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januari 31, 2004
Alwa at Mejeriet
Another wonderful gig at Mejeriet today. Swedish folk/jazz/ambient group Alwa visited the "Jazz Brunch" and gave us about 100 minutes of dream-like atmospheres. Another challenge sound-wise but it turned out pretty good, if I can say so myself. It's wonderful to work with unusual line-ups and sounds and bands than knows how to use silence and air as part of their compositions. The band's sound is very ECM and the nordic folk tunes together with the tenor sax reminded me more than once about some of Jan Garbarek's music.
The line-up today was various percussion, electric and acoustic guitars, tenor and baritone saxophone, flutes, violins, kantele and vocals. A Schertler transducer designed for cello turned out to work beautifully on the kantele.
The kantele, known as Finland's national instrument, looks a fragile little fellow with almost nothing in the construction that helps it "amplify" itself, like the body of an acoustic guitar. The monitor engineer and I discussed this and he suggested that it belongs to the rare family of instruments made to sound as little as possible. The small one Alwa used was pretty much just strings on a piece of wood. The band had apparently had problems micing this thing before but our little transducer made the trick. The result was a very big but still fragile sound, very atmospheric. Alwa's music lends itself to creative uses of reverbs and various effects but the kantele sounded just the way it should without any digital gizmos enhancing it.
Posted by swepett at 5:44 EM | Comments (0)
januari 28, 2004
Another image of winter
One can complain that although we've been below freezing for quite a while now, it still doesn't snow. The cold does beautiful things to our fountains though. Don't ask me why someone decides to keep this one going every winter when all others are emptied but our morning paper claimed it had been that way for 30 years. They empty it during the city festival in August instead. It would be horrible if one of the drunk rednecks visiting got wet.
Oh, and now it's actually snowing, and it's below zero. Let's see how long that lasts...
Posted by swepett at 12:55 FM | Comments (1)
The Egg Slicer
This particular one turned out to have a tendency to rust though. But not in the egg-touching parts. How convenient.
Posted by swepett at 12:54 FM | Comments (0)
januari 27, 2004
Holocaust Memorial Day
Posted by swepett at 1:28 FM | Comments (0)
januari 25, 2004
Double gig
Did a double gig at Mejeriet today (Saturday). First the first Jazz Brunch of the season, this time featuring Almaz Yebio and her band. Vocalist Yebio had assembled a nice quartet perfect for the Brazilian program they presented. Two percussionists and one acoustic (nylon string) guitar player from Denmark and local master bassist Mats Ingvarsson gave a lot of room for Almaz's beautiful voice.
In the evening we had a old school dance evening with the Flashback Big Band playing good old big band dance music. With a big band in a venue like Mejeriet you pretty much have to let the trumpet section set the volume. With the trumpets acoustically at about 95 dB at FOH and me trying to get vocals to be intelligible over that, I was worried about how many of the rather old people in the audience would come up to me and complain about the volume. Explaining that it would be just as loud if we turned off the PA, but the only thing they would be hearing would be horns, usually never works with these people either. They want to complain, I am wrong, they are right and that's usually it. However, no one complained. Maybe they got flashbacks to their young dancing days because I guess trumpets were as loud in those days as they are today. They apparently didn't have mirrorballs in those days though as the lighting engineer got complaints about the mirror ball.
Posted by swepett at 1:01 FM | Comments (0)
januari 19, 2004
And then you wake up ...
Oh, well ...
Posted by swepett at 3:42 EM | Comments (1)
Winter!
Ah, it's snowing! Lately I've realised that I miss winter. I mean real winter, with snow and even though it is cold, not cold in the way we have down here. Our winter is months of biting wind and mostly no snow. Plenty of rain. From left or right, rarely from above. And that damn wind. We may have temperatures around +5C but it always feels worse than up north where they have real winter and maybe -15-20C.
But now it's snowing. From the right though...
Posted by swepett at 1:35 FM | Comments (0)
januari 14, 2004
"Emotion", "Tone", and crap like that
That's another thing I have a hard time seeing people talking about, emotions in playing, and "tone" and stuff like that. Again, subjective and all about something weird that connects you to that playing by someone else. Especially weird if the playing was done a long time ago. But yes, that guitar playing on Rainbow's "Finyl Vinyl" just hits me straight somewhere where stuff like that hits people. Some time ago, I listened a lot to that album around the same time I listened a lot to a similar live compilation with Miles Davis. "Around the world", it's called and is a compilation of stuff from Miles' last tours. With both Miles and Ritchie, some people complain about "noises". It can be Miles throwing down his hand randomly on a keyboard or doing a crazy, fast as lightning run on the horn. It can be Ritchie playing slide with an octave pedal that can't follow that slide playing at all, causing mistracked tones and weird artifacts. Maybe playing the guitar with the cable or scraping the strings or something. But somewhere along that listening, I thought that they were doing the same, stretching the boundaries of the instruments just to be able to express those emotions dying to get out. Ritchie's and Miles' heads said "ARGH" and that couldn't be expressed with just a clean "A" on the instrument.
And BTW, it isn't just about soloing either. Ritchie Blackmore must be one of the coolest rhythm guitarists in the business. Trying things, lots of "big chords" (don't know the proper terms but there's a lot of strumming and a lot of strings involved, not just two or three note power chords). Just listen to the choruses of any live version of Rainbow's "I Surrender".
I just put on "Finyl Vinyl" and was reminded of the same thing I'm always reminded of when I enjoy these solos though; they wouldn't be anything without the rock solid backing of Glover and Bürgi (and Rondinelli in '82). Just as some of the glorious noodling in the '70's Deep Purple was not only about great solos by Lord and Blackers, it was also about the hard working backup of Roger Glover and Ian Paice. A soloist can't be other than inspired playing over that backing and having people follow you like that. The studio albums may have been slick and I may like those for the melodic touch but live it still was very driving, energetic rock'n'roll.
Posted by swepett at 12:17 FM | Comments (0)