Easter Saturday

Easter Saturday evening, and I am home alone, wrapped in joy. This is my Easter holiday, this evening with its extra hour; I’ll be working solidly through the rest of the 4-day break. Drew is at the Cockatoo Island music festival, Eugene is coming tomorrow. There are a thousand things I could be doing, about 12 of them urgent, but I am doing nothing much.

I’m kind of flitting from this to that, half an hour each of all the things I like to do most days and haven’t had much time for… stretch, sing, potter, cook… On the spur of the moment, I do some tidying and come across the pile of stuff to go to charity. It provides me with my own entirely impulsive, secular observance of the spirit of Easter: I pick up the two old directors chairs and take them down to the footpath. The air has just turned cold, so it’s a good time to get rid of last year’s winter discards (I had a clean-out). I take down a bag filled with big bright daggy old jumpers, warm ones, and pants that don’t really fit and old CDs (don’t ask) and godknows what else, shoes and toys and pretty things I don’t want. I throw in some plastic carry bags so people can take just a few things if they choose. It’ll all disappear within 24 hours.

Tomorrow morning I really should sweep the front steps… sometime between writing up my Narelle Benjamin interview for Dance Australia, completing the song analysis assignment that was due last week and studying the copyright stuff for next week’s test. And learning the lyrics for Divinyls’ Love School and Waifs’ The Lighthouse before Eug gets here around 6. Monday’s just as full; I could do with more than one extra hour this weekend.

Good Friday

coal country

Originally uploaded by Illuminata.

Good Friday – a lovely, crisp autumn day, and I’m journeying south along the coast to Woonona, about an hour and a half out of Sydney. My tafe teammate James lives here, commuting to town three days a week, but today I’m commuting to him to begin recording my song. The train passes through green valleys, bushland, seaside hamlets and the occasional old coal silo rigged for rail transport; the view ranges from idyllic to panoramic but the train windows are dirty and my photos can’t do it justice.

returning…
The recording process is simultaneously stimulating and draining. You’d think a day was enough to complete a 4-minute song, but it’s not even close. By the time you factor in travel time, meal time, setting up and faffing round time, the public holiday train timetable and my commitment to dinner with Drew’s folks who eat at 6, there was only a couple of hours real work time left. We talked through the parts and the dynamics I want, James got a clearer feel for the song and we set bpm rates for the 2 parts. I chose which string sounds I wanted, we sorted the keyboard strings wash for the prelude verse and I practiced the keyboard string solo. We managed to get guide vocal and guitar lines down and burnt me a CD without the vocal so I have a practice track, but are we even halfway through? I don’t think so.

*sigh*

The scary part is that the time we have left to complete this project is rapidly shrinking, but what I have to get done in that time seems to keep on expanding. I honestly can’t see it all coming together…

but it’s always like that at this stage, isn’t it?

the rain in me

it’s a grey and rainy day, dark inside the house, meditative with its sodden silences and softly beating water. i have put in 5 hours at the computer, uploading to flickr, blogging, answering emails. i should’ve started a vocal workout half an hour ago but i’m reluctant to break the spell of lassitude and quiet cast by the weather… i have errands to do that require leaving the house, putting on proper clothes, venturing out in the rain… maybe tomorrow.

a day for procrastination, perturbation, masturbation…

lilo and stitch

drew got a dvd player for xmas and now his friends keep offering him films from their libraries, only too many people watch too much terrible tripe.

we just saw something lent to us by one of his work colleagues, a woman who likes ‘chick flicks’ – but she also offered the films her husband’s into: action movies, the more shooting the better. drew said the best of the entire collection was lilo and stitch… so that’s what we watched.

and hoo-wee what a trip. what zooming, soaring, virtuosic animation, what engaging and plausible characters, what a touching inclusiveness this tale of misfits finding something to belong to brings to disney’s shamelessly normative agenda. ‘family means no-one gets left behind,’ they kept saying… what shite, what dreadful, untruthful, sententious, misleading codswallop – but i almost bought it, so impressive was the medium.

tina harrod at side-on cafe

through bruce reid, head of the tafe course i’m doing and master slide guitarist, i’ve come to know a few other luminaries of the australian music scene – well, the blues/soul/roots/jazz/country part of it, at least – and one treasured discovery is tina harrod. louise, simone and i went to her gig at the side-on cafe, one of sydney’s favourite jazz venues and a longstanding ‘arts complex’ (gallery and venue) with a history of supporting the local live music/arts scene. alas, in heading about the gig we also heard that side-on is to close soon, as its most profitable night, the sydney improvised music association, is about to move to a new venue and without it, the cafe cannot go on. so not only will this be my first visit to side-on, it’ll also be my last.

we came to this shabby but elegant place on parramatta rd where so many great acts have played. there was no music playing and the toilets needed cleaning. the service was occasional and the food wasn’t good or even properly cooked – and this is where you go in sydney to see the best soul singer in the country. it was a sad end to a venture as noble as side-on.

happily, though, tina was fabulous. for more about her, go to the description from the first time i saw her, with the field at the vanguard.

ray

eug and i went to see ‘ray’, a film of ray charles’s life starring jamie foxx in an award-winning performance… a research project, really, more in the need-to-know than love-his-music way. we’re not big blues fans – eug even less than i, but out of respect and curiosity…

a good film, a fine film, and musically rich, as one of my tafe teachers said in recommending it, though I fear some of the subtleties of mr charles’s particular innovations were lost on anyone who wasn’t a blues and soul afficionado – ‘yo’ cain’t mix gospel with rhythm n blues!’ cried his opponents, utterly scandalised. but i can barely separate them… it was a pre-motown world, which is a cultural map near unimaginable to us post-sixties kids.

so what can i draw from this evocation of that evolution? do i, in my own teenage churchgoing, hymn-harmonising distant history, have a ‘pre-motown’ era of my own? and am i moving towards a synthesis between it and my pop/punk/grunge/indie real-world influences?

we can only hope so. if you have a god feel free to pray. if, like ray charles and me, you know we are our own only ultimate authority, i’d be honoured if you’d wish, will, make a small sacrifice (don’t kill anything; i recommend giving away some money, preferably directly to someone in need) or cast a spell in my favour.

i promise to use any powers i might gain only for good.

the field at the vanguard

the field at the vanguard

Originally uploaded by Illuminata.

Wednesday night a few of us from TAFE went to see our head teacher play at The Vanguard, a hip venue in King Street, Newtown. There were fewer of us there than I expected, maybe because of the gap in age and musical taste between the faculty and the majority of the class, maybe because of the cost and the impracticalities for 18-year-olds getting around this sprawling city at night – dying train system and all. Anyway, I thought it looked like a good night so I went, and it was.

Bruce’s band is called The Field, and this event was the launch of The Field’s second album. It’s kinda rootsy, moody, spacious blues – the kind of music you hear when a bunch of first-rate musicians no longer in the heat of youth get together to immerse themselves in the magic that doesn’t die. God they were good. I’m not going to gush about Bruce’s seductive slide guitar cos he’ll probably read this as part of my assessment and think I’m brown-nosing :)

But I wouldn’t be a good student if I didn’t tell you that the album, News From Home, is out on Rufus Records and available thru Universal.

I found myself spellbound by the guest vocalists, Darren Percival and Tina Harrod. I was absorbing and analysing their vocal work as best I could but I was also intrigued by their ‘presence’… a singer/frontperson is so naked up there… if you don’t mount a full-frontal assault on your audience you really have to be prepared to be utterly visible in your weakness as well as your strength. The balance has to come out visibly in your favour obviously, but that won’t enable you to hide your vulnerabilities. He, for example, has a charming ungainliness, a hint of the goof about him, though he’s a warm honey-voiced crooner, and she – I’ve heard her spoken of (and not by Bruce, who might be biased) as the best blues singer in Australia, and she did not disappoint; she’s amazing. But time is ruthless even on the beautiful, and there is tension between that and some part of her that is still a please-love-me little girl. How I wish I could talk with this degree of understanding about their respective vocal techniques… I watched for her breathing and couldn’t see a thing. That puzzles me – must remember to ask my vocal teacher. I learnt something about what’s possible just listening to her, but how she does it… that’s still mysterious. But I bought the CD and I’ll listen again to the song she sings on it, and again… searching for that control, that freedom, that power that is so much more than volume.

lest we forget

geometry of death

Originally uploaded by deborah lattimore.

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

TS Eliot

Today is the 2nd anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

about gigging…

today i was given the lead part in a class version of ‘killing me softly’ – teacher on keyboards, 3 guitars, drums, and 5 other singers on harmonies – and afterwards michael (brown, teacher) said as we put the gear away in the side room that i should be gigging, i should be getting out there. i said yeah, i’d love to, but i’ve given up on the trauma of trying to organise the goddamn things, how do you do it? so we talked about ways and means, with contribution from andrew, the drummer, who plays regular originals gigs with a band called joey rocket and also does session work. michael said networking is essential and he’d give me some numbers of people who organise bands and gigs, but they both also said that once you get it rolling the gigs come to you…

boy am i looking forward to that.

about gigging…

today i was given the lead part in a class version of ‘killing me softly’ – teacher on keyboards, 3 guitars, drums, and 5 other singers on harmonies – and afterwards michael (brown, teacher) said as we put the gear away in the side room that i should be gigging, i should be getting out there. i said yeah, i’d love to, but i’ve given up on the trauma of trying to organise the goddamn things, how do you do it? so we talked about ways and means, with contribution from andrew, the drummer, who plays regular originals gigs with a band called joey rocket and also does session work. michael said networking is essential and he’d give me some numbers of people who organise bands and gigs, but they both also said that once you get it rolling the gigs come to you…

boy am i looking forward to that.