PrettyInScarlett

Something of a late review.... M and I went to see Melissa Auf der Maur at Mavericks on 5th November - first 'dingy venue' gig in Ottawa. Not that Mavericks is at all bad - seemed on first impressions to be a mixture of The Boardwalk and Clwb Ifor Bach. Nice and cosy, although the 'locals' seem to drink less. In keeping with the usual pattern of support bands, the touring support Final Flash (whom I believe are from Montreal) were quite interesting and obviously had some solid fans in the crowd, but local support The Balconies left a lot to be desired (although they also had a few keen fans). The young lady fronting The Balconies seemed to run out of breath part way through lines. They were clearly targeting the catchy-tunes-trio idea but said front-woman also lacked sufficient guitar skills to really pull it off. Melissa (and band - who also doubled up as road crew but were very polished players) played a set mixed from new album Out Of Our Minds and previous solo ...

Something of a random spot in the free Metro paper. Sunday 31st October M and I attended 'an afternoon of classical guitar, flute and violin' sponsored by the Embassy of Japan but held in the auditorium of the National Gallery of Canada. We thought, maybe it would be similar to the Swiss Ambassador's Award Concert last year - we were wrong. The NCG auditorium holds many more people (a few hundred at least) and is much more modern. The show, free and not ticketed, was also completely full - mixture of dignatories, Japanese local residents and others. According to the Ambassador's preamble, almost 100 people were turned away! The 3 musicians - Yasuji Ohagi , guitar; Kazunori Seo , flute; Gentaro Kagitomi , violin - have played a string of concerts across Canada, in Vancouver , Montreal and Quebec City as well as Ottawa. The programme was a mixture of (predominantly 20th century) Eastern and Western music for solo, duo and trio. M and I thought the solo works (Ysäye: Sona...

Something of a hiatus over the summer.... After a brilliant holiday in Iceland, M and I relocated to Ottawa, Canada. Our new neighbourhood, Old Ottawa South, hosts a literary festival twice a year: Ottawa International Writers Festival . Last Thursday I tried out one of the events: an evening with writer Eric Siblin in Southminster United Church. Earlier this year I read his book The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals and the search for a Baroque Masterpiece and found it hugely enjoyable and informative. At first glance the book is a biography of J.S. Bach through the story of his 6 suites for unaccompanied cello; however, as Siblin also tells the story of 20th century Spanish cellist Pablo Casals, the book encompasses not only 17th but 20th century history, as well as Siblin's own journey with Bach. Siblin was talking on the subject of Bach's Cello suites, accompanied by cellist Winona Zelenka . Zelenka is assistant principal cellist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and...

Time again for the periodic trip to Wolverhampton. The last few visits (Nov 2008- Sigur Rós, Jan 2009- Seasick Steve) were to Civic Hall, but 28th April was to the smaller sister venue Wulfrun Hall. We hadn't been there for (I believe, don't really want to count!) 5 years, and in a lot of ways it is a better venue than the Civic -more intimate but still good acoustics. The reason for this trip was to see Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (BRMC). I somehow want to write 'underground', but as the show was a sellout and I believe many of the other dates were/are too, maybe 'ignored by the media' will suffice. Certainly I can't recall reading much about them recently, however over the years there's been a steady stream of albums with a few varying styles. M and I saw BRMC separately back in 2003 and enjoyed the band's live sets then. Amazingly, BRMC's website has their entire 'gigography' online, so according to them the respective dates were 4th...

Another trip to Barfly on 15th April. Not quite a complete random gig; we chose The Crookes as the band members are/were all students in Sheffield (my old university haunt) & the band is named after the city suburb. Something of an oblique reminiscence, then. They've also been on 6 Music recently. Thankfully, it was one of those period nights where the support bands were at least as good as (possibly better than) the headline act. Toy Horses and Zenyth completed Thursdays lineup. Toy Horses were fun and quite infective. Very enjoyable and maybe even the highlight of the night. Zenyth were more in the South Wales rock mode, in my ears quite obviously influenced by Stereophonics etc (the list of influences on their myspace is also quite telling) but not disturbingly so. They weren't as exciting as Toy Horses but still an enjoyable set. The Crookes, for all the 'great new band' hype, were again ok but not an awful lot better. Someone needs to teach them onstage bante...

Now for something quite different. Tuesday 13th we went to see Piano circus at Cardiff University School of Music . I was going to say 'new' but turns out the group (ensemble doesn't quite seem to fit) formed in 1989. Piano circus , who according to their website are named after the Latin for circle, perform works for 6 keyboards/pianos and have developed a varied repertoire (which is also listed in full online). One of the reasons for going (apart from pure curiosity) was to try out contemporary compositions. The set list comprised: Erkki-Sven Tüür-Transmission (2006), Conlon Nancarrow- Study No. 5 and Study No. 26, Colin Riley- Recast, Steve Reich Six Pianos, David Lang- Face So Pale (1992) and Lynne Plowman- Hall of Mirrors (2007). Lynne Plowman was in the audience & briefly introduced Hall of Mirrors as sampling parts of lots of other classical piano works (anything from 1 bar to a more recognisable theme) & threading them together. In terms of the works them...

A special solo trip to the Norwegian Church arts centre on 9 th March to see Icelandic band hjaltalín together with support from Dry The River. I heard about the show via email lists from the people behind Swn (join the list/ Facebook group if you haven't already). Partly from lack of time, I treated the evening as a 'random gig number 3' so wasn't sure what to expect! Turns out it was an excellent evening (shades of last year's Woodpigeon gig) & pretty much a capacity crowd. A note for cake lovers -the cafe/bar at the Church was still selling foodie bits along with drinks, had a hard time resisting! Dry The River were very good. I don't know much about their background (plenty of scope online as they have both a website and myspace ), but their set (all new stuff - believe the debut album is currently being recorded) seemed to me to show shades of William Elliott Whitmore , Jeff Buckley; lo fi indie ish with a bit of modern folk thrown in. Very int...

Something of a first on a few counts. I stumbled across the legendary Peter Green 's tour dates a few weeks back. Slightly surprised as I was under the impression he was no longer around!! I wanted to go to tonight's (24 th February) show at The Globe, but it was (somewhat unsurprisingly) sold out. Fortunately, Green's 23rd February show at Huntingdon Hall in Worcester still had tickets available. Huntingdon Hall was originally built in the 18 th century as a Methodist chapel but has been a live venue for a while now. It's certainly one of the more unusual live music venues we've seen. First visit for both of us, somewhat different to have a church pew for one's seat! Looked like a sell our or near sell out on the night. Also interestingly, the show/door times operate more like a theatre than a live venue - show started at the advertised time which nearly caught us out! The support act was a local singer-songwriter called Dan Whitehouse (not forgetting Tom ...

This time M and I visited new(ish) venue Cardiff Arts Institute for some Sunday evening entertainment. The CAI hosts quite a few free music evenings (as well as other events, curated by various promoters including the likes of Kruger ). This one was a mixture of local and non-local bands but none were indie-guitar types. First up were Fife duo Panda Su , who could I suppose be classified as 'singer-songwriter' but also kinda folk, lo fi...instruments included a glockenspiel, so far so interesting. They only played about 4 songs which is a shame as they were at the very least 'good' and worth a future look. Next up were the locals (complete with fan club - at least half the audience!) King Louis Collective . Their site states soul/ska/tropical which is pretty spot on, this lot of multi-instrumentalists would be right at home on Craig Charles' 6Music show ! A variety of tracks including a cover of Kings of Leon 'Use Somebody'. They seem to have fairly regular...

Something of a quiet start to the year for us for one reason or another, so I picked a random band off the Clwb Ifor Bach website and came up with Strange News from Another Star , playing last Friday 5 th February. First time at Clwb Ifor Bach for a while, and it was full (too often there's been an audience just in double figures!) - though as all bands (2 supports, Goodtime Boys and Panic Basket) were local that's not too surprising. I won't waste much time on the dire Panic Basket except to say that screaming "12345678" does not constitute a song! Goodtime Boys were better but neither much our thing. The main guy from SNFAS , Jimmy Watkins, has a good line in banter, starting the gig with a poem about the residents of St Mellons , and with printed flyers satirising David Cameron! Again, the style of music is probably not our thing (more in the line of my earlier student taste) but certainly interesting and worth checking out. They were described as '...