This video needs to be watched by as many people as possible. She's like Keith Jarrett. In an alternate universe where Jarrett was a pseudo-pop star of fuzzy origin and still like electronic keyboards. And was a woman. Who performed in a bikini and see-through clothes.
Doug Ramsey brought up Roger Scruton's "Harmony and History" article, but only quoted part of it. Here's the whole thing. The historical part is fairly interesting, if dizzingly, inevitably, condensed. Then comes the contemporary questioning, in which Scruton falls into the old trap(s).
Last summer, I watched a semi-random bunch of people (some clearly regulars, others clearly passer-bys) congregate in a square in Gent and do traditional dances to traditional, and some not-so-traditional, music. I'd share a video of it with you, but my camera doesn't do sound along with video, so it wouldn't make much sense. It was there that I had a blinding(ly obvious, perhaps) revelation: this music, rather than classical music, is the ancestor of pop. In terms of complexity, the place of rhythm, instrumentation, social factors (who plays/writes/hears it, where, when and why), the relationship is quite clear. Later, seeing groups like Cor de la Plana or Nass El Ghiwane at Klinkende Munt, and thinking back to some traditional music I'd heard in Spain, only reinforced the notion.
That pop music comes from older popular music is a rather simple point, but it goes against our perception of musical history, which comes from music as it has been recorded. The traditional view is summarised in Scruton's article: church music, Renaissance, Classical, Romantic, Serialism. This kind of chronology is based pretty much entirely on music that was written down. Popular music wasn't written down, so it is erased from the history of Western music: I haven't read it, but I somehow doubt that Richard Taruskin's six-volume The Oxford History of Western Music deals with what peasants were dancing to at village parties. This sets up the fallacy, the apples 'n' oranges comparaison, that Scruton, like countless others, reproduces.
If it is assumed that contemporary pop music is the descendant of classical music (how that could be the case is never discussed, of course: it is enough to leap, as Scruton does, from Alban Berg's "Violin Concerto" to young people singing along to pop songs), there can only be a "the sky is falling" reaction. It would probably be more instructive to track the history of music that took place outside the palace walls and chic salons, and compare oranges to oranges. I haven't conducted this thorough-going study, obviously, but details of that sort have never stopped me from forming opinions.
Most of the world's music is simple, rather than complex. Or may be complex/sophisticated in one or two regards, and very simple in others. Scruton gives an example of this, in how harmony is often limited to unison in the modal musics of India and Arabic cultures. Traditional European musics, just like traditional musics from around the world, it seems to me, were nowhere near the harmonic explorations of the palace composers. Further, contrary to a popular belief reinforced by written music-centric histories, European music doesn't lack rhythm, nor is rhythm some distant concern (flamenco, Irish music, Greek Koumbania... Maybe it's just the church-derived stuff that sounds stiff). I think that contemporary pop flows quite naturally from the same (social/cultural/musical) place these older musics came from.
I've honestly never read this view anywhere, so I'm either completely out at sea, stating the unspokenly obvious or radically original, whichever suits you best. Still, I've seen the "we've gone from Mozart to this?" lamentations so many times...
And now for some smaller nitpicks. Scruton says:
Here is the most remarkable fact about our music, one that has never been sufficiently commented upon: A musical person, familiar with the outline of our tradition, can at once assign a date to almost any piece of our music, however unfamiliar. Western music is through and through historical, in just the peculiar way that Western civilization is historical: We hear history in it, and even if it is only a delicate nuance of style that distinguishes the language of Mendelssohn from that of Schubert, you know at once that the "Hebrides" overture was written a few years later than the Unfinished Symphony. In such experiences you perceive, through the ear, something of the spiritual development of a civilization and the unique place of the individual within it.
Is this kind of historicity really so particular to Western music? Is there really no reason to think musical evolution did not follow psycho-social evolution in non-Western societies?
The old culture of listening depended on something else that is no longer easily obtainable: silence. (...) We owe it to young people to turn off the noise. We must re-create silence, so that silence can turn to song. If we do not do this, then our musical culture will die. It is not we, but our children, who will be the losers.
I see the situation differently. The "natural sonic state" of the world is not silence (from which song may spring), or even relative silence, but noise. Certainly in cities, Muzak isn't the main source of noise. Go out in the country: a fieldful of crickets make a huge amount of noise. Go up in the Alps, those cowbells are really loud. In Martinique at night, the crickets are joined by the frogs and who knows what else. Nature hates a void. From that, I come to the conclusion that silence (even relative silence) exists only in music. And that music sounds nothing like real life, even though it tells us a great deal about it.
I wanted to go to the Museum of Musical Instruments, but I had underestimated the cheapskateness of the human race. The line of people waiting to take advantage of the "free entrance on the first Wednesday of the month" policy stretched well up the street. So I decided to head for the Palais des Beaux-Arts and its Young Belgian Painters Award. Entrance was, of course, free.
The first room I visited was Cindy Wright's. You can see my photos for yourself, but three things I found particularly interesting:
-She was the only painter present in the competition, which I found weird. Unless it's like one of those jazz festivals in which jazz is a minority interest.
-The photo-realism of her work disappears when you get close and it looks like, well, brush-strokes. I found this interesting, because it showed me that the effect was less a matter of technique than intent. So the real and not real are made in pretty much the same way.
- From a distance, I didn't like the portrait of the older man, but up close it really was really affection: heavy, present, powerful.
There was also a portrait of Che Guevara, which I found ugly, but that may have been because I don't like the Che very much. The cube of bacon and the sleeping guy were my favourites.
The second room was taken up by Kris Vleeschouwer's "Glasswerk." This was awesome. I entered with some apprehension: broken glass, which has clearly fallen from some height, tends to make one uneasy. At first I thought it was some boring conceptual thing and just when I was reading the signboard to find out what it was supposed to represent, the machine started to move.
The machine that pushes the bottles off the shelves is controlled by sensors placed in five glass recycling "bubbles" all around Brussels. Whenever someone deposits bottles into one of the bubbles, another is pushed off a shelf. Five webcams allowed gallery visitors to survey activity around these recycling points. The installation made me think of Flickr and the civic journalism that got talked about after the London bombings and how, in a networked society, information is distributed and used to unpredictable ends.
In the third room, they were showing a short film by Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost. It was about a couple of people who find out that they can't take plants to America. So they buy a small cactus, make a fake one out of clay, take both on the American Airlines flight, are told they have to leave the real cactus behind, drive and then walk out into the desert, plant the fake cactus and put a piece of yellow and blue cardboard behind it, thus substituting their imagined desert (sand, sky, cactus) for Death Valley's real one (a rather drab affair). I tend to take this kind of thing quite light-heartedly, but the signboard made grave declarations at me about paranoia and other stuff I can't remember.
Number four (out of six, and, don't worry, the rest will be quick) were Frenchman Sébastien Reuzé's unadorned, unmanipulated and sometimes bizarre, unsettling, confusing or plain... plain photographs of stuff stumbled across in Paris. Some photographs must have been quite recent: there was one of Angelina Jolie posing as Mrs. Smith. The cool ones used reflections on glass (a car or train window, for example) to skew perspective or happy coincidences to create unexpected meanings (a huge poster of a face (make-up, perfume?) trapped behind the shutters of a closed shop). The best ones created visual situations for which the source was untraceable, lost under myriad angles or a single glitch made the familiar strange.
To enter Carlos Aire's multi-part contribution, you had to step through the wardrobe, into a corridor with a bunch of framed b&w photographs hanging on both walls. Exactly the same photographs, arranged in mirror-image: Toots, Britney (several times), Prince Harry, porn stars, anons... Then there was a series of photographs of unusual people (a dwarf bull-fighter, a cross-dressing cabaret dancer...) and further still, a projection of a transvestite lip-synching in a night-club (aren't transvestites kinda 1999, though?). Fun, but there wasn't much more to it than that. Of course, the signboard disagreed, as always.
Finally (or, should I say, last and least), was Olivier Foulon's series of reproductions of reproductions of art. After about 5 seconds, I was thinking "Okay, that's enough of that." Still, it ended with a great installation: a slideshow (old-fashioned, not PowerPoint) of playing cards was projected onto a piece of paper folded in half and standing on its side a few centimeters away. It was a note one of the Bozar's press service people had sent to Foulon, asking him for the title of his piece, as it's useful for promo.
A final thing that impressed me was that the Bozar staff had painted stuff like directions, arrows and the name of the exhibition directly onto the walls. A classy touch.
Arts Journal recently added their first jazz blog, Doug Ramsey's Rifftides. The other three music blogs are about classical music. Quantitively, AJ is a fair representation of the classical:jazz ratio. There is an abundance of classical blogs by instrumentalists, singers, composers, critics, industry people and fans, for which jazz has no equivalent. A few examples (discounting those already on my blogroll):
Pianist Jeremy Denk's Think Denk, one of the greatest music blogs I've come across. He pretty much achieves that Holy Grail of musical discussion: the junction between subjectivity and objectivity, what is heard and what is felt. And it's superbly written.
Sequenza 21 brings together a lot of different voices (fans, composers, performers) in animated debate and provides a portal to many composers' blogs.
Opera singers Tomness and Canadienne are lively and insightful.
And there's no point even going into the various shades of pop blogosphere. There is simply nothing like this in the jazz blogosphere (or, more precisely, there is almost no jazz blogosphere), and I really can't figure out why. The threads by Robin Eubanks, Dennis Gonzalez and Ellery Eskelin on JazzCorner are active and are sort of halfway blogs, but it's not the same thing, since they're mainly Q & As.
Guitarist Gary Lucas has a blog, a rare thing among well-known (and even little-known, it seems) jazz (?) musicians, AFAIK. The Bad Plus used to have a nice blog which all three members contributed to, but it's been deleted and not replaced by a blog on their official site, as was promised. Saxophonist Chris Kelsey's blog used to be about music and some of the posts were awesome. Now, not only has he switched to berating Republicans, he's also erased the old, interesting archives. A sad loss. Still, there are jazz blogs, here are a few more, in no particular order:
David Valdez (I've just found this one, a musician blog, it looks very good)
Josh Roseman (a rare musician blog, but it's... idiosyncratic)
musicircus (Rob seems to be talking about jazz more and more frequently)
Jazz & Blues Music Reviews
Jazz Thinks
The Jazzcat
Jazz Writer
Blog-O-Jazz
Chromatic Musings
J-notes
The Jazz Authority
I f00k for jazz
JazzPortraits
Armwood Jazz Blog
etnobofin
Xanax Taxi
JazzListening
And then there are podcasts. I haven't had time to find the really good ones yet, but pianist DD Jackson has started one. He speaks fast, which should be unsurprising to those who've heard his music. Another good one (at least, the two parts of the Dan Balmer interview I've heard are good) is Portland Jazz Jams.
It's pretty sad when what used to be a major jazz festival is run by someone who declares things such as:
We have to draw up a very diverse programme. Today, there isn't a single jazz artist capable of attracting as many people as the site can contain. All the greats are dead.
One way to guarantee the non-jazzness of your jazz festival is to design it so that jazz musicians can't play there:
We have to book extremely festive things so that the sound from the different stages don't cover each other. This place isn't adapted to hosting Sonny Rollins or Keith Jarrett.
The article states that only four of the eight nights drew more than 6,500 people. Obviously, if your aim is to attract than many people a night, then there probably aren't very many jazz musicians you can book (none of the headliners for those nights were jazz musicians). The obvious question is, then, do you actually want to be doing a jazz festival? If it's designed so that the biggest-drawing jazz musicians (such as Jarrett) wouldn't be able or want to play there, surely the answer is no. Which is more worrying, to me, than a year-on-year dip in attendance (down by 10,000).
The Second Death Star-ish picture on the right is a new building. There used to be an old, decrepit tower there, of a similar size. It was so old and decrepit that I felt anxious whenever I walked past: it looked like it could collapse at any moment.
Debate raged between two English girls in the FNAC about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: why did Dumbledore have to die? the actor who plays Harry in the films is ugly and bad, why did they choose him? is Snape evil or not? Dumbledore was my favourite character, with Hagrid... The conversation unexpectedly veered towards Spandau Ballet, "an old boys band."
This year's summer sales haul. All of it. I think. It seemed unreasonable at the till, looks pretty tame now. What, me, endanger the monthly budget?
Oh, wait, I just found two more CDs (Fishbone Truth and Soul, James Grant My Thrawn Glory, a random 3€ buy: "thrawn?"). There may be a few more downstairs...
I don't have much to add to the intial brief note about Tricycle, except that this concert was probably better, judging from my tone in that post (and the flute playing was fine).
The music continues to be a light-hearted romp through jazz-inflected popular/folk musics that recalled Parisian musette, jetted off to Brazil (where Floorizone first started playing accordion), paused on a North African rhythm or hopped over to Eastern Europe. It's happy, G-rated stuff, not quite as good as "The Incredibles" or "Finding Nemo," but better than "Hercules." The age range (from infant to senior citizen, and just about everything in between) of those assembled for the early evening outdoors concert and the ambiance (pétanque pistes had been set up on one side of the square. They were pretty low-quality, though: too many pebbles, not enough sand) attested to the music's spirit. Still, there was a more adult turn on "Kater" (hangover in Dutch), which started small, slow and slightly dissonant, looking for a little melody to ease the pain.
Tricycle shares a space with a much older and more famous trio, l'Ame des poètes (with guitar instead of accordion). I think that it's an important space: easily accessible, melodic improvisation based on songs (in the case of ADP) or rhythms or feels (for Tricycle) that everyone knows (isn't that why jazz musicians played standards in the first place?) and the whole family can gather around and have fun with. Of course, it doesn't hurt that these are (especially in ADP) are amazing musicians.
Two weeks ago we had gone up to the Hopper, a 45-minute drive away, to see Pascal and Jef in duo (something I've been waiting to see for a long while, a wait that seems justified, see below), but due to something of a scheduling conflict, the entire quartet was performing in South Africa at the time. They were replaced by a random band and a loud audience. This time, everyone was in their right place and the monday night Hopper crowd allowed itself to be tamed. The Hopper itself is an important jazz institution, doing in Antwerpen what the Sounds does in Brussels: a smallish bar that has a lot of concerts and gives musicians young and old space to develop bands, with month-long monday (and occasionally tuesday) residencies. The Sounds provides a more pleasant listening experience, though.
Almost a year ago, the PSQ won a French competition, the main reward of which is two days in one of France's finest recording studios. They're heading there in a couple of weeks' time, so tonight's concert was a bit of a preview for the group's second album, scheduled for release in November.
We stood at the bar for the first set, which isn't the ideal place for listening or comfort and my enjoyment was probably impacted. They started with Bud Powell's "John's Abbey," a fast bebop tune to warm up with. I don't consider the PSQ to be a bebop band and probably wouldn't like them nearly as much if it were their bread 'n' butter: I can think of better places to get my straight bop, so that's not where their comparative advantage lies. Things really started cooking with Neve's sure-fire "Blues for Mr. P.S.," by now an old favourite. The theme doesn't necessarily tell you it's a blues, but the piano solo does. Then came an exotic Mike Mainieri tune: a biguine-type bass and a tom-based (as opposed to cymbal-based) rhythmic pattern give off a slow, sultry Caribbean steam (kind of like a Bacardi ad's visuals), while the vibraphone melody delights in wide and oddly melodic intervals and the piano solos in a wonderful reflective (the use of octaves, perhaps?) Cuban mood. The first set ended with Schumacher's "Kitchen Story," which starts gently but discord erupts periodically, as if to evoke a blender's sudden cacophony. Metric shifts emphasise the mood swings as waltz becomes harsh 4/4 rock.
The undisputed highlight of the second set was a medley of Neve's "Flim Music" (new to my ears) and Cole Porter's "You and the night and the music" (they've been playing that one for a while). Neve uncorked one of his trademark intros, which are unpredictable (simple or complex, happy or sad or playfully weepy) but incredibly penetrating. Here, the key moment was a quiet, rising 3-note arpeggio that brought the chattering crowd to a talkstill through sheer simplicity and obstinate repetition. The song could then burst forth boldly and joyously, with something of a Keith Jarrett European Quartet feel. The transition to the Porter was handled as a demanding and magnificent piano-vibraphone duo: seamlessly blending water-surface textures, complex interlocking rhythms and fast unison lines, it was breath-taking. As an encore, we were treated to a Belgian premiere: a light, happy South African song learnt during the tour and powered by an irresistable dance rhythm.
Clearly, the band is still moving forward, even if many of the basic parameters are set. The old sense of joy of playing together is still there and individually, the players continue to evolve: for example, Schumacher seemed to me more fluid on four mallets than he used to. Tellingly, he never reverted to two.
Is it just me, or does Willy Wonka bear a disturbing resemblance to Michael Jackson? Inviting kids into his fantasy land, an eerie, otherworldly appearance, childhood trauma, barely coherent declarations...
Still, the first half of the film is utterly fantastic: the neon-bright caricatures meant to stick in a child's mind (eg. the evil-looking spies smuggling an envelope stamped "Secret Recipe"), the integration of real and CGI characters (Violet Beauregard's final incarnation is stupendous), Johnny Depp's Wonka, Burton's visuals... The Oompah-Loompah songs are a bit disappointing (I found the lyrics difficult to make out), Charlie himself is cloyingly sincere and the second half or so is a bit of a slog.
Trailers: "Herbie: Fully Loaded" got a unanimous thumbs up (on DVD) from the 3-person jury and the "Harry Potter 4" teaser recieved unqualified approbation. Amazon.co.uk tells me "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" was dispatched yesterday. I can't wait.
The military parade down the Champs Elysées, Jacques Chirac waving from a jeep, Mirages flying high above, a Frenchman winning the leg of the Tour de France and the bleu-blanc-rouge fluttering against a cloudless sky: things couldn't be better for patriotism to shine forth.
I thought I'd offer something a little more uplifting.
The photostream continues.
The Beursschowburg contains two main spaces. On the second floor, there's the concert hall, a drab shoebox with black drapes hanging from the walls, and much smaller than you'd expect. Around it is folded a structure that twists unpredictably and space-wastingly on itself. Masochism seems to drive the architecture: speckled beige carpeted floors, destined to be trampled, muddied and splotched, inaccessible dead space, walls painstakingly made to look unfinished or deteriorated.
Oddly, it's only on the ground floor that the rest of the structure becomes comprehensible. I say "oddly," because the main access leads directly to the second floor and because to get to the ground floor (which is where the bar and informal stage are), you need to exit the building and go one door up the street. Here, there are open, rational spaces (which is probably why they are so hidden) that maternally encase the tortuous upper floors. A charming place.
Day 3
Ori Kaplan's Balkan Beat Box: "From New York and Tel-Aviv" a Masada for the post-hip hop/panglobal/DJ era. Drummer Tamir Muskat launches pre-recorded beats spanning hip hop, dub, 80s staccato drum machines, pounding rock or rocking dance from his laptop, and sometimes peppers them with vocals (Jewish schoolgirl playground chants? his own vocals processed and looped in real-time? a bit of both?), to great effect. The drums are almost just a prop to kick the whole thing into a furious overdrive at crucial points. The horns blare middle-Eastern melodies and exhort the crowd to scream and jump; the handlebar-mustachioed guitarist laconically distributes Israeli-rock solos; the mohawked singer/Mc/percussionist is insane and keeps the crowd energised, crowd-surfs to celebrate his success, shuffles along the thin platform that extends under the drapes for drama. "This one is for the children of Ramallah and Tel-Aviv," he says. Yet, the beat is more unstoppable machine than tender lullaby. The straight-to-the-point, relentless dancefloor music is interrupted only when Hassan is introduced. He takes a voice 'n' guembri solo, then picks up those hand cymbal things used to create the typical 6/8 pattern, and joins the band for Arabic-flavoured mania. Hassan's hat has a cord with a ball of cloth at the end of it, which swings non-stop as he plays. Awesome. By the end of the concert, calves ache, voice is hoarse. I haven't had this much fun at a concert in a while.
Day 4
Nettle (DJ/Rupture and Abdelhak Raha on violin and oud) constitutes a radical departure from the breezy fanfares of previous days. "Violin and DJ" can seem odd, taken in isolation, but isn't, really, in context. When Raha plays the violin upright on his knee, the earlier technological assimilation is made clear, and it's sort of the same kind of thing as having the violin's sound processed by the DJ. When the Arabic community that had come early claps along to familiar melodies, the cultural subtext I'm missing is made concrete and coincidentally reveals Nettle's concept to be not all that different to that of popular crossover artists like Khaled. Or to that of many jazz musicians, who keep techniques created for the dancefloor even as they move away from it, which allows for exciting oscillations between the two poles.
Nass El Ghiwane is apparently a legendary and politically radical Moroccan group from the '70s and 80's. I'll admit to having been more interested in the crowd's sociology than in the music. The first dozen or so rows were overwhelmingly Moroccan, young and male. They knew all the lyrics and reacted with an almost unsettling fervour, carrying each other on their shoulders and so on. Further back, the crowd became more European, feminine and observational. After about 45 minutes I'd had enough and went for a walk.
Pest sounded good on paper (Ninja Tune, cellist...), but turned out to be merely serviceable medium funk of the post-hip hop/acid jazz variety. The Fender Rhodes played its creamy chords and the guitarist unfurled a few good solos, the DJ/rapper livened things up from time to time and everybody danced a bit, eventually, but compared to the BBB's furore, it was all rather tame.
I dropped by the Kawa Jaipur Brassband's concert in the bar, but it was too hot and crowded. So I went and sat on the steps of the Bourse (Stock Exchange). It's a bit of a hotspot: it connects the touristy Grand'Place to the trendy Halles St-Géry and marks the northern limit of the Moroccan Gare de Midi area. It's an interesting place to eat a beef durum and drink a peach Bacardi Breezer late into a saturday night.
I left work ridiculously early, affording me time to go back home and watch coverage of the London bombings: a terrible Western glimpse into daily life in Baghdad. As always, I'm torn between sadness for the victims and cynicism as to the credibility of declarations by Mssrs. Blair and Bush: denouncements of callousness and disdain for human life are hard to stomach, coming from those two.
The trip back into town was happier than the thoughts above would have you think, even though I was bothered by my ill-advised wolfing down of two bowls of cereal. Going to the Nouveau Marché au Grains takes me further down Antoine Dansaert than usual, well past the Archiduc's art déco stylings and by all the chic, semi-underground designer boutiques. Sure, they're expensive, but the clothes are awesome. The festival's main tent is the bottom edge of a rectangle formed by the World Market's smaller tents. In the middle, there's a basketball court. One can buy food, jewellery and random stuff, or discover Kif Kif radio and their photos of the event.
The line-up and mp3s. My Klinkende Munt photo stream.
Puns as band names are always dubious, and Marockin' Brass, who kicked off the festivities, is no exception. At least the name announces the aim clearly: horns over Moroccan percussion. Interestingly, altoist Cesariusz Gadzina, who released a good saxophone-bass-drums trio album early last year, is part of the band, and provided what was easily the most interesting soloing of all the musicians I've seen so far. It's fairly fun music, but too often the rhythm simply percolates somewhat disconnectedly behind the horns (the key word being behind). This is emphasised when the percussionists take off on their own, turning towards each other, increasing in intensity until finally antique brass instruments (like those long, valveless trumpets used in films set in the Middle Ages) let loose barely-articulate blasts.
Cor de la Plana is a six-man a cappella (apart from a couple of frame drums) vocal group from Marseille that sings Occitan songs. Their subtle and highly sophisticated use of polyphony creates a multi-layered sound in which who is producing what is, at times, dizzingly unclear. The music seems to tap into something ancient, rewriting popular clichés as it brings together reminiscences of both Gregorian and African chanting and rhythms, along with the old Italian and Arabo-Anadalucian influences that have traversed Occitan culture over the centuries. A farandole set off long lines of people dancing, hands joined, the likes of which hasn't been seen since, well, the Middle Ages. It's amazing the energy you can generate just sitting in a semi-circle, clapping your hands and stomping your feet.
The festival is organised by the Beursschouwburg's idiosyncraticly-dressed director, and I've never seen someone take on so many roles at once: announcing bands, directing traffic, mingling with the audience, filming a concert and even serving beer to the musicians on stage.
I had to leave a bit before the end of La Panika's concert, therefore missing Brad Shepik's organ trio... Despite another disappointment (after missing Soulive yesterday) I'm still determined to see Ori Kaplan's Balkan Beatbox tonight, despite a prior restaurant engagement earlier in the evening. And saturday's line-up looks promising, too, as well as edgier. And then there's Brosella on sunday. And then the work week starts again.
The line-up.
Fanfares/marching bands have enjoyed renewed popularity for the last few years, seemingly on both sides of the Atlantic (Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Youngblood Brass Band, "Lose My Breath," "Hollaback Girl") and this year's Klinkende Munt (clinking coins?) festival will feature a lot of them. Except that over here, we don't really go for the brass button and big hat thing. The Orchestre International du Vetex marched into the tent (a judicious choice by the organisers, as it was raining and will be raining throughout the festival), remained at audience-level throughout their concert and immediately set the tone: joyous westernised Balkanic music, with hints of North Africa. A limited palette of fast to medium tempos and short hooky riffs, but irresistably popular and dancey. The brass (two trumpets, fluegelhorn, trombone) and rhythm (snare, bass drum, cymbals) dominated the other instruments (two flutes, two saxophones and that wraparound tuba thing). There was, of course, the drunk guy staggering around that inevitably appears at events of this kind. There's also only ever one of them at a time, so I wonder if there's a kind of Highlander thing going on, with catastrophic consequences if two should meet.
Antibalas came on next, serving up the Fela-derived Afrobeat expected of them: barely-finite songs that are essentially variations on a groove and horn riff, an impenetrably dense rhythmic backdrop (two guitars), harmonically simple, syncopated keyboard solos (with the same sound as Fela), sloganeering and dancing singer/percussionist, etc. I love the occasional gunshot snare hit (kind of like in reggae) that replaces the usual crash cymbal, which can't really be heard in the morass. But overall, it's too cloying and undifferentiated a meal; surprisingly undanceable (as opposed to merely a vague swaying), too.
I wanted to see Soulive, but having had only a few hours sleep the night before and facing a string of short nights (I definitely want to see Brad Shepik (with Tom Rainey!), tonight, and that starts at midnight), IVN and I headed home towards the end of Antibalas's set.
...and other friday night (and saturday and sunday) fever revelations.
- It really is a small world after all.
- Arno is chanson crunque. L'il Jon, 30 years older and a lot more (Belgian) beer, but the same bellow.
- The combination of excessive eating, below-average wine and a too-early move to (and on?) the dancefloor leads to stomachache but also to strange visions of a symphony orchestra with a big beat (and that doesn't sound kitsch).
- It's one thing when musicians make political statements from the stage, quite another when presenters tack their own random agenda onto a performance. Celebrations for Flanders's national day (11th july) have begun, which is apparently an excuse to play the "Vlaamse Leeuw" (Flemish Lion) and speechify. I turned my back to the stage in silent protest during the song (I would have done the same had it been "La Marseillaise"). The speech could just have been ye olde "Flanders First!" blabber (let each community (Wallonia & Flanders) find its own solutions to its own problems), had it not been directly challenged by singer Stef Bos's Dutchness and his wide-ranging (South Africa, Spain, America, North Africa...) influences and inspirations.
- Venus, baby!
- Playing songs live exactly like you recorded them is pretty boring.
- If you're going to put hundreds of dancing people into a room, make sure there's some kind of ventilation system in place.
- What happened to lounging around and doing nothing on week-ends? I almost miss it.
Is there really a better way to spend a hot sunday afternoon than to go to a beer festival? I've been trying to broaden my beer horizons lately, considering I'm in the greatest beer country in the world, and all. And one tires of Hoegaarden, Maredsous, Duvel, Palm and the like after a while. Under a surprisingly cool big white tent set up in one of Antwerp's main squares, there were 22 stands, 38 breweries and who knows how many different kinds of beer. No beer tent is complete without music, and there were not one but two brass bands and a bagpipes guy. Not exactly local colour, but whatever. It's not like anyone can get enough of "My bonnie lies over the ocean," anyway. And the brass band rendition of "Copacabana" was not to be missed.
Entrance was free, you paid 2 euros for an empty glass and then 1 euro for 20 cl. of any beer. We remained reasonable, sharing eight glasses between the two of us, but still had to go have a pita and take a long walk to make sure we were fit to drive.
The usual categories: blonde, brown (come to think of it, I didn't see any white beer, but there surely was some somewhere), monastery, trappist, kriek (made from a kind of cherry). Then, there were some less usual ones. We ended with Huyghe's (the makers of Delirium Tremens) Mongozo Coconut, which was not only good (and really did taste of coconut!), but also a fair trade product and could only be bought in Oxfam shops. Also of note were Contreras's incredibly rich Valeir Blond and Lefebvre's very tasty Barbar blond honey beer. I have no idea where any of these beers can be bought, which is rather annoying. Slightly less special, but still good: Bockor's Kriek Max and De Leyerth's brown Novicius Vertus, 5.9 degrees, refreshing (especially for a darker beer) but lacking a bit of body (unlike the lively breweress who served us).
We also picked up a book by Michael Jackson (yes, THE Michael Jackson: the biggest beer-writer in the world, the back cover tells us) on Belgian beer, which should speed me down the path to beer expertise. A nice wood handled bottle opener came with the book, a nice complement to the glass (specially made for the festival) we got earlier on.
Yes, I know what you're thinking: "Mwanji, what are you doing, paying 56 euros (twice!) to see Lenny Kravitz, when you wouldn't even pay half that (once!) to see Sonny Rollins?" That's a good question. First of all, we didn't just see Lenny. We also saw Duran Duran. Secondly, we didn't pay, the tickets luckily fell into our laps when a friend couldn't go. So I popped my rock festival cherry for free with the TW Classic, in Werchter (rural Flanders; the main event is next week).
I'd never been to a big rock concert before. The kind with video screens (which, during Duran Duran, were lagging disturbingly behind the live action) so that you get to see more than inch-high stick figures. The kind in a big field, ringed by car manufacturers, banks, mobile network operators, magazines and food stands. The kind where it takes you half an hour to walk from the grassy parking lot.
Of course, Duran and Lenny weren't the only people on the bill. I would've like to have seen Novastar (Belgian piano rock songwriter) or Brian Wilson. But we found out that the tickets were ours fairly late in the day. So Duran and Lenny had to do.
Kravitz played what you'd expect him to play: new stuff like "Where Are We Runnin'?" and "Lady" (a poppier thing that's nowhere as good as the D'Angelo song of the same name), old stuff like "It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over" and "Are You Gonna Go My Way?" (as a second encore. IVN had lost hope, but I knew it was coming: AYGGMW is to Lenny what "Take Five" is to Brubeck.) and middle-aged stuff like "American Woman" and a very good "Fly Away" that closed the set before the encores. But I was disappointed by the way the songs were played. Impeccably, yes, it all sounded exactly like the recorded versions (which, in terms of singing, is more than many can say, but still). I was expecting more fire, more looseness, more eruptions. They came, inevitably, with AYGGMW, "Fly Away" extended itself to burst with life, but overall to many songs came and went without really affirming their reason for being outside of "Well, I've recorded these songs before, so I might as well play them."
Kravitz looked as you'd expect him to look: sunglasses at night, strategically removed to generate shrieks; nipple rings, revealed at the end when he ripped open his shirt; sexy (although IVN doesn't think so. I think she's wrong); rock star poses (a bit disappointing, though, because they struck me as having a forced stiffness, an odd combination, to say the least) that screamed "praise me!" He made declarations that seemed generous but were actually about himself: "It's an honour to play on this stage that has been blessed by Duran Duran, true living legends." Just like you, Lenny! "We're here for one reason and one reason only: to celebrate the greatest blessing of all: the blessing of life! Can you get with that, people?" Um, no, not really.
Kravitz brought who you'd expect him to bring: "the supergenius" second guitarist, with whom Lenny gracefully shared solos; Cindy Blackman [always a fun jazz trainspotter's moment. She may not be in the pantheon, but who wants to see John Coltrane in a bikini? Her solo may have been disappointingly senseless pounding, but she looked great in her black bikini with pearl beads hanging from it, long curly hair in a made-to-head-bang afro and amazing arms. "Does anyone want to come up here and keep Cindy warm?" Lenny asked. I'll let you guess as to the number of volunteers.]; three backup singers, one of whom was Isaac Hayes (you can see him for yourself in the photo), and a horn section, both of which brought the necessary soul/funk inflections. Okay, so Hayes wasn't singing backup, it was just someone who looked exactly like him.
So, what did we learn last night? Lenny probably said it best: "I love you all, but God loves you even more."
William Parker - b
Hamid Drake - d
Lewis Barnes - tp
Rob Brown - as
Leena Conquest - voc, dance
It's been a while and I've lost my notes.
Beforehand, in discussion, this group was described by one member of the audience as being hard bop. Which it is. And isn't. Therein lies its greatness: populist and progressive, rooted and free. The tradition is to be heard straight-forwardly in Barnes's neatly articulated lines (even his occasional blurts are clean-cut); in Brown's piercing and heart-on-sleeve brand of bop, that finds its own third way between '60s volubility and '40s melodicism; tangentially in Leena Conquest's vintage soul voice, not the biggest, but secure and swinging. Then there are the two guys at the back.
Parker, who wrote the tunes and lyrics (spiritual and esoteric, not really my thing), takes off from simple and irresistably groovy Motown/Stax vamps and regularly lands in freer territory. Drake is one of those people who seems to embody what modern jazz is, or could be, or should be: swinging, yes, multicultural, omnivorous, passionate, churning. When Parker pulled out his guembri (Moroccan two- or three-string bass) and the pair jammed on a Gnawa rhythm for 10 solid minutes, I re-evaluated everything I had just heard. I even re-evaluated "Caravan." There was no glib appropriation: they were playing the rhythm for what it was, for the joy of playing it and showing that they knew it, but also for themselves, for what they are. And so, Drake's more swing-oriented playing took on another tint: its accents and fills, sometimes rock, sometimes reggae, sometimes gnawa, clearly became a beautiful sort of inverted prism: the different forms of rhythm blended into his own kind of jazz. And we're back to the tradition, but enriching it rather than living off of it.
It's astonishing how nostalgic students in their early- and mid-twenties are. At least, according to whoever DJs their parties. You'd think all these hip dressers and future leaders of the nation would be interested in dancing to something more forward-looking than Gloria Gaynor. Even the new additions to the canon get sucked into this vortex: "Seven Nation Army" can now be classified somewhere between "Billie Jean" and "I Will Survive."
Of course, a high density of pretty girls excuses pretty much any and everything.
Why is it that the conference of the birds is at its most intense and awe-inspiring just before dawn (light sky, no sun)? That's the real after-party.
Since Clap Clap asks so politely... I hate this kind of thing, just like I hate "What's your favourite colour?" (what colour am I wearing today?) or "What famous person would you like to meet?" (nobody. Apart from Clap Clap, of course). I might just be able to settle on Mingus as my favourite musician, but have zero interest in meeting him. More related to this questionnaire, I really should make Beaneath the Underdog "the next book I'm going to read" one day. So, although I have no idea who this could possibly interest, here goes:
Total number of books I own:
Most of them are in boxes, as I've moved 7 times since 1996, and the ones in my house tend to be mixed up with IVN's, while who knows how many are somewhere in my parents' basements, but I'd guess somewhere around two-three hundred (I guess comic books don't count).
Five books that had a big influence on me:
Hmm, this is going to be difficult. Here's a fanciful, and thus weak (in the sense of not really adhering to its title) list:
1984 & Animal Farm, George Orwell: I was obsessed with them during the summer of 1995 and still refer back to Animal Farm regularly, especially when pondering the (d)evolution from the French Revolution's guillotining of the aristocracy to the Fifth Republic's President occupying the former's palaces. Georges Brassens also has a song about a courageous little white horse (aka "the most poignant song ever") that reminds me of AF. The two books are so closely associated in my mind that I'm not sure whether this counts for one entry or two.
Adventure Stories For Boys, ???: I remember the big yellow writing on the blue cover and particularly the story involving one Toledo Steele, who had a cane that hid a long sword-like blade. He was cool.
Sun Certified Programmer & Developer for Java 2 Study Guide (Exam 310-035 & 310-027), Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates: Admittedly, I didn't read it by choice and it makes no claims to being great litterature, but it's essential to why I do what I do and why I work where I work.
Social Theory of International Politics, Alexander Wendt: Simply because it's the only academic book I read cover to cover in my four years of university and the pair of degrees they produced. It's an interesting experience though: it allows you do discuss and disagree in detail with the big-timers.
Last book I bought:
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowlings: I can't wait for it to arrive.
Last book I read for the first time:
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert: I found it lying on a bookshelf, I have no idea where it came from, and figured I should read it. I felt all high-schooly, but better late than never. It's cruelly funny, sometimes beautiful, often painfully opaque (what are all those objects/clothes/etc. he endlessly describes?) and it was nice to read something in French again. Right before that came Michael Chabon's excellent The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which fits right in with my recent re-watching of the greatest super-hero movie of all time, The Incredibles.
