If anyone has been visiting this site hoping for a new blog, I apologize.  What happened was that my wife Jane (German) tripped in Harleston Thoroughfare, fell onto a wall and broke her upper right (painting) arm in two places. This has inevitably cut into what I was doing, apart from stopping her work entirely for the time being. She is now mending up nicely, thank you.

I expect some of you are as indignant as I feel about Amazon, which seems to have found a way of evading British taxes. (tho it was very convenient and efficient). I believe that any company or person who is trading in these islands should be obliged to pay the appropriate taxes, and that any cunning manoeuvres by way of evasion should be deemed a priori to be illegal.

Anyhow, for current books there is a site called HIVE (www.hive.com) which networks to British independent bookshops: you can collect an ordered book from a local book-shop free of delivery charge The list of participating bookshops is at http://www.hive.co.uk/store-locator. For out-of-print books I used to use ABE books, but it turns out that Amazon owns this too. So instead, use biblio.co.uk “largest remaining independent book marketplace in the world,” according to their publicity.  More info on the site.  And more anon from me soon.


Rommel in Lines

 Yes, this is another of those misleading titles.  What I meant to say was that Pop Art depended on where you were and who you were at the given time. This is my take on it.  So let me set the scene.

After the 1957 Young Contemporaries (where Robyn Denny scored highly with a sort of revived cubist collage involving sack-cloth and gold leaf), a wave of Abstract Expressionism, or what the press called “drip and dribble,” hit the  art schools, and dominated for a while.

A few years later I was living in St Ives. I had gone there because friends went on ahead, and said “Come and join us;” also because I admired de Kooning, and thought Peter Lanyon’s work might be a sort of bridge to American painting (which was mostly European painting anyway as it turned out). St Ives was where Pop Art reached us, in the form of an idea. As I remember it, we didn’t at first see any images, but we got the concept.  We were already grit in the St Ives oyster, where painting was supposed to be either abstraction with a landscape feel, or landscape with an abstract feel.  Images were meant to be mostly based on battered rectangles or circles, relatively thinly painted, in muted landscape colours. Nobody issued these edicts, but they were implicitly house rules for the Penwith Gallery, which was curiously much more conservative than the actual mature artists then working in the vicinity.

I said we were already an irritation because we used bold or brash colours, non-regulation shapes, and paint squeezed straight out of the tube.  Cruder, less sensitive, unrefined. The most obviously challenging painting I remember was one by Tony Shiels . It was about six foot square, with a disk of lemon yellow within the square and a dot of cadmium red in the middle, entitled Big Tit. It was a hazardous painting in more ways than one: I helped Tony to carry it to the Penwith, along the sea-wall, and a sharp gust of wind nearly dumped it and us into the sea..  But in spite of its satirical intent, Big Tit was not that far from what Terry Frost was doing at the same time.  The pull towards abstraction was still strong. Most of us were working non-figuratively. Lanyon was still using local colour, rather than the bold pigments of his later work, and Alan Lowndes, who had got to where he was in a Lowryesque idiom was momentarily teetering on the brink of a decision to go abstract.

 

The Big Cow

Pop Art meant a much more radical change. It meant a great expansion of subject-matter so that the man-made environment, with manufacturing, advertising and information, became valid subject matter of art. More broadly it meant “Back to figuration!” – we were free. We didn’t know what Pop Art in London was actually doing.  Not having seen it, we had to invent it.  This isn’t an entirely unfamiliar situation in the Arts – in 1846 Robert Browning wrote to Elizabeth Barrett:

“And years before that, the first composition I ever was guilty of was             something in imitation of Ossian, whom I had not read, but conceived,through two or three scraps in other books – “

I expect there are plenty of other examples.  You need to remember that in the early ‘sixties everything moved more slowly than it does now.  Art Mags, such as they were, took time to catch up with what was happening now, and TV was still in monochrome. The first Peter Blake painting I saw (the self-portrait with the badges) was at the ICA in Dover Street, after I had moved from St Ives to London.

The new subject-matter, representational, could be almost anything.  There were of course nostalgically familiar objects – the England’s Glory matchbox, Staffordshire dogs and the Union Jack, for instance.  There were also those Airfix kits, assemblable plastic planes which could be painted up and transferred with insignia, and these in turn were conduits for the Second World War (as it is still misleadingly called).  We had lived through the end of that war and popular culture was flooded with its iconography, which still persists to a surprising degree. One of my friends made a number of paintings of downed bombers, and warplanes occur repeatedly in Colin Self’s work. I think they were not just part of an attempt to exorcise the war, but also the continuing violence, which would not go away.

The new subject-matter, even when well executed (which it often wasn’t) was not necessarily likeable. Terry Frost, for instance, a great encourager of younger artists, didn’t give up on me, but he didn’t like what I was doing. And after all, a man who had been stuck in a POW camp didn’t need reminding about the war. Abstraction was at least a space outside of politics.  Paintings of mine at that time upset others than Terry.  Someone at the Penwith said that I had “broken all the laws of art since the cave men!”  I considered that, and thought it would have been a great achievement,if only it could have been true.

The Stuka at the Bedroom Window

One of my paintings which used icons of war was The Stuka at the Bedroom Window.  It retained some of the loose handling learned from part of abstract expressionism, but the central story was the pleasant bed-room wall and curtains framing an evil dive-bomber, buzzing like a hornet.

A more metaphysical use of the related material was The Dog in the Window, where the Staffordshire dog sits calmly on the Union Jack, before a window looking out to a shell explosion on the Somme, during Germany’s invasion of France, ( taken from Rommel’s own photograph of June 5th 1940, reproduced in The Rommel Papers).

The Dog in the WIndow

 

Other non-high art representation systems  infiltrated painting – for instance the cartoon books of RB Crumb and others.  Some of Hockney’s early paintings show this sort of influence.

In The Cruel Elephant for instance, the area of grass under the elephant’s feet holds wavy lines of  written words: ‘crawling insects  crawling insects….” You could say, surprisingly, that Pop Art had reached the inclusivity previously aimed for by the Arts and Crafts Revival Movement. Anything represented or made by hand was in, without obvious divisions or hierarchies.

The Monster that Conquered the World Smiling at Lord Snowdon

‘What is conceivable can happen too’ – Wittgenstein. according to Empson. Finally there is a re-emergence of the vein of surrealism which runs through English art and literature – back through Alice to the William Blake of The Ghost of a Flea.  An example of this vein in my pop was a painting entitled The Monster that Conquered the World Smiling at Lord Snowdon.  The creature was based on an engraving of the zoea of a land-crab in a nineteenth century magazine. Another more simplified version of this creature, now embodying sexual aggressiveness, cropped up in pictures called Strange Fruit of Love and Look Out Little Noddy.  Lord Snowdon photographed everyone important at that time, so he would certainly have snapped the monster.

However, paintings don’t seem to like immediate obvious emotions, unless done by a genius like Goya, so in my case they became quieter. less obvious and more observatory, moving into still life, and later, increasingly, into landscape.

Pop Art included everything in the world, and it was fun. It was an antidote to the fuddy-duddy.  It had a wider reach. As for what it wasn’t, I think, after all, I’ll leave that to you.

Self portrait in the 'Sixties

 

 

 

 

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,000 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 33 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Victims of 'coasting', around 1952

Listening to the BBC recently I heard a discussion about incompetent teachers. “And then,” someone said, “there are those who are coasting…”  I have found ‘coasting’ in various places recently – it is becoming a buzz-word, which is to say a gash label in lieu of meaning.

I was taught by teachers who were coasting.  The school staff had two generations: those who had got through World War 2, and those left over from WW1. Of this older group I well remember Bum, Sniffer, Taffy, Old Tom and Uncle Norman, nicknames stuck on them by generations of schoolboys. Several carried wounds of various sorts from the war.  Sniffer had been gassed, and Tom still had bouts of malaria from his African service. Uncle Norman was struggling with Bright’s Disease (probably nothing to do with his fixed and glittering stare).

The Chemistry teacher’s confidence had apparently been shot or shelled away.  The Science Lab had rows of continuous worktops, each with a sink, a Bunsen burner and a space underneath for a tall stool. When every boy in the class hid in the stool space just before the class began, he scanned the empty room, assumed they had gone elsewhere, and went off to look for them. On another occasion he was demonstrating the mingling of two heavier than air gases. Someone had switched the class jars, so in fact he was pouring air into air, but he continued to describe the colour of the invisible precipitate, as if this kind of thing often happened, and it was best to ignore it.  Maybe generations of schoolboys had repeatedly played the trick. (I wasn’t in the Science group: the story was told to me by my school-friend, David Austin the cartoonist).

The art teacher, Old Tom, had me round to tea, in an apologetic way, and showed me his water-colours: well crafted landscape sketches, very sweet and with minimal content. He said ” I get them through Art ‘O’ level – that’s what their parents want.”

I was an anomaly – a boy who painted landscapes in oils, heavily influenced by Paul Nash – not a modernity he normally had to cope with.  He was always kind and helpful to me, but he didn’t have anything else to give.  Not his fault. The Art School, a bike ride away, was where real art happened, and later on I had great support from people there, staff and students. But Tom didn’t know them, or they him.

All of these teachers were approaching the end of their professional careers, and were working out their time, doing what they knew how to do.  They were committed professionals; they tried to do a good job, and some of them worked way over the odds – Sniffer gave much of his evening and week-end time to games, to which he was devoted. The point was that they had endured tough times, they were growing old, and coasting was not scrimshanking. Of course they didn’t have the drive of the younger generation of teachers – that was very obvious at the time. But my English teacher Shel, a truly great teacher, and one of the younger group, told me that he regularly had to sit and rest for an hour or two when he got home, to recover from exhaustion. Apart from exhaustion there are occupational conditions: primary teachers with bad backs due to repeatedly bending down over low desks, and so on.

If good teaching demands commitment, energy, invention, empathy and show, as well as a substantial cache of knowledge, it is also demanding and exhausting. Teachers wear out. Some manage to be great for a whole career: others flag, and a few break apart. It’s the rare teacher of whom you might say “Age could not weary her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety.”

All educational establishments (like other organisations) are a mixture, with their quota of ‘coasters’: teachers run out of steam as their bodies decline, and nothing can be done about this. Some things can be done to mitigate its effect, but those in charge of the system are usually too fixated on structural change in the organisation to

think hard about the implications of the human condition. Most ministers of education are in the job for a very short time: the average, from 1945 to 2007, is two years.  (See the helpful chronology by D. Gillard at www.educationengland.org.uk/history) Just as they develop an initial grasp, they are moved on, so the Civil Servants pursue their groundswell policy, underneath occasional surges of Government interest. (In more arcane areas, Art Education, for instance, ministers never have the time or knowledge even to grapple with the arguments;  Ministry policy in the second half of the Twentieth Century was to reduce the number of Art and Design students, seen, without reference to evidence, as a drain on the economy, and that was about as close to the area’s problems as ministers got).

There could be a better use of the human resource. To look at just one aspect of it, teaching is a monastic event. Teachers study their subject and do their teacher training. Once they have taken their vows in their twenties, they are supposed to continue to transmit what they have for the next forty plus years and to replenish their stock unaided. Retraining, refresher courses, paid study leave, are rare.

Teachers’ triumphs exist at one remove, belonging to their pupils. They do not own their success, unlike, say, pop-stars or orchestral conductors. Generally, if the students did well it was because they were bright: if they did not it was because they were badly taught.  Some individual teachers are respected but as a class teachers have low social esteem, and they are easily found to be in the wrong. You might say, well. at least they aren’t Social Workers, who have minus social esteem before they start.  But if you wonder why teachers get worked up about their pensions, you might also ask “What else in the world have they to look forward to?”

Seven years ago we  set up an Art Trail. The idea was to create a small, local Open Studios trail, run by and for local artists, in a limited area, with quality controls. (We had been unsatisfied by the then enormous, impersonal, top-down, quality-untested Norfolk Open Studios)  Our main advantage was the existence of a Gallery in Harleston which could act as home. We obtained some grant to set up, but since then we have been, and aim to be, self-funding.

Have we achieved anything apart from personal satisfaction? Yes. We have encouraged local people to think of the making of art as a natural activity, and they have become used to the idea that it is not so difficult to buy a painting/drawing/sculpture/mosaic/ceramic or whatever; not greatly different as a transaction from buying a pair of shoes, a dress or a settee.  A synergy is also created between all kinds of artistic/craft/design activity, so that furnishing, fashion, cookery all benefit – or at least local shops in these areas do.

Here are this year’s results (we opened on three week-ends in the summer).

The total number of visits (including the Gallery, where the taster exhibition took place), was 4,635, and the total sales netted £26,146.  There were 35 studios;  14 had under 100 visits, 16 had between 100 and 199, and 5 studios had between 200 and 298.  Experience shows that the studios which are conveniently clustered tend to attract more visitors than ones which are out on a limb, so it’s not just a question of objective popularity.

So far as sales are concerned,  five studios made less than £100 each, nine made from£100 to £499; 13 made from £500 to £999; five made between £1000 and £1999, and three made upwards of that figure: over £3000 at the top.

Clearly, then, an area can be cultivated into a better environment for working artists by their communal effort. And it is an effort. Some members give a great deal of time and effort to the many things which have to be done, and they are not necessarily the ones who reap the greatest rewards. There is also a social reward -   a community of artists replaces the atomised individuals, and this often provides moral and physical support which wouldn’t otherwise be there, (along with its flop-side-the ability to have rows over policy etc).

Something has to be said about limitations.  This activity does not produce a living wage – there is a long way to go before we reach £15,000 p.a. (which I suggested in an earlier blog, might be considered a reasonable income). However, some artists run courses, or other activities, and are able to use the Trail event as a recruiting drive, so that it contributes to income- generating activities.

Another limitation is in what you can call the pain barrier – that is to say, the highest figure which most local people would spend to buy a piece of art. An informed guess puts this at about £500 hereabouts.  There are always a few people willing to pay more.  Fame seems to overcome the barrier: a recent exhibition of Maggie Hambling’s work in the hideous Stables Gallery in Diss (medium sized oil paintings and etchings of waves) bearing prices at two and a half to six and a half thousand for paintings, with etchings in the high hundreds, displayed

red dots on more than three quarters of the list of works.  Was some of this purchasing regarded as investment? Anyhow, the money was spent, in spite of the fact that we are in a recession.

Yet another limitation is the legacy of the past. Anyone who watches Antiques Road Show will see good paintings by earlier artists. I generally find the prices quoted surprising, and disappointing – very good paintings, in some cases, going for much less than a contemporary artist would wish to charge for work of  the same size: these prices can’t compete with the take from silver goblets, jewellery or Chinese vases.

You can call that the craftsman’s revenge: painting and sculpture nets the contemporary prestige, but the craft community wins out in the long run, and maybe in the short run too. Painting and sculpture, apart from a few stratospheric individuals, are marginal production.

My conclusion remains this hard one. For an artist to earn a reasonable living, say £15.000 p.a. from art alone, he or she would have to sell at least £20,000 worth in a year. Assuming one piece of work per week the  unit price would have to be over £380, and all the work produced that year would have to sell,  Communal endeavours can improve artist’s incomes, but don’t produce security or the jackpot. I hope this is what they tell Fine Art students in the Art Colleges nowadays.

One of last year's drawings

The Big Draw

Jane and I did the Big Draw at the Guardian again this year,  The BD is an annual, national event (held in October) by the Campaign for Drawing. It’s always very enjoyable hard work – kids and parents come in for a morning or an afternoon session, and a bunch of us provide them with exciting drawing activities. We artists /illustrators/cartoonists get our travel expenses, but otherwise we do it for free. You can get the feel of it from http://www.guardian.co.uk/gnmeducationcentre/cartoon-and-art-family-day and from Jane’s blog: janegerman.com.  It’s nice to be among honest artists who make a living by drawing. They don’t have time to wait for the Muse to strike – they just get on with it. Our old friend David Austin used to read the papers to take in all the news, and then provide the Guardian with five or six topical cartoons to choose from each day (only one was printed). His gift was the ability to draw a funny line round a funny idea. I envied him that. being as it were, cartoone deaf.

Part of the Land Marks Exhibition at the Harleston Gallery

The Artist’s Compleynte

My pics look so neat & so sweet on the wall -

But nobody’s buying the buggers at all

Soon they’ll be bundled back into the shed

With the mice and the spiders, as if they were dead

So come all you millionaires, get your art here

You’ll only be paying the froth off your beer

 

 

 

For artists get lonely, and some go insane

” Well they must have been wicked to earn so much pain!”

We need to buy paint, and we need to have fun

But it’s neither of either if we have no mun

So come all you gamblers & take my advice:

As soon as I snuff it they’ll double in price

 

 

 

 

But thanks to the lovers who saved up their all

To put a fine picture by me on their wall

May they relish their icon, and long may they thrive

And may I make a profit while I’m still alive

 

  22 August 2011

LAND MARKS Exhibition on show for the last week

Coffee Pot and Bowl oil on board

This is a painting I did in 1956, I had just finished Finals at Oxford, and worked through that summer in Southend with Derek Nice.  He had just finished his NDD, and I met him when we were both visitors at the hospital bedside of the same girl.  My parents went away for a few weeks, so we took over the back room and worked all day – drawing, painting, making mono-types on old etching plates on my father’s small table-top etching press, throwing some pots and baking them in an improvised kiln at the bottom of the garden. Derek made me do some  things I hadn’t done before – working on drawings in sequences, and squaring drawings up accurately to enlarge them for painting. In the evenings we went visiting, went to parties, and took it in turn to tell the same interminable shaggy dog stories, each of us preserving any additions made by the other at the last telling.  It was an exhilarating time, with for me a great sense of release from the cocoon of the Oxford English Syllabus, or, come to that, from the idea of works to be studied rather than life to be lived.

There were literary influences – we both read  Joyce Carey’s The Horses’ Mouth at that time, and benefitted from its exuberance and optimism – and still do.  It seems to me a  profound as well as very funny book, entirely aware of the problematic position of the individualist artist in a capitalist society. (I find John Berger’s view of the book perverse). Derek was greatly taken by Wallace Stevens:

They said, “You have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are

Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

The Man With the Blue Guitar 1937

 

He did a series of drawings and monotypes based on the poem. Our subject matter at that time was anything natural you could pick up and look at: seed-pods, spikey twigs and so on, including grasshoppers, but not flowers; still life objects – oil lamps various, and whatever was in the kitchen, with occasional bits of landscape. It didn’t at that time include people, and we weren’t (yet) drawn to abstraction.

This painting came out of a series of drawings in which the objects became  increasingly wild. I had been an admirer of Braque’s work for a long time, as is plain enough here, so this is at the restrained end of transmutation, characteristically rendered as planes parallel to the picture surface, without perspective (Braque’s “eye-fooling devices”).    The transparent areas and the white lines derive rather from Patrick Heron’s take on Braque (before Heron himself was drawn to abstraction). The bowl was earthenware, one of Derek’s, I think, and the green fruit which you might suppose would be an avocado was in fact the slightly speckled fruit of a Japonica.

There is perhaps a touch of Gris in the pictorial organisation, but I don’t think I really knew much of his work at the time,  so maybe it’s there and maybe not.

LAND MARKS EXHIBITION ON UNTIL 27 AUGUST -SEE LAST BLOG

Landmarks

paintings 200 – 2011 by David Page

about Claypit Hill, Dicky Hill and Low Meadow at Hallwong,

Starston, Norfolk, with excursions to some other places

Harleston Gallery  23 July – 27 August,  Tues-Sat 10 – 3.30

The Ruts on Claypit Hill, oil on canvas

When I worked in London I came up often to a cottage in Syleham, just south of the Waveney, and eventually ended up living there, so I have been painting in this area since the mid-’seventies. My wife Jane (Jane German) and I bought Redenhall Cottage a mile or two north of the river, in 1991.

Once settled in I started painting pictures of this patch of land – round the house and further afield. A large number of my paintings are about Low Meadow, Claypit Hill and Dicky Hill. There have been changes here since that time: one of the adjacent Dutch barns collapsed, skewing its neighbours. One barn was rebuilt, but the others have gone, so that we now look west to an uninterrupted view of Low Meadow and the skyline punctuated by Wellingtonias which makes Starston a unique place.  Previously that the view was dominated by the great inverted W of the roofs. One consequence of the barns’ collapse was that our boundary clay-lump wall began to decay, now that the rain could get into it, leading to Jane’s paintings of cows looking through holes they had licked into shape.

Jane German:Friesian through the Wall, pastel drawing

The most recent change is that Low Meadow sways and tosses with mature grasses, like shot silk, because the cows which have grazed it for our last twenty years have gone – and with them some of Jane’s subject matter. Nothing stays quite the same.

A painter tries to find images which say more than simply what they are, and much of the meaning is in the telling. Patrick Heron said “Form is content now,” which made life difficult for those of us obsessed with figurative images but who still want to benefit from gains made through Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and so on.

So far as content is more than form, I have been concerned with the way that the land is carved up by heavy machinery (burning oil which is going to run out), and regenerates itself. The carving up of the land is sometimes irresistibly reminiscent of images of the 14 -18 trenches, and though I don’t go as far as Richard Mabey , who thinks (if I have understood him correctly) that those who broke the soil  broke the pact with nature, nonetheless I can’t help seeing it as some sort of wounding. The fields themselves are empty in our time: even quite recently, in the time of our parents, they were full of people working. You only have to look at the paintings of Harry Becker, Constable, Breughel, Hokusai. Now, occasionally, there is a man encased in a tractor, probably with earphones on, who moves around the space like a spaceman, without ever being quite part of it. Only the annual pheasant shoot fills the fields with people.

Those who live in towns see the countryside as parkland, gracefully or scruffily surrounding them: they see it as Pope or Capability Brown did, as a backdrop to the refined life. I see it as an industrial site organised by farmers who struggle, sometimes to restructure nature, sometimes to collaborate with her, but at all costs to produce. For restructuring you have only to look at our field-pattern: even in 1940 there were twice, maybe three times as many fields round here: miles of hedgerow have gone to create the prairie fields of today. The big woods went aeons ago. Farmers and farm labourers are a small and shrinking minority of the population, though they determine the shape of the bulk of the land. Urban myopia is the root of an old antagonism: the fields are really there to feed the city, but the city does not seem to care. The old Marxist objective of equality between city and country is as far off as ever.

Maybe some of these preoccupations are there in my paintings, or perhaps I would like them to be more eloquent than they are. At all events I am showing as many as I can at the Harleston Gallery, so if you care to come and look you can make your own minds up.

David Page

27 06 2011

Green Lamda, early corn, oil on canvas

Here is a St Ives story, as well as I remember it.  We were sitting in the pub yarning & setting the world to rights, as usual, when the conversation turned to attitudes to animals in the North and the South.  (I had been living in Greece, after two years teaching in Germany). Karl Weschke had been a young soldier in the Wehrmacht and told a story which happened to him during the war.  He had been given the job of driving officers in one of those open Volkswagen jeeps with a corrugated bonnet.  He was taking some of these officers downhill, along some very narrow bending tracks, between dry stone walls, in the South of France.  Somewhere down there, intermittently seen, was a peasant was working in a field; his donkey impassive, unmoving, stood in the middle of the track. (I had known a Greek donkey stay stock-still for two hours as I drew it and the stone wall behind it).

When the peasant realised that a German army vehicle was coming his way he took the reins and pulled at the donkey to get it out of the track. But the donkey would not budge. Maybe it had been hard-worked and needed a rest. Coming round the next bend they saw him beating the animal with a stick, but with no result. The next sighting showed the peasant throwing stones; in the next they saw him pick up a fair-sized rock. The rock bounced off the donkey, but still it would not move. By now they were getting close, and the peasant was panicking. They saw him bending down by the donkey, and saw him packing straw under it.  He lit the straw.  The donkey suddenly gave a great bellow and galloped off: the peasant escaped across the stony fields.

I always remember that story when I see his paintings.

 

 

Diana

A friend kindly sent me this photograph of the poetry post outside Diana Leap’s house, not aware that Diana had died before Christmas. She was remarkable. Her conversation was like a mountain stream over pebbles -clear, sparkling, with little pauses as she searched for the right word or phrase (never the ones you expected), and small  whirlpools where she went back and corrected herself. I am reminded of Robert Lowell’s lines about a rather different person:

your old-fashioned tirade-

loving, rapid, merciless-

breaks like the Atlantic ocean on my head.

Man and Wife

She was someone for whom expression was not bounded by compartments – her comments on the world came out as sculpture, poems, drawings, post-cards, telephone calls & emails –  and one of the finest novels of our time. I plan to write about her at more length later.

Nick Page’s new Album (Addis Through the Looking Glass/ Real World) has been getting great reviews (Times, Financial Times, Guardian, Mirror etc). It’s a driving, powerful set of sounds which really do fuse apparently disparate elements – traditional and popular Ethiopian song, reggae, and experimental music, with stunning singers – everything from the sounding brass to the tinkling cymbal. It has the kind of excitement that Stan Kenton had when I was seventeen. If you like World Music, go out and buy one. If you want to know where Jazz went, this is where.  You can find out about it here:

Click on the Dub Colossus album and you can hear excerpts from the new album:  the same applies to all releases

http://realworldrecords.com/artists/dub-colossus/

http://www.myspace.com/dubcolossusmusic

http://www.dubcolossus.org/

For those of you with Latin, Nick is my son, not my nephew – just thought I should get that right.

ps Artists Do It For Free is also a new blog. It should have come before Nepotism, but didn’t because of my cack-handedness.  Sorry.

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