Music in the City. . .

What a great city this is for music - of all types -  as my excursions last week proved.  This is a picture of the Liverpool Philharmonic - a gorgeous Art Deco building with great acoustics and a lovely cafe in the basement.   

I've been to a few classical concerts already but last Monday I headed there for something completely different.  Last month, the Philharmonic had a promotion, offering £1 tickets for several of their upcoming shows. I was more than happy to line up for three hours, and one of the gigs I jumped at was  the Mugenkyo Taiko Drummers - a Scottish group that practices Japanese Taiko drumming.

It was an exhilarating performance and what a workout for the drummers! At one point several were sitting on the floor with their feet wrapped around medium sized drums and basically doing sit-ups while drumming.  You could definitely see the grimaces on their faces.  I loved the energy and the choreography - it was all just fantastic.

Wednesday night I headed off to the Capstone Theatre, part of Liverpool Hope University, for a night with jazz singer Stacey Kent.  I previously wrote about my appreciation for her here and was thrilled when I saw she was coming to Liverpool.

She had a great band and it was a very enjoyable night with a mixture of American songbook classics, a bit of French and Serge Gainsbourg, a little bit of bossa nova, and the premiere of yet more quirky sad songs written for her by her husband Jim Tomlinson and the writer Kazuo Ishiguro.

Then last night it was back to the Philharmonic for a concert I've been so looking forward to.  Listening to this band completely brings me back to my university days and they were just fantastic live.  One of the best concerts I've ever been too - it was impossible to get to sleep last night, I was so wired.

A really nice surprise was the opening act, Blueflint.  I'd never heard of them before but immediately fell in love. They are a five person band from Edinburgh with two female singers and lots of banjos, bass and fiddles.  They made me nostalgic for bands from Nova Scotia and the East Coast - foot stomping music, great lyrics and songs about boats and water.  And with the purchase of their CDs you got a free tea towel!  Now how often does THAT happen at a rock concert?

Waterfront Concert. . .

Liverpool is definitely a city that likes its music and this weekend I went to check out their Music by the Waterfront concert. I would have loved to have been there Friday night when the Liverpool Philharmonic was playing but couldn't make it, so stopped by on Saturday for a varied line-up of different types of popular music. The venue and the weather were perfect - they set the stage up right down on the waterfront between the Mersey and the "Three Graces" - the trio of beautiful buildings that are Liverpool landmarks. I was dancing along with the Royal Liver building to my right. I was impressed with the crowds - no jostling, no pushing, it was very easy to get a spot with a decent vantage point, and even though wine and beer (and fish and chips even!) were readily available, apart from a bit of litter, everyone was well behaved and just enjoying themselves in the evening sunshine (it doesn't get dark until close to 10pm here, which I love; I know I'll pay for it with very short days in the winter).

I wasn't familiar with a lot of the bands but it was the head liner that I really came for - the opera/pop singer Russell Watson. I have a number of his CDs but it was great to hear that powerful voice live. His last song  was Nessum Dorma and as he hit the high notes at the end, the fireworks went off.  As the Brits like to say - it was bloody brilliant.

WWI Knitting Songs. . .

I don't know where she unearthed all these wonderful songs, but Melanie Gall, professional chanteuse and half of the Savvy Girls Podcast, has just released a CD of WWI knitting songs from Canada, the U.S., Britain and France, and it's just marvellous.  I have numerous recordings of WWI songs, mostly those sung by soldiers or rousing patriotic ditties, but I've never come across any of these songs before. There is a wide range in style - some are humourous, some sentimental, and some just get me tapping my wooden dpns along to the music.  My three favourites are the gossipy "Knocking at the Knitting Club", the motivational "Gertie Get On With Your Knitting" and the catchy "And Then She'd Knit, Knit, Knit" which could only be Canadian with the following lyrics:

"She even knits while out in his canoe. She knits while Billy tries to bill and coo. . ."

 Knitting All The Day is currently available on iTunes or CD Baby but she hopes to get it distributed in yarn shops as well.

Treat yourself - this is so much fun to listen to!

It Had To Come Eventually. . .

We've had our first blast of winter snow and the morning commute was extremely slow.  These are the days when I'm glad to take the bus and have someone else do the driving.  I had my knitting with me (and I'm working on something really colourful - it's just a joy to look at) and my iPOD and there was no more appropiate music to listen to than Kate Bush's latest album, 50 Words For Snow.  I particularly like the title track which, not surprisingly, is more or less a list of 50 different words for the white stuff, set to music. But while Kate does the counting, Stephen Fry actually says the words in all his lovely British pluminess.  My word for snow (not part of the list) is simply: Yuck.

Two Great Musical Collaborations. . .

I spent most of the weekend knitting, alternating between two projects that I was pretty excited about.  And then on Sunday night, unhappy with the look of , and frustrated with the number of mistakes I'd made with the other, I "frogged" them both.  When I first heard this term, I thought it was the knitting community being polite instead of using another "f" expletive, as in "I really F*&;%#*ed this up!" but no, it refers to tearing apart your work, i.e. "rip it, rip it".  Sigh.   If nothing else, knitting is teaching me lots of patience.

The other thing it allows me to do is take the time to really listen closely to CDs. While I  love my iPod, I have rarely bought music from iTunes, always preferring to browse among the ever-shrinking aisles of actual CDs and loading them on afterwards. I like to look at the album artwork, stumble unexpectedly over something that looks interesting, and when I do buy a CD, I like reading the physical booklet with the lyrics and liner notes. I rarely know what I'll end up taking home and that's half the fun.  And that's how I recently acquired these two really enjoyable collaborations.

I have a previous Stacey Kent CD titled Raconte-Moi which I discovered in a listening booth in a classical music shop in Oakville,  and I really liked how clear she sang in French. So I already was a fan of her voice and light jazz style. Breakfast on the Morning Tram quite frankly enticed me with the song titles; it seemed to be a romantic album all about travelling.  So imagine my immense delight on opening the accompanying booklet to discover that the lyricist on four of the songs is none other than Kazuo Ishiguro!  Now I shouldn't be too surprised that he has a musical yen - his last collection of short stories, Nocturnes, were all centered around a musical theme.  And in his lyrics, he continues to tell stories. "The Ice Hotel" is about a couple who reject the tropics for their holiday in favour of an ice hotel because they really need to talk about their relationship.  "I Wish I Could Go Travelling Again" is about a woman yearning for the joys of travel but knowing that if she does, it will only lead to painful memories.  "Breakfast on the Morning Tram" is an almost surreal song about a city tram that serves a full buffet breakfast and cures a broken heart as well.  And  in "So Romantic", a woman regretfully remembers how she and her previous lover would disagree on what was really romantic. The music, by Jim Tomlinson, is reminiscent of those great songs from the 1920s or 30s. Ironically, he did not write the lyrics to the song "Never Let Me Go", which I like to think has been included because Stacey Kent has a wicked sense of humour.   It's a really lovely album - wistful, playful, joyful - and I hope Ishiguro continues with this second career.

And then there is Hush, a terrific pairing of Bobby McFerrin with Yo-Yo Ma as the two cover a lot of different musical styles from classical to lullaby to even a hoedown.  Their rendition of "Ave Maria" is incredible - hearing McFerrin's soaring voice is really akin to listening to something very special and almost sacred.

Happy Canada Day . . .

. . . and Canada Post now has Bryan Adams on a postage stamp. Love it!

Of Liza and Huxley and a Real New World. . .

I was browsing the newspapers a couple of weeks ago, rolling my eyeballs at the mediocre reviews of Britney Spears' concert and wondering why anyone would shell out so much money to basically watch someone lipsynch on a jumbotron. And then I turned the page and there was an ad for Liza Minnelli's concert and I thought well, now there's someone real - she'll be belting out every word herself, backed by a great band and in a venue where you can actually see the star without having to squint at a huge video screen.

I immediately went and ordered a ticket. And how glad I am that I did. The concert was last night and it was terrific. What incredible energy! I was exhausted by intermission, just from watching her. She was funny, gracious and the power in her voice was incredible. I feel very privileged to be able to say I've now heard her sing "Cabaret" live. And I teared up, both when she sang about watching her mother perform, and during the encores where in complete contrast to all the flamboyant, powerful numbers, she beautifully sang "Everytime We Say Good-bye" with just a piano accompaniment. During her last encore, she was completely alone on the stage, sequins replaced by a t-shirt, high heels shoes kicked off, lit by a lone spotlight and then, "I'll be seeing you in all the old, familiar places. . . "

Of course another great reason to go to Roy Thomson Hall, is to check out their music store in the lobby where I always find the most unusual stuff. Last night's find was a 1956 radio dramatization of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where Huxley himself plays the narrator, and with an original score by Bernard Herrman (which is really why I bought the CD - Herrman is an incredible composer doing the scores for lots of Hitchcock movies such as Vertigo and North by Northwest, but also Citizen Kane, Fahrenheit 451 and so on). I've only listened to a bit of it, but I'm enjoying it so far. Huxley's voice has an old-fashioned, but elegant school teacher tone to it and the score is like a mysteriously sinister lullaby. In the accompanying booklet, they quote from a Time article describing the challenges of getting the sound effects just right:

"It took three radio sound men, a control-room engineer and five hours of hard work to create the sound that was heard for less than 30 seconds on the air. The sound consisted of a ticking metronome, tom-tom beats, bubbling water, air hose, cow moo, boing! (two types) oscillator, dripping water (two types) and three kinds of wine glasses clicking against each other. Judiciously blended and recorded on tape, the effect was still not quite right. Then the tape was played backward with a little echo added. That did it. The sound depicted the manufacturing of babies in the radio version of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World."

The notes also talk about how this production was an attempt to revive CBS's Columbia Workshop which had produced a lot of experimental radio drama in the late 1930s before television arrived to lure the audience away. I however, am going backwards and rediscovering the joys of radio. I've just recently cancelled my cable tv, deciding that there was nothing worth watching that was worth the $500 annual fee and I was wasting far too much time on my couch, lazily sucked into persuing inane programming. So my television set now exists solely to allow me to watch DVDs. I don't think I'll miss it. The older I get, the more I crave real experiences - theatre, live music, travelling, walking - and if I'm lazing on my couch, I want to be accompanied by a good book, or be listening to great music. Or perhaps now, a radio drama.

Easy on the ears. . .

Feeling a little blah this January? Tired of all the dull, cloudy, cold days?

Well, while waiting for the movie to be widely released, get a copy of the Easy Virtue soundtrack. Based of course on the Noel Coward play, the CD is full of upbeat, toe-tapping songs from the era, many of course by Coward. There are also more contemporary songs such as Tom Jones' Sexbomb and Billy Ocean's When the Going Gets Tough, that are orchestrated as though they had originated from the 1920s. The CD opens with a not-bad rendition of Mad About the Boy sung by Jessica Biel who stars in the film along with Ben Barnes, Colin Firth, and Kristin Scott Thomas (the latter two don't sing, but Colin does have a speaking line in the last song). One of the tracks is the instrumental tango that Colin and Jessica dance to near the end of the movie. I saw (and really liked) the film at the Toronto Film Festival last fall, and let me tell you - that tango was very hot. Lots of female sighs in the audience.

I'll definitely be seeing the film again when it opens - in the meantime, listen to the soundtrack. I guareentee an immediate mood improvement.

A Glamourous Night with Novello. . .

I'm feeling rather wistful this morning. Last night I attended a concert by the Toronto Operetta Society - an evening devoted to the songs of Ivor Novello, many of which I had never heard before. I absolutely adore the music from this period, and Novello's tunes (like Noel Coward's) are so beautiful and romantic and catchy too. Some of the selections such as "And Her Mother Came Too" or "I Can Give You the Starlight", I was familiar with from the soundtrack of the movie Gosford Park where the fetching Jeremy Northam plays Novello and does wonderful renditions of his songs. And on the whole, I think much of Novello's work sounds better sung by men rather than soprano women - the male vocal range seems to suit the style, and the articulation of the lyrics is often improved at a lower octave (although one of the best male singers from last night embarrassingly forgot the words to not one, but two songs and actually had to start one number over again from the beginning. He recovered well but one was worried about him every time he appeared on stage - I think he did a cramming session over the intermission; no flubs in the second act) Still, many of the selections were taken from Novello musicals (Glamourous Night, Perchance to Dream, The Dancing Years) and written specifically for a female soprano and certainly "A Violin Began to Play" or "Love is My Reason" works in that regard. And it doesn't matter who is singing "Keep the Home Fires Burning" or "We'll Gather Lilacs" - hearing those two songs always chokes me up. There were CDs available for sale in the lobby and I bought this compilation sung by soprano Marilyn Hill Smith. It's very enjoyable to listen to, but I'll also be searching out collections recorded in Novello's lifetime.

Novello was also a screen idol, and another of my weekend purchases was The Ultimate Hitchcock Collection - a 6 DVD set of twenty of Hitchcock's earlier works, including many of his silent movies. One of these is 1926's The Lodger - starring Ivor Novello -which I'm really looking forward to viewing as I've never seen any of his films (Novello that is, not Hitchcock). The set also includes the 1928 film of Noel Coward's Easy Virtue which will be fun to compare with the recent version I saw at the Toronto Film Festival. This was a fairly cheap set given how many movies are on it, and so I wasn't surprised to see that the prints are quite grainy and scratchy - Criterions these are not - though they are still easily watchable. And it's filled with tons of interesting stuff I've never seen and which doesn't appear to be available in better quality DVDs. There's a 1930 version of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock (he's one of my favourite Irish playwrights). And 1939's Jamaica Inn, based on Daphne du Maurier's novel is also included. Then there's Secret Agent (1936) based loosely on W. Somerset Maugham's spy novel Ashenden, starring John Gielgud and Peter Lorre. Not to be confused with Joseph Conrad's Secret Agent which is also included under its 1936 film title Sabotage. What a bargain at $25.00 - enough goodies to keep me occupied for weeks.