerous albums by other bands were the product of a musically fecund period. During this period the slow decline of the old political order signposted by the Suez Crisis in 1956 and Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961,...

Recent time spent with a DAB tuner simply confirmed that BBC Radio 3's presenter-led daytime programming is an embarrassing disaster. But sadly, hiving off the presenters to Classic FM where they belong is no solution. Because Radio 3's flirtation with presenter-less Mixtapes programmes is an even bigger disaster (mixtake?). Just as the station's dumbing down of presenter-led programmes is a futile attempt to recapture the mass audience low ground from Classic FM, so the cringe-inducing Mixtapes are a futile reaction to the very popular Spotify playlists . The same disruptive technologies that disrupted the record industry are now disrupting the broadcast media . But Radio 3 refuses to accept this, and instead insists on a fruitless survival strategy of emulating commercial stations and streaming services. This despite having none of their competitive advantages but having many, many competitive disadvantages. I worked for the BBC and Radio 3 provided much of my music...

Music journalists are, by instinct, more drawn to something that is good to write about than something that is good to listen to. Marshall McLuhan taught that the medium is the message , and in the classical sphere the music itself must always be the primary message. But today's obsessive contextualising means that the context is fast becoming the message. As an example, it goes without saying that much important work still remains to be done to eradicate gender inequalities. But because the feminine narrative is good to write about and rich in click bait , the female context is starting to become the message at the expense of the music. Let's consider a provocative scenario. Funders are pressuring an orchestra manager to deliver better attendances. There is a choice between two conductors of equal calibre. One is male the other female. The manager knows that booking the woman conductor will generate much-needed media coverage, and this in turn will boost audience numbers. W...

Thankfully not everyone is purring in their self-reverential reality tunnel . Later this year the premiere of John Cage's Scottish Circus is being replicated in the hall where it was first performed in September 1990. The replicated first performance is in the Concert Hall at the University of Glasgow on June 1st. Scottish Circus was commissioned by composer and activist Eddie McGuire for his group The Whistlebinkies who will perform it in this year's concert alongside student musicians. The Whistlebinkies have also recorded Scottish Circus together with 4'33' ' for new music advocates Mode Records of New York for future release. Scottish Circus was premiered during the 1990 Musica Nova Festival in Glasgow with John Cage in attendance. The Festival was a celebration of contemporary music presented by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO) under the direction of the visionary and underrated Sir Alexander Gibson . At the time the legendary recording ...

Why is that mechanic at the Marrakesh ePrix wearing protective clothing? Why is another mechanic poised behind him holding a yellow plastic stick with a hook attached to his colleague's derrière ? Have they discovered a swarm of bees in the car? Find the answers is my guest contribution to my brother's Rolling Road blog . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Georg Solti's interpretation of Berlioz's drug-induced episode in the life of an artist in its original LP release provides the graphic for this post because the veteran conductor was in the audience at the UK music industry's 1994 Brit Awards. During their performance that evening the duo Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty of the band The KLF fired blank machine gun rounds at the audience of record industry luminaries as a PA announcement declared "The KLF have left the music industry" - see this video . Solti's unsuccessful attempt to leave the auditorium during their act - he was persuaded back by his Decca minders - was viewed by Drummond and Cauty as the only reaction from an audience member that showed any understanding of what they had done. Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty were heavily influenced by Discordianism . This is a quasi-philosophy based on the now scientifically-supported belief that chaos is as important as order, and it pioneered the conce...

That photo was taken at last weekend's Marrakesh ePrix . I wanted a shot of one of the local youngsters posing in front of the race publicity material. But being only too aware that photographing minors is frowned on - or worse - in England and elsewhere in the West, I was hesitant to ask. But my preconceptions were, once again, wrong. This teenager could not have been more amenable; his cousins all wanted to be photographed as well and there were numerous requests to not only exchange Facebook and Twitter details but also to share phone numbers. When I entered Morocco in November the police looked at the very large number of Moroccan stamps in my passport and asked if I was a drug smuggler or sex tourist, to which I replied 'dream on'. When I left Marrakesh last Sunday a policeman at the airport looked at the multiple stamps and asked if I lived in Morocco. I replied 'No, but I wouldn't mind living here', to which he responded ' In shāʾa llāh ' (...

That photo shows the New York Philharmonic with Lorin Maazel arriving at North Korea's Pyongyang's Sunan International Airport in 2008. Tours by major orchestras are big business, and tours to the Far East and elsewhere are even bigger business. Just to take London orchestras as an example, in 2018 the London Symphony Orchestra tours China, Vietnam and South Korea , the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra tours America , and the London Philharmonic Orchestra has just returned from China . Yes, orchestras need to tour, but the environmental impact cannot be ignored. The car has become the environmental scapegoat while the impact of jet travel is overlooked. Which is wrong, because the aviation industry depends entirely on fossil fuel and consumes a staggering 5m barrels of oil every day; that is 2.5% of total carbon emissions. A plane flying from Europe to the Far East and back generates 4.5 tonnes of carbon , which compares with average per capita emissions globally of around 1 tonn...

Crosby, Stills and Nash's 1969 Marrakesh Express famously sung the praises of "Colored cottons hang in air, Charming cobras in the square, Striped Djellebas we can wear at home" and half a century later that image of Marrakesh as a city agreeably stuck in a touristic time warp remains. Which could not be further from the truth. Yesterday I attended the Marrakesh ePrix at which the accompanying photos were taken. This is an international race for cars that superficially resemble their more familiar Formula One counterparts but which differ radically under the bodywork, because they are 100% electric powered. Formula E, which races in many major cities including Hong Kong, New York and Berlin, is a laudable attempt by motor sport to clean up its environmental credentials. The standard objection that electric cars require fossil fuel to generate their electricity is overcome by using specially commissioned generators that run on glycerine , which is a byproduct of bio-d...

Moody Blues' flautist and vocalist Ray Thomas, whose credits include Legend of A Mind - 'Timothy Leary's dead/No, no, He's outside looking in' - has died aged 76 . A Reading University gig by The Moody Blues in my student days ranks up there with my great music experiences, and there have been more mentions of the band here over the years than of any other rock group. They were a signpost on a musical path which five decades later still enriches and, most importantly, still reveals . Here as a tribute to Ray Thomas is a reprise of an Overgrown Path post. In book Vinyl Adventures from Istanbul to San Francisco lead singer of The Charlatans Tim Burgess recounts how: I've always thought that I was defined by records. Not just ones I've been involved in recording but every one I've ever loved, bought, fallen out of love with or that has soundtracked a particular chapter of my life. They are like punctuation marks. If I need to think back to a...

One of the classical music industry's many paradoxes is that contemporary business practices such as marketing and branding are de rigeur , yet elementary economics are ignored and sometimes even deliberately defied. A recent Overgrown Path post linked the economic concept of the tragedy of the commons - when the result of all members of an interest-based community trying to reap the greatest individual benefit from a shared resource results in the degradation of that shared resource - to the detrimental impact of new technologies such as streaming. While an earlier post pointed out the basic rules of supply and demand mean that the grossly inflated supply of classical music to a market with static or even declining demand is an accident waiting for a place to happen. Another economic law, that of diminishing marginal returns , states that there is a point beyond which the level of benefit gained is less than the amount of additional resource invested. News that the New...

In 2008 my compulsive exploration of music's overgrown paths led me to present the first and almost certainly the only radio broadcast of a Gnawa trance ritual . This project was a collaboration with KamarStudios in Marrakech which had recorded and released commercially the two hour long ‘black’ section of the twelve hour Nights of the Seven Colours lila - trance ritual - with which the Gnawa celebrate the creation of the universe. My overnight broadcast of the black lila was prefaced by an ambient session from two young Marrakechi DJs which mixed electronic trance and more traditional sounds, a session also released as part of the Black Album package. The Gnawa practice a folk Islam containing strong elements of animism and consider themselves descendants of Sidi Bilal , who was the first black person to convert to Islam, a companion of the Prophet and the first muezzin in Islam. The Gnawa identify with Bilal because of his colour, because he was a slave and for his conversio...