I had a HUGE day at the racetrack today covering the first ever Indian Grand Prix, outside New Delhi. And it turned out to be a success, against all the odds. But that meant returning to my hotel very late and having no time to even consider looking for a place to play tonight, as I must arise early tomorrow morning to go to the airport to catch a flight. Fortunately, though, I have just a neat little nugget to put on this blog today before I leave the country. My friend Niki Demiller, who I met at open mics in Paris – and who even sang at my own brunch at the Mecano a while back – has just put out a video of his concert at the famous Paris landmark venue, the Bus Palladium. The video images are a compilation of stuff I filmed of him that night when I attended the concert. He has put it all together in a very neat little video, adding a soundtrack of the same concert but made by our mutual friend Alexis Raphaeloff, and the whole thing was also edited by Alexis. Check it out, it is very cool, as Niki has a very interesting style and look and a bunch of very cool, and very French songs:
Has the news of the cancelled Metallica concert in New Delhi spread around the world yet? The fact that the stadium was going to be filled over-capacity and the group refused to play? (That’s the rumour I heard.) That the angry fans started tearing the stage apart and burning Formula One posters and destroying equipment as a result of the cancellation? Well, Metallica may not have been able to play New Delhi – as part of the F1 race sideshow known as F1 Rocks – but yours truly did two concerts in New Delhi, one on Thursday that I already reported on here, and another last night.
I met a bunch of disgruntled Metallica fans on the New Delhi metro and I invited them along to hear me last night at Bennigan’s.
“Brad who?”
I repeated my name.
“Can you give us your card?”
That meant, “Thanks for the offer, we’ll think about it….”
Well, it may not have been a Metallica concert, but we all sure had fun at the open mic at Bennigan’s, in Greater Kailash. Despite the sound of the name, this is NOT a real Irish pub inhabited by nothing but foreigners. The open mic was run by Gautam Lahiri, a musician who plays at Bennigan’s every Friday and runs his evening as an open mic, jam session, inviting friends, acquaintances, his guitar students and anyone else who wants to come to play. We did some on-camera talk for my open mic film, and I found a real kindred spirit.
I played for about 45 minutes or so, maybe more. And I was eventually joined by some of the other musicians present on guitar, vocals and harmonica. We did my song “Memories,” with two people playing harmonicas, including Gautam. It was really touching….
Oh, and it turned out that one of my own acquaintances met at the Formula One race who was supposed to go to Metallica ended up showing up at Bennigan’s to see me instead of going to Metallica. But he left before I arrived, which was just after 10 PM, since I was delayed by writing about the Metallica cancellation – among other things – on my NYT F1 blog.
PS: My internet connection is so slow in my cut-rate hotel that I have not been able to upload the videos I did. I will do that tomorrow….
Last night in New Delhi, I did two sets of one hour each in my concert at the TLR Cafe, which is short for The Living Room. It was an enormous evening of fun and music, with Indian friends new and old sharing the atmosphere and my music. I could not have asked for a greater evening.
I had come to India hoping to do at least one open mic or jam session, and I had found TLR through a recommendation from both a musician friend in Singapore and the Indian Formula One driver, Karun Chandhok. TLR is one of the only spots in New Delhi that has a weekly open mic, but unfortunately for me, it falls on a Wednesday, and this week Wednesday was a public holiday so the bar was closed.
No problem, they booked me in for a gig even though the bar was all booked up with entertainment until the end of December. They did this on the basis, if I understand correctly, of my myspace music examples and this blog.
It turned out to work perfectly, my music and their crowd and atmosphere. This is a laid-back, fundamentally music-loving, art-loving, talent-promoting cafe and bar, cum club.
Unfortunately, due to a sudden outage of the Internet at my hotel, I have no good internet connection and I must cut this post off here. The internet connection worked great for two days, but now it has taken a short vacation during this time of national holiday.
I will return to this post and also do another tomorrow, when I have a better connection. My apologies. I have so much more to say!!!
I finally got back to my two regular Paris open mics after a couple of weeks away in Asia. And as it turned out, for this blog I ended up getting very little material from the music of the evening. I was too distracted, not by my new Gibson guitar that I played at these places for the first time, but by meeting a couple of interesting French classical music musicians.
One was a flutist, named Christel and the other was a piano player and composer named Christine Haquet, and she gave me a copy of her CD that has just come out. It is a fabulous set of piano compositions all based on aspects of and places in Rouen, where Christine lives. I listened to it immediately Tuesday morning as I did my exercises, and it reminded me in some ways of the kind of feeling I enjoy listening to Erik Satie’s piano compositions. But Christine’s touch on many different feelings and shades of style, with a very contemporary pop sound at moments, along with classical sounds. I am inadept at writing about such music, but suffice it to say I enjoyed it and know that I will be listening to it again. Furthermore, it made me want to return to Rouen, as it makes me see it in a completely different light to the only time I was there.
So it was that while I went to both the Tennessee Bar and the Galway Pub open mics, and I played at both of them, I ended up filming only one performer. That was an interesting young Frenchman singing at the Tennessee Bar in a fairly traditional French popular music style. Sounded very interesting, and gave a lot of us a jolt.
I am currently going through another kind of jolt as I write these words, for I barely slept through the night flight to New Delhi, and then I got lost in the maze of streets of two completely different quarters as I sought my hotel. I am now sitting in my hotel room and I have been entertained for hours by the sound of exploding fireworks. They are non-stop. I mean, this is as bad as the music outside of the love motel in Mokpo, South Korea. It is, I suddenly remember shortly after I had thought the Indians were a mad people, quite simply a national holiday, and that is why there is all of these fireworks going off.
Tomorrow I will have my own concert at The Living Room Cafe in New Delhi, and I am really looking forward to doing and reporting on that!
As regular readers of this blog know, I love – and many other people love – my Seagull S6. But the Seagull has become very war-weary and battered in my round-the-world travels, and the latest incident – smashed on a flight to Singapore – made me decide finally to splurge my life’s non-savings on a new guitar that will remain with me in Paris, while the Seagull goes off to battle around the world, but carrying less weight as my main axe. So yesterday, after more than a year of zeroing in on Gibsons, I finally bought a J-200 Standard.
The thing that really, finally clinched it for me was that earlier in the week I had gone to the store in Paris and tried three or four of the J-200s and others, and I had found one that I kept saying I liked the best. Yesterday, I returned to the Pigalle area and visited all the music stores that sold the J-200s and I tried them all out. I even tried some 1965 Gibsons, although mine is a new one. I then returned to the same shop where I found the one I liked, and where I had noted down the serial number two days before. Playing the guitars, I almost immediately found the one that I was sure was the same one: I checked my noted serial number for the guitar in my iPhone, and yes, it was the same one. So I bought it.
It was not THAT easy. This is a natural wood – as opposed to Sunburst – Gibson J-200, and it cost a fortune. But it matched my playing and my needs and was sufficiently different to the sound of my Seagull, that I had to have it. But the other thing that decided me on buying this particular one at this moment was that I felt very much at ease in the store where I bought it, as opposed to several of the other places. It is a shop called “Acoustic Guitar,” at 18 rue de Douai, and the service is fabulous. They recently refurbished the store, and all the people I have dealt with there are very agreeable, honest, and provide all the explanations and information that you’re looking for. I had been showing up occasionally for more than a year and there would be plenty of reason for them to think I was not going to buy a guitar, but they let me play for an hour or more early in the week, and then again a few days later. A young woman named Aurélie also dropped by and wanted to play a Gibson and they let her, and she asked if she could sing while playing – since that was the best way to know if she liked the guitar – and they allowed that too. I filmed her. (I had also sung the previous day.)
Another example of the great work they do is two different salesmen said to me that every Gibson J-200 sounded different and you really had to play them and compare and find one you liked. At another shop on the same street, the salesperson told me they all sounded alike, so there was no point in her going to get the natural colored one if I liked the Sunburst…. Sure. Okay.
Having bought the guitar – and having fallen in love with it – I immediately rushed home to play it, but then saw on Facebook that there was an open mic last night on Rue St. Maur, near the Metro Colonel Fabien in a bar called O’kubi Caffé, at 219 rue St Maur, that does not usually host an open mic. So I ate quickly and decided I had to baptize the J-200 immediately. I went to the open mic, was immediately welcomed by some musicians and the woman who ran it – Ajahlove – and then played, and played and played and let others play my new Gibson too, as there was no other real acoustic guitar set up. I was a little nervous about that, since I have decided this will not be a guitar for everyone and anyone the way the Seagull was – and is – but it was a pleasure to see it played. And most of all, it was a pleasure to play it. The open mic turned out to be more of a jam session, but with the J-200 I dived right into it and had the time of my life.
I bought this guitar for the deep bass and beautiful high strings as well. They describe the sound as being in something of a form of a V, with great bass, great highs, and in between, space for the singing voice. It is also a great guitar for strumming, which is what I do most of. Needless to say, I have been watching videos of great moments on the J-200, like Elvis Presley during his comeback in the late 60s (he used it before that too), like Pete Townsend of The Who, like the Everly Brothers, like Neil Young on “Hey, Hey, My My,” like so many of the Oasis songs, and like others too numerous to mention. I am not let down. And while I have grown so used to my grunge look and feel with the Seagull, I got so much into the playing of the J-200 last night behind the mic in public, that I felt totally at one with the guitar and didn’t care how it looked – which was probably pretty cool, when you think of it.
Here goes: Sometimes life runs away with us and we cannot seem to catch up. That is how it has been for me since Monday. So this will be a catch-up post, or rather a “ketchup post” for its fast-food writing style. It starts at Tony’s Aussie bar in the Itaewon neighborhood in Seoul, and finishes at the Highlander in Paris. But one of the most interesting parts was one of the flights – or, rather, the guy sitting next to me.
So anyway… I went to Tony’s Aussie bar last year while at the Korean Grand Prix, and so I returned this year to find the same place, but better. Tony’s is a cool expat bar/restaurant, run by cool Tony, who is a drummer and entertainment tycoon in the making. The bar was an afterthought, something that grew out of him sitting in this place and practicing his drums and finding people dropping by and wanting to jam, and drink and eat and, hey, presto, there it was and is: One of the greatest places for jamming in Seoul. He also has a standup comedy night and another kind of open mic night on Sundays.
What made it better even than last year was that there were more people present, more Koreans, and other nationalities – British, Australian, American, Canadian – and some absolutely wonderful musicians and singers. During my three-song set – Mad World, I Won’t Back Down, and Borderline – I was joined on the first two by Vadim Scott, a Ukraine/Canadian who lives in Seoul and works as a musician and actor. He just climbed up behind the mic and joined in with me. That’s the spirit of Tony’s, and I loved it. Especially playing with Tony on the drums, with the bass player and violinist. Check out the Hendrix bit and the guitar solo bit too. Great stuff.
I left Tony’s at 1 AM, went to bed at 1:30 AM and then got up at 4:30 AM to go to the airport, catch a flight to Tokyo and from there a flight to Paris.
The second I sat down in the Air France A380, the guy sitting next to me said, “You are a guitarist?” He had seen me put my guitar in the overhead compartment, and he was smarter than most of the Japanese customs people who thought it was a set of golf clubs. In fact, he was much smarter, and when we were not both trying to catch up on sleep during the 12-hour flight, we were talking music. Because it turned out that this was Paolo Alderighi, one of Italy’s most promising and finest jazz piano players on the international scene. He plays a wicked stride piano, mostly American jazz from the ’30s and ’40s, but he is classically trained, and mixes the traditional jazz with a classic feel too, and his own feel from growing up with a dad who loved and played jazz music around the house.
But part of our conversation also centered around how to mix and live a life using different talents, multiple approaches and points of view and careers. Paolo, for instance, is a pianist, but he also took a degree in management and economics, and he is now teaching a course in musical culture at a university in Italy. I spoke, of course, about how I write as a journalist about Formula One racing, I do other more literary writing pursuits, the music, the open mic adventure, the film. We listened to each other’s music on our iPhones, and I was humbled by the quality of his, which I will put below from YouTube.
What really fascinated me too discussing his life and career, was how it came about in an interesting step-by-step manner with one thing leading to another without a master plan. He did a gig here and a gig there since he was 16 or so and the pieces all began falling together, the connections were made, other musicians met, and now he travels the world and plays his piano from Japan to the United States, Australia and almost everywhere in between.
So I returned to Paris late Tuesday, missed open mics and crashed out in bed for the night. Woke up, tried getting things done, was swamped, but then did that ridiculous small space-holder post here before doing the Highlander open mic, where it was life as usual, lots of fun, some good musicians, some less so. And I enjoyed trying to get the audience to sing along with “What’s Up!” which they did. But I was thinking I have to find something new since I’m doing the same songs week after week now at the Highlander….
It is still taking so long to upload all the videos over this period of time that I will just now put up a few, and add more later….
In newspaper journalism, they talk of a space-holder article, which is an article put in a spot on the page that will be taken up by a “more important” article in a later edition. They don’t want to lose the spot, change the shape of the page, and they lay out the page and put a space-holding article in the spot. That, I have decided is what THIS post is. I have gone through a night at a great open mic, jam session in Seoul, an amazing trip back on two flights with an interesting person sitting in the seat beside me, and a return to Paris where I have done a bit of work, washing, organization, and then went out to play a bunch of cool guitars at a shop in Pigalle after taking my Seagull in for reparations. The result is, with my desire to run out now for an open mic, NO TIME to update the blog with the videos and stories I have to show and tell. So I excuse myself, and decide to put up this mess of an explanation and call it a space-holder! Back tomorrow with the cool stuff….
It is one of the main reasons I do my worldwide open mic and jam session musical adventure, and it happened again last night: Despite being in my second year in Mokpo and failing after last year and the first three nights of four this year to find anywhere to play, I did not give up, I pushed myself beyond my safety and comfort zone and I found a place to play.
Having said that, it was not an open mic or a jam session. But I did play with my guitar and sang my songs. But I’m jumping ahead of this little story, which is really about pushing ourselves forward beyond our preconceptions, our comfort zones and into territory we may fear. Last year in Mokpo the only place I managed to find to play was with buskers in the Street of the Roses in downtown Mokpo. I had ventured into one or two bars that had musical instruments and advertised live music. But they were empty of both musicians and clients. This year things went the same way and I did not even meet up with my young busker friends.
But a couple of nights ago I thought I had discovered a local equivalent of live music joint where there might at least be a jam session, if not an open mic. (Oh, Moe’s Bar and Grill, an expat joint, is holding an open mic, but not until this coming Friday, when I will be in Paris.) The places are called a “Live Cafe,” and some are “Music Bar.” There are a number of them around town. I dropped into one where I saw a guy playing keyboards and singing Korean music. But there was not only no clients in the bar, I couldn’t even see a bartender or other worker. So I just left the guy to sing for himself and continued checking out other places.
Two nights ago I found one near my hotel called 7080, and it had a neon guitar outside, and it had photos of The Beatles, c. 1964, in the stairway leading up to the bar. When I opened the door to the bar and looked inside I saw a nifty but strange neon stage, screens on the walls, and neon and silver lights and walls and chintzy music and people at tables all over in a half inebriated state. Someone came quickly to see me at the door and my immediate reaction was to say, “No thank! Sorry, not for me….”
Why? Because it was sooooooooo foreign. A lot of the Formula One journalists are forced to stay in so-called Love Motels in Mokpo because there is not enough housing. These are motels rented by the hour where young lovers and prostitues alike alight. The district in which we find ourselves, and where I found the 7080 bar is pretty much the sex and games part of what is probably the crime capital of South Korea.
So my immediate reaction was fear and also a sense that if I went into that place I would surely be robbed, propositioned, or otherwise volunteering myself for some illicit act that I wanted nothing to do with. But over the day or two since I did that, I began as I said, finding these music bars and live cafes (which are also bars that serve alcohol), and the more I thought about it, the more I thought perhaps the 7080 was just another of these. Perhaps the 7080 was a bona fide local entertainment bar with live music and karaoke and whatever. Nothing to fear but the real, true Korean experience I had been looking for all along. At Moe’s none of the expats I spoke to had any idea where I might find live music or a jam or open mic. They had not even heard of the live cafe….
So I returned the following night to the 7080 and found it had been rented out to host an F1-related party. Some kind of Korean company involved in oil and gas had bought up the room and they were doing live-band karaoke when I arrived. I was promptly asked to leave, this time, which was the inverse of what happened the previous day.
So it was that last night, desperate to prove to myself that I could indeed find a place to play in Mokpo and that if I had failed to do so it was my own failure as opposed to a failure of the city to provide. And above all, I decided I had to be courageous and not shy away from what is unfamiliar, since that is the very essence of what I am seeking out in this adventure.
I went to the bar, walked in, asked if I could buy just a beer, and I was told yes. (That was another fear, that I’d be fleeced for thousands of won in a so-called cover charge.) I went to my table and the woman very kindly brought me my Hite beer from Korea, and a piece of paper for me to make a request for a song. Although I had come in to listen the musician on the stage – who played keyboards, electric guitar and sang – it turned out it was a karaoke too, with the musician playing part of the music track.
The room had some 20 or so people in it, not bad for a Sunday night. I watched and listened, and then decided that although the Karaoke was written in Korean, I would try to request doing a song. I asked for anything by the Stones, Beatles, Dylan or Cat Stevens, since all the other stuff had been in Korean…. In the end, I got to do “What’s Up!” by the 4 Non-Blondes, which I have done a lot lately. And I did a great job! I’m usually terrible at Karaoke, but this worked. (It’s easier.) I received massive applause, people sang along, and a man immediately asked for an encore and then invited me to his table to talk.
His name was Kim Sek-Soo, and he is a Korean painter and Pine Art Master. He offered me beer, he went up and sang himself, we talked as much as we could with fractured English. And he and his wife and the woman running the bar and I all communicated for some time and had a great time. He requested I play more songs, but the musician in charge took a break. So that is when I took out my guitar and played some songs for Kim and his wife. They clapped along, the other people in the bar did too, I received applause, and then the karaoke started again and I did another song – “Unchained Melody.”
After I did that, Kim came up to me in front of the stage and importuned me to do a song for everyone with my guitar. The musician, with some sense of wounded pride – I think – eventually agreed to this, and so I played “Since You Left Me,” my song, with my guitar and vocals. It received warm applause, and we drank and spoke more and the evening eventually ended.
This, I thought and realized, was a REAL musical night in Korea at a place where the people go to have fund – the Koreans, not the expats. And I had my chance to sing my heart out in Korea for Koreans. Above all, I had broken down a communication barrier and a preconception in my own mind, and I had screwed my courage up, with the reward being absolutely massive.
That’s a lesson that I want to apply to life in general. That’s why I love this adventure.
P.S. Oh, by the way, I managed to get a video of me doing “Unchained Melody,” and “Since You Left Me.” But it was too long for YouTube, so I tried to put it up but it would not go. I will have to edit it and perhaps put some up another time. Or use it in my film.
Last night in Mokpo, South Korea, I was hit by the sounds of music everywhere – even where I least wanted it, as loud as anything in my cheap and crappy motel room. But the one place I really wanted it, I could not find: An open mic, jam session or other music-friendly place for amateur musicians.
Mokpo is celebrating the Korean Grand Prix Formula One race, and the city is in festivity mode. There is an outdoor stage just around the corner from my motel, and the stage was rocking all evening and until after midnight. They told me at the reception desk that the loud music – that pierced into the room through closed doors and windows – would continue until the morning. That is when I despondently filmed the dreary interior of my motel room in order to give an idea of how loud the music was in there. As it turned out, the music stopped shortly after midnight, so I could sleep. (I had an early interview to do in the paddock today.)
Having said that, there was a pretty good Led Zeppelin cover band playing much of the time, although it was not perfect and I enjoyed counting the notes they missed on the lead breaks. What was more difficult was figuring out during “Whole Lotta Love,” if the sexual panting was coming from the singer or from the room next to mine in the motel. Like many of the Formula One journalists, you see, I am staying in what is known as a “love motel,” meant for a short stop of an hour or so… such is the lack of accomodation in Mokpo.
I may have been wandering around Mokpo, South Korea last night desolate not to have found a place to play music, but I was also floating on clouds of satisfaction at the knowledge that the Istanbul chapter of my open mic book has just been published in French.
The only place I found to place in Mokpo last year was in the street with some young Korean buskers, and last night I did not even find them again. But I will continue my explorations. I stopped off at Moe’s bar only to learn that there WILL be an open mic there… next week, on Friday. That’s one of my biggest frustrations on the neverending open mic adventure: Being in the right place at the wrong time.
But one of the most rewarding bits of the adventure to have come into fruition yesterday – or was it the day before? – was that the Istanbul chapter of my book about the first year of the adventure was published in a French magazine that has just hit the stores in France this week.
The magazine is called Grand Prix, and it is a large format color magazine that despite its name covers much more than Grand Prix racing, and other forms of racing. The best way to describe it is the way the magazine describes itself, here in French with my English translation:
“Un beau magazine, sur un beau papier avec pour seule ambition de parler des hommes, femmes, lieux et histoires de que l’on aime. Automobile, moto, horlogerie, voyages, littérature, aventure… Juste du plaisir. Un magazine à conserver dans sa bibliothèque, à prendre et à rlire avec plaisir”
“A beautiful magazine, on beautiful paper, with its sole ambition being to speak of men, women, places and tales that we love. Automobiles, motorcycles, watches, trips, literature, adventure…. Simply pleasure. A magazine to collect in one’s bookshelves, to take and reread with pleasure.”
In short, it is the perfect place for a chapter from my own personal adventure of playing music around the world at the location of each Formula One race and then some. The open mic book covers the first year of my adventure. The second year was covered more loosely in the blog, and this year I have been doing blog entries AND videos that I will turn into a documentary film.
The Istanbul chapter used in Grand Prix – actually, it’s just the first day of the chapter – describes, funny enough, not the open mic I ended up doing in Istanbul, but an encounter I had with a gypsy street musician, and the time I spent busking with him within my first hour of arriving in the city. It talks about Turkish music and culture and my own feelings of trepidation in busking for the first time in nearly 30 years!!!!!
It has been translated into French, and I believe it is accompanied by a photo or two – although since I am in Korea, I have yet to see the magazine! But judging by my look at the previous issue, the magazine is well worth buying and reading. This issue has a large feature focusing on the French racing driver Francois Cevert, who was a teammate of Jackie Stewart back in the early 70s. Cevert was killed at Watkins Glen in 1973. He was about to become the No. 1 driver for the team as Stewart, who won the title that year, was about to retire.
It has stories about helicopters, motorcycles, a Belgian graphic novel thing… lots of stuff.
