AUSTIN, Texas – It was a deadly combination of life and death in the streets of Austin last night, that brought the city – particularly 6th Street – back to death with a bursting forth of action in the deadzone that is this Texan city on Halloween night. The Halloween festival is always a big one, but with the added 100,000 or so Formula One fans taking to the street for the F1 Fan Festival for its first night, it was a celebration like none before.
I was half asleep by the time I arrived on 6th Street with a friend, and then I was immediately swept up into the riotous affair of the local population going crazy with Halloween costumes and filling the street from side to side – with only the central part cordoned off from the revellers, where the cops watched over the action.
Austin is particularly respectful of Halloween since there is a large Mexican population as well, with its deadly equivalent of the dastardly festival. The F1 Fan Fest runs Friday, Saturday and Sunday in conjunction with the U.S. Grand Prix that is taking place in Austin this weekend. The festival has four stages for music running throughout the weekend, and there are also little entertainment fairground-type activities for those who attend. The concerts include Joan Jett, and a few other bands better known locally than around the world. But all in all it’s a fabulous line up and an amazing atmosphere.
I had been thinking about trying to find a place to play music, but I had been advised against it. Then I discovered that in fact, on the Austin360 stage there was a daylong live band karaoke yesterday, and it is happening today too. But I am too busy working my job to think about doing that.
In any case, I have never seen such a Halloween occasion, and some of the effort put into the costume defies belief. You’ve got to see them in the little video I assembled of footage I took last night. My favorite wa the man who played the role of a gorilla and of a captive human in a cage carried by the gorilla. Check that one out on the video, I put in a few freeze frames on it, as I had a very small window of opportunity to grab the image….
PARIS – Menilmontant is a funky cool quarter of Paris, and this weekend it celebrated a funky cool arts festival on the boulevard, with artists and artisans displaying their wares in the middle of the boulevard, and musicians playing on two different stages at either end. I was invited to play in the festival by a musician I met at the open mics, who calls himself She-Me, and who was organizing the talent on the stages.
I leapt at the opportunity of playing outside on this open-air, middle of Paris, middle of Menilmontant stage, and as it turned out, the day would be one of the sunniest and hottest of recent weeks, and probably the real end of summer too. In any case, it seemed like the sun had come and the clouds had parted in order to create the absolute perfect weather for a street festival in Paris. And that ensured a large number of people talking part, passing by, and generally giving an atmosphere of a country fair to the center of Paris.
I made discoveries amongst the artisans, the musicians and the local businesses all afternoon long. The festival is just winding down as I write these words, and it had started Friday evening. I was a little jealous when I saw the big stage, but once I got to performing on the smaller stage, I realized that I had perhaps got the better deal. It was much more intimate, the passersby could stop if they wanted to – without making the commitment of standing in front of the big stage, but just sort of stopping at the edge of the small stage and checking it out, and I had better eye contact with the audience.
The small stage was also set up in a spot where I could look off at the facing cafes and the place where the Métro exit sits, and feel really as if I was kind of floating around in Paris playing my music to all who cared to listen, and even those who did not. Helping me out on that was my friend Joe Cady, backing me up with fiddle and lead guitar, just as he has done in Paris open mics for several years now, and at the F1 FanZone concert that we did at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London in July. Joe’s fabulous accompaniment was just what I needed to feel completely at ease in providing the passersby with a full musical experience.
Of course, that was helped by the good sound system also, that ensured a crisp and clear sound to my vocals and some adequate mixing on the rest. The festival was organized by an association called ArtMachine, that has as a goal to help artists, artisans and musicians show off their creations.
Now, if only every quarter in Paris could come up with one of these. The free meal ticket providing food at a local North African restaurant was absolutely insanely good, as I found all the main dishes cost the price of the ticket of a measly 7 euros, and the food was amazing! My lamb chops and french fries beat just about any I’ve eaten recently in other French restaurants for twice the price. Menilmontant really feels like a village within the bigger Paris, and I would live there at the drop of an equally cheap apartment!
As many readers of this blog know, I have a list of open mics, my Thumbnail Guides to open mics in more than 20 cities around the world. These are the cities I visit as a journalist covering Formula One, and I basically only put on the lists the venues where I have played. Today, though, I just wanted to use the blog to announce a one-day open mic festival in Melbourne, Australia on 28 September, to welcome in the spring (there!). I’m putting this up for two reasons: 1), because someone involved in the festival sent me a link to the Melbourne open mic festival page on Facebook, and I encourage readers to give me their local information, since I visit the cities just once a year, and 2), because, as it turns out, my Melbourne Thumbnail Guide to Open Mics and Jam Sessions happens to be my second most popular list of open mics, behind that of my home city Thumbnail Guide of Paris open mics. This festival looks great. I’d go if I was there, but I’ll be in Paris that weekend….
CHATEAU-THIERRY, France – Last weekend Pierre Bensusan held a fabulous two-day event outside his adopted home town of Chateau-Thierry, located about an hour’s drive east of Paris, where he has lived for the last 21 years. They called it the 1st Salon International de Lutherie, and it consisted of an exhibition of guitars, mandolins and violins built by luthiers from around Europe, all of whom are friends of Pierre. For his part, in addition to speaking to and meeting the public in the exhibition, Pierre put on a concert on Saturday night in the wonderful concert hall in the same building where the salon took place.
In addition to luthiers from around France and Germany (see my list of those present below), there was, of course, the presence of the Lowden Guitar company of Northern Ireland, showing off the latest prototype for the second Pierre Bensusan signature model guitar. Aaron Lowden, the son of George Lowden, who is the company founder, was there to talk about the guitar, which is a modern copy of the original 1978 Lowden that Pierre used for 25 years. It was made to honor the 40th anniversary of Bensusan’s career as a professional musician, which also happens to be the 40th anniversary for Lowden Guitars, by the way.
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If you have a problem hearing the podcast on Mixcloud, here is a connection to the same podcast but on the WordPress server:
I’m hoping to write more about this craft of lutherie in some future article somewhere, but my main goal for this post was to put up on my blog the wonderful interview that I had with Pierre during the salon, which I have recorded and dressed up a little – with sounds I recorded of Pierre playing from the concert the night before, and other surprises – in the form of a podcast.
The interview was a broad, wide-ranging talk about his life and music to mark that 40th anniversary of his career as a professional musician. He started out at age 16 at the American Center hootenanny in Paris, and today, at 56, he is roaming the world and earning honours and fans everywhere. He will be performing a monthlong, 50-date series of concerts in the United States starting next week, and is just finishing up a 21-date tour of France, his first here in 25 years.
I’m also hoping to make this podcast the first in a series that I intend to do throughout the year as I embark on my sixth worldwide musical adventure around the world, starting with Melbourne, Australia, next week. So I’m not going to write more about the concert or the festival of lutherie. Just listen to the podcast – Pierre was a fabulous interview subject!
Here, though, is a list of some of the luthiers who were present at the salon. I highly recommend you check out some of these instruments. It was a real dream to play some of them – and frustrating, too, if you happen to be a poor musician!:
There is a kind of fad amongst many musicians in France to say that they hate the Fête de la Musique, that night on the 21 June where music is allowed in the streets, bars and everywhere and anywhere else and goes on all night long, celebrating music (and the first day of summer, usually). It started in France in 1982, and it has spread to other countries, but I think there is probably no other country and city, especially, than Paris that celebrates this musical festival with as much fervor. But a lot of musicians like to say they are not going to play or celebrate the music, and they hate the festival. I can understand that in some ways, but my own attitude now is that I play music every day of the year – or if I don’t, I don’t feel good – and so why would I be so contrarian as to say the only day I’m not going to play is during the day that music has its official celebration?
Still, in recent years I have been much less enthusiastic about going out on the Fête de la Musique in Paris quite simply because it can be an absolute mad house in the streets of Paris, and even violent and loud and disagreeable. And if the metros run all night and are free, well, they’re also full of rowdy people pissed out of their minds and carrying a guitar on your back – as I always do – makes you stand out even more, oddly enough, than you usually do.
Anyway, all of this build up is in order to say that I ended up finding the most wonderful alternative to the madhouse of Paris during the Fête de la Musique after I was invited by the young and up-and-coming French singer songwriter Melody Says – with whom I had shared the bill last fall on a boat on the Seine – to play in the first part of her show at a bar in her native Levallois, just outside Paris. In fact, she had invited me without telling me where it was, and I immediately accepted, and then found out afterwards that it was a 23-minute walk from my home. That, of course, meant that I would perform during the Fête de la Musique without having to fight through the hell and noise of the Paris streets.
It also meant that the gig itself would take place in a nice, calm, cool neighborhood pub, where, as it turned out, there were lots of locals and lots of guests and fans of Melody Says. And no wonder: Melody’s music is fresh with nice melodies, lively with moving rhythms and captivating with her lovely vocals. There is one wonderful song, “I Wish I Was Born in 1952,” that I particularly like, and I think it’s one of her most popular ones. But I kept wanting to interrupt her act and say, “Melody, listen, I’m sorry to have to break the news, but if you had been born in 1952 you would be hitting 61 years old about now, and I’m not so sure your future would be looking quite the same….” But then, who am I to say? Maybe it will – if she keeps up the melodies.
She had some interesting musicians with her too, by the way, with on bass a former bassist for Le Spark, and on guitar her producer Kenny Paterson, who it turns out – although I did not realize it last night – was a legendary engineer and producer from Scotland who has worked with bands like Texas, and INXS and John Martyn, and who today recorded Melody’s EP (in London), and worked recently as Pete Doherty’s sound engineer on his gigs. (Melody Says has, by the way, also toured a little with Doherty recently.)
I myself had a completely new experience as a musician working on the Fête de la Musique. When Melody Says asked me to play, as I said, I immediately agreed to do so. The idea was I’d play with my band. But here’s what happened: It being the Fête de la Musique, and me not really having any kind of permanent band (I play with several other musicians occasionally), I discovered that every one of the five or six or more musicians that I have played with were already performing in gigs around Paris in their own regular bands! I almost got one in the end, but he had a very non-understanding employer who would not let him finish work early for his music passion, even on this international music festival day.
So it was that I had to perform solo and act as the warm-up man before the real treat of the evening – Melody Says. Fortunately there was a kind of neighborhood feel to the pub, which, by the way, is called, The Last Drop, and so I found that starting the evening’s music with just my guitar was actually a great way to do things. I did shift from my original desire to play mostly only my owns songs into a decision to play some of the crowd pleasers too, some of the songs, like “Father and Son,” that everyone knows or can sing along with. And as it turned out, both Melody and her bass player joined me for several songs by playing on the drum set behind me. So I chose some very moving, thrusting rhythm songs for those ones and that got the audience warmed up a bit, and it was great fun to play with them.
So all in all it was actually a fabulous evening, and we finished it off by going to Melody Says’ place and doing a little rooftop jamming within sight of the Eiffel Tower and with my Gibson J-200 facing of with Melody’s Epiphone EJ-200, which is the Gibson clone and a fabulous guitar of its own…. Could it have been a better celebration of music in Paris – or rather, Levallois – than that?
One thing leads to another and that is how we weave our lives together; I’d never have ended up at this interesting little festival in Mannheim had it not been for meeting and playing music with Tonio the day before. Tonio and his friends invited me to see their improv show at a theater on Friday night, and I got stuck in so much traffic leaving the race track that I missed the improv show … but found Tonio and his friends attending this very cool little festival in the same locale: It was a student-run festival that has been going for around a decade and is meant to fight against racism and neo-Nazis.
I found it very inspiring, and in fitting with most of the stuff on this blog, there was lots of music – in fact, most of the festival revolves around the music, an evening of four concerts by local up-and-coming rock bands. There were also tables full of merchandize and printed material, books and tracts against racism, T-shirts and other objects as well.
Brad Spurgeon interviews Antonia Hauth about the anti-racism, anti-neo-Nazi festival in Mannheim:
It was refreshing to find all these young people getting together to fight the scourge of hate and hate crimes. I decided to interview one of the organizers of the festival, Antonia Hauth, a young woman who has just passed the equivalent of her high school diploma, or A-Levels. I made it part of my series of podcasts that I have been doing with open mic and jam session organizers.
This may not have been an open stage, but I felt I might have been able to ask to play a song. Ultimately, however, I saw no real point in intruding. I was happy to attend and to make this felicitous discovery that I would never have known about had it not been for stopping Tonio in the street the day before because of his violin case!!!! But this was a real, true, interesting cultural experience. Listen to the interview and look at the videos to get the feel for it, and the intelligent response to hatred by a portion of today’s German youth. Or if you understand German, check out the organizing group’s web site about their activities against racism and neo-nazis in Germany.
