Radio performance for National Public Radio, recorded 26 September 1993 and broadcast two days later.
Rather intimate setting with a (too) polite audience.
Blending jazz and rock doesn't always go smoothly, but singer John Martyn manages to get the job done easily on No Little Boy.
We had come, most of us, to pay homage to and enjoy the results of a 26-year career, spanning 21 albums.
Pop and Jazz in Review
By JON PARELES
The blues is a touchstone for John Martyn. In the blues, he found music that transmutes pain into beauty, music that initiates select listeners into a secret world of loneliness and danger. But he didn't become one more blues imitator. Instead, he forged a highly individual style from British folk songs, jazz, soul and his own eccentricities: music with pinpoint syncopated vamps under hazy, free-form vocals, in songs that contemplate death and mourn lost love.
30 minutes
Radio interview on release of No Little Boy with live May You Never and Solid Air, solo acoustic.
Also a bit about the Monsoon Suite and a 2 minute clip as well.
17 Dec 1992
One of the great lines of the year tumbled out of the film Glengarry Glen Ross as Ricky Roma was peddling real estate. Played by Al Pacino, the spidery Roma looked deep into the eyes of a diffident client and said that everyone worries about the past and the future. But no one lives for the moment. You can't say that about John Martyn, whose mysterious career is full of passionate moments.
01 Oct 1992
The voice on the other end of the telephone line is most certainly John Martyn's. The soft Glaswegian accent and the dark timbre which is Martyn's trademark is there, yet he seemed strangely disconnected. Oh no, I immediately thought. It is well known that Martyn struggled with alcohol and many other substances for years, but I thought those days were behind him. So why the strange distance in his hello, I mean it was four in the afternoon, after all!
26 Jun 1992
John Martyn has been a cult figure on the pop music scene for more than 20 years.
Band performance from Bottom Line cafe.
At least Big Muff was played as this track ended up on the Georgia On Our Mind CD.
Sounds around town
Pop Album of the Week: John Martyn: Foundations (Island).
