New on the Eye blog, review of The AI Con by @johnlw ‘The ouroboros of hype’, www.eyemagazine.com/blog/post/th...

Hilda Gaunt, rehearsal pianist with The Royal Ballet for over 40 years, was (said Frederick Ashton) "a tremendous drinker. She'd always be on tap." She died on 10 October 1975. That's her in the hat in 1939. I pieced together this short Wikipedia entry for her. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_G...

Great photo of record exec John Boyden and singer Belle Gonzalez in 1957, probably in Richmond, just before they married. They met in Singapore. Sadly the marriage was dissolved in the mid-1960s. Belle now has a Wikipedia page www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_G...

Innocently listening to the 1967 Joe Harriott and John Mayer album Indo-Jazz Fusions this afternoon, and on comes the theme tune to Ask The Family (aka Acka Rag). Re-entering my brain after nearly 50 years as if it's never been away! www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4ZL...

I'm late with this even though I knew it was coming: a new biography of Bill Haley by Chris Gardner and David Lee Joyner. I worked with Chris for several years at PRS, he knows about all sorts of music. His father was composer John Gardner and he played piano with the Stargazers in the 80s. Ordered

Two eclectic and lively books that fill out some significant gaps in the history of light music. Kenneth Young's "Music's Great Days In The Spas And Watering-Places", focusing on the UK, came out in 1968. Ian Bradley's broader (ie Europe and North America) "Water Music" is from 2010.

After years of on-off research I at last have enough information to create a Wikipedia page for the amateur song composer Wallace Southam (1900-1990). Wilfrid Mellers and Colin Wilson both thought highly of him. Even found a picture, from a 1954 film he appeared in! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace...

I've now written over 230 original Wikipedia articles, mostly on music, some long, some short, some just sections of longer pieces. Mainly for my own benefit I plan over time to revisit each of them here, in alphabetical order, attempting to explain why I wrote them in the first place. #jawiki

Many thanks to the @londonsymphony for the LSO Discovery showcase at the Barbican last night - so much going on, it was really vibrant - and thanks for supporting a Clarion Trio performance (Ali, Georgina and my son Oscar). They had a brilliant time... clariontrio.co.uk

Just finished this beautifully written biography of Edgar Wallace (1938), really a study of what overwork can do to you. Lit crit doesn't really come into it: Wallace had a writing process, a bit like Dick Francis but less consistent. At the time Lane was married to Wallace's son Bryan Wallace

Jack Westrup's "wretched" 1962 revision of Eric Blom's Everyman's Dictionary of Music is blasted by Andrew Porter in the Musical Times, November 1962

As for using AI, not to rule the world but to carry out humble and obscure music research (especially subjects where data is not obviously to hand on the open Internet), I'm not yet fully convinced

The Wall Street Journal reports that 1) AI will never achieve artificial general intelligence, and also that 2) it already has, at least in respect of resisting all human attempts to turn it off www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-... www.wsj.com/opinion/ai-i...

Pianist Ambrose Coviello respected the playing and teaching of his famous Royal Academy of Music colleague Tobias Matthay, but didn't think much of his writing. In 1948 (three years after Matthay's death) he wrote this highly critical "translation" of his ideas en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrose...

Joan Mary Last (1908-2002) appears to have been an unassuming music teacher from Littlehampton. But her graded piano pieces for children made her famous, and in the 1960s she embarked on a worldwide tour as a lecturer. Her pieces are still frequently performed today en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Ma...

The concert in Poole last week by the National Open Youth Orchestra was the best yet - now looking forward to tomorrow's concert at Hoddinott Hall in Cardiff. My son Oscar playing piano and tuned percussion www.bbc.co.uk/events/evdrn3

Just filling in the gaps - one obscure Wikipedia entry on British music - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_T... - leads to another en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ar...

Hard not to share our Heathrow horror stories today, so here's mine. At least it's sunny in Burlingame this morning

Looking forward to reading this, but the conclusions are likely to be grim. "What makes culture less interesting for listeners is also what makes it less sustainable for artists....Spotify benefits when we stream content that's cheaper to provide". But - why is there no index?

Composer Kalitha Dorothy Fox: Wikipedia entry before and after. There's usually more to find out if you look....

Fuga Duodecima by Hindemith (No 24 from Ludus Tonalis). "The most beautiful fugue ever written" said John McCabe. musicwebinternational.com/2025/03/so-w... www.youtube.com/watch?v=imUe...

Thanks once again Oxfam - £1.99 for a month's worth of pleasure. I'm working through the whole book of 26 pieces, one a day, starting with the wonderful "My Soul There is a Country" (Parry) then the flowing "Beati Quaorum Via" (Stanford) www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBZj...

Clive James in "Somewhere Becoming Rain" presents a good case for "All What Jazz" by Philip Larkin as "one of the great books of creative criticism". I will revisit. But his "mouldy fig" reaction to any vaguely modern jazz is hard to ignore, and despite the poem I don't listen to much Sidney Bechet

Musicologist and music critic Herbert Antcliffe was still very much alive in January 1940 when his obituary was published in the Musical Times. I can't see a later correction, and the MT failed to report his real death in September 1964 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert...

On 15 January 1968, one of the earliest concerts of electronic music by British composers took place as part of the Redcliffe Concert Series at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, organised by Tristram Cary and Peter Zinovieff

I found this recent Archive on 4 very therapeutic www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Do all those people who so venerate the BBC's Shipping Forecast ever listen to the 5.20am version, where harassed and sleep-deprived weather presenters (not continuity announcers) attempt to battle their way through it? The result is anything but poetic www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The Wall Street Journal today on the merits of miniature trucks from Japan, compared to hulking US alternatives 10x more expensive. But its picture shows modifications Americans like to make that immediately turn them back into giant, heavy gas-guzzlers... www.wsj.com/business/aut...

Is it a coincidence that Eric Wetherell (new Wikipedia page) took over as conductor of the BBC Northern Ireland Orchestra in 1976 from Kenneth Alwyn (original name Kenneth Alwyn Wetherell)? Both were born in 1925, but I can't find evidence that they were related. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_We...

Rather pleased with these four Simon Brett hardbacks, all found in the same charity shop. "Murder Unprompted" is a first edition, the other three are book club editions dated the same year as first publication

This from "The Art of Entertainment: Nobrow, American Style" (2019). In fact it's the opposite. Montague Ewing (from exotic Friern Barnet, North London) had to use the American sounding name Sherman Myers to get any of his work published in the US - Masquerade original title, Ewing the original name

Another triumph for AI. The Book of Django was self-published in 1973 by drummer Max Abrams, documenting in details the life and music of Django Reinhardt. Copies cost a fortune. But because there's so much more data out there on the Django framework (yes named after Reinhardt), we get this garbage

Two letters to the editor that show 1) the formidable side of the highly influential British drummer and teacher Max Abrams (Chelsea News & General Advertiser 1967), and 2) the more vulnerable side of his old age (Eastbourne Herald 1984). He now has a Wikipedia page en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Abr...

As usual, one book leads to another. After the splendid review of Jeremy Cooper's novel Brian on BBC Radio's A Good Read, chosen by Irving Welsh (now ordered) I found out that one of Cooper's favourite books was Christy Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973, now also ordered) www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Worth catching this 1983 dramatization of the lesser known Highsmith novel, A Suspension of Mercy, originally written in 1964 with the author at her most post-modern. A reminder of the late lamented Saturday Night Theatre, recently re-discovered after the tapes wiped www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Long afternoon walk yesterday from Kingsclere, then down to Caesar's Belt, a stretch of the old Portway Roman road that starts at Silchester and ends at Old Sarum. It's a broad strip of ancient woodland that runs alongside the old route

I had the most vivid of imposter syndrome nightmares last night: in front of a huge crowd the CEO asked me to explain some technology in simple terms. I couldn't, but the person next to me provided an explanation that led to a parting of the Red Sea style miracle. CEO was ecstatic, I was devastated!

Has any other sector ever become so supplier concentrated as IT infrastructure? 90% of all advanced semiconductors come from TSMC in Taiwan and TSMC can only use one type of machine (ASML) to make them. And now that we all rely on the same few cloud services, if one thing fails, everything goes down

Intense three day business trip to downtown Los Angeles relieved for 30 minutes or so by a quick visit to the Central Library just down from the hotel - great to see many music scores on the shelves, including a whole row of musicals, lots or pop music and even the odd Constant Lambert score

According to Oliver Lomax (The Mood Modern, pp. 268-9) pianist Steve Gray came into the session as a stand-in with no preparation, and delivered this performance from a part that "was very exposed, and required a considerable quantity of Evanesque improvisation" www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Do...

Sad notice tucked away in The Times on 22 June, 1963. Frida Kindler, concert pianist, Busoni pupil and later wife of the composer Bernard van Dieren, by then 84, was suffering from dementia so the family sold off her Steinway. She died in January the following year en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_K...

I've been a member of The London Library for 30 plus years - it's easily my favourite place in London - but I'm still blown away when they accept a recommendation from me to acquire a book. Off to pick it up early next week

The Zodiac Variations (1965) by John Dankworth are wonderful - and on top of it all the 12 variations use all the 12 keys, while the soloists are proportioned out so that they only play in the variations denoting their own star sign - such as Ronnie Ross on Libra www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE2d...

Very pleased to see this recording of chamber music by Freda Swain released. She composed over 450 pieces and only a few have been heard since her death in 1985. She composed a wartime piano concerto for her husband, Arthur Alexander, air-mailed to him in installments while he was serving abroad

I always thought of Hugo Cole as a critic, 30 years at The Guardian. But he was also a composer, his works include five operas for schools and other accessible choral-dramatic works. These 1958 nursery rhyme settings have illustrations by his wife Gwyneth John Eedy en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Cole

Found from a passing reference I'd not spotted before in U and I by @nicholsonbaker8 - Baker is surely the king of footnotes. John Dickson Carr's The Nine Wrong Answers (1952) sounds wonderful, according to Stephen Sondheim in conversation with Anthony Shaffer - most 2nd hand copies live in the US

Unusual, a pop music documentary that engages with music theory, discusses harmonising in thirds, delaying tonic resolution, mixing major and minor, comparison of melodic shape in verse and chorus, recitative passages, genre and style references, & more. Worth a listen www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

My son Oscar, aged 21, is autistic and that means most educators have underestimated him. In an otherwise vacuum we took on his music and found excellent (no compromise) piano and percussion teachers. Yesterday he was at the piano with the National Open Youth Orchestra at Guildhall's Milton Court

I'm all for redundant phone boxes (like Ashampstead, local to me and Balfour Gardiner) being repurposed into "libraries". But as with charity shops now, most of the books left there are disposable. Villages need phone box librarians that can weed out the rubbish and encourage more interesting stock

Excellent walk through Finzi country yesterday afternoon, planned by my son with no help from me and no awareness of the musical connection. We saw almost nobody else along the way. Fantastically peaceful