Doing This Backwards at Brad Spurgeon’s Blog – a Two-Week Log-jam

Café Oz Paris

PARIS – I have been so busy in the last two weeks winding up my sixth worldwide open mic adventure with a visit to Abu Dhabi that I never did get back to the blog to talk about all the musical and other things I have been up to since my last post, two weeks ago. That is VERY unlike this blog. And I have no excuses – because I don’t believe in using “overwork” as an excuse, since we can ALWAYS do more.

Having said that, I’ve got stacked up in my brain of experiences and plans and projects over the last couple of weeks a bunch of different things and evenings and musical experiences to talk about. And I hate the idea of writing about them all at once on a single, never-ending post. So instead, I’ve decided to talk about the things freshest in my mind and memory first – i.e., the stuff I did yesterday – and each day when I come back (provided no new experience has been got) I will write about the experience of the day before.

That is the beauty of a blog: Anything goes!!! To hell with chronological order and the tyranny of time!

Visiting the New Open Mic at the Café Oz, Denfert in Paris

It has been running for a few weeks now, but I somehow only managed to get to the new Sunday-night open mic at the Café Oz at Denfert Rochereau in Paris last night for the first time. It’s even more surprising since I have been jogging past this pub for a year and a half on my nightly – ok, sometimes fortnightly – jog around the neighborhood. But what was even more surprising, in a pleasant way, was to discover that this new Café Oz open mic in this voluminous Australian pub, is run by the same guy who made the Tennessee Bar open mic such a great success for so many years, along with one of the regulars at that open mic night.

Yes, James Iansiti is the guy behind it, and he works with Chardes on the MCing, on musical backing, on announcing and organizing. And here we have an open mic with a difference in Paris: It may be the same format that James ran at the Tennessee Bar for so many years – until he did not do that anymore, a year ago??? – but this bar is such a different kind of place that the feel is quite different.

It confirms my feeling again that the success of an open mic is the sum of its parts: attitude of bar owner, size and shape of bar and stage, location of bar, MC, sound system, whatever. So this may be James and the gang running this Café Oz open mic at Denfert Rochereau in Paris (not to be confused with Brislee Adams’ open mic at the Café Oz at the Metro Blanche), but the feeling is different.

I personally just loved playing on this big raised stage area in front of the voluminous bar room, with hugely high ceilings, and a friendly staff. I even enjoyed the fact of the sports televisions showing their imagines as I played. All in all, this is one to recommend, and breaks a little the stranglehold of the Pop In on Sunday nights in Paris….