etnobofin

Grimentz – the centre of the old village

Zinal, the most south-eastern francophone village in Switzerland

Looking east over the Val d’Anniviers

This is Seb Clarke – …and a blue bottle and a candlestick
From Rover: Sons Ltd [Buy]

“If you are cold, tea will warm you. If you are heated, it will cool you. If you are depressed, it will cheer you. If you are excited, it will calm you.” – William Gladstone

Tea is a punctuation mark in the day. The first cup in the morning through half-closed eyes and unbrushed hair. The brief pause between phone calls or project reviews. The sharing of stories and time together. A secular sacrament. In the middle of a chaotic swirl of activity, tea provides that clear moment of repose or refreshment, before plunging back into the maelstrom.

For those who remain doubtful about how to make a good cup of tea, George Orwell (for it was he) provides an indispensable guide, first published in the Evening Standard in 1946.

I pretty much concur with Orwell’s recipe, (especially his thoughts about sugar) although I would add a few new rules for the 21st Century:

1. Never, ever buy a cup of tea at a restaurant/coffeehouse/café/railway kiosk. It will be disgusting, weak and taste of bleach. Railway kiosks are why God invented coffee and hot chocolate.

2. If you do like tea, and can afford it, it is worth spending a little extra for good quality leaf or teabags. I’m currently working my way through a box of Nilgiri, which is definitely not up to par with the Assam I was guzzling last week.

3. Tea on aeroplanes will always disappoint you, especially on Lufthansa. On British Airways, the tea may taste fantastic, but this is a sure sign that you will hit turbulence and spill it everywhere

Tea (along with expensive train tickets and resentment of the weather) is a key pillar of British* civilisation. When our beloved American cousins started throwing tea into the harbour 200 years ago, it was a clear sign that our ways were destined to part. The Americans also decided that civilisation was spelt with an “z”, not a “s”, and that tea should be thrown into a “harbor”, which pretty much spelled the end to any chance of North America could be saved from bottomless cups of filter Arabica.

And NO, America, Starbucks does NOT redress the balance – it may be a nice dry place to get wireless access, but I have yet to find a Starbucks that does good coffee. Visit a café in Wellington or Melbourne and you will never darken the doorway of a Starbucks ever again.

Sorry, I got distracted by coffee. Tea. Whether you’re in a tent beside some roadworks in the pouring rain, or taking elevenses with and Ango-Irish duchess in the drawing room, tea is the one drink that never fails to elicit a little mantra when the steaming elixir is poured:

“Ooooh, lovely.”

Cartoon from Natalie Dee

*Yeah OK, so I was born in Christchurch. But my British passport is available for inspection when necessary.

The Mike Westbrook Concert Band – Original Peter
From Mike Westbrook’s Love Songs: Vocalion CDSML 8407 [Buy]

A few months ago I got all sweaty and excited about Mike Westbrook’s big band recordings, and even ranked Citadel/Room 315 among my personal faves of last year. So I’m slowly making my way through some of Westbrook’s large ensemble dates from the 1970s (ie. those that are available on reissue).

Love Songs was recorded in March and April 1970, and features a smaller group (11 players including Westbrook himself and Norma Winstone on vocals) than he used on many of his other recordings of the period. It’s an entirely approachable disc that leans far more towards soul-jazz and groove than one might expect for a British band from this time.

Original Peter was written by Westbrook as a musical accompaniment to an acrobat who went by the same name, “the greatest hand balancer in the world”. At live gigs by the Westbrook band, Original Peter would appear on stage and do acrobatic tricks during the performance. Groovy, baby. The extempore tenor saxophone solo on this version is by George Khan.

A hand-balancer (not Original Peter, though!)

One of the things that’s notable about this recording is that it’s an early example of Norma Winstone’s wordless vocal style, where she joins the frontline horns in the melody lines. This is a role she used on many later recordings, including Kenny Wheeler’s large ensemble work like Song for Someone (1973) and Music for Large and Small Ensembles (1990)

Non-Publishing Note

A week’s holiday beckons until the 28th of January. There will be no laptop where I’m going, so there won’t be any posts here for a little while. I’m sure the world will carry on perfectly well while I’m hiding, so take care and have fun!

Well, according to Time Magazine (who named me Person of the Year, by the way), we are all content producers now.

So in the spirit of this exciting young interactive century, here’s a video of a weekend in Slovenia.

Skiing and filming at the same time is pretty darn difficult, I’m surprised that there was any usable footage at the end of the weekend. The quality isn’t fantastic – I was filming with my trusty Canon Ixus 55, (ie, not really a video camera) and then Windows Movie Maker refuses to bounce down completed videos at 30fps (the optimum for Youtube). But I hope somebody enjoys the results.

The soundtrack is Srce od Kristala by Slovenian singer Anžej Dežan, who was the country’s entrant in Eurovision last year. The song is a little different from what you’d normally hear on this blog, but believe me, after a few days in a place like Slovenia, all that trashy Europop starts to make sense – it’s all a question of context.

Slovenia is a drop-dead gorgeous country, and if you’d never been to Europe before and had to pick one nation to visit, you could do a lot worse than wind up here – it’s got all the essential things that make continental Europe so cool – Adriatic coast, Alps, vineyards, turnip fields and a cute little capital city called Ljubljana. Everyone is either friendly or at least accommodating, most people speak English, and you can eat as much horse as you like.

You disappear for a weekend in Slovenia, and while you’re incommunicado, more great musicians die. I’m wondering if James Brown is currently recruiting for a new band in the sky…

Alice Coltrane and Michael Brecker were very different musicians in many ways, and although they both represented continuations of John Coltrane’s legacy, they accomplished their art in divergent fashions. Alice Coltrane pursued a mystic connection with the multiple spheres that her husband had so passionately explored. And Michael Brecker’s laser-sharp chops and tone that could break granite helped create a massive body of work as a leader and collaborator that stood astride the whole progression of jazz from the 1970s into the 21st Century.

Michael Brecker – obituaries at Song with Orange, Bagatellen and a personal appreciation at The Jazz Clinic

Alice Coltrane - mourning with mp3s at los amigos de durutti, wordsandmusic and Destination Out.

Given that there are currently a lot of Alice Coltrane mp3s floating out there (check the links above), here’s a Brecker classic: Michael and his brother Randy in full flight in New York in December 1976. The rest of the band isn’t too shabby either – it includes Terry Bozzio on drums, Patrick O’Hearn on bass, Ruth Underwood on percussion, Ronnie Cuber on baritone sax, and some hairy guitarist called Frank Zappa running the show.

Frank Zappa – The Purple Lagoon
From Läther: Rykodisc [Buy]

Keith Jarrett – Pastel Morning

From Ruta and Daitya: ECM 1021 [Buy]

Occasionally nature does something really neat, like sunrise yesterday morning. Given that English weather is scientifically proven to be crap 98% of the time, it seemed worth grabbing the camera to capture the moment.

The good soundtrack for these photos might be Pastel Morning, an intriguing piece by Keith Jarrett off the early ECM release Ruta and Daitya. Soon after this recording Jarrett, threw all his electronic toys out of his crib and embraced acoustic instrumentation forever. But Jarrett’s performances in electronic settings make you wonder what he could have produced if he hadn’t unplugged himself…

(OK, maybe he wouldn’t have recorded The Survivors’ Suite, in which case it was a very good thing Jarrett quit the electricity habit).

(NB. These photos don’t work very well on a black and white computer.)

Hat tip to the hometown…

Andrew Dubber’s got a classic piece of kiwi postpunk on his mp3 blog: “Auckland Tonight” by The Androidss. If you like indie stuff from the early 80s, check it out.

(I was a bit young to hang out at The Gluepot in 1981, given I was still chewing on the collar of my pajamas and drawing on the wallpaper with purple crayons. We’d just moved to Auckland and apparently managed to unpack the T.V. and plug it in time to see Charles and Di’s wedding. I don’t remember any of this, but Mum and Dad told me, so it must be true.)

Derek Bailey – What’s New?
From Ballads: Tzadik [Buy]

Happy New Year ! - I wish that 2007 brings with it everything you hope and dream for.

For 2007, things are going to change around here. Recently, doing some maintenance on etnobofin.com, I got thinking about what the heck it’s all about. For a short time, while peering under the bonnet, (that’s “hood” in many North American dialects, comprenez-vous?), hands smeared with excess oil and burning my nose on steam hissing from the radiator, I did seriously consider driving the whole rickety contraption off a cliff to join the estimated 2.72 million abandoned blogs drifting about in cyberspace.

After all, if etnobofin were abandoned this blog would be in good company – for some really interesting music blogs shut up shop in 2006 as their authors found that other lives and other people required more attention – the work of david fenech, ecrivains.org, samizdjazz, and ianB’s various projects notable among them.

However, the decision was eventually taken not to throw the kitten kaboodle out with the bathwater.

Instead, etnobofin.com will become more inclusive in its subject matter. Music has largely dominated these pages since March 2005. To be honest, there are so many great music blogs out there now doing a better job that I can ever do, and ultimately it’s not clear that I can continue to spin a cohesive narrative out of personal musical interests that are increasingly divergent. (More on that another time).

What will etnobofin.com be about in 2007? Well, like everything it’s a work in progress. It’ll adhere more closely to its mission statement. While music will not disappear from view, it will break the “only-cover-one-topic” rule of blogging and will possibly include more about journeys, writing, naïve stabs at politics, spiritual bits and bobs, ripping yarns, stupid stuff.

Miles Davis will have to learn rub shoulders with Marc Chagall and Ingmar Bergman and BBC Radio Four and scottish islands and cups of tea and candles and the necessity for sleep.

My hopes for etnobofin.com in 2007 are that:

- it will become more interested in people

- it can be honest and humble

- it will smile and laugh at itself

- it’s readers (no matter how few) will be interested and entertained

So that’s where we’re at. If none of this sounds like fun, delete your RSS feeds and Favourite links right now.