Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood Of Breath

Here’s a turn up! Previously lost footage of Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath on French TV in 1973. Fifty years ago!
Lineup includes Dudu Pukwana, Harry Beckett, Elton Dean, Lol Coxhill, Louis Moholo, Harry Miller, Nick Evans, Mark Charig, Radu Malfatti. And Chris McGregor at the piano.

Big thank you to Riccardo Bergerone. Tracks: Do It, Nutcase, Andromeda

Frames of reference

Gate No.84

The date on the photo is 21 August 2022. It was a Sunday. We started out at Gate No.84, Earl’s Path north, and headed down the Green Ride into the forest. It’s a steep hill but always steeper coming back. Continue reading “Gate No.84”

Frames of reference

It Is Not My Music

There’s a celebration of Don Cherry at the Barbican tonight (Don Cherry Tribute). Sadly I can’t go. So I’ll put this video here as a consolation. And today I’ll rummage through my CDs and I’ll shake the Cherrytree. Its fruits have many flavours and taste of many places. According to Richard Williams, “he collapsed the distance between the supposedly primitive and the supposedly sophisticated more effectively than any musician I can think of.”

This film from 1978 is about Don and Moki Cherry and others who lived with them in the school house in Tågarp, Skåne, Sweden, in the 1970s and onwards. It includes sequences from SoHo, New York, and Moki Cherry’s textiles on the walls in Hästveda and Long Island City. With Rashied Ali, James Blood Ulmer, Nana Vasconcelos, Denis Charles, Huss Charles, etc. A film by Urban Lasson.

If you enjoyed this you might also like to see For Don Cherry.

Frames of reference

Perry Wood

It’s a balm of leaf light. Catch it on a good day and you can carry it with you for months. This was mid August, now as I write it’s mid October and I’m housebound, too sick to walk in the woods, so I gaze at these photos and remember how we bathed in the green light of sweet chestnuts, how it washed over us, and Perry Wood is a convalescence of trees. Continue reading “Perry Wood”

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Playing Places

A short immersive documentary that takes you into the woods at spring with artist Cosmo Sheldrake. Working with his own field recordings of the dawn and evening chorus, he talks us through his process of interpreting these sounds into music and playing them back to the places he recorded them. More here – www.cosmosheldrake.com

Frames of reference

The Book Of Vanishing Species

A short film to introduce Beatrice Forshall’s beautiful new book of stories and engravings of species presently threatened with extinction. It also helps explain why we’ve not seen Bea for the past three years – out of reach, head down, focused. She makes small edition, fugitive prints that briefly capture the disappearing life around her. Tender images of the passing world.

Filmed by Temujin Doran of Studio Canoe for Bloomsbury Publishing.

Beatrice Forshall / The Rowley Gallery

Frames of reference

Walking Wallington

We’d just walked up the hill out of the village and were about to turn off the main road to follow the Icknield Way. I’m pointing at the fingerpost, map in hand, but with such a weird posture, as if I don’t really know which way to go at all. This was the summer I discovered sciatica and every footstep was a conscious effort. But walking was so much better than sitting. Continue reading “Walking Wallington”

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A Summer Walk In Epping Forest (3)

There are some great old oak trees at Hollow Pond. Here’s one with a cave in its roots, just fit to crawl into. In my dreams. It was the last day of July and we were on a walk down memory lane. In the early 1980s Sue had an Acme house (Acme Housing Association helped artists find short-life living and studio space in what were essentially licensed squats) on Fillebrook Road in Leytonstone, now under the M11 link road. Continue reading “A Summer Walk In Epping Forest (3)”

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