Late

by Better Than TV

When I was in Cambridge earlier this year, my friend Sergio told me that his band is about to release their debut CD any day now. When it finally was released, he promptly sent me a copy to Gran Canaria.

I heard one of incarnations of Better Than TV performing live in Cambridge some years ago, and then again what was (approaching) its current line-up rehearsing at Sergio’s house in 2013, the very day I unsuccessfully tried to enjoy, also on Sergio’s suggestion, the May Bumps. So it was not exactly unfamiliar stuff, but I still was impressed by quality of music on this record. (For the record, all tracks were captured live, something I would not say, er, without looking at the CD sleeve.)

What is Late? Not exactly cutting edge of modern jazz but, as Bertie Wooster could have put it, there is a time for cutting hedges and a time for not cutting hedges. In fact, I am quite happy away from being cut by any edge provided that I am not bored. And Better Than TV — indeed, quite unlike TV — won’t keep me bored. They could have easily put in a few standards (and make a good job of that too) but no, we’ve got nine originals, all penned by Sergio, and quite diverse at that. Latin-ish groove here, funky theme there, blues yonder, a bulería at 5 pm, a samba later, and so on and so forth in a stylistically united variety. My favourite so far is Morse, a beautifully hummable upbeat jazz-waltz, with just right balance of discipline and improvisation (incidentally, it is the shortest track on the album). But really there are no weak cuts here, and the band consistently shines without showing off. Respect.

The only minor annoyance is the not-so-well “hidden” track in the end. Why anyone still bothers to hide the tracks anyway? Just call it track #10 and tell me when it was recorded.

Independently produced, not even on an “independent” label but without any label, Late is a quiet but confident debut of a label-free band. Given that it was recorded two years ago, one should expect a follow-up soon... please?

Late 1000 and one Standing with Sally Elliulogy Morse pm FEAB Samba per mi Se volete Late Standing With Sally (alternate take)

All tracks written by Sergio Contrino better than TV David Burgoyne: piano Ed Blake: drums Gavin Spence: trumpet, flugelhorn Sergio Contrino: electric bass Tom Green: trombone Recorded live at Churchill College Music Centre, Cambridge Tracks 1—5 recorded by Tom Howe on 10/6/2013 Tracks 6—9 recorded by Andy Cross on 8/12/2013 Mixdown Engineer: John Ward Mastered at Metropolis Studios, London by Andy ‘Hippy’ Baldwin Produced by Sergio Contrino and John Ward

Mort

by Terry Pratchett

☠ Boy saves the princess but chooses not to marry her.
☠ Alternate realities can co-exist.
☠ If you want Death’s job, learn how to speak in all caps. Now.

Mort was the first book of the great fantasy master that I read, some time at the end of last millennium. It was borrowed from the then newly-discwoverled (by me) Saffron Walden library. It took me exactly one evening and one full night. I finished reading about five in the morning, and I was working that day. I don’t remember if I came across a read this absorbing ever since. On the darker side, no other book of Pratchett I read was quite up to the standard set by Mort.

Now that I re-read Mort fifteensomething years later, I enjoyed it even more. I think most of its humour was lost upon me the first time round. A lot of brilliant ideas, barely mentioned here, could easily have been developed into full-blown novels. (Maybe they were.) And, while I did remember most of the book, some parts of it completely slipped off my mind, like the scene of Mort’s very first solo job.

The witch stood up, leaving her body behind.
“Well done,” she said. “I thought you’d missed it, for a minute, there.”
Mort leaned against a tree, panting heavily, and watched Goodie walk around the log to look at herself.
“Hmm,” she said critically. “Time has got a lot to answer for.” She raised her hand and laughed to see the stars through it.
Then she changed. Mort had seen this happen before, when the soul realised it was no longer bound by the body’s morphic field, but never under such control. Her hair unwound itself from its tight bun, changing colour and lengthening. Her body straightened up. Wrinkles dwindled and vanished. Her grey woollen dress moved like the surface of the sea and ended up tracing entirely different and disturbing contours.
She looked down, giggled, and changed the dress into something leaf-green and clingy.
“What do you think, Mort?” she said. Her voice had sounded cracked and quavery before. Now it suggested musk and maple syrup and other things that set Mort’s adam’s apple bobbing like a rubber ball on an elastic band.
“. . .” he managed, and gripped the scythe until his knuckles went white.
She walked towards him like a snake in a four-wheel drift.
“I didn’t hear you,” she purred.
“V-v-very nice,” he said. “Is that who you were?”
“It’s who I’ve always been.”
“Oh.” Mort stared at his feet. “I’m supposed to take you away,” he said.
“I know,” she said, “but I’m going to stay.”
“You can’t do that! I mean—” he fumbled for words — “you see, if you stay you sort of spread out and get thinner, until—”
“I shall enjoy it,” she said firmly. She leaned forward and gave him a kiss as insubstantial as a mayfly's sigh, fading as she did so until only the kiss was left, just like a Cheshire cat only much more erotic.
“Have a care, Mort,” said her voice in his head. “You may want to hold on to your job, but will you ever be able to let go?”

Theo Croker & Nettwork live

Yuri and I went to see Theo Croker and Dvrk Funk performing at Plaza Santa Ana in Vegueta. It was a pleasant surprise to discover this American band. Yes, a classic jazz quintet format (Theo Croker, trumpet; Michael King, keyboards; Kassa Overall, drums; Anthony Ware, reeds and Eric Wheeler, double bass), playing mostly original compositions, melodic, full of interesting rhythmical twists and, indeed, funky — not all the time, just enough time to keep the audience happy. Hardly groundbreaking stuff, but then again, sometimes you need to keep the ground intact and concentrate on delivering the quality music. What they did.

When they finished, Yuri went home. Judging by his saying that is was not exactly his cup of steak, he didn’t enjoy the music as much as I did. I wonder what would he make of the next act, which was a totally different, er, bucket o’shrimp.

Featuring Charnett Moffett (electric bass), Stanley Jordan (electric guitar, keyboards), Casimir Liberski and Jeff “Tain” Watts (drums), Nettwork could be called a jazz supergroup. Jordan is one of my all-time axe heroes, and his Stolen Moments (also featuring Moffett) is one of the finest jazz guitar recordings ever. I was really looking forward to see them live. But there’s an inherent danger with supergroups: the whole is often less than the sum of its parts. Don’t get me wrong, it was not bad at all, for a bunch of guys jamming together, but I expected more than that. Take the first composition (don’t know the title, for Nettwork didn’t bother to introduce their songs): imagine the intro to Speed King played for fifteen minutes. I mean, you only can play so much of one chord, even with yummy solos. For me, the band did not compare favourably with Dvrk Funk who were more “together” and took less time to deliver their message. Oh, and they should lose that singing.

As for Stanley Jordan, he appeared to lose none of his magic touch. I hope to see him playing again.

Noumoucounda Cissoko & Zara McFarlane live

This double act kick-started the Canarian International Jazz Festival 2015 on Friday 3 July. So I boarded the bus #8 from Las Palmas to Vecindario (where I’ve never been until this day) and arrived to Plaza de San Rafael just in time to get one of the last free seats and a caña of Heineken (€1) before the show started.

Senegalese singer and kora player Noumoucounda Cissoko was supported by Kissima Diabaté (vocal, djembe), Frederic Hirschy (electric bass) and Yoann Julliard (drums). What a feast for the ears and eyes! It might be not exactly what you’d call “jazz” but who cares when it’s groovy? A group of young Africans turned up and started to dance, at first in front of the scene. Then, for the encore, they joined the musicians on stage, while the audience went completely wild.

The name of Zara McFarlane sounded vaguely familiar but I never heard her music until last Friday. The young British singer was accompanied by the trio of Peter Edwards (piano), Max Luthert (double bass) and Moses Boyd (drums) in what would appear like a mainstream jazz idiom, especially after Cissoko’s extravaganza. Yet mainstream it ain’t. There wasn’t a single standard; instead, soul-flavoured original compositions with clever lyrics and quite unique singing style. Oh, and a wonderful, happy smile.

Both acts featured some magic call-and-response improvisations: machine-gun-speed djembe/kora duel of Diabaté and Cissoko; seductive, almost erotic scat vocal/drums exchange between McFarlane and Boyd. And I was about to start complaining about lack of quality live music on this island!

The night was growing rather chilly and the wind was interfering with Zara’s microphone. At midnight, the show was over. I had to rush to catch the night bus (#5) back to Las Palmas. By the way, it stops at the airport. Good to know in case you need to get out of there in the middle of the night.

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

by James Gleick

Apart from furnishing me with great quotes for my blogs, this may be one of the most fascinating books on information theory I’ve read. Considering that I was reading this book once a week, while travelling by train from Santander to Bezana and back (11 minutes each way), I managed to finish it, well, under four months.

I feared that, after the great start, it would continue in a less spectacular fashion, gradually losing the steam and eventually reaching the thermodynamic equilibrium with the literary noise around me. I’m glad to report that this didn’t happen. True, as we move closer to the present day, it becomes progressively out-of-date: think about the future of the cloud computing in post-Snowden era (the book was published in 2011). Thankfully, the author seems to be well aware of that.

After “information theory” came to be, so did “information overload”, “information glut”, “information anxiety”, and “information fatigue”, the last recognized by the OED in 2009 as a timely syndrome: “Apathy, indifference, or mental exhaustion arising from exposure to too much information, esp. (in later use) stress induced by the attempt to assimilate excessive amounts of information from the media, the Internet, or at work.” Sometimes information anxiety can coexist with boredom, a particularly confusing combination. David Foster Wallace had a more ominous name for this modern condition: Total Noise. “The tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective” — that, he wrote in 2007, constitutes Total Noise. He talked about the sensation of drowning and also of a loss of autonomy, of personal responsibility for being informed. To keep up with all the information we need proxies and subcontractors.

So long, Cantabria

My first sense of Santander was not unlike the one I had of Trieste some twenty years earlier. In both cases, I knew nothing of the place before. Both are situated between the sea and the mountains. Both are distinctly European, but one can easily get confused where exactly in Europe they are. Trieste didn’t look like an Italian city to me. Of all Spanish cities I’ve seen so far, Santander did feel least Spanish. Later, I found similarity between these two places on a deeper level.

I find this mermaid near Palacio de la Magdalena rather sexy. Unlike her caudal fin, the Latimeria-like pelvic fins make perfect sense to me.

I got my first impression of santanderinos the following day, on boarding the city bus. Two things did strike me:

1. It was too quiet.
2. Nobody was smiling.

Let me explain. In Canarias, people board guaguas to talk as much as to travel. People shout “Hola, guapa” or “Chao, mi niña” across the bus cabin. The seats closest to the front door usually get occupied by talkers who spend the rest of the journey distracting the driver. People do ask each other things (and answer). If you ask anyone about your destination, half of the bus joins to explain where you have to get off and what to do next, mi niña. And they do smile at you.

Not here. Even though that first impression was shaken one Friday night (the bus was full of drunk and loud youngsters), it still holds true.

At first, I could’t believe that people here really speak Castellano Castellano. They say “Voy a Madrith”, €10 is “dieth euros” (not “dieh euroh” like in Canarias), and they use vosotros.

When I arrived (on a slow FEVE train from Bilbao), the sun was shining. “Just you wait”, I was told. I was waiting for a month. Patiently. I spent the two last days of October on the beach. On the 1st of November, the floodgates of the heavens opened and winter began. I had to invest in an umbrella and a pair of welly boots. Again! Maybe leaving most of winter things in Porvoo was a mistake after all. (Clothes! Layers and layers of them. I hate it.) February was particularly horrible, with thunderstorms and hailstorms every other day and simply rain in between.

I made good friends in Santander, just like I did in Trieste. None of them are native of either place. This may, or may not, suggest that you can’t make friends with santanderinos. In any case, I can’t prove it. As a rule, Cantabrians are proud not to be from Santander; or, if they are, they hide it well.

If you follow this blog, you know that Santander is full of live music and other cultural events, many of which are free. There even are free dance classes — bachata, kizomba, tango... Thanks to the weather, not that much was happening outdoors. (Maybe now, when the temperature is in mid-twenties, it is not raining and I am not there any longer.) The Carnival did not impress me at all, and a couple of Semana Santa processions that I’ve seen almost freaked me out. So what. Cantabria is more than Santander, and there is a lot to sea.

I was working in Liencres, a town about 9 kilometres west of Santander, where you can find some of the finest beaches in Cantabria. I mean, Santander’s own El Sardinero and Playa de Mataleñas are great by any city beach standards, but once I’d discovered La Arnía, Covachos, Somocuevas and Valdearenas, there was no way back.

Covachos is probably the most beautiful naturist beach I've ever been. You can only access it by foot when the tide is out.

Every second Sunday, there was a walk-cum-language exchange organised by La Escuela Oficial de Idiomas de Santander. Thanks to these excursions, I got acquainted with some corners of Cantabria I’d never get to on my own, such as “the capital of the world” Arredondo or spooky Túneles de La Engaña.

Cantabria is small (Canary Islands have larger area and population), but, disregarding the weather for a while, it has everything one can dream about. There are mountains — not the hills called “mountains”, like in England, no, the real mountains with snow on top, Picos de Europa. On a good day, I could see them from my school window.

Meltwater lake near Fuente Dé.

There are rivers — again, real rivers, not barrancos with puny streams of water which disappear during the dry months.

Ghostly face of la Cascada del Asón in Collados del Asón Natural Park.

Then, there are forests. (Yes, you’ve got it, the real ones.) España Verde, of which Cantabria is a part, is not called Verde for nothing. I did not realise how green it is until went to Málaga for a long weekend in the beginning of May. When I flew back to Bilbao just three days later, the visual impact of The Green took me by surprise. Now, at the peak of Canarian summer, I miss you, Holy Chlorophyll.

Loads of green stuff near Barcenillas.

And then, there is a sea. English may call it Bay of Biscay and French Golfe de Gascogne, but here it is called much more respectfully: Mar Cantábrico.

I should have explored España Verde beyond Cantabria a bit more, but I didn’t. Just before Christmas, I went to San Sebastian with Toastmasters Sardinero group. I liked it. Could have been nicer if it were not raining all day. Then, I went to Las Palmas for Christmas/New Year break. The cheapest flights I was able to book were from Bilbao (to Las Palmas) and to Santiago de Compostela (back). I decided to stretch my journey back to Santander over three nights, staying in Santiago, A Coruña and Oviedo. Back to work, I told my colleagues about my holidays.

— ¿Te ha gustado Bilbao?
— Sí, claro.
— Yo soy de Bilbao.
— Ah. Por supuesto, me gustó mucho.
— Mucho mejor que Santander, ¿no?

When I mentioned Oviedo, another colleague of mine, who seemingly was not paying attention, turned to me and asked:

— ¿Te ha gustado Asturias?
— Sí, mucho.
— Soy de Oviedo.
— Lo sé.
— Es que Bilbao es feísimo, sabes?
— ¿Pero qué dices? (The first teacher chips in.)
— Es verdad verdadera.

My last week in Cantabria was supersaturated. Every day I was saying goodbyes on an alarming scale. Also, in a knowledge that these were my last days of sleep deprivation, I almost gave up sleeping. Luckily, I had two school excursions, to the two places I wanted to go myself but somehow never did, Cabárceno and to the Cave of Altamira, so I did not have to prepare classes for those days.

The conversations with my colleagues kept revolving around my imminent departure.

— Ay Kirill, es tu última semana aquí, ¿verdad?
— Sí.
— ¿Cuando te marchas?
— El viernes.
— Jolín, es muy prontito.
— Eso es.
— Que guay. Este finde vas a la playa con tus hijos, con tu mujercita...
— Sí, claro.
— Vas a compensar el tiempo perdido, ¿no?
— Por supuesto.

A lump in my throat prevents me from giving longer answers.

Yes, I knew I was going to stay in Santander for eight months. I did not expect my stay there to be exactly eight months. I have to thank Ryanair cheap direct flight scheduling (Santander — Gran Canaria, one weekly flight) for the fact that I flew back home on my last working day. Which probably spared me a few more days of heartwrenching farewells.

Somocuevas as I last saw it

Adiós, Cantabria. Te echaré de menos.

風立ちぬ

a film by Hayao Miyazaki

“They smoke a lot in this movie”, observed Timur.

“This is because it reflects reality”, said Tamara.

The Wind Rises was the second Studio Ghibli film Timur wanted to watch with me (the first was From Up on Poppy Hill). Much sadder affair, but luckily not another Grave of the Fireflies (I couldn’t bring myself to watch that movie for the second time). Once again, ample quotes from other Miyazaki works, such as Porco Rosso and Castle in the Sky, which I kind of expected: it wouldn’t be a Miyazaki without air ships, and this is a film about an aircraft designer! Comic relief is provided by Jiro’s vertically challenged boss, Mr. Kurokawa (a male equivalent of Edna Mode, as Tamara noticed, and probably the most memorable character of the movie). And yes, they do smoke a lot.