Fishing around for places to play in Nice, I was always going to try out the amazing Shapko bar on the rue Rossetti. And last night, I was in the presence of my friend Baptiste W. Hamon, the inimitable French redneck hillbilly singer songwriter, and it turned out that the theme of the music at Shapko was fairly close to redneck, so I thought Baptiste and I should make a visit.
We had also been considering going to King’s Pub again, where I had played the night before and was invited to play again last night. But I really wanted to take another look at Shapko, where I managed to play some songs last year during a similar acoustic night, hosted by someone else – Peter Cogavin. Peter, in fact, told me yesterday that he knew the guy hosting the evening at Shapko, and that he thought he might be open to letting me play.
That guy was a British musician with the somewhat bourbon soaked hillbilly name of Jack Daniel. It is his real name. And he plays a wicked fingerpicking blues and country guitar and lays a nice laid back vocal on top of it. He had a harmonica player, and then his “friends,” who joined in as the even progressed.
Shapko, the man who owns the bar, is a saxophone player from Russia, and he is a real mean sax player. I mean good, not nasty. He is also a music-loving performer who opens his stage to other players as much as he can while maintaining a good professional business and show. I was really flattered when I walked in last night and he immediately remembered me, although I had visited his bar only twice last year: ‘The Canadian!” he said.
At the break, I spoke to Jack Daniel about the possibility of playing, and he more or less accepted. But as the evening went on with the second set, it became clear that the music was moving further and further away from what either I or Baptiste do, so we ultimately decided to cut out and check out the scene at the King’s Pub. It turned out that that was pretty quiet and the musicians were doing a long set, and we ultimately decided that it was getting too late to hang around much longer. So we both left and went our ways.
But the night was really enriching in terms of the music at Shapko, which was fabulous – especially in the middle of the jam during the second set.
I never expected to do a nearly 1-hour set in a bar in old Nice last night. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I’d find any place to play the whole time I am here until next Monday. But I stumbled on the King’s Pub, noticed they hold an open mic sometimes on Thursdays and Sundays, went in, asked when the next open mic was, got told it would be in nearly two weeks, looked disappointed, got offered to go on stage then and there to play. So I went up, never got asked to get down!
I could not believe my good fortune, but it had to do with the mindset of Christian, the manager of this rock, pop, folk venue in Nice, a mainstay of the live music scene. I had arrived in Nice at dinner time, had to finish doing three articles for my Monaco Grand Prix preview, worked until nearly 10 PM, ran out and found a restaurant, ate, then decided to digest my food by walking around Old Nice checking out the various venues to see if I could plan for playing somewhere later on the trip.
But I had my guitar with me, as always, and the vibe passed with Christian, and the stage was already set up with the equipment of the musician for last night, Matthieu Saque, who was just as open and willing as was Christian to allow me to go on stage and play.
The sound system was great, the monitor was perfectly set up, and later in my set – which lasted 45 minutes to an hour – Matthieu came up and pointed out that I could also use the vocal mixer button to give my voice a bit of harmony.
All in all, it was a superb evening, a great way to digest my food – truffle pasta, confit de canard and baba au rhum, plus a good local red wine – and to discover this very cool bar, the music of Matthieu and Christian and his group. Because it turns out that Christian, the manager, has a band called The Running Birds, that plays at the pub sometimes – he is also doing a different duo thing tonight and tomorrow at the pub – and they are opening up the show this Saturday at the Nikaia for The Scorpions.
Can anything be much cooler than that for a first night in Nice where I expected nothing and inherited the world? The audience was appreciative, and kept asking me to play, so you cannot feel any better while playing than having that happen.
Got up real early – for me – to return to Paris from Barcelona yesterday, spent the day landing on earth, and then went out to the Coolin open mic where I had such a great evening last week with the great crowd. Nothing wrong with the crowd last night, but I frequently have a hard time adjusting back to home scenes after being in some far off land at “foreign” open mics and jams, and Coolin was no different last night. For me, it started slow. Then picked up, then turned into a really, really good Coolin. The thing is…
This open mic is getting so popular now that there are more and more musicians. I think last night was a record, with 20 or more musicians having signed up to play. And Etienne and Lena, the hosts, made sure that everyone who wanted to go up, did go up – although people were asking to play right up to 1 AM I think, so maybe not all did play.
I was suddenly surprised to find one of the Frangin duo brothers there, who introduced himself to me, and I had recognized him but forgotten that he had run an open mic at the Polly Magoo bar in St. Michel a couple of years ago. But as soon as I heard him sing and play, I remembered. He told me he was now hosting a new open mic, every second Thursday, at a bar called La Tête à l’Envers” in Vincennes, with the next one on 24 May.
I decided to go out on a limb and sing a song I hardly ever sing, since it really calls for me to be in a certain zone, and even then…. So I did it, A Change is Gonna Come. I was told it went well. I kept my eyes closed pretty much the whole song, so I couldn’t tell!
In any case, by the end of the night and after a long and good open mic, I felt firmly established once again in Paris. Onward I go….
I grew up with jazz in my home. My dad was a jazz lover, I ended up seeing live performances by people like Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Keith Jarrett. I heard and met Gene Krupa when I was seven, in a jazz club in Toronto. Later, I sent myself to concerts by people like Weather Report, and Jaco Pastorius in solo…. I have NEVER tried to play or sing jazz, considering it impossible. Last night over dinner with the beautiful and talented Marianne Bp, I had an important lesson in what makes up a jazz standard, and it actually changed my idea of what jazz is.
Basically, the wide-ranging conversation – Marianne writes poetic texts, songs and she is just finishing a book – ended up leading into talking about her debut music video that she just released a week or two ago. I told her again how much I loved the video, and how cool it looked and sounded. But I also sort of spoke aloud a thought I had on my mind for a long time, even before she did the video.
She had told me a couple of months ago that one of her projects was to take the lyrics from jazz standards and to put them to music and just completely turn them on their head, modernizing them and doing them her own way. The first video, in fact, was one of those songs: “Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good to You.”
She not only uses original lyrics in English, but she also throws in some French lyrics. The whole is very inventive, and I loved both the idea and the execution. So in dreaming aloud about it last night, and thinking about the potential of the song, I said, “One of the thoughts I had about this was that it seems too cool to have not been tried before, this idea of taking the lyrics of a jazz standard and doing it completely your own way, sort of improvising out something new.” And I was thinking that I was wondering just where that could fit in with the acceptance on behalf of jazz lovers and jazz musicians.
Before I said anything about that latter bit, she said: “Oh, but that is exactly what doing a jazz standard has always been about. Taking the old song and completely reinterpreting it and doing it your own way.”
Huh?
“The history of jazz music is made up of that precise thing: Taking the original and changing stuff, adding stuff, dropping stuff, doing your own music, improvising.”
Really?
“Yeah,” she said, “check it out on Wikipedia, if you want.”
So suddenly I realized that not only was Marianne right about that, but that her interpretation of Gee Baby was not only one that I loved and thought very cool and far out, but it was actually super acceptable as part of a tradition of making standards new and different and personal.
Thanks for the lesson Marianne, and for the music.
P.S. By the way, Marianne also told me some interesting things about the filming of the video. There are parts where she seems to be walking in an odd way. She is: She filmed herself and a chauffeur walking backwards, and then the reversed the film in the video so it actually appears as if they are walking forwards…but weirdly. You see the cars behind them all going backwards. Just as original as the sound of the music.
Last night I had a wonderful brief break from the usual whatever to go and listen to a friend, Baptiste Hamon, play a short show at a bar called the Red House, not far from the Bastille in Paris. I have mentioned Baptiste over the last couple of years occasionally on this blog under the name usually of his band Texas in Paris. Baptiste writes cool, Dylan-like, Guthrie-like, Townes Van Zandt-like songs with sober, sombre lyrics and strong emotion mixed with a highly distinctive voice and delivery. Last night I was invited to attend the launch concert for his cassette of new songs – yes cassette, tape cassette! – and what I found was a wonderful, interesting surprise. Baptiste has grown as an artist.
The launch was for a cassette he has put out on a very small independent label in France called Midnight Special Records. There was another singer at the Red House bar too, but I came in just as she sang her final words. So I missed that. But Baptiste went up as soon as I arrived so I caught his whole set. Suddenly, as I was being served a beer at the bar, I heard Baptiste singing in French. Wow! Before I had a chance to take the beer I whipped out my Zoom Q3HD recorder and began to shoot the song, since I thought it was a rare and unusual chance to catch Baptiste singing in French. Turned out I was wrong. During his set of six or so songs, Baptiste sang only one in English.
The rest were a new crop of songs he has written in the last few months, and they were a fabulous surprise. Basically, to try to sum it up, Baptiste writes excellent poetic songs in English. And he is far from the only non-native English speaker to do that. It is happening all over the world. But how much of the stuff really breaks out? The Tallest Man on Earth from Sweden is similar. Abba, not at all. Bands from all over the world try English. It just never seems to take off or doing anything much of importance, no matter how good it is.
But what I found Baptiste doing last night was to do EXACTLY what he has always done in English, but to do it in French. And that brought out even more originality in what is already an original writing and sound. Baptiste continues to sing about the U.S. dream he lives and follows, but he does it in a non-fake sentimental way and in his own language. There he was singing a ballad to Townes Van Zandt, for God’s sake.
Apparently the French think he has changed his style, and sounds closer to something like Jacques Brel or some other classic French singers. But for me this is the same Baptiste, he’s just finding more precision in what he sings, and its a step closer to who he really is than what was already something very fine before. Oh, and with these songs he is no longer calling himself Texas in Paris, but simply Baptiste W. Hamon….
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!
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….
I am still trying to catch my breath from last night’s concert at the legendary Bus Palladium in Paris. The praise I am about to give has nothing to do with the fact that I have known and watched the Burnin’ Jacks grow for three years, since they played at Earle Holmes’s open mic at the Lizard Lounge in Paris, and since I first started playing with their lead guitarist, Félix, at the same time. Just looking at any of the videos I put up on the site will strike out all thoughts of bias. No, I was blown away as was the audience in the main concert hall of the Bus Palladium, where so many of France’s stars – and international ones – have played since the place was founded several decades ago.
I kept thinking to myself throughout the evening about how I had watched this band evolve from the time it was just a few guys doing their acoustic rockin’ rollin’ at Earle’s to this full-fledged band with its own sound and a real rock ‘n roll attitude. There was something very Stones about it. Every time I see the Burnin’ Jacks they are better, more together. And the solo that Félix and Antoine did together, oh man, that was an absolute classic. Félix came out with some screeching, crying Hendrixy sounds and then suddenly Antoine joined him and the two did a little chatting back and forth with their guitars and then they segued into Antoine’s country-like song – a favorite of mine – called “Baby Please Turn Round.”
And Syd Alexander’s singing and front-man performance whipped the audience into a frenzy. Scared the hell out of me as he lept endlessly into the crowd and I feared for his safety.
There was even a fabulous drum solo – at the end of the video I put up here – and much, much more (as they say in crappy fanzines).
The room was really full of spectators – including many older ones – and they loved the show, playing along at every move.
But the Burnin’s Jacks were not the only ones I enjoyed or knew or had watched progress. There were two acts before the Burnin’ Jacks. It was the second of the two that I liked the most, and that was actually on the same level as the Burnin’ Jacks but in a completely different way. This was Niki Demiller, whom I have also known through the open mics in Paris for somewhere near three years. Niki, however, unlike the Burnin’ Jacks, has not been on precisely the same road of development since that time. Niki was the leader of a punk-like band a few years ago called The Brats. It was one of the first of the new wave of young bands in Paris in the last decade, and it had some pretty good breaks. I mean, crap, they once opened for Iggy and the Stooges at the Zenith in Paris!
But Niki in the last year or so has buried himself away to write new songs and transform himself into something completely new. He has become a kind of next in line of the tradition of the French crooner or music hall pop rocker, like a cross between Charles Aznavour, Johnny Hallyday, Jacques Dutronc and Eddie Mitchell. Last night was the first time I have seen him perform anything like these new songs with the backing of a full group. And it was very cool indeed. A cool stage persona and an original sound, and about as far from the punk rocker as you can image…yet with some of the edge and anger still there just as it should be.
Ollie Fury, who founded the open mic at the Ptit Bonheur la Chance, has moved to Berlin and hence has not run the most successful recent open mic in Paris for several weeks. The job at the Ptit Bonheur la Chance bar has now been taken over by his friend, Ollie Joe…. So if the names are similar, so is the open mic. It was quite a success last night, my first return in a few weeks. A number of the regulars were there, but there were some very interesting new acts, like the American-born Nigeria-raised KUKU, who returned to the U.S. to live many years ago. He is living for a while in Paris, and attending open mics. One of the high points of the evening was when KUKU and Ilan, of Israel, did an impromptu jam, that came out like a real bona fide “world music” vibe.
There was a very nice instrumental by Chardes and Nicolas, and Fabien Fabre presented one of his hit songs about a town in Essex, England.
I am in one of my perpetual rushes, so I cannot write that much more about the evening, and will let the videos do the talking. Unfortunately it is so dark in the bar where the open mic takes place that lighting is always a problem for the videos, and even worse, I was sitting in such a position last night that I had glare off the only light near the performance area.
Last night turned into another of those exceptional moments that only the open mic can do. From time to time the people who attend and the musicians who play in open mics get treated to the surprise visit of a star musician wanting to get back to their roots or maybe try out new material or just have some fun. They show up unannounced and play like anyone else at an open mic. After Johnny Borrell did that at my brunch at the Mecano back in February, the Razorlight singer and songwriter decided to try out the Bus Palladium last night.
Of course, the Bus Palladium is a legendary venue in Paris that is well worth the visit of any musician. As I wrote the first time I visited the Bus Palladium in April last year: Started in September 1965, it began by sending out buses to the kids in the suburbs to bring them in to see the shows, since they didn’t have much money to make the trek into Paris. It quickly became a real center of the rock and pop scene, and even Salvador Dali showed up one night with a bunch of his friends. The reputation grew outside France too, and in addition to performers such as Johnny Hallyday, Eddy Mitchell et les Chaussettes Noires, Julien Clerc, Alain Bashung, CharlElie Couture, Indochine, Etienne Daho, Stephan Eicher, Noir Désir, La Mano Negra and the Rita Mitsouko, it is also famous for the fact that Mick Jagger decided to celebrate one of his birthdays there.
Borrell attended my brunch in February thanks to his friendship with my friend Earle Holmes, and it was again with Earle that Borrell showed up last night at the Bus Palladium. He has been spending a lot of time in Paris lately, and is hard at work on new songs. I was pleased to lend him my guitar again for the several songs, his own and covers, that he played last night. The Bus has been doing an open mic for the last six months or so, on Tuesdays, and normally the musicians must send in a request to play along with links to their music. Obviously, Borrell needed no such introduction or examination….
He seemed more relaxed than when I saw him in February, and he played more songs. But there is something about the restaurant room of the Bus Palladium, something about the small stage and the lighting, that makes you want to continue playing on. It’s got some kind of 1960s or 70s cocktail lounge feel to it. It may not be the quietest or most attentive audience, but there are always a sufficient number of listeners to make it worth wanting to continue. I enjoyed making some videos of Johnny playing while trying to keep the portrait of Serge Gainsbourg as visible behind him as I could. The only problem was the lighting was so dark I had to set the Zoom Q3HD to night light, which cust a lot of the clear definition of the image.
Earlier, I did my songs and a few friends showed up – like Calvin McEnron and Olivier Rodriguez – and did theirs. I heard a few new people too. All in all it was a spectacularly wonderful evening.
