UFO Info Week-End

The sale of the Waterstone’s bookselling chain to EMI and Tim Waterstone is expected

The sale of the Waterstone’s bookselling chain to EMI and Tim Waterstone is expected to be announced in two weeks with a price tag of around pounds 300m. EMI’s due diligence is now in its final stages and the deal with WH Smith should be completed next month. It is thought that Mr Waterstone’s Daisy & Tom children’s stores will be included in the new company, though at a greatly reduced valuation.
The two Daisy & Tom stores are expected to be valued at just pounds 2m-pounds 3m. This is a fraction of the pounds 30m price tag which WH Smith claimed Mr Waterstone was attaching to the chain when he made his audacious pounds 1bn offer for the WH Smith group last autumn.Daisy & Tom will be grouped together with Waterstone’s and EMI’s Dillons book stores and its HMV music chain. Retailers urged the Chancellor not to introduce a tax on car park spaces in next month’s Budget.

In its pre-Budget submission the British Retail Consortium said this would tax shoppers and raise inflation without reducing car use. It also urged that any new revenues from environmental taxes should be ring-fenced for spending on improved transport. The BRC added that the minimum wage would increase the average weekly shopping bill by 3p or less than 0.1 per cent if it were set at pounds 3.50. It urged the level should be based on total pay, including commissions and pension contributions, not just the hourly wage.. Allied Domecq, in a City presentation to analysts, appeared to downplay the possibility of deals with other spirit groups in favour of a go-it-alone policy.

The stock market had expected the drinks group to forge a link, perhaps even indulge in a merger, with another drinks operation following the creation of Diageo through the get together of Grand Metropolitan and Guinness.
Allied’s shares fell 21p to 533p; at one time they were off 35p.Since Diageo appeared there has been a succession of stories that Allied, to counter such a powerful opponent, would link with the likes of Seagram of Canada or Pernod Ricard of France.But in a 110-page circular Allied, in effect, poured out its heart, giving a detailed financial break down which indicated it was doing well and did not need any outside help.Even before Diageo appeared, the stock market had taken the view that Allied’s best course was a straight forward demerger, leaving stand alone retail and spirit operations.But Allied came out against a split and has appeared reluctant to change its shape although it could be a casualty of Diageo’s marketing muscle.It is thought to be keen to buy Diageo’s Dewar’s Scotch whisky brand which is being sold at the insistence of regulators. For two years he worked with Jutta Hipp and they joined the band of the tenor player Hans Koller. They played for US Army clubs in Turkey and then in 1954 Zoller went alone to Holland, and saw his first American jazz musicians – the Jazz at the Philharmonic unit and Lionel Hampton’s band.He settled in Frankfurt, where he met the pianist Jutta Hipp and the trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff. However, Zoller and Pettiford were injured in a car crash; the group broke up and the guitarist went back to America, to stay, in March 1959.On arrival, thanks to the pianist John Lewis and the guitarist Jim Hall, he was awarded a scholarship to the Lenox School of Jazz in Massachusetts. He met the American alto saxophonist Lee Konitz in 1955 when the two shared a concert bill in Cologne, and Konitz remained a friend for many years.When he returned to Hungary from a second trip to the US in October 1958, Zoller formed his most famous trio, which included the expatriate Americans Oscar Pettiford (on bass) and Kenny Clarke (on drums).

I found out the point of the music on that trip when I heard Clifford Brown on trumpet.”
Zoller was born in Hungary in 1927. “My father was a music teacher and he started me on violin when I was four,” he later recalled. “When I was nine I started to like the trumpet better than the violin so I practised in secret on a borrowed horn. The tuning was terrible!” This feat of engineering was typical of Zoller’s ingenuity; he later patented several musical devices in the United States.Zoller and Auer worked together for five years, winning first prize at a jazz contest in Vienna in 1951. “We formed a quartet together – and then we heard records of the George Shearing Quintet which included a vibraphone.” It was impossible to buy such an instrument, so Zoller decided to manufacture one himself “I moulded the keys myself in a foundry. So, in 1948, just before they closed the border with Austria, I walked across the mountains with nothing but my guitar and some changes of underwear stuffed in the case.”In Vienna he met Vera Auer, who at that time played jazz on the accordion. “It was hard to find work as a trumpeter, so I switched to guitar and taught myself the chords from piano music.” In 1947, still unaware of jazz, he joined one of the top commercial bands in the capital and it was then that he first heard Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie on the radio.”Like most things, records were very hard to get in Hungary then.