A Rollercoaster DayI woke up this morning feeling down. It's time for my annual bout of flu.
Then my flu blues were blown away when I checked the result of last night's football match, which I didn't get up at 3 o'clock this morning to watch.
Yes! Yes!
Charlton beat the European Champions 2 - 0. What a high!
Then I opened my emails. From cheers to tears in less than a minute.
Elton Dean R.I.P.
This might not mean a lot to you but the music described below is part of my lifeblood. If I have any regrets about living in Indonesia it is that I cannot hear any of these musicians live, as I would have done, regularly, if I had continued to live in London.
Obit from
Allaboutjazz.comBritish jazz saxophonist Elton Dean died on the evening of February 7th, 2006, in a London hospital. For the last year in particular he had been suffering from heart and liver related heart problems. He was 60.
Dean first gained acclaim as a member of the Keith Tippett Group, led by the English pianist and featuring the horn section of Dean, Marc Charig and Nick Evans, in 1969. Later that year, Dean, Charig and Evans were hired by Soft Machine to augment their core trio. After touring as a septet, the band was trimmed down to a quintet, then a quartet. This resulted in what many consider the "classic" Soft Machine line-up of Robert Wyatt, Mike Ratledge, Hugh Hopper and Elton Dean, which recorded Third (1970) and Fourth (1971) for CBS.
Dean left Soft Machine after 1972's Fifth to devote his time to his own group, Just Us, and various jazz-oriented line-ups, many of them featuring Tippett. Over the years however, he remained associated with the Soft Machine family (also known as the "Canterbury scene"), often in the company of bassist Hugh Hopper, while leading his own acoustic jazz quartets and quintets.
In the past few years Dean had again been involved in a variety of Soft Machine-derived line-ups : SoftWorks with Hugh Hopper, Allan Holdsworth and John Marshall; Soft Machine Legacy with Etheridge replacing Holdsworth; Soft Bounds, with Hopper and French jazzers Sophia Domancich and Simon Goubert; and the French-based PolySoft tribute project, again featuring Hopper.
Soft Machine Legacy recorded its debut album in September, and the band were looking forward to supporting it with a series of live performances; a live DVD, recorded in Paris last December, is also set for release later this year.
Written by Aymeric Leroy, chronicler and archivist of all things Canterbury.I first saw and heard Elton in the mid-sixties with Long John Baldry and the Hoochie Coochie Men. Later, there was a piano player, named Reg Dwight, in the group for a while. He decided that he needed a better name if he was to achieve stardom so he borrowed Elton and John and the rest, as they say, is history.
Elton's lyricism will be sorely missed. Losing a member of one's family is deeply sad, but Elton leaves a legacy of recorded music which will ensure that he will live on as a towering figure in the jazz world.
I have the largest collection of 'Canterbury Scene' music in Indonesia. It continues to inspire me and excite me. If any local readers would like a CD of MP3s, many not officially released,
please email me.
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Finally, I have received a couple of emails asking if I had received any hate mail following my posts about the Danish cartoon controversy. No and none in the comments either.
Then
Indcoup sent me a link to a new blogger,
Topo from Solo in Central Java.
He has only posted once, about the reactions to the controversy, but he has got into his vitriolic strde very quickly.
... let us look at our backyard. Have you been lately reading blogs run by expat in Indonesia.Take a look to see that having been in Indonesia doesn't make them more sensitive. But I want to be fair minded. According to statistics compiled by Kelurahan Bangka Kemang ,number of bule population in Kemang has dropped 85% since Bom Bali I. After all, who want to live in a country where bombs explodes every year,except of course the remaining 15% who are second rated .They seems to have no choice but stay because otherwise they will be one of those standing in the line collecting social security money in their homeland. If you want to visit their blog sites, drop an email to me, cause I don't want to link my blog with rubbish.Bules standing in the line collecting social security money ?
Oh, I wish, Tropo, I wish. After all, reading racist stereotyped tripe like yours does tend to make our lives here uncomfortable. At least, that's what 'Er Indoors tells me. And as an Indonesian Muslim, she should know. Still, I'll be generous this once and welcome you to the Indonesian blogosphere. We await your further views with interest.
Incidentally, given that Tropo lives in Solo, I must ask if he is, or was, a member of one of those fundamentalist Islamic groups listed
here who was involved in a 'sweeping' operation back in 2000 seeking to oust foreign (meaning Amarican) tourists from upmarket hotels.
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