Wimps

WARNING: Self-confidence book content. You might get bored. But this is an old one and  I need to write it out. And yeah, I’m not worried about making any sense.

On the beginning everything is nice and easy. You are almost always warm, make a small poo here and there and get some nice warm milk and a cuddle whenever you want. You don’t really need to be scared as you have people doing all that job for you.

As you grow up that changes. Kids bulling you at school, monsters in the wardrobe, the fat bearded man that lives around the corner. All legitimate life threatening situations and all you do is hide and run. Different tactics but, even then you have someone to really worry about the stuff to you. You carry on.

Without noticing you suddenly lose that. Scary stuff really became scary to you too and not only to people around you, even when you scared about them. You fell responsible for you girlfriend, you don’t want your parents to be disappointed with you and you want your boss to be happy with your work. But, most of all, you don’t want to do look silly and disrespectful for the people around you. That’s what makes them like you better, Nietzsche would point out with a sarcastic smile on his face.

Am I a person that scares easy? No, I’m not. As a big Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy fan I’ve learned with Ford Prefect not to panic. The thing is that, when I do, I also learned with Ford Prefect to fake it really well. And that, my friend, that’s the secret.

Lately I’ve been thinking what has scared the crap out of me during my life. Excluding those teenager days of crying insanely because my two week girlfriend broke up with me or that I dropped Coke on the big guy’s notebook and now I’m screwed. Like serious, adult stuff. Funnily enough, I couldn’t think of a moment that wasn’t already happening. Being scared, for me, always involved wanting something so hard, so strongly, achieving it and then being absolutely sure that I wouldn’t be able to manage it.

Moving countries and joining the jazz school are two big examples. The build up for those were tremendous, the possibilities and outcomes impossible to plan. They both brought me some instability – financial and psychological – and also a uncertainty about the future. I wanted to bail out, something inside me was telling me to quiet down and run away because life was good and I wouldn’t need change anything. Carrying on with normal activities, when confronted with ground shaking situations, always seemed to be the more appropriate thing to do. But, scared as hell, I went for them.

When summed up with other situations, I’ve been getting less and less scared when dealing with stuff I really dreamed about in my life. After all of these I realise that as soon as I made the jump and lived up to confront whatever happened, I was happier and more confident after it. Sometimes a visit to hell is necessary to jump higher in the sky.

Shifting is hard. Throwing everything you have away and starting from scratch even harder.  You might fell guilty, you might fell bad. You might regret it later. You might even hurt one or two loved ones along the way. You will also always have your bed to cry at night when you let despair take in for a while and drive some bad dreams. Luckily you will have a couple of good friends to listen to you and help you find your ground. But, a while later, the craziness was always totally worth for me.

Having said that, the hardest next thing is try and learn to step back when you scared. Specially if, by doing that, you will end up even more scared than you were in the first place.

It’s been aaaaages since I’ve been to the concert. Beginning of May to be exact. But I’m damn sure I’ll be able to talk about it as if it was just last night.

I couldn’t bear with the anticipation before the concert. I’ve known Regina work since her first album, in 2001. One of those albums that you hear in the car, while traveling, and can’t help but grin.

Probably the first thing you will notice when Regina gets on stage is that she is GORGEOUS. Absolutely gorgeous, with a smile that makes you want to jump around and scream crazily. It took me a while to actually realise she was playing – actually, until she started singing. Gosh. It started badly for me – I already didn’t want it to end.

Regina’s band is small, modest and unusual – violin, cello, drums and her on the piano. The three guys that follow her (from the band Jupiter One) are extremely talented and up for the task of playing with her.

Apart from being gorgeous (have I said that yet?) and having a voice that is eight thousand times prettier than it’s owner, Regina has a unique tone, a child-like sense of humour and behaviour, a perfect tune between her body movements, dynamics and facial expressions. She is extremely dynamic and original in the way she does things. She wobbles while walking along the stage and is shy when someone yells something at her from the crowd. And that is incredibly lovely.

The concert was truly an amazing experience. It’s been a long time since I got goose bumps like that in a music concert. Really, really. I usually give good reviews from the concerts I go to because I tend to analyse technical aspects and music junk. So I always manage to get something good out of them even though they are rubbish. But with Regina I couldn’t concentrate on that. I couldn’t concentrate on anything but the music coming out of her. There was that magic, that something else about her which I couldn’t really understand what it was. And still, I was very touched by it. It’s one of the top 5 concerts of my life, for sure.

The drummer mentioned, while Jupiter One was opening the concert, that they went to Café Lido to watch some Jazz the night before the concert. And I almost went there that day, but decided to stay home instead. Gladly. If I met her there I would have made a fool of myself .

I couldn’t find a video from her that I could embed here on the blog (due to copyright restrictions). So here goes a trailer of one of my favourite movies ever ever, that has a lot of Regina’s songs on its soundtrack. Anyway, I really encourage you to check ALL Regina Spektor’s videos on YouTube.

Not a lot of people know that I enjoy going to concerts to study. Not that I grab my books on the middle of the concert and start reading them, God no! Sometimes I go to watch people that I’m not that a big fan, but I know that have quality stuff to play and that they are going to have a great production behind them. Enters John Mayer!

Every time I talked to people about the concert before the concert I would get a lot of rambling on how he is a jerk, about his declarations on this or that magazine or what he did to that girl. Guess what? I don’t care. Mr. Mayer work doesn’t really fit on my style of music but I have to give him a lot of credit. He does have some great songs and his work with the John Mayer trio is a very good thing to listen to. And yeah, he is an outstanding guitar player as he proved on this concert.

One of the first things you’ll notice on a John Mayer’s concert is that the great majority of men that are there are not there because of him. Very feel went to the concert alone, like myself. They go there because someone else asked / implored / begged for tickets and well, it’s good to make your girl happy by watching another man playing the guitar sometimes, you know? But the fact is that eighty percent of the public were women. And they scream a lot. Oh my!

Did I enjoy the concert? Yeah, a lot. John Mayer is an awesome musician, that’s for sure. The guitar is such a casual thing on his hands. It looks and sounds great and his blues background makes his solos something real enjoyable to listen to. The show progression is great and the lighting as well. John knows how to keep the public involved with his character, even though he made quite a few comments that made him sound like a bit of a dick. But…

Even though the overall concert experience was very enjoyable, one particular fact stole my attention. I thought that the drummer that I was going to see that night was going to be Steve Jordan, John Mayer’s trio drummer and that toured with John for a while. That was the real deal for me, more than John to be honest. But the minute I got there I saw that it wasn’t Steve’s kit on the stage and the kick drum had big “KC” letters stamped on it. I was a bit disappointed but I relaxed and waited to see who it was. For my delight it was Keith Carlock. It took me a while to recognise him, but the KC stuff helped me out. And yeah, after that, the concert went pretty much as a class to me. Watching a monster of the drums playing simple straight pop stuff with a lot of groove and simplicity it’s something special. I couldn’t concentrate and anything else apart from Keith on the drums and that’s what John Mayer’s concert was most about for me.

Have you seen Once? Yeah, Once, the Irish movie that won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 2007 for Falling Slowly? No? Oh God, you are SUCH a fool. Well, if you did, much of the praise I’m going to right here is useless. You will know what I’m talking about.

Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, the stars of Once, started touring after the movie to play the movie soundtrack, and named themselves as The Swell Season to kind of give a “band” felling, you know. Well, it got serious and they became a actual band, playing songs from the movie and making more stuff together.

I was mesmerized when I first saw the movie. That was when I watched it for the second time, straight after the first. As Steven Spielberg said, it is a bottomless pot of inspiration. It’s magic, it’s pretty, it’s awesome.

Yeah, as you can imagine, they came to play on the NZ International Arts Festival, on it’s last day. And yeah, they were the number one on my list of tickets to purchase. As a friend very wisely said some days after the concert, it felt like the whole festival built us up for this very moment.

When the concert started, Glen stepped out of the curtains, walked all the way to the front of the stage and did something very similar to this:

Swell Season – "Say It to Me Now" from Colleen McDevitt on Vimeo.

There, that very song, that very first song. Shit yeah. I haven’t felt goose bumps like that  in ages. From then on it only got better and better and better. I truly didn’t want that concert to end. Ever.

Glen is a magical person. He is funny and friendly on a very humble way and it really makes you fell like he is an old friend of you. Not only that, but he is one of those friends that you want around you with a guitar, just singing on every little spare breath he has. His technique to play the guitar and to sing (actually I think his technique is to have no technique) just give it all from the guts. He doesn’t think twice to scream as loudly as he can or to strum his guitar as hard as he can – hence the wholes on his old friend, as he call it.

Markéta was more low-profile. With a beautiful red hair, she was quieter and more into her piano, with kind of a sad look on her face. Not sure if there was a reason for that or if she is just like that really. I really love her piano lines and, even not screaming as Glen does, she has a beautiful sweet voice. Even the contrast between the two of them made things more interesting.

Apparently 20 years of busking cannot be taken of your soul that easily. Glen has all the techie apparatus to sing as a “normal” singer, but he doesn’t tend to treat the stage as much differently then a corner on a busy street. The way he screams and play his guitar almost don’t fell right when amplified by the microphones. And the whole band follow him on that idea. Everyone seems passionate and thoughtful about what they are playing from the beginning to the end. And the cool thing is that he also brings songs from the Irish culture and enriches us a little bit with some of his favourite stuff.

The concert went on for almost two hours. Very short two hours. It definitely didn’t fell like that at all. Well, I’ve been around on quite a few concerts through my life and I’m quite picky on my opinions about them, even though very often I manage to find a good thing or two about every one of them. But I have to say, The Swell Season ***is*** one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to. It was funny, beautiful and delightful. Since the concert I’ve been in love with both Glen and Markéta for good.

Not sure if you are aware of that, but I’m a huge fan of the Jazz. I like music as a subject, that’s one thing. I love Jazz and it is almost if it is something different for me. The ability to have a chat between friends, being it sad, happy or anything else, using nothing but your instrument fascinates me on a magical way. Sometimes a Jazz tune gets me on a way that makes me feel like I don’t need anything else. It’s like being in deep love for some minutes – it all makes sense all of the sudden. I don’t fell like that in any other genre. I don’t feel like that with any lyrics, poems or movies. Only Jazz makes that to me and yes, it is as absurd as it sounds.

I knew the Branford Marsalis Quartet from a while ago. Branford Marsallis is one of the finest modern jazz musicians of the New Orleans style, greatly influenced by his father, Ellis Marsalis Jr. The whole Marsalis family is a great nest for Jazz musicians, actually.

Branford has never been one of my favourite jazz musicians. Not that he is not good, because he is VERY good. It’s just that, for a reason or another, I connect more with other figures. But he has always been around my playlist, with his quartet or with other artists, and I have always admired with the quartet or with other musicians like Art Barkley and Béla Fleck, not to mention Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie.

Other two great reasons to go to the quartet concert were Joey Calderazzo, a pianist that have an astonishing work with some monsters of Jazz (like Dave Holland) and for a weird reason is not widely known by many musicians. The other reason was Justin Faulkner, the 18 years old drummer that just makes you fell like kicking your chair up when he starts to play. Jesus Christ, what was that… Eric Revis, the bass player, was a good surprise for me, as I didn’t know much of his work. Boy, what a jazz band those four fellas are…

The quartet is like a good and old New Orleans band should be. No one shows any stress or deep thinking while doing music – they just do it, from the guts. The four of them cruise through some originals and through some jazz standards as if it was a good chat on the backyard of the old grandpa’s house. It never gets boring. It never gets confusing. Every solo makes you happier than you were a minute ago and with every phrase you fell like finally someone says you always wanted to hear.

The Yellowjackets were great too watch for many reasons. But Marsalis doesn’t have that craziness that the Yellowjacktes fusion has. It’s a jazz more connected to the roots. It’s THE real old style jazz.

I could keep going on and on about the musicians. I could keep going on and on about how fun it was to enjoy them talking to each other in between songs. I could keep going about how Faulkner amazed me as a drummer. But I just want to finish this post saying that on that Saturday night, that kind of cold and kind of busy Saturday night, when it comes to the Jazz, that night was it for me.

Once again, on a Sunday night a got a random call saying “Spare ticket! Interested?” Hell yeah! Why not? I heart Springload. I arrived to watch Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea with no knowledge whatsoever on what it was about. I knew a bit that it had this 1920’s feeling and that it was a theatre play. But from there on it was all surprises.

Well, I got a bit lost at first, I have to admit. My English language skills got a bit stuck and it took me a while to understand what was going on. But very quickly I realized that it was my lucky day, as the play was consisted of a lot of short little stories. That helped me keep on the loop during the night.

The noticeable catch about this play is the clever user of the scenery, being that none. The only scenery element is a white screen where the story projections occur and that’s what the actresses interact with, on a mix of videos and cartoons. But the awesome thing is that you never really think about the setup and just enjoy the thing.

Another awesome aspect of the play for me was the soundtrack, played entirely by a pianist on the stage (that some times sings on a amazing lyric style). The tune with what’s going on the play is great and the central theme that the song always come back to is a lovely enjoyable piece of music.

Once again we got to meet with the cast as sponsors which only enhanced our delight about the play. The three ladies and the fella responsible for the animations and projections are an amazing bunch of British people. Together with Clare Bear they kept talking with the coolest accent in the history of the universe while I grimed and stared.

When I first saw the NZ International Arts Festival line up I knew I would have some trouble while choosing what I was going to see. I read the Calexico excerpt and thought “Yeah, I wanna see this”. But then, after choosing what a REALLY wanted to see it got expensive and I had to cross Calexico off the list. Sad.

Enters the Springload awesomeness. As sponsors, all of the sudden we’ve got spare tickets for the concert and voilà, there I went. Man, I was glad I was to be that lucky.

I didn’t know Calexico before the festival, but what really got me interested was the fact that the band had a mix of Mexico and western United States’ sounds. In my head I translated it as country music with mariachi. And it seemed odd to me to mix those up. But when I sat there, started to listen to that country guitar and all out of the nowhere those horns started to sing with all that Mexican-ness on top of it. I got a bit frightened. I just never expected it would be that good.

While Burns (guitar, vocals) and John Convertino (drums) are the band founders and are clearly the base that all those guys work with. The amazing trumpet duo, namely Jacob Valenzuela and Martin Wenk (they play a whole lot of instruments on the stage), make you want to jump off your seat, so good they are. The syncopation between those guys and Convertino is something that just gives you joy. A shinny, smiley, joy.

For the record, Wenk and the bass player, Volker Zander, are German. German. For God’s sake, German people cannot swing that way. That’s not what I thought about Germans. If all that Germans can play Latin rhythms as these guys do, the Latin musicians are in trouble.

You couldn’t help but dance on your seat. Even though the venue wasn’t that dancing friendly some people got up and danced in front of the stage. The concert was beautiful and happy, and that makes up for an excellent night.

To make things better I ended up the night chatting with Jacob, the North-American and Venezuelan descendent trumpet player. We started chatting about the concert, then he told me about his son and how passionate he is about music. Somehow we moved to Jazz and there we spent a long time. Can’t think on a better way of ending a night other than talking about Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Coltrane with someone that really loves them.

More about Calexico: http://www.casadecalexico.com/