TWTWETW

I think I might have to find stronger hay fever tablets. I am beginning to suffer the summers in the way I never used to and I am fed up with feeling ever-so-slightly short of breath when I go outside for any length of time (though I accept that being a Lardy Boy doesn’t help in this connection).

Having got through the weekend, I find that I really could do with another one immediately to get over it. We seemed to have very little time to ourselves; though you shouldn’t construe this as meaning that it was a bad weekend by any means: merely a busy one.
( Quite a long entry hidden here )

It remains only for me to observe by way of non sequitur that Sontarans are clearly well-bred and better-mannered Klingons.

TWTWETW

I think I might have to find stronger hay fever tablets. I am beginning to suffer the summers in the way I never used to and I am fed up with feeling ever-so-slightly short of breath when I go outside for any length of time (though I accept that being a Lardy Boy doesn’t help in this connection).

Having got through the weekend, I find that I really could do with another one immediately to get over it. We seemed to have very little time to ourselves; though you shouldn’t construe this as meaning that it was a bad weekend by any means: merely a busy one.
( Quite a long entry hidden here )

It remains only for me to observe by way of non sequitur that Sontarans are clearly well-bred and better-mannered Klingons.

A blues legend… as you’ve never heard him before

There’s an article in today’s Times - more precisely in the Times 2 section of the paper that one or two of my friends may find interesting. I am thinking particularly of (in no particular order) telemeister, fractalgeek, rumfuddle, jimfer and possibly keresaspa. I have rooted around on the Times Online website and can’t find the article there to link to, so I am typing a précis of it here. If you disagree with the text, remember that I am only reproducing the salient parts of the article; they’re not my words, but this sounds very interesting to me.

A blues legend… as you’ve never heard him before John Clarke

Robert Johnson is widely considered the greatest of all the prewar blues singers. Before he died at the age of 27 in 1938 … he had cut tracks such as Kind Hearted Woman Blues, Ramblin’ on my Mind, Love in Vain and Hellbound on my Trail, which, through countless reissues, have gone on to influence a whiole generation of rock stars including Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards…

Yet now it appears that none of us is hearing Johnson the way he actually sounded. Blues fans in Japan apparently think Johnson’s recordings are playing too fast. Slow down the recordings by 20% and … you hear the music transformed, “a man whose words are not half-swallowed, garbled or strangled, but clearly delivered, beautifully modulated; whose performances are not fleeting, harried or fragmented, but paced with a sense of space and drama that drew an audience in until people wept as they stood in the street around him”.

If we are to accept this claim, then every one of Johnson’s 12 78rpm records and all of the reissues since have been giving us a distorted view of the man Clapton claims was the world’s greatest blues singer.

…several other 78s recorded in the 1930s have been slowed down … to obtain the correct pitch at which they were cut.

But for blues fans brought up with the Johnson records, this is almost heresy. Why didn’t any of the musicians who knew Johnson … ever mention it, and why should every one of (his) records … have been speeded up?

Samples of the music slowed down can be found here: www.touched.co.uk/press/rjnote.html and you can buy a CD of 24 reduced-speed Johnson tracks.

A blues legend… as you’ve never heard him before

There’s an article in today’s Times - more precisely in the Times 2 section of the paper that one or two of my friends may find interesting. I am thinking particularly of (in no particular order) telemeister, fractalgeek, rumfuddle, jimfer and possibly keresaspa. I have rooted around on the Times Online website and can’t find the article there to link to, so I am typing a précis of it here. If you disagree with the text, remember that I am only reproducing the salient parts of the article; they’re not my words, but this sounds very interesting to me.

A blues legend… as you’ve never heard him before John Clarke

Robert Johnson is widely considered the greatest of all the prewar blues singers. Before he died at the age of 27 in 1938 … he had cut tracks such as Kind Hearted Woman Blues, Ramblin’ on my Mind, Love in Vain and Hellbound on my Trail, which, through countless reissues, have gone on to influence a whiole generation of rock stars including Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards…

Yet now it appears that none of us is hearing Johnson the way he actually sounded. Blues fans in Japan apparently think Johnson’s recordings are playing too fast. Slow down the recordings by 20% and … you hear the music transformed, “a man whose words are not half-swallowed, garbled or strangled, but clearly delivered, beautifully modulated; whose performances are not fleeting, harried or fragmented, but paced with a sense of space and drama that drew an audience in until people wept as they stood in the street around him”.

If we are to accept this claim, then every one of Johnson’s 12 78rpm records and all of the reissues since have been giving us a distorted view of the man Clapton claims was the world’s greatest blues singer.

…several other 78s recorded in the 1930s have been slowed down … to obtain the correct pitch at which they were cut.

But for blues fans brought up with the Johnson records, this is almost heresy. Why didn’t any of the musicians who knew Johnson … ever mention it, and why should every one of (his) records … have been speeded up?

Samples of the music slowed down can be found here: www.touched.co.uk/press/rjnote.html and you can buy a CD of 24 reduced-speed Johnson tracks.