I’ve been having some jazz piano lessons recently in preparation for a project I’m working on in 2013 with The Prince Consort and British jazz pianist Jason Rebello. His Make it Real is a personal favourite and he’s also recorded some great tunes on Alyn Cosker’s album Lyn’s Une and some super-slick solos as part of Sting’s band. Emma Pomfret has just written an article in The Times on this kind of cross-genre collaboration.

The new Linn website is all about music and the emotions it inspires and reflects.

As it developed, it was great fun for us to remember the music that defined the key events and emotions in each of our lives, and also surprising to discover many similarities and overlaps between these times when music made the difference.

Moving from the personal to the public, some mixtapes are meant to broadcast, not serenade. Most people have a friend or workmate who is always trying to get them to listen to “this great new band”. The original Social Network app, a good mixtape can build more bridges than the Roman army. It also covers the whole gamut of self-promotion, from ‘I know my music’ to ‘look how cool I am’, however much you admit it to yourself…

A few weeks ago there was an article in The New Yorker about the French pianist Hélène Grimaud. In the interview she talks about how she practises in her head away from the piano, and that for a recent recording she had to play the pieces through just a few times at the instrument, and she was ready to go. The journalist, evidently dazzled by this, reported that her preparation for the recording session ‘only took about twenty minutes’ with Grimaud leaving for dinner saying nonchalantly, ‘Let’s keep it fresh for tomorrow.’

Hands up if you’ve ever made or received a mixtape. Keep your hand up if it was for/from someone you fancied. Keep it up if it worked.

If you’ve still got your hand up (figuratively, at least) then I guarantee that you’ll be able to name at least one song from that mixtape, if not the entire tracklisting.

One Friday evening in my early teens I sat with my family watching The Rock and Roll Years, a BBC television series that presented archive news footage from a given year, backed by a soundtrack of the biggest hits of the time.

That week’s year was 1966, and underneath a montage of 1966’s highest profile deaths was a song of ethereal perfection…

The summer preceding the September 1991 release of Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’, I was one of the lucky people to receive an advance cassette of the album.

At the time, I was producing a radio show called Music View that was syndicated on 200 college radio stations across the USA. I had previously been the Program Director at one of the biggest college…

I was one of those appalling children born with the demeanour and sensibilities of a 50-year-old.

Only work saved me from a lifetime of ‘fogeydom’; at 16 I turned up for my first day at work at the hi-fi company Linn Products, in my three-piece suit, eager to learn more about the intimate secrets of loudspeakers. I was given a tub of bitumen and a brush.

Following my last blog on music industry moves towards studio master, and Neil Young’s blog on the same subject, I was both gob-smacked and terrified to be invited to Broken Arrow Ranch to meet with the man himself.

Neil Young’s music was a soundtrack to my teenage years, especially Harvest. Inevitably, every time I was dumped by the seemingly-never-to-be-replaced…