But this song is also quite different from my other songs, in being the only song that I actually wrote at the request of another musician. It was an interesting exercise, because I wanted to write for this other person’s style, but also put my own spin to it, and equally, make sure that the song was completely true to my own heart. When it turned out that the other musician – actually, a duo – said they liked it but never acted on it, I decided to record it myself….
As with the others of the five-part series of the five songs I recorded at the Melodium Studio in Montreuil outside Paris in February, I recorded with my favorite lead player, Félix Beguin and drummer, Jeremy Norris – both of whom are in two excellent Paris bands, The Burnin’ Jacks and the Velvet Veins – and also with Scott Bricklin – a Paris expat musician originally from Philadelphia – on bass. Together, as I mentioned, we spent three days in the studio.
In the coming weeks I plan to finish this cycle of videos with my final song, “Borderline,” and then I plan to put out a CD of the whole, as well as others of my songs.
The beauty of doing these recording sessions was the incredible cohesion and talent I was surrounded with in Félix, Jeremy and Scott and their wonderful arrangements and Félix’s mixing. All three have worked together extensively, and often at the incredible Melodium Studios, and of course, I have gigged with Félix regularly in the last five years. So it was all just so together.
As with the others of the five-part series of the five songs I recorded at the Melodium Studio in Montreuil outside Paris in February, I recorded with my favorite lead player, Félix Beguin and drummer, Jeremy Norris – both of whom are in two excellent Paris bands, The Burnin’ Jacks and the Velvet Veins – and also with Scott Bricklin – a Paris expat musician originally from Philadelphia – on bass. Together, as I mentioned, we spent three days in the studio.
In the coming weeks I plan to continue making videos of these songs and releasing them, and then I plan to put out a CD of the whole, as well as others of my songs (and a wicked cover song). The videos, as I said, will all be quite different; the first one I did while walking around Paris and being filmed by Raphaëlle. With “Crazy Lady,” I decided to have a completely different kind of fun doing a completely different kind of video to illustrate my song, drawing on black and white films from the public domain to try to illustrate this song with a story to tell that is a little tricky to illustrate otherwise! With “Mad World,” it too is in Paris, but I decided to add a few mad aspects of my own personality – as you will see – and some mad places in Paris.
The beauty of doing these recording sessions was the incredible cohesion and talent I was surrounded with in Félix, Jeremy and Scott and their wonderful arrangements and Félix’s mixing. All three have worked together extensively, and often at the incredible Melodium Studios, and of course, I have gigged with Félix regularly in the last five years. So it was all just so together.
PARIS – It was the list that started all of my lists of open mics around the world, and started in Paris four years ago. It has grown to a huge popularity, and led to my more than 20 other such guides of open mics and jam sessions around the world. Today I finally got around to updating my Thumbnail Guide to Paris Open Mics, Jam Sessions and other Live Music, since making sure the list is up-to-date is the key to these things, and the biggest pain in the butt! But that pain is always washed away when I get emails, meet people and hear from other sources of the utility of the list. Then the pain turns to a great feeling of usefulness and purpose!
A word about the updates: The Tireuse open mic has been taken off the list, as it has finally really ended – it used to be called the Ptit Bonheur la Chance – as has the Anthracite jam, which I can find no evidence still exists. I have, on the other hand, added several new open mics and jams: The blues jam at the Angora, and open mics at the Café Oz Blanche, at the Blues Bar and the cabaret open mic of the Soirée Buzz. And there is, happily, another old open mic returning after a brief disappearance: That of the Lizard Lounge, the first Sunday of the month. I have also begun to add a new feature, which I’ve been incorporating in my worldwide open mic guide lists elsewhere, which is to put links from the guide entry to a sample story that I have written about my own experience at the open mic in the past. (How many other city or country guides to open mics can boast doing that nice little multimedia trick??!!!???)
PARIS – As I prepare to fly out tomorrow to Shanghai for the next step of my worldwide musical open mic adventure – well, all right, mostly for covering the Formula One race in my job as a journalist – I decided I had better do a very short post just to announce on Bradspurgeon.com that I have a new web site now that I have just launched. It is Bradspurgeonmusic.com and it will in no way replace this current web site, which is a blog and general repository of all sorts of wild and crazy Brad Spurgeon ideas and articles. The new site will be strictly devoted to my own musical recordings, videos, CDs and other musical news and creations concerning my upcoming gigs and other personal music news. I have created the site because this blog, while wonderful as a medium in many ways, is not the idea place to group together all of my own music. So often at open mics or gigs or elsewhere, I have people asking where they can hear my music online – and I kind of have to send them all over the place, or to this blog, and it just isn’t adequate. So now there is: Brad Spurgeon Music. Check it out!
PARIS – A couple of weeks ago, while in Kuala Lumpur, I posted my first video and recording of the songs I recorded in the studio in February, in the post for “When You’re Gone Away.” Since then I have been working on the second video while I was in KL, in Bahrain and now in Paris (where I’m back again for a few days before taking off for Shanghai). I’ve now finished that second video of the five-part series of the five songs I recorded at the Melodium Studio in Montreuil outside Paris in February, I’m talking about the video for my song “Crazy Lady.” As with “When You’re Gone Away,” I recorded “Crazy Lady” along with my favorite lead player, Félix Beguin and drummer, Jeremy Norris – both of whom are in two excellent Paris bands, The Burnin’ Jacks and the Velvet Veins – and also with Scott Bricklin – a Paris expat musician originally from Philadelphia – on bass. Together, as I mentioned, we recorded five songs.
In the coming weeks I plan to continue making videos of these songs and releasing them, and then I plan to put out a CD of the whole, as well as others of my songs (and a wicked cover song). The videos will all be quite different; the first one I did while walking around Paris and being filmed by Raphaëlle, and adding two bits of “mystery footage” from the past and from elsewhere in the world that I took – see if you can spot it! This time, with “Crazy Lady,” I decided to have a completely different kind of fun doing a completely different kind of video to illustrate my song, drawing on black and white films from the public domain to try to illustrate this song with a story to tell that is a little tricky to illustrate otherwise!
The beauty of doing these recording sessions was the incredible cohesion and talent I was surrounded with in Félix, Jeremy and Scott and their wonderful arrangements and Félix’s mixing. All three have worked together extensively, and often at the incredible Melodium Studios, and of course, I have gigged with Félix regularly in the last five years. So it was all just so together.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – This post has nothing to do with my location of sitting in a hotel room high above hot and humid Kuala Lumpur, where I will be working and playing music for the next week…except perhaps that high in the air (although not high in the head) is also where I was when I edited this music video of the first of my songs from the Melodium recording sessions last month in Montreuil.
In fact, yes, this post is all about a chain of events that started at the Melodium Studio in Montreuil outside Paris last month, that continued in the streets of Paris’s Latin Quarter over the weekend and that I finalized on my flight to Kuala Lumpur from Paris last night. I’m talking about the video that I put together for my song “When You’re Gone Away,” the music of which I recorded in Montreuil last month, and that I filmed in Paris over the weekend and that I edited on the flight and uploaded in my hotel room in Kuala Lumpur.
That actually seems a fitting chain of events for my song called, “When You’re Gone Away,” that I recorded along with my favorite lead player, Félix Beguin and drummer, Jeremy Norris – both of whom are in two excellent Paris bands, The Burnin’ Jacks and the Velvet Veins – and also with Scott Bricklin – a Paris expat musician originally from Philadelphia – on bass. Together, as I mentioned in a blog item about my session at Melodium Studios, we recorded five songs, of which “When You’re Gone Away,” is one.
In the coming weeks I plan to continue making videos of these songs and releasing them, and then I plan to put out a CD of the whole, as well as others of my songs (and a wicked cover song). The videos will all be quite different; this one was fun, as I did it walking around Paris and being filmed by Raphaëlle, and adding two bits of “mystery footage” from the past and from elsewhere in the world that I took – see if you can spot it!
The beauty of doing these recording sessions was the incredible cohesion and talent I was surrounded with in Félix, Jeremy and Scott and their wonderful arrangements and Félix’s mixing. All three have worked together extensively, and often at the incredible Melodium Studios, and of course, I have gigged with Félix regularly in the last five years. So it was all just so together.
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.
[gigya src=”http://www.mixcloud.com/media/swf/player/mixcloudLoader.swf” flashvars=”feed=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mixcloud.com%2Fbradspurgeon%2Finterview-with-pierre-bensusan-by-brad-spurgeon%2F&embed_type=widget_standard” wmode=”opaque” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”480″ height=”480″]
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!:
PARIS – This has been probably the lowest month ever in terms of me updating my blog. I should be ashamed of myself, or feeling guilty, or thinking that I’m lax, undisciplined, a scoundrel in the world of blogs who is incapable of updating on a regular basis. In fact, I’m celebrating! For a month of February the blog has never had more page views. The reason? Because my Thumbnail Guide of Open Mics Around the World continues to feed the blog and give it action and interest with evergreen material. But most of all: Because I am able to announce that I will continue once again this year my 20-country (at least) around-the-world open mic and open jam session adventure. It will all start in exactly two weeks from today with a return to Melbourne, and then will follow – as usual – the Formula One world championship car racing events as I continue to make my annual trip around the world to cover that series AND continue my exploration of the world’s open mics and open jam sessions. And I will update the open mic guides that I inaugurated last year, and actually, a few years before that with the Thumbnail Guide to Paris Open Mics and Jam Sessions. Is this a crap post or what?!?! Answer: It’s a blog and I can do what I want, and have fun with writing! Thanks for your ongoing interest!
PS: One or two of you might have noticed that I’m in the process of updating the look of the blog as well – although it is far from my desired end-result….
PPS: Oh, yes, I forgot to mention: This is the 800th post on this blog since I began it almost exactly 4 years ago. (We’re a week or two shy of that anniversary.)
MONTREUIL – There has been a big blank hole on this blog for the past several days as I have just spent four of the best and most important days of my life, rehearsing for a day, and then spending three days in a studio recording five songs, four of mine and a cover. That may sound like hyperbole or exaggeration, but really, I mean it. It was certainly four of the most enriching days I’ve had, and I am hugely impatient to show the results, but I won’t do that until the five tracks are all properly mixed. So in the meantime, just a quick post to say what I was up to.
It was Part II of a project I started nearly four years ago when I went into the studio to record four songs as part of my worldwide open mic and musical adventure, another media aspect to my open mic film, open mic book and this blog – i.e., the music I have written and been singing during this period. My goal is to do a full CD, and I now have nine songs recorded in full band mode, and I will add one or two in solo acoustic and maybe one live from an open mic somewhere…. I will put up links below to the first four recordings, from 2010, which I recorded live in the Point Ephemere in Paris. As soon as I have the mixes to the stuff I did this week, I’ll make that available somehow too!
But for the moment, a bit more on this week: Aside from my own guitar playing, singing and songwriting, another one thing that ties together the recording sessions from 2010 and this week is the presence on the tracks of the lead guitar player, Félix Beguin. I have spoken about Félix frequently on this blog, as he is also the lead guitarist of the bands The Burnin’ Jacks and Velvet Veins. These are two fabulous up-and-coming young French bands, the former of which had one of its songs featured on the Rock&Folk compilation CD last month. Raphaëlle – whose video “Mississippi” I put up last week – also contributed chorus and a fabulous vocal part on one of the songs.
And anyway, this time, Félix did much, much more than just play lead guitar on my songs as he did three and a half years ago – by the way, we first played together at the Lizard Lounge open mic in November 2008! – as he played lead and keyboards and did some backup vocals, and he engineered, recorded and even basically produced the five songs we did this week, along with Scott Bricklin and Jeremy Norris. Norris is the drummer for both of the aforementioned groups, and Bricklin is an American musician from Philadelphia who has lived in France for a decade now, and who has an illustrious history of making music – he is a multi-instrumentalist, and a singer-songwriter (I have one of his albums on which he plays basically all instruments).
Working with these three guys was superb in many ways, but not the least interesting aspect to it – which helps in the music – is that they are all used to working not only with each other, but also at the studio where we recorded: Melodium Studios in Montreuil, which is a funky neighborhood located just outside of Paris. Félix and Scott are both regular engineers at the studio, so everyone knew each other and the working environment, and it paid off in the music. In fact, it was three days of bliss in this amazing, spacious cellar studio that has several rooms, some really nice equipment and a warm and highly competent staff.
The Amazing Leslie Speaker at the Melodium Studios in Montreuil
One of the high moments in terms of the equipment was when they pulled out the absolutely wonderful antique Leslie speaker and ran the keyboards through that, and then later ran some vocal chorus stuff through it like the Beatles first did in the mid-60s. The Leslie, devised in the 1930s, uses a rotating fan-like device to distort the sound waves and give it a sound like an organ.
Together, we recorded my songs “Borderline,” “Crazy Lady,” “When You’re Gone Away,” and “If I Only Had You.” For the cover song, we recorded “Mad World,” which I have been playing for a few years, and notably, with Félix for about four years on occasion. But this time, this is a monster of a cover song, unlike any version I know of “Mad World,” and I can’t wait to show it here!
In the meantime, here are the songs I recorded live at the Point Ephemere nearly four years ago. Believe me, the quality of the new ones is incomparable. (I feel like I’m boasting without showing the result – which is an empty boast – but I’m sooooo excited!)
Lighter, shrimpy, easy to download but less good quality file versions of my 2010 live recordings at the Point Ephemere in Paris. These are NOT the studio recordings of five different songs that I just did at the Melodium, and on these recordings Félix played lead on “Memories” and “Except Her Heart,” while Laurent Zarby played lead on “Let Me Know,” and “Since You Left Me”:
DUBAI – I have sometimes used the newspaper term of “space holder” – which means a weaker story that holds a space on a page before a stronger story is set to arrive – when a day or so has gone by and I have had nothing to post. Today, I am making up terms and calling this short post from Dubai a “breath-holder,” since I have been away from this blog for so long and I hope that some regular readers are missing my posts!!! BUT…
I wanted to explain that this nearly 10-day period is definitely the longest period of time I have ever been absent from posting on the blog, but it is not an indication of the future. It is a result of having a HUGE amount of work to do on my day job after returning from Milan, and then promptly and immediately falling ill with a nasty – if unimportant – cold and losing my singing voice entirely – to say nothing of my energy – and so making me unable to take part in any open mics, and wanting to do little else aside from recuperate.
Oh, of course, I spent time with loved ones, read, listened to music, and finally got back to my morning exercises. And now I sit in the Dubai airport on a 7-hour stopover as I prepare to catch a flight to Singapore and continue the worldwide open mic musical adventure.
So thanks to all my faithful readers for sticking around, and keep up the faith! Hold your breath, and I’ll be back with more news of the open mics and open jams of the world – next stop Singapore….
