Pierre M Durand

In the limelight - Hot Summer Nights

By Graham Dixon

The second Hot Summer Nights, Cool Music show at the Noel Heritage Park in Odessa featured the California-based band Incendio. A perfect temperature, lightish winds and a picturesque sky drew out a large audience who were rewarded with some virtuosic guitar work from the two lead guitars, some competent bass work and a percussionist who used nothing but his hands on a variety of instruments.

While I love traditional drums as much as the next man, Incendio has made precisely the right choice in limiting its percussion to subtler use of hands on drums. So Brian Brock has a quiet but essential role to play in underpinning the work of the guitars in front of him.

And what guitarists they are.

Jim Stubblefield does not say much, his expression barely changes throughout the show, and he often simply stands virtually still - yet his presence is quietly mesmerizing as his fingers fly up and down the neck with smooth precision. His pick hand often speeds into a blur of movement. Incendio members call themselves a "world music" band - a genre that is by design eclectic rather than proscribed - and Stubblefield is equally virtuosic in flamenco, classical, jazz riffs and even an occasional reference to slash playing. His performance was a master-class for any guitarist in the audience.

Incendio's ostensible front-man is Jean-Pierre Durand, who writes he has spent his time "generally ignoring any disciplined approach to music." If his easy rapport and blinding guitar-work are the result of such an approach, then we should introduce his anarchic method to every school music department. I remember Durand from his bar gigs at UC Berkeley in the 1990s, and while he has obviously moved far beyond those early days, he maintains the same smiling joy at making music. He is the constantly-moving, Tigger-like enthusiast who bounces around the stage in contrast to Stubblefield's fascinating but moody introspection.

The highlight of the first half was "Dragons," a number that has firmly Greek themes that slide easily into a Turkish feel. A poppy-smoke filled bar in Istanbul with belly-dancers in the early hours of the morning came to mind.

Incendio uses guitar synthesizers to produce a range of sound from accordion to piano and on to more exotic world instruments. Durand actually showed the sounds were being produced live rather than from a recording with a brief solo between songs - perhaps unneeded evidence, but it served to show just how rich a sound those three guitars can produce. They use synthesizer-boards to create symphonic complexity rather than the mush of sound that often occurs with lesser performers.

PR: How an Organism Dies Affects the Fitness of its Neighbors ...

At first glance, investigating why organisms die may seem rather macabre. At the University of Arizona, however, Pierre Durand, Armin Rashidi, and Rick Michod have made an unexpected discovery that is helping unravel a perplexing phenomenon. They found that genetically programmed death (known as programmed cell death) in a single-celled green alga can benefit others in the population while dying passively (without the death program) can be harmful to others. "The question of why under some circumstances, an individual would actively kill itself has been difficult to explain," they say. "Why this suicide-like behavior evolved and was maintained in single-celled organisms is mysterious." Explaining the evolution of programmed death in unicellular organisms by Darwinian principles is difficult; death could hardly provide a fitness advantage to the dying individual. Is programmed death simply an evolutionary "accident" — the side-effect of some other important function? Research suggests that at least in some situations, this is not the case. Genetically programmed death could have evolved as an altruistic behavior to benefit others (presumably relatives) in the population.

Using Chlamydomonas reinhardtii "What is interesting for us now, is to understand the generality of these findings," say the study authors, "and exactly how these benefits are provided to others." Their work suggests that programmed suicide can be altruistic and is fundamentally different from passive death. Furthermore, programmed death could have facilitated the evolution of multicellular forms of these algae — an ongoing topic of the authors' research.