Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 8 Amandala by Dave Fiuczynski

I came across Dave Fiuczynski by chance but I’m bloody glad I did. For once this might be touted as an album which, if it didn’t exactly change my life, did set me off on a new path and getting to know other performers and their music, simply by googling Fiuczynski’s sidemen and seeing what they were up to and who they played with.

OK, doing that still leaves you within quite a narrow field, but there is still good stuff to get to know.

I came across Fiuczynski quite by accident. When iPods were just getting going and becoming all the rage but commanding very high prices (as all Apple products do and were being bought by folk who work on the principle that if you’re being charged through the nose, it must be good! Er, not necessarily, sunshine, but that’s for another time) I got interested. What all my music in a small gadget like that and I can carry it all around? Bloody hell!

Well, after the hell of tape spooling out of your Sony Walkman (or it’s cheapo Saisho rip-off) once too often, it was a godsend. The downside was the price: I’m not one of those dicks who will pay £100 for a £5 pencil just because it’s good a sodding white apple printed on it. (The same is true of T shirts: three for £8 from Asda is good enough for me rather than one for £40 which is identical except for a tiny Ralph Lauren logo of a polo player on the upper left which informs your idiot peers that like them you have more money than sense.)

One day I was in North Devon on a National Trust ‘working holiday’ (i.e. you do hard work for nowt but earn the gratitude of the nation) for a travel piece for the Mail, when on the mini bus back to where we were staying I noticed one of the other guys wearing which led into a small gadget like an oversized USB stick. What’s that, I asked him. An MP3 player he told me. And that’s when discovered how you can listen to music on the go without taking out a mortgage because Apple are such shysters.

The first one I bought — and this was at least 20 years ago — was not very sophisticated, had little memory, and a bugger to use: lose your way in the various menus and you were there till next Christmas trying to get back out. Oh, you could change the ‘colour of the display’ but was that worth it? Yet it did the job and bonus was it came with a voucher to download several tracks for free.

I looked up jazz tracks and among them saw the name the guitarist Dave Fiuczynski. It was one of the ones I downloaded and I liked it. In fact, on the strength of it I decided to buy one of his CDs — and Amandala was the one I chance upon, chosen pretty much at random.

Ironically, though the music he produces as a rule was absolutely nothing like the track of conventional jazz I had downloaded with my voucher (and nothing by Fiuczynski I have since heard — I’ve bought about five more of his albums — is remotely like that track). But I loved it. In an odd sort of way it was music of a kind I’d been waiting for all my life.

Furthermore, if I was a better guitarist and formed a band, Fiuczynski’s music is exactly the kind of music I should like to play. Admittedly, it is marmite, but then you can’t win ’em all. If you like this, check out his other stuff, it’s just as good.