visit from Pok

Pok Spacegoat turned up on Tuesday night, at relatively short notice, straight from the Kingston Green Fair. He, his new girlfriend Aurelie and I listened to some far-out, lesser-known Jefferson Airplane recordings I'd compiled - she's a complete devotee of the Airplane, probably something you come across more in France (she's French) than the U.K.

Pok and I babbled extensively (as we tend to do) about the new Dr. Who series, the musical genius of Jerry Garcia, his own ideas for a new kind of loop-based music which he's hoping to start recording soon, the future of recorded music, the weirdly cultish 'Mayan Calendar' scene which he keeps encountering within the N. London psychedelic trance crowd, etc..

Eventually we got 'round to watching part of a DVD I'd got out of the library that morning specially for his benefit - Miles Electric - A Different Kind of Blue, which deals with Miles Davis' late 60's transition into electronics/rock/funk which was so 'shocking' to the jazz community at that time. It was too late to watch the whole documentary, so we cut straight to the 38 minute "Call it Anything" performance from the 1970 Isle of Wight festival. Wow! Collective improvisation beyond belief. Aurelie had asked if I was in a band, and I'd struggled to explain what kind of entity Children of the Drone is. After she'd seen Miles & co. doing their incomparable 'thing', I was able to explain that, were we a million times better, we'd be something like that.

Pok and I then attempted our own saz and mandola jam, which felt pretty good at the time. I got it on minidisc, just a few minutes, which I've made available together with some older Pok-related stuff, some going back to 1996:
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