Simon: I guess that’s a pretty big difference in Jennings pieces!

Thanks for the write-up Richard, sounds like a very interesting evening!

A couple of factual amendments, for what they’re worth: the Jennings piece played back at the start of John and Sebastian’s performance was ‘For Christine Jennings’.
And I didn’t plan the February concerts with Toshi Nakamura and Havard Volden; they were coming anyway and just asked me to suggest other musicians to play with on their two nights at Cafe Oto.

I’ve listened to the recordings from the Friday concert a few times over the past two days, and have enjoyed both. I really liked the Loris performance at the time. As you say, it had a slower, more relaxed, loris-like feel than the music on their Cat from Cat Hill cd, but if you accept its almost glacial pace for me it’s of similar quality. They are a fantastic trio.

I found the Tilbury/Lexer performance impossible to judge at the time, mainly because I was on tenterhooks about the technical side of Sebastian’s set-up, knowing that he was living dangerously and worrying that the whole thing would collapse. So it was only when I played the recording back for the first time while driving home to Sheffield that I began to appreciate just how strong this ‘live’ version of the Cage piece was. As you suggest, it didn’t have that quality of rich-and-strange otherworldliness that the cd version is given by the further level of aleatoric editing that Sebastian subjected the original recording to. But listening back I found it truly compelling and it completely immersed me. Awesomely beautiful and original music, police sirens, jukebox, coughs, shuffles and all.