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.