It was a good week on my favourite jazz programme last week.  Each of the five Open Jazz broadcasts was entirely given over to recordings that Duke Ellington made for Columbia Records between 1951 and 1961. I particularly enjoyed the hour in which his Shakespeare inspired compositions featured.

The music played was from the umpteen LPs Ellington produced which are now available on two CD box sets.  The obvious tunes are there, some in various versions, as well as lesser known pieces.

All these programmes as well as many more are available on the Open Jazz website.  In contrast to the BBC which gives you 30 days to listen to a broadcast after it has gone out Radio France gives you nearly three years so there's no rush.

As well as presenting a well attended and well appreciated Christmas concert this year the Dunedin Wind Band had another and arguably more exciting gig.

We were invited to be part of the general frenzy accompanying the opening of the new Star Wars movie.  Six bands around the UK turned up at their local Vue cinema and played while audiences poured in to see the film.  Naturally we played Stars Wars music and I assume the other bands did the same but we played other film music as well to fill out our hour.  Nonetheless the Star Wars stuff was repeated several times and I'm pleased to report that my fingers got progressively more nimble while never quite mastering it all.

Apparently all the bands were being videoed and a composite video is to be produced, to what end I'm not terribly sure.  To appear on screens throughout the country?  Perhaps national fame awaits but my immediate reward was a free cinema ticket and a bucket of popcorn.

I bought an Evening News the following day to see if our fame had at least reached Holyrood Road but there was no mention.  However the Daily Record and the Scottish Sun had a better nose for such an important news story and this picture is nicked from one of them.  My tiny head is positioned just where the tips of the conductor's baton and the cinema manager's pointy thing meet.

The absence of posts to this blog over the last few weeks is not due to my having been floating around in space but I just happened to catch the arrival of three new astronauts at the international space station this evening and here they are gathered together in the Russian kitchen for a welcoming photo session with the three others who were already on board.

It is unfortunately a little bit out of focus ( I've got one that's even worse) but they were goodness knows how many thousands of miles away and I took the picture from Earth thanks to an excellent event organised by the Edinburgh Science Festival at the museum.

Here's the crowd in the big hall watching the big screen.  We were treated to a video of this morning's launch and amazing shots from inside the Soyuz and then some of the tricky docking procedure, made trickier on this occasion because the automatic system didn't work so they had to guide it into place manually.  An astronaut who had already spent time in the station, Samantha Cristoforetti, was on hand in the museum for an interview and two ladies from the European Space Agency answered lots of  questions as we watched the live broadcast from the station waiting for all the multitude of techie things that needed to be sorted out before the hatch separating the Soyuz from the station was opened and the three new crew members swam weightlessly into view.  It was brilliant.

Much of the audience left at this point but those who stayed on, of whom I was one, then saw a film called The Martian about an astronaut being marooned on Mars, his struggle for survival and eventual rescue.  It wasn't a bad film but I'd have enjoyed it more if the acoustics in the grand hall had not distorted most of the dialogue.

At least it was not as grim a story as Sunset Song which I saw in the afternoon.   It's decades since I read the book but I don't remember the story being as relentlessly dreich as this was.  The book is still on my shelves so maybe I should revisit it to check.

So if I haven't been out in space or spaced out what explains the lack of posts.  Lack of dedication.  I resolve to do better.