Wimps

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/

Oh, the Circus! I can’t really remember when I have last been to the Circus. But certainly it wasn’t memorable enough or else I would know it straight away. Well, the point is that Inside Out will surely be remembered with happiness in my heart for a long, long long time. It’s not a child circus that’s for sure. Is not quite a circus either. Inside Out is one of the concerts of the Festival that I picked on random choice – no knowledge or specific reason. Just signing up for a surprise. Little did I know it was a very nice surprise.

The Swedish group Cirkus Cirkör gathered up with the Swedish band Irya’s playground and put up a show which mixes traditional circus, theatre, music and comedy. It’s kind of hard to figure out what’s happening for a while until it all falls into place.

As well said by a friend it is extremely hard to tell to others what happened there. We go like a kid saying “There was this guy that kept spinning inside a ring, and that girl that walked up the pole, and the guy that cold juggle a lot of stuff at the same time and the girls on the trapeze, and, and…”. It was just magical. For quite a few moments I would just gasp of amusement, not believing my eyes.

Not only the visuals and performance were great, but the Irya’s Playground band had a concert of their own. They are not only great musically, but they are a great part of the show. Heaps up for the drummer, with a great role on the juggling number and an awesome funny drumming style.

We truly left the theatre wishing for more. Wishing they had come before. Wishing they would never go. It’s was a concert for adults all right, but it definitely got me out of there felling as a child. It was hard to sleep after it with all that excitement inside my head.

More information about Cirkus Cirkör: http://www.cirkor.se/
More information about Irya’s playground: http://www.irya.se/

If there’s one thing that I regret about the 13 Most Beautiful concert on the NZ International Arts Festival is that I wasn’t prepared for it. I don’t mean prepared on a “I read a bit about the concert and I know what it is about”. I mean on a “I know the universe around it quite well” way.

The 13 Most Beautiful is a concert prepared by the Kiwi Dean Wareham and his wife Britta Phillips. The band plays while Andy Warhol’s screen tests show on the background. Those amazing, black and white silent (and sometimes awkward in a way) screen tests, that Andy shot with a bunch of nice looking crazy people in The Factory on the 60’s.

It’s really had to have a opinion of the whole concept. The band was good (not awesome, but good enough) and the matching with the people on each screen test was probably the best part of it. Before each song Dean or Britta would give us a brief history of the person who was going to be on the next test, and that’s what helped me connect the ideas and enjoy it for a bit. And they made a nice job writing and choosing the write music to match to each of those 13 tests.

The screen tests are nothing more than a camera set on a persons face for around four minutes. After stare at the person’s face for a while you can’t help but wondering about their history, what they are thinking about and how their life was. And that is what was really beautiful. Legend tells that Andy Warhol shot more than 500 screen tests on The Factory, and I really would love to have a glance on some of the most famous ones (such as Dali’s and Bob Dylan’s).

I’ve got a mixed review from some friends that went to the concert. Some of them loved it, some of them were bored. On my vision the whole idea wasn’t more interesting because of my complete ignorance about Andy Warhol and the Pop Art universe. But I’m not sure that it would’ve been a awesome concert even if I knew all of that.

Since then, I’m trying to catch up with the movement and that’s where my regret is coming from. How all this cool stuff slipped through my radar for this long?