Things were looking bleak from the start

By admin
Ballet Shoes Center.com

Published: July 29, 2010

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Things were looking bleak from the start. Ten minutes after Ben Parker and Jason Hazeley’s midnight arrival in Montpellier someone threw a bucket of water at them from a fourth- storey window. It’s partly the band’s fault – it has taken them four years to follow up their debut The Blue Moods Of Spain, with their current LP She Haunts My Dreams. Los Angeles-based singer, Josh Haden, oozed haunted compassion, from the lilting whisper of his voice to the incorrigible sentimentality of his songs.There was a child-like quality to his performance – he stood utterly still throughout the evening, fresh-faced and doe-eyed, as if he were being propped up by the microphone.If his lyrics sometimes seemed trite – titles such as “Our Love Is Going To Live Forever” and “It’s All Over” could rival Celine Dion on the schmaltz stakes – they are made compelling by his exquisite melodies and lovelorn vocals. The overall effect was dreamily depressing, which is a compliment, by the way.Spain are not so much a new band as woefully overlooked.

Nick Cave – to whom his vocals have justly been compared – seems like a laughing hyena next to him Think of a more downbeat Tom Waits with a bad case of ‘flu. Backed by sparse, twangy guitars, shifty percussion and vocals from ex-Pale Saint Colleen Brown. For a band struggling to make themselves heard over the bar-room chatter, White Hotel could shake you to the core.Low, whose cracked and craggy features look as though they could have been carved from the Appalachian mountains, was on sublimely funereal form. SOMETIMES, THERE’S nothing more satisfying than self-pity. It’s like looking in the mirror after you’ve been crying and admiring your state of disrepair, or listing your reasons why life is not worth living in front of a sympathetic audience. Ken Low, guitarist and vocalist in White Hotel, was positively wallowing in it, rocking back and forth on his chair and inviting us to share in his psychodrama. Indeed, the world was weighing so heavily on his shoulders, he couldn’t even bring himself to stand up.
His distant rumbling tones were sometimes so quiet you had to press your ears against the speakers to hear anything.

But, just as you adjusted, discordant shafts of sound snapped through your psyche as if in punishment. Some of her earlier compositions were written when she felt the need to conform to a modernist, serial way of writing “I found it easy to conform,” said Wallen “I like numbers and I like manipulating musical material… but I thought it would be more interesting to see what notes I could put together when I didn’t have a rule book.”I remember going to a tutorial and my lecturer asking, ‘how is it possible that you can just pluck notes out of the air?’, but that’s where they belong, that’s where they live They’re not in a box!”John L Walters. One of the festival’s featured composers is Errollyn Wallen, working with locals for “Songs in the Key of Kirklees” and performed by the Kaleidoscope Ensemble (19 Nov), her own 10-piece Ensemble X (20 Nov) and electric cellist Philip Sheppard (22 Nov), who also plays a London date with Wallen at the 12 Bar Club, Denmark St (12 Nov).Wallen’s CD Meet me at Harold Moore’s was closer to pop or theatre music than classical recital but full of the attention to detail that characterises her orchestral commissions. The LJF also dishes up the Irish folk fusion Sin (QEH, 20 Nov); Linton Kwesi Johnson with Dennis Bovell’s Dub Band (RFH 18 Nov) and a Duke Ellington tribute from Mathias Ruegg’s Vienna Art Orchestra (QEH, 12 Nov). There’s no shortage of Ellington memorials at the moment, with new albums by Dr John (Duke Elegant, Parlophone) and Daniel Barenboim (Tribute to Ellington, Teldec).Over at Huddersfield, the performers include Psappha (28 Nov) a student big band working with Louis Andriessen and Steve Martland (19 Nov), the Bang on a Can All-Stars and the Cornelius Cardew Ensemble with its 10- minute “pub operas”.

As well as senior figures such as Joe Zawinul (Barbican, 16 Nov) and Carla Bley (RFH 20 Nov), the London Festival takes in Rhys Chatham’s Hard Edge Quintet (Embassy Rooms, 16 Nov) and the ambitious hybrid of Grand Union’s Echoes from Anatolia featuring Sabahat and Cemal Akkiraz (Union Chapel, 13 Nov). ECM’s “Selected Signs” series in Brighton includes the sublime Dino Saluzzi and Eberhard Weber (19 Nov) and Anouar Brahem and John Surman (tomorrow night), while the “Rainbow over Bath” series soldiers on with concerts by Regular Music 2 and Tim Brady (26 Nov), an electro-acoustic music weekend (27-28 Nov) and a chance to hear Howard Skempton’s Hurdy-Gurdy concerto (28 Nov).While Bath and Huddersfield take admirably wide sweeps across several musical types, broadly defined as contemporary, it is interesting to see how “jazz” festivals often have the widest programmes. THE ECONOMICS of music-making and CD manufacture mean that solo albums will always be with us. You can find a CD with almost any kind of solitary expression from hard-wrought compositional tours de force to the sound of someone leaning against an electronic keyboard. Yet making a solo album that people will actually want to hear requires courage, a great repertoire and instrumental mastery that bears close scrutiny. Matthias Ziegler comes close to these criteria: his album Uakti (New Albion) features his pieces for various flutes with draughty adaptations of a couple of Recercadas by 16th-century composer Diego Ortiz.

Beautifully recorded by Jan Erik Kongshaug, Uakti may not be profound or “significant” but it’s a joy to hear someone take pleasure in music-making without the pressure of posterity or Christmas sales.
November is a good month for new music events, with the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (17-28 Nov) and the London Jazz Festival (12- 22 Nov), which umbrellas a score of venues and hundreds of gigs. “Simon may have had enough of me, I may have had enough of him and, anyway, I don’t speak German! I’m lucky to be able to break loose and do this but I’m a single man without any responsibilities and I can live quite comfortably without having to earn for a few months I’m off to do what I’ve always wanted. I’m going on a cargo boat to the West Indies with a lot of books, and scores and CDs of Sibelius’s seven symphonies and I’m going to study them, bar by bar, for fun…”. It hasn’t happened yet and I think there’s a long way to go before both orchestras and Regional Arts Boards will feel the circumstances are right. There aren’t enough people with sufficient expertise to contribute in all the regions and there are already signs that the bureaucratic buck is simply being passed from the Arts Council to the regional boards.”At 50, he’s got no intention of retiring yet.


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