Category: Musing on Music

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Typical Muse Fans….

So yesterday afternoon, TAFKASJ IMs and says ‘do you want a ticket for Muse?’ What could I say? they’re one of the few RAWK bands I’d have much interest in seeing live, they’ve got a kick ass bassist, and their set from Glasto on the TV a few years back was one of the best I’ve ever seen from there.

And, to be fair, they delivered – huge light show, drummer inside a spaceship thing, air punching, nonsense apocalyptic lyrics, mosh pit, smoke, and a singer/guitarist who so badly wants to be Brian May he’s one flourish away from a curly mullet wig.

Muse have got 4 or 5 world-beatingly brilliant singles. Anthemic, catchy, original, HUGE. The rest of the set is good too, very good, just all on the same emotional level, sonically in pretty much the same area (when Matt switches to piano to become the Liberace of Emo, the uber-compressed sound of his piano is in almost exactly the same register as his guitar. The gig is like a 90 minute encore – any song could’ve been their last. I was aching for an acoustic guitar tune by the end. or a brass band, or a string section, or…

They played brilliantly, ran around like crazed munchkins, and the drummer did all the between song chat (as TAFKASJ said, ‘you’ve got worry when it’s the drummer in the band that has all the personality’ – haha!) And it was well worth going. Hysteria is still one of the most iconic basslines of the last 10 years, fo sho.

Good jeorb!

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Bass Day UK

Well, yesterday was a landmark for me. The first time I’ve ever been to a bass day-style event that I haven’t been playing at! Needed to find out what kind of low-end hell we musos were inflicting on the great unwashed, after all.

So, long drive up to Manchester for Bass Day UK. LOOOONG drive. but Sunday morning’s an easy time for traffic. It was at the Life Cafe in the city, same place as last year (when I did play at it). Potentially a nice venue, but last year they ran out of food half way through the day, and this year they just didn’t even bother having any to start with! Ah well, Subway did a roaring trade.

These bass day things are all about people for me – occasionally there’s some great music, but a lot of what happens is people who don’t normally play solo doing their thing over a backing track, or some fairly rudimentary looping. Which is fine, and works well for bass-day-type crowds. It’s just not something that I’d choose to go out of the house to listen to.

So musically, the highlights for me were the delightful and wonderful Yolanda Charles and her MamaYo band, and Stefan Redtenbacher’s Funkestra. Stef I’ve known for years, and he’s a fantastic player, genuinely great person, friend and makes me laugh more than almost anyone. His band are amazing, so worth the drive to Manchester just for him. Yolanda’s band featured to wonderful and lovely Miles Bould on drums, who I’ve been listening to do for the best part of 15 years, and a couple of great guitar players. Both bands were funky, raw, danceable, fierce, fun and life-affirming. Just great.

I also enjoyed hearing Jonas Hellborg play – he was also looping in some interesting ways, changing the loop every few bars, and using a reverse delay that sounded lovely. Good stuff.

Always nice to catch up with friends too – Janek Gwizdala was playing, and did an exquisite solo version of a Mike Stern ballad. So nice to catch up with him. Same for Adam Nitti – an amazing bass player from Nashville, who sounded the best I’ve ever heard him. Great playing, great sound.

it’s all about the people – new friends like Yolanda and Miles and Lucy Shaw, and old friends like Stef and Steph, Mike Sturgis, Marco, Janek, the guys from BassWorld.co.uk, the organisers Stevie, Jono and Pris, and loads of other great people. All in all a v. fine day. The great music was a bonus, the not-so-great music wasn’t a distraction (when did you last see 8 or 10 acts on one day and love them all? :o) – all in, it’s great to have a UK Bass Day that seems sustainably big, is booking interesting music, and getting supported by companies and the industry. All good, nothing bad.

Got back home at gone 3.30, and had to be up at 9 to teach, so am suffering now. But was well worth it.

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is this the most gig-heavy week of my life???

So three gigs last night! Started off with Estelle Kokot at The Octave in Covent Garden. The Octave could be a great venue. could be. Sadly, being as it’s in one of the most expensive places to own a bar in London, the guy who owns it is unlikely to actually apply the kind of strictures that would be needed to mean it wasn’t about a band trying desperately to play over the din of 200 people talking loudly. The venue want it both ways, so they book credible acts and charge a door fee, but don’t ask people to STFU. You can’t charge people £7 to listen over that noise.

Anyway, aside from that, Estelle was great, as she always is, as was Neville Malcolm on bass – one of my favourite players in London. Great feel, great sound, and a lovely bloke to boot.

Then Catster, my LJF gig-buddy, and I headed off to the QEH foyer to catch a bit of Marc Ribot doing a scronking improv thing on the free stage. Bits of it were great, bits were unfocussed. Like most squeaky gigs. Seb Rochford was on drums, and was great as ever – that’s three Seb-gigs in two days. Clearly I’m stalking him.

Also ran into lots of other lovely people there – Andrew Cronshaw, whose album Ochre is one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard in a long time, and I haven’t seen for quite a while, was there, so lovely to catch up with him. He’s got a new gig he’s booking called Half The World – a series at Pizza On The Park in London, that looks amazing. Check that out.

And finally, gig number 3 back to the Vortex, to see Huw Warren and Lleuwen Steffan doing their sublime hymns project, along with some new tracks from Lleuwen’s just-finished-but-not-out-for-a-while album. They were, as expected, amazing. Of course. One of my favourite gigs to see anywhere. The hymns are deeply moving and beautiful, Lleuwen’s own songs are a heady mix of classic jazz with left-field singer/songwriter stuff and a dose of pure originality. And Welsh is such a beautiful sung language. It was made for singing. More people should sing in Welsh, and less loser audiences should feel put off by it. She deserves to be the next Beth Gibbons or Madeleine Peroux. I think she’ll just continue to be the first Lleuwen, which is just fine. And Huw – lovely bloke, great player, writer of stunning music. Always a pleasure to listen to him play.

Home at some god forsaken hour, but a worthwhile late night, fo’ sho’.

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An unflinching commitment to one's blog readers/viewers

Now, y’all know I’m a huge fan of Questlove’s blog – he’s the drummer/bandleader of The Roots, also plays with Eryka Badu, D’Angelo etc. etc. etc. He’s one of the greatest drummers anywhere. He’s also one seriously funny blogger.

Here he hits a new blog-commitment high – during Hub’s bass solo, he’s filming back stage, and then goes on stage, keeps filming, then sits down at his kit, starts playing ONE HANDED and KEEPS FILMING! Now, if I did that y’all would know I was looping. No big deal. Funny, but hardly complicated. But in front of a packed house, Questo plays one handed so he can capture for us what’s going on. Great stuff.

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Polar Bear and EST at the Barbican

So Catster and her ticket connections came up trumps again last night (yay Catster!), and we headed off to see Polar Bear and EST at the Barbican. Polar Bear is Seb Rochford’s band, Seb you’ll remember came and graced the Recycle Collective with his lovely presence back in August.

So following a drinks and nibbles corporate reception beforehand (including the surprise appearance of lots of lovely people – the Gay Gordons, Julie and Mark and assorted friends), we headed in to see Polar Bear. I’d never seen them live before, and was completely blown away. I’ve always loved Seb’s drumming since we first played together years ago, and am very familiar with Mark Lockheart’s great sax playing. But the whole band – rounded out by Pete Wareham on sax, Tom Herbert on bass and Leafcutter John on noises – were a revelation. Fresh, exciting, edgy, funny, chaotic, original music, with great tunes, fantastic spikey feels, and god-know-what weird noises from John, sampling bowed cymbals, balloons, the rest of the band and anything else. A really really great gig. Seb’s between song banter was on top form, and the audience were well and truly seduced.

And then EST – the poster boys of icy scandinavian cool. Like characters from a Nokia advert, or Bond villains. Not a note out of place. The sound, lights, staging, smoke – everything, perfect. Too perfect. After the danger and excitement of Polar Bear, it all felt like it was too good to be true. It wasn’t in any way a bad gig, far from it. A couple of the tunes were so impossibly beautiful they took your breath away. It just didn’t connect in the same way. I wonder if there’d been no opening act, if I’d have been deeper into it. I wasn’t NOT into it. At all. It was great. It just felt like an orchestral performance masquerading as improv. I’m really glad I saw them, and I may well even get the new album – on CD, that kind of perfection is welcome – but for me, the night belonged to Polar Bear.

Bumped into yet more very lovely people after the gig – my coat came in most useful again, as the sublime Zoe Rahman came up and said ‘you’re steve aren’t you? We’re myspace friends’, along with her squeeze, Patrick Illingworth. CDs were swapped, laughs were had, plans were hatched, and all was good. Also saw Julian Maynard-Smith – a fabulous jazz writer, who interviewed me for Unknown Public (I still haven’t seen the final article, but the transcript that he sent me was the most interesting interview I’ve ever done) – very nice to catch up.

And then late night, I headed down to The Vortex to hear Seb and John play AGAIN, this time playing a bunch of chaotic crazy improvs with Mandy Drummond on violin and piano, and a bloke who looked like he was in Franz Ferdinand on recorders and voice. Some of it was magic, some of it was nonsense, all of it was risky and fun. A lot of it was hilarious. It wasn’t even close to being safe. Yay for noisy squeaky improv!

And tonight, if I’m well enough, I’m off to see Estelle Kokot at the Octave, and then Huw Warren with Lleuwen Steffan at the Vortex. The London Jazz Festival is one seriously busy couple of weeks!

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Music Biz Advice

This Article by Bill Lefsetz, is 20 top tips for the music business. Some great stuff in there. Have a read, go on. It’s pretty hard nosed, and certainly not couched in the friendly loving new-agey terms that I tend to think in in relation to my art and audience, but maybe that’s what I need to hear. ;o)

And I picked it up from Jeff Schmidt’s blog.

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Paul Simon sings and all is well with the world.

So, at the 11th hour, my angelic mole in the evil empire comes good and two tickets are procured for Paul Simon at Wembley. Now given that Paul Simon is, I think the only artist that’s been around for more than 20 years with not one song that I don’t like, you can imagine this was a pretty big event for me. Until yesterday morning, if you’d asked me my top 3 artists I’ve still yet to see, you’d have had Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon and Tom Waits in that order. Tom’s just been promoted. :o)

The delectable Jude Simpson was round in the afternoon, to try out some poetry ‘n’ bass ideas for future gigs (that stuff’s going to be magic – Jude’s a stunning performer, and she guested on what is probably my best ever gig – the last night of the Fringe, in 2005). Anyway, the late showing for the tickets meant that TSP bowed out, and Jude got the treat of a lifetime… or at least a nighttime and came with me to the gig.

Which. Was. Perfect. Everything you’d want from a Paul Simon gig except more chat (didn’t really say much between songs, sadly) – the sound was great (especially for Wembley), the band were out of this world (Steve Gadd live? I can die happy), and Paul himself was on absolute tip top form. I’ve long held that his vocal phrasing is one of the most wonderful and perfect things in the history of music, and tonight he was the living embodiment of that. A great set list, with three tracks from the new album, the title track from You’re The One, and hits going back to The Boxer and Homeward Bound. I’ll see if I can dig up the set list online somewhere. As the subject here says, all seems well with the world when Paul Simon sings. The man that comes across in his songs is someone I’d like to grow up to be, and his lyrics could quite easily form a guide to live by.

One of the beautiful things about Paul Simon is that he’s always written for his age – I mean his own age, rather than ‘the age of man’ or whatever – so his now in his 60s and writes with the wisdom of a man that age, looking back on a life well lived, with faults and failures and a sanguine approach, having learnt the lessons and moved on. I wanted to hug him after the gig, but unusually for me, I didn’t bump into anyone who could procure me a backstage pass…

Anyway, if there’s one person to see live in your life, it’s Paul Simon. Go and buy ‘Surprise’, his latest album it’s lovely, and while you’re there, get the last one, ‘You’re The One’. It’s the wisdom of the elders, and we’ve lost that in so much of western culture. And he’s still funkier than most funk bands! Grooves a mile wide, tunes you’re humming for days.

A gig with everything right. Yay for Paul Simon! And thanks to Jude for being a tip-top gig-buddy! :o)

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When you wish upon a blog….

So I phone the lovely Catster re da moychendyz, and she informs me that Joni’s working on a new album!!!! Yay!! How great is that?? It must’ve been my blog that inspired it… 😉

It’ll be really interesting to see what she has to say about the state of the world. Responses thus far from artists have been really interesting, from Steve Earle to Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young to Spearhead… it’s both tragic and ironic that when the world is getting really fucked up, it’s fertile ground for artists. Look at the 80s, where while mainstream pop was going all Yuppie and Thatcherite, the US was gestating Public Enemy, NWA and the socially conscious rap movement, as well as the political end of the hardcore punk thing, like Dead Kennedys.

So, Joni, er, Yay!

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Coupla gigs this week (seen not played)

Been to a couple of great gigs this week. Firstly on Tuesday I went to see Patrick Wood’s band The Works – who, long term bloglings will remember, released one of my favourite ever British Jazz records a year or so ago, called Beware Of The Dog (get it, it’s great). They were playing at the 606 in Chelsea – a bitch of a place to find, but with a lovely policy of letting MU members in for free. Thanks to teaching, I only got there for the second send of The Works, but they were fantastic, and have two special guests augmenting the usual quartet – Bosco D’Olivera on percussion and voice, and Mick Hutton on steel pan. Mick’s pan playing was a revelation – Mick’s much better known as having been one of the finest double bassists in the country for years, but some major trouble with his hands has stopped him playing that altogether – a major loss to bass playing, but bass’s loss is steel pan’s gain. He’s a great musician, and fitted in perfectly with The Works.

So their set ended, and I thought people would start leaving, but another band were setting up. 11pm? another band? WTF? Now a dilemma – should I stay or go, the band featured some amazing musicians (Dudley Philips on bass, Julian Seigel on sax and Winston Clifford on drums), but I had an hour’s drive home, was utterly knackered, and really couldn’t sit through a whole other set. Which is a shame, cos I’m sure the whole gig was marvellous.

And then, last night I went to Koko for an album launch gig by Alexander’s Annexe – an intriguing trio of Sarah Nicholls on piano, Mira Calix on laptop and noises, and David Sheppard processing and manipulating the acoustic piano. The music was amazing – proper spikey weirdness, but with a strange beauty to it. Sarah’s a brilliant pianist, and thus gave David a whole range of lovely stuff to work with.

the big problem was the venue – Koko is a pretty big space, and they had it laid out with tables and chairs downstairs. The lack of a compere, and the drift from one musical act into another meant that the audience didn’t really stop talking when the music was on, which with this kind of thing was pretty ruinous. Next time you do a gig like that, David, gimme a mic and I’ll tell people to shut the fuck up before you start playing… ;o)

Anyway, the other fantastic revelation of the night was an ‘act’ called ‘Mr Hopkinson’s Computer’ – a laptop doing covers of 80s and 90s indie tracks that was just heartbreaking. Here’s are three myspace pages with examples – the first one has his versions of ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ and ‘Where Is My Mind?’ on it. I rang a coupla friends while it was on who I knew would dig it, and they did! Jyoti, you so need to check this stuff out if you haven’t already…

Anyway – MySpace Page 1, MySpace Page 2 and MySpace page 3. go there, it’s beautiful.

Was supposed to be going to Paul Simon at Wembley tonight, but it doesn’t look like my ticket-spy has been able to secure the moychendyz. Ah well, I’m exhausted so could do with a night in.

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Happy Birthday Joni

Joni Mitchell is 63 today. On the quite ludicrously tiny off-chance that she reads this blog, ‘happy birthday Joni – thanks for Hejira, and endless other amazing albums. You changed my music life!’

I first heard Hejira as ‘contraband’ – I was playing in a New Orleans jazz band in Berwick on Tweed in my teens, Sunday nights round the pubs, and the trumpeter and leader Pete Roughead was a proper old-school purist – any jazz after about 1930 was modern, Dixie was populist, only proper New Orleans stuff was allowed (I was only allowed to play bass because the double bassist was ill, and was still introduced as being on ‘double bass’, cos Pete couldn’t bring himself to say anything else…)

Anyway, one of the trombonists, Sandy, wasn’t quite so narrow in his listening tastes, and started my surreptitious musical education by slipping me a C90 cassette under the table at a gig with his own best of Weather Report’s Jaco years on one side, and Hejira on the other. And while I really enjoyed the Weather Report stuff. It was Hejira that changed the way I thought about music. Everything I ever wanted music to be was on that record. Honest, freewheeling, mellow, heartfelt, superbly played, funny… It is still to this day my desert island disc. If you twisted my arm up my back and told me I was only allowed to keep one album, that’s it, for sure.

Joni’s done other great albums – Hissing Of Summer Lawns is great, the early folky ones are gorgeous, and the 90s stuff, especially Night Ride Home is some of the greatest music of the last 15 years (and ‘Travelogue’ is vital listening for anyone with a heartbeat), but it’s still Hejira that gets me every time.

So happy birthday Joni – I completely understand your stated reasons for not doing music anymore, but part of me still wishes you’d change your mind. Happy painting… x

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