At the ADE 2011 DJ Cook Off in the Keizer Culinair...from left - Jason Geisinger, in the far distance Seth Troxler dribbling his secret recipe sauce over a rack of ribs that would later prove to be the winning dish, Chris Stafford, Ali Dubfire and Camille, Matt Stafford, unknown blond lady, Olivier Giacomotto and John Acquaviva ... a huge thank you to everyone involved
It is invariably midly surreal meeting the person behind a TV character, and none more so than Patrick Duffy, who despite playing Stephen Logan in The Bold & The Beautiful, will always be Bobby Ewing to me. He was in Monaco to meet a group of competition winners with his co-star on TB&TB, the thoroughly likable and engaging Heather Tom. Over lunch we chatted about the differences between working on feature films and TV, and both apparently much prefer the rapid fire rhythm of TV, especially a daytime series like TB&TB where you rarely if ever get a chance to do a second take. As Duffy said: "On TB&TB you better come with your A-Team performance ready to go, whereas in a film, you could mail it via the Pony Express." Then we got chatting about the pornification of society and both agreed that there is too much nudity around these days, and that it will inevitably lead to a backlash: "I get scripts where in the opening notes it's made clear that the role involves nudity, and I'll do it if the part genuinely demands it, but frankly a lot of the time it just isn't credible or necessary," Tom said. At which point Duffy added somewhat whistfully that it was a while since he'd been asked to get his kit off for a role...and of course, he did it in that voice. He recently finished a pilot for a new series of Dallas for cable network TNT which also features Larry Hagman and an astonishingly well-preserved Linda Gray, but as yet is not sure whether it will green-lighted...here's hoping
Last night in Les Andalouses, a disused church which serves as party-central for the massed ranks of Corida aficionados, local Flamenco dancers and be-hatted proto-cowboys, Natalia del Palacio danced up a storm. A truly electric performance full of a very particular kind of pent-up yearning, fused with a mildly mystical kind of melancholy which is the source of la duende, the energy behind all great Flamenco performances....apologies for the appalling sound
Having been at every Amsterdam Dance Event since the beginning nearly sixteen years ago, and during that time, having heard thousands of people enthusing about the value of being at the event and the contacts they made, finally we have a label that has taken the time to get in touch and thank the organisers, and also to detail what happened to their track after the event. "We got almost all of the buzz and licensing activity for Redroche vs. Armstrong Presents Make Your Move project thanks to being at ADE 2010, when the team from Eyezcream Recordings in Canada played a 2 minute snippet to labels," Nathalie Mccain of promotion company Platform tells me. "In the ensuing months the the track has had massive support from Sebastian Ingrosso, Laidback Luke, Chris Lake, Arno Cost and many more." Most excitingly Make Your Move is now signed to ten labels including Hed Kandi in the UK, We Play for Germany, Austria and Switzerland and Scorpio Music in France. "ADE is fast becoming the major international conference thanks to the presence of representatives from pretty much every country across the globe, hence it is THE MOST important conference out there today for Redroche & also for Eyezcream Recordings. For us, coming from Canada, being able to play our latest projects and receiving face to face feedback from major A&Rs was wonderful. Speaking to labels one on one and being able to see their excitement is a huge positive and if someone wants to sign your new single, they will let you know – sometimes right there on the spot! We totally felt that our job was accomplished by seeing such amazing feedback and respect for bringing back such a classic for 2011,” says Redroche.
It's a tradition that has been going on ever since the Japanese publishers society MPAJ has been coming to Cannes for the annual music industry trade fair MIDEM. Alongside the local artists, music company executives and CD samplers, someone back in Japan is tasked with transporting a vast, highly ornamental, porcelain-clad bucket of sake to the event. It stands about 50 cm high and the same across, so there's no way to get it on the plane as hand luggage, and in these days of extreme paranoia about liquids on planes, having the contents checked when the bucket is sealed and covered by a sturdy wooden lid must be somewhat challenging. Despite this, every year the bucket arrives and every year a small group of top executives put on kimonos, arm themselves with large wooden mallets and break the lid. This year they were a tad over enthusiastic, or maybe the wooden lid collapsed rather too easily, but whatever the reason, the execs got a sake shower as the contents did what any liquid does when large chunks of wood fall into it, it headed up and out. Watching the spectacle each year are various media and a gaggle of MIDEM delegates who then get to drink the rice wine in those cute square wooden boxes neatly piled on the counter. These days, thankfully, they hold the ceremony in the afternoon, whereas previously it was always in the morning, and much as I love sake, morning is soooooo not a good time to be imbibing a drink that was described by a Scots friend as 'mad juice', and coming from a Scottish person, born with hollow legs which allow them to drink any other nation under the table, that is quite a compliment to the awesome power of fermented rice.
Trips up to the Col de Vars always have a slightly surreal quality, partly due to the contrast between Marseille's gently rolling topography and the austere, claustrophobic gradients of the Alpes de Haute Provence, and partly due to the fact that the further you go into that mountainous region, the further back in time you seem to go. After leaving Guillestre down at the foot of the Col de Vars, the first proper mountain village is St. Marcelin, which, although still clearly part of the modern world, is already showing signs of wishing to return to an earlier, simpler epoch.
This is the house occupied by Josette who has lived in St. Marcelin all her life, has never married and is truly, deeply bonkers. She still lives without electricity, and she hates tourists with a passion verging on the rabid. In fact the only thing she hates more than tourists, is tourists who have the temerity to park outside her house. She regularly stands at her front door wearing a Provençale straw hat, stroking her impressive stubble while watching a steady stream of 4x4s rumbling past. If ever anyone stops to ask directions, her stock response is "there's no snow up there, you may as well turn around and head home". The fact that she is standing next to a deep snow-drift while saying this doesn't exactly enhance her credibility, but neither does it stop her shamelessly carrying on with her mission to rid the village of the tourist menace. Just next to Chez Josette is one of the village's two churches - and incidentally, why there are two churches for a fixed population of around 70 people is not clear, especially as both of them are always closed - but this one is a cronkly, jerry-built beauty that reminds me of the sorts of semi-improvised Russian Orthodox churches you find in the depths of Siberia. A few hundred metres up the mountain is the extremely quaint Ste. Catherine which truly is the village where time has stood still. There are occasional glimpses of modernity amongst the earthy, smoky woodiness, but it is really very easy to pretend you've fallen through a hole in the time-space continuum...until a large BMW rounds the corner pursued by Josette and a crowd of locals with medieval teeth and comedy haircuts.
Although it would be cheating to include the whole year here given that the blog only started in August, there have been several events over the last five months, all of them associated with music, which provided evidence that the business of making and selling music is still very much alive. This impression does not come from something overtly technical like streaming services, the area of the industry that most people expected to start to show profitability, or at the very least the promise thereof in 2010. In fact for me it came from the success of two events, one brand new and the other fifteen years old, and ironically, from the utter failure of a third. Starting with the failure, Quincy Jones' appearance at Berlin-based electronics tradefair IFA, previously blogged about here, proved two things beyond any doubt; that inept and overawed PR people are able to ruin absolutely anything, and, on the positive side, that even at an event like IFA which attracts thousands and thousands of people who look as if they would rather get down and dirty with a DVD player than a fellow human being, the presence of a towering genius like Jones can still cause a proper minor riot with normally 'seen-it-all' press people pushing and shoving each other for a better view like petulant 6 year-olds. Another major affirmation that something is still fundamentally very right about the business of music came in October when the 15th Amsterdam Dance Event sold out some weeks ahead of the event. Not of itself news anymore as the ADE has sold out its last four editions, but this year the event had upped its capacity, which meant that an extra 500 professionals attended. And therein lies something very exciting because the ADE proved that there are considerable numbers of people who still believe that there are ways to make a living from working in music. Behind the hundreds of labels/publishers/agents and managers who had made the effort to be there and then, having done so, worked their socks off, networked and created a buzz that reverberated through the Felix Meritis Centre and beyond, there is an immutable truth; that music as and of itself is still hugely important, and that its future seems to be in good hands. On a personal level, when Earl Spanky Smith and DJ Pierre re-created the moment when Acid House was born on the Happy Accidents panel, the audience and panelists were collectively and unanimously reduced to a state of brief but undeniable bliss. Such was the effect of the simple but immeasurably powerful noise made by Spanky's TB-303 that I managed to forget to film the sequence...but there's two short interviews with these fine fellows here. Lastly, it was such a huge pleasure to be at a brand new event and Buma Rotterdam Beats was a triumph on several levels. The venue and the city are so absolutely right for an event based around Urban music, the players who came felt at ease with the set-up and the team behind the event did a great job of both the day and nighttime programs. Here are a couple of short interviews with BRBeats festival director Roger Brouwn and daytime program director Aldo Bruining
