On odd occasions some wicked jazz turns up on YouTube. This is an excerpt from the DVD Dave Holland Quintet Live in Freiburg. Recorded in Germany in 1986, it’s only recently been released.
Anyone’s who’s read this blog for a while will know I’m a bit of a Kenny Wheeler freak. This clip proves he’s a great “free” player. On this tune (Steve Coleman’s Vortex), he’s playing cornet. Sweet.
Kora are an AMAZING live act. Their gig last night last night at Barfly in Birmingham was like taking a journey home to NZ for a couple of hours, and the Kora brothers (yes, 80% of them are from the same family) were good company on that trip.
Having raved too much in the postgrad common room about New Zealand music, I had persuaded a classmate from Chile to come along to get “a taste of kiwi”.
When I last saw Kora play in New Zealand (at least 3 years ago), they were a solid reggae band from Whakatane with a few good songs. They’ve matured since then into a world-class live act. Their show is watertight, full of energy and good-natured.
Kora’s music has now pushed far beyond their easy-skanking origins. Apart from Brad behind the drums, the other 3 brothers and Dan Mcgruer swap instruments with alarming regularity (guitars/bass/Nord/sequencers/mixers), as well as sharing vocal duties.
Electronic bleeps and bloops in the mix hint at dark drum’n'bass moments (shades of another kiwi act, Shapeshifter, but with more soul). And at times the guitars march heroically towards metal.
The crowd at Barfly was small but enthusiastic - and happily it wasn’t all New Zealanders. I’d agree with Andrew (he saw them last year in Brum) who suggested that they’d work much better in a more intimate venue than Barfly like the Hare and Hounds. although the band did a fine job with the space and the crowd they were given.
A strange thing about being a New Zealander… you feel more like a kiwi when you no longer live in your home country. There’s something about roots/reggae/dub that (at least for me) speaks deeply of our landscape and people, a sense made all the more poignant 12,000 miles from home. Hearing Kora was like tapping back into those island origins.
We had a great night. Afterwards, my classmate from Chile summed it up in one word: “indescribable“.
Next time Kora is playing in your town, GO AND HEAR THEM. They are truly awesome.
I rarely blog about bad music - there is too much good music in the world to bother with the crap. But sometimes a recording pops up that is just so horrendously awful that avoiding comment is impossible.
Don’t ask how Jazz and 90s(The Coolest and Sexiest Songbook of the Nineties) ended up on my iPod. Like many avoidable accidents, the story involves a weekend in Didcot, home of the most famous power station in southern Oxfordshire.
The album didn’t quite make me puke, however it did inspire this short guide on how to successfully make will-sappingly turgid “Not-Jazz”.
“Not-Jazz”in 7 Easy Steps:
1. Use MIDI horns (or if you use real horns, make sure they sound like MIDI horns). Because nothing sounds quite as authentically Not-Jazz as digital horns. An added advantage of MIDI is that you don’t have to pay a real horn player.
2. Don’t. Swing. Ever. For an example of how to accomplish this, learn from the Cooltrance Quartet’s inimitable phrasing in Wonderwall’s bridge “And all-the, roadsthat-leeead-us, there-are-windiiiing “
3. In order to sound more sultry, sing the lyrics in a stage-whisper. Because everyone knows that sounding sultry is better than, say, actually learning how to sing.
4. Steal licks from Van Morrison’s Moondance, because you might as well pay homage to the archetypal Not-Jazz tune.
5. Ronny Jordan-style guitar tags on on the end of every line are ALWAYS a good idea and add style and substance to any tune.
6. There is only one tempo that works - insipid medium. Whether you’re playing Wonderwall, Creep, or Black Hole Sun
6.a) The only permissible variation to step 6 is to harness an irony-free bossa nova for a Guns’n'Roses cover:
7. Wait at your letterbox to receive your large royalty cheque because you’ll probably make a fortune selling this pap to cafés and airport duty free outlets across the planet.
Last week, as part of its Neil Young season, the BBC broadcast a rarely-seen TV special recorded by Neil Young at the Sheperds Bush Empire on February 23rd 1971. Young was 25 years old, touring in support of After the Goldrush, and previewing some of the material that would appear on Harvest.
He starts the gig with a version of Out on the Weekend:
The quality of Young’s voice at this age is remarkable - controlled, strong and yet sounding so frail… a frailty accentuated on later work like 1973’s Tonight’s the Night. Young’s dry Manitoba humour is still intact, too, as he engages in some easy banter with the studio audience.
I watched the show in fairly hi-fidelity thanks to iPlayer - the sound and image quality is superb. Maybe one day it’ll be available somewhere as a DVD extra? The whole 30 minute concert is now available on YouTube (for how long, I don’t know).
In November 2000, lying in bed, listening to the radio (France Inter as I recall- I was living in France), we hear the news that Florida, earlier called for Al Gore, is back in the “too close to call” category. Two weeks later, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively declares George W. Bush the victor in Florida, and therefore the new President.
It’s hard to remember what the world was like in 2000… Guantanamo Bay was still an obscure footnote of history and geography. Most peoples’ internet connections ran at 56k. The founder of Facebook was still in high school. The World Trade Center was just another pair of skyscrapers in Manhattan. At 4am on November 5th, 2000, there was no clue as to how fateful that presidential victory would be.
Cut to 4am in Birmingham, November 5th 2008. Lying in bed, listening to the radio. The BBC have just called Virginia for Obama. They’re about to cross to London for a news bulletin, when Jim Naughtie announces that the West Coast polls have closed: Oregon, California and Washington are falling into the Democrat’s column. With 293 electoral college votes, Barack Obama is the new President.
In the ensuing hours, journalists try to write history off-the-cuff. First black president. The end of Reagan-era politics. McCain’s majority in Montana cut to 17,000. A re-drawing of the political map.
But he punditry sounds clumsy when faced with the image of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, in tears as he awaits the president-elect’s arrival at Grant Park. No other western [Correction - industrialised] country has ever elected a member of an ethnic minority as head of state. “I Am - Somebody” indeed.
But there are still fears. Can Obama ever live up to the huge expectation - that enormous weight of hope - that has accumulated around his candidacy?
Obama’s victory is an obvious milestone in American civil rights - and yet last night California, Florida and Arizona passed consitutional bans on gay marriage.
Given the burden of vested interests at home and overseas, how much reform is truly possible? How much does Obama actually represent “change”? His platform is moderate - he doesn’t represent the radical agenda that some have ascribed to him. By world standards, Obama is more John Major than Hugo Chavez.
We can’t really tell at this point what an Obama presidency will bring. We don’t know what the world will be like 4 years’, 8 years’ time. All we do know is that Barack Obama is the best hope we have right now. On behalf of the 95% of us on the planet who aren’t Americans, America has made the right choice and that fact is worth celebrating.
Luchino Visconti’s Morte a Venezia is one of those few films that successfully manage to translate a book into cinema. When planning the film’s soundtrack, Visconti chose Mahler, whose death in 1911 partly inspired Thomas Mann’s novella. The main theme used is the 4th movement (Adagietto - sehr langsam) of Mahler’s 5th Symphony.
“when the lights went up in a Los Angeles screening room after a showing of “Death in Venice” for American executives, no one said anything. The silence encouraged Visconti, who believed it meant that the executives were undergoing a catharsis after watching his masterpiece.
However, he soon realized that, in Bogarde’s own words, “Apparently they were stunned into horrified silence.. A group of slumped nylon-suited men stared dully at the blank screen… One nervous executive, feeling something should be said, got up and asked: “Signore Visconti, who was responsible for the score of the film ?” — “Gustav Mahler“, Visconti replied. ” — “Just great”, said the nervous man. “I think we should sign him…”
Death in Venice has become arguably Thomas Mann’s most famous and widely-read work. (Let’s face it, few people have the time and patience for Mann’s long-form novels like Buddenbrooks or Der Zauberberg.)
Similarly, Mahler’s 5th is undoubtedly the most-heard and widely-performed of his symphonies. After its premiere in Cologne in 1904, Mahler is reported to have said “Nobody understood it. I wish I could conduct the first performance fifty years after my death.” Thomas Mann might have shared comparable sentiments about his novella…
Björn Andrésen (Tadzio) and Dirk Bogarde (Gustav von Aschenbach)
A battalion of New Zealand musicians are invading Birmingham over the next few weeks. None of this was apparently planned, but it’ll effectively double the kiwi population of the city for a few nights anyway… here’s the (entirely coincidental) line-up:
The Black Seeds are on the road promoting their new album Solid Ground, and they’re playing the Hare & Hounds in Kings Heath tomorrow night (1st November). Unfortunately I’m out of town for the weekend…
Pianist and producer Mark de Clive-Lowe has been London-based for a while now but he’s soon to be setting up in LA. One of his last UK engagements is as musical director for 8sixteen32, a show put on at the Birmingham Rep by the Decypher Collective, a bunch of local grime MCs who come together to perform ‘grime theatre’… it sounds pretty unique.
And if all that weren’t enough, Fat Freddys Drop arrive in town the following night to play the Academy. I saw them in London back in April in front of a 95% kiwi crowd, they were awesome as usual. It was almost like being at the Grey Lynn Festival, except it was indoors, at night, and you could only get Carlsberg at the bar.
(The video above is a Fat Freddy’s performance in France on Canal+, at the start it’s funny to hear the crowd clapping on the 1 and 3 rather than the 2 and 4.)
One of the more fascinating features of the Guardian online over the past few months has been the regular contributions of photojournalist John D. McHugh. McHugh is spending 6 months with the US 173rd Airborne in Afghanistan (it’s his third “tour” in Afghanistan - what a way to make a living). McHugh’s work is insightful and moving, and I hope he gains some recognition for it.
Despite being embedded with an American military unit, McHugh’s photos and stories comes across as stark and factual, and are all the more engaging because they effectively communicate some of the grim reality of war for the Afghan people as well as the western soldiers stationed there.
McHugh’s approach to war journalism is an interesting contrast to the recent coverage by NBC, whose camera team was in-and-out of the country in one week, (they were heading onwards to Baghdad). and whose presence may have contributed to the friendly-fire death of a US soldier.
But perhaps some of the most insightful images of the Afghanistan conflict have been taken by soldiers themselves. Violinsoldier’s images on Flickr are a fascinating mix of beauty and mundanity: photos of his MRE meal-packs sit next to candid snaps of local people taken while on patrol.
Currently the internet provides ready access to a western view on this conflict. Hopefully in the long term (if you believe the debatable supposition that the situation in Afghanistan can be improved), more local voices and images will be seen and heard around the world.
It’s a busy week. Given limited time to write anything original myself, here’s a round-up of some highlights from some other blogs sliding down the RSS feeds.
Sarah Laurence isn’t Canadian. But she’s from Maine, which is pretty close. Last weekend she went hiking in the White Mountains... the autumn colours in Maine are in a different class to the brown sludge currently filling gutters here in Edgbaston.
But he punditry sounds clumsy when faced with the image of the 
