AI is good at doing things nobody wants to do. It writes things that no one wants to write to send to people who don’t want to read them, music to be played to the unfussiest of so-called listeners.

It excels at CVs, compiled lists, claustrophobically self pitying songs by facelesssly beautiful singer/songwriters…that sort of thing.

I think a CV, for example, should tell you a bit more than what a person has done. It should tell you what you are in for when you employ someone. It should tell you if they are stingy, possessive about biscuits, territorial insde the office fridge , if they will make you laugh. It should give away the prospect of that person, should they be unsuccessful in their application, poisoning your cat, putting a brick through your window or hacking your contacts list and sending them unsolicited offers of sexual union.

So I am updating my Cv, which I wrote (and arguably completed) a full eleven years ago, before AI was the cultural dominant force it is now. It makes as much sense as anything else you will read on a screen.

Liam Noble Curriculum Vitae

Liam Noble was brought up extremely rapidly by two parents in Bromley, Kent. His interest in music started from age two, when his analyst played him Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” as light relief from his regression therapy, resulting in the first in a line of prestigious awards – “Patient Of The Year, 1971.”

From there it was a short step to Cannonball Adderley, the records of Miles Davis that featured his wives on the front covers, and the exuberant expletives of Jelly Roll Morton’s Library Of Congress recordings. Indeed, music and swearing went hand in hand in Noble’s early years as he hopelessly splashed through mid-period Beethoven sonatas and Chopin Études in a sea of curse and rage. He has since avoided sharps and flats altogether.

In a career spanning his entire working life to date, Noble has worked with a whole roster of international talent that reads like a list of people on a CV. Among them are some that should be singled out for special mention.

He continues to practice Bach’s “Goldberg Variations”, in the hope that out of 32, one will eventually come out right. Noble is a sought after educator, holding several marginal posts at major institutions. Teaching can often become repetitive; he has avoided this by working only one hour per year at each college. This hour is then taxed at source.

His solo cd, ” A Room Somewhere”, marks a significant departure from his usual way of working, including as it does many of the black notes of the keyboard, which are used in new and surprising combinations. Despite working in a band of one, artistic differences dogged its production but the album received rave reviews throughout the press, who accurately summarised his own press release remarkably well.

Four years later, he dipped his toe in the waters of electric-acoustic music, which, as anyone who owns a toaster and a bath will know, is dangerously stupid. The resulting album, “The Long Game”, was named after a childhood foray into hide and seek where he discovered only hours later that his friends had since gone home.

His newest project, “Go See Jasmin”, an all-electric group named after a non existent clairvoyant, would fit the cliche of the mid-life crisis album perfectly save the fact that he would have to make it to one hundred and fourteen years old to honour it, reversing the old saying about the timelessness of music- the music dies but the person lives on. Liam Noble writes exclusively in the third person.

I wonder if John Scofield likes the writing of Lydia Davis or, if he doesn’t know it, might respond well to being introduced to it, although this might be more likely coming from a close friend of his rather than a fan like me. I wonder if he might see something of himself in her work, or whether it’s just me who sees that or, additionally, whether my reading of her latest book and seeing his gig in close succession makes me see similarities between their work.

I wonder if Lydia Davis likes jazz.

Most people don’t, but then she is of an age where she might (older).

She makes me feel like the simple writing of a sentence, regardless of its subject, is enough, and John Scofield seems to have a similar way with melody. Commonplace things, like a musical scale or a meal between friends, described well and used with a sense of their microscopic tensions and variations, are enough. When I listen to John Scofield’s music I imagine that, in the liking of it, I can do something similar. I feel the same about Lydia Davis’s writing. I think a lot of work goes into these illusions, which are not the kind of illusions built to deceive, but to save the time of hearing or seeing the many less satisfying way of writing a sentence or playing a melody. It’s fun to try and do it, in both cases, and the level of success is unimportant.

I guess someone who knows about literature may clarify these connections, or lack of them, although what might be achieved by that is uncertain, since I’m enjoying those connections either way, the way you do when the world becomes, or appears to become, one part less randomly chaotic, and humans appear connected in interesting ways. I am enjoying that.

I am supposed to be meeting the famous acoustic guitarist Ralph Towner,  and it is not known to me why that is. He turns up, introduces himself, but is instead the popular comedian Ricky Gervais. Suddenly I’m not sure. I convince myself they look similar and that I am mistaken.

The mystery person allows me to board his jet. It’s not a jet, it’s a kind of spaceship and it’s taking us somewhere in London. This thing is so fast that we are there almost before we have boarded it.

We get out and Ralph Towner starts with his trademark comedy of awkwardness and really pushing it so you don’t know if he’s serious. At one point we walk through some showers, the kind that reminded me, not pleasantly, of school, where he is suddenly naked and pulling those faces at me like he wants something. He doesn’t get it, whatever it is.

I still haven’t decided who this is. Those who know Ralph Towner will be wondering why I have continuing doubts.

I say come on man why are you doing that and he says it’s only a joke don’t be so uptight, an explanation I don’t even have time to accept before…

…we then arrive at some kind of dinner table set for a large group in the vein of Henry 8th and his lot. Ralph Towner, a man of delicate harmonic sensibilities, poignant melodic economies and average build would never, I decide, have such a lavish and vulgar banquet.

At that point, I wake up wondering if that’s what I needed to realise in order to put an end to this unlikely story, and if I hadn’t realised it then, how much longer the dream might have gone on for. The only reason I can find for Ralph Towner’s appearance is that I was trying to figure out his tune “Distant Hills” in my head as I dropped off the night before. Gervais, though, remains a mystery to me in every way, as he always has.