Music

The Boss’s Big Day Out

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

A quick follow-up to last night’s Twitter coverage of the Big Event, in which Bruce and the E-Street Band played a short gig during the half time of some football game. The songs played were: “10th Avenue Freeze Out”, “Born to Run”, “Working on a Dream” and “Glory Days”; in that order. It was clear that Bruce and the band were having a whale of a time, but also working within some fairly hefty constraints. They had to play “Born to Run”, they had to plug the new album, and they needed two other songs. “Glory Days” was a natural because it actually mentions football. I also suspect the two end tracks were chosen because they had flexible instrumental sections that all you to do stuff leading in and out – such as the joke about being penalized for “delay of game” if they didn’t get off stage.

Possibly the best bit of the gig, however, was the opening shot of Bruce and Clarence back to back in silhouette. It was a lovely touch.

I do have the new album, but haven’t had a chance to play it yet. I shall blog when I do.

Fascinating : Burns, Anderson, Palmer

~ Cheryl

A quick tour. Over here Christine Burns interviews the very wonderful Adele Anderson of the equally wonderful Fascinating Aida.

During the interview Adele reveals that their songs are now being covered by various young persons, including one Amanda Palmer, whom various persons have been enthusing about of late.

Adele also plugs their new tour, and I discover from the schedule that they are going to be playing Taunton on Valentine’s Day. Which means — shock horror! — that I find myself needing a date! (Preferably one with a car as I’m sure the trains will have stopped running by the end of the show.)

And as I’m unlikely to get one, and wouldn’t want to go out on that day with anyone other than Kevin, here are the girls with a bit of sage advice on the subject of writing a novel.

Plus Ca Change

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I’ve just been out for a walk, and around the other side of the estate I encountered a bunch of young boys skateboarding. Aha!, I thought. The youth of today. Some of them are even wearing hoodies. Obviously these are the people that the Daily Mail is always warning us about. Doubtless they should be served with an ASBO or something before they knife someone.

The kids could doubtless see that I was wearing an MP3 player. But I am an old lady, so they probably figured that I was listening to Bing Crosby, Tom Jones, Bob Dylan or some similar old fart that no one cares about these days.

Close. I was listening to Mott the Hoople. Music that was current when I was in school. Into my ear, Ian Hunter warbled the following sweet and gentle lyrics:

Get off my back or I’ll attack, ‘n I don’t owe you nothin’
Head for your hole, you’re sick and you’re old
‘N I’m here to tell you something
Violence, violence
It’s the only thing that’ll make you see sense

Yep, kids were so much better behaved in my day.

New Toy – Adventures in Electronics

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Sometime earlier this year my Dell MP3 player (aka The Best Xmas Present Evah!) developed an annoying problem – something in the headphone socket is broken and unless you hold the jack firmly in a certain way it will only play mono. This gets wearing on the fingers eventually, and makes the player pretty much a bust for walks.

So as it is holiday season I decided to get myself a new player. After much reading of reviews I got one of these. It arrived last night, and so far I am very impressed. The sound quality is excellent, especially with my Bose headphones, and the video quality is awesome. I’m still learning my way around the various audio functions, but the mere thought of having an MP3 player that claims to do surround sound is rather cool.

The software that came with the Cowon appears to be pretty shoddy, but you don’t actually need it to use the player – files can be copied to it just like it was any other external drive.

I’ve just tried the Cowon out on speakers and it doesn’t seem to have the pop to drive them effectively, but that’s OK because the Dell has a base station / amplified with a separate audio jack that still works perfectly. It might be an issue using the Cowon with a TV, but I haven’t bought the TV Out cable so I can’t check.

More later when I have had a chance to play with the thing some more.

No Market for Quality

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

There is an interesting post over at Tim Anderson’s blog all about the lack of a market for high quality audio. As I hope you all know, the MP3 format results in quite a bit of loss of quality because of the compression. Listening to an MP3 over earbud headphones causes even more loss of quality. But does anyone care? Apparently not. Or at least not enough for there to be a sizeable market for better quality audio.

Two things occur to me. The first is that this sound very like the sort of complaining we see about people liking rubbish books rather than well-written ones (and yes, I’m sure I have been guilty of both of those things myself). Secondly, I know that my ears are not good enough to tell the difference between an MP3 and better quality audio, and I’m wondering if there might be parallel issues with reading.

Wales’ Finest

~ Cheryl

The Venice Biennale is one of Europe’s premier arts festivals. The Festival of Contemporary Music dates back to 1930 and has featured world premieres by the likes of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, so choosing your national representative is serious business. The Welsh Assembly have just announced their pick. Who is it? No, not Tom Jones, nor Princess Charlotte. It is not even Katherine Jenkins or Bryn Terfel. They have chosen to send John Cale. I am so proud.

And here’s our boy performing one of those famous old Velvets songs.

N’Awlins – Day 1

~ Cheryl

The trip went very well. I was a bit worried about the fog this morning, but SFO ran like clockwork. A colleague of mine who flew out of OAK said he was an hour late leaving. I think I was very lucky. There were flurries of snow in Denver, but it wasn’t settling.

I took Gene Wolfe’s An Evil Guest with me to read. It is a lot of fun. I would have finished it if I hadn’t slept much of the way.

I’m staying in the Sheraton on Canal Street which, if I remember my history correctly, was one of the main hotels of NolaCon. I hope this is not an omen. Thankfully this is a business/academic event with only around 250 attendees so there isn’t much that can go wrong.

We went to Galatoire’s for dinner, and I have to say that I was not impressed. The turtle soup was OK, and the mushroom side dish was lovely, but the rest of my meal was poor. Two of my three fellow diners were also unimpressed. Our waiter explained afterward that they have a lot of older clients who don’t like food to taste of anything much so you have to ask for flavor if you order a dish that is supposed to be spicy. Not recommended.

Bourbon Street is fairly quiet on a Wednesday in December, but that’s only relative. There were lots of people, but several of the sex clubs were closed and there was no band at Maison Bourbon. Preservation Hall was closed too, but that was because Pat O’Brien’s, an Irish pub, had much of St.Peter’s Street packed solid for a block party with a live band actually in the street. The jazz boys wisely decided not to compete. I did find some interesting live music in one of the Irish pubs on Decatur, but I didn’t have time to investigate.

7:00am breakfast meeting tomorrow. Urgh.

Avast, Pirates! Deploy The Sonic Laser!

~ Cheryl

No, seriously. A naval security firm is using a “precise beam of sound” as a weapon against Somali pirate attacks. And it is hooked up to an MP3 player as a source. The idea of repelling pirates with blasts of death metal is rather wonderful, although given the advertised effects of the weapon I don’t suppose the pirates will enjoy it much:

It’s very effective up to 1,000 metres and excruciating if you get within 100 to 200 metres if it’s at full power. It would give you more or less permanent hearing damage.

Urk!

Digital OK After All?

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Not having a terribly good sense of hearing, I have always taken it on trust when music aficionados tell me that analog recordings are vastly superior to digital. Imagine my surprise, therefore, to discover from today’s Economist that this isn’t always the case and that the “warmth” of sound on vinyl is often the result of distortions in the recording process.

Of course this doesn’t make any difference as far as poor old MP3 is concerned, because any compression method is bound to produce losses, but thankfully it is still good enough for my useless ears.

That Crazy Music Drives You Insane

~ Cheryl

Having got back to the UK, and having a brain that is still mainly mush from jet lag, I decided to see what I could find on the BBC iPlayer. So I have just spent a happy, nostalgic hour listening to a BBC 4 Documentary called The Roxy Music Story. It was great to see people like Bono, Siouxsie, John Taylor and even Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols talking about what big Roxy fans they had been, and of course to listen to the band members tell their stories. A particular surprise for me was listening to Nile Rodgers talking about how Roxy had influenced him in creating Chic, and how the Chic sound then influenced the new, second-wave, disco-fied Roxy. And there was lots of fabulous music too, of course.

One thing that did make me sit up and think was Phil Manzanera pointing out that there were no Roxy tribute bands when they reformed in 2006. How could there be, really? You could maybe reproduce the sound, but the performance? I don’t think so (though maybe I’m wrong). Besides, so much of what has come since has been a tribute to Roxy. The title of this post was picked deliberately because Adam and the Ants used it on marketing stickers that the spread around the Tube in London in an early form of viral marketing before they became famous.

So yeah, I guess I never did achieve my ambition to be a Roxy Music cover girl, and doubtless I never will now, but thanks for the memories, boys. I still love you.

Hard Core Jazz

~ Cheryl

The brass band boys were out again tonight, and we caught them just starting up. I think they are trying to do a Brazilian thing, and they were very good, but we couldn’t stay long as we were off to Preservation Hall.

This is an old building on St. Peter’s just south of Bourbon. It looks like it is falling apart, it is quite dark inside, and the seating is mainly wooden benches and cushions. You pay $10 to get in for the night. The bar consists of a bucket of water bottles, but you are welcome to wander in and out to get drinks. (We popped out briefly for some soul food at the nearby Old Coffee Pot). This place makes no concessions. It is all about the jazz.

Although they have a resident band (who once supported the Grateful Dead at Filmore West), they feature other bands as well. Tonight we saw the St Peter’s All Stars, which I suspect might mean whoever they can get together for a night. They play traditional tunes. There is nothing electronic in sight, not even a microphone. And they take requests. If you know a traditional jazz song, the chances are they’ll have it in their repertoire.

I’m not a great one for sticking with tradition myself. I like to see people experiment. But equally it is great that other people like to preserve the way things once were. This is jazz as it used to be, and in this small corner of New Orleans, as it always will be.

Kevin, who is a clarinet player himself, will probably have something to say about the amazing instrument we saw in use tonight.

Update: here’s Kevin’s take.

Beignets with Busking

~ Cheryl

My second visit to Cafe du Monde was a definite improvement on the first. The beignets were cooked through, the hot chocolate is better than the coffee, but best of all we got to listen to Tanya & Dorise. That would be Tanya Huang (violin) and Dorise Blackmon (guitar). They were really good. Pop over to their MySpace page and check them out.

Or, thanks to the magic of YouTube, here they are performing “Stand by me”. (I seriously considered videoing a song, but it seemed kind of cheeky.)

Street of Contrast

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

This evening we went for dinner at a place called Arnaud’s. I can happily say that it was one of the best meals I have had in my life. The Alligator Sausage and the Petit Filet Lafitte were both wonderful, and while the Strawberries Arnaud that I had was merely good, the crepes that Kevin ordered were phenomenal – something to do with adding a little cream cheese to the cream stuffing, which worked brilliantly.

The other thing that struck me about this evening was the level of contrast you get in Bourbon Street. Inside Arnaud’s, had it not been for one rather loud table (who had come “All The Way From ATLANTA!!!!”), and the somewhat less rigorous dress code, we might as well have been in 1918, when the restaurant opened, not in 2008. Outside, on the other hand, Bourbon Street was in full Saturday Night swing, and was full of drunk people eager to lap up cheap booze and sex (and doubtless getting overcharged for both).

After the meal we popped into Cafe Beignet where they promised live jazz from Steamboat Willie. The band was perfectly competent, but after a few numbers the phrase “easy listening” started to come to mind. Willie and the band were playing for the audience, and assumed that audience knew little about jazz. The bands we saw on Thursday and Friday were playing for jazz fans in the audience, and because they loved playing.

There was a rather good brass ensemble busking at the entrance to Bourbon Street, but they were already posing a (pedestrian) traffic hazard and I didn’t want to have to listen standing up, so here we are back at the hotel instead.

Hot Summer Night

~ Cheryl

This evening we had dinner in a place called Cafe Orleans on Decatur that doesn’t seem to have a web site. It isn’t one of the famous restaurants, but it was very good. I had red snapper; Kevin had a pasta seafood medley. The price was reasonable too. I suspect that there are plenty of places like that in the city.

After that we took a long walk around the Quarter and ended up in a German pub called Fritzel’s which had an excellent jazz band. We ended up sharing a table with two very sloshed gay boys who were totally stoked to learn that we were from San Francisco. The City’s name acts like a passport to friendship with the Queer Nation all over the world.

By the way, Fritzel’s describes itself as “European” rather than “German”, though there’s no doubt as to its origins once you get inside. I guess there are obvious reasons for that. But for some strange reason Larry Flynt’s establishments appear to be using “European” as a code word for “topless”. Go figure.

Bourbon Street Browsing

~ Cheryl

Well, this is New Orleans all right. The French Quarter reminds me a bit of Soho in London, except that the sidewalks are rather more decrepit and the sex clubs don’t appear to have any limits on what they can show outside. But Soho has nothing like Bourbon Street. We started out with a nice little seafood restaurant (alligator nuggets to start, crab-stuffed flounder for me, crawfish for Kevin), and then found our way to Maison Bourbon, where we spent a happy hour or so listening to Jamil Sharif and his band play some excellent jazz. There were half a dozen or so other music clubs I would happily have spent time in, but the blues and rock clubs, having electric instruments, tended to be very loud. And anyway, jazz was what we have come for, and Jamil was very good. So far, so good.

By the way, alligator, much to my surprise, is not like crocodile. It looked more like pork than chicken, for all that they cooked it as if it was chicken.

Commercial Cuteness

~ Cheryl

I’m slowly catching up with the Tri-Nations action and I was delighted to see that MediaZone’s coverage of the weekend’s NZ-Australia game included the local advertising. Much of it is very local, but I did see the car ad below, which is so seriously cute I felt obliged to share it. (The music, by the way, is “Come to me” by the very wonderful Koop.)

Music Discovery

~ Cheryl

When Fingertips tells me that they’ve found a band that sounds like David Bowie or Mott the Hoople from the 1970s I am bound to sit up and take notice. They are right too. Dead Heart Bloom’s new EP has just that feel. Their earlier work, however, doesn’t have nearly as much production. Still, it is all interesting. And all of their music is available as free MP3 downloads. Check them out here.