as well as a review of the "classical roots" presentation at the dso,
which ended with a performance of beethoven's fifth piano concerto, on mar 6, 2020.
in the week leading up to this show, or excursion, i found myself trying to juggle a number of shows into a one or maybe two day escape, and so flirting with going to the concerto on the saturday or maybe trying to fit a double bill in on the friday, meaning i should come home early on thursday - or even just giving up and going to steve hackett on wednesday, instead.
i do feel that the first thing i should acknowledge is actually that hackett concert. the following was posted a few days before the show:
what is steve hackett? well, he was the not-quite-original-but-certainly-classic guitarist for the legendary 70s prog act genesis. mr. hackett left the band in 1977, so he had absolutely nothing to do with the band's somewhat infamous run of 80s pop singles, and in fact only did two records with collins singing, at all. however, he was the band's guitarist for all but one of their string of classic records (he was not the guitarist on trespass) between 1970-1977.
genesis is known mostly for being the initial vehicle of peter gabriel and then of phil collins (who initially played drums, before gabriel left for a solo career), and is generally thought of as a synthesizer-driven band when discussed for it's compositions. however, the guitar work on these records is actually somewhat revolutionary. amongst other things, hackett is widely credited for introducing the technique of tapping into rock music, something that was picked up on most prominently by van halen and has became a staple in rock music ever since.
on this tour, he appears to be starting with a solo record he did in the late 70s and finishing with a set of genesis material centered around the classic record, selling england by the pound, which was the third with the classic lineup of gabriel on vocals, collins on drums, banks on keyboards, rutherford on bass and hackett on guitar.
he appears to have hired younger musicians to do the vocal and drums duties, which is fine and probably necessary.
if i could get cheaper tickets, this would be a no brainer. but i don't want to spend too much on this show and then regret missing a bunch of others, and this weekend may be full of other stuff that i want to get to, instead. if i had a money tree. alas...
i want to decide what i'm doing on the weekend, first. but, if i go out on wednesday, this is where i'm going....
by wednesday morning, i'd come up with a kind of maximal plan that started wednesday with hackett and ended early saturday morning. i had to face the facts - if i were to go to the hackett concert, i would have to cut something out. i also realized it was going to be seated and mostly populated with older men. if i had another $100 to blow, i would have started here, on the wednesday, and ended up at an experimental noise show a little later, before going home and heading back out for the thursday night.
after scratching wednesday off, i then decided that the most interesting things could be strung together starting on thursday evening and ending on friday afternoon, leaving friday night open as a variable, if the weather and my consciousness, as well as my finances, permit.
this was the ideal that i hoped set times would align around:
1) talking ear @ cliff bell's, 20:00-21:30 - first set.
2) take the bus to royal oak for roughly 22:00 and hopefully catch the last two acts, sunsquabi and the floozies. i want this to go late - until after 2:00.
3) get something to eat. it's a thursday, so i don't expect to find an after party. but, the bus runs all night, now. so, i can make my way back to detroit for the morning.
4) the beethoven concerto is running at 10:45 in the morning.
5) go home, shower, sleep.
6) maybe come back for another funk show on friday night at tangent gallery, followed by dancing.
obviously, imagining set times on my blog doesn't make them real, so the next thing to do would be to actually ask the artists what time they're playing at. this is done these days by posting at the event listing.
talking ear indicated that they would actually start at 20:00 sharp, and perform three 45 minute sets, each on the next subsequent hour. so, if i could get a confirmation that sunsquabi were going to be on a little later, i could maybe even catch the first two sets. perfect.
talking ear would also be playing as a four piece, without their singer, who is now their ex-singer. i will admit that much of the charm in the recorded material is driven by this now departed singer, but that's only really a drawback in terms of the uncertainty in direction that it creates; the rest of the band seems capable of holding my interest, regardless, even if i have little to go by in predicting what they actually would sound like. i'm sure i'll enjoy any new recorded material, once it exists.
i grew up listening to fusion records by the likes of holdsworth, di meola, mclaughlin....as well as some non-guitar jazz, albeit not much of it. i've heard ridiculous amounts of chick corea. there were a couple of bruford/holdsworth records with a singer named annette peacock. that's maybe the closest thing i can think of directly, although i should point out that it's also roughly in the same space as a local act name saajtak.
https://talkingear.bandcamp.com/album/talking-ear
i wanted to get up and dance before the end of the night, but i was actually kind of stoked about starting at the jazz club early; that's something i wish lined up well more often.
unfortunately, after some prodding, we eventually got set times for the royal oak show - and learned that sunsquabi were scheduled for 21:00, making it impossible to schedule both shows. i'd have to cut out talking ear from the night.
this opened up some space for me, as i was planning on picking up beethoven tickets on thursday night, before the box office closed, at 17:00. so, i settled on crashing what looked like a weekly experimental dinner time series at tv lounge, that seemed like it might even have free food, before catching the bus to royal oak.
with all that planned, it was time to get ready to actually go. of course, that took hours longer than planned, and so i ended up failing to make even the 5:30 bus, and instead ending up in detroit around a quarter after six, without much to do but crash the dinner series, which happened before the hour, at the latest.
there was indeed free food, some sort of vegetarian burrito type affair, with some chips and salsa. i got a cheap beer, and found myself outside talking about this virus with somebody that actually works in the insurance industry.
he fully acknowledged the error of insufficient testing, and the problems that a large uninsured population would face. was i concerned, though? this seemed to be his interest - measuring my concern. we're all collecting data in our own ways, aren't we? the whole world's a laboratory. i tried to articulate myself as best i could - being that i was healthy, i was not particularly concerned about myself, or my well-being, and would rather consider it advantageous to confront the virus early, but if i were uninsured, or older or suffering from existing conditions, and i lived in the united states, then i could see some potential for alarm. my lack of concern is due to being in a relatively privileged position as a relatively young and healthy canadian.
he wanted to rely on the who mortality stats, which i insisted were an exaggeration; the high mortality rate in the united states may appear to be more in line with a third world country, or a country like iran that's been battered by us sanctions, but that's really just because they aren't testing; it's not really 7%. it's more like a 0.5%. although i'd be a lot more concerned if i thought it was 7%! but, he needed data, not speculation. in his mind, that 4.5% coming out of china was reason for serious alarm. and, i guess if i thought that was a reasonable mortality rate, i'd be alarmed, too.
the artist performing at the tv lounge on this night is also known as the detroit bureau of sound, and tends to frequently do these kinds of early night spotlights that are a kind of mix of high and low art; i've seen him perform philip glass pieces in dilapidated warehouses, and also do pretentious reinterpretations of cage pieces at energy drink showcases. he had an electronic reinterpretation of koyaanisqatsi up for showcase at the detroit institute of art in mid-march that got canceled. i keep an eye on him because a lot of what he puts together is kind of the perfect pre-show event, even if i end up showing up too late to catch it more than half of the time.
on this night, he appears to have set up a large amount of analog gear in the bar, and decided not to do much with it. i would have to label what i saw as a brap, albeit not a particularly lively one. so, i ejected from the situation a little bit before 20:00, with the intent to catch the early bus out.
i just had to get up and around the corner to temple, down the street to woodward and - hey, there's a bus...no....wait.
gah.
so, i had 20 minutes to wait to catch the bus i initially planned to take, to get to royal oak a few minutes after 21:00, and into the bar by 21:15 - hoping they're running late. when you miss the bus by seconds, the wait for the next one is of course maximal. but, even so, it would take as much time to drive there as it would to bus there, according to google, so i wouldn't actually be saving any time by driving. once i was able to get the driver to stop and let me on, it did run on time, and did get me to the neighbourhood of the venue at very close to 21:00, as expected.
i feared i'd miss the first song when i got there, but i actually showed up with plenty of time to spare. in fact, i'd been in and out for a few smokes, including finding the kind i like, by the time they came on, after 22:00. if i knew they weren't going to be on until after 22:00, i could have caught the fusion band after all.....
sunsquabi are a fully instrumental three piece white-boy funk band that also take strong influences from some specific guitar-driven progressive rock acts, like tangerine dream and pink floyd. while there are lots of bands that are vaguely like this out there right now, sunsquabi caught my attention due to the musicality - which is not to say that this is particularly technical, so much as to point to the wide musical vocabulary. so, they tend to make good use of abstract rhythms and syncopation, for example, in ways that would be better described as playful than technically impressive. the result is a convincingly fun sound that is also more than interesting enough to keep a nerd engaged, one that i tend to enjoy dancing to, as i get lost in the shuffling beats and the soaring guitars. i'd recommend this to anyone, but it's going to be especially intriguing for all those that exist in that intersection of the electronic with the guitar....
i found myself back outside between sets, and this is when the giant blunts started getting passed around, leaving me feeling fairly spaced out before the floozies set. this bar will make you leave your $8 beer on a table, in a room with hundreds of people, before you go for a smoke, and then who knows what's going to happen to it when you're gone. it was against my better judgement, but i did what i had to, and seemed to make it out of the venue able to walk.
the material i'd heard from the floozies also included a horn section, so they seemed a little bit stripped down on this night, as a two piece. this hemmed their sound into something that was a little bit more generic and formulaic, from a modern "edm" template. so, you had lots of dubstep wobbles, for example. i took it for what it was, and kept dancing in between the guitar licks, which were less plentiful than i'd have liked, but the truth is that sunsquabi is a hard act to follow.
my stark suggestion to the floozies is to make it a habit to bring a horn section with them when they tour. they're just not pulling it off as a two-piece.
a lot of people may consider a show that ends a little after 1:00 to be a late night, but it left me with some time to blow, as i could either find a late-night speakeasy in royal oak and ride it out until the morning buses started up or evacuate the suburbs and go back downtown early on the late night bus out. if this show had lingered past 2:00 to 3:00ish, it would have been relatively seamless to catch the early morning bus out, right from the venue. but, the earlier night had me wanting to catch the late bus out, instead. i had time for a beer, before the bus came, a little after 2:00.
i had picked out a couple of divey bars that i thought would be open, but neither were. instead, i found myself at a sort of sports bar, as they were the only thing around there that seemed to be open. it was moments after i ordered my beer, though, that they were yelling at everybody to finish their drink and get out.
the place was actually fairly well populated on a thursday, so it was maybe a bit weird that they were aggressively shuffling everybody out at 1:35, but i had little choice but to drink my beer quickly and be sure i'm not the last one out.
outside now, at 1:45, i'm having a smoke and am approached by a woman who remarks that she likes my red overcoat (indeed, the coat is a bit of a hit) and wishes she could straighten her hair as well as i do. she then proceeds to speak to me in what i presume is some dialect of hebrew, although i would be unwise as to advise on which one.
i have a complex ancestry, and i do get recognized sometimes, most often by native americans, but also by italians and also by people that are from the northeast of europe. i used to get teased for looking jewish when i was in high school, years before i realized i was, actually, of some ancestral hebrew heritage. i've never, however, been identified as a jew on the street and then spoken to in hebrew, with the assumption that i'd understand it.
"i'm part italian and part jewish, so i do have very wavy hair. i wouldn't call it curly, exactly. it's actually also really light and fine, due to the norse ancestry on my mom's side. so, it's more like a thin, fine and wavy hairtype than thick, heavy and curly type. and, i certainly don't speak hebrew..."
"you're not really jewish, then."
(she was disappointed)
"no, not culturally. except i kind of am like a secular american jew in my politics and in my tastes in art, which is sort of a different jewish culture. i'd bet the number of jews in new york city that are bilingual is pretty low nowadays. so, you could think of me like that, and it's not totally wrong. but, i'm only really vaguely aware of my actual jewish ancestry and don't really prioritize it over my other heritage."
"i still like your coat."
"thanks."
after some further late night banter, and an eventual dispersion from the closing bar, i did catch my late night bus out of royal oak, which tricked me into thinking it was going to take me downtown and then dropped me off at the state fair transit centre instead, to await the regular city bus going back downtown.
waiting for the woodward bus at 3:00 am at state transit in detroit is maybe not the most enviable situation to be in, but i can be friendly enough with the other riders, whoever they are. so, one of them wants a smoke, and i give it to him. it turns out he's recently been released from hospital, and nursing a gunshot wound that just missed his vitals; both lucky and unlucky, as he claims, at least, that he was an innocent bystander, and essentially struck by a stray bullet. the doctors told him he should have been killed. right now, he needs to get downtown to get to the mission, which is where he's staying until his wound has healed. and, i can have some of his vodka if i want (i passed).
he carries a sleeping bag around with him on his back, stuffed into his coat. says he needs it to keep the cold out.
"no, you use it to keep the warmth in."
"yeah, gotta keep the cold out."
"it would probably be useful to you on a day-to-day basis if you actually realized that you keep the warmth in, you don't keep the cold out."
"gotta keep the cold out...works good if you get bundled up right...."
eventually, the bus comes and our gunshot victim actually wanders down the street the other way, before he's coerced back by the driver. i admit that i sat in a place that would force him to sit elsewhere.
it's pushing 4:00 when we get back downtown, and i find myself getting off a stop early, due mostly to badly eyeing the stops - i knew where i was, but didn't know where the stops were. as it is, i'm walking south on woodward to the diner when a man in a wheelchair rolls up to me and asks me for a smoke. and, he needs me to put it in his mouth and light it for him too.
obviously, this guy probably shouldn't be smoking. but, what is the use of denying a dying man a smoke?
so, i give him the smoke, and i light it, and i turn around to walk off, but he asks me to come back and help him get a bag out of the side of his wheelchair. i initially thought he meant out of a pocket on the external side of the wheelchair, but after some discussion it is clarified that he meant a bag that was lodged between himself and the seat of the wheelchair. i am able to oblige this request relatively painlessly.
he tells me he's pulling a cup out of the bag to take a piss, right there, in his wheelchair, on the side of the road, on woodward avenue, in midtown. he wants me to get another bag out of the back, and i can't see where, and he's yelling at me to hurry up....
what's going through my mind at this point is a kind of self-righteous indignation as to why it is that this clearly severely sick man is in a wheelchair on the side of the road at 3:00 am and asking a canadian tourist to perform unpaid volunteer work as an orderly. any concept of dignity had left this man behind. everything else aside, that was what had me angry and almost shivering, the fact that i was forced to suffer this man of his lack of dignity so badly.
i eventually walked away, and went straight inside to wash my hands. there's a virus going around, they said.
this man was eventually wheeled into the diner, which was no doubt an unacceptable sanitation decision, but i said nothing. it was hovering around freezing outside.
i always get the same thing at this diner and wanted to take a closer look at the menu, so i didn't end up ordering until well after 4:00, but i ended up getting my breakfast special, anyways, nonetheless. it was barely 5:00 by the time i was done eating, so i just got a lot of water and a lot of coffee and camped out.
of course i nodded off a few times, but they were punctuated by smoke breaks in the cold air that did a good job of waking me back up.
i was lucky that i got the specific waitress doing the overnight shift that sees me as harmless local colour, and doesn't seem interested in chasing me out. i just told her up front that i was waiting for the symphony to start and would probably be there until after 9:00, and she seemed to register it and then said nothing to me about it.
i got some french fries around 7:00 and munched them slowly on purpose.
the food, the coffee, the water and the brisk smoke breaks actually had me largely sobered up by 9:00, when i ordered one extra large coffee to go (the specific waitress had been refilling my cup all night for free, actually) and made my way out to the box office to get a ticket for the symphony.
i was aware that they were doing a specifically african-themed event on this day, something i didn't look too deeply into, and also noticed that they were initially planning on doing the same ravel piece i saw the previous month, which minimized my interest in the whole thing. however, the pianist performing the ravel piece had to withdraw at the last minute due to tendinitis, and they replaced it with a performance of beethoven's fifth piano concerto, which i hadn't seen yet. that all of a sudden became a priority when i noticed it; the whole thrust of the adventure is really centered around making sure i can get to the symphony at some point that weekend, with the friday morning show being identified as most tactical, due to there not being a great follow-up show on the saturday and there not being a sunday show at all. this let me get to the two things that were most interesting to me, sunsquabi & the concerto, in one long & epic trip, rather than piecing together two or three half-nights in order to stretch it out.
i still didn't really look into the african themed first part of the show, though - i decided that i'd just go and check it out. i had a vague expectation of something religiously themed, but i otherwise didn't really know what to expect.
they started the show off with a piece called lift every voice and sing, in which the expectation was that we would all know the words (i did not. sorry.) and that we would all stand together and sing it (i did neither. sorry). it seems as though this tune has some political significance in the black community. i just have this aversion to choir-singing for some reason; i don't like the group think, the unity of action, it gets into my skin and makes me squirm. it doesn't really matter what it is, if i'm instructed to stand and participate, i almost certainly won't.
the piece itself sounded like an orchestration of a gospel tune, which i gather is what it actually is.
i'm not sure if this is the exact arrangement, but i think it is.
this was followed by an arrangement of ave maria. is ave maria black? it seems somewhat farcical on first glance, but i take it that this particular arrangement must have been constructed by a black american. it's still a little bit of a curious pick.
these pieces were running into each other like a medley, or, i guess, like a haphazardly thrown together symphony; these were movements, and the third was....a meditation on the word 'hallelujah'. it has a very minimalist feel to it in the reich or glass sense, but i was almost cracking up, really.
they then went into two pieces by a black female composer called nkeiru okoye, the first of which is supposed to be a hopeful reaction to 9/11 but actually kind of comes off as a walt disney megahit, to me, which is perhaps just a topical reflection - if america were to produce a hopeful response to 9/11, it would have to be in the form of a disney film. you can and i might suggest should imagine heroines singing soliloquies into their mirror in the middle part, psyching themselves up for their task. the big band perhaps gives it a downtown manhatten feel, but it kind of just comes off sounding like 49th street massacre.
https://soundcloud.com/nkeiruokoye/voices-shouting-out-1
the second piece by this composer was apparently a world premiere of her piece black bottom, which is a sort of opera in several short movements about the northwards adjoining neighbourhood in detroit, which is also currently the party district. i didn't even try to follow this, but i generally have no interest in opera, so i was not a good test subject; to me, the piece seemed sort of disjointed and didn't flow well, but i'd probably say that about most opera. i think that the dso did have this at their youtube site previously, as it is in the google cache, but it appears to have been taken down; as it was the world premiere, this is probably the only extant recording, as of this time.
the fifth piano concerto started up after a short intermission, and at that point i became cognizant of the nature of the audience - it was black, but it was also very young and apparently in attendance due to some kind of function. it clapped between the movements of the concerto.
this was my write-up, a few days after the show:
so, we didn't do a preliminary review of beethoven's 5th piano concerto.
the reason i didn't catch this earlier was that it was added at the last minute. the program was initially supposed to start with what the dso decided was specifically "black music" (and i'll have a bit to say about that when i do the review) and end with the same ravel piece i saw a few weeks ago, but the pianist had to drop due to tendinitis. so, they brought somebody else in at the last minute to do what is one of beethoven's most classic works.
i hope they didn't pick beethoven in order to buy into the urban legend that he was black. the arguments i've seen would lead to the conclusion that he might have maybe been distantly arabic - if you want to pull something out of his tonality, that's really what you pull out, and these reaching deductions about some paintings at most have him looking a little tanned, rather than black. it's supposedly due to the idea that his mother came from an area that was once under moorish control. in fact, the idea that the moors were black is itself just a eurocentric myth that should really be vigorously corrected across the literature; european art constantly depicted the moors as dark-skinned, and they of course were, but they were dark-skinned in the sense that an arab is, and not black like subsaharan africans. that is an anachronism that we've picked up fairly recently. so, shakespeare's contemporary audience would have actually known that othello was an arab. what the moors really did was create a neo-carthaginian state that was fundamentally semitic in every way, not african. but, i don't think anybody actually takes this idea seriously as it isn't based in any hard evidence, and i'll remind you that there is an urban legend that mozart was black, too. rather, this idea seems to get it's support from a strain of historical revisionism called "afrocentrism" that essentially argues that everybody was black - including historical figures like darius (iranian) and cleopatra (greek) that quite clearly were not. maybe, though, there were good reasons to pull the ravel from a concert about black music...beethoven was at least about liberty, equality and fraternity, even if his mother was actually polish and he was, actually, pretty much lily white.
this piece is perhaps beethoven at his most cliched, and you can kind of interpret that in a variety of ways. is it therefore beethoven at his peak? or does it get a little bit expected, in a sense? regardless, it's impossible to deny the sheer enjoyment of it, if you love the aspects of beethoven's work that he is still best known for all of these years later - the raucus piano parts, the sheer fucking with christian tonality and the nice, catchy melodies that he wraps all of that into. we get beethoven as barnstorming revolutionary, beethoven as purveyor of catchy tunes for the masses and beethoven as epic, brilliant troll all at once. it's hard to present an argument against such compactness.
but, it is a little predictable in terms of following his own previously established form, for better or worse.
if you ever get a chance to see this, jump at it. there's a magic to it. really. i'm glad i stayed up all night for it...
i was aware before i left that the weather might turn on friday night, but it was also supposed to hit a peak of niceness on friday afternoon before rapidly deteriorating. in fact, the wind was already starting to pick up when i got out of the orchestra hall around 13:00, enough that it was somewhat of a difficultly cold walk home.
i was finally back in before 15:00, a little less than 24 hours since i'd left, and this ritual did end properly with nachos, a shower and some good sleep.
