SHANGHAI – My worldwide open mic journey began in China in 2008 after the Formula One race in Shanghai, and little did I know that it was a journey that would continue for six more years and cover most of the globe, every continent except Africa (where I once lived and played music in an open mic decades earlier) and Antarctica, and that it would spawn a book, a blog, an album, a documentary film, numerous podcasts, music videos and other multimedia projects.
This year, 2014, I have decided to finish all of the projects and tie them together into a consolidation of multimedia. As part of my personal impetus to gather it all together for myself, but also put it into perspective on this blog, I have decided to create a page for each city I have visited on the journey, tying together samples of the whole multimedia adventure linked to that city.
MANAMA, Bahrain – My worldwide open mic journey began in China in 2008 after the Formula One race in Shanghai, and little did I know that it was a journey that would continue for six more years and cover most of the globe, every continent except Africa (where I once lived and played music in an open mic decades earlier) and Antarctica, and that it would spawn a book, a blog, an album, a documentary film, numerous podcasts, music videos and other multimedia projects.
This year, 2014, I have decided to finish all of the projects and tie them together into a consolidation of multimedia. As part of my personal impetus to gather it all together for myself, but also put it into perspective on this blog, I have decided to create a page for each city I have visited on the journey, tying together samples of the whole multimedia adventure linked to that city.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – My worldwide open mic journey began in China in 2008 after the Formula One race in Shanghai, and little did I know that it was a journey that would continue for six more years and cover most of the globe, every continent except Africa (where I once lived and played music in an open mic decades earlier) and Antarctica, and that it would spawn a book, a blog, an album, a documentary film, numerous podcasts, music videos and other multimedia projects.
This year, 2014, I have decided to finish all of the projects and tie them together into a consolidation of multimedia. As part of my personal impetus to gather it all together for myself, but also put it into perspective on this blog, I have decided to create a page for each city I have visited on the journey, tying together samples of the whole multimedia adventure linked to that city.
MELBOURNE, Australia – My worldwide open mic journey began in China in 2008 after the Formula One race in Shanghai, and little did I know that it was a journey that would continue for six more years and cover most of the globe, every continent except Africa (where I once lived and played music in an open mic decades earlier) and Antarctica, and that it would spawn a book, a blog, an album, a documentary film, numerous podcasts, music videos and other multimedia projects.
This year, 2014, I have decided to finish all of the projects and tie them together into a consolidation of multimedia. As part of my personal impetus to gather it all together for myself, but also put it into perspective on this blog, I have decided to create a page for each city I have visited on the journey, tying together samples of the whole multimedia adventure linked to that city.
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!:
Here it is, my fifth year in a row of traveling the world to play in open mics and jam sessions. It starts tomorrow with my flight from Paris to Melbourne, then the following week I go to Kuala Lumpur. As regular readers of this blog will know, I have been documenting my musical adventures around the world on this blog for the last three years, and for the year before that I began writing a book about it. This year I will again visit 20 countries in the next nine months, and play in a massive number of open mics and open jam sessions, and I will write about what I find here….
To recap a little, the first year was the book. The second year was the blog. The third year was the blog and a documentary film. The fourth year was the blog and me recording myself playing music with musicians in the open mics around the world, as well as a series of podcasts of people running the open mics and playing in them.
So where does this whole trans-media epic stand at the moment? Another recap: I take these worldwide trips as a journalist reporting on Formula One auto racing for my newspaper, and in my free time I seek out places to play, in these cities and countries where I would not otherwise expect to find open mics – in many cases. And each time I like to have a new project to work on to document it, or do something “else” with it. This year will be no exception. I again have projects in the works. What are they?
First, I want to say that my goal this year is perhaps more ambitious than in all the other year combined. Because my No. 1 goal will be to COMPLETELY finish all of the projects that have accumulated but never ceased to spin out. In other words, I’m still working on the book – it’s written, but I’m now editing it – and I want that finished finally by the end of the year, but hopefully within the next couple of months. I want to work with all the recordings I did and make some kind of CD – ie, the podcasts and some of the stuff of me playing with other people. And I want to finish the film, finally. To that end, I have made a number of very important steps in recent weeks, and I’m very, very excited about them, and I will write about that in the coming weeks.
For this year, I will not simply sit back on my laurels and be satisfied with finishing the other projects, but I will start one or two new ones. In addition to simply continuing to play at open mics and jam sessions everywhere I go, and recording it here on the blog, the first new project is that I will be adding a new page to the blog at every location I go to, which will be a Thumbnail Guide to the open mics and jam sessions, etc., that I know of in those cities. Having now had four years, and this will be the fifth, of accumulated and growing knowledge about each city’s open mics, I finally feel like it is time to put it all up on the blog in a usable form. Of course, my Paris guide to open mics will always be the most up-to-date, since that’s where I live and play the most. But the other pages will, I hope, serve their purpose well, and give a whole knew heft to this site.
The other project I plan to do, but this one may or may not be feasible, is that I plan to write a new song in each country and city I visit, and the song will in some way be inspired by the place. I have no idea how big a task that will prove to be, but I really want to face the challenge and try it. If it produces one good song, then that’s cool enough – the rest will just be a great exercise and discipline…. I will decide whether or not to make the songs heard on the site, but I expect that I will only manage to lay down the melodic idea and write the full text, but not perfect the song at each place – since I’m often not present in the countries long enough to do that…especially given all the work I have to do for my day job.
So that is it in a nutshell: 20 countries in 9 months; a new web of evergreen material for a worldwide open mic thumbnail guide of where to perform; 20 new songs inspired by the places I visit; and finally, all of my previous years’ projects finished and finalized to tie together the entire multimedia, trans-media, worldwide musical adventure. Sound like I’m a dreamer? I hope so!!!!
PS, here is the schedule of places I will visit, and when (although the date usually but not always represents the last day I am in the country – and while there are only 19 countries here, the 20th is France, where I will play in between times):
Mar. 17 Australian Grand Prix Melbourne
Mar. 24 Malaysian Grand Prix Kuala Lumpur
Apr. 14 Chinese Grand Prix Shanghai
Apr. 21 Bahrain Grand Prix Bahrain
May 12 Spanish Grand Prix Barcelona
May 26 Monaco Grand Prix Nice/Monaco
Jun 9 Canadian Grand Prix Montreal
Jun. 30 British Grand Prix Silverstone/Oxford
Jul. 7 German Grand Prix Nurburgring/Cologne
Jul. 28 Hungarian Grand Prix Budapest
Aug. 25 Belgian Grand Prix Spa-Francorchamps/Liege
Sep. 8 Italian Grand Prix Monza/Milan
Sep. 22 Singapore Grand Prix Singapore
Oct. 6 Korean Grand Prix South Korea/Seoul/Mokpo
Oct. 13 Japanese Grand Prix Suzuka/Nagoya/Osaka
Oct. 27 Indian Grand Prix Delhi
Nov. 3 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix Abu Dhabi
Nov. 17 U.S. Grand Prix Austin
Nov. 24 Brazilian Grand Prix Sao Paolo
I was fantastically excited last night because one of my favorite Paris open mics fell on the day to end all days in the history of the world. So it was that the Arte Cafe decided to have a little theme of the end of the world for what was also its final open mic of 2012. I was so excited because although I was going to bring my guitar with me and perhaps sing some songs in the jam afterwards, my main plan was to read a couple of poems by one of the favorite poets of my youth: Adrian Henri.
Henri was one of the Liverpool poets from the 1960s – and after – whose volume of Penguin Poets No. 10, The Mersey Sound, was a famous moment in such anthologies when it came out in 1967. The other two poets in the group were Roger McGough and Brian Patten. Henri was an artist, performance artist, musician, poet and friends with people like John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Allen Ginsberg and others.
I met him briefly at a Toronto Harbourfront Reading series night on 25 October 1980. I remember the date because it is inscribed in my book of his poetry that I bought that night called “From the Loveless Motel.” I also recall the moment because I was so young and gauche and although I admired him greatly, I insulted him without intending to. I went up to him excitedly to buy the book and talk, and I told him that I had traveled a good part of the world in my life and as a fan of his writing I had looked all over the place for his volumes and never found any of them outside England. Or something to that effect.
My intention, of course, had been to show what a devoted reader I was and not how obscure he was as a writer. But naturally, his face dropped and he said, “Well, you’ve got plenty of them here….”
Anyway… the point of all this is to say that when I learned that the end of the world was about to come, it immediately reminded me of one of my favorite Adrian Henri poems, and I decided that I would read it at the open mic last night. I thought that as an introduction to Henri for the listeners, I would also read another of my favorite poems by him after the end of the world poem.
As it happened, a friend was also holding his annual end-of-the-year party, so I decided I would attend that first before going to the open mic. During the party I learned that the open mic at the Arte Café was, exceptionally, closing down early, for lack of its usual unfailingly loyal crowds of attendees. (Due no doubt to the Christmas holiday.) That meant my big moment as a reader – as opposed to singer – would never come. Neither, of course, did the end of the world.
But I did get to play my guitar and sing songs at the home of my friend, and that was loads of fun. And because I have this blog, I’ve decided that I can STILL read those two poems, and put them here on the blog for everyone to listen to – and then to go out and find Adrian Henri books and buy them wherever you may be. Henri, by the way, was born in 1932 and he died in 2000…on 20 December – IE, it would have been his 80th birthday two days ago, the day before the end of the world that never came.
The first poem, called, “Death in the Suburbs,” – and contained in “from the loveless motel” describes the end of the world…. which, as Henri says: “will surely come in Bromley South or Orpington.” Listen right to the end where suddenly I finish reading the poem only to have the sound of a siren emerge from outside my apartment like the end of the world has really begun after all:
The second poem, called, “Me,” is contained in Penguin Poets No. 10, and is a clever rhythmic thing which consists only of the names of people Henri would like to be, as you will hear if you listen:
Austin continued to give me reason to believe it is both the weird capital and possibly the live music capital of the world. The good news, or rather, the GREAT news, was the fun, laid-back and simple open mic at B.D. Riley’s Irish Pub on 6th Street. The bad news was the “Friends” bar next door – or rather, the bartender woman who proved to be very obnoxious.
I decided to go to B.D. Riley’s for no other reason than it was close to my hotel and located in the crazy center of the weird town, the vibrant 6th Street. I checked things out around the corner to find that the well-known and recommended “Hideout” open mic at 617 Congress was closed for the month for what appears to be renovations. But as soon as I walked into B.D. Riley’s, I felt welcome and ready.
It is just a classic Irish Pub of the kind you find all around the world. But the open mic takes place on a big stage at the front of the pub, overlooking the street. And with the large windows wide open, you know that you are playing not just for the pub patrons, but for the people walking by in the street.
Brad Spurgeon interviews Chris Olson, aka Johnny Fargo, the MC of the BD Riley’s open mic in Austin, Texas:
It is hosted by Chris Olson, aka Johnny Fargo, who used to host an open mic for around five years in L.A., and has now hosted this one for 5 years too. Check out my podcast with Chris, another in my ongoing series of podcasts. Unfortunately, because my computer broke down over the weekend, I lost my Audacity sound editor, and I just do not have the time to download another and do a proper edit of the interview. But aside from a few hesitations on my part, I think it holds together well as it is – it’s just a little heavy in bytes since it is high quality .wav and not the usual mp3….
I enjoyed several of the performers at B.D. Riley’s and I even managed to continue on my challenge of playing with a local musician in every country I visit. This was thanks to Chris being kind enough to ask Joe Gee if he would play with me, and Joe being kind enough to accept. We did Mad World, and it went over pretty well. Joe plays guitar and sings, as you can see in the video I did of him. But he is also a good jazz pianist.
It seemed that the night was just too good and without problems for this to be Austin – and judging by my experiences of the previous days. But that would soon change. As I left the pub with Joe I heard suddenly the sound of a guitarist in the bar next door, called Friends. The guitar caught my ear as it was Hendrix. But what caught my ear more, was that it was not JUST Hendrix. It was a great rendition of Hendrix, note and detail perfect…before it suddenly moved into a kind of Stevie Ray Vaughan sort of Hendrix. And of course, this is the home town of Stevie Ray Vaughan, and there is even a statue to him here.
Well Joe told me that this guitarist was named Eric Tessmer, that he was 30 years old, and that he could be playing anywhere all over the world if he wanted to, but tended to stay in Austin. Joe and I departed company, and as I started toward my hotel, the Tessmer guitar playing was just mesmerizing me. So I thought that with that Stevie Ray connection, I just HAD to get a bit of this on video for the blog. AND I just wanted to hear more.
So I quickly turned on the Zoom recorder and walked across the street, heading back toward Friends. I stopped in the door and recorded a lot of Tessmer from behind, before I decided I might as well enter – nothing held me back. So I went to the bar, holding my recorder all the time recording the blissful music, and when I found myself at the bar I thought I should do the decent thing and order a beer. (Remember that “fuck you!” violinist in Barcelona who was not happy I didn’t tip him? I had no change.) So I turned to the bartender woman and said I’d like a beer. All the while, I held the camera pointing at Tessmer, and recording.
“You know, that bag of yours is a little obnoxious,” said the bar tender woman.
You can hear this on the recording if you go right to the end. I was slightly in shock, because my guitar bag – she was referring to it being on my back – was not blocking the view of anyone standing at the bar. Of course, I had no plans to keep it on my back the whole time I was there, but it was clear that I was recording the guitar solo and would take it off when I finished that – or rather, when he finished.
“Ah, yes,” I said. “Well, I’d like an obnoxious beer, please.”
“When you take that bag off your back I will serve you the beer,” she responded.
I said, “Okay,” and I closed off my video recorder and walked out of the bar. I will not return. And once again I have found Austin WEIRD! I mean, HOW on earth can this be the live music capital of the world if a musician is treated like shit and insulted because he enters a bar with his guitar case on his back, and is clearly making a video of a performer – a fellow guitarist – so has not yet had a moment to remove the bag?
I have never in my life been spoken to with such arrogance and disdain because I had my guitar bag on my back in a live music joint!!! Or anywhere else, for that matter! (Except on flights when nervous stewardesses are convinced it’s a machine gun.)
It was rude, arrogant and above all obnoxious. And such a huge contrast to the style of the bar and above all the great music played by Tessmer, and the reputation of Austin as the live music capital of the world. Oh, it fit in perfectly with its status as being “weird.”
Don’t get the wrong impression by this post. I am not angry and frustrated by the woman’s reaction and nastiness. That’s more her problem and that of giving a bad image of the city. But I thought it was very much par for the course so far in terms of my strange mixture of experiences in Austin!
Tonight I head off for my final open mics in the city. I hope I find some, since the two or three best of them all that I had been recommended no longer run as of recent weeks or months. So I’m stepping out into the dark again….
PS: It is now 2 AM in Singapore and I have not yet eaten my dinner, or jammed, or done anything else except my “day job.” But as I did go out and have a great night of jamming yet again at Actors Jam bar in Singapore, and again this time with Luke Buirski, and as this is my third day of talk about the Actors Jam bar and my second day of talk about Luke, well, guess what? I have decided simply to put up the videos from last night’s jam – minus me – and also to put up the great interview podcast I did with Luke about the music scene in Singapore, and his career. This is another edition of the regular podcasts that I have been doing this year in my round-the-world musical adventure. Oh, another PS: Like the memory deficient person I often am, I forgot to bring my Zoom video recorder last night, so had to settle for the iPhone – which is someone sound-deficient by comparison.
Interview with Luke Buirski at Actors Jam Bar in Singapore, conducted by Brad Spurgeon:
And here a couple of videos of Luke performing last night, one of which is his own song, the other is a well known cover song(!):
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.
