footie's blog

I spent this afternoon with an old friend, Pete Dyson, who now owns Studio West recording studios in San Diego. He was playing host to 30 school kids (and their teachers, parents and assorted hangers-on) who were making a charity record in aid of the Hurricane Katrina disaster relief fund. The whole event was the brainchild of music teacher, Joretta Harris, who had organized the whole event, written the song, laid down the backing tracks with some musician friends in Atlanta, and organized for with the 30 or so parents of the children for them to be there.

I have recently been rediscovering Steely Dan - one of my favourite bands of all time. Until the late 1990s they were regarded as a passé 1970s AOR band - but over the last couple of years have reformed and released two great new albums. I have always loved their witty/ ironic lyrics, clever rhythms and high standards of musicianship/ production.

I have now discovered on amazon, that there are a whole load of "early years" compilations available of material that they recorded before their first official album release "Can't But a Thrill"...

It's not often that two of my areas of interest converge - but I saw an article in the Guardian Science supplement last week, which intrigued me - "How do you decode the new Coldplay album cover?" by Marcus de Sautoy, a professor of mathematics at Oxford.

Not wanting to be a spoilsport or anything - but the answer is that it is a pictorial representation of the Baudot code for the characters X (10111), & (11011,00011), Y (10101).

If you ignore the colours - you should be able to see it clearly reading vertically. Things are getting a bit pretentious when it takes an Oxford professor to decode your album cover !

I have just found out that my saxophone - a Selmer Cigar Cutter - has just passed its 70th birthday.