Visiting Tony Levin

Tim and I went to visit legendary UK jazz drummer Tony Levin at his home in Church Stretton today. We’re keen to work with him on an online jazz project, and this was an initial conversation to get the ball rolling.

Tony runs a semi-regular jazz club at the Patrick Kavanagh pub in Moseley, where some of the greatest jazz players in the world play to a handful of people in the know. He also has a record label called Rare Music, which releases some great undiscovered British jazz gems.

We’re interested in working with Tony to start building a bit of an online oral history about local jazz that we hope will eventually seed a UK Jazz Digital Archive. We’ll bring students into the plan, film some performances (Dave Holland’s giving a masterclass at the Conservatoire this week — that’s our university), and get Tony talking to some of his jazz mates to reminisce about the old days.

And then we’ll do some cool social networking, cross-platform, Web2.5 stuff with it.

Internet dating

Paul of Inglesby Greenhow

It occurs to me that I’ve been doing things online longer than most people I know. I was involved in bulletin boards back in the early 1990s, was a keen user of Usenet, and had a website up and running as early as 1995. It was around that time that I started chatting with Paul Baldwin – a radio producer in the UK.

I can’t remember who got in touch with whom. I think I remember he emailed me, but I could have that wrong. At any rate, we fairly quickly figured out that we had overlapping interests. I was running Adverb Productions, an independent radio company that was heavily involved in programmes about New Zealand jazz. He was running NowMedia, an independent radio company that was heavily involved in programmes about UK blues.

We both got into education around the same time, and have pretty much had parallel careers – other than the fact that NowMedia actually still exists in some form or other. He’s now the radio lecturer at Teesside University in Middlesbrough, and it was under this banner that he arranged for us to actually, finally, meet.

Caption wanted

Go cat plays Go

I played Go against Dan again last night. I lost quite catastrophically. The less said about that, the better. But his cat wanted to get into the game. There’s a LOLcat waiting to happen, I thought – and took some photos. But I’m coming up blank on captions. Ideas?

Hury Up! It’s UR muv!

And as for the game itself: