Having a trumpet as our logo, I’ve often been asked if it was because I had a love of jazz. Even more so since we have images of trumpets on the walls of our business, and quotes from the likes of Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong, everybody in the agency even learned to play the trumpet (badly) in aid of Children in Need….and we were invited to play live on regional TV on Pudsey night! Traditionally when we win a new client it is accompanied by a blast from our real in-house trumpet! But no I don’t have a love of jazz.
But that might be about to change. My son Tom, of The Whalley Wine Shop fame asked me to put together a jazzy, bluesy playlist for him as background music for the shop. So after a bit of exploring the internet and iTunes I bought six albums widely acclaimed as the best jazz albums of all time. No 1 on everybody’s list seems to be ‘A Kind of Blue’ by the aforementioned Miles Davis. And having listened to it quietly with a glass of wine in hand I can safely say it is amazing!…and I will be listening to a lot more of it from now on.
The world is getting quicker. No it’s not that I’m getting slower although my sidestep and bodyswerve cross a time zone in their execution..but a couple of examples in the last week have caught my attention..
A week last Sunday my good friend Brian Maudsley suffered a bad angina attack. He was admitted to hospital Monday, had heart surgery Tuesday( to have a stent, a small mesh tube that’s used to treat narrowed arteries, inserted, he’s got the full set now,) out Wednesday, and (as always) it was great to enjoy his company at Blackburn Rugby with the lads on Saturday. Anybody seeing him one Saturday to the next would not know any different! Amazing.
Yesterday there was a big fire in Blackburn Town Centre and as I sat at my kitchen table I was looking at pictures of the fire on Twitter while it was happening….even before the fire engines had arrived! The speed of the internet. A photo taken and broadcast and spread round the internet in a matter of seconds. Amazing.
My reader and his dog will know that I am a big fan of how The X Factor is marketed. And this year they have pulled yet another masterstroke. By linking with iTunes and allowing the public to buy the performances of the contestants at a £ a time within hours of them making them is pure genius (speed again!). As the technology gets even more refined and faster we will surely be able to purchase live broadcasts almost instantaneously. Amazing. Here’s my favourite performance of the show so far…
Not only is Simon Cowell going to make even more money (with very little additional work) he will also be privvy to the goldmine of information of which acts and which songs the public are actually shelling out their hard earned cash for. Combine this with charts of the numbers of phone calls made, and numbers of online hits for the various artists on you tube and on their website, and he has all the market information you could possibly ask for to ensure that several new ‘cash cows’, I mean pop stars, will be created this year. Adding even more cash into his coffers…in time for the whole money spinning machine to start again next year compounding his earnings year on year on year! Amazing!
As a fan I think it weakens the show. Since Simons motivation is now to ‘sell’ each performance to the millions listening the iTunes innovation will make him and his judges very reluctant to criticise any performance, therefore the days of him saying a performance was terrible, or cruise ship, or anything derogatory that might prevent a listener buying the song are over. Shame.
We’ll still get the insults in the auditions though. Here he is having a go at two of my countrymen…or women….(I love the last bit where she says “she’d still do him…!” Amazing.
Workhouse’s very own rock star, Graham Slater who is drummer with local band Outsider, is proud to announce that their music is now available on itunes.
Outsider’s album, In Your Life which features some of the bands most loved tracks such as Understanding and Only Yourself To Blame, is available to downloads from the itunes store at
Let’s see if we can get this fantastic band into the download charts!
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