Two nights in Gateshead
Nov. 5th, 2010 10:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustAfter a lean period in the summer, the Sage's autumn programme was full of things we wanted to hear, and it started this week with two consecutive evenings which were about as different as it is possible to be.
Wednesday was Salsa Celtica: I'd heard fragments of their music on the radio, and liked it enough to try a little more. Besides, Julie Fowlis was joining them as a guest.
The experiment was interesting, but not entirely successful. I felt I was hearing two bands, the salsa band and the (mainly Scottish) traditional musicians, who had somehow collided and liked the result enough, not to start working together but to keep on colliding. This is probably just because I'm not sufficiently attuned to salsa to hear what the two elements contributed to each other - but the arrangement of the musicians on the stage, salsa to the left and Celtic to the right of the drum kit, suggested the same thing.
I also reacted badly to the evident desire of the one (probably Toby Shippey) who did all the introductions for a more lively and demonstrative audience. The performance was in Hall One, the big concert hall, and I'd come prepared to listen, but he was anxious the we should dance - in the narrow aisles which were all the available space. We were urged to have a drink during the interval and come back ready to dance - not once but repeatedly, which always makes me less ready to comply. Presumably it's the same culture which requires anyone who plays a solo to be named and applauded, but I wearied of this, too.
On the other hand, Julie Fowlis was wonderful, as she always is, and one of her songs was, for me, the only point at which fusion was achieved and the two strands of the music came together. How fortunate that there's a video of this on Salsa Celtica's web site.
Kathryn Tickell, as Artistic Director of Folkwaorks, has been putting together a series of events under the title 'One Night in Gateshead', featuring the older generation of north-eastern musicians, and last night it was Bob Davenport's turn. This was in Hall Two, a much more intimate space, and the atmosphere was almost domestic: Mike Tickell (Kathryn's father) interviewed Bob Davenport, breaking off from time to time for a song (when did I last sing Cushie Butterfield? Long enough ago not to have recognised her as the precursor of Viz's Fat Slags...). The second half was less chat, more music, with Hazel Askew and Kathryn Tickell providing the music - and Kathryn also sang Here's the Tender Coming, with perfect simplicity.
But it was Bob Davenport's evening, and everything else was simply the frame for his stories and his songs. I don't know when I first saw him - long, long ago - but he was still quite recognisable (though his hair is no longer red). I hadn't known anything about his life, so his story of how his father was killed in a gas explosion was doubly shocking because I didn't know where the narrative was leading. Nor did I know that he'd missed singing with Paul Robeson because he went down with TB, or that he had sung on Bright Phoebus (and sang a couple of those songs for us)...
We got up early this morning to go swimming, and when we left the house realised that someone had gone down the road snapping off the wing mirrors of all the cars - ours included. We used to get a lot of this sort of petty vandalism, and were forever replacing wing mirrors, windscreen wipers, hub caps, but it had stopped. I hope it hasn't started again. So much of the morning was taken up with phoning the police and talking to the car-repair man.
And when we reached the pool - having decided to swim today instead of our regular Thursday, because last Friday the University hadn't turned up and we'd been able to use the lanes - we were greeted by fellow-swimmers with "You should have been here yesterday, the University weren't here." Whereas today they were, and the public side of the pool was crowded too, and no doubt it's still exercise and Good For Us, but it's not as relaxing.
Time for bed, and I wonder what tomorrow will bring?
Wednesday was Salsa Celtica: I'd heard fragments of their music on the radio, and liked it enough to try a little more. Besides, Julie Fowlis was joining them as a guest.
The experiment was interesting, but not entirely successful. I felt I was hearing two bands, the salsa band and the (mainly Scottish) traditional musicians, who had somehow collided and liked the result enough, not to start working together but to keep on colliding. This is probably just because I'm not sufficiently attuned to salsa to hear what the two elements contributed to each other - but the arrangement of the musicians on the stage, salsa to the left and Celtic to the right of the drum kit, suggested the same thing.
I also reacted badly to the evident desire of the one (probably Toby Shippey) who did all the introductions for a more lively and demonstrative audience. The performance was in Hall One, the big concert hall, and I'd come prepared to listen, but he was anxious the we should dance - in the narrow aisles which were all the available space. We were urged to have a drink during the interval and come back ready to dance - not once but repeatedly, which always makes me less ready to comply. Presumably it's the same culture which requires anyone who plays a solo to be named and applauded, but I wearied of this, too.
On the other hand, Julie Fowlis was wonderful, as she always is, and one of her songs was, for me, the only point at which fusion was achieved and the two strands of the music came together. How fortunate that there's a video of this on Salsa Celtica's web site.
Kathryn Tickell, as Artistic Director of Folkwaorks, has been putting together a series of events under the title 'One Night in Gateshead', featuring the older generation of north-eastern musicians, and last night it was Bob Davenport's turn. This was in Hall Two, a much more intimate space, and the atmosphere was almost domestic: Mike Tickell (Kathryn's father) interviewed Bob Davenport, breaking off from time to time for a song (when did I last sing Cushie Butterfield? Long enough ago not to have recognised her as the precursor of Viz's Fat Slags...). The second half was less chat, more music, with Hazel Askew and Kathryn Tickell providing the music - and Kathryn also sang Here's the Tender Coming, with perfect simplicity.
But it was Bob Davenport's evening, and everything else was simply the frame for his stories and his songs. I don't know when I first saw him - long, long ago - but he was still quite recognisable (though his hair is no longer red). I hadn't known anything about his life, so his story of how his father was killed in a gas explosion was doubly shocking because I didn't know where the narrative was leading. Nor did I know that he'd missed singing with Paul Robeson because he went down with TB, or that he had sung on Bright Phoebus (and sang a couple of those songs for us)...
We got up early this morning to go swimming, and when we left the house realised that someone had gone down the road snapping off the wing mirrors of all the cars - ours included. We used to get a lot of this sort of petty vandalism, and were forever replacing wing mirrors, windscreen wipers, hub caps, but it had stopped. I hope it hasn't started again. So much of the morning was taken up with phoning the police and talking to the car-repair man.
And when we reached the pool - having decided to swim today instead of our regular Thursday, because last Friday the University hadn't turned up and we'd been able to use the lanes - we were greeted by fellow-swimmers with "You should have been here yesterday, the University weren't here." Whereas today they were, and the public side of the pool was crowded too, and no doubt it's still exercise and Good For Us, but it's not as relaxing.
Time for bed, and I wonder what tomorrow will bring?
