All posts by Jay

Musician, aesthete, lover of concord.
reviews and reports, togetherness

Listen carefully, you will hear this more than once

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I experienced something of a revelation this lunchtime.  I’m reading Norman Lebrecht’s book about the history of classical music recording, Maestros, Masterpieces & Madness, and found myself very moved by his descriptions of one hundred milestone recordings.  The importance of the people performing, the time and the place.

I found myself wanting to hear music performed, to share in the absolutely unique event that each performance of a work constitutes; a communication of the performer’s feelings to the audience.  As much as I want to hear the recordings that Norman Lebrecht compellingly chronicles, they can only make sense as part of a larger picture.  It seems impossible to know a piece of music by hearing only one performance of it – one interpretation – no matter how many times.  (One thing that recording has helped reveal to us is that, even though the performance we’re listening to may be in every way precisely the same as the last time we listened to it, we have changed and it is the change in us that is revealed, the recording acting as a mirror.  This role of art would have been historically fulfilled by painting, sculpture or architecture, music and drama having to wait for the advent of recording to be scrutinised in this way.)  It also strikes me as imperative that musicians perform pieces without music in front of them.  The physical ‘text’ between performer and audience seems an insurmountable barrier to true communication, rendering the attempt as ineffectual as an actor standing on stage and reading from their copy of the script.  It is usual and acceptable for ensembles of instrumental musicians to use music, for example string quartets or orchestras.  I’d be interested to experience performances by ensembles who give concerts without any music stands.  (Choirs are not generally permitted this indulgence although choir pieces do tend to be shorter than the average chamber music movement.)

Listening to recordings and going to concerts needs to be practiced and not just reserved for special occasions.  I very much enjoy reading novels and it strikes me that I probably spend far more of my time doing that than attentively listening to music.  Culture is not just what is around us, it is the things that we spend our time doing.  Just because I did a degree in music it doesn’t automatically follow that I am ‘musically cultured’.  Something of a revelation, indeed…

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beautiful minds

Sound admonishment

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Back in 2004 I went to a Bill Hicks tribute night in a pub in Temple Bar. They showed a couple of Hicks’s recorded stand-up shows as well as some documentary and interview material and we all sat – on the ground, mostly – and watched and laughed. I don’t keep a diary but I’ll occasionally note down something that has an impact on me. That night I wrote one sentence: “Play from your fucking heart!”.

A significant thread of Hicks’s material stemmed from his love of music and his disgust at the cynically marketed stuff that is presented as music in the mainstream. He screamed that sentence with utter conviction and it shook me. I couldn’t sit back and chuckle smugly, as I could when he vilified people in advertising or politicians. This was me, as a musician, that he was raging at.

I read a post today by another great cultural commentator with a love of music, Seth Godin. He urges us, with less of Hicks’s white heat but with no less passion, to Sing It. “If,” he writes, “you’re going to go to all the trouble of learning the song and performing it, then SING IT.  Sing it loud and with feeling and like you mean it.”

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any requests...?

My first podcast

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I played a set at The Song Room last week, 23 July, and thought I’d record the same songs for the website.

I did a bit of talking between the songs, which I edited today…quite an illuminating exercise! Lots of little vocal clicks, tics, habits and halations. (Unfortunately for my alliterative ambition, ‘halations’ isn’t actually the blanket term for exhalations and inhalations, instead having something to do with photography. If anyone knows what the word is – if one exists at all – for breath noises, be they in or out, please share.)

Click on the link on the ‘Any requests…?’ page to listen to the podcast. If you like what you hear, please consider throwing a few coins my way by clicking on the ‘Make a donation’ button.

Let me know what you think of the podcast, so I can improve things for the next one.

reviews and reports

The Song Room, 16 July

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The Song Room enjoyed its second outing tonight in its new home in The Globe on South Great Georges Street. The player-managers of the weekly singer/songwriter night, Brian Brody and Hamlet Sweeney, were joined on the bill by three other acts: Farrell Spence, Lisa McLaughlin and Max Greenwood.

Farrell Spence opened the evening with a beautiful set of songs that gently drew the crowd into her tales of growing up in Canada. Despite having only been in Ireland for two weeks, Farrell has obviously been busy networking and described meeting John Spillane in her chosen home of Cork: “you’re that singer from that far away land” was his suitably poetic introduction. I found this delightful animation, done by a company called 9mm film, to one of John’s songs, ‘We’re going sailing’.

Augmenting Ms Spence’s open-tuned guitar with perfectly-judged accompaniment on a second acoustic guitar was Eoin Regan. Farrell’s debut album, A Town Called Hell, has found great critical acclaim and can be bought on iTunes and CD Baby. I’m very glad of this, as she left before I could get a copy off her! If you like your music in the room and your heart in your mouth, get thee to The Cobblestone on 9 August.

She played: ‘A town called hell’; ‘I drink’ (by Mary Gauthier); ‘Boys like you and girls like me’; ‘Wayfaring stranger’; ‘You can sleep on my floor’.

Next up was Brian Brody and harp player Junshi Murakami. The pair met through the Grafton Street busking scene, surely one of the most interesting (and romanticised) in the world, and tonight may be the last time they play together. We listened with appreciation as the duo played the dynamic arrangements they’d crafted together: ‘Before I dream’, ‘Rise’, ‘Carousel’, a new song called (for the time being) ‘Forbidden love’. They finished with Brian’s amazing rendition of Tom Waits’s heart-wrenching ballad ‘Martha’. The way Brian makes the song his own really is a treat and is certainly one of my personal highlights of the Song Room series so far.

Hamlet and I played next, starting with the ballsy ‘I am a man’ – a song I’m really looking forward to working on with a band. It has a great swagger. I switched to clarinet for crowd favourites ‘The Una Molloy hangover song’ and ‘Boogie man’. Last week we debuted the dirty skank version of ‘El Capitane’ – featuring the rather nice Organ 2 sound on the P-200 – and it went down well again this week. Another one that’ll be great fun with a band. ‘Buy this song’ followed with its tongue in cheek humour and then ‘Mr Slim’. We finished the set with ‘Sunshine’, a song which is becoming more apt as this dismal summer rolls on…

A singer who I was impressed by last time she played the Song Room, Lisa McLaughlin, played next with her versatile guitarist Anthony Gibney. Lisa has a great voice and has a great collection of songs, from which she treated us to the following: ‘Fiddly song’; ‘Lucky seven’; ‘Strange but true’; ‘Hey you, I like your jumper’; ‘These days’; ‘Bubble’. Two of these in particular, ‘Lucky seven’ and ‘These days’ have really great choruses and made me wish I could hear them with a full band arrangement, especially some big harmonies!

The night was (this week and last) unfortunately plagued with gremlins in the sound system. Hopefully this can be ironed out by next week (not least for the slightly selfish reason that I’m doing a solo set!).

The thing that’s often noticeable about songwriters who accompany themselves on piano (rather than the guitar often synonymous with the title) is that the songs they write tend to have more interesting harmony. Max Greenwood reminded me of this with his virtuosic set. Variously calling to mind Bruce Hornsby, Randy Newman, Paul McCartney (especially with his final number, ‘The long goodbye’) and Aqualung, Max served up some of the tracks from his self-released debut album, ‘In The Blood’. I bought a copy from him – Brian Brody was full of praise for it – and am very impressed indeed. Again, you can buy it on iTunes or from his website. A few of the songs resonated with me in their dealing with some of the searching questions of purpose which seem to arise in the third decade of life and Max conjures some beautiful images while providing endlessly delightful piano, supplemented by a tight band that obviously understand the jazzy sound he’s after. It was apparently quite rare for him to play a gig on his own, so I count it a privilege to have heard him play the songs raw for us at The Song Room. (There’s a solo version of ‘In the blood’ and the marvellously kinetic ‘Frozen still’, recorded live on RTE radio, on Max’s MySpace site.)

If tonight is in any way indicative of the kind of roster we might expect from this Wednesday soiree, then I am looking forward with glee to what’s to follow in subsequent weeks.

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any requests...?, this freelancing business, what I'm up to

virtual busking

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I’ve started a new page on the site, ‘Any requests…?’, up there at the top right. The idea is that people (you?) might send in a request for a song you would like me to record and I’ll put it up on the page. I sent a note to my fans on Facebook (all two dozen of them – legends every one 🙂 – follow the Facebook link on the left and become one today!) and got a couple of interesting songs suggested within a day or two. Please keep the ideas coming and let me know what you think of the ones I’ve already posted. Don’t worry about being critical: I have to approve the comments before they appear on the site anyway!

If you do like the songs then please consider throwing some virtual coins into my virtual PayPal guitar case. If you don’t want to do that then please tell your friends about the site, link to it on your blog, your Facebook site etc.

Keep up to date with the updates to the blog by subscribing to the RSS feed (button at the top left). I keep a folder called ‘blogs’ on my Firefox toolbar, so I can quickly check the blogs I subscribe to.

what I'm up to

Never a dull moment…

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I sometimes look back on my diaries from my student days (sadly only appointment diaries: I’m not a memoir person…yet) and marvel at the sheer variety of things I used to do. Well, since beginning life as a freelancer, it sometimes feels quite similar and my diary for this weekend was pleasingly mottled with some interesting engagements.

So, on Saturday, Jen and I (along with Margaret O’Shea, a fellow New Dublin Voice, and her friend John Wade) went in to a TV studio to take part as backing vocalists in the broadcast of a music segment for a show. I hadn’t done this kind of work before and it was good fun and actually pretty challenging.  The song was a track called ‘The way old friends do’. I didn’t know the song before – it’s an old ABBA number – and my opinion about the song has fluctuated wildly in the short time of my acquaintance with it. I just watched a video of ABBA singing it and it’s rather poignant watching them perform together.

This morning I played keyboard at the service in St George and St Thomas (Church of Ireland) church on Cathal Brugha Street. The regular organist was away and I agreed to dep(utise) for him although, not being an organist, I used the church’s Roland keyboard. I grew up in the Church of Ireland, in fact the minister of St George and St Thomas was coincidentally a curate at my church in the North when I was a teenager. I enjoyed the warm hospitality of the people and the familiar liturgy. We sang ‘Great is thy faithfulness’ at the end of the service and, despite being few in number, the congregation made a joyful noise!

links, reviews and reports

gig at Urban Soul (1jul08)

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I’m just back from playing at Urban Soul, a new event for teenagers that sees them working on community projects in some of the less salubrious areas of Dublin in the daytimes and coming together to reflect and chill out in the evenings. The night ends with a kind of a talkshow/café gig and I was asked to play tonight, their first night.

I did a half-hour set, a mix of my own songs and covers:

I’ve linked to different videos of the covers there. Check out the Guillemots and Bon Iver ones – they’re from a French site called La Blogotheque which features interesting performances by bands on their ‘take-away shows’. The Coldplay one is a couple of guys I found on YouTube doing a great job of covering this, the cracking title track from the band’s latest album; it’s really lodged itself in my head. Apparently it’s the first Billboard Hot 100 #1 by a British rock band since EMF’s ‘Unbelieveable’ in 1991. Good old Wikipedia, eh?!

composers, New Dublin Voices and other choral singing

warming up the pipes

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The triennial Pipeworks festival is in full flow at the moment – the Great is coupled to the pedals and all the stops are out (or something). I don’t really know a huge amount about the pipe organ but what little knowledge I do possess leaves me in awe of really good organists. I’ve had the privilege of witnessing a number of really excellent players – usually it’s difficult to actually see what’s going on because they’re up in the organ loft, obscured from the vision of those below. (I just had a random image of Superman III – you know the big computer they build to take over the world? Now I’m not saying that such megalomaniacal tendencies are lying dormant just below the surface of organ designers/players but just compare…)

The picture on the left is the magnificent organ at St Giles cathedral in Edinburgh (city of my alma mater) and the image on the right is, of course, the aforementioned supercomputer from Superman III.

Anyway, there are lots of chances left to experience the rare pleasure that is the skilful and artful manipulation of the manuals, stops and pedals of a top-class pipe organ. This year is also the centenary of the birth of Olivier Messiaen, perhaps the most important composer of organ music of the twentieth century. A synchronicity of cosmic proportions such as this should not be overlooked. Here’s what’s available for your listening pleasure:

tonight (thurs 26jun) 9pm Saint Patrick’s cathedral: David Leigh plays Messiaen’s Livre de Saint-Sacrement

fri 27jun

  • 1.15pm St Mary’s pro-cathedral: David Leigh plays Messiaen’s Les corps glorieux
  • 8pm National Concert Hall: symphony orchestra plays Messiaen’s L’Ascension, Poulenc’s Organ Concerto (with soloist Thomas Trotter), and Faure’s Requiem (with the choirs of St Pat’s and St Mary’s). This is a hugely talented bunch of musicians gathering to play really fantastic music.

sat 28jun

  • 3pm City Hall: New Dublin Voices and three other choirs do a concert in the opulent surroundings (and lovely acoustic) of the city hall, at the top of Parliament Street. Each choir will do some music on their own and we’re also going to be joining together to sing some pieces. It’s free, so please come along and delight your eardrums for as long as you feel like 🙂

sun 29jun

  • 5pm Saint Patrick’s cathedral: the festival finale; “…the presentation of a Vespers in seventeenth century Lutheran manner. With massed choral forces, brass accompaniment and the glorious acoustic of Ireland’s largest cathedral, this event promises a rousing conclusion to the festival.” We’re singing at this, too. The Lutheran church in its hey-day was the absolute bees knees in terms of music and spectacle. Songs of Praise just doesn’t cut it compared to this! If the stones of the world’s cathedrals could talk, they’d ask for this kind of church service. Come along and rejoice with the stones of St Pat’s as they get a proper pampering session!

more info (prices, telephone booking numbers etc.) can be found at the Pipeworks website