This week’s musical interlude is courtesy of the Miguel Atwood Ferguson Ensemble, performing Donny Hathaway‘s Someday We’ll All Be Free. This video was shot live a few weeks ago at California Plaza in Los Angeles.
Bilal Oliver does a fine job shadowing the original vocal style of Mr Hathaway on this song. He will have his own album Air Tight’s Revenge out in September… could be worth checking out.
There is nothing new in stating that Norway is one of the most spectacularly beautiful countries on the planet. Fans of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will know, of course, that Norway was in fact designed by the Magrathean engineer Slartibartfast, who won an award for it. I can confirm that the award was well deserved.
There’s not much more to say about our short trip to Norway’s western fjords in July, except that the photos and videos we made don’t do the landscape justice. And it’s important to note that it’s not just the fjords that are beautiful – the drive there and back from Oslo was equally spectacular.
On the way north, we drove up through Hagafoss and over the Route 50 to Aurland – one of the most scenic drives I’ve ever done. And on the way back (via the Lærdal Tunnel, the longest road tunnel in the world at 24.5km), we crossed through the equally beautiful Hemsedal, over 1000m plateaux that reminded us of the central North Island or the McKenzie Country in New Zealand.
It also helps that Norway is ridiculously prosperous thanks to offshore oil, a small population and wise investment. The Scandanavian social model of high taxes, state-supported infrastructure and generous welfare system finds its apogee in Norway. It also has some of the lowest speed limits in the world – all the better for enjoying the scenery!
If you’ve not been to Norway before, save some money and make the time. You will never regret it.
It is a rare and exciting day when you hear a musician of the calibre of Eddie Palmieri in concert. One of the founding fathers of New York salsa and a great innovator in the Latin jazz of the 1970s, Palmieri brought his Afro-Carribean All-Stars to New Morning in Paris last Friday, and they blew the roof off.
Eddie Palmieri, Concert Pique-Nique, Reims France, 17.07.2010. Image: Eulsteph
Two hours of music stretched out over a pair of sets, suffused with humour and generosity. It was hard to suppress a giggle when Palmieri threw a quote from Salt Peanuts into one of his famously overblown solo passages. The grinning complicity between Palmieri and his bass player, Luques “Salsa” Curtis was evident throughout the gig.
Brian Lynch, Concert Pique-Nique, Reims France, 17.07.2010. Image: Eulsteph
The presence of trumpeter Brian Lynch in the touring band was a particular pleasure – an incredibly technically accomplished player, Lynch has been a regular collaborator with Palmieri since 1987, and directed the Grammy-winning album Simpàtico in 2006.
The music traversed Palmieri’s jazz catalogue (including tunes from Simpàtico and 1990′s Palmas) and included a steaming Latin version of Monk’s In Walked Bud, a nod to one of Palmieri’s own stylistic influences on the piano.
Palmieri apologised that the band wouldn’t be playing his salsa hits (Vamonos pa l’Monte, Cuidate Compay…), because of a lack of vocalists in the group. But with the energy on show last Friday, nobody went home disappointed. This is a gig I’ll remember for a long time.
I’ve succumbed to the hype and have started watching The Wire on DVD (in France it’s called Sur Ecoute and almost nobody’s heard of it). Currently I’m halfway to Season One, and it’s already freaking great.
Here’s a taste: D’Angelo (a middle-management drug-pusher with half a conscience) is teaching his underlings how to play chess – and the pertinence of the metaphor is lost on nobody…
And if anyone – ANYONE - tells me what happens for the next five seasons, I call the Five-Oh on their ass, OK?
It must be time to check in with Stornoway again. At the end of May they released their first full-length album, Beachcomber’s Windowsill on 4AD. Which is nice.
For those who already own Stornoway’s independently released EPs, many of the songs will already be familiar, but new standout tracks like Fuel Up and I Saw You Blink make this album well worth picking up. Alexis Petridis at The Grauniadliked it, in any case.
Here’s the band playing “unplugged” in the fernery in Oxford’s Botanic Gardens. They may not be the most innovative group out there, but they’re still probably my favourite British band right now. And I think I want one of those squeezy portable harmoniums…
Geographically speaking, Paris is not a big city. Its suburbs stretch on forever and are home to 11 million people , but the city proper, (just 2.2 million inhabitants), is clearly enclosed with the boulevard périphérique. The city can be crossed, according to Graham Robb “in a few hours” by foot.
On a day-to-day basis, you never realise the true size of Paris while you zoom from place to place by métro, bus or taxi. So a friend and I decided to test the “smallness” of the city by walking across it in an afternoon. We followed roughly the route of Métro Line 4, from Porte d’Orléans in the south to Porte de Clignancourt in the north, with a little meander eastwards to take in parts of the Marais.
If we had taken a direct route, the distance would have been just 9km, however with the detours we walked about 13km. South of the river, we traced the route of Général LeClerc’s 2nd Armoured Division as it liberated Paris from German forces on 25th August, 1944. There is even a monument in the Jardin du Luxembourg to one Jean Arnould, killed while liberating the park from Nazi oppression.
Crossing the river by way of the Ile St-Louis, we dog-legged right to walk through the Hôtel de Sully and the Place des Vosges before following our nose north-west past Place de la République towards the 18th arrondissement.
Climbing over the Butte de Montmartre and down the other side, we arrived at the Porte de Clignancourt four and a half hours after we started out. Paris est à nous!
We made a video: four and a half hours walking summarised in four and a half minutes:
The places seen in the video are, in order, from south to north:
Monument LeClerc, Porte d’Orléans, 14e
Place Denfert-Rochereau, 14e
Hôpital St Vincent de Paul, 6e
Fontaine des Explorateurs, 6e
Jardin du Luxembourg
Beer stop, rue Soufflot, 5e
La Sorbonne, 5e
Cathédrale Nôtre-Dame de Paris
The Seine @ Quai de la Tournelle
Hôtel de Sully, 4e
Place des Vosges, 4e
Place de la République, 11e
Arc de Triomphe de la Porte St-Martin, 10e
Tati, boulevard Rochechouart, 18e
Sacré Coeur / Montmartre
Café La Maison Rose, rue de l’Abreuvoir, 18e
Stairs, rue des Saules, 18e
Traffic, Porte de Clignancourt
Celebrating a successful walk with another beer - Bistrot la Renaissance, rue Championnet, 18e
We imagine there are very few native Parisians who have ever walked the width of their own city, and it’s certainly not something recommended (yet) in the tourist guides.
There are plans afoot to repeat the exercise later this summer by crossing Paris along an east/west axis – a journey of at least 16 kilometres. Does anyone want to join us?
Summer in Oxford: a rock band plays to the cows in Port Meadow
Over the weekend I was back in Oxford to catch up with some friends. While I don’t miss England that much, I do miss Oxford and its mix of grand architecture, rural landscapes and casual intellectualism.
While I was walking around town, I took some video of life on the river and in Christ Church Meadow. Hopefully it gives an impression of a lazy summer weekend in the most beautiful town in England.
The song I’ve used as soundtrack is “Summer’s Here” by Zim Grady, a band from Abingdon.
I spent much of today out in the rain, collecting footage for a little video project I’m helping with. With a video camera in your hand, it’s amazing how quickly you come to consider the city as your own private film set.
Pedestrians, traffic and background noise constantly interrupt your shots, and it gets a little frustrating. Next time, we’re going to call the police to shut down a couple of streets for us.
To help us construct a storyboard, we used Charlie Brooker‘s indispensable guide to “How to Report the News” as inspiration. Even if you’ve seen it before, it’s always worth watching again, because it’s very clever:
It’s safe to say I’ve finally leapt on board the Esperanza Spalding bandwagon. I got her album Esperanza a few weeks ago, and it’s pretty darn good.
For a still-young musician (25 years old) Esperanza shows remarkable maturity in performance and composition. She reminds me a lot of a young Tania Maria, both in the fact she is a vocalist/composer/instrumentalist and because of her taste for rapid-flight scat melodies spread over latin grooves:
But Esperanza is also all about subtle and complex songwriting, both in terms of the lyrics and their harmonic structure. I wish Betty Carter were still alive, because she would understand exactly where Esperanza is going with songs like She Got To You. Esperanza is the real deal:
