For Moral Absolutists Only? Maybe

  It was the afternoon of Saturday, 16 February 1980, a day I'll remember for the rest of my life, when I travelled to the old Bridge Street Library in the heart of the old Gorbals, in Glasgow, to listen to Escalator Over The Hill . The work had intermittently crossed my radar but I had not actually listened to it and knew of Carla Bley largely by reputation only. Because I lived in Uddingston at the time I was only allowed to borrow books and music from Lanarkshire county libraries, but because my father worked in Glasgow I managed to get a pass to read books and listen to music in Glasgow libraries, even though I couldn't take them out. So it was that I listened, on library headphones, to all six sides of Escalator . Shortly beforehand I had dreamed the entire record and was now naturally very keen to listen to the thing itself. I was utterly transported, and transformed. I left that library in a daze, wandered around various, mostly disused areas of Clydeside. It was as if

I have written a 117,156-word book entitled Uncorrected Bound Proof . I commenced writing it on 1 January 2023 and finished editing it today. The book consists of 100 chapters, each based on a song in my personal Your Top Songs 2022 algorithmic Spotify playlist, in ascending order from numbers 100-1. The book’s purpose is to tell the story of my not uneventful life, but I have done so in accordance with the strict numbering order of the playlist. This means that the events of my life are told out of sequence; however, I have ensured that the central autobiographical narrative has remained united and coherent.   While this is a book dictated by music, and which in large part consists of musical criticism, it is, however, not a book about music. It ventures with moderate violence against the grain of what is normally perceived as music writing. It mixes autobiography, criticism and semi-abstract thinking in ways which have not previously been attempted in this field. Its influence

Since September of last year I have been using Spotify as my primary means of listening to music. For years I didn't go near the programme because for obscure technical reasons it was not on speaking terms with Microsoft. But that contretemps got sorted out and I caved in. The experience was glorious, like all Christmases coming at once. That album you've been fruitlessly trying to find on CD with online auction prices guaranteed to send a chill down the back of your bank manager? Why, it's here! Records or songs which you weren't quite sufficiently sure enough to want to purchase? Ones you read about in the papers, or in magazines, or online, from critics or peers? Albums available on download only? A simple matter to go to Spotify, give the records a listen and make up your own mind about whether you want to explore or invest that music further. It set off a stream of liberation through my arteries, the likes of which I haven't quite felt since my teenage days 40-

    I knew from an early age that this was a sine qua non in jazz. A large-ish group of players, many of whom I had already heard individually and found to be, in varying degrees, intimidating, if not actively terrifying. This was supposed to be the big blowout, the freeform frenzy to finalise it all. But in late seventies Glasgow, at a time when jazz was beyond question the least fashionable and marketable form of music, the record, in common with most of the important post-war jazz records, was impossible to find - even A Love Supreme remained out of print until 1979. Jazz Journal was an irritating entity at the best of times but did have its uses in that it carried advertisements for specialist record shops, mainly in London. I was particularly taken by Dave Carey's Swing Shop, opposite St Leonard's Church in Streatham; even though I never ordered anything from it, there was a sweetly sour romanticism about the concept of a place like Streatham, and when I eventually pass

There's nothing like spending a Bank Holiday relatively quietly at home, not switching on the television, iPlayer or radio, staying well away from social media and catching up with some quality music listening. I'd recommend it to anybody. We ourselves should do it more often. Well, that is indeed what we did two days ago (19 September 2022 for the benefit of anyone who finds this piece via random Googling circa Christmas 2025) and here's a brief summary of what we listened to. CHARLES STEPNEY: Step On Step An emotional photograph, that cover. From my perspective it could be my father at some stage in the sixties or seventies. More emotional is the rear cover with the track listing which displays the same photograph minus the gentleman standing in its centre. Charles Stepney was a genius. Not a competent craftsperson, but a genially mould-broaching genius. His art expanded orchestral maximalism perhaps to one good extreme - in one of the many reminiscing conversations whic