When I wrote Farewell to Philosophy for Julian, I knew his playing from recordings. He aims for a lyrical, singing approach to the cello, which suited me down to the ground. More recently I wrote a double bass concerto for Duncan McTier, and I spent a long time getting to know Duncan’s playing, while also thinking about my own history with the double bass, my relationship to the jazz bass and to the classical bass. In the process the piece became a detailed meditation on the instrument, and on the people playing it.”Bryars’s attitude to composition as in part a collaborative act finds a further reflection in his work, as both composer and performer, with his ensemble. He describes its members as “my best musical friends; in some cases, I’ve worked with them for more than 25 years. In their different ways, each has the qualities of a virtuoso, but they are also fine chamber musicians who represent the chamber-music values I take very seriously.”While a 60th birthday provides the opportunity to look back, the composer himself must, inevitably, look forward.

He now spends part of his time living in Canada (where Jesus’ Blood topped the pop charts in 1994), and has started his own record label, GB Records. Current projects include a set of madrigals, eventually to comprise seven Books, each written on a different day of the week – a typically Bryarsesque conceit that will occupy him for years to come. Retirement at 60? It’s not an option.’Gavin Bryars: A Portrait’ is released by Philips on 10 February. The composer’s website is at . As the most uncompromising of the early-Seventies Krautrock groups, it’s quite heartening to see Faust carrying on regardless into the new millennium, cranking out avant-rock of sometimes stubborn opacity, and subjecting audiences to “happenings” comprised of roughly equal parts noise, nudity, heavy engineering and action-painting.

This new album follows the “scrapbook” form adopted so successfully for The Faust Tapes, with sonic fragments from disparate eras mixed together into a pair of 20-minute audio-collage “Patchworks”, in the manner of Frank Zappa. The first opens with a 1971 comment from the critic Walter Adler, an indictment of Faust as “children who thought they could play the game of the entertainment business, and didn’t realise that the business played with them”. Maybe so, but they did manage to wangle a fully equipped studio and DM300,000 out of Deutsche Grammophon, with which they created the two albums (Faust and Faust So Far) now universally regarded as groundbreaking classics just ab

As the most uncompromising of the early-Seventies Krautrock groups, it’s quite heartening to see Faust carrying on regardless into the new millennium, cranking out avant-rock of sometimes stubborn opacity, and subjecting audiences to “happenings” comprised of roughly equal parts noise, nudity, heavy engineering and action-painting. Splinters and memories of tracks from those early albums bubble up here occasionally, offering brief glimpses of the band in all its glory, before submerging back within the turbulent flow.

It’s rather like a perverse survey of Faust’s career, a Leastest Hits compilation of the bits between the tunes: “Ironies” blends machine noise from four distinct eras of the band’s history into one vertiginous, plummeting hum, while the “Out of Our Prison” section that concludes the second “Patchwork” effectively telescopes all the 1974 sessions for their fourth album down into four minutes of noise and murmuring.. It’s an ill wind: thanks to his affliction with Kallman’s syndrome, the hereditary hormonal deficiency that stunted his growth, Cleveland balladeer Jimmy Scott was compensated with boyish good looks and a voice to match, one so pure and clear and measured that many, on first encountering it, are convinced they’re listening to a female singer. To fellow performers, Scott was a unique talent: his tone and timbre were a big influence on Frankie Valli, while Marvin Gaye “longed to sing ballads with the depth of Jimmy Scott”, and considered this long-lost LP “calming, haunting, and just plain beautiful”. Recorded for Ray Charles’s Tangerine label in 1962, with Charles serving as pianist and producer, Falling In Love Is Wonderful was quickly withdrawn from shops due to a contractual dispute with Scott’s former label Savoy. Regarded by all, including Scott himself, as the pinnacle of his career, the album became a prized rarity in the intervening four decades and only appears now following the death of Savoy

It’s an ill wind: thanks to his affliction with Kallman’s syndrome, the hereditary hormonal deficiency that stunted his growth, Cleveland balladeer Jimmy Scott was compensated with boyish good looks and a voice to match, one so pure and clear and measured that many, on first encountering it, are convinced they’re listening to a female singer.