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OliverM

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Posts posted by OliverM

  2. What live music are you going to see tonight?

    in Live Shows & Festivals

    Posted

    1 hour ago, mjazzg said:

    It was great. I saw the Rogue Art notice about the upcoming concert with Maneri and the others - seems like a very interesting concert indeed. I wish Paris were a bit nearer!

    I'm interested in your comments about her level of recognition. For some reason I'd always imagined she had a high profile in France and it's a shame to hear not. Might this be due to her time spent teaching/playing in the US? I'm surprised, and frustrated, how little she seems to come to the UK. She was due to play a duet with Nicole Mitchell this year but cancelled. 

    Yes I remember her feeling a bit bitter after a free concert she gave in a church last year, telling me she doesn't generally do free concerts by principle, and because too few people from the public (it was a classical music monthly listening group, and most hadn't heard of her) had bought any of the records she had brought with her, it was as if the public had left and ignored her it is true. I saw her with her tentet this year which was a great success though, and she spoke out at the end explaining how the different ways of combining composed and improvised music would be essential to the development of this music in the 21st century, in a way that reminded of Threadgill or Braxton. But her profile is less important for the media than when she colaborated with Boulez I guess, and is probably higher abroad nowadays. And institutionally the support for this adventurous music is dwindling, last year's new concert hall in Paris, the Carreau du temple, has stopped programming any of it after a great first year, it is now become a place for artistic and commercial fairs.

  3. What live music are you going to see tonight?

    in Live Shows & Festivals

    Posted

    On 20/11/2016 at 8:55 AM, mjazzg said:

    Irene Schweizer, Maggie Nicols, Joelle Leandre at Kings Place

    three consummate improvisors presenting an hour of fascinating music. Unusual to see humour used so effectively 

      Sounds great! I will be seing two of them next Monday, three French labels organized for Joelle Léandre a 40 years of touring celebration concert to which she responded by inviting trombonist Christiane Bopp as well as Mat Maneri and Maggie Nicols.

    I feel that Joelle Léandre has suffered from a relative lack of recognition in France, especially from institutions that otherwise support culture more than in other countries, so this should be a special moment.

  4. BFT 152 – November 2016 Link and Discussion

    in Blindfold Test

    Posted

    First blindtest for me on this forum and I enjoyed it very much - some great music - I might have had a few ideas for tracks 1 and 10 at one time but now that they were found, I see I had no chance. Well done Corto maltese! An occasion to learn and discover more I guess. What proportion of this music has made it once on CD? None at all?

    Thank you for preparing and sharing this. Solidarity from France!

  6. What was the first jazz you heard that really fascinated you?

    in Miscellaneous Music

    Posted

    17 hours ago, Scott Dolan said:

    Did you continue down the Free Jazz road afterwards? 

    Yes! Through Archie Shepp. This drummer friend started taking lessons with Stephen McCraven from the Shepp Quartet in Paris and he would tell me what they spoke about. Archie Shepp's music was easily available here and I connected with its political orientation which made me appreciate this music even more. I started exploring more later on by learning about the history.

  7. What was the first jazz you heard that really fascinated you?

    in Miscellaneous Music

    Posted · Edited by OliverM

    Very dependent on age/generation, family and surroundings I can imagine.

    For me, it must be Coltrane's Impressions which a drummer friend whom I was playing with at the time lent me. I was really not ready to hear that at the time, especially the starter "India", yet the length of the piece, the basses, the musical voyage were truly fascinating. It took me a long time to start to realize what was happening. I think I handed it back after one month and very many listenings and told my friend that I still didn't like it, and after a little time without it, things changed by themselves and I went out to buy my own! Just this morning, I listened to India again from the 1961 village vanguard dates and noticed how effective the spell still is!

    Edit: I thought I had read almost all of the above, only to notice I had completely skipped Scott's own recollections, what a coincidence! For me this "transformation" happened in the Paris subburbs in the end of the 1990s in my early teens...

  13. Bob Dylan corner

    in Artists

    Posted · Edited by OliverM

    I fail to see the contradiction. While Dylan has kept songwriting as a "minor genre" though having a heroic tradition, his songs can also be appreciated from a literary point of view even if this exceeds sometimes the intentions of the singer/composer. Literature resides maybe more in the act of writing than in the fixed forms one recognizes (poetry, the novel, plays, etc.), and silent reading is only the most recent form of appreciating litterature, it doesn't have to and wasn't always that way. Relations of words that stick with you and work on you, that is at the core.

    Anyway, I will be curious to hear his allocution.

  16. Today's clarinetists

    in Recommendations

    Posted · Edited by OliverM

    Xavier Charles and Jacques Di Donato, different generations and Di Donato played in classical formations for a long time (a historic recording of Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps directed by the composer for instance). They were recorded together for French radio last year and can be watched and listened here:

    http://www.francemusique.fr/emission/l-improviste/2015-2016/duo-jacques-di-donato-et-xavier-charles-enregistre-radio-france-11-07-2015-23-00

    Sylvain Kassap

    Rudi Mahall

    Joachim Badenhorst

  21. What live music are you going to see tonight?

    in Live Shows & Festivals

    Posted

    10 hours ago, king ubu said:

    some bad smartphone pics (and longer German review) up here now:

    http://ubus-notizen.blogspot.ch/2016/09/meteo-music-festival-mulhouse-august.html

    You captured some good expressions there, I especially like the Roscoe Mitchell/John Edwards and Douglas Ewart pictures. Glad to discover your blog too, it will be a good way for me to try to recover some german.

    -----

    Will try and catch (but starts early) tomorrow:

    Christian Wolfarth Solo // Christiane Bopp & Jean-Luc Petit Duo

    at Souffle Continu record shop.

  22. Travelling to Paris early September (plus Italy & Finland) - Jazz Advice

    in Miscellaneous Music

    Posted · Edited by OliverM

    I also have a special attraction to Ferrara! I was there before the 2012 earthquake and heard that it was strongly affected. A young population there with lots of students. I will pick up Bassani, thanks for pointing him out!

    I would be happy to help you, Romualdo, regarding Paris. You can check out the program of Jazz à la Villette which takes place right now to see if there is anything of your liking:

    http://jazzalavillette.com/programme

    That Orchestre National de Jazz 30th anniversary concert on the day you arrive looks very interesting to me, as does the "under the radar" concert on the 4th (Basque vocalist Benat Achiary in trio + Regis Huby quartet). I would have been there had I been in town this week.

    As for record shops, as Flurin said Gibert Joseph has cheap second hand CD, some of them press returns so really new. It also has an excellent japanese import section. For second hand vinyl, Paris Jazz Corner and La Dame Blanche are good places though not cheap (both in the Latin Quarter):

    La Dame Blanche, 47 rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève

    http://parisjazzcorner.com/

    Souffle Continu for more experimental music (no second hand), which is close by to cemetary Père Lachaise (the latter is definitely worth a visit):

    20-22 rue Gerbier 75011, http://www.soufflecontinu.com/index.php?f=accueil

    The Musée de la Musique is great if you want to see Adolphe Sax's innovations, octobasses and other rarities:

    http://philharmoniedeparis.fr/en/museum-exhibitions

    The newly built Philharmonie concert hall which is in the same parc should be seen for its architecture.

    This is what I can think of for now, I might add some more later. Have a good trip!

     

  23. What live music are you going to see tonight?

    in Live Shows & Festivals

    Posted · Edited by OliverM

    Great write-up Flurin, thanks for posting your impressions here first and so quickly! (it was also really nice for us to meet you, and we hope there will be other occasions).

    Opening the festival was a concert at 6 pm in the city's tourism office, the French based Japanese drummer Yuko Oshima had invited the aforementioned Frantz Loriot and cellist Anil Eraslan for an improvised set on what was apparently their first meeting. The set was very focused and intense, and Yuko Oshima seemed to be playing her life here, surprising a large part of the audience who were maybe expecting a more chamber like atmosphere.

    That first Chapel concert (Luft and Christer Bothén) was also a personal highlight of the festival for me. As Gustafsson mentioned after the concert, the acoustics were such in the 15th century building that the slightest small inflexion on the saxophone came out very distinctly. While he started powerfully on the baritone, he then switched to a small predecessor of the saxophone -- so I was told -- on which the notes are played by a vertical sliding pitch lever (I would do better in posting a picture here). The association with Keravec's playing on the bagpipes was excellent, the instrument was less loud than what it is generally reputed to be and the two combined greatly. Mats then introduced Christer Bothén to the public in a very respectful way, showing that he is not only a great musician but also a great organizer in this field of music. Bothén who had sojourned in North Africa in the early 1970s had then connected with Don Cherry in Scandinavia. He started playing on the Guembri and then stayed on the bass clarinet before calling on the two other on stage for some trio playing. Joe McPhee was sitting on the front row for this concert.

    About the Pat Thomas, WP and Hamid Drake trio, you are right Steve, it really showed on their expressions that they all had been looking forward to playing together. After playing their last note, they looked at eachother to confirm that the enthusiasm had been shared. I was very happy to see Pat Thomas in this configuration.

    Also, before the Sonic Communion concert started, there were very strong laughs to be heard behind the curtain, which I think were mostly Douglas Ewart's, what a great spirit in his playing and his communication with Joelle Léandre was a pleasure to watch.

    I was on the same train back to Paris as some of the musicians -- Léandre, Zerang, Ewart and Sophie Agnel, and had a chance to thank some of them one last time. Michael Zerang was transporting Joëlle's bass, that was my last sight of Météo. I also hope to come back!

     

     

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