Rowley Gallery Blog
Our Christmas card this year at The Rowley Gallery is from a wood engraving by Howard Phipps.
I can see holly in there and ivy too so here are a couple of complementary musical offerings as well…
The first is Anonymous 4, the second is Bruce Kernow, and below are a few of the Christmas cards that were sent to us…
Continue reading “The Holly & The Ivy”
Probably one of the best gigs of the year for me was the Tedeschi Trucks Bands at the Royal Albert Hall. I’ve known Derek Trucks’s music for the past ten years; he ranges from John Coltrane, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to Bob Dylan, Delaney & Bonnie and Curtis Mayfield. But recently his band has joined forces with his wife’s, Susan Tedeschi’s band and so it was this mighty eleven piece that we saw back in October. Continue reading “Mavis, Susan & Derek”
This is a trailer for my favourite film of 2013, La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), a kind of modern day equivalent to Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, full of gorgeous and spectacular images together with a sublime soundtrack featuring music by David Lang, Arvo Pärt, John Tavener and many more. Continue reading “The Great Beauty”
The Forty Part Motet is a sound installation by Janet Cardiff, a 40 track recording of Spem In Alium by Thomas Tallis presented at The Cloisters in Upper Manhattan by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I heard about it from David Byrne:
In Cardiff’s piece, the singers—all 40 of them—are recorded, each on their own mic and track. In the installation, each individual voice is played back through their own speaker. The speakers are roughly arranged in a circle at head height. One assumes this is how they were positioned during the recording. The nature of the Tallis composition is that various groups of voices come and go, sing or remain silent for a bit: if you are standing by a speaker you might hear nothing for a while then suddenly a person’s voice booms out, with absolute clarity, as if they’re right next to you. So, depending on where you’re standing in the room, you hear a completely different balance of voices. Unless you’re in the center of the installation, you will hear some voices way louder than others.
There’s a moving review in the New York Times.
This recording was made at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco in 1971 by Paul Beaver & Bernie Krause with baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. It was an exploration of the cathedral’s long reverb acoustics. Mulligan wanders through the space discovering constantly changing sound perspectives.
Bernie Krause is still recording but nowadays concentrating on capturing and archiving the sounds of the natural world and finding that wild sounds are increasingly silenced by the deafening noise of mankind.
For Nelson Mandela. Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra. Suggested by Richard Williams.
Imagine this song by Ivor Cutler as the musical accompaniment for a group of New York’s finest morris-dancers choreographed by the greatest living creative artist in any art form. Put it together with thirteen more of his songs (including the ever popular Beautiful Cosmos), with dancers dressed as children (Ivor Cutler always seemed a child dressed as an adult) in madcap square dances, shape-shifting and pattern-weaving around the playground, and you’ve got one of the four spectacularly life-enhancing performances by the Mark Morris Dance Group last night at Sadlers Wells. All that was needed for a perfect St Andrew’s day was a curtain call with Mr Morris dressed in a kilt.
To celebrate Carla Bley‘s appearance tonight at the Wigmore Hall as part of the London Jazz Festival here’s a recording from 30 years ago when the LJF was known as the Camden Jazz Festival. The Lord Is Listenin’ To Ya, Hallelujah! was written as a tongue-in-cheek gospel showcase for Gary Valente’s gloriously raucous trombone. This performance was at the Roundhouse and I was in the audience that night with a big smile on my face. I’d been a huge fan ever since I first heard Escalator Over The Hill as a teenager and wanted to run away from home to join Carla’s circus. Praise the Lord for Carla Bley!
A lovely film by Myles O’Reilly of Reiseger/Fraanje/Sylla performing in the music department of Ludwig Beck in Munich. I’ve known Ernst Reijseger’s versatile cello improvising for many years, with Trio Clusone, Uri Caine, Tenore e Cuncordu de Orosei and Werner Herzog. Sometimes he plucks, sometimes he bows and sometimes he picks it up and strums it like a guitar. But this trio is new to me; heartfelt collaborations and inventions, full of surprises. They’re playing tonight, November 16, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the same bill as the Arild Andersen Quintet. Continue reading “Ana”
Christopher Corr has been sending us photographs of miniature buildings. If he spots one he snaps it and it joins the collection. This is a Lego version of the Pompidou Centre seen at the Royal Academy’s Richard Rogers exhibition. Continue reading “More Miniatures”