Brecker’s wife, Susan, is appealing for the right donor of bone marrow or blood stem cells.

For those of you who’ve been following The Great Sailing By Debate on this blog, you may like to know that this week Jarvis Cocker chose Sailing By as the disc he’d most like to take to his desert island – yeech!

Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4.

I’m an addict of the BBC’s online audio output. And now they’ve made it even better.

The interface now works properly with Firefox, so I have another good reason not to fire up IE. But that’s not all – the navigation is much richer, the window resizable, and best of all, it gives you the option of continuing from where you left off.

It’s just so cool!

For the last 12 months or so, I’ve been exploring some of the free music – Parker, himself, prefers creative music - coming out of New York.

It’s been confusing, to say the least. So many half-remembered names, and even more new ones.

I only wish I’d found this page earlier. I don’t agree with all the opinions, but they’re in the right ballpark for the CDs I’ve bought.

Base Fiddles and Nu Bop:
A Consumer Guide to William Parker, Matthew Shipp, et al.

Ever since being blasted by Coltrane’s Ascension for the first time when I was a student, I’ve been a little reticent of listening to free jazz big bands.

However, my current fixation with the work of New York bass player William Parker has led me inexorably towards his Little Huey Creative Orchestra, an aggregation of around 20 of his colleagues in what seems to be a fantastic flowering of talent in his hometown currently. Must get to New York to hear this lot in the flesh.

I just bought The Mayor of Punkville on Ebay, and I’m sitting here with a silly grin on my face as I plan two Web sites. This is the sort of fun I get listening to Thelonious Monk, it really is that good.

I’ve been fiddling about on the Net, repurposing a club at Ecademy, catching up on e-mail… and watching a great documentary on John Lee Hooker on BBC4.

Who says men can’t do more than one thing at the same time?

Recently, there’s been some brilliant stuff from WOMAD this year – if you have a chance to see the Oumou Sangare set (they’ve shown it three times, that I’ve seen), do it! It’s one of the most stunning sets of African music I’ve seen.

Singer Robert Palmer died of a heart attack in Paris earlier today.

He was only 54.

His latest album, Drive, was an astonishing return to form and his musical roots.

We wuz robbed.

BBC News

I’m just listening to a track called Orbitron Attack, from Axiom Funk’s Funkronomicon. Never having been much of a Parliament/Funkadelic aficionado, I’d never heard of Eddie Hazell, their wild guitarist.

Suddenly, I know who Prince and Vernon Reid have been listening to. Absolutely amazing stuff – sustained funk metal invention of boggling proportions.

And Hazell died not long after recording the album in 1995, after a life partaking of (ahem) recreational substances.

What is it that links great musicians with hard drugs? Charlie Parker, Art Pepper, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and many others have all had a significant brush with them – and that’s just the jazz world.

One of my great heroes had a great turn of phrase. I’m reading Paul Tingen’s excellent Miles Beyond. The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991; he turns up this gem:

“If you learn any of that old shit, you’re fired.”
Miles to bassist Michael Henderson.

Priceless!

The book’s Web site

Why is that Rahsaan Roland Kirk album called Does your house have lions? (Mine certainly doesn’t).

They’re playing a track on the Avant Garde station on Radio@Netscape Plus. I’m flipping between Avant Garde and African today, as one gets too extreme or the other gets too sweet and poppy.