Heritage Blues Orchestra

Urban living has its disadvantages, but if you have no choice, well, Bristol isn't a bad city to find yourself in, at least not as far as culture is concerned.  Last night after the Poetry Can board meeting, it was off to St George's next door to see the Heritage Blues Orchestra.  Hard to pick a stand out moment with a band comprised of virtuosos in their particular field, though I have to say I particularly enjoyed the harmonica playing by Vincent Bucher.  Here's one he prepared earlier.

And amongst a constellation of songs, this next one was very shiny also.  Love Chaney Sims.

Wodwo and the Carolina Chocolate Drops

Between stints of poetry brochure and kitty cat delivering, and manuscript checking and book launch planning, I've managed to squeeze in a bit of culture over the last few weeks.  One Saturday afternoon in August we broke off from brochure lugging to see the Bristol Young Vic's 20th anniversary production, a conflation of Ted Hughes' poem, Wodwo, about a strange woodland spirit with original material from the cast to make a 50 minute play that was creative and challenging, yet lost none of the original's mystery. 

And the week before last it was the sumptuous Carolina Chocolate Drops at St George's Hall. What a delight!  Here's a review I wrote of the gig for the local rag: 

The Carolina Chocolate Drops: St George’s Hall, Bristol

The Carolina Chocolate Drops is an old-time string band, formed in 2005 to promote a wide range of African American music, from country and blues, early jazz and string band numbers to African and Caribbean songs and spoken word.  Its line-up has changed several times in the intervening years, the sole remaining founder member Rhiannon Giddens currently joined by multi-instrumentalists Hubby Jenkins and Rowan Corbett, and virtuosic cellist Malcolm Parson (surely the coolest man on the planet). 

A rapt St George’s audience listened and even jigged in their seats a little as vocalist Giddens took us on a historical journey through her native North Carolina and the southern United States.  Not that anyone should assume that the respect with which the members of band approach their musical heritage makes for a staid and unimaginative performance.  The variety of instruments used, from fiddle, cello, guitar and banjo to cajón, djembe and bones, and the exuberant skill with which they were played, was riveting.

But for me it was Giddens’ sublime voice that defined the evening.  Whether she was singing her own songs, inspired by the slave stories she’d encountered in her research, covers like Hank Williams’ ‘Please Don’t Let Me Love You’ and Ethel Waters’ ‘No Man’s Mama’, an upbeat song about divorce, or an almost incantatory piece of Gaelic mouth music, its power and  versatility was never less than astounding.  My absolute favourite was ‘Waterboy’, a traditional American folk song based on the call ‘Water boy, where are you hidin’?’, one of several water boy calls in cotton plantation folk tradition and positively bone-shivering.  

Rarely have I seen such uniformly ecstatic faces exiting a gig.  If traditional music is your thing, do yourself a favour and check them out. 

Raise The Roof And Kiss The Sky

And so to the finale of the Bristol Spring Poetry Festival 2014 - the inaugural primary poetry slam, held in the pink and gold serenity of St George's Bristol.  

Upon arrival, all was calm.  Sound and light technicians were doing technical things with sound and light, and the four intrepid poets-turned-mentors who'd gone into four of Bristol's primary schools to work with their Year 5 pupils in preparation for the day's event were fine-tuning its organisation.

Indeed, there was an almost palpable air of orderly productivity.  

Then the surface tension on the judges' jug of water began to quiver ... 

... as the auditorium filled with 500 pupils from Ashton Gate, Bishop Road, St Mary Redcliffe and Whitehall Primary Schools. 

Time for a little last-minute coaching ... 

... before the judging procedure was explained ...

... the sacrifical poets warmed up the audience ... 

... and the children got the chance to practise making as much noise as possible.  (It turns out they were very, very good at this.)

And then we were off, all 16 teams, with names such as Dangerous Doughnuts, The Monster Mashers and Word War III, strutting their stuff through four heats and giving an excellent account of themselves.  

+

In the end, Zombie Apocalypse from Whitehall School emerged as winners in a contest which saw the roof raised to a height of about five miles and the sky very definitely kissed, almost into oblivion.  

Best of all, the knowledge that 500 impressionable young minds  - and hopefully a few older ones as well - would be leaving with a rather different idea of poetry and the limits to which it will take you.  

Beth Orton at St.George's, Bristol, Monday 15th April 2013

Here's a review I wrote this morning for our local rag (with some assistance, it has to be said, from my escort on the night):

I didn’t much feel like going to a gig, being thick with a cold and arthritic, but the lure of St George’s – surely one of the finest concert venues in the country – and Beth Orton, who is returning to touring after a decade in which she got married and started a family, proved too much to resist. 

Having first come to prominence through her collaborations with William Orbit and the Chemical Brothers and then her own ambient 90s folktronica, these days there’s a somewhat more traditional feel to Beth Orton’s music. What hasn’t changed, however, is the sense of longing that pervades so many of her songs, a feeling or yearning for a better way of being, now lost, or of being haunted by the memory or dream of a time and a place where life was clearer and more whole. 

This feeling moves gracefully through her new album Sugaring Season, a beautiful suite of songs, which, like all good albums, seems to sound better each time you hear it. She played several of its songs at St George’s, including Call Me The Breeze, Something More Beautiful, Magpie, and Poison Tree, a particularly compelling take on the poem by William Blake from Songs of Innocence and Experience.

For die-hard fans, there were earlier songs too: She Cries Your Name, Someone’s Daughter, Central Reservation, Feel To Believe, Stolen Car to name a few.

Whether it was the rosy gold warmth of the venue’s decor or the transcendent music, I felt cocooned in a mellifluous beauty that negated even the hardness of the pews in the Gallery.  Rather more effective than huddling on the settee with a Lemsip, I feel.  

Poems for an Imperfect Pearl

This morning, after an appointment with my lovely orthotist, Qureishi, whose mum back home in Kenya writes poetry, I headed to St George's Church in town to see the exhibition 'Poems for an Imperfect Pearl' which is part of the Bristol Baroque Festival.  Most of the poems were written by members of the writing group I attend run by Colin Brown of Poetry Can, with two additional pieces by Kapka Kassabova and Deryn Rees-Jones, who are appearing at the Bristol Spring Poetry Festival next month.  

And most impressive they looked too.

After a while I could hear a soprano rehearsing - a-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha - and, resolute in my conviction that Baroque is not for me, I decided it was time I left.   After a quick visit to the ₤2 bookstore - where, ridiculously, I bought four books despite being in the process of downsizing my collection - I returned to the car, put Lucinda Williams on full blast and drove to Sainsburys, pretending all the while that it was summer and I was driving around the ring road pretending I was in Louisiana.  Thank God for an imagination.

I Should Rococo

If you are in Bristol during March and a classical music fan, do pop into St George's Church on Great George Street as it will be hosting the first Bristol Baroque Festival in association with BBC Radio 3.  Its publicity claims it will 'unwrap an abundance of great music and artistry that flourished during the Baroque era, bringing it into the light of the modern day in a way that underscores its zest and glorious originality', with a particular focus being 'the musical genius of J S Bach'.  

Now, if you know me, you will likely be aware that I have an aversion to all things overly curly, be it art, sculpture, architecture, interior design, costume or music - in fact, anything apart from hair. I don't even - whisper it - like Bach much. So why am I bleating on about this festival?  Well ...

... over the last seven or eight months the monthly Poetry Can workshop I attend has focused on Baroque poetry, and we have been writing poems in the style of certain of its practitioners and/or modern takes on the form.  This isn't quite as horrific as it sounds. For one thing, the major poets regarded as writing in a Baroque style - John Donne, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan et al - coincide for the most part with the first two phases of the period, rather than the excesses of the hateful Late Baroque period, also known as ... shudder ... Rococo, and I am mightily fond of some of their works.  For another, I now have a better appreciation of the techniques they employed to make their poetry so distinctive from what preceded it - wit, metaphysical conceits such as far-fetched similes and metaphors, irony, paradox, intellectual rigour, etc.  

The exciting thing about all of this is that thirteen poems are going to be displayed on big boards in St George's cafe bar for the duration of the festival, including one of mine about a street-sweeper, entitled 'The Dream-Catcher'.  So if you want to be one of the approximately 3,000 people who are expected to pass that way and see them, make sure you drop in before the end of March.  Added artistic value for money, see?  And a distraction from all that twiddly stuff.  

And now I am going to post a portrait of the extremely hot John Donne. Because I can.