Fascination: Derek Bailey - January 2007 January 1st, 2007

I have about 150 albums by Derek Bailey. I first heard of him in 1995. I think, quietly, his music changed my life. By 1966, the 36 year old one-time session musician had abandoned tunes altogether to invent a totally new language for the guitar. Derek’s music was based entirely on improvisation and operated outside…

Sunny Murray - December 2006 The Wire Magazine - December 1st, 2006

It was hard to say exactly when the veteran free-jazz drummer Sunny Murray’s performance in the back room of this outwardly unassuming Finsbury Park Working Men’s club began. Murray’s current collaborators, the British duo of bassist John Edwards and saxophonist Tony Bevan, were nowhere to be seen when he sauntered on stage to make final…

Lucinda Williams, Live - November 2006 The Sunday Times - November 12th, 2006

Lucinda Williams is one of the finest living exponents of the well made song, making sceptics into country rock apologists, and her uncommonly lean and literate lyrics inevitably inspire speculation on the influence of her father, the poet Miller Williams. Now in her mid-50’s, Williams is a sand-blasted frontierswomen, her voice coarsened into richer colours.…

The Buff Medways - November 2006 The Sunday Times - November 5th, 2006

The Dirty Water Club, housed in a function room above a North London pub, hosts weekly live performances by musical recidivists wielding fuzzy guitars and familiar 60’s riffs. Billy Childish, whose current band The Buff Medways played their final show there to a sell-out house, is the scene’s spiritual king. During his three decade career,…

Evan Parker – My Favourite Londoner - November 2006 Time Out - November 1st, 2006

When I am stationed abroad as a stand-up, in New York, Montreal or Melbourne, I spend hours searching for venues showcasing the kind of sounds that are right here on my doorstep all along. London, and specifically North London, is the best place for free-improvised music in the world, and the saxophonist Evan Parker is…

Albert Ayler - October 2006 The Sunday Times - By Stewart Lee - October 8th, 2006

Albert Ayler’s body was retrieved from the East River in Brooklyn on the 25th of November, 1970, a few months after his 34th birthday. The saxophonist grew up in Cleveland, left to find work as a musician playing in restaurants in Sweden in 1962, and returned to New York, changed and inspired, to take the…