Aug 11: Getting my Second Wind

Another album from Pierre Moerlen's Gong. I had these on vinyl and they are not so easy to come by now. More bass wonder from Hansford Rowe. 

Jul 24: Pat Metheny at the Barbican

I think Pat Metheny may be getting close to being the artist I've seen play live the most. At one point it was probably It Bites, or Whippersnapper or Jethro Tull... all of whom were in double digits. I first saw Pat play live on the First Circle tour which was on May 4th 1985 at the Manchester Apollo - one of only 2 dates that year.

I've seen Pat play live in various different circumstances:

- with the Pat Metheny Group - including the late Lyle Mays and Steve Rodby, along with varying combinations of musicians

- as a Trio, with various musicians, including Antonio Sanchez

- Solo (including a superb concert at the Barbican 

- with the Orchestrion: an automated 

On Sunday, I headed down to the Barbican to see the latest tour with Side Eye 3+

Set List

Opening drum intro - in 'First Circle style'... although that involved a wider range of instruments...

In On It

Bright Size Life

Don’t Look Down

Better Days Ahead

Make a New World

The First Circle

Band introduction

Urban and Western

The Red One - (a John Scofield & Pat Metheny song)

Más allá (Beyond)

Phase Dance

Round Trip / Round Trip / Broadway Blues

Zenith Blue

America The Beautiful / The People United Will Never Be Defeated / Last Train Home

Are You Going With Me?

Minuano (Six Eight), Antonia, James, September Fifteenth, This Is Not America

Song for Bilbao

Here's a live performance from a Paris concert...

Jul 4: 1976

1976 saw the arrival of another few classic albums. Blondie was in the charts a lot at the time - I was in Secondary school by now... and a half century has passed since... 

Genesis released 'A Trick of the Tail', another album since Peter Gabriel's departure.

Perhaps the best album released this year is now a classic, but I didn't encounter it for another 20 years at least....

2026 is the 50th anniversary of its release.

Bright Size Life is the name of the album: a trio recording, and the debut for Pat Metheny - at the age of just 21.

The album features Pat Metheny of course, plus Jaco Pastorius on bass and Bob Moses on drums. It was released by ECM Records. Details are here.

Here's the title track:

Meanwhile, there was another album which kick started a long career. This time in electronic music.

Jean Michel Jarre released 'Oxygene': a classic.

Rush released 2112, which really sent their career into overdrive too... I remember listening to this album when still at school, so that must have been a few years after it was released....

The summer of 1976 saw the heatwave which is still referred to to this day.

I remember it well.

I am currently reading this book, which is a social and cultural history of the months from May to July of 1976. 

One of the sections is about music.

I was also pleased to see that when I opened the book, a Spotify playlist had been created for it.

What are your favourite albums from 1976 with its long hot summer?

Jul 2: Abdullah Ibrahim RIP

Back in April I posted about the South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim / Dollar Brand.

I was sorry to notice an obituary for him in yesterday's issue of the i newspaper, and that he passed on June the 15th.

I saw him play a concert in Sheffield.

I don't think it was at the Leadmill from memory, although I know that he did play there.

It must have been in the early to mid 1980s as I remember having to get a lift home, so I hadn't learned to drive yet...

This website suggests he played the Crucible Theatre in 1981-ish with his Quartet.... not sure it was there either. Although I did see the late John Martyn there in a memorable concert.

Here's a track from the late 1970s... full of the energy I remember from seeing him play live. His later albums were more reflective.

Here's a Guardian obituary for him.

His music played a part in the freedom struggle in South Africa. His tune Mannenberg, recorded during a return visit in 1974, became an anthem of the movement, its title referring to a Cape Flats township created under the Group Areas Act to house black South African people evicted when Cape Town’s District Six was designated a whites-only area.
After the Soweto uprising of 1976 he left South Africa again, declaring his support for the African National Congress. Nelson Mandela was said to have described him as “our Mozart”.

Here's Mannenberg with some shots of Robben Island when he visited.

June 26: America the Beautiful

Pat Metheny has released an unexpected digital only single today... I'm seeing him in a few months' time on his latest Side Eye tour, having seen the previous two of these.

Jun 25: A song you like by an artist no longer living

OK... so we have lost a great many wonderful musicians and each year brings more at my age.

I shall go here for a song by Joe Zawinul, from the 1985 album 'Sportin' Life'.

Joe Zawinul was the keyboard player and arranger of a lot of Weather Report's music.

This also features Wayne Shorter and Omar Hakim, both of whom I heard playing live.

Joe Zawinul – keyboards
Wayne Shorter – saxophones
Omar Hakim – drums, background vocals
Victor Bailey – bass, background vocals
Mino Cinélu – percussion, lead vocals and acoustic guitar

Joe, Wayne and Victor are all sadly no longer with us.

This song is Confians. I love how it builds...

The song has also been recorded by Mino Cinelu: the percusionist on the track, and his version is also worth seeking out.

And the band name is geographical of course...

May 26: Miles Davis - centenary of his birth

Miles Davis was born on the 26th of May 1926.

This was the first album I heard him playing on.

There were also some classic albums featuring other jazz musicians, and also Tutu (1986) where he reinvented himself with Marcus Miller in a tribute to Desmond Tutu.

Which era of Miles is your favourite?

May 25: Guest Blogger Carl Lee #16: Cuba: The music never stops.

The latest in a series of guest posts from Carl Lee.

Carl wrote this post several weeks ago, and the situation in the country is now deteriorating due to a lack of energy reaching the country due to US sanctions yet again interfering with another country.

Cuba: The music never stops.

Watching the strangling of Cuba by the United States of America and the subsequent disintegration of key elements of the country: assailed by nationwide power outrages, food shortages, crumbling infrastructure and patients dying in hospitals starved of drugs and power is heart breaking. This is a nation that attempted to forge its own unique developmental path and found itself in the political and economic cross hairs of its global super power neighbour who already had ‘1898’ form in regime change on the Caribbean island. 

It still startles me that once, from 1762-63, Cuba was part of the British Empire, until it swapped back to it’s original colonial oppressor, Spain, in exchange for Florida. 

Don’t anybody tell Donald Trump.

It is over two decades since I visited Cuba and I still reflect on the depth and diversity of music that I encountered there from the cool piano jazz of tourist hotels, driving rhythms in an Havana bar where folk swapped instruments in a joyful celebration of talent and soul, and the incomparable Le Casa de la Trova in the heart of Trinidad where the band and dancing were like something out of a film set: think ‘Sinners’, but under a Caribbean blanket of stars and no vampires. 

You want an idea of that Cuba; down at heel but joyous, inter-generational, spontaneous, cultural and cool, very cool, then Daymé Arocena, the young Afro-Cuban jazz singer from Havana pretty much captures it for me.

 

So much music of such variety has sprung out of Cuba over the years that it is hard to know where to begin but colonialism is as good a place to start as any, because it was the combination of predominantly Spanish colonialists and the rhythms of the African slaves that are the two key elements that remain even today. 

The guitar, violins, piano and melody that were bought by the Spanish colliding with polyrhythmic percussion of Africa are at the core of the multitude of musical styles that Cuba has forged. 

The early fusions of this hybridity are still kept alive by groups such as Santiago de Cuba’s Chagui de la Maya with the call and response vocals reminiscent of songs sung by slaves as they toiled in sugar cane plantations.

 


Yet for all of Cuba’s deep historical musical roots it is also something the Cuban government invests a lot of resource and time in. It has invested in developing music education in schools - with music given equal standing to academic subjects and starting at a young age. This can involve up to eight hours a week over the full twelve years of formal education .

This education focuses on classical music as well traditional Cuba music. 

More gifted students are directed towards specialist schools as the video below shows.

Check out the gifted Gavilan twins:

Classical music is the starting point on the Cuban school music curriculum but then the multitude of Cuban musical styles starts to be explored: bolero, songo, guarancha, danzon, mambo, bata, son, guajira, rumba, pilon and tova. And that is just a selection. 

A personal favourite style of mine is Afro-Cuban jazz and currently one of the hottest acts are teenage young brothers Fabio and Diego Abreu whose talent is breath-taking and covers everything from mambo to old school jazz classics such as Duke Ellington’s ‘Take the A Train’ of which this superlative version is thoroughly ‘Cubanified’.

Of course Cuban musicians don’t just stay in Cuba. 

They break out periodically into the wider global musical consciousness. 

Perhaps most notable has been the Bueno Vista Social Club and their global hit ‘Chan Chan’, which has now become a standard in every tourist hotel in Havana as well as remixed and repackage across the World. And then there is even Cuban hip hop which I first discovered in 1998 when stumbling upon a car parked up on the beach in Trinidad with hip hop blasting out of the CD player whilst a crowd gathered around cracking beers and throwing down moves as the sea shimmered against the white sand and the sun beat down. 

A dictatorial communist regime it most certainly did not feel like in that moment, and to be fair it rarely did anywhere. Poor, yes, virtually no advertising and certainly ‘down at heel’ but surprisingly upbeat and super friendly. This was in the time of Fidel Castro: El Presidente. Orishas were perhaps the only hip hop act that translated outside of Cuba and they relocated to France where there sound seemed to resonate more than in the UK.

Yet as observed at the start, these are very troubled times for Cuba. The romance of Castro’s revolution and an alternative path to development, once under-pinned by education, health, art and music is unravelling. Investment is non-existent and a diaspora focused in Florida is circling ready to pick at the bones of the revolutionary dream as every institution of the state appears to be reeling. 

Yet even under these disintegrating conditions music survives. 

As the Irish percussionist and musicologist Ruaairi Glasheen observed in a recent visit to Cuba in February 2026 the drum “meant power, it meant resistance, the drum meant revolution and despite the hardship many in Cuba continue to face today these rhythms persist against all odds”. 

The music never stops.

Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.

Let's hope the music never stops.

Feb 18: Q is for Queen

An A-Z of bands through February suggested by Spotify when I type in each letter of the alphabet into the search...

So Spotify suggested Queen for 'Q'.

I've not really played a lot of Queen on Spotify, but it's one of the Q bands that will pop up when people search.

I certainly played a lot of it when I was younger, and I remember buying Queen 'Live Killers' album from Woolworths - a double LP, which I played a lot... 

I also bought the single for 'Bicycle Race' from the album Jazz... which I think was partly because of the design of the cover... the 'B' side was Fat Bottomed Girls.

I also remember this song coming out when I was at Primary school.

Some years ago, when I still did a lot of climbing, I was able to climb the Cioch on the Isle of Skye.

This is a dramatic spot: half way up a cliff which is hundreds of metres high.

It features in the film 'Highlander', the soundtrack to which had several songs by Queen.

Some details are here.

Of course, the iconic performance by Queen was as part of Live Aid (more on that to come when we get close to the anniversary of the event)....

All together... 'Daaay oh!"

Partial Queen Discography - AI generated.

What are your favourite Queen songs?

And would anyone have a different 'Q' band? 

Jan 19: Record Labels #1: ECM

The first of a series of posts featuring some record labels which champion music from global artists.

The record label which I perhaps have more of than any other in my collection is ECM.

ECM was founded by Manfred Eicher.

The covers of ECM music are always works of art.

This Substack article showcases some.

I have a great many ECM records in my collection. 

Here's five of my favourites, although ask me again tomorrow and I'll choose a different five:

1. 'Twelve Moons' - Jan Garbarek Group (1993)

2. Pat Metheny - 'Bright Size Life' (1976)

3. Keith Jarrett - 'Köln Concert (1975)

4. Anouar Brahem - 'Le pas du cat noir' (2002)

5. Ale Moller and Lena Willemark - 'Nordan' (1994)

Some of these will have their moment on the blog as well....

Here's the opening track from one of the albums, the wonderful 'Twelve Moons' - played live. I saw this band and this track performed live.

We also had sad news yesterday of the passing of an artist who has recorded many times with ECM: the virtuoso guitarist and pianist Ralph Towner. A real multi-instrumentalist.