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Katrina - the musicians' perspective

The Times, November, 2005

What’s the correct emotional response to news that a Category 4 storm is heading toward a city of unique and global cultural consequence? It’s impossible to conceive of a jazz or American music enthusiast anywhere who didn’t experience a kernel of panic as the story of breached levees and catastrophic floods began to emerge. Until August 29 2005, Buddy Bolden’s 1902 clarion call cornet tone - the very first note in a century of jazz and a sound so diamond clear it was said to carry out of New Orleans and across the Louisiana state line - could still just about be heard. Its continued echo wasn’t just down to the way it remains lodged in jazz’s musical DNA, shaping the breaths of jazz trumpeters from Beijing to Brussels. It was absolutely at its most concentrated and valuable in New Orleans, where it continued to simmer in a racial, cultural, architectural stew that hadn’t left the heat in hundreds of years. New Orleans was America’s Vienna.

And then as witness-reports and pictures filtered out - of bloated bodies floating past houses; people, who had had little before, left with nothing; packed hospitals without power or water - it seemed almost obscene, a guilty spoilt indulgence, to be worrying about the romance of streets once trodden by a young Louis Armstrong.

According to Bob Hurwitz, president of Nonesuch Records, there is no correct emotional response to Katrina.

Concrete Proposal

The Financial Times, How To Spend It magazine, November, 2005

Design enthusiast and curator Sarah Gaventa had already written a book about creating the perfect home office when she pitched Concrete Design to a Mitchell Beazley editor. Clearly, this was a tougher proposition. She remembers the response - “a sharp intake of breath”. Her editor made the required leap of faith, but even as Gaventa started writing, others in the office proved harder to convince:

“It turned out to be the only book the accountants knew anything about, because they were convinced it was going to be such a colossal failure.”

This was in 2001. Four years later, something very like a concrete revolution is influencing every strand of contemporary design. The material is being re-evaluated, rehabilitated, reborn and described as exciting, hi-tech and luxurious without so much as a smirk. It can also be extremely expensive. Furthermore, Gaventa’s book is scheduled for a paperback reprint in February. Let the accountants account for that.

Shave Club

The Financial Times, Saturday, October 29, 2005

Back in February 2004 an online satirical magazine called the Onion announced a new five-blade razor system by Gillette. “What part of this don’t you understand?” ran the mock interview. “If two blades is good, and three blades is better, obviously five blades would make us the best xxxxing razor that ever existed.” It would be launched with the slogan... “You’ll be so smooth, I could snort lines off your chin.”

Last month, commerce mimicked comedy and Gillette announced the Fusion - a razor with five blades, due for American distribution next year. The slogan will be a disappointing... “The Future Of Shaving”.

Social Bookmarking

The Financial Times, Saturday, September 24, 2005

As I write, there’s some buzz about a website cataloguing “idea generation techniques”... systems for getting creative. Like 390 other idea-hungry people today, I’ve been intrigued by, and bookmarked, the site. Now I’m curious to discover more about the subject. A single click later I have a whole array of obscure but specialised websites about idea generation, brainstorming, creative thinking, productivity. How did I do this? Google? No way. It wouldn’t have been creative or productive enough. I’ve used a “social bookmarking” website called del.icio.us (pr. delicious).

Del.icio.us and another website called Wists are at the forefront of what the clickerati are already calling Web2.0, a democratisation of the internet driven by a blogging technology that allows us all to not only read what’s online, but also edit, interact with and add to it.

Jazz's perfect hour

The Times, August, 2005

Could an archivist at Washington's US Library of Congress really have casually stumbled across the bebop equivalent of the Rosetta Stone? Sixty minutes of music by a band endlessly talked about but almost entirely unrecorded? The missing link between jazz that was and jazz that is? It's a story almost too good to be true. Except... it’s true.

The band, a quartet led by pianist Thelonious Monk and featuring saxophonist John Coltrane, existed for half of 1957, playing nightly at New York’s Five Spot jazz club. The stories and descriptions of those late night orgies of invention, flights of fancy, long and intricate and thrilling solos have turned the Monk-Coltrane partnership into part jazz myth and part instrument of torture for those of us too young to have heard the group live, because the band was never properly recorded. There were three tracks assembled inside a studio that were brilliant enough to obsess, short enough to frustrate. Out of blue, in 1993, Coltrane’s widow Naima unveiled a home-made tape made inside the Five Spot; and the jazz world stopped turning. Everybody scrambled to (just about) hear the scratchy, no-fi, ghost of a wild night, released by Blue Note. But it was like being allowed to listen to the band only if you promised to push wet sponge into your ears first. The frustration grew.

And then, early this year, an engineer and jazz specialist called Larry Appelbaum, working on a colossal project to digitise the library’s 2.5 million-strong sound archive, turned over a boxed reel bearing a hand-written note: “T. Monk”. It was enough to pique his curiosity. Listening to it was enough to, apparently, make him physically tremble. This was the Monk-Coltrane line-up - not at the Five Spot - but recorded at a one-off Carnegie Hall concert, without chatter, without clinking glasses... a perfect hour of perfect sound.

Yiddish - Alive And Almost Kicking

The Times, June, 2005

Have you ever witnessed a proper blank stare? I hadn’t, until about three years ago when, in answer to a question about the “hieroglyphics” I’d been scribbling in a notebook, I told a friend I was learning Yiddish. I didn’t think it was so strange. I’m half-Jewish. The thousand-year Eastern European culture that left a heritage of literature, poetry, left-leaning political thought and klezmer music is inherently fascinating; and imagine reading Isaac Bashevis Singer in the original. “But,” asked my friend, “why don’t you learn a language that other people can speak too? It might be less... lonely.”

Actually, there are orthodox Jews who speak Yiddish on a daily basis; but he was right. On the eve of the Holocaust there had been 11 million Yiddish speakers; now there are perhaps one million. And its rarity was part of its attraction. I could play a part in the survival of a language all but wiped out. I would be a mixed-race foot soldier, spreading the secular Yiddish word(s). Three years of fragmented and interrupted study on, I realise how late I came to the party. Without any help from me, Yiddish is undergoing a dramatic resurgence of interest.

Who?

As I was saying... I'm a UK-based screenwriter, journalist and broadcaster. Throughout the 1990s I worked first as jazz editor and then a commissioning editor at Time Out magazine, as well as writing for Q magazine, the Independent, the Guardian, the Financial Times, the London Evening Standard and other newspapers and magazines, on music, new media and economics. I've appeared occasionally on Radio 3, presenting segments on the arts magazine show Nightwaves, jazz features in the late night Jazz on 3 slot, and Jazz File on Saturday afternoons.

I left Time Out in 1999 to write a screenplay. Since then I've written film scripts for Film Four, Litmus Films and Momentum Pictures, an episode of TEACHERS for Channel 4, some children's TV for CBBC and an episode of WATERLOO ROAD, for the BBC. I'm currently writing for popular UK soap, EMMERDALE. I'm represented by Joe Phillips at Curtis Brown.