Musical and geographical offerings from GeoBlogs: a 365 blog project for 2026.
Mountain Dance is a piece by Dave Grusin.
Here's a Sunday morning treat for you apropos of nothing....
Ralph Towner and Gary Burton playing 'Icarus' from the album 'Matchbook'
2019 saw some interesting albums released. Spotify Wrapped produced a summary of the year - always some tracks in there which make no sense.
IQ released 'Resistance'. This has some good tracks in typical IQ style - they have a very particular way of building their tracks, with the distinctive voice of Peter Nicholls.
There are now 70 episodes of the ECM Podcast, which shares news of acts on the roster of this record label, which has helped determine my musical taste over the decades.
I have it on DVD - this particular edition...
Written by Alan Plater and broadcast between 1984 and 1988.
It starred James Bolam and Barbara Flynn, along with Dudley Sutton, Colin Blakely and many other character actors who were all excellent.
The story was set in Leeds, and the two main characters are teachers at a run-down comprehensive school, where they are not popular with the Headteacher and also come to the attention of the local police force. There were three series, each with their own delights and great performances, and lots of lines which have stuck with me and became catchphrases we would use e.g. "The switch marked switch".
I have a copy of the book by Alan Plater, and it's very readable. I also like the first line of the book, set in a school "It was the best of term, it was the worst of terms..."
Frank Ricotti is one of the jazz musicians who helped put the soundtrack together. Ricotti won a BAFTA award for his work on The Beiderbecke Connection.
Bix Beiderbecke was a real jazz musician. He played the cornet and piano.
Anyone else out there who's seen this series?
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 ListPat Metheny Group released 'We Live Here'.
This is one of their best albums. The inner sleeve featured photographs and maps and other material describing the places where the band members grew up and live. There are lots of maps on the front cover too.
It won a Grammy.
I saw the band on their tour to support this album.
A good analysis of the album here from Sputnik Music.
Jethro Tull released 'Roots to Branches'. This album has some very nice pieces. Here's 'Beside Myself'.
What are your favourite albums from 1995?
That's the title of the latest album from Nils Petter Molvaer. Listen to it on Bandcamp.
Each track is produced in association with another musician.
One is with the late Marilyn Mazur
All of the tracks are named after places.
1 - Bangkok (Chang Jing)Another (much earlier) classic track by Nils Petter Molvaer is called On Stream.
It's taken from his album 'Khmer'.
It captures the band that toured with Joni Mitchell in 1979.
Another band with a geographical name: an American state. Oregon were on a tour of the UK, which is rare. St. Andrews Hall is an intimate venue - it's been closed for some time for renovations which have just about finished. This was Oregon's 20th anniversary.
I've seen Jan Garbarek play there from the front row, which was epic, and here I was down the front again for this one as the seats were unreserved and not many were sold - as you can see I was ticket #53.
On the left of the stage was the epically talented guitarist and pianist Ralph Towner. He recorded for ECM for years and produced some classic albums - it was a privilege to have seen him play live, and he sadly passed away at the start of the year.
Paul McCandless released a few wonderful albums, one of which I have on CD - he was on reeds. Glen Moore played bass and on percussion was a young(ish) Trilok Gurtu.
More on him elsewhere on the blog. He was replacing Colin Walcott - one of the co-founders.
So it was over 35 years ago, and only £6 - what a bargain. The audience was quite small.
Three days earlier they'd played the much larger Queen Elizabeth Hall, in London and the setlist was as follows:
JunebugI remember them playing Wichi-Tai-To (a track later recorded by Jan too) and Silence of a Candle which was also recorded by the Paul Winter Consort. I also remember a Ralph Towner solo piece on guitar.
Here's 'Silence of a Candle':
And here's the Paul McCandless track that stands out for me.
Eberhard Weber is a German bassist. He has sadly retired from playing following a heart attack which happened in April 2007.
He played with a great many of my favourite musicians.
The first time I saw him I was completely blown away by his style and sound. This was a concert with the Jan Garbarek Group performing 'Molde Canticle' from 'I took up the Runes' at the Cambridge Corn Exchange.
More on that to come in a few days' time...
Portrait by Gert Chesi - Shared under CC license
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eberhard_Weber#/media/File:Eberhard_Weber_-_Portrait_by_Gert_Chesi.jpg
I then saw him around a half dozen other times with the Jan Garbarek Group, including a concert at the St. Andrews Hall in Norwich, where I had front row seats.
One night in Norwich I also went to see him play a solo concert at the Norwich Arts Centre. He said quite a bit between the music that he played expressing thanks and surprise that people would come out to watch him "playing with himself".
This was a reference to the echo and delay unit that he used to layer up sounds and create some wonderful effects and tunes.
He started out working with other musicians, and recorded several solo albums too.
He also played with the Colours Quartet and recorded several albums, which had Lyle Mays as one of the players too.
Here's an early performance.
A tribute concert was held in Stuttgart in 2015.
It was released as an ECM album called 'Hommage a Eberhard Weber' - I have a copy of that album.
Musicians playing were: Gary Burton, Pat Metheny, Scott Colley, Danny Gottlieb, SWR Big Band, Helge Sunde.
Weber's latest albums, Résumé (2012) and Encore (2015) comprise solos from his performances worldwide with The Jan Garbarek Group, overdubbed with keyboards/treatments by Weber, saxophone by Garbarek, and flügelhorn by Ack Van Rooyen.This included a long piece which was written by Pat Metheny.
This was recorded with musicians in front of a screen which showed some of his solo work.
One of the final pieces of music that the late Lyle Mays (who will be remembered in due course in a post on the blog) recorded is called 'Eberhard' and is a tribute to him.
Seek out some of his work with Jan Garbarek.
Finally, it's also worth saying that he also worked with Kate Bush.
A REDDIT post tells the story by sharing images of books.
He talks about the experience in an interview:
She called me once when I was in Hamburg. I couldn’t even believe it was her. The hotel had a message from Kate Bush and I called her back. She told me she loved ECM music in general and my music in particular. She wanted me to participate in one of her albums. She sent me a tape of the two tracks she wanted me to play on and asked me to think about countermelodies. So I did that and flew to London where she lived. I thought it would be like the jazz people I work with and that within two hours, the first tune is done and within another hour, the second tune is done.
New Orleans, Louisiana.
Three months after.
Antoine Baptiste is running to catch up a second line band in the Tremé, trombone in hand. He has got himself a gig standing in for Trombone Shorty. When he arrives after explaining himself to the band he hollers “play it for the money boys, play it for the money” and they break out into ‘Feel like funking it up’.
And so opens Treme the HBO drama that premiered in April 2010 - not quite five years since Hurricane Katrina hit the city of New Orleans resulting in destruction and the loss of over one thousand lives.
The Tremé, the oldest African American neighbourhood in the USA, and is just north of the famous French Quarter, and it took the full force of Hurricane Katrina but survived serious flooding because it is on higher ground. Treme the television drama is the story of how the residents of the Tremé tried to rebuild their lives three months after America’s most destructive hurricane to date.
Treme spans four series and 36 episodes and if you have never watched it you are in for a real treat; it is American drama at its absolute best. Not that should be surprising given that it was created by David Simon and Eric Overmyer who were also responsible for ‘The Wire’, a series often cited as the best American television drama ever created. It had pedigree.
Here's that opening scene.
Treme is as much about a place as it is the people that live in that place and call it home.
It was in the Tremé that free people of colour first lived in American and as Wendell Pierce, who plays Antoine Baptiste, explains, “In Tremé captured Africans could listen to the music of European brass bands and they combined those two sounds into jazz. Um pah pah turned into um…pah a douba douba douba boom boom yeah”.
So the Tremé, a working-class inner suburb of New Orleans, was effectively the birthplace of jazz and unsurprisingly it seeped into the cultural soul of the place.
Nowhere is that more clearly expressed than in the tradition of the second line.
Here at death there is no greater honour at your funeral than to have, after the close family - the first line, friends and neighbours who with a jazz band make up the second line. To the cemetery a dirge is mournfully played but on departure - post the funeral - the band, driven by the drum, kicks up party style, literally funking it up. The cost of the second line was met by the social and pleasure clubs that glued together the working communities of the Tremé.
Although Hurricane Katrina certainly dealt a blow to the Tremé, that was not the event that has been most damaging to this unique culture and community.
That has been urban renewal and the changing demographics of the resident population, partly as a result of gentrification.
In the 2000 Census, 93% of the population of Tremé was Black. By 2020 it was just 58%.
The old working class culture of Tremé, the neighbourhood bars and Black owned business have now been subsumed by fancy coffee houses and packaged ‘jazz and blues’ experiences all projecting a perceived and sanitised ‘authenticity’. The old communities that had developed unique musical and cultural traditions such as the Mardi Gras Indians are increasingly difficult to sustain as long standing member sell up and move out, or are moved on by the city authorities as a response to redevelopment or they have simply aged and died.
In 2010, HBO's Treme captured the freewheelin’ bohemian ‘pioneer’ gentrifiers of the Tremé: the chi- chi gumbo restaurants, the French Quarter clubs and the new wealthy residents and older moneyed dynasties - but also there were the itinerant drug-dependent musicians, the casual street gun crime and the brutality of the city's policing especially during the Hurricane Katrina crisis. It is a moment in time in a place.
Echoes of this culture and sound undoubtedly remain, and New Orleans retains its reputation for the birth-place of Black American music, whether jazz or blues, while Mardi Gras still attracts tens of thousands of people from all over the World.
However, you can save yourself the air-fare, the handing over of your DNA and social media history to the US border control or run the risk of ICE picking you and deporting you, by finding 36 hours to binge watch Treme.
References and reading.
Wendell Pirece’s New Orleans - a tour of the neighbourhood thanks to 'The Guardian'
Tremé Neighbourhood Civil Rights Trail
Tremé: Death of a neighborhood, survival of a culture
Black Masking Indians: A historical New Orleans Carnival tradition
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.
An alphabet of bands and artists as a series for the last 26 days. These were selected by the Spotify algorithm. This is the final feature... and comes with a parental advisory.
Frank Zappa rounds off the A-Z.... I often use Zappa quotes for my geography presentations - either to start them off, or to finish them off...
Here's one...
Zappa was a real musical maverick. He recorded well over a hundred albums, and was constantly recording, rehearsing and sharing his philosophy to a wide range of audiences.
As his Wikipedia entry says:
"His work, which predominantly features electric guitar work, is characterised by nonconformity, improvisation, sound experimentation, musical virtuosity and satire of American culture".... plus lots of smut...I have quite a few favourite albums - he recorded so many - but they are often NSFW, with scatalogical, misogynistic or sexual interludes... which were a big part of his live concerts as well... He went through various phases, with improvisation, jazz and then rock, with a phase working with George Duke, and violinists including Jean Luc Ponty and Eddie Jobson (him again).
Check out instrumentals such as 'RDNZL' for example from his jazz phase.
If you want to know more about him, this Medium post is a useful introduction.
He was a countercultural icon, a pioneer in progressive rock and jazz rock, one of the greatest guitarists ever to grace the Earth, an often-controversial lyrical provocateur, and arguably the finest composer of his generation. He was also almost supernaturally prolific.
He often broke the barriers of polite society (and strained the barriers of good taste) in his earlier material, but starting with Sheik Yerbouti, Frank Zappa was writing lyrics deliberately meant to offend just about everyone.
So you have been warned...
I listened to these a great deal over 40 years ago as a student in Huddersfield with the Bent Street gang...
There were some key albums which came out in the late 1970s and which we then listened to just a few years after they came out. These were also recorded with virtuoso musicians who Zappa drilled for hour after hour to get their playing just right, so that it sounded spontaneous.
Joe's Garage, Acts I, II and III
Tinseltown Rebellion
You are what you is
There are so many classic riffs and lyrics here, but caution is needed...
To finish, here's his version of Led Zeppelin's 'Stairway to Heaven' from an album of his which I have called 'The Best Band you never heard in your Life'. It's one of the few tracks I could safely include... the brass version of the famous guitar solo is a highlight...
One of the greatest albums of all time, and still the bestselling solo jazz album – and the bestselling solo piano album – of all time, selling more than 4 million copies to date - I have one of them.
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.
