Miles

I fell to sleep today - during the day. A real old man's sleep. I lay on the sofa, put the wonderful Sigur Ros 'Takk' album on and the next thing I knew it was the last track and I was coming round. It's funny, I felt like I had heard the whole album but I was not conscious of doing so. The undermind at work...

Inspired by reading an excellent musically orientated blog from NYC I thought about Miles Davis today. I remembered seeing him live at the Royal Festival Hall six weeks before he died. The night he actually died I had been to the theatre and I put the radio on when I got home and heard the news. Obviously I had to have a drink to arguably the 20th century's most important musician (well to me anyway) but the only drink I could find was a very old bottle of creme de menthe. It must be the only time in my life when there was nothing alcoholic and tempting. Still I drank the CDM and listened to (from memory) 'walkin''. I don't really know why I chose that album. It was never a favourite but perhaps a desire to listen to something of his that was not totally familiar made me go for that one. I was buying a Miles album a week at that time and maybe I had overdone it.

There are some Miles albums that are criminally underrated. I love 'Jack Johnson' and particularly the Herbie H stuff on it and also 'Starpeople' from the eighties which featured John Scofield. I saw Scofield a few times live (it was two gigs a week in the very early '90's) and once at the tiny 'Monkey club' in Essex he was phenomenal. Monkey's was almost like a private jazz club and I remember a few weeks before the gig the owner took to the mic and said 'look, we've got a chance of getting JS here but because it's a small club we can only get a few people in. If we all pay (£30?) each we can get him'. And he did. He was amazing (with I think Adam Nussbaum with him) and there was less than 150 of us cramped into a tiny club. Cramped, loud (and my partner in crime Mike, very stoned) but a seminal moment in my musical life. I am sad in a way at all the gigs I miss. Next week for instance Britain's very own John Etheridge (one of the world's great guitar players) plays with Arild Anderson (one of the very first ECM pioneers) and John Marshall (Soft Machine and many others) at the Pizaa Express in Soho. But I cannot be there.

While I write this I am listening to the Sigur Ros album again. It is stunning. And it continues to be my album of the day.