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And after the gigs, The reviews!

This was quick – the joy of the internet – here’s a lovely review of the Vortex gig from Tuesday night with Theo Travis and Orphy Robinson. Very nicely written.

And if you can read Italian, there’s a lovely review of Grace And Gratitude, in the ‘No Warning’ E-zine. Luigi Ametta who writes it has been very supportive of all the music of mine that he’s heard, and this looks to be another lovely review (though so far I’ve only read the Google translation, which is pretty garbled…)

If you’ve been to one of the recent gigs, please post a review in the forum, and if you’ve bought one of the CDs, you can post those reviews in the online shop.

Thanks!

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The Solo Summit

So last night was The Solo Summit a mini festival-within-a-festival as part of Hackney’s Spice Festival.

The idea was to have lots of performers on different instruments and across myriad styles all playing solo. As it was, it was that and a whole lot more – the solo performances spawned some really interesting collaborations as the mini-sets overlapped.

Due to the current mess of bomb-scares and transport disasters in England, a few of the performers were either late or didn’t appear at all, so the set was being re-jigged all evening, and as a result even more time was freed up for new combinations of players. The initial three long sets became four slightly shorter sets, and each set seemed to take on a character of its own.

The first set began with Tunde Jegede on Kora, who was then joined by Cleveland Watkiss, who was using my loop set-up to great effect, layering vocals on top of Tunde’s gorgeous Kora.

The rest of the set was three of Orphy’s students, Renel, Yao and Michael, two spoken word artists and guitar/bazouki, respectively, who played some marvellous music. My set dove-tailed into the end of Michael’s, as I took a short solo over the end of his last piece. I then played Grace And Gratitude, and went into The Kindness Of Strangers, which Orphy joined me on, with my loop gradually fading after I’d left the stage and Orphy took over for his solo spot. End of set 1.

Set 2 was very different – mainly guys from the London Improvisors Orchestra, it started with harpist Rhodri Davis (playing music a fair bit removed from his work with Charlotte Church!), Bass Saxist, Tony Bevan, flugal horn from Claude Deppa and electronic bleeps ‘n’ squawks loveliness from Steve Beresford. An interesting set with moments of magic, a very long way from the opening set! This stuff is really a stretch for the audience – they seemed to stay with it though, which was great.

Set 3 was back to many of the performers from set 1, with the addition of Pat Thomas on piano (an insanely gifted musician) and Steve Williamson on Sax. I played another duet with Cleveland, and a trio with Cleveland and Tunde on a track that they’d be playing as a duo, which worked beautifully. I had it set up that I was able to loop Cleveland in the usual way, so that gave us a lot of scope to loop ‘n’ layer and have some fun, and it came out superbly well.

By Set 4, we were about an hour ahead of schedule (whoever heard of a gig running ahead of time???), but my ears were getting a little fatigued after such a long time of intense listening. I listened to BJ’s set from just outside the main auditorium, where the processed ambient pedal steel wafted beautifully around. The set grew with the addition of more and more musicians, til most of the LIO guys were back on stage making a glorious racket. Cleveland then joined them, and once I’d turned up his mic, was able to add a vocal percussion loop to it, and start to inject a key centre into the melee. I joined in on bass, and the whole thing gradually mutated from free soundscape to twisted funk/swing groove thang, providing a space for the rappers/spoken word guys to rejoin the party. As the musicians peeled off one by one, the loop faded, and it ended with just bass, acoustic guitar and the two voices. One heck of a journey from the free to the funky. I look forward to hearing the recording of that one too!

All in, a fine evening’s music. A smallish crowd (hey, that’s brit-jazz for you), but an enthusiastic one with a fair amount of stamina!

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More on the G8 aftermath

Gig report from last night, and a couple of online reviews to come, but first, some politics! (yay! i hear you cry)

Today’s Guardian reports that Blair is a bit hacked off the aid agencies are down on the G8’s ‘acheivements’, but also suggests that he has some fairly ambitious plans during Britains tenure as president, to push for more movement on getting rid of farming subsidies, and for a new treaty on climate change.

Now, the problem here is, Tony now has a foil in both camps – he knows that Bush is not going to give in on capping emissions, and he knows the French aren’t going to go quietly on the CAP, so he can happily talk in non-definite terms about wanting things to ‘move forward’, ‘develop’ etc. without much fear that he’s actually going to have to do anything.

Of course, there’s the off-chance that he means it, which would be good. But there’s no real way of knowing. I don’t really trust him on anything these days. I can’t really see why anyone would after the outright lies he and his government told over Iraq. Why should he change now? He hasn’t even come clean over that disaster.

But I live in hope. We still have the problem of the G8/WTO/IMF/World Bank actually existing in the first place, but I’m a pragmatist and I really hope things move forward in a direction that is favourable for the world’s poor. We just need to remember that we’re still operating within a fundementally inequitous framework, and at some point, the world’s poor and working classes need to realise that the billionaires don’t really have our interests at heart. The globalised neo-feudalism of G8 style political dialogue is all about seeing what concessions they can make without spoiling things for share-holders. And therein lies the fundemental problem.

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Meet The Fockers

Just watched Meet The Fockers – both TSP and I really enjoyed the first one, so got the sequel out. I’m always nervous of sequels but had no reason to be with this – the story continued well, the new characters (Greg’s parents, played by Dustin Hoffman and Barbara Streisand) were played to perfection, and the ‘Some Mothers Do Have ‘Em’-style disasters were just right, not so bad that you curl up and want to die. A handful of killer lines, some fun twists, and a load of Hollywood royalty.

Recommended for a fun night in.

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The corruption of Islam

A commenter on the guardian news blog said this in relation to the newspaper coverage of the bomb attacks –

“The media is being foolish and dangerous in terming these terrorists as “Islamists” – will further aggravate feelings between followers of Islam and the rest, the former feeling they are unfairly and stereotypically being classified as murderous maniacs and the latter associating terror with the basic religion.”

And certainly questions are raised about the way such things are portrayed. Have people ever talked about the IRA as ‘Christian Exremists’? Do crazy cult leaders like David Koresh and Jim Jones get labelled as Christian? I wonder if they do in those parts of the world where Christianity isn’t the dominant (though nominal) faith.

Clearly, the behaviour of terrorists is completely out of step with the basic beliefs of Islam, just as running weird death-cults and murdering for the IRA is fundementally anti-christian, and the suggestion that what drives these people to commit attrocities like this a true understanding of their faith is very misguided.

As reported in the Guardian today, The Muslim Association of Great Britain have condemned the attacks,

“Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: ‘Our faith of Islam calls upon us to be upholders of justice. The day after London was bloodied by terrorists finds us determined to help secure this justice for the innocent victims of yesterday’s carnage.’ “

The rubbish part of this for British Muslims is that the sickos who perpetrated the bombings have stolen the arguments about Israeli occupation in Palestine and US occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan away from them. Any Muslim now who sticks their head over the parapet and talks about those issues is going to be labelled by a certain section of the British populus as terrorist sympathisers.

It’s more important than ever that we make Muslims feel particularly welcome in England, that we make it known that there’s no way in which we hold Islam responsible for inspiring these dreadful killings, and that we won’t allow discussions over the geopolitical mess in the middle east to be made taboo by these murderers.

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Looking forward to tomorrow's gig.

And in other news, I’ve got a very intersting gig tomorrow, in Hackney as part of the Spice Festival. The gig in question is the Solo Summit, at The Bullion Theatre.

It’s going to be a lot of fun, and lots of my favourite musicians are on the gig – Orphy Robinson, Cleveland Watkiss, Filomena Campus, Tunde Jegedi, Celloman (Ivan Hussey), Pat Thomas and just added to the bill, BJ Cole! What a lineup that is!

I’ll be playing solo, as well as looping and processing Filomena and Cleveland, so will be kept nice ‘n’ busy. I love the idea of a gig designed to explore the various ways that people perform solo, and am looking forward to stealing some ideas from all the people there!

Soundtrack – Wheeler/Konitz/Holland/Frisell, ‘Angel Song’ (one of my most favouritest albums ever, a hugely inspiring CD, featuring some of Bill Frisell‘s best playing)

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OK, enough of me being a nay-sayer about the G8…

now it’s George Monbiot’s turn – he echoes (far more eloquently and with footnotes ‘n’ everything) a lot of what I’ve been saying about the selling off of ‘aid’ to business. And he goes a lot further, looking at the heinous relationship between what governments term ‘aid’ and what those corporations have done, are doing, and are planning to do.

It doesn’t look good.

Soundtrack – Mike Watt, ‘The Secondman’s Middle Stand’ (times like this, I need me some righteous punk anger courtesy of Watt)

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Bono and Bob on the G8…

here it is.

What on earth are they thinking???

” ‘We’ve pulled this off,’ said U2 frontman Bono.

He and Geldof praised the Group of Eight summit for pledging to double aid to Africa to $50 billion, saying the move will save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who would have died of poverty, malaria or
AIDS.

‘The world spoke and the politicians listened,’ Bono said.”

and

“Geldof, creator of the Live 8 concerts, said: ‘The summit in Gleneagles is a qualified triumph.’ Appearing alongside Bono at a news conference held at the close of the summit, he said: ‘A great justice has been done.’ “

Oh shit, why do these people conspire to make me look like a miserable whinging git? Everyone has come out and said the G8 produced very little of note. The 50 billion is fine – it’s 50 billion, not to be sneezed at – but it’s way too little and it won’t be protected by trade reform and debt cancellation.

Before the summit Bono and Bob were both calling for the three points of the MPH campaign – trade reform, debt relief and aid. Only the aid element has been touched with any effectiveness.

Maybe I’ll just go back to writing about my solo gigs, it’s less depressing than all this stuff.

The MPH campaign goes on, more pressure is needed. What isn’t needed is Bono and Bob telling the G8 what superstars they are. ‘A great justice has been done.’ – no it hasn’t!!!

I really really hope I’m misjudging this, that they know something I don’t about making things happen. I’ve no problem with pragmatic compromise to get a result, and if they honestly can get the bastards to move faster and further by chumming up to them, then great, I’ll sit here and whinge to my few hundred readers while they change the world, but right now, it’s looking like they’ve got too close and can’t tell it like it is.

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MPH Response to the G8

here’s the Make Poverty History campaign’s damning response to the G8 – despite them being pretty close to the government in the run-up to the G8, they’ve not pulled too many punches in their cricitism.

Has anyone seen a full statement from Bono and Bob? I saw a soundbite bit on the TV last night with them spouting some crap about it being ‘the beginning of the end for poverty’, to paraphrase Churchill, but I want to see a full statement before blogging about them talking bollocks…

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