Friday, July 06, 2007
What is it about The Cinematic Orchestra playing in my town that promotes serious misfortune?
4 years ago they played Ronnie Scott's and I was due to go, but at the last minute my ex's dear cousin died and we were in Paris for the funeral instead. Friends who went pronounced it "best gig ever". It had not been such a good week for me. I may write about it at some point. It certainly bears retelling.
6 months later, they played Shepherd's Bush Empire and my best friend bought tickets for us. As we reached the venue he realised he'd forgotten to bring them. And indeed he had no idea where they were. We spent the night driving around London listening to their albums instead. Not bad but also kind of shit, too.
And so, last night, they played Club Soda here in Montreal as part of the Montreal Jazz Festival. They were brilliant, just brilliant and very almost worth the wait. It's true what they say - Luke Flowers is an amazing drummer, there is a sense of absolute perfection to what he does that makes the live show sound like a very tight recording session. They played all the hits, had a special guest spot from the vocal, local boy Patrick Watson and finished with the best and bizarrest cover version I've heard in a longly while: Stravinsky's Rite of Spring! It was deep, dark and viciously, viscously funky. (Not that the crowd liked it too much - more of that later) Even the lighting was original and rather fitting, I dare say even cinematic. The band looked like they were encased in these great sombre primary colours bleeding into eachother through darkness and fog, just like you see in press shots of live acts but actually never in real life. To be fair, though, the band had an easy ride as half the crowd were clearly in love with every note of their music, wildly applauding every intro that they knew and throwing many bizarre whoops and cheers out for some fairly unexceptional moments of soloing and for the rare harmonic changes of the pieces themselves. To give Jay Swinscoe credit, I think what he's managed to do better than anyone else out there right now is crack the jazz conundrum: how do you make jazz accessible to the millions of people around the world who have the ears to listen to it but don't? His answer is to play it like it's dance music and damn the purists if it gets people interested. Good man. So that was all great then.
Oh, and I went with my girlfriend of four months who is also a big fan of the band. We both had a great time after a difficult couple of weeks and by 3am we'd walked back happily to her apartment.
And at 3.10am I'm walking home down Rue Rachel, single again.
Here's the fucking Rite of Spring in all it gory, anyway, taken from this blog which is a bit more expansive about the music itself.
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4 years ago they played Ronnie Scott's and I was due to go, but at the last minute my ex's dear cousin died and we were in Paris for the funeral instead. Friends who went pronounced it "best gig ever". It had not been such a good week for me. I may write about it at some point. It certainly bears retelling.
6 months later, they played Shepherd's Bush Empire and my best friend bought tickets for us. As we reached the venue he realised he'd forgotten to bring them. And indeed he had no idea where they were. We spent the night driving around London listening to their albums instead. Not bad but also kind of shit, too.
And so, last night, they played Club Soda here in Montreal as part of the Montreal Jazz Festival. They were brilliant, just brilliant and very almost worth the wait. It's true what they say - Luke Flowers is an amazing drummer, there is a sense of absolute perfection to what he does that makes the live show sound like a very tight recording session. They played all the hits, had a special guest spot from the vocal, local boy Patrick Watson and finished with the best and bizarrest cover version I've heard in a longly while: Stravinsky's Rite of Spring! It was deep, dark and viciously, viscously funky. (Not that the crowd liked it too much - more of that later) Even the lighting was original and rather fitting, I dare say even cinematic. The band looked like they were encased in these great sombre primary colours bleeding into eachother through darkness and fog, just like you see in press shots of live acts but actually never in real life. To be fair, though, the band had an easy ride as half the crowd were clearly in love with every note of their music, wildly applauding every intro that they knew and throwing many bizarre whoops and cheers out for some fairly unexceptional moments of soloing and for the rare harmonic changes of the pieces themselves. To give Jay Swinscoe credit, I think what he's managed to do better than anyone else out there right now is crack the jazz conundrum: how do you make jazz accessible to the millions of people around the world who have the ears to listen to it but don't? His answer is to play it like it's dance music and damn the purists if it gets people interested. Good man. So that was all great then.
Oh, and I went with my girlfriend of four months who is also a big fan of the band. We both had a great time after a difficult couple of weeks and by 3am we'd walked back happily to her apartment.
And at 3.10am I'm walking home down Rue Rachel, single again.
Here's the fucking Rite of Spring in all it gory, anyway, taken from this blog which is a bit more expansive about the music itself.
|
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