Since I wrote about My Morning Jacket’s “Evil Urges” a few weeks back (comparing it unfavourably to the Fleet Foxes debut), I’ve been thinking about the band and the record a lot. Picking up Billboard this morning (not a regular habit, rest assured), I found them staring awkwardly out of the cover. Jim James could barely be spotted in the accompanying feature, overwhelmed by laudatory quotes from a great swathe of on-message, optimum-strategising execs and some head-spinning stats suggesting that, yes, they were set to break into the biggish league in America sometime later in the summer. I’ve persevered with “Evil Urges” – due more to my enduring affection for the band, rather than some grudging obligation to make myself like a properly successful act who work somewhere in the neighbourhood of my beat. And while I can’t pretend I’ve revised any of the huge misgivings I expressed on that first blog, I find myself with some of the songs – “I’m Amazed”, “Sec Walkin”, “Touch Me I’m Going To Scream Part Two” – inadvertently playing in my head at quiet moments. I guess this bodes well for the full band gigs (I missed James’ solo show in London last week), especially that Neil Young support . But just as I slowly reconcile myself to the place My Morning Jacket occupy now, a bunch of reissues turn up to remind me of the band they used to be. Since they signed to Rough Trade in the UK, the releases for ATO over here (“It Still Moves”, “Z”, the “Okonokos” live double set and the “Acoustic Citsuoca Live!” EP) are coming out again, this time distributed independently. They’re interesting as a document of an evolving band – though the jump to “Evil Urges” still jars. Chiefly, I guess, this means marvelling again at the potency of “It Still Moves”: the one-two-three punch of “Mahgeeta”, “Dancefloors” and “Golden”; the seething, lunging dynamics of “Run Thru” (probably even better on the “Okonokos” live version); the unnervingly beautiful “Steam Engine”, a song loaded with private and profound significance for me. Right now, I’m playing that “Acoustic Citsuoca Live!” EP, which is as good a way as any to point up how better suited James’ voice and his songcraft are to an unfussy context rather than a prissy, overly-conceptualised production. Of course, the versions of “Golden” and “Bermuda Highway” here would never get played on American radio, and I imagine My Morning Jacket’s vigorous defendants will find it easy to label me an indie snob for such Luddite sonic preferences. But I suspect that, beyond his drive to be contrary and contemporary and escape the Americana shackles, Jim James’ ambitions involve shooting for posterity, making records with a resonance that will last beyond the lifespan of mere indie bands. And my hunch is that, ironically, the MMJ records that will stand the test of time are “It Still Moves”, “At Dawn” and maybe “Tennessee Fire”: records made back in that Louisville grain silo, unadorned by studio flash that’ll sound dated within a couple of years. We’ll see. . .

It’s not immediately clear quite where Sydney Pollack fits into the scheme of things. As one of the generation of film-makers who flourished in the Sixties and Seventies, there’s nothing on his CV as canonical as, say, Taxi Driver or The Godfather, no real sense of him breaking the same kind of ground as his peers. Even the Evening Standard’s film critic Derek Malcolm, interviewed this morning on Radio 4’s Today programme, admitted the movies which most people would associate with Pollack – Out Of Africa and Tootsie – were ultimately rather “bland”. While you could certainly agree that …Africa and Tootsie were glossy, middlebrow movies, there are sparks in Pollack’s work, particularly Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and Three Days Of The Condor (1975). Both starred Robert Redford, who made seven films in total with Pollack, including Out Of Africa. I like Jeremiah Johnson because John Milius’ screenplay taps brilliantly into the myth of the old West, Redford’s disillusioned ex-soldier turning his back on society and setting himself up as a trapper in the desolate, snowy mountains of Utah. And I like …Condor because it’s one the best conspiracy movies released during the genre’s heyday in the mid-Seventies, Pollack getting all neo-Hitchcock as he explores the shadowy world of CIA black opps aided by a sharp screenplay from Lorenzo Semple Jr. Outside Pollack’s prestige movies (The Way We Were, Tootsie, Out Of Africa), there’s an attempt to embark upon more engaging work, not all of which is successful. The Yakuza (1975) came from an ongoing obsession with Japanese culture by co-writers Paul and Leonard Schrader, and benefited from a towering performance from Robert Mitchum. 1977’s Bobby Deerfield, with Al Pacino as a race car driver, stalls rather than zooms, and although Oscar-nominated, 1981’s crime thriller Absence Of Malice is distinctly ho-hum. It’s not clear entirely what Pollack wanted to achieve with these movies. You could perhaps sense he’s aspiring to the kind of journeyman status afforded to the likes of Howard Hawks or John Ford, comfortable dipping in and out of different genres. But Hawks, particularly, brought zing and wit to his forays into screwball comedy, westerns, thrillers or war movies; Pollack’s films, although often polished, could be conversely rather dull. Pollack, though, became something of a role model for George Clooney. They shared a political outlook, and you suspect Clooney admired Pollack’s desire to mix big budget studio pictures with other work. Certainly, when I interviewed Clooney in late 2005, around the time of Good Night, And Good Luck and Syriana, he spoke at length about his love for Three Days Of The Condor in particular. But I think I generally prefer Pollack as an actor or producer. On screen, he replaced Harvey Keitel in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and had a great cameo in The Sopranos, as an oncologist turned murderer. He was also superb opposite Clooney in Michael Clayton, playing the grizzled boss of the law firm that employs Clayton. He also worked for Woody Allen (Husbands And Wives, 1992) and Robert Altman (The Player, 1992). He was superb, though, as Tootsie’s agent, playing opposite Dustin Hoffman in his own movie. As a producer, he was responsible for The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Talented Mr Ripley, Iris, The Quiet American and Cold Mountain, and he went into business with Anthony Minghella in 2000. If Pollack is to be remembered best, then, it’s probably for the largesse he displayed when helping others, or as an extremely good actor, happy to take off his own director’s cap and bow to the creative vision of another film maker.

I was writing, not for the first time, about Howlin Rain the other week, and admitted that my preoccupation with the band had a certain stalkerish intensity. As I begin yet another blog about James Blackshaw, a London-based guitarist and so on, it strikes me that my prosletyzing on his behalf might be somehow detrimental to his career: a random google of his name would probably bring up this great weight of waffle from me, so hyperbolic that some might suspect we must be related. We’re not, of course, and I’ve never even met the guy. I have, though, played his CDs at home more than any others over the past year or so, and am beginning to suspect that the latest one, “Litany Of Echoes”, might be the best yet. So here we go again: I’m aware that this man is never going to trouble the mainstream, or anything much near to it, but his music is just wonderful. To recap: Blackshaw first wandered onto the radar as a British auxiliary member of the New American Primitive school of guitarists, a fellow traveller of Jack Rose, Ben Chasny etc, with just one obvious British kindred spirit in Rick Tomlinson from Voice Of The Seven Woods. Blackshaw’s lavish, expansive 12-string meditations had their closest antecedent in the work of Robbie Basho, I thought, and they had a richness and shape which seemed further removed than most from folk tradition. As his records have kept coming, Blackshaw seems still further removed from this world. Most of his music remains based on the solitary, concentrated sound of an acoustic guitar (though “Litany Of Echoes” begins with a flurry of piano, and he’s tracked by a cello or violin at times here, too). But the pieces on this, possibly his seventh album, have a classical form that suggests they could be rescored for a romantic symphony, or have buried echoes that hint Blackshaw has been informed by post-rock and – as John Robinson points out in the new issue of Uncut – Sonic Youth. I’ve seen Blackshaw play live once, at the excellent In The Pines club, where he did this: “He starts with a new, untitled song dedicated to someone called Dusty, and it stretches out for something like 15 minutes of interlocking, recurring, bewitching melodies. It's quite extraordinary.” That song is Track Three on the new album, and it’s still extraordinary. I only have a CDR of the album, without track titles, and have lost the email from Tompkins Square which revealed them to me, so you’ll have to excuse the lack of specifics. Hunting round the internet for those titles a minute ago, though, I found this illuminating piece on James Blackshaw by Rolling Stone’s David Fricke. How reassuring to discover that it’s not just me. . .