nekomatic

That sounds like a brilliant line-up. If I walked into a venue and saw that lot set up on stage I would be like WHOAH, this is going to be AWESOME. So lucky they managed to reanimate one of the chaste young women to play the theme from Get Carter. So weird that she came back looking like Roy Budd.

I feel I ought to do a round-up of the Manchester Jazz Festival, as we did quite a lot of it this year. (If you feel otherwise, please skip to the next post.) Daniel Casimir was great, I hadn't heard him live before and I'd seek him out in future. Jasmine Myra, The Deportees and Emma Johnson's Gravy Boat all played fine lyrical contemporary jazz and Secret Night Gang decent jazz-funk or neo-soul or something. Kara stood out, three singers (plus band) singing quirky soul type stuff in close harmony (apparently there's also a K-pop band by this name… it wasn't them). Nguvu didn't quite live up to their billing for me, basically a competent funk covers band with a couple of good originals. Laetitia Alexandratos deserves mention for tearing it up on six-string bass though, especially as she was just depping and is usually their sax player 😮 The Intergalactic Brasstronauts played ska and reggae with a brass-heavy line-up including sousaphone and contrabass clarinet covering bass duties. Good party band but not mrs nekomatic's cup of tea. Ruth Goller's SKYLLA was an absolute highlight for me - the sort of thing that you will either love, hate or ridicule, the latter not discouraged by the fact that the three of them perform in paper headdresses like goat or dog skulls, but I thought it was incredible. Goller creates sound textures on the bass, using a lot of harmonics and unpitched notes, and she and the two singers add vocals I assume are mostly improvised and for which my nearest reference point was Maggie Nichols, but to my ears often sounding a bit Lappish or otherwise Nordic. It was in the perfect setting of St. Ann's Church on a Wednesday lunchtime and I dragged a friend along who was generous enough to say he quite liked some of it. If that description makes you want to run a mile then fair enough, but you won't hear anyone creating a more individual sound with a bass guitar any time soon. Zoë Rahman played a solo piano gig also in St. Ann's and was brilliant. Gary Crosby brought a sextet to do a show dedicated to Mingus and obviously this was a fine band and should have been bass heaven, but I couldn't shake off the feeling that it was all a bit polite compared to what Mingus must have been like live. I also can't quite shake off the feeling that I've never really got Mingus though, so maybe it's just me. Ayanna Witter-Johnson was another great discovery - she sings (and would be talented enough if she just did that) while simultaneously funking out on cello, and is well worth checking out if you get the chance. And last of all Tim Garland and his group themed around Chick Corea, who you would expect to be superb and yes, they were. I hadn't heard Conor Chaplin on bass before, and also Ant Law on guitar who was ace.

Do you know about hive.co.uk for CDs? They aren’t always as cheap as Amazon but give a percentage to a local shop of your choice.

Delighted to see the Derek Bailey and Stockhausen fans representing. You should check out Ruth Goller’s SKYLLA who I may get round to writing up in the gig review thread.

I’m no PA guru but I find it hard to imagine the use case where you need to put 1200 W into a single load but couldn’t split the load across two channels instead.

It turned out I lied about Nubya Garcia (as did the programme, but they’ve edited it now). Sorry. Daniel Casimir was great though, as were Emma Johnson’s Gravy Boat who we caught earlier today. Terrible name, great band!

I knew I had an unpopular opinion on something, thanks for reminding me what it is! Trouble is, you won’t get far criticising them in this country, as their position is deeply entrenched by long-standing constitutional convention. Well now that I’m here: Tina Turner should have been a jazz singer. I know Christian McBride and Esperanza Spalding are both prodigiously talented and highly acclaimed, but I’ve always struggled to really like their music. Accordions are brilliant. I’ll stop now.

I imagine the planning process for mounting such a gargantuan event starts pretty much the second the winner’s name leaves the presenters’ lips, so I imagine there are a lot of people at the EBU having absolute kittens right now. After all, they can’t possibly show a lack of faith in Ukraine by entertaining the possibility of an alternative host being necessary…

The Eurovision result clearly demonstrated the sympathy that many Europeans feel for a fellow nation oppressed by a malicious, dictatorial regime. Ukraine also benefited from the same phenomenon.

And now I've also lined up Honeyfeet at Band on the Wall on 17th June. The awesome Rioghnach Connolly's blues project on home turf - should be raucous!

Booked tix for a rake of gigs in the Manchester Jazz Festival: Daniel Casimir, Mamilah, Kara, Nguvu, Intergalactic Brasstronauts, The Deportees, Secret Night Gang, Zoë Rahman, Gary Crosby, Ayanna Witter-Johnson, Tim Garland. Very much looking forward to all of them but most especially Casimir, Rahman, Crosby and Garland. Top tip for fans of the sax player Nubya Garcia (and you should be): her own gig in the festival is twenty five quid a pop, but she's also in the line-up for Daniel Casimir's band which is a princely one pound booking fee only. Albeit it's in the less than perfect setting of Escape To Freight Island rather than the unimpeachable Band on the Wall.

Only one bass here. I can see the attraction of having more, but I’d have to be playing a lot more to justify it… either to myself or to the rest of the household

Knock Knock - Who’s there Shirley or Karen - Shirley or Karen who Shirley or Karen expect me to pass up this obvious setup for a joke

I’d start with your local trading standards department, they should be able to advise what to do here. Are Selectron simply not answering their phones? The next step might be to write to them by recorded delivery setting out what you want and by when, e.g. either to agree a repair cost and timescale with you, or return the unit and anything you’ve paid, or pay you a fair sum for the value of the unrepaired unit if they can’t return it. Of course if they’ve actually gone bust you’re probably out of luck. I don’t think PJB have any legal obligation to you but they might be willing to help try and sort it out with Selectron from their side.

I discovered Benson by randomly picking up a copy of Shape Of Things To Come, so that’s my favourite of his, and one of my favourite jazz guitar albums.

My cancellable bass take is that I like sunburst, I like tort, but tort+sunburst?? Noooo… Single cutaway and relicing are also both just wrong, obvs.

I have made exactly the same mistake in my time 😁

Like the colour ultramarine refracted through a pentaprism of unfulfilled desires.

I think their original drummer moved away for uni (or too far away to come back for gigs), yes.

I’m at the Tynemouth Social Club seeing the Samphires, in which mrs nekomatic‘s best mate’s niece is the guitarist. They are really, really good - easily up to the standard of bands I’ve seen at small festivals. If there’s any justice they’ll go far.

I don’t see why that circuit wouldn’t work off 24 V for a 24 V fan. Bump up R5 to 750 ohms ish, and maybe R6 and R7 to 2k each.

Yes indeed!

It would be perfectly possible for a pedal power supply to use an external mains adapter and still have isolated outputs, if it uses isolating DC-DC converters for each output I don’t know which if any do that though. Where people have found problems with noise when using non-isolated or daisy-chained supplies, did one of the pedals use digital circuitry? My guess there would be the digital one injects noise into the power supply which an analogue one is not very good at rejecting.

Some of you may know Ruth Goller from her furiously energetic bouncing at the back of Melt Yourself Down (and if you didn't, you do now) but this is one of her other projects, which could hardly be more different: