Brad Spurgeon's Blog

A world of music, auto racing, travel, literature, chess, wining, dining and other crazy thoughts….

Monthly Archives: July 2011

From Hungarian Dancing to Simply Madness at Szimpla in Budapest

July 29, 2011
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I am caught in another bind of time in Budapest. A full night ahead, a full day behind, but last night was just so spectacular and promising that I have to put down a few words before I speed off again into the adventure of the Budapest night. We went looking for places to play music and that led us to all sorts of bars and clubs, with the most remarkable being this underground thing I forget the name of at the moment, but will put in later. There we found made Hungarian folk dancing that made me think the dancers had all taken LSD. But the greatest discovery was the vast underground – in a different sense – so-called-cafe known as Szimpla.

If I thought the folk dancers were on acid, Szimpla made me feel like I was on acid. It looks like a squat, but I do not think it is. It has a web site, an events calendar, and just too many little bars and businesses inside to really look like a squat. But it is so hip and cool and vast, with its music, wall decorations of every nature, infinite variety of private rooms, narguile pipes – chicha – and fashion statements, that this place cannot be defined in a few words here.

The greatest news, however, is that Szimpla has an open acoustic jam session every Sunday from 7 PM to 10 PM, so I have finally found a bona fide open mic or jam session in Budapest and I will definitely be attending. As it was, Vanessa and I sang several of our songs together last night, playing my guitar and singing in our corner in one of the many rooms, and a few people sang along, and we just had a great little private jam session going on. Despite the loud music that meant few people could hear us. But that is the free nature of this dynamic “cafe.”

Check it out!!!

The Chess Champions on the Airplane

July 28, 2011
bradspurgeon

No music in Paris last night for me as I had to get up early to fly to Budapest for the Hungarian Grand Prix this weekend. I am hoping for music this weekend, obviously, but Budapest can be very tricky on the jam, open mic front. However, I have a little blog story I just had to tell, as it was an extraordinary coincidence.

During this trip I will be stay at the home of a friend of mine, a chess International Master, who once trained my son to play chess, but who also once trained Judit Polgar, the No. 1 woman chess player in the world. Polgar is so strong that no other woman has come close to her rating and performance in the last decade or so. She also has two sisters who are Grand Masters, like her, but not as strong. I once interviewed Polgar on the telephone for a story in the International Herald Tribune, but I never met her.

A few years ago, I also met through my friend the trainer, the man who is now Hungary’s No. 1 rated player, and 19th in the world at the moment. His name is Zoltan Almasi, and he is also, it turns out, a fan of Formula One motor racing. A few years ago I gave him a tour of the paddock in Budapest and I wrote a story about that visit by Almasi on my Formula1.about.com site.

Boarding the airplane in Paris this morning I recognized Almasi standing at the check-in and we boarded together. He was returning from a team tournament in China where he played with the Hungarian national chess team in a world teams championship. He then told me that Polgar was on the same flight.

It then turned out that the two of them were sitting in the row of seats directly in front of mine on the airplane! So we chatted away for a while before and after the flight.

Talk about a coincidence! Unfortunately, however, they could not tell me of any place to play my music in Budapest this weekend.

Too Late for Ollie’s, Just on Time for the Baroc and Its Live Web TV Show

July 27, 2011
bradspurgeon

I was sure that the summer months would mean Ollie Fury’s open mic at the Ptit Bonheur la Chance would die out a little, so I arrived well after 10 PM. But I was wrong about the popularity of the place dying out. And I paid for it. I had taken a cab to Ollie’s with Vanessa as we decided to pick up where we left off at the Galway and try our songs again. But when we arrived at Ollie’s the place was so packed with singers and spectators that you could not get down the stairs, and worse, there was just no more room for any more performers on the list. I waited until a few cleared out and I took a brief bit of video footage to show how packed the tiny room was. Then we took another cab and headed off to the Baroc bar open mic near Belleville.

We arrived at Le Baroc bar after 11 PM, and while there were a number of musicians there and they were having fun jamming and playing, there was still room for Vanessa and I to try our material again. In fact, we did a total of 25 minutes of stuff, including most importantly the “I’m No Good,” of Amy Winehouse that we learned the day before. I am still horrendously shaky on the guitar playing and had to read it on my cell phone. But Rejean, the MC of the open mic, heard Vanessa’s voice and decided to join us immediately on piano. So it was a nice moment.

What’s really cool is that although I recorded it myself, I had to do all 25 minutes, and I don’t want to cut up the video – no time to edit. But Le Baroc has recently started a new feature of their musical evenings that I am sure is going to catch on all over the place: Web TV. So you can actually watch the evening live on the Internet at the Baroc web TV site, and you can also check out the archive videos. So I have put up a link here to some of our stuff. There are two songs on each of these, and the Amy Winehouse does not open the video, so it could be worth it to fastforward to find it….

The first video in this link contains “Just Like a Woman,” and “I’m No Good.” The second video in this link contains my song “Borderline,” and “What’s Up!” – on which we both sing, and we are later joined by a sax player.

Good Galway! And Another Karaoke….

July 26, 2011
bradspurgeon

After going through a slow period on its Monday night open mic, in recent weeks the Galway on the Quai des Grands Augustins has returned to its grands jours. (Big days.) It has been very crowded in recent weeks with both spectators and musicians, and last night was no exception. I returned from a long drive back from Germany to find that I was just slightly too late to try for my usual Tennessee Bar AND Galway open mics on the same night, so I did the Galway – and then dropped into the karaoke at the Pub St. Michel, just five minutes walk away.

Now that I think of it, that is a triple-header possible on every Monday night, as the karaoke goes on very late. After what I wrote about the karaoke in Cologne, some readers might wonder why I returned again to another karaoke. Karaoke is NOT my thing. But I am realizing that I can strengthen a lot of aspects of my musical delivery, playing, presentation, etc., by taking part more often in karaokes. I am WAAAAY out of my comfort zone when I am not playing my own guitar and doing songs MY way. The karaoke can help me get better, no doubt. But anyway…no, this blog will NOT turn into a worldwide karaoke adventure and source. But I suppose they deserve to be there once in a while.

The Pub St. Michel, by the way, had a predominance of men, and was pretty small and intimate, but good fun.

The Galway had some interesting acts, including another visit by Kensuke Shoji, the wonderful Japanese violin/fiddle player.

I played three songs with my friend Vanessa, our usual “Mad World,” “Just Like a Woman,” (in which she features as the “little girl”) and a song she insisted on doing AND learning with me last night. It usually takes me three months to feel secure enough learning and playing a new song, so there again I was out of my comfort zone as I played the chords – reading them from my iPhone – and she sang the lyrics. But it was essential that we do the song now, so she was right to force me to do this thing against my better judgement – and we pulled it off, much better than I expected. It was a homage to Amy Winehouse, with the song, “I’m No Good.” Unfortunately, no good as I am at videoing myself, I did not get a video of it.

Why I Did Not Play at Flanagan’s Karaoke in Cologne

July 25, 2011
bradspurgeon

I had some unfinished business in my last night in Cologne. Two years ago when I did my first world tour of open mics and jams I spoke to a busker in front of Cologne Cathedral asking him where on that Sunday night I could play my guitar and sing. “Any open mics?” “No, but you can play your guitar and sing at Flanagan’s Pub in the karaoke they have on Sunday night. You just need to bring your own guitar cable.”

I had a cable, I went, and I sucked out. I regretted it since then and thought I had indeed simply chickened out. But there was another feeling, and that was , that it just was not the right place. And no one else played an instrument and sang. It was just a karaoke.

I went back last night, having had only one open mic since Thursday in Cologne. This time I realized why I did not do it, and that I would not do it this year either: I hated the atmosphere. In Mannheim last year I attended another karaoke and they allowed me to play guitar and sing and it went great. It was a wonderful break for the other performers too, after three hours of karaoke. But I just didn’t dig Flanagan’s! The place feels a little like a cafeteria, not an Irish pub. So I left and said, that’s it for Cologne. The open mic I DID do at the Tankstelle, was so good that it didn’t much matter anyway….

Singing on the Rhine, and the Love Padlocks of the Hohenzollern Bridge

July 23, 2011
bradspurgeon

I am absolutely furious not because I failed to find a jam or open mic last night in Cologne, but because once again I lost some of my video footage for some bizarre manipulation I did while downloading it to my computer. This time it had nothing to do with interviews of people, but rather a few nice bits of skyline, and most importantly some wonderful shots of the thousands of Love Padlocks on the Hohenzollern Bridge across the Rhine River.

After eating a meal in a nice restaurant called Oasis, I walked along the Rhine and found a good spot to play a couple of songs, singing into the wind, singing and playing to the skyline of the massive Cologne Cathedral on the opposite bank. A few people stopped by to listen, and applaud.

It was a nice moment, and it was fitting that one of the songs I sang was “Crazy Love.” For it was then followed by the amazing discovery of the thousands of Love Padlocks on the bridge. They are clasped to the fence on this busiest of all railway bridges in Germany, and they bear the names of lovers, couples, and the dates of their relationship or when they were put on the bridge. The custom is to lock them and throw away the key, an eternal symbol of the lovers’ bond.

It is incredibly impressive and beautiful and warm to look at all these names and dates and different styles of locks. Apparently it has been done on this bridge since 2008, according to wikipedia, but I found locks with dates back to 1989. The bridge authority apparently at one point wanted to get rid of the locks, but the lovers won a battle and the locks remain.

I have now done another visit to the bridge and got some video footage….

Tankstelle Open Mic in Cologne, Germany, Grows Up

July 22, 2011
bradspurgeon

Tankstelle bar open mic in Cologne, Germany

Tankstelle bar open mic in Cologne, Germany


It went so smoothly I could hardly believe it: Without consulting any notes from two years ago, I walked out of my hotel near the cathedral in Cologne, took the U-Bahn to precisely the right station, headed down the precisely right street and arrived at the Tankstelle bar to find an announcement outside that there was an open mic.

I had first discovered the Tankstelle bar‘s open mic two years ago on my first world tour of open mics. It had just begun three months earlier, and it was the only open mic in Cologne, and it was run only on the Thursday and I had stumbled upon it on the Thursday. Founded and hosted by the genial Daniel Klaus, a fabulous guitar player – his flamenco is crazy – and good singer, I had very little hope that I would find the open mic still existed when I set out last night. But there it was, soon to begin.

So I went out, ate a pizza and returned. Not only did Daniel remember me almost instantly but he remembered me precisely: “Cat Stevens?” he said. “Yes,” I said. “That’s me.” It was at the Tankstelle that I had sung “Father and Son” for only the second time in public. (I’ve now sung it probably around 100 times.)

Anyway, the atmosphere was fabulous as it was two years ago, but the open mic stage had moved to another part of the bar and now dominated the evening and the bar. It was full, bubbling with life, and a good mix of both German and English songs. Oh, and there was a wonderful touch whereby Daniel bangs a gong between each act, before and after the act, so that the bartenders at the other end of the large bar can turn on the house music between acts, on cue.

Definitely a worthwhile event if you’re ever in Cologne. I hear there are some other jam sessions, but I remain skeptical as to whether I will find them, and precisely what the quality will be like. Keep posted.

Eureka! Finally Did the Caveau des Oubliettes

July 21, 2011
bradspurgeon

As I mentioned yesterday I was pressed for time. In fact, I wrote my stories for the upcoming German Grand Prix all day long, finished after 9 PM and debated if I should leave the house to go play music. My philosophy of life for the last three years has been, if you can do it and it hurts no one, do it. The problem was that the Highlander open mic was certain to be too full to accommodate me at that late notice.

I arrived after 10 PM at the Highlander, met a friend I had not seen for months, and felt the whole night was already worth it thanks to that. She then disappeared to chat with someone else and I listened to the music and said, “I will not get up until 1 AM and I have to drive to Germany tomorrow.” The list was maybe 17 people long.

So I left the Highlander and decided to head over to the Caveau des Oubliettes. This is a Paris fixture in the jamming scene, with a different kind of jam or concert every night of the week. It is on the rue Galande, near Notre Dame and the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. Every time I have gone there in the past I have been either too intimidated to play or I have felt that the music was not my kind: the blues night is pure electric blues, the rock ‘n roll night is pure electric blues… last night I saw it was a “soul” night.

I do not sing soul, but I do have that song I do so often by Van Morrison, that has been sung by soul singers, and which I always call “Irish Soul.” So hey, why not try? I asked a couple of people how it all worked, and the second guy I spoke to was organizing the evening. He put me up immediately, with a bass player, keyboard player and drummer. The room was crammed with people, the room was bopping, jiving, just a great vibe.

And I couldn’t believe what I was doing finally. We got through the song with only a problem or two when I leapt into the bridge and that changes the chord structure, and momentarily on the chorus when it changes. Otherwise, it went pretty well. The key to this kind of jam, though, the difference between it and say the open mic or the live-band-karaoke, is that All the musicians are members of the public going up to play their moment of fame for the night. So I had a lot riding on my shoulders and had to play several bars of the song without singing to allow for long solos from the bass player and then the keyboard player. Hard to judge and play it right to be fair to the other musicians.

But I loved it. And the organizer apparently thought I did well enough to ask me to do another. I told him I only had the one song that could be considered soul – and I completely forgot my own song “Memories” could fit the bill – but he said that was all right. So I chose “What’s Up!” and did it and the audience sang along and the solos were longer and it all just fell into place and we had a fabulous time. Well, except I STILL have not got the count down on that one perfectly so I wandered off a bit at a couple of points leaving the other musicians at sea – but it went well and they thanked me.

I thanked the organizer and I felt like pushing myself out the door was the best thing I could have done. Got the Caveau des Oubliettes done finally after two years worrying about it! Afterwards, though, when I saw the level of the other singers and performers, I was grateful that I got on immediately. Had I seen the others play, I might once again have sucked out, they were so good.

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