Brad Spurgeon's Blog

PARIS – Maybe I should call this a gibberish post. The fact is, since returning from my last two-week trip to China and Bahrain I have been spending my vacation in Paris doing catch-up work to do with the office, family life and other things uninteresting to this blog. Still, I did managed to find an island of peace at John Redford and Stephen Saxo’s musical night at the Oasis 244, which is their weekly, Friday night gig where they kind of open the stage to musician friends and others who happen to drop by, if they feel like it.

The Oasis was its usual oasis of peace in not exactly one of the best neighborhoods of Paris, near the Stalingrad and Jaures metro stations. A truly laid-back evening, and unfortunately with all I have been doing, I didn’t have the time to charge my Zoom Q3 recording device’s batteries. So I got only limited video footage of a fun night.

And then a nice laid-back concert at the Connetable

From there, I got another nice interlude from the work at a show put on by a couple of friends, Nick Buxton and his wife Stephanie LB, both of whom have their own soft-touch acoustic-vocal thing going at the Connetable, a neat venue in the Marais with a bar and restaurant on the ground and first floors, and a cave music room underground, in a classic vaulted ceiling room of Paris.

I’m writing this thing so quickly that my syntax is taking a walk. But I desperately wanted to get a few words and videos in here before it got too late to do so. Nick Buxton, by the way, is the owner of the famous Basement studios in Paris, and when he and Stephanie are not playing the kind of touching and sensitive acoustic music they did at the Connetable, they are rocking hard and strong in their various rock combos.

Anyway, that’s about all I can get in here before I’m off to my next bit of work for the office, family and whatever! Back soon, hoping to do a ton of open mics in the coming week….