Rowley Gallery Blog
This is the Street of Wheels in L’Isle sur la Sorgue, Provence, France. The town once had seventy waterwheels, all powered by the Sorgue river, driving mills for grinding grain, making paper and weaving silk. Nowadays the river turns fourteen vestigial wheels driving the tourist circuit around the town. We came here on holiday and stayed in the house on the right by the street lamp. Continue reading “Rue Des Roues”
David Byrne & St Vincent play London’s Roundhouse tonight. Sadly I won’t be able to make it but this is some compensation. It’s from their album Love This Giant. Continue reading “Who”
This is The Rowley Gallery joiners shop in the summer of 2012, a black wooden shed perched on the flat roof of the ground floor workshop. Access is by spiral staircase and it’s where I join picture frames. It sits in the shelter of a towering tree-of-heaven, Ailanthus altissima, which in my early days here I remember as a self-sown seedling. No-one paid it too much attention, but before long I loved its dappled light in summer, and in winter I measured the sky through its mesh of branches. Continue reading “Tree Of Heaven”
Nous sommes en vacances.
Voici une jolie chanson.
Moussu T e lei Jovents
This is a lovely story of a chance meeting that led to the creation of some beautiful music. Vieux Farka Touré and Idan Raichel explore their common ground between Mali and Israel. I’ve been playing The Tel Aviv Session non-stop in my workshop; a gorgeous, improvised soundtrack to our recent heatwave. It’s almost as good as the magnificent Talking Timbuktu, the 1994 collaboration between Vieux’s father, Ali Farka Touré and Ry Cooder. There’s also a new album by Vieux Farka Touré, Mon Pays, and I’m looking forward to seeing him perform live at this weekend’s Open East Festival.
The 16th Gnawa Festival in Essaouira on Morocco’s Atlantic coast is a largely free four-day celebration of the music of the Gnawa, what is perhaps the oldest trance music in the world, the root note of inner transportation and sufi trance that attracts hundreds of thousands of Moroccans and intrepid international visitors to Essaouira each June, over the weekend of the full moon. Continue reading “Gnawa Studies”
I’m getting behind. Too many posts and not enough time. This one’s long overdue. We walked this way a month ago or more. It was another suggestion from Christopher Somerville. We printed out the map and the directions only to find when we arrived in Fyfield that I’d left the map at home. The directions were good but occasionally a map would have clarified things. It led to a few differences of opinion and a few trial and error wrong turns and turnarounds. 7½ miles turned out to be more like 10. Continue reading “The Fields Of Fyfield”
American-born artist John Hubbard talks about his life and work in rural Dorset over the past five decades. This film, produced for his exhibition Littoral at the Luther W Brady gallery in Washington DC from May 15 – June 28, 2013, includes insights into the process behind his extraordinary abstract impressionist paintings, as well as a selection of songs he learned as an art student in New York in the 1950s. www.johnhubbard.com
This is a recommendation from Christopher Corr, recently at Union Chapel to see much anticipated Irish/New York music collective The Gloaming. They sound fantastic, they’re a surprise to me but now I’m eagerly looking forward to their new album and their next visit to London.
Just over a week ago, when everyone else was at Wembley to see Bruce Springsteen, we were at Ronnie Scott’s to witness the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. This was the highlight. They came storming on stage, firing on all cylinders with an extended, extra-exuberant version of Voodoo. Kirk Joseph was practically hyperventilating on sousaphone and I’ve never heard a more slippery baritone saxophonist than Roger Lewis. It was an extraordinary, virtuoso performance. More here.