Tag: greenbelt

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Home from Greenbelt

Another August bank holiday weekend over, which means we’re home from Greenbelt, hot, tired and sweaty, but very mellow after a fabulous weekend of great music, great friends, brain food and organic munchies.

Greenbelt’s been an annual fixture on my calendar for 15 years now (I’ve only missed two years in that time, and really don’t want to have to remember the reasoning behind those…) and as a result I know definitely-hundreds-possibly-thousands of people who go (it’s about a 20,000 attendance).

Aside from my previously mentioned gigs, I did get to see a few fantastic things – here’s a short summary:

Bill Drummond – doing his ‘How To Be An Artist’ talk – funny, charming, self-deprecating and ever-so-slightly nuts. A fabulously entertaining show that resulted in me forking out £2 for 1/10,000th (strictly, 2/20,000ths) of an original Richard Lock print. He was remarkably restrained, given his propensity for doing things that lots of people find shocking (burning a million quid, throwing dead sheep onto the steps of the Brit Awards, numerous other activities that have really upset a lot of people).

Ben Castle – saxophonist with his quartet, featuring the wonderful Tim Harries on bass (sadly not weilding his BC Rich Warlock bass, but sounding just as metal as ever).

Carleen Anderson – with Ben and half his band as well, and featuring the also-wonderful Andy Hamill on bass. (Sunday was a killer bass day at Greenbelt, with Oroh Angiama also turning up on the mainstage earlier on in the evening!

Juliet Turner – I never get tired of listening to Juliet play; genius singer/songwriter, with a great trio, playing in a lovely venue. And I was compering. What fun!

A panel discussion on the intersection between faith and comedy – four very talented comedy peoples (Milton Jones, Paul Kerensa, James Cary and Jude Simpson). I also saw (and guested on) Jude’s own gig, which was as funny and charming as always.

Pure Reason Revolution – neo-prog trippy loveliness, with a former student of mine on bass. Sounded great.

Jazz Jamaica – the motown project, featuring many many amazing musicians and some very cool arrangements. Nice to see Alex Wilson, Jason Yarde and Gary Crosby again.

And aside from that the hundreds of friends caught up with, smiles and hugs shared, news swapped, and friendships rejuvinated. Much fun indeed. I’ve got a lot of pictures, that I’ll hopefully put here over the next few days.

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Gig three at Greenbelt…

So yesterday was a much more mellow day here, just hanging out, seeing some music, chatting to friends, eating lovely music, and not doing any work at all until I had to compere in Centaur (big indoor venue here on the racecource) for gigs by Juliet Turner and Ricky Ross – the nice thing about compering in Centaur is that the music seems to have been booked just for me – I always get to introduce bands that I really like, and want to see anyway. I was offered a slot compering on the mainstage this year, but just couldn’t muster up enough enthusiasm for some of the stuff on (though it would have been great to introduce Ben Castle and Carleen Anderson, both of whom played and were amazing.)

So that was yesterday.

Today was back into work-mode, starting with a two hour rehearsal with Duncan for this afternoon’s gig. That led straight into the soundcheck, which was held up due to Daby Toure’s band taking a heck of a long time to soundcheck, meaning that we had less than a minute to sort out all the monitors! As a result, the onstage sound wasn’t great, and we had the occasional rhythm-glitch, but Duncan and Rise were both amazing, and the rest of us kept things moving! A hugely enjoyable gig, much appreciated by the audience. Getting to play with musicians as good as Duncan and Rise was a bit of a dream and I hope it happens again soon!

the rest of the day will be spent chillin’ with TSP, hopefully seeing some gigs and catching a seminar or two.

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Another great Greenbelt Gig

Saturday at Greenbelt, and my plan was to avoid anything ‘work’ related for most of the day, and it mostly paid off. What I did do was to invite lots of special guests onto my show during the day in the hope that some of them would turn up!

So following a couple of seminars and a lot of sitting around chatting to lovely peoples, I headed up to my venue for the 7.30 start. just after 7.30, the band before started their last song – which then went on for 12 minutes. Always nice to be 15 minutes late getting on stage for a gig at a festival where audiences are on a tight schedule and probably have the gig bookended by other things they wanted to see…. if I’d been on sound, I’d have turned the power off.

Anyway, we got set up and I explained the premise of the gig – one piece of 50 minutes long (it was going to be 70, but the delay meant I cut it down), with a whole load of special guests, each one coming on stage one at a time, then playing, me looping them and then leaving while their contribution lives on for the next guest to interact with.

The four guests who ended up doing it were Jez Carr (obviously – Jez being a genius improvisor and perfect first contributor to anything like this in terms of letting the others who are less familiar with the form to hear roughly what’s going on.) So Jez played some piano, which got looped, then left, and after me layering a little more, guest number 2 was Andrea Hazell, (soprano from the Royal Opera House), who sang three of four beautiful layers of wordless vocals, harmonsing my ebow line.

Guest no.3 was Duncan Senyatso, who contributed some beautiful guitar, and a vocal line that meshed so marvellously with Andrea’s voice that it sounded composed, though far to intricate to have been composed by me!

Last guest was Patrick Wood, keyboardist and composer with The Works – I’ve collaborated with Patrick on a lot of improv things before, and once again he played some gorgeous fender rhodes sounds to the loops. To finish things off, Jez came up and played some bass – Jez is a great bassist and plays very differently to me, so it was lovely to have him take the low end somewhere else…

And in between and through it all I was mixing and adding and fading and chopping and multiplying and post-processing and keeping it all interesting for 50 minutes.

and the end result was without a doubt the best gig I’ve ever done at Greenbelt, and one of my favourite ever, I think. Some really really beautiful music – I’m gutted that I didn’t record it, but I’m sure we’ll get to do something similar again – time to contact the British Council in Botswana and see if we can get them to fly us over there!

So after the show, I was compering in Centaur – the huge indoor venue here at GB – where The Works were playing, followed by Aradhna – both played fantastic sets and went down a storm.

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First greenbelt gigs…

Got here yesterday, set up our tent (tent??? what am I doing camping at my age!)

First gig went well – first half was me solo, doing Grace and Gratitude, Kindness Of Strangers and People Get Ready, then Jez joined me, and we did the audience participation improv from Edinburgh, and then a bunch of other improv stuff that seemed to go very well as well. Lots of fun.

I then got to see a bit of Iain Archer’s set on the mainstage, which was fab, as expected.

Then it was back into playing/compering mode for the late night ‘jazz lounge. First act was Jez on solo (I joined him for a version of Autumn Leaves. Then a singer/songwriter called Naomi, and finally my first live set with Duncan Senyatso, which went surprisingly well – playing those African rhythms without a drummer was a real challenge, and the tempos were moving around a bit, but all in, it was fine.

This morning was spent with TSP, my mum and niece just mucking around, and this afternoon we’ll take in a few seminars. Then it’s back to playing again tonight! all mad.

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Why everyone should hire Steve Brown

Over at rockandrollconfidential.com they have a catalogue of the internet’s worst band promo shots, the hall of douchebags – some of the captions are very funny indeed, and many of the pictures are hilarious with or without captions. It’s amazing just how unaware some people are of what’s needed to do promo, and for that reason, anyone in a band needs to look at the hall of fame, then head over to Steve Brown’s site, check out what proper band shots look like and pay him lots of money to make you look very cool indeed. Seriously, you’ll get more gigs, and less people will laugh at your website.

Soundtrack – right now, I’m just listening to Duncan’s songs over and over to get them firmly planted in my head for the gigs at Greenbelt.

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not one but two Amy Kohn gigs in London

One of the best things about Edinburgh is meeting up with other performers. Sometimes it’s a fleeting yet encouraging chat outside a venue (I met Alan Carr outside the Assembly Rooms where he was performing, and had a lovely chat and swapped encouragement for the fest) and other times it’s people who become top chums and you stay in touch with.

Amy Kohn is a friend of JazzShark‘s, who was playing up at Edinburgh, and who stepped into the role of Echoplex footpedal on Fringe Sunday and jammed along on accordian, on Amo Amatis Amare. She was down in London this weekend playing a couple of gigs so we went along. First up she was at The 12 Bar – an acoustic venue in central London, playing at an accordion night (oh yes, it’s not just bassists who get together for a geek-out once in a while!). Obviously for this gig she was just playing accordion and singing, but was fab. She writes very quirky songs, with lots of really odd harmony in them, and it takes a while to get drawn into Amy-world, but when you catch up with her, it’s beguiling stuff.

Monday’s gig was at Ray’s Jazz in Foyles – just a half hour in-store. But they had a piano, so I went along to see what Amy was like with piano instead of accordion. Damn, she’s a fantastic piano player! Scary stuff indeed. The Accordion is a great live tool, in that it gives her freedom to move around, it’s pretty original for a left-field singer/songwriter and is just makes a nice change, but Amy’s piano playing is on a whole other level. There are nods towards Tori and Kate Bush, but that’s just a tiny part of what Amy does. She’s as much Charles Ives as she is Tori Amos, and her background in musical theatre definitely creeps in there too… I picked up copies of both her albums, and have listened to the brand new so-new-it’s-only-an-advance-copy one, which is marvellous. Really really original and lovely. Top stuff.

Today’s been a day of two halves – the first half was spent shopping in Enfield with my auntie Babs. Well, she’s actually my third cousin Babs, but has always been auntie Babs… (maternal grandmother’s cousin). Anyway, I think I’ve probably blogged about Babs before – she’s 80 (I think), but looks about 20 years younger, has a more active social life than most people half her age, a great sense of humour, and is much fun to go out for lunch with. Today she needed the batteries in her smoke alarms changing, so that was a fine excuse for us to go out for lunch before heroic me shimmying up a ladder to swap said batteries over.

And now I’m listening to and playing through the songs for Duncan’s greenbelt gig. Lucky me – what a charmed life. 🙂

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What is this, how you say, 'Kassett'??

So, I’ve got four days to get my head round Duncan Senyatso‘s tunes for Greenbelt, so time to have a listen to them… hang on, that’s not a CD. What is it? It this some new technology I’ve not seen before? A small plastic box, with a long ribbon inside wound round two spools.

Ooh, I remember – cassette tape! Blimey.

It took me about half an hour to find a cassette deck in the house (actually, there’s one in the kitchen but I didn’t want to bring that into the office). Eventually I found the cassette player at the bottom of a dusty box under a pile of records (records!!) behind the TV. It hasn’t been used for many years, but it seems to be doing OK thus far..

The sound quality is dreadful – how did we put up with this for so long? What a rubbish way to listen to anything. It makes low res MP3s sound positively high-tech. Maybe we should blame the inventor of the walkman – there’s no way cassette would have survived without it…

Thank the good Lord for CD, CDR, MP3 and Minidisc!

though sadly I don’t think even those lovely new technologies would make Duncan’s marvellous music any easier to play!

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I think that's called 'going out on a high'

Words I wasn’t expecting to hear at the Fringe ‘hello can I get a ticket for ‘Bass: The Final Frontier?’ ‘no sorry, sir, he’s just sold out’.

Oh yes, a sell out. A rather confusing sellout, given that I’d got lots of comps and given them to friends, not expecting the room to be full at all, so just before I went on stage there were people who had bought tickets who didn’t have a seat… all v. mixed up. My fault. But hey, what a problem to have!

The show went superbly, and loads of lovely people were in tonight – the poetry legend that is Jude Simpson sat in on the show and did a cracking version of Femur (to the tune of Fever), Ronnie Golden was there (his show with Barry Cryer, Little Richard III has just started at the fest, go and see it!), Duncan, Simon and Rise – who I spent a fantastic 5 hours rehearsing with today for Duncan’s gig at Greenbelt – were there, Jack Cryer, the guys from Rap Canterbury Tales and of course the potty-mouthed Rev G. ‘Twas the perfect way to end a run at the fest, great crowd, I was on form, played well, bantered well, and sold lots of CDs and T-shirts. If you were there, thanks so much.

The CVenues crew in C Central were great to work with – lovely peoples who put up with a lot of crap.

And now it’s finished, and I’m off back to London, to spend the next week and a half teaching and learning the songs for Duncan’s gig at Greenbelt – the rehearsal was amazing, and the best bass lesson I’ve had in years, getting to grips with the African rhythmic stuff that Duncan and Rise were throwing at us. Being on stage with two guitarists that good will be a dream come true. They are both outstanding (Rise Kagona was the guitarist in the Bhundu Boys, one of the first African bands I was properly aware of, thanks to Peelie and Andy Kershaw).

So tomorrow we’re off home, via Berwick to see the family again. It’s been so much fun staying with Gareth and Jane – they are the perfect Edinburgh hosts, and it’s just a shame we’ve seen so little of Jane, as she goes to work before we get up, and is in bed before we arrive back in the middle of the night.

So if you’re still in Edinburgh please go and see the shows I recommended tonight at the show – , , , , , .

And I’ll see you here again next year!

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Tiredness catching up on me.

So much so that I completely forgot to put a ticket on my car today, and so got a parking ticket – £30 needlessly wasted there… DOH!

TSP and I finally got rid of all our remaining flyers today – no more left for flyering tomorrow, which is just as well as I have a rehearsal for most of the day with Duncan Senyatso, for a gig at Greenbelt weekend after next.

I’m truly knackered, and it showed a little in my show tonight – I was a little more vacant than usual, but still played well and was funny enough to carry the gig off, just not as sparky as I have been. It was odd going back to doing People Get Ready on my own at the end, having had the truly wonderful Julie McKee sing it with me on Saturday and ‘Mr Fringe’ himself, Andy Williamson play a gorgeous tenor sax part on it with me last night. (Andy, for those of you who know what this means, is the Ralston Bowles of the Edinburgh Fringe – knows everyone, plays 17 shows a day, is the networking king and basically IS the festival. He’s also a very fine saxophonist and is playing up here with his fabulous Big Buzzard Boogie Band, and in a show called Sex With Mae West.

Anyway, show went well, 33 people in, lots of CD sold (great for paying parking fines with!) – last night tomorrow, and then home…

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Italy post no. 11 (last one!)

(written 25/7/05 17.07)

So, on the plane on the way home. It turns out there was wifi available in the airport once you’d gone through to the departure lounge, but I met up with a guy from Naples who was at the gig yesterday, so spent the time chatting to him instead of online. So none of this stuff will be uploaded til I get home.

The good news is that I’ve had no hassle at all getting my bass onto the planes on this trip – it remains to be seen if my rack makes it home safely; it’s currently in the hold, at the mercy of the gorillas that throw your stuff around in a way euphamistically refered to as ‘baggage handling’ – I think baggage mutilation or baggage stomping would be more accurate.

Anyway, it’s the home stretch, and I’m hugely looking forward to heading out for curry tonight with TSP and Jez. Can’t wait to be home.

It’s been a very successful trip – a lot of opportunities have presented themselves for further touring in Italy, and I’ll hopefully be back there in November. Which gives me about three months to learn how to explain the story behind Shizzle in Italian.

From this evening though, it’ll be full speed back into Edinburgh, as well as the gigs in Guildford and Berwick, and planning some more dates for September, writing an extended improv framework for a performance at Greenbelt and planning a couple of tours for early 2006 with Theo in the UK and Michael Manring in the US.

…And now I’ve just been fleeced to the tune of £4.60 for a particularly hideous cup of hot chocolate (I’m dying for a mint tea – I’ve had none for days!!) and a cheese and pickle sandwich… don’t you just love budget airlines?

Oh, things are looking up, I’ve just noticed that one of the flight attendants has taken that crap-mowhawk-boy-band hair thing one stage further and is teetering dangerously on the boy-band/flock of seagulls cusp. Somehow bad 80s hair makes the journey more palatable.

Soundtrack – Maurizio Rolli, ‘Archivi Sonori’; Jonatha Brooke, ’10 Cent Wings’; James Taylor, ‘Hourglass’.

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