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.
I’m not sure which direction to zoom in on this story, but it’s one of the coolest ones in my life in the last two years. And last night at the Théatre de l’Essaion in Paris – near the Pompidou Center – it continued with extraordinary power. I attended a concert in a small venue to listen to Pierre Bensusan playing his acoustic guitar and singing. Sounds like nothing, right? Forget it. This guy is one of the world’s great, and original guitarists – and I’m not the only one to say that, as I will show. But there is also a personal story to this, so hang on and take a ride….
It was two years ago almost exactly that I was returning from Italy after the Italian Grand Prix and wandering around Milan airport with my guitar bag on my back. I had arrived at the airport very early, and while wandering around I crossed paths two or three times with another man carrying a guitar. We had nodded to each other as people carrying guitars will sometimes. But it was when I entered the gate an hour or so before my flight to Paris and I saw the same guy – he looked about my age, healthy and intelligent with a sharp gaze – sitting on one of the seats and fingerpicking a light melody on his guitar, that I decided to approach him.
Part of my interest was the guitar itself, the other part was just my general curiosity about anyone with a guitar in an airport or anywhere else, especially as I am on my neverending world tour of open mics and jam sessions, discovering what the world of music is all about. That was my first year of the tour. So I approached the guy and asked what kind of guitar it was, as it was indeed very interesting and old looking.
“A Lowden,” he said. And he showed me the guitar. It turned out he had had it for some 30 years or so. It also turned out that I had just recently discovered these extraordinary guitars made by a luthier in Ireland named George Lowden. I’d been reading about them in Acoustic magazine, I think, which is a magazine from the UK about acoustic guitars.
We struck up a conversation. The guy, I learned had been attending a guitar festival outside Milan, where he had been playing as a featured guest. He lived outside Paris. I told him about my life, a journalist travelling the world and playing in open mics and jams. I think I told him I’d had an amazing weekend playing with anarchists in Milan.
As the flight began boarding, we ended our talk – I showed him my Seagull, by the way – and he suggested we exchange emails. So we did, and when I looked at his and saw that his name was Pierre Bensusan, I said, “Hmm… I just read a story in Acoustic magazine last week by a gutarist with this name….”
“Yes, that’s me,” he said, adding that it was a regular column he did for the magazine.
I had rememebered seeing the name and wondering where the guy had come from and why I had never heard of him, as he was French, and I have lived in France most of my adult life.
Upon returning to Paris, I looked him up on the Internet and found his web site, and I ordered the complete works collection of CDs of his life works that he had just put out. Oh, he had given me a compilation – or mailed it to me -, I must add, and I had really enjoyed it. Looking up who he was, where he came from and listening to his music I was struck by many things: We were born only 5 weeks apart, he had listened to and been inspired by the same traditional music as I was at the same period of life in the 1970s, and he was often mentioned in the same breath as one of my favorite acoustic guitar players, John Renbourn.
So fastforward to last night. I loved Pierre’s albums, but I did not really know what to expect in the concert. I thought I would find some kind of laid-back, world music kind of thing in the concert, a reproduction of the albums. I mean, Pierre was elected “World Music Guitarist of the Year” by Guitar Player magazine in 2009 or something like that. And as I found last night, he was on the cover of Acoustic magazine in July 2011.
What was astounding in this very intimate concert last night, was just how amazingly good and entertaining and “prenant” was his playing last night. Pierre does not really like to collaborate or play with other musicians; but as I saw last night at the Theatre de l’Essaion, he does not need to. He creates so many different kinds of sounds, he crosses so many different styles, that he is trully a one-man-band. But in the best possible sense of that word. He is a virtuoso. He has his own sound. And the astounding thing is that unlike so many guitarists or other musicians who range and rove between styles, Pierre absolutely and truly captures the reality of the styles. He can jump from Celtic to jazz to Brazilian Bossa Nova and you are entirely and completely convinced by the world he inhabits and delivers to you. It is not fake. Renbourn did an interesting bluesy record with a top American bluesy musician, but although I love the record for its technical virtuosity, I am not convinced of the feeling and world behind it. With Bensusan, I am. Deadly.
Listening to the records is one thing, but hearing it live and above all, SEEING him do this stuff live is extraordinary – his fingers seem to cover all strings, all frets, all bases, with a simplicity I could only imagine possible, but never believe. I just cannot figure out how he is not better known than he is. His playing is absolutely extraordinary!
Anyway, so much for being a critic. I will never succeed. That’s not my goal, though, as I am just another musical traveller looking to be inspired by the truth. I was flattered, too, when after the concert I went to speak to him and introduced myself and he said immediately, “My travelling friend!!!!”
He remembered our meeting in the Milan airport, and the fact that music is truth, truth music, for both of us. No doubt. Except that Pierre Bensusan is soooooooooo goooood that he makes me question why I continue playing music at all. (Okay, because I enjoy it – but still….)
Oh, by the way, Pierre’s last show is on Sunday – tomorrow – at 18:30 and obviously, I highly recommend going to see it….
The last thing I expected on my last night in Milan was to have a wonderful jam and an educational and cool cultural experience. But thanks to my friend Emiliano, the didgeridoo-playing anarchist, I had both – and more. We played for two or three hours at the Leoncavallo social center, which is one of the most important of these squat-like places (called a Spazio Pubblico Autogestito) that I will describe in a moment. Emiliano, I just wanted to mention, was someone I met two years ago in Milan during my first open mic adventure. Milan had proven to be one of the world’s most difficult cities to find a jam or open mic in, but it turned out there was indeed an open jam session on the Saturday night I was there, at the Circolo Anarchico Ponte della Ghisolfa, which is the longest lasting anarchist’s association in Italy.
That jam turned out to be a wonderful, almost family affair, in the association’s club locale on the Viale Monza, and there I met the former university professor, PhD and didgeridoo player Emiliano, and his wife Barbara. I won’t go into the details on that one, but simply say that when Emiliano learned I would be there again this year and was looking for a jam session, he decided to set one up at either the club or elsewhere. He chose the Leoncavallo social center, and so I got a history and culture lesson. The place, as I said, looks like a squat and reminds me of the Szimpla space in Hungary. There is graffiti everywhere, it has several different buildings, rooms, gathering spots. It has bars, computers for the public, baby foot tables, ping pong tables, gardens and massive gathering spaces.
The movement of the social center was born a few decades ago, particularly in the 1970s when there was a housing problem in Italy and people did not even have many of the basic needs either from a home or a community. So abandoned buildings were squatted and the social centers were born. The Leoncavallo is one of the biggest – Emiliano said it could hold thousands of people – and it had been closed down by the police periodically in its history. There seems to be some sort of legal status to these social centers, however, which makes them seem a little different than the squat.
In any case, Emiliano brought a couple of his didgeridoos and there was the bass player Fabio, another guy who dropped in to play didgeridoo alone with Emiliano – we had two going with my Borderline song – and Abdul and Willy – they are of Moroccan origin – played percussion, sang and played guitar. It was pretty wild playing Borderline in this situation, but we did some plain old jamming of the never-ending-song kind as well. Later, I interviewed Emiliano in a different room at the Leoncavallo for my film about open mics and jams around the world.
The total of my four night trip to Milan and Monza, therefore, came to two jam sessions in Milan, one at a bar and one at the social center, and playing in a restaurant in Monza with a band. Far, far more than I ever expected, and I revise my previous idea of Milan as being a city without live music jams and open mics!
I had high hopes for the open mic night last night in Paris, and it came to pass – far beyond my wildest expectations. If the headline to this post, and my lede, sound like a massive dose of hyperbole, too bad!
First stop was the Bus Palladium, the famous Paris venue that I have written about on several occasions on this blog. Last night was the second of the Bus’s new open mic evenings, the first being around a month ago. I don’t know how long it will continue, and I didn’t ask. I get the feeling that the Bus is kind of feeling out the territory, and seeing how it works out. They took a very professional and highly organized approach to the thing by sending out a Facebook announcement and asking musicians to send an email and a myspace link to their music as a tryout. And they admit that this made it a “semi” open mic.
I got accepted along with 14 other acts. I missed the first evening a month ago, but they said that they had room for 14 acts, but received 35 responses. So I felt honored to have been accepted, but I’m not so sure they got 35 responses this time. In any case, the whole evening lineup was planned in advance and I was to play 7th. Musicians were greeted at the door and asked questions about our music and what material we needed.
So professional and cool, and that is normal for such a fantastic and historic venue. Having said that, as the evening progressed, I had some mixed feelings about it and how it might pan out in the future. Most of the tables in this cool restaurant that greets the “afterwork” crowd, were booked in advance, so most of the musicians sat like cattle on the sidelines on a step, awaiting their turn. The usual Tuesday night crowd was the same last night as on the afterwork evenings hosted by Yann Destal, and that meant that music for them was really a background thing, and not the main attraction, or, I soon felt, something they care for at all. One table of around 25 people was particularly noisy, with the effect that although I thought there were a number of very good acts, I could not hear their vocals or their guitars.
I made some videos at the quieter moments, but it got pretty loud and rowdy. It is very common to find open mics where people talk, talk and talk. But this one seemed a little heavier than usual to me. Having said that, I was really determined to see if there was a way that I could break through the clamor and grab the attention of the afterwork crowd and pull them out of their conversation and into the show. I had invited someone with me, too, and I felt a little helpless at the thought of her seeing me standing all alone up on the stage singing to myself.
So the first thing I thought I should do was cover songs that everyone knew, and forget about my own songs. The second thing I thought I had to do was to dive into it absolutely totally, but not so much as to be aggressive. Well, to cut the long story short, it worked from the first notes and lyrics of “What’s Up,” through “Father and Son,” and “Mad World.” The audience applauded, sang along, cheered, and briefly left their conversation to take part in songs they all knew and wanted to leap into. I finished with my own “Borderline,” after asking if I should do another cover or one of my own.
So I left the Bus Palladium walking on clouds and delighted at having worked like a bullfighter, or rather, a rodeo rider, trying to tame the bucking horse and succeeding.
From there I decided it was still early enough to go on to Ollie’s open mic at the Ptit Bonheur la Chance, and I was right to do so. I got to play a song at the end of the evening. But there I felt hardly up to the task, as Ollie’s was such a HUGE contrast to the Bus Palladium: You could hear the proverbial pin drop so quiet was the audience. And like usual, the place was full of massively talented young people. (I’m not saying the Bus was not, but it was more difficult to hear and appreciate them.) Ollie’s is attracting new musicians every week, and there is thankfully more and more French language stuff too.
Then, like icing on the cake, at the end of the Ollie’s evening I struck up a conversation with the man who I had seen at the Galway the night before. This was the man with the guitar with the carvings on it. Remember the video? It turned out that I had found a fascinating like-spirit – Ollie had prompted me – who wears more than one hat: His name is Danny Fonfeder, and he owns 50 percent of one of the most successful school supplies companies in Canada, makers of the Buffalo pencils with the famous tartan box, that I used as a child in grade school. His dad founded the company, and Danny is apparently running it, but in any case, he is travelling the world in his job for the company, and like me with my Formula One race travel, he brings a guitar with him and plays in open mics wherever he can. He started two and a half years ago. But unlike me, the guitar he brings with him – that fabulous carved thing on the video – is one of his own, that he has made for a company he owns and started up six years ago.
It is called Blueberry Guitars, and Danny put the whole thing together when he met a woodcarver in Bali, and decided he wanted a guitar with woodcarvings on it. He started this Blueberry guitar company and it is quite a good business, with guitars I could never afford – check out the $7500 Blueberry guitar on eBay. The wood comes from Canada, it is carved in Bali, and a luthier from the U.S. is responsible for making these into real musical instruments. I invited Danny out after the open mic, along with my friend Tory Roucaud, in order to interview him – and her – for my open mic film.
Now, does it really sound like hyperbole, that headline and lede? No way! A monumental evening.
My first night in Istanbul reacquainted me with the fabulous sounds of the downtown quarters of this most musical cities of the world. Everyone talks of Phil Spector creating the so-called wall of sound, but I bet it was invented in this city that traverses Asia and Europe with a brilliant cacophony of musical mixes all splashing into each other from one café and bar and restaurant doorfront to the next throughout the night.
But if I easily found several places to play in the past, this year I fear that I am heading into a less than fabulous opportunity to find an open jam or open mic situation. The owners of the Blues Live music club where I played before told me they no longer ran their official Monday night jam, but the stage remains open when musicians and the right vibe come together. They still run a band on the weekend too. But I did not feel very positive about my own chances of getting up as last night there were only two people in the place when I was there.
But my musical journey around the world has ALWAYS been about shifts from desperation to success and ecstasy as the weekend progresses and I suddenly fall into an unforeseen musical situation. Last night, in fact, I was ostensibly invited into a bar to have a beer and play some of my music, when the man outside trying to get clients saw me with my guitar and offered that I come in and play on the stage where he had a musician already. I had the beer, but I did not end up being invited to play. Nor did I insist.
Did I ever find a wonderful vibe throughout the city, however, and mostly in the Taksim and Beyoglu areas, and down near the Galatasary Tower. In fact, I decided on several occasions to do turn my handheld, Q3 HD video recorder, as I walked down the street to show you how full this place is of music. But with on musician in almost every single restaurant and bar, I suppose that is partly why the open mic and jam session mentality is not as big here as in some other cities where musicians are less often employed….
But music just fills the air everywhere here, and it is of every style imaginable, from the Blues Live rock of the Hendrix, Clapton, John Lee Hooker and Stevie Ray Vaughan style to the local rock and the traditional and classical Turkish music. Oh, I even made a brief stop in Nardis jazz club, but elected not to pay the cover charge and go in and listen. I also found some new places with local rock and jazz. I even passed a music shop without clients where the workers were involved in a jam session, and music is so well loved that they didn’t even blink when they saw me enter and film them. My hotel receptionist upon check-in wanted to see my guitar – he being himself a guitar player.
I just keep my fingers crossed that I will finally find some place for myself to play in this music-loving city.
This post was not supposed to happen, but after I broke my Seagull S6 guitar tonight on the way home from an open mic in Kuala Lumpur, I had to say a formal goodbye to it. This guitar has been with me around the world twice. It went to 17 countries and nearly 30 cities and all continents except Africa and Antarctica in 2009, and last year it visited just about the same number of places and some other places, like South Korea.
Brad Spurgeon with his S6 Seagull Guitar in 2009 (Olivier Rodriguez photo)
Tonight after I did a cool open mic in the suburbs of Kuala Lumpur, it slipped from my hand as I entered a car. It hit the pavement with a massive explosion. When I got back to the hotel, I saw that the soundboard, or top, of the guitar was splintered and wood stuck out in odd crappy directions.
This guitar has been complimented by people around the world for its beautiful sound. It was a relatively cheap Seagull S6, but I got lucky with it. Somehow it just sounded better than most of the other S6s I’ve ever heard. And it has a history. It has been played by Johnny Borrell of Razorlight, by Dan Haggis of The Wombats, by one of The Cribs, Viking Moses and Stephen “Danger” Prescott, by just about every new young band guitarist and other in Paris – Brooklyn, Neimo, The Parisians, Miggles, Burnin’ Jacks – by unknown but great musicians in England, China, all over the world.
And tonight it burst, split a gut. The only good part to this story is that I could push the bits of splintered wood back in place and the guitar will be usable for the rest of my gigs in Kuala Lumpur and China next week. No doubt with the electric pick-up the sound will not have suffered that much. But it is dead, officially. Dead. Just one drop on the pavement – and thanks to a crap case, full of video and recording equipment.
Now what do I buy next, another Seagull S6? I’m not sure I will be so lucky. I can only think of the time I saw Harry Chapin drop his Ovation in the dressing room in a TV station in Ottawa just moments before going on TV, and laughing about it. Guitars we build.
Tomorrow I will give a complete report of the open mic in the Kuala Lumpur suburb. I had a great time, and there were some interesting musicians – from New Zealand and Kuala Lumpur….
At the Tennessee bar and the Galway last night I spotted some new things to write about: First was the great use of one of the worst guitars that exists in the world. When I started travelling around the world two years ago playing music I decided to check out all the travel guitars, and I quickly concluded and discovered that it didn’t matter what size the guitar was, the airplane would let you on board or not. So I stuck with my regular guitar, my Seagull S6. But one of the guitars I had tried was a piece of shit, and I could never understand how anyone could buy one for the crap sound it gives off…until last night I saw someone at the Tennessee doing a fabulous thing with it: Slide guitar. Check out the video. And the most mystifying thing about this piece of crap is that it is a Martin!
After that, over to the Galway where for the second time that night Ollie Fury played his wonderful new song, and both he and Stephen Danger Prescott for a change played Dylan, and did it in their own ways, as you can also see from the video. All in all, a satisfactory “new” night.
