The last of the handful of gigs I went to recently was the Neil Cowley Trio, another in the cellar that is the Jazz Bar.

I saw the trio play eighteen months ago in London, supporting another band, and I’d been impressed, so when I saw they were playing in Edinburgh as part of the Triptych Festival - spread over the cities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen (I am never sure if they intend one to venture all over the place, racing from Aberdeen to Glasgow and back to Edinburgh, or just attend events in one’s home city) – I made sure to catch them.

A jazz power trio – their latest CD is called “Loud Louder Stop”, apparently after something an unfavourable reviewer wrote about their first album – Cowley’s music is somewhat riff-heavy, and occasionally formulaic; but it is also engaging and exciting, and they make a really good sound together.

Evan Jenkins on drums is steady, pushing the band forward – more rock than jazz (not many dotted triplets there!) – and freeing up bass player Richard Sadler to play more melody.

This was a really enjoyable gig; Cowley comes across as a really nice guy – he has a good line in London-patter – and the band held the audience enthralled.

Another gig in Edinburgh: this time Colin Steele and Brian Kellock with the house band at the Jazz Bar.

I had noticed trumpeter Steele concentrating hard on Enrico Rava’s playing earlier in the week. In the subterranean dive of the Jazz Bar, he took the limelight – it was his evening.

They played standards, rather than Steele’s own music, but his playing was scintillating. Reaching for the high notes – and hitting them – his trumpet sounded ringing and striking.

Keith Edwards on tenor produced a rich tone which balanced Steele’s more strident sound – Edwards played some great solos, and the two of them bounced lines around in true chasing style.

Kellock played less of a role than I had expected, and Bill Kyle, who plays drums as well running the Jazz Bar, could have been more forceful and driving – it felt like he was hanging back behind Edwards and Steele.

My one gripe was the audience: they got louder and louder and louder, until I could hear more of the audience than I could of the music – and I was sitting at the front! Why go to a jazz gig to talk? It the depths of the cellar, the chatter was distracting. It was good for the bar – a lot of people means they must have sold a lot of beer! – but a shame for the music.

Stefano Bollani and Enrico Rava played at the Queens Hall recently. I had seen them play before - a set supporting Tord Gustavsen in last year’s London Jazz Festival – and they hadn’t really set the place alight.

In Edinburgh, they were excellent.

It might be the venue - the Queens Hall is a small concert hall; it used to be a church. It is much more intimate than the Barbican Centre in London.

It might be the musicians – they were in charge, they weren’t the support act, and everybody was there to see them.

It might be that they had the time to do what they wanted – to build the set properly, to pace their performance, to fully warm up.

Either way, it was a cracking gig. Rava’s trumpet was crisp and fluent, with lots of Miles’ like runs and trills, and Bollani’s piano playing was by turns inventive, exciting and thoughtful.

They made some beautiful music – they play together a lot, in duets like this and in Rava’s band, so they a natural understanding.

It was a really enjoyable evening – they were wonderful.

I tend to read the obituary column in the Independent, sometimes when I have not heard of the subject.

Yesterday, they published the obituaries of two true Glaswegians: footballer Tommy Burns and writer Jeff Torrington.

I had heard of Burns' death on the radio - touchingly, a Rangers' fan fresh back from Manchester told the reporter how moved he had been by the Celtic player and manager's death. It affected me too: he was only a couple of years older than me.



I didn't know Torrington had died. Reading of his life, I was stuck by what a fascintating life he had lead - and how he confounded society's stereotyping. Or at least mine.

* * *

BBC Scotland had a tribute to Burns on their tv news broadcasts. It is on YouTube (of course):



The statements with Peter Laswell, the Celtic chief executive, and Gordon Strachan, the current Celtic manager, are moving; but - at about 2 min 26 seconds - there is an incredibly wooden performance by Gordon Brown. Brown just can't do empathy. He may believe what he is saying - but I don't believe he does.

My brother works in aid. In the last twenty years, he has worked in various parts of Sudan (including Darfur, before it became the disaster story we read about now), Somaliland (that's the part of Somalia that doesn't have a government), Kenya, and various other places one might prefer not to visit. For the last few years he has been working for Help the Aged International, spending time in Sri Lanka (during the ongoing civil war) and, post-tsunami, Thailand.

Just now he is in Zimbabwe, fact-finding.

It is a strange world.

As white_hart has pointed out, my review of Pride and Prejudice has been published on the blogapenguin website.

I wrote it so long ago, I had forgotten about it until the kind people at Penguin sent me an email last weekend, telling me they had finally posted it.

The was an article in yesterday's Guardian about the Modern Lovers, by Keith Gessen.

I remember their eponymous album first time round, when my brother bought it in 1976; I think he may even have seen Jonathon Richman play that year.

It is a classic album - recorded before Richman dumped the rest of the band and found his irritating whimsical style. The band got their own back - Jerry Harrison went on to join David Byrne in Talking Heads whilst David Robinson formed the Cars.

A piece of 1970s brilliance.

I haven’t been to jazz gigs for a while, but I recently went to two.

First, I caught a concert by pianists John Taylor and Gwilym Simcock at the Queens Hall. (The lack of an apostrophe pains me, but that is how they write it.)

The gig started with Taylor playing a solo set. Looking just like a slightly jazzier Bernard Cribbins, he sat at the piano and played. It was lovely music – thoughtful and peaceful, slightly meandering – rather like Satie. He played three or four numbers before he was joined by Simcock.

Cribbins - Taylor
(neither picture is mine!)

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Walking home from Queen Street, the sun was just setting below the chimneys.

It was very beautiful, and a little sad.

On my way from a meeting in Glasgow last week, I took shelter from the rain in the very grand space of the Gallery of Modern Art. This wasn’t chance, though: I had seen a photograph in the Independent of a new installation by Jim Lambie, and I knew I wanted to see it. Hiding from the rain was just fortuitous.

I have seen Jim Lambie’s work before – the installation Zubop in Washington (this is visible to friends only), and Zubop again in Edinburgh.

The installation in Glasgow was new: “Forever Changes” – actually, a combination of several installations and artworks.

I loved it.

I loved it all.

The floor was wonderful.

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The third lecture I went to at the Science Festival was the most interesting: I actually got excited about it, perhaps because it was covering new(ish) stuff for me, things I didn’t know much about. I almost wished I had become an evolutionary-neurologist-psychologist (add your –ology to the list here).

Having said that, I arrived a little late and so missed the first few minutes.

The speaker was Robin Dunbar who is now apparently at Oxford. (I can’t help wondering why Liverpool University still hosts his website, but that must be a whole different discussion.) I hadn’t heard of Prof Dunbar before, but I am interested in human evolution and why we evolved as we did, and the lecture topic - What Makes Us Unique? - sounded my kind of bag. (By the way, that website describes Dunbar as an evolutionary anthropologist – an -ology I hadn’t included in my list…)

When I arrived, he was explaining how unique we weren’t - how, essentially we share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees - or, according to New Scientist, 95%, or 96% or 98.77% - or whatever the figure really is – how, basically, we our very similar to our chimpanzee cousins, at least in terms of DNA.

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I saw this on TheObvious. And laughed!

The second lecture I went to the Science Festival was entitled “Are You Wrong About Your Rights?” There were three speakers talking about citizens’ rights and remedies; it was very interesting; but I still don’t know what it was doing in the Science Festival, since there was not really any science in it at all.

The three speakers were Kaliani Lyle from Citizens Advice Scotland, Lord Hamilton, the Lord President of the Court of Session (the head of the judiciary in Scotland), and the journalist and former editor of the Scotsman, Magnus Linklater. It was chaired once again by Heinz Wolff.

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I have often seen this giant hot dog outside a greasy spoon cafe in Leith when I have been on a bus. Last week, I walked past it, and having my camera with me, I finally took a photograph of it. There is something rather obscene about a hot dog willingly slathering itself in mustard.

It was a birthday a couple of weeks ago, and the guys I work with gave me a card: one of those 3-d cards where the picture changes as you tip the card. This one showed a beer glass, and as I changed the angle, it started full, then half full, then empty. (I am a glass-half-full kind of a bloke.) I was saying thank you, and I described the beer straight as being like Schrodinger’s beer mug: simultaneously full and empty, and impossible to say which it was.

Schrodinger’s beer glass … full.

I got a very blank look back.

You know, I said, like Schrodinger’s cat – neither alive nor dead.

The blank look got blanker.

So I tried to explain Schrodinger’s cat – the thought experiment he used to show the inherent absurdity of quantum mechanics extrapolated into the real world. And I realised how hard it was to explain these things; and how I didn’t really understand it myself. (There is no reason I should; I am neither a physicist nor a mathematician; but I have read popular science books about quantum physics, and I thought I understood it.)

That afternoon, another colleague told how she had taken her young children to the opening of the Edinburgh Science Festival the night before, so I looked at the festival website and saw several talks that interested me; the first was by Marcus Chown – called “Quantum Theory Can’t Hurt Us”, the apposite randomness seemed appropriate. I decided to go along.

* * *

The lecture was introduced by Prof Heinz Wolff. This too seemed very apposite: many years ago, as a young teenager interested in science, I went along to talks at the Hampstead Scientific Society, where Heinz Wolff would chair and introduce the meetings. I went to lots of lectures there; one I remember was about relativity (I can’t remember the speaker – it was about 35 years ago, after all!): I recall understanding everything that was said, until I left the lecture theatre, when none of it seemed quite to tie up.

In the lecture theatre of the Royal Scottish Museum, Prof Wolff described exactly the same feeling: he said he had been to lots of talks about quantum theory, and they made sense at the time; but the sense seemed to decay quickly – he estimated the half life of knowledge about quantum mechanics to be about twelve hours. (So I am writing about it now, several days later, to see what I have retained; I took lots of notes – it is how I remember things – but I intend not to look at them at all, until I have finished; and then I’ll tidy this up a bit. They will be the bits in square brackets…)

( What I remember from Marcus Chown's lecture! )

...from chickenfeet2002...



And I rather like the answer!

...And I took a lot of photographs at the new St Pancras station. It wasn't a station I knew - it didn't really go to anywhere I wanted to go - but the redevelopment makes it rather special.

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I saw these at the British Museum...

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When I was last down in London, I spent a morning in the British Museum. I hadn't been there since they rebuilt the Great Court. It was a sunny day, and it looked amazing. I also strolled around the rest of the museum; given what was going on in the world, it seemed ironic that so much of art came from Mesopotamia.

( More pictures behind the cut! )