Brem's Blog

Moving House

2011-10-27T22:10:00.001-07:00

Hey Hey - I've moved my blogging platform

so I now blog over HERE.

Join me!

Cheers
Bremner

2011-10-21T14:28:00.000-07:00

Upcoming - this was a summer of remarkable beginnings, and they continue to move me forward. '33 was the most challenging show that I've ever created, and it took all of my energy. That seems to have been rewarded in being accepted by the Jury at the New Orleans Theatre Festival (so I'm currently heading slowly down towards NoLa to perform the show for a Southern audience). And the Gladstone Theatre in Ottawa will be doing a three week run of the show in February and March. I'm considering if I should take it over to the Edinburgh or Brighton Festival next summer to shop it around in the UK.

Other beginnings - well, I'll be going into the studio in New Orleans to record the vocal tracks for the CD based around '33. Tentatively titled ‘Closing Night - Songs of resistance and revolution from the dying days of the Weimar Republic'.

I'm currently working on a collaboration with the lovely and irrepressible Melanie Gall, on an imagined concert of Jaques Brel and Edith Piaf. I think it'll be more or less us amusing ourselves (and hopefully audiences) with some of the greatest songs ever written.

The wonderful English performance poet Jem Rolls has been kicking some ideas around for exploring the period of 1918-28 in revolutionary Russia - the so called Russian Spring - when ideas and creativity exploded, before being crushed by Stalin.

And, of course, there is a new show to write. Hoping to push myself even further after '33. This time I'm curious about the other side of the Atlantic. I'm listening to a swath of music from the late 1920's and 30's in the US of A. I'm fascinated by the last vestiges of Vaudeville and the final heydays of the travelling Circus. And I'm curious about the crushing of the radical left in America, and how that destruction might have been one of the causes of the current monolithic 'one party' state that exists.

Nothing written yet - just a bunch of themes that fascinate - we'll see where they take me

SUMMER 2011... ON THE ROAD

2011-10-21T14:10:00.000-07:00

Orlando, Montreal, London, Regina, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Victoria, Vancouver. Have I left anything out there? No. Nine festivals, three shows (including my part in Rupert Wates wonderful musical revue). Almost six months on the road.

The new cabaret piece - '33, (a kabarett) was a challenge to perform. My pitch line finally for it distilled down to 'Imagine Stephen Harper orders the Homeland Security forces to shoot the cast of Glee through the back of the head. Well, my job is to come on stage, clear up the bodies and sing songs about them.' Only, of course, this event is set (more or less) in 1933 and it really did happen that way.

I was delighted with the response. It was a challenge to mount such a dark show at the Fringe, where comedy kills, and I was inspired by the audiences who came along for the ride.

It wasn't an easy ride - I played to crowds of 3 and 4 at the Montreal Fringe, and at each festival I would enter with small crowds and then watch it slowly build. But at the last festival, the show sold out most of it's performances in a huge venue at the Edmonton Fringe. It was honestly humbling to perform the work for all these people.

'33 was inspired by a single song. 'Unsrer Shtetle Brent', by Mordecai Geburtig. The song was written to commemorate the destruction of a village in Poland. Mordecai Geburtig was killed several years later when he refused to leave his village. He wrote that he wanted that song to become a song of universal resistance to oppression and injustice, not just a song about that particular incident. When I wrote the show I thought about what my 'village' was, and the stage and the people on it came to the fore. So the show is about a man mourning his friends fate and determining to carry on regardless.

I also remounted my old show 'Whiskey Bars', a show built around the songs of Kurt Weill, and took that to three festivals.

I've been playing that show for almost 10 years now in various forms and it was great to see how well it works. We sold out 8 shows in a row at the Winnipeg Festival, and got a 'Best of Fest' award there, and again at the Victoria Festival.

I think though that this might be it's last time out in this format. It's time to shake it up. So I think it's next emergence into the world will involve a reworking and rethinking of the show.

The rethink is partly inspired by a vast screw up on my part. On opening night in Vancouver, with a sold out show, and with 15 minutes to go before the show, I realized I had forgotten my costume (formal tuxedo with tailcoat). And the show is basically built around me getting dressing into said Tuxedo. I freaked out and while I was running around panicking a good friend rushed into the performers green room and asked if anyone had any kind of formal wear.

A wonderful Australian performer (who goes by the name of The Birdmann) handed over his ancient tux coat and the skinny black jeans he wears on stage. They made it to me with enough time to be laid out on stage before the audience arrived. So I went on stage with a costume that I had never tried on. And that might have been one of the best shows of the summer. The ancient threadbare costume inspired comments afterwards from patrons who read a whole story into their quality and my 'inspired choice' in wearing that outfit....

London bound

2011-06-19T09:45:00.000-07:00

Great run in Montreal. Fabulous to be back in the city after so many years. Maybe it's time to go back for a longer trip!

We didn't get any mainstream press, but some reviews from the web on the show

FIVE STARS
"This is the best show I've seen so far. Crosses the line between touching and gut wrenching. The character is beautifully developed. Compelling performance that speaks to darker themes without losing it's sparkle. A must see for Brecht lovers or anyone with an interest in the political history of theatre.
A touching love song to a bygone era"

AND

FOUR STARS
"A must-see! This show combines music, nostalgia, tragedy, comedy, and cross-dressing into a one-of-a-kind experience."

AND

FIVE STARS
"Absolutely wonderful. (And I can be a hard sell on cabaret!) Loved the dark melancholy mood, and the political parallels arguing what it means to be an artist in uncertain times. HIGHLY recommended!"

Going Dark

2011-06-15T19:59:00.000-07:00

Driving North, heading up to Montreal Fringe Festival from the Orlando Fringe Festival. Spent today walking through the appropriately atmospheric streets of Savannah thinking about my new cabaret show.

My blurb for the show is

"Get out! Raus! Casse-toi! Vous êtes trop tard. Too late. The Cabaret is finished. Forever!"

Trapped in the ruins of a Cabaret theatre, the Master of Ceremonies is trying to make his escape. First they censored him. Then they beat and dragged away his cast. Soon the theatre will vanish in flames. But tonight a final group of thrill-seekers has wandered in the open door, looking for a spectacle. Alone on stage, the MC must improvise one last show. So tonight he will play all the parts - singer, dancer, stagehand, showgirl, funnyman - and sing his heart out with some of the greatest songs ever written.

it's a dark little show.... very, very dark.... a stage full of corpses and some songs to sing....

And until 10 days ago I wasn't really sure that it added up to anything. I knew I wanted to work on this period and work on these songs. And I believe that the songs gain a special strength and power when they are put in context of their time. I'd spent months researching, getting the costume together, the music. I recruited my friends to help out. Roxanna Bikadoroff did an amazing poster.

I traveled to Ottawa to work with Dave Dawson on the direction.... but it all just seemed like a strange idea that I had.

Now, after a series of shows in Orlando, it seems to actually be something. The Orlando Sentinel called it 'A gem of a show... a cabaret of shadows', and orlandotheatre.com said 'Duthie, with his shaved head, haunted face and gorgeously delicate baritone, is utterly arresting as the vanquished impresario of a ruined cabaret…Duthie’s singing is magical.'

After touring Whiskey Bars for years (a show which I'll be doing for the first time in Vancouver and Victoria this summer) I knew that songs can gain a special power if put in context of their time.

And over those years I've become fascinated and also very frustrated by Cabaret. Mostly because the word is almost meaningless now.... Cabaret once meant a very special performance space and style - a space where the performer was in close, almost uncomfortable intimacy with the audience, and a satirical, almost aggressive style that questioned both the morals of the day, and the motives of the audience. Nowadays Cabaret can mean so many things - long-legged girls with pasties and feathers, faded old Broadway singers rehashing their lives beside pianos, a jumble of disconnected skits by eager young thespians, an evening of Rodgers and Hart. All of which have their good and bad side, and none of which particularly interest me.

I wanted to do a concert of songs that would capture the rebellion and questioning and unadulterated fear that permeated that period.

I particularly wanted to do that right now because in the US and Canada there is a new repression making its way over the Arts. It might not be the unashamed brutality of Hitler's rise to power in 1933, but it's a brutality of conservatism and rationalism, where the Arts are asked to justify themselves on whether or not they are 'profitable' and 'express community values'. Since the only possible answer to these is a resounding 'no', then this justifies cutting and slashing and repressing. In the US there is the stupidity and anger of the Tea Party, seeking to 'defund' any hint of artistic expression that doesn't match their conservative Christian values or that isn't based on a strict profit motive, and in Canada a new right wing in charge is seeking to personally green light only the arts funding which they personally approve.

There's an infamous line about the pre-war period of anti-war art which goes something like

'you can observe the incredible success and power of avant-garde theatre and cabaret from the way they stopped the rise of fascism in Germany'.

That is, they failed, big time.

but they left a precious legacy of rebellion... so does that mean it was a mistake to try?

next shows in Montreal Fringe Festival,

Horaire / Schedule

09 - MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels)

11 Jun @ 20.00
12 Jun @ 15.15
14 Jun @ 23.45
16 Jun @ 20.00
17 Jun @ 23.45
18 Jun @ 17.00

then on to London, Ontario, and Regina, Saskatchewan

Want some music? Get it direct from CD Baby

2011-06-03T19:31:00.000-07:00

Lucky

2011-04-26T06:45:00.000-07:00

Is how I feel.

Starting a new tour in a few weeks. With a new show. And new songs. And I'm nervous. Very. But I shouldn't be. I have the help of wonderfully talented friends. The wise and thoughtful Robert Burns read the early layout in Paris and pushed and pulled the concept till it had some direction. Alex Morrison in Winnipeg gave me another perspective. The wonderful Dave Dawson of Black Sheep Theatre is directing the new piece. Chris Cody did an extraordinary job on the musical accompaniment. Tracy Darin kicked in the choreography and musical staging. Benjamin Lefebvre designed the poignant bowler hatted MC costume. The amazing Roxanna Bikadoroff is designing the Poster and image for the show. And of course Lisa made the whole thing worth doing (and kicked my butt when I almost gave up).

Lucky indeed!

Burn's Day

2011-01-25T00:15:00.000-08:00

On Sunday night we celebrated Burn's night. Haggis and whiskey and all the trimmings.

But today is Robert Burn's birthday, so I thought I'd put up a little tribute of my own - one of his first songs, dedicated to all the ladies of the world.

This comes from years and years ago when I recorded a cassette (that's how long ago it was!) of Scottish songs for my Dad's birthday. God, I sound very wee!

the player should pop up here -

Green Grow the Rushes

or click HERE

Green Grow the Rushes, by Robert Burns
There's nought but care on ev'ry han',
In ev'ry hour that passes, O;
What signifies the life o' man,
An' 'twere na for the lasses, O.
Green grow, etc

Chorus
Green grow the rashes, O;
Green grow the rashes, O;
The sweetest hours that e'er I spend,
Are spent amang the lasses, O.

The warly race may riches chase,
An' riches still may fly them, O;
An' tho' at last they catch them fast,
Their hearts can ne'er enjoy them, O.

Green grow, etc

But gie me a canny hour at e'en,
My arms about my Dearie, O;
An' warly cares an' warly men,
May a' gae tapsalteerie, O!

Green grow, etc

For you sae douse, ye sneer at this,
Ye're nought but senseless asses, O;
The wisest Man the warl' saw,
He dearly lov'd the lasses, O.

Green grow, etc

Auld Nature swears, the lovely Dears
Her noblest work she classes, O;
Her prentice han' she try'd on man,
An' then she made the lasses, O.

Green grow, etc

Back in Paris, back to the web

2010-11-16T11:44:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm back in Pareee. It feels great to be home after almost (no, wait, actually more than...) 6 months on the road. Such a pleasure to cook my own food and be surrounded by 'my stuff' and my music and my walls. The dog is snoring on the floor and all feels right with the world. And I'll be doing most of my blogging over on my site www.parislovesjazz.com.

I haven't been updating it for a while, but now that I'm back in the city of lights I figure it's time to hit the keyboard again. It's brought me some great friends and contacts and managed to work its way up to the top of Google's search engine listings for jazz in Paris. Not sure what that means - but it's kind of cool...

So drop by www.parislovesjazz.com and you'll probably get a good idea of where I've been this week, or my plans for the weekend - and if you're in town, then please join me

cheers
Bremner

Winnipeg

2010-07-18T17:46:00.000-07:00

I'm not reading reviews this summer.

God, that feels terribly decadent and pleasurable to be able to say that. It's an incredibly self-indulgent pleasure to just perform for the audiences, and do the show, and not pay any attention to the reviewers. I got kind of obsessed in the last fringe tour I did - with Whiskey Bars, and the reviews - either good or bad - and god knows I had a lot of both - really started to affect the way I performed and my pleasure in the work, so this summer, I figured I'd just get up there and sing and let the audience tell me whether the show was good or bad...

But Lisa is keeping track for the files - and a thoughtful one came up, and they liked it, so I'll post the link here - I haven't read it, but apparently it gives a good idea of the show, and god knows I'm crap at describing my own work.... so here goes

http://www.cbc.ca/manitoba/features/fringefestival/2010/06/the-pig-of-happiness.html

cheers
Brem

Pigs first night out

2010-06-20T18:55:00.001-07:00

well, that was stressful – and fun!

the first show in ottawa of a new text with new music and new instruments in a byov where I’m running the sound and costume changes and musical accompaniment…. ack…

it went fairly well…. no, honestly, I have no idea how it went. Everyone stayed for the whole show (always a good sign!), and at the end they seemed happy. But I have no perspective. I’ve had my head inside this show for a long rehearsal process, and I’m still not sure what I’ve come up with. A story, within a story, within a story… and a character that is the actor that is the character and a set of wildly cheerful happy songs presented in a way that veers between the maniacally delighted and the deeply tragic.

For now I’ll rest on my laurels… the show is up and running. There’s a whole whack of details and storylines that I now see need to be polished and tightened, but I’ll leave that for tomorrow, when I can see straight.

In a dark room with a lot of words and music

2010-06-07T13:57:00.001-07:00

The last weeks are always like this …. though I swear every time that I will have the piece done and ready a month before, I end up in a dark room in the days before the opening with a lot of words and music trying to put them all together in the way that I imagined.

The Pig of Happiness is a reworking of a show I tried out last year at the London Fringe – The Barker’s Spiel …. however, extensive marketing research at the fringe revealed the title was impossible to pronounce for the average theatre goer… so changes were made. I thought this would be just a tiny tweak to the text and music, but it ended up being a total reworking of the piece.

So, the studio is full of paper – I work by sticking big sheets of brown paper all over the walls and then when I’m working on the show I can make notes with markers and stick ideas and images. It makes for a flexible way to work, but even I have to admit it sort of looks like I’m a crazy person living in a room, writing on the walls…

The Studio in mid rehearsal

at the moment there’s 12 songs and a ukulele and a concertina and an old casio and some backtracks and a bunch of text and old lights and costumes and a soft shoe shuffle and it all adds up to about an hour and forty five minutes — which is a problem since by the time I open in Ottawa on the 19th I have to have to cut it down to an hour….

it’ll be an interesting two weeks…. I’ll keep you updated on how it goes

you can see more of the work, and videos and listen to music at www.bremnerduthie.com

Summer Plans

2010-05-16T05:02:00.000-07:00

I'm on the road again! Well, almost... in June gonna start moving from Toronto to Victoria with a new cabaret show and also a jazz concert.

(and between you and me - both of the shows adapt to impromptu spaces like living rooms and gallery spaces and church basements ... so if you'd like me to detour over to your community or home or neighbourhood, just give me a shout and I'd love to head over and use it as a chance to meet up)

The Pig of Happiness is a cabaret about.... well, about being a pig for happiness...

here's the blurb - ‘To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.’ Elevate your spirit, kick-start your karma and become one with the Pig. A new show from cabaret singer Bremner Duthie. From Weill to Nirvana to Britney to Brel to Tom Waits. From a howl to a lullaby. “Seedy. Stirring. Utterly memorable. – Andrew Clover, Sunday Times, UK

And the Sky Was Blue is a new album of standards and re-imagined pop songs.

I like to say it's like a big old brass bed – a well pounded mattress of bouncy old jazz springs, a colourful quilt of pop twang, and a huge fluffy feather pillow of Sixties soul.

more information on both of them at www.bremnerduthie.com

Some of the shows I'm doing this summer are still fixing dates and times, but here's a short list below.

I'll be in Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, B.C.

Ottawa, Ontario
Ottawa Fringe Festival - June 21 - 28
Laurier Royal Oak Pub
The Pig of Happiness,a cabaret

Wakefield, Quebec
Piggyback Festival - June 25 - 27th
'The Pig of Happiness', a cabaret

Swift Current, Saskatchewan
Chautauqua Festival - June 9 + 10
'Whiskey Bars'a kabarett with the songs of Kurt Weill

Toronto, Ontario
Annex Live Restaurant Cabaret, July 13th
Speak Low, the songs of Kurt Weill

Winnipeg, Manitoba
Winnipeg Fringe Festival - July 14 - 25
The Pig of Happiness, a cabaret

Winnipeg Manitoba
Centre Culturel Francopho Manitobann
Mardi-Jazz - July 20th, 2010, 8:30pm

Winnipeg, Manitoba
Mcnally-Robinson Bookstore July 24th
Saturday night Jazz at Prairie Inc.

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Saskatoon Fringe Festival July 29 - Aug 7
The Pig of Happiness, a cabaret

Gabriola Island, British Columbia
Gabriola Theatre Festival, August 22nd
Whiskey Bars, a kabarett with the songs of Kurt Weill

Vancouver, British Columbia
Vancouver International Fringe Festival - Sep 9 - 19th
The Pig of Happiness, a cabaret

All new Weill

2010-04-20T08:49:00.000-07:00

Spent the last months reading the collected letters of Lotte Lenya and Kurt Weill, a couple of Weill biographies and the remarkable biography of Lotte Lenya. Also searched through Weill's complete works to find new material that I want to explore in this upcoming cabaret.

Years ago I created Whiskey Bars because I was frustrated by doing the songs in recital. Well, now I'm creating a cabaret (that resembles a recital) along with the remarkable pianist and singer Neill Kernohan, because I'm frustrated about doing the songs in a theatrical venue. I want to be able to sing these songs and not be in costume, not worry about lights and theatres and sound and just be able to sing.

But I still think the songs deserve (like any great jewel) to be placed into a great setting. So I'm hoping to link them up with stories, anecdotes and reflections about his life and times and the complex relationship he had with Lotte Lenya. Their lives together spanned two world wars and a half dozen countries and some of the most important artistic and political movements of the 20th Century.

We did a first workshop performance this month as a house concert in the welcoming salon of pianist Lawrence Pitchko, we'll do another in May. No theatre, no makeup, no costumes. Just the music and some reflections on the extraordinary life of Kurt Weill.

The Bloody Business

2010-04-06T12:04:00.000-07:00

It's a broadsword and dagger extravaganza! I'm walking onstage soon with a new production of Macbeth. We're all done up in designer suits and carrying blackberrys and iphones, but also carrying daggers and broadswords. It is a small cast, so we're all playing several roles, and I think (at last count) I die four times (that's not counting the off-stage dispatching of myself as Duncan) The only character I play that makes it through the show alive is the Porter, with his great licentious speeches... A wonderful adaptation by Tommy Taylor of Forward Theatre and fabulous stage fighting choreography by Christian Feliciano.

LIVE RATS!!

2010-02-22T08:50:00.000-08:00

Lisa Pasold looking fab and reading the opening paragraphs of Rats of Las Vegas, at SPOT - Small Press fair of Toronto. The huge bay windows of the Gladstone Hotel look out on Queen St West and framed a wonderful reading series hosted by Sang Kim.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MfTDdHaIvU

http://www.lisapasold.com.

RATS OF LAS VEGAS features Millard Lacouvy, a short, plain, fiercely independent girl who is a prodigy in the male world of poker. Millard learns her craft in Depression-era Vancouver and then graduates to high stakes games on the Canadian Pacific Railway. When the trains fail to satisfy either her ambition or her need for security, she goes to Bugsy Siegels Las Vegas. There, her talent with cards brings her a new kind of family. But she is haunted by the handsome conman she has known all her life, and she learns that love can also be a game of chance. Along the way, Pasold gives us a rich and convincing historical portrait of Vancouver and Vegas in the 1940s.

Buy the book at http://www.amazon.com/Rats-Las-Vegas

Filmed at the Small Press Book Fair in Toronto.

March 4th at the Cameron

2010-02-18T07:47:00.000-08:00

Come along, it'll be half party, half concert, audience participation is threatened but not guaranteed, the ambiance is spiffy, the beer is great and the location is simply historic.

the CD is jazz with a dark, pop twist, pulling in songs from the Velvet Underground and the Talking Heads. I think it sounds like Tom Waits and Frank Sinatra in a fist fight over who gets to sing next in a red velvet lounge in Vegas.

or maybe it's less violent and more romantic to say it sounds like a big old brass bed – you know... a well pounded mattress of bouncy jazz springs, a colourful quilt of pop twang, and a fluffy feather pillow of Sixties soul.

what else should I tell you? Stories??

Should I tell you how the CD was originally meant to be a jagged mix of electropop and jazz, but the producer got a better paying gig and quit days before the recording session?

Should I tell you about my panic as I realized I was faced with four days in the studio, and no idea how to deal with it?

Should I tell you about the day the charmingly stoned guitarist forgot both his guitar and amp, and did the day's recording on what was basically a toy guitar that was kicking around the studio?

Should I tell you about my despair as I listened to the feeble twangings that were recorded from that cheap instrument straight onto the board?

or should I tell you about how those four amazing musicians pulled together without any producer and simply did what I should have had confidence they would do in the first place - use their talents and skill to put down some amazing music, and challenge me to come up with vocals to match.

and should I tell you about the studio engineer who, when he was mixing the CD, heard the guitar sounds and went straight to the back of his cluttered space, pulled out a 1963 fender amp, rerouted the tiny guitar through that amp, added some reverb and rerecorded the whole thing... giving me a sound like it fell out of a gorgeous '60's blues album.

or how my friend Toni Mustra donated his amazing graphic talents to create a gorgeous, mysterious album cover crafted from a shot of a cloud drifing through the Blue Sky over Trinity Bellwoods park in Toronto.

I'm not sure if I should tell those stories... but if you're curious, and want to hear some more gossip... and what it sounds like live... well, come by the Cameron House (the Back Room... the party room!) on March 4th, and we'll show off a bit...

'The Sky Was Blue' was recorded in Paris at Bopcity Studios with Remi Amblard, Benoit Gil, Thierry Tardieu and Tomasso Montagnani.

I'll be accompanied on the 4th by the extraordinary talents of Scott Metcalf on keyboards, Scott Kemp on Bass, Robin Pirson on drums and Joel Schwarz on Guitar.

Splendid Koko

2010-02-15T12:12:00.000-08:00

Delighted to have been part of the launch of the new very spiffy venture of my friend Sang Kim - KoKo in Yorkville. Extraordinary space, renovated with 100 year old beams of wood from an ancient Ontario barn. Great mix of antiquity and glowing modernity. Amazing Japanese/Korean cuisine and wow, those cocktails... as yet unnamed creations from behind the bar based on various Asian alcohols...

The first outing of the new group, with Robin Pirson on drums (or drum, as he could only fit a snare and a multitude of little percussion instruments onto the performance space), Scott Metcalf on piano and Scott Kemp on Bass.

We played three eve-more fun sets. Finished the evening with a rap/jazz version of Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark (as my French guitarist Benoit Gil said after our first try at this arrangement "Are we allowed to play this song like thees? What eeef her lawyers hear it....")

Looking forward to taking a 2nd shot at the songs at the Album launch on March 4th at the Cameron House on Queen St.

Gil's back

2010-02-11T09:14:00.000-08:00

Very excited to hear the extraordinary (and tragic) singer Gil Scott-Heron has a new album. The producer had to hunt down the singer and poet in the Riker's Island Prison in NYC. Gil's been a heroin addict for years, and, though I've deliberately avoided finding out about the details of his fall from grace, it seems that he's been about as damaged and destructive as anyone who has decided to devote themselves to this drug.

His voice is shattered and broken, but the musicality and poetry is still intact. He now sounds like one of those ancient, mythical blues recordings out of the deep south in the twenties and thirties. Singing a hard road.

I saw him play in Toronto in 1983 at the Bamboo Club. I remember being almost the only (incredibly young) white face in a sea of guys who looked like they could have had walk-on roles in the Shaft movies. It was a great gig.

this widget is from the guardian - click on the link to go their page or click 'play all' to hear the whole album

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/feb/02/gil-scott-heron-new-here

Holy Reposting Batman

2010-02-03T10:11:00.000-08:00

And in an odd turn of events, the National Post picks up the press release I sent out about my last blog and runs it in their blog...

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/theampersand/archive/2010/02/03/whiskey-bars-conflicting-pull-quotes-make-bremner-duthie-happy.aspx

the web is almost as strange as show business

Crazy Corrupt Carnival

2010-02-03T04:10:00.001-08:00

In my show Whiskey Bars there's a line I stole from David Mamet; "Show business is a crazy corrupt carnival, and always will be." He's saying that if you want to be part of the business that is what you have to sign up for. I think he's right. The unpredictability of the whole thing is truly astounding.

Ten years ago I did a version of Whiskey Bars at the Toronto Fringe. The first evening was terrifying. I had sold quite a few ticks and I had five reviewers in the audience. The evening probably changed my life. The audience liked the show, a lot, and it began a run of growing numbers in the audience. I actually made money from my own work and creativity! The reviews however showed me how crazy the industry was.

The same show on the same night resulted in five completely different reviews, ranging from four stars and wild enthusiasm in Eye Magazine to 'nice show, could use some work on the script' in Now Magazine (which honestly I think was the most accurate for the state of the show at the time) to a strange almost hysterical attack in the Toronto Star. It was like they had seen five different shows. It cured me forever from taking reviews seriously. I suddenly realized 'oh, it's not about some intrinsic artistic worth of the show, it's totally subjective.' Since that time the show has made a lot of people laugh and cry around the world, and that is what has made it worthwhile for me.

Last week the show got another hysterically negative review, which read more like an attack than an artistic assessment of the work. It was wonderful and awful at the same time. Exhilarating and affirming that a show I wrote (which, if you've seen it, is a fairly simple proposition - I put on a tuxedo and sing a bunch of old songs)can inspire vitriol that seems out of proportion to the event. And a total drag, since I figured with only that one review it would kill the audiences and I'd have to cancel the run.

I turned up for the show last night and told the gang not to set anything up until we knew if we had an audience. I brought cake so we could have a little 'closing night party'. We sat on the stage and waited and chatted and stared at the cake and waited. And then, an hour before the show, Lisa poked her nose out to see if anyone was there. We had two people. Then another. Then another. The stage crew convinced me that since there were more people in the audience than on stage (not hard with a one-man!) I had to do the show. I was not thrilled, but we set up the stage and I retired to the back stage.

To cut a long story short, living up the unpredictable nature of show business, we ended up with the largest crowd we've had for the show. Not a sell out, but a great audience who seemed to love the show and who had come because of the review. That really awful review.

Maybe Oscar Wilde said it best... "The only worst thing than being talked about, is not being talked about"... or, less eloquently, but more to the point, as PT Barnum said, "All Publicity is Good Publicity"

or maybe I'll just never understand this surprising show business carnival...

Rites

2010-01-25T13:37:00.000-08:00

In Paris was lucky enough to have ticks to the premiere of Igor and Coco, a docu-movie about the brief love affair between Stravinsky and Chanel. Honestly, I was dragged to it. Historical romance. Not my thing.

What I didn't realize was that the movie was a very non-romantic look at two immensely talented, creative people and how that creativity affected the way they lived their lives. The first long scene - a recreation of the riot caused by the Rite of Spring - is simply extraordinary. I think most amazing since the director managed to capture how the event might have actually felt.. inspiring and scary... I'm working on a new piece and I've been watching it again for that reason..

I put the trailer for it here (though honestly it makes it look like an overly dramatic chic flic)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As64A0vo7MM&feature=fvw

and the St. Petersburg Mariinsky's recreation of the dance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHiyVSuDJzg

The Room

2010-01-22T10:28:00.001-08:00

Nice article on Cabaret in Art News - discusses an issue I always find difficult to explain - i.e. just what the hell is Cabaret anyway. Naked Girls in Feathers? Guys in Tuxedo and Whiteface? An unconnected set of skits? Provocation? Entertainment?

I think he's still defining it against that mainstay of US Cabaret - the aging singer hacking their way through a bunch of broadway songs in a wood paneled hotel bar - an entertainment form in which I have less than zero interest - but it's got some nice points...

"Main Entry: cab·a·ret
Pronunciation: \ˌka-bə-ˈrā, ˈka-bə-ˌ\
Function: noun
Etymology: French, from Middle French dial. (Picard or Walloon), from Middle Dutch, alteration of cambret, cameret, from Middle French dial. (Picard) camberete small room, ultimately from Late Latin camera -- more at chamber
Date: 1655
1 archaic : a shop selling wines and liquors
2 a : a restaurant serving liquor and providing entertainment (as by singers or dancers) : nightclub b : the show provided at a cabaret

There's only a small scene here in San Francisco. Mostly it's based out of a venue called The Rzazz Room, a low-ceilinged nook in a corner of the Hotel Nikko downtown. But other venues host cabaret-like events such as Yoshi's, Bimbo's, The Exit Theatre, The Eureka Theatre and the Marine's Memorial Theatre.

It's really a very amorphous artform that seems to feed on the outer edges of other more well-defined genres such as musical theatre, jazz and singer-songwriting. Few artists these days can be said to be truly indigenous to cabaret. I suppose that's not surprising when the word itself means a container for art -- the walls between which it exists -- than the art itself."

here's more of the article

Longer than a minute

2010-01-11T12:02:00.000-08:00

A while ago I was cutting down some footage from Whiskey Bars and I showed it to a friend. He saw that it was three minutes long (cut from an hour long show). He shook his head and said, 'No one will ever watch this. It's too long. Get it down to below a minute." I took his advice, for better or worse, but lately it's been nagging me. When did our concentration level get to the point where more than a minute of focus seems like an effort. I recently watching the opera Les Troyens - all five and a half hours of it - and I can't say I really got into it until the second hour.

Anyway... enough ranting. I write that just because I'm putting up a new video for a song from the new album, 'The Sky Was Blue', and its four and a half minutes long. Quite a stretch for the new age. An homage to The Talking Heads, and the songwriting skills of David Byrne. Heaven.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvkRycrxro8

filmed in the Yukon in Dawson City, and at the best bar in Canada, the Pit, at the Westminster Hotel.

Unforgettable

2009-12-16T15:07:00.000-08:00

Just back in from the most extraordinary piece of theatre. A Chilean troup performing 'Sin Sangre' (Without Blood) based on a book (short story?) by a Chilean writer. The most exquisite mixture of film and theatre. The whole performed behind one transparent movie screen, and in front of another, allowing them to layer amazing effects. And combined with a beautiful, simple, heartbreaking script. Just amazing. I am still in shock from how powerful the whole thing was. Combining video and theatre is hard enough at the best of times, but making a piece based around this combination, and then making it into real theatre.... wow!

I post the trailer for the piece, which does it no justice, and link to a film (of the film) of the whole piece from a festival in France.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BocoVCpVYpE

and an 'arte' video of the whole show

http://liveweb.arte.tv/fr/video/Sin_Sangre_au_festival_Temps_d_images/

You never stop

2009-12-09T20:28:00.000-08:00

The end of the year coming up and I'm trying to wrap up a million projects, while do the admin for a million projects coming up and strangely enough I don't have a million hours in the day to do it. Sometime I curse the fact as an artist you stumble out of bed, wash your face (not compulsory) and then there you are, working. And the day continues until late at night you find yourself... working. And sometimes I bless that fact. Since if you love your work, it means you get to keep on doing it, and doing it, and doing it.

Here's Baryshnikov in his 50's working and working...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIZ0KLLzs5U

If I'm lucky, I'd like to be doing what I do, like he's still doing what he does. That would be amazing.

Most boring, and most documented?

2009-12-08T09:27:00.000-08:00

Sometime in the ancient pre-history of the 1980's I had the pleasure of seeing the first North American gig of the band New Order (the reformed Joy Division, after the suicide of their lead singer). The excitement was intense, the crowd was pumped up and we were jammed against the edge of the stage desperate to see what was going to happen.

About half an hour into the gig, I started to notice my attention, along with most of the crowd, start to wander away. Skinny hipster musicians (ok, they weren't called hipsters then, but you know what I mean) staring at the keyboards and synthesizers and pressing buttons. I don't think they even looked up at us or said anything. The rest of the gig was spent at the bar, with the rest of the crowd, occasionally checking over our shoulders to see if they were 'doing anything'.

Not until this iphone concert have I considered that there could be much, much more boring ways of making music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BfPHs-hdkU

Amazing review for Lisa's new (first!) novel

2009-12-05T11:26:00.000-08:00

Read the whole article here.

a couple of choice quotes

"Toronto-based Lisa Pasold's debut novel is as enticing as the lit-up Las Vegas strip and as satisfying as a winning hand at poker."

and

"Millard is an exceptionally refreshing heroine -- wonderfully independent and completely unwilling to rely on anyone else for her needs. Millard's first-person account of her story is wonderful. Though she's celebrated for her bluffing skills during games of poker, she's thoughtful and straightforward with the reader."

Mathew Herbert, 1st prize for obsessive and wonderful recording methods

2009-12-05T10:46:00.000-08:00

I wish I could say the final result was more amazing. I mean, it ends up being well crafted and listenable ambient dance music, and considering how many crappy versions of that exist, I guess that's already great. But, whatever you think of the final result, the means he uses to get there are amazing and beautiful. In this video he's up in a hot air balloon, or sitting in the ocean waves recording drum tracks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktBApsVyCm4

These days I'm all about process... the means justifying the ends... and what a wonderful process this would be... I'm gonna make sure my next project ends up with me doing research in a hot air balloon!

books come alive

2009-12-02T09:16:00.000-08:00

Thanks New Zealand film board for this extraordinary piece of animation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_jyXJTlrH0

Theatre Fails America... Canada too?

2009-12-01T18:41:00.000-08:00

Great essay by Monologist Mike Daisey on American theatre. Or perhaps the slow death of the possibility of ever having a paying career in the theatre in America.

"The regional theater movement tried to create great work and make a vibrant American theater tradition flourish.

That dream is dead. The theaters endure, but the repertory companies they stood for have been long disbanded. When regional theaters need artists today, they outsource: They ship the actors, designers, and directors in from New York and slam them together to make the show.

Not everyone lost out with the removal of artists from the premises. Arts administrators flourished as the increasingly complex corporate infrastructure grew. Marketing and fundraising departments in regional theaters have grown hugely, replacing the artists who once worked there, raising millions of dollars from audiences that are growing smaller, older, and wealthier. It's not such a bad time to start a career in the theater, provided you don't want to actually make any theater."

when I think of some of the amazing, huge, beautiful theatres I have performed in all over the world that sit empty most of the time because it is simply too expensive to program theatre in the spaces that were designed to perform theatre, I wonder how true this essay is everywhere right now.

you can find the whole article here

Playing in the sandbox

2009-11-30T09:39:00.000-08:00

A few shots of the wonderful production of Hamlet with Forward Theatre. I had the pleasure of playing Hamlet's Father (aka 'the ghost') and the Player King.

It was a great production. Sometimes, when you're doing a show, you just have to put your head down and ignore some choices that the production team are making and just do your best job with your part.

Chris Legacy (the director) managed to pull off a great looking production that was an amazing present for the actors and for the audience. It was smart, challenging, inventive and tragic. A huge sandbox surrounded by tiers of risers with chairs and cushions, and the whole scattered with piles of lovely red and gold autumn leaves that Chris must have been collecting for weeks.

In behind Chris hung a huge curtain that served a dozen purposes - a backdrop to anchor the set, the closet in which Polonius hangs, a ghostly shade in which the Ghost appears, a red river of blood when Hamlet kills Polonius, the shroud for his body after it falls.... etc etc The Fight Choreographer for the show was remarkable - the various kinds of violence that are so necessary to this piece looked extraordinary.

Jeremy Trite, our technician, took a pic of the end of the Player King's speech... you can recognize me by the top of my head...

I'm not in the final scene of slaughter at the court so I was able to race into the balcony and snap a quick pic of the final scene before racing back down for the bows. Here's a blurry shot of the final kill of Claudius. (Dagger to the throat... ouch!)

The most amazing scat

2009-11-16T12:32:00.000-08:00

I think I've posted this before. But couldn't resist again. The scintillating young Louis Armstrong in the prime of his invention...

hacking at the brazilians

2009-11-15T20:11:00.000-08:00

Sick like a dog this weekend, had tickets for the amazing Brazilian singer Gal Costa, so took at taxi down and sat huddled up with a huge smile on my face in the back of the amazing Massey hall. Sadly she didn`t do my favourite, `Baby`written with Caetano Vaeloso, but she was simply wonderful.

now I`m heading to bed with a hot toddy and whole bunch of aspirin and some beautiful bossa nova rhythms dancing in my befuddled brain...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTUnRlW_rVE

Giving up on the post

2009-11-14T17:23:00.000-08:00

Sick at home in bed today. Lisa brings both papers home. The national papers. Not sure why they get that name... An easy read of forgettable articles about... well, I can't really remember. A self serving article by Conrad Black which was supposed to be about how he finds redemption in teaching, but is really about his love of long, pretentious sentences about himself. I go back to Ruskin.

Couple of years ago I wrote a show that I took across Canada that featured the National Post and the Globe and Mail as active participants. I spent the two months on tour cutting up the arts sections. I divided articles written about Canada from articles about (mostly) crap pop culture from the States. Movies, books, computer games. By the end of the run I had an immense clear garbage bag with articles that were advertising for American products that needed to be sold to Canadians, and a small clear kitchen bag of stories that were actually about Canadian culture. I carried those on stage and tried to talk about how strange it was to come from living abroad to a country that seemed to have no offical outlet for its own worldview. A culture that for an outsider would seem to have no interest or respect for itself.

They scream about how terrible the decline in readers is, but will they cure that by creating more empty and uncontroversial articles about ... well, mostly about nothing. I think we're desperate for information that actually connects to the life we are living. And I think on some level we're clear when we're being offered smoke and mirrors, bait and switch. Culture sections that are ads for celebrity movies. Lifestyle sections that are twelve pages of product placement.

I've had the good luck to live in countries where papers were filled with articles that took hours to read. Articles that were challenging and maybe even ( shock, horror!) made me work to understand. Info that made me want to talk about the issues over dinner.... that made me, well, at least remember what they had been about.

I go back to Ruskin. The Nature of Gothic. How to tell good architecture from bad. He says, "First, see if it looks like it had been built by strong men; if it has the sort of toughness, and largeness, and nonchalence, mixed in places with the exquisite tenderness which seems always to be the sign-manual of the broad vision, and massy power of men who can see past the work they are doing, and betray here and there something like disdain for it. If the building has this character it is much in its favour.'

there's some truths to talk about over dinner.

I wish the culture mavens of Can-culture would dare to confront work that has this sort of complexity. The country is full of it. It just seems to scare the shit out of the self proclaimed national reporters and editors of Canadian culture.

Memories of Bonnie Scotland

2009-11-05T14:10:00.000-08:00

It rained in Edinburgh. A lot. In fact, it was the rainiest year in over 100 years. Scotland is renowned for its soggy climate, so imagine how wet was. Rain on the castle, rain on the cobblestone streets and rain on the umbrellas of folk waiting in line to buy tickets for my show Whiskey Bars.

It was wet, soggy theatre madness. You think the Canadian Fringes are crazy – they have nothing on this elephant of a festival - over 2000 different theatre shows were performing. Which adds up to 19 000 (that's right - nineteen thousand!) performers wandering the streets trying to get audiences to come to their shows. Over the course of the three week festival around 1.7 million tickets were sold. And for our whole last week I watched the rain fall on my glorious sold-out line-ups… The average size for an audience at a show in Edinburgh is 8 people (that’s right, just Eight warm bodies), so a full house is a dream come true.

We arrived here on August 1st as an unknown Canadian one-man show. When we walked into our tiny venue we didn't expect much – it was seedy, to put it politely. A crumbling door at the end of a dank alleyway beside a gloomy ancient cemetery. The theatre is a 500-year-old vaulted church basement. Right next door is one of Edinburgh's least glamorous massage parlours, and on the other side armored cars bring in criminals to the Law Courts that sit high above. Reviewers have said complimentary things like "the seedy, dank atmosphere of the Vault creeps into every sinew of this performance".

I can't argue...but the locale was perfect for a one-man exploration of the music of Kurt Weill--composer of Mack the Knife. Weill basically invented a whole new style of music theatre in the 1920's, working with Bertold Brecht. I've been obsessed with Weill's music for years - I first heard his songs in a cabaret in East Berlin in the 1980's while living in a squat in West Berlin. How could I not fall in love after the glamour of squeaking through Checkpoint Charlie, sitting in a dank bar watching a cabaret show while drinking harsh Eastern Bloc vodka.

I first performed Whiskey Bars at the 2000 Toronto Fringe Festival. It took me years of touring, reworking the show and tweaking the script before I felt like it was good enough to bring to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. At the beginning in Edinburgh we played to audiences of three and four enthusiastic friends. We begged the folk who work in the theatres to come and check out the show, hoping to start some buzz. And amazingly, it worked. Britain's prestigious theatre mag, The Stage, dropped by & gave us a double thumbs-up: "Like Hedwig with far better melodies" they said. We got Five Stars from The Edinburgh Fringe Review, and Five Stars from Edinburgh's Broadway Baby Review. (you can read all the reviews here)

So, amazingly, for once, it worked. A little show wandered into town on a wing and a prayer, our whole gamble paid off (we even covered the cost of getting over there) the glowing reviews kept stacking up. The only question for the summer was, of course, could we handle any more British weather?

Whiskey Bars at Bread and Circus in Kensington Market every Tuesday at 8pm. Tickets $10.00 at the door, or through www.breadandcircus.ca

yes, that is a tea cozy....

Cease and Desist!

2009-10-22T07:37:00.000-07:00

The Cease and Desist on “Whiskey Bars” (my cabaret with the songs of Kurt Weill) arrived from the New York lawyers the day before opening night. It was one of those fine spring Canadian mornings—after the rains but before the mosquitoes—and things had been looking pretty good as I wandered into the Festival office. I’d just come from the Hamilton Festival where “Whiskey Bars” had gone famously; they’d even used my crazed miniature piano promo image for the general Festival poster.

But I should have known something was wrong when the festival director leapt up, handed me a fax and pushed me back out the door, obviously wanting nothing to do with anything with the name of a New York law office printed across the top.

I sat on the steps of the building and read: “Cease and Desist.” In accordance with the theatrical and copyright controls over Kurt Weill’s music, I was hereby forbidden from performing his works and would be held liable in court for the unlicensed use of his music to this point. All further performances of the show “Whiskey Bars” with the songs of Kurt Weill, must be cancelled. Period.

But, but, but…I reread. Unlicensed. That wasn’t right—I had a license! I had paid for a standard contract with the Canadian society that deals with music sung live in concert. I’d been warned that the Kurt Weill Foundation was strict about using Weill’s legacy, so I’d tried to do the right thing. And this was a tiny one-man cabaret! Really tiny. Just me, with a bit of pancake makeup and a handful of songs. With the string of legal names on this letter, it felt like swatting a tiny Canadian mosquito with a huge New York Yankees baseball bat.

My first instinct was the one that has carried me boldly forward all my life in this career — I would run and hide. If I headed into the uncharted North, it might be weeks before they tracked me down. I could live off the grid, hunting for my meat, scavenging a few meager crops; I could survive for years, madly singing Weill alone, until their helicopters found me.

But as I headed home to pack my bag, a sense of desperate calm descended. I knew the Foundation forbade any unauthorized theatrical interpretations of Weill’s music theatre. But my show had songs sung pretty much as I’d do them in concert, set in a dramatic throughline. I had tried to follow the rules. Hadn’t I? Perhaps I could reason with them, beg with them, persuade them. Lawyers are people with hearts and emotions, aren’t they?

I changed my route and headed for a new and empowering destination: the local internet café. Several mega-espressos later, my fears seemed ludicrous. I had to confront this team of authoritarians and nit pickers, show them they couldn’t cow me. In a caffeinated frenzy, I drafted faxes, emails, printed up propositions, and by noon I had summed up my strongly worded missives in a couple of brief bullet points:

‘Hi, ummmmm, really, really, sooooooo really sorry about this. Super sorry, in fact. Honest, truly, I thought it was all legal and, in fact, I kind of still think the show is really good, in fact, people seem to like it… could we work something out, that is, just let me know, whenever you can, no hurry, I’ll be waiting. All the best. Hope the weather’s nice in Gotham.’

And attached to that threatening email, I sent them a full script of the show, a list of the songs I was singing, my Hamilton reviews, an explanation of what I was trying to do with the songs. I wanted to add “xo” at the bottom, just for luck.

So I waited. And I waited. I could have phoned New York, but honestly, when dealing with teams of lawyers, I felt like a Neanderthal, all inarticulate grunts. The day went by with no email reply. Opening night was 24 hours away, so I returned to the Festival office to see if I could put off canceling the show till the last minute. They cringed but agreed.

I spent a terrible sleepless night. My whole summer had been planned around doing a Canadian tour of different cities with this show— this would mean months of admin and rehearsal and fees down the drain.

The next morning there was a curt email from New York. “Dear Mr. Duthie. Performances at this festival only can continue. We will review your material. Thank you.”

It was like reading a SMS text message after a first date – Yes, they said 'can'. I love them. And hey, they thanked me! That must mean they love me! Everything is going to be all right. I kicked my heels, said blessings to the gods of theatre and headed out to do the show.

And somehow the deities of theatre did smile on me: my script and letter arrived during the Weill Foundation’s annual directors meeting. Weill experts and scholars, singing stars like the incredible interpreter of Weill’s music Teresa Stratas…all these people were actually meeting when my note arrived. And they liked my script. They sent me a letter from the Foundation saying that the Board had loved my show, loved my reviews and that from henceforth I would receive the enthusiastic support of the Kurt Weill Foundation for my efforts to sing the work of this most amazing composer.

So now I just have to do Weill justice.

Whiskey Bars every Tuesday at Bread and Circus in Kensington Market - tickets at www.breadandcircus.ca

Opening Whiskey

2009-10-12T16:24:00.001-07:00

Played the first night last week of Whiskey Bars in Toronto. Fab! A great house of friends and theatre folk and a great cabaret setting. Bread and Circus in Kensington Market is perfect! The Vampyre paintings (look closely at the above pic) in the trendy little bar up front add to the general decadent cabaret atmosphere.

And the tiny theatre has a nice lighting hang, good sound and puts me in the lap of the audience. Which suits the show perfectly.

I'll be curious to see if the show develops a relationship to the Toronto audiences in the next 5 weeks. It's developed into such a dark story about this obsessed man on some personal road to redemption that I never know now whether it's going to click with the general 'zeitgeist' in a city. The Scottish at the Ed Fringe got it, but they have a dark, dark sense of humour... come to think of it, maybe that's where I got mine...

Creatures from the Id!!!!

2009-08-13T01:20:00.000-07:00

A night out at La Villette Park in the north of Paris for their outdoor movie series - with their amazing inflatable full size movie screen. A picnic of fine food, a crowd French movie enthusiasts, a lovely evening and a truly wonderfully shlocky B movie - the Forbidden Planet

Up in the air

2009-08-04T07:18:00.000-07:00

First day back home in Paris. Totally, brutally jet-lagged after long flight from Vancouver. Lisa drags me down to the Ferris Wheel in the Tuileries Gardens... I protest, a little, but find that in fact I still really like being up in the air... maybe its just that the view is better when you're not at 30,000 feet.

Fire on the Water

2009-07-27T08:04:00.000-07:00

Couldn't resist posting some pics from the web of the amazing lightening storm on Saturday night. - and none of these pics are photo-shopped! - I was having a drink with a friend and when we saw the light we jumped up thinking there was a boat on fire in the harbour.

First an incredible Orange sunset, and then an immense lightening storm...

Fire down below

2009-07-23T12:54:00.000-07:00

I flew to Vancouver to see my Mom yesterday and we went right over the fires in the Okanagan... the smoke had shrouded the whole of the Rockies and then we came to this very impressive blaze... apparently they evacuated another 3000 people today - you can see why...

Footage - the Barker

2009-07-16T15:21:00.000-07:00

edited video of latest Cabaret work - The Barker's Spiel. Songs of Tom Waits, Nirvana, Jacques Brel...

first presented at the London Fringe Festival, The Barker's Spiel plays with cliches and stereotypes of cabaret and lounge singers, mixing and matching singers and songs.

the London Free Press says

"Bremner Duthie promises that miracles will happen as he opens his new show The Barker's Spiel at the London Fringe. He also offers a "side order of belief" and a "tiny sliver of hope."From carnival barker to Las Vegas performer to Berlin Cabaret singer, Duthie gives us the scoop on life as an entertainer. Everyone's looking to be entertained -- and Duthie serves up wares such as white-fingered monkeys and red velvet hats, juggling, singing and dancing…..

Why oh why do they sit there...

2009-07-08T13:55:00.000-07:00

Alright, I feel a bit guilty about sneaking a picture of my neighbours, because they are sweet and charming and pleasant people. But this is becoming a wonder. What are they doing.... in their backyard, just inside their garage, all day, every day. They're such nice neighbours and they have a huge, beautiful house and a huge, beautiful garden. And they sit here, on the concrete, in front of the car. Occasionally she knits, he moves bits of wood around, mostly they doze. Occasionally they have a barbecue and they eat in the garage beside the car... Why? Oh my head hurts. Its not for the shade - they have a 'gazebo' in the garden, and its not for a view - they can only see the back of their house and a sliver of a street... Sigh!... I dunno... I'm not judging - they can sit anywhere they damn well like - its their home....I hope it makes them blissfully happy to sit on the concrete behind the car in the garage... but its very odd

Court and Spark - A song a day

2009-07-06T07:11:00.000-07:00

today's song is track 3 on the album - Court and Spark by Joni Mitchell

Court and Spark is the amazing Joni Mitchell album where she begins to seriously indulge her interest in Jazz, weaving jazz chords and harmonies into a pop setting. It went to the #2 spot on billboard in 1974 and stayed there for a month. Its a beautiful album. But, oddly enough, the musicians who I worked with in France, being serious, serious jazz guys, had never heard of it, or heard this track. Which left us free to start afresh, so to speak. The word street rap was thrown around (in a very thick Parisian accent) and the guitarist edited down the chords to a basic blues progression, and then we come up with this arrangement - which, oddly enough, features serious jazz musicians taking a jazz inspired pop song and simplifying it and taking aspects of rap and blues and layering those on top. I'm still not sure what I think of it - one day I love it, since I get to hear the bones of the song anew, and the next day I think - 'what the hell were we thinking...'

you can always hear more from the album, and buy digital downloads of individual tracks at itunes.com, or pick up a physical version of the CD by emailing me or dropping by www.cdbaby.com

Gamelaning

2009-07-05T19:26:00.000-07:00

A couple of pics from our concert last month with the Gamelan I've been playing with in Toronto. Verrrry serious looking I am... It was a lovely event - so relaxing to be playing this wonderful Indonesian instrument in an orchestra of quiet chimes and gongs.

more me...

2009-07-02T06:55:00.000-07:00

Found this video and interview posted on the Free Press site

Ack - always hard to watch yourself - I find myself being very earnest during the interview, but to give myself credit: the journalist walked into my first tech rehearsal when we only had 45 minutes left to set up the show, and so I was being interviewed about the meaning of a show that I had never performed while all I could think about was that we hadn't set the lights for the last half of the piece. You can also click on this link to see the interview and a brief flash of the moment of me singing Some of These Days by Shelton Brooks.....

A Song a Day

2009-07-01T11:24:00.000-07:00

today's song is (logically enough) track 2 on the album - Again by Lionel Newman

I fell in love with the song when I heard Mel Torme's version. I love the long and complex melodic lines and the enigmatic, ironic text. We were playing around with this and finally Thierry (who is from Madagascar and has played with Brazilian bands) suggested a slight Samba rhythm on the drums. Benoit joined in and suddenly we had this uptempo lilting version.

Apparently the song comes from a 1937 gangster movie called roadhouse, which is described as a 'noir cabaret'. I have yet to find a copy, but I'd love to see it one day.

you can always hear more from the album, and buy digital downloads of individual tracks at itunes.com, or pick up a physical version of the CD by emailing me or dropping by www.cdbaby.com

A Song a Day

2009-06-30T08:14:00.000-07:00

putting up a song from the new album every day.

This is the lovely 'Lover Come Back to Me'

This slow interpretation was a reaction against the many versions of this song which are upbeat and bouncy, even though the words are totally desperately tragic. We took the first words of the song, 'The Sky Was Blue', as the title of the album - enigmatic, and kind of bittersweet.

you can always hear more from the album, and buy digital downloads of individual tracks at itunes.com, or pick up a physical version of the CD by emailing me or dropping by www.cdbaby.com

Back at the Ranch,

2009-06-30T06:44:00.000-07:00

Just back from the London Fringe Festival - a really great time there. The show did most of what I hoped for it: that is, I was hoping that I was writing an exploration of Cabaret and Performance, and a lot of folks came back to me with the enthusiastic feedback that's what they got out of it. I'll drop the whole review from the Free Press into this blog - since, I think she caught a lot of the show.

"Bremner Duthie promises that miracles will happen as he opens his new show The Barker's Spiel at the London Fringe. He also offers a "side order of belief" and a "tiny sliver of hope."From carnival barker to Las Vegas performer to Berlin Cabaret singer, Duthie gives us the scoop on life as an entertainer. Everyone's looking to be entertained -- and Duthie serves up wares such as white-fingered monkeys and red velvet hats, juggling, singing and dancing….. but his best offering is his astute insight. After the shows are over and the crowds go home, Duthie tells us what it's really like, such as being sick in a hotel room, saying goodbye to an uptight loved one, never really being appreciated and then dying alone. Or what about this ending? You reach stardom, such as Louis Armstrong, and then are mourned by thousands. At Armstrong's funeral, we find out that Ella Fitzgerald, Governor Rockefeller, and Guy Lombardo were among the honourary pallbearers. He calls us neurotics, post-traumatics, introverts, extroverts, . . . ." And then slides into a little Cheap Trick with "Didn't I See You Crying." He sings in a whisper and then belts out a bar tune. He chastises; then caresses. He's sarcastic; then honest. A dreamer and a schemer….. He gets his laughs. He entertains."

She captures a lot of the show, but I feel like a whole chunk of what I was trying to do didn't make it over the footlights, so I'm heading back into the rehearsal hall with the piece to tighten it up and to see if I can make some the links and stories clearer.

London Festival

2009-06-23T08:49:00.001-07:00

Fourth day now at the London Fringe Festival. A total delight to be doing new work for new audiences and being in this lovely town. Lisa and I were lucky enough to be billeted in a historic neighbourhood of the town filled with amazing mansions built of gleaming yellow brick. An absolute delight to be walking to and from the theatre past all these amazing buildings covered in ivy and surrounded by extravagant gardens.

We ended up in a wonderful theatre and the tech there fulfilled our every wish in terms of technical lighting and sound for the show. I can definitely say that the show looks amazing! I'll post some pics soon.

the audiences are great, the folk who run the Fringe are super folk, welcoming and interested in community and the well being of the performers. I've done other theatre fringes where you really felt like one more problem rolling into town that had to be dealt with (Hello Saskatoon Fringe!), but here it's like rolling into a friendly family. And I'm delighted to be doing a new piece. Its a thrill ride for me since I wrote it to include a bunch of stuff that challenges me constantly.

no press yet, but a few notes from the fringe patrons. I'll post one that describes the show a bit -

"During one segment of The Barker's Spiel, performer Bremner Duthie's character states 'I wish I had ten lives, but I only have one.' Yet over the course of this highly entertaining cabaret, Duthie manages not only to show us three of his lives but to expose many of our own. From Fairground barker, to Las Vegas Performer, to Berlin Cabaret singer, this show, though full of wonderfully performed musical numbers, is not a skip through the psychological park, so-to-speak. This is a cabaret full of 'sarcasm and criticism.' This is a cabaret about beginnings and endings. This is a cabaret about things that we would rather sometimes ignore.

The Barker's Spiel is a wonderful play. Bremner Duthie is a wonderful performer. Some of London has had the opportunity to see him perform before (at the Oh Solo Mo Festival a few seasons ago); there is no excuse for the rest of London to miss this high a calibre of theatre this time around!"
Thomas Keith

One show at the Ottawa Fringe Festival on the night of the 28th at the Saw Club at the Saw Gallery in the Arts Building downtown. 8:30pm

I'm Big in Japan

2009-06-01T11:27:00.000-07:00

Well, last night I googled to see if the album's digital distribution had been set up yet by my distributor - the wonderful indie group cdbaby - and instead found this eye popping page.

bremner duthie

[ 前の作品 | 次の作品 ]
The Sky Was Blue
発売元：
曲リスト
トラック試聴購入 / 価格
01： Lover Come Back to Me
試聴試聴
曲を購入
150円
02： Again
試聴試聴
曲を購入
150円
03： Court and Spark
試聴試聴
曲を購入
150円
04： Chelsea Hotel No. 2
試聴試聴
曲を購入
150円
05： Secret Heart
試聴試聴
曲を購入
150円
06： Pale Blue Eyes
試聴試聴
曲を購入
150円
07： Some of These Days
試聴試聴
曲を購入
150円
08： Whisper Not
試聴試聴
曲を購入
150円
09： Angel Eyes
試聴試聴
曲を購入
150円
10： Love Me or Leave Me
試聴試聴
曲を購入
150円
11： Sweethearts On Parade
試聴試聴
曲を購入
150円
12： Heaven
試聴試聴
曲を購入
150円
13： Court and Spark (Slight Return)
試聴試聴
曲を購入
150円

I can't really describe how much ridiculous pleasure it gives me to see the first commercial appearance of the album be in Yen and Japanese (see the actual page here http://download.music.yahoo.co.jp/shop/ic/11/281856353-316831191 )

I know the price because on tour in Japan I only ever figured out a couple of letters, but the sign for Yen ( 円 ) was the obvious one to need to understand. To memorize it I thought of him as a shy little character with one foot turned in awkwardly. I still find him a cute, endearing little guy. The price for one track is about the price for the pair of Japanese socks I'm currently wearing (don't know if that has any existential meaning)

So, I'm now expecting the big phone call from Tokyo. Hopefully the album will go to #1 with the harajuku crowd so I can tour smokey bars filled with folk who look like this:

or this

or even this!

meanwhile the album is now up for sale in a more comprehensible format at itunes and directly from cdbaby (just click on the links to get there), and you can listen directly to all the tracks at Myspace. No physical discs yet... just the ethereal digital realm...

The Virtual Album

2009-05-05T07:58:00.000-07:00

So The Sky Was Blue is finally incoming... sort of... it currently exists in the warm embrace of Canada Post. Versions of the CD are winging their way towards printers in BC, and electronic distributors in the US. CD Baby (which distributes my first album Bremner Duthie Sings Kurt Weill) will be handing the electronic side of things.

click 'here' to jump over to myspace and hear the songs

Toni Mustra, a friend and a fabulous graphic designer, handled the final step of the design work for the CD cover. I had the privilege of sitting watching him working on Adobe Photoshop, basing the cover on an image of the blue sky he took above Trinity Bellwoods park just outside his door in Toronto. It is a fabulous design - the whole of the front is shadowed and dark apart from the title of album, with wisps of cloud sneaking into the words, and then when you open up the cover you get the blue sweep of the sky. Very nice work and a nice visual metaphor for the album's songs - they're a bit dark and a bit quirky and the title is based on the first line from that bittersweet song 'Lover Come Back to Me' ("the sky was blue, and high above, the moon was new, and so was love")

I should have it in my hands somewhere around mid/late June....

beauty of a short...

2009-04-12T10:09:00.001-07:00

a new toy

2009-04-11T23:05:00.001-07:00

The Casio VL1 (or VL-Tone) was one of those truly bizarre products in musical history.

Thanks to ebay I have a new toy - half calculator, half 'synthesiser'... One of the four Kashio brothers who founded the company was a would-be musician as well as an electronics engineer and he had designed a simple and inexpensive LSI (Large Scale Integration) chip that could be used for musical purposes, but executives at the company weren't confident that it had enough features to sell in its own right so some bright spark at Casio had the idea to add a calculator! Obvious really! What else would you add to a small, portable musical instrument?!?? I guess that as one of the world's leaders in calculator manufacture, they had the technology for free.

As well as being a calculator, it can also be powered up in a mode that offers a handful of monophonic sounds played from the two-octave 'keyboard' (an inappropriate term for the row of unplayable and unreliable switches you can see above). Flute, Piano, Guitar and Violin. To describe these sounds as 'realistic' would be highly misleading.

It was something of a novelty gadget and sounds pretty poor through its own small speaker but played through the line output, it can sound fairly reasonable, so much so that it was used by the Human League, Devo, The Cars and others - even Stevie Wonder is alleged to have used one!

However, it was the German band 'Trio' who gave the VL-Tone its finest moment of fame in their record "DaDaDa" which was a huge huge hit (especially in Europe) and which used one of the VL-Tone's preset rhythms as its foundation. The VL-Tone was used in later years by Moby and Goldie and others. And despite its obvious limitations, the VL-Tone sold 1,000,000 units in its five year lifetime (1979-1984).

Juju...

2009-04-11T19:40:00.000-07:00

I’m now officially addicted to this album. Its on at the gym, it makes me laugh out loud on the TTC, I’m listening to it right now on the ipod dock.

Strut Records has put out a 2nd set of Nigerian high life and Afro-Funk and it is amazing. Quirky, beautiful, complicated, so, so rootsy. I remember when highlife first hit the scene and I spent months dancing round the house to ‘Sweet Mother’ by the amazing Prince Nico Mbarga - I’d never heard the jangly high guitar sounds of this afro pop sound before and they just pulled my heart out. But eventually it seemed like that sound was everywhere and I moved on and I felt like I’d been there and done it. But this fab collection breaks the stereotypes about the sound and shows the immense range of sounds and styles that these amazing musicians were exploring. A wonderful mix of acoustic and electric instrumentations and quirky expressive vocals. Even the names of the songs and the bands are thrilling: "Everybody Likes Something Good" by Ify Jerry Krusade, "Yabis" by Sir Shina Peters & His International Stars, "Onyame" by Ashanti Afrika Jah, "Ezuku Buzo" by Bola Johnson & His Eazy Life Top Beats, "African Dialects" by Peter King, "You Are My Heart" by Rex Williams, "Hot Tears" by The Immortals, "Dododo (Ekassa No 1)" by Sir Victor Uwaifo & His Melody Maestros, "Happy Survival" by Ifeanyi Eddie Okwedy & His Maymores Dance Band, "Tug Of War" by The Faces, "Ire Africa" by Chief Checker, and "Eddie Quansa" by Peacocks Guitar Band. Check them out here and I think that Soundscapes on College St has the CDs.

and man, I love their outfits. I think we should all dress like that in Toronto - it would so cheer up the winter.

My Current Favouritist Album

2009-04-04T06:55:00.000-07:00

Eccentric Soul - the Trager and Note Labels.

Imagine a time when everyone was trying to copy the great songs of Motown and the Soul explosion. When every recording studio across America was filled with wannabe groups and singers and arrangers and producers trying to find the next big thing. Well, some of them made it and some of them 'almost' made it, and sometimes they almost made it in really interesting ways. This series of recordings has been dredging through little known archives and labels to find unknown gems - and I love this particular collection. They all sound so, so, so close to the greatest soul record you ever heard, but then a sound comes slightly out of left field and you think 'what the hell was that'... a riff that would be better in a classical quintet, or a voice that stepped right out of the church pews, or a shout out that sounds like it should be in a modern pop record. Sometimes there is a note out of place, or the singer dips below the pitch, but it doesn't seem to matter at all - the songs are constantly surprising and filled with passion and conviction and they are somehow (in spite of the fact that they are desperately trying to copy the greatest hits of the time) totally original. You can hear them on Amazon.com

the auditory cloud

2009-03-29T06:23:00.000-07:00

This extraordinary site gives you a visual cloud of popularity and associations between music and groups. I like how the names float into place as the site picks up Data. Click on any name in the cloud to continue...

http://www.music-map.com/nick+cave+and+the+bad+seeds.html

Winds

2009-02-12T04:12:00.001-08:00

Our Barn in Burgundy got beaten by the windstorms in France on Monday. 130 mile an hour winds across the central region. Normally the little town is in a valley and seems to escape the winds, but this time no.

The damage is bad enough, but what the photos don't show is that the roof and those immense timbers are not lying beneath the open hole. They are about 100 meters away. The wind picked them up and threw up up and over our Barn and into the neighbours yard. Thankfully they fell in the yard and not on their house and so no-one was hurt.

I was in a panic driving down from Paris to see the damage, but something about the immensity of it (the entire village is missing rooftops and wood and tiles are scattered across the road) was kind of calming. I can't even pick up one of those roof beams. I can't even move it. Ridiculous amounts of power. Apart from clearing up a bit there was nothing much to do. The roofer came by and shook his head, the insurance is going to slowly work its way to offer us some solutions and by the time we see it again in the summer we hope it'll be looking more like its old self.

Rainy night in Paris on the Seine

2009-02-09T22:48:00.000-08:00

Dropped Lisa off at her poetry reading and then took a walk down at the Seine.

One last goodbye to a very painful, long, (and very funny) trainwreck of a presidency

2009-01-28T13:10:00.000-08:00

thank you David Letterman...

Finally truly honest service

2009-01-23T05:50:00.000-08:00

On the flight they offered chicken or beef, when I asked how each was done the steward gave me a funny look and said ‘well, they’re both reheated’ … I took the chicken…

Miracle Drug?

2009-01-19T09:59:00.001-08:00

Odd... for the last year (probably started by all the physical work on the show in Japan) I've been having a lot of joint pain... A lot of pain! - to the point where I was panicked about having to do the physical work on the cabaret show that I'd been planning! And it's been getting worse and worse as I rehearsed. A week ago I looked up the Sports Medicine facilities in Toronto to start some kind of rehab. I thought they would order me out of the gym and away from physical work and onto anti-inflammatory drugs or steroids or something..

Then, by coincidence, last week I took a dose of the flax seed oil that had been recommended to me for something else and that I'd been avoiding (since it tastes so awful), and overnight all the pain disappeared. All of it. Overnight.

I spent the day wondering what the hell had happened to the pain I'd be dealing with for 6 months and then finally put the two together. Since then I've been on the web and seen that flax seed oil is recommended for joint pain. So that explains it. I guess. But overnight miracle cures. That's weird. Not like I'm complaining or anything... but it's kind of weird.

Slave and Master

2009-01-10T08:28:00.002-08:00

I'm off to spend the day in front of a set of 20,000 dollar audio speakers listening to myself - I'll be hanging out while James Paul of Rogue studios, 'masters' my album.

Wikipedia defines this as "a form of audio post-production - the process of preparing and transferring recorded audio from a source containing the final mix to a data storage device (the master); the source from which all copies will be produced (via methods such as pressing, duplication or replication). After the advent of tape it was found that master recordings could be optimized by making fine adjustments to the balance and equalization prior to the cutting of the master disc. Mastering became a highly skilled craft and it was widely recognized that good mastering could make or break a commercial recording"

When pressed for more details James defined it as 'I give him some money, he sits in front of a set of 20,000 dollar speaker for hours, and then he gives me an album that sounds amazing'....

beyond that it seems to be witchcraft and magic...

basically as far as I can see its the process of finding a middle balance for the sound on the album so it rings true on every kind of speaker - the cheapo transistor, or the ultra high end, or the car stereo... cutting some frequencies, adding others...

it should be a fascinating and strange few hours...

Diving in

2009-01-09T05:09:00.000-08:00

Now it's back to the Waterlogs.

I wrote the short play, The Waterlogs, just after living in NYC for a couple of years and immediately after 9/11. On March 30'th I'll be having a reading of a new draft of Waterlogs with the First Draft Readings at the Epicure Cafe on Queen St. (so I guess technically this will be a 2nd draft...) and its time for a re-write

I arrived in NYC literally as the smoke was still drifting over the city... my flight was booked for 9/12 and I flew into NYC a few days later on one of the first commercial flights. But re-reading it now I think it was too filled with that event. I had snuck through the police and army barriers just after I arrived to watch the rescue attempts in the burning building. I had sat on the west side highway and watched trucks go by filled with dirty exhausted men and women heading back and forth from downtown. And as I wandered the city everyone was breathing the acrid smoke drifting up across the city. So it wasn't difficult to be overwhelmed with the emotions of the moment. But its nice to have a chance to re-work it and see if there is a chance to step away from that event.

The play explores the hidden geography of cities through the struggles of three people who inhabit the city in very different ways. Once we all believed that sickness and health was caused by upwellings of good or bad airs from the waters and marshes. The strange, stagnant but unkillable streams, creeks and lakes that lie beneath the asphalt and concrete of a city seemed to me to be an good metaphor for how cities affect people.

Now the waterlogs seems to be adapting itself to new places and new times. I've been walking over the lost rivers of Toronto, buried beneath the grid of the city and channeled into sewers and wondering what kind of relationship Torontonians have with their city - just as complicated and fraught as New Yorkers, that I'm sure of, but perhaps less angst ridden (or more?.... still figuring that one out...). Last week I wandered up to Wychwood and walked the length of Taddle Creek that runs through downtown Toronto and comes to the surface in only one place.

Yes! Thanks Rick Mercer

2008-12-07T12:22:00.000-08:00

Its been a while since I've seen Mercer so riled up about something. A great, succinct and passionate rant about the Gag order Harper served on parliament last week.

How We Can Act

2008-12-04T04:54:00.000-08:00

This was forwarded to me by the group - Department of Culture.

I think it expresses the possibilities for protest and action fairly well. After listening to Harper twist the truths so barefacedly in his national address, and after his attempt to ram a series of terribly Partisan measures through on the panic of a budgetary crisis I'm now convinced that he's an ideologue and a man governing in a profoundly un-canadian way. The thought that he believes he has the right to shut down Parliament for two months to avoid a non-confidence vote, which the constitution of Canada demands he be exposed to, is deeply shocking.

I'll be at the rally in Toronto on Dec 6th at Nathan Phillips Square - Hope I see you there...

As you are undoubtedly aware, this past week has brought unprecedented change to federal politics.

We believe the proposed NDP/Liberal Coalition government is a welcome change to the ideologically driven ultra-right wing policies that Harper represents. With a formal agreement from the Bloc Quebecois and the support of the Green Party, this government now represents 63% of Canadian voters. Meanwhile Harper is trying to use his millions in fundraising advantage and ignorance of parliamentary procedure to keep power.

He can be stopped and there are several things that we encourage you to do:

1. Email the Governor General
We need to flood the Governor General’s e-mail box with support for the coalition government. Copy and paste this letter or write one of your own. Send it along with your name and address to Michaëlle Jean. DO THIS NOW. It is essential that we show the governor general that there is massive support for this plan.

Send your message to: info@gg.ca

Your Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean,

I am writing to encourage you to accept the proposal by M. Dion and Mr. Layton to form a coalition government in cooperation with M. Duceppe. The actions of Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party are motivated by a lust for power, not the best interests of the people of our country. I believe that the coalition — which duly represents the voices of 63% of Canadians — should be given the opportunity to form a government. I also do not think that an election is a prudent choice at this juncture. We need leadership and a cooperative process. I look forward to the days ahead with
hope; please act in the name of democracy and good government.

Best Regards,

Insert your full name and address.

2. Go to a rally in support of the coalition government.

On Saturday December 6th there are rallies right across the country. The Toronto rally will take place at the same time as a Conservative Rally at Queen’s Park. Don’t be confused by the Conservative rally at Queen’s Park. Pro Coalition people are gathering at NATHAN PHILLIPS SQUARE. Jack Layton and Stéphane Dion will be speaking at NATHAN PHILLIPS SQUARE. Musical guests will follow.

The Conservatives are using their own considerable resources and sympathetic media in an attempt to escape a confidence vote and maintain power. We must demonstrate that the majority of Canada’s citizens support the coalition by showing our numbers at rallies right across the country.

CLICK HERE for the time and location of pro -coalition rallies across the country:
http://www.makeparliamentwork.ca/makeparliamentwork/rally-listing.

MANY OF THESE RALLIES ARE ON THURSDAY DECEMBER 4th

3. Sign these petitions:

Avaaz.org

http://www.avaaz.org/en/coalition_for_canada/98.php/?CLICK_TF_TRACK

Canadians for a Progressive Coalition

http://www.progressivecoalition.ca/form.php

4. Join these Facebook groups:

Canadians for a Progressive Coalition

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=27949758238

Canadians United Against Stephen Harper
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=29529380865

5. Copy/Paste this message and send it to everyone you know via Facebook and email:

This situation is unprecedented. It is imperative that you act. The massive cash advantage that the Conservatives have means there are people BEING PAID to write emails and messages supporting Harper’s cling to power across the country. At this moment, each action reverberates and makes a big difference.

In Solidarity,

DoC

Ain't I handsome

2008-11-28T05:12:00.000-08:00

New Headshots from the fab photographer Chris Frampton .

Under advice from my agent I went for a series of character shots. Her remark was something like 'Casting agents aren't the most imaginative people in the world' (OK, actually her words were a little stronger than that, but I don't think she'd appreciate the quote) So we went for a series of looks and a series of shots... I'm not sure which I like best - I'll have to live with them a little...

Demon Drink

2008-11-08T04:43:00.001-08:00

Well, sad but true - I've been wondering for the last few months, or maybe even been a year now, why I've had a weird ongoing cold - sinuses are all screwed up and I've lost my sense of smell and taste... sort of like having the aftermath of a bad cold, only all the time. And I've finally put two and two together, and it seems the culprit is booze, with Red wine being the meanest. Some kind of allergy to alcohol...Ack!. I had a couple of glasses of red wine last night, and was up half the night with the feeling I'd been practicing that trick where people drive nails up their nose - excruciating pain! Perhaps this is payback for all the amazing wines I overconsumed in France for several years.

So I guess this means that I'll be the designated driver from now on! If its permanent then it'll be hard to give up, but as a singer its pretty freaky to constantly be stuffed up, and I'd like to have my sense of smell back please. Especially in Fall.. its such a great, smelly season..

out there

2008-11-06T11:15:00.000-08:00

Back to work in Toronto... found a great quote by David Byrne that cheers me up when I'm bummed over the current state of the music industry...

"In the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian.

We'll always want to use music as part of our social fabric: to congregate at concerts and in bars, even if the sound sucks; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Internet) as a form of social currency; to build temples where only "our kind of people" can hear music (opera houses and symphony halls); to want to know more about our favorite bards — their love lives, their clothes, their political beliefs. This betrays an eternal urge to have a larger context beyond a piece of plastic." - David Byrne

Rogue Mixing

2008-10-23T21:42:00.000-07:00

Spent the last five days in the Rogue Studios finally mixing the album I recorded last year. Its been sitting in the can for so long that I've forgotten what some of the tracks sound like... and, to be honest, the mix it had on it was so bad that when I'd listen to it I could hardly remember why I had been so excited about the sound during the recording sessions.

But the last five days hve literally wiped the grime off of the music and let me remember how it sounded live. There are about 12 drum tracks, 5 piano tracks, 5 bass tracks etc etc etc (the last engineer overmiked things a wee bit) and they sounded like sludge. Now each track has something to offer to the song. James loads the songs on the big screens and starts mixing on the huge console and they begin to take shape line by line. Its extraordinary to hear.

and the studio itself is an amazing creative space - the piano comes from the venerable jazz club The Montreal Bistro, and is the instrument that Oscar Petersen played his last live concert on.

JP is a comic fan and the studio is filled with characters and toys and fun and bizarre objects. We had a couple of afternoons where I wasn't sure that the files were going to make it off of the old mixes (which were done on a PC via a program called Cubase, and onto JP's Mac and his amazing mixing program called Logic) They kept arriving in pieces or so blurred that they weren't usable. So it was 'calming' to be able to turn around and be faced with this cheerful population of superheroes that fill every corner of the room.

and he worked miracles on a couple of tracks which I had given up on. The guitar recordings from the original work were crap. They were lifeless and characterless. Enter the 1964 Fender Vintage Amp. JP took the original tracks, plugged them through the amp and then rerecorded them with all the character that 44 years of music making can give to a piece of machinery... And now they sound pretty damn good.

There's two days left. Then I'll be able to see what I have and decide if any of them deserve another vocal retake. If so I hope I'll be able to sing it some time soon under the watchful eye of Marilyn peeking out from the shadows at the back of the studio.

The sleazier side: looking for a rehearsal studio in Toronto

2008-10-15T07:33:00.001-07:00

Well that was weird... a day spent wandering through Toronto's sketchier side to see if I could find a studio space. In Vancouver and Montreal I managed to find loft/studio/rehearsal spaces where I worked and taught.

And in France I used the mezzanine of our huge barn.

But in Toronto Lisa and I are sharing a small one bedroom studio... so the larger physical work gets a little tricky...and those props, lights and gear can just make living a wee bit hard.... So, I've been wandering through the darker areas of Toronto looking for possible buildings... Through the Junction (maybe...), King St. East(yuck... too many junkies even for an artist looking for cheap studio space), Roncesvalles (already filled with fake lofts... where the various yuppie loft-dwellers are comfortable in the knowledge they have an 'artist lifestyle' without any actual smelly, messy, noisy artists)...

at least I'm getting a vast insight into the sketchier parts of Toronto's downtown... I guess if nothing comes up here then I'll be heading north and away from the central area...

Strategic Voting? How to find out your riding results and decide how to cast your vote

2008-09-30T08:11:00.000-07:00

Strategic Voting? I'm supporting the NDP, but I'm voting against the Conservatives. This CBC site will give you the 2006 results for your riding (just put your postal code into the box at the right and it will bring up your riding) and should give you an idea of whether you can vote from your heart, or vote strategically to make sure the left's vote doesn't split between the Greens, NDP and Liberals and hand Harper a majority goverment.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canadavotes/riding/202/06results.html

I'm searching the web for a site that will give current polls on a riding by riding level but so far can only come up with nationally and provincially averaged results. If anyone has a link to more detailed results then let me know!

Scratch Nights

2008-09-16T07:06:00.001-07:00

SCRATCH NIGHTS

I’ve been performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Fest for a chunk of the summer, (which was an extraordinary experience… read about it at http://bremduthiesblog.blogspot.com ) and after my show I’ve been doing ‘scratch’ nights… an informal session where performers get to workshop new material. They’ve been incredibly useful in getting new work on its feet, and I want to continue the same thing when I get back to Toronto.

So, in October and November I’ll be setting up a space for a few evenings; the sessions will be open to writers/actors/musical theatre or classical singers. I’m looking for performers who want to try out new work or workshop material for auditions. They’re also for writers who want to read their own theatre work, or present it with other actors.

To get it going quickly we’ll start off in a studio space and sharing the cost and, if we have singers, the fee for a pianist. Later we might move into a bar or café. While its in the studio it’ll 5 bucks for 15 minutes on stage and a chance to present a piece – monologue, or scene, or song. For singers who need an accompanist then there will an extra shared fee. You can choose to get comments and criticism or not, and you can use the whole 15 minutes or just 5.

This is not an open mic; it’ll be a private studio and we won’t be doing poetry, or singer-songwriter material, or traditional standup, or impro or sketch comedy, and I’m going to restrict it to performers only, though you can be at any level of your work and career. I’ll be setting up the first one in the week of the 6th. Let me know if it might interest you…

For anyone who’s getting this as a forward and doesn’t know me, you can check out my work at www.bremnerduthie.com , and you can reach me at bremner.duthie@gmail.com

And here’s some articles about this kind of work in the british press

http://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/features/3088/Scratch_Nights.html

http://www.nightingaletheatre.co.uk/initiatives/scratch.htm

Cheers
Bremner

Drenched

2008-09-05T09:12:00.000-07:00

Drenched…

Not me this time. But after surviving the wettest August ever I seem to be carrying the rainy curse with me. I’m sitting in the Barn with the lights on low and the shadows gathering in the corners around and listening to Thunderstorms rage overhead and rain pour onto the slate tile roof overhead. Amazing sound. Furious, but incredibly calming. I’m here working on the next show and normally I have one of Brian Eno’s ambient tracks as my background noise… no such need now. Couldn’t imagine more beautiful sound to work against.

Catatonic in Burgundy

2008-09-04T09:09:00.001-07:00

I could have slept all day…and night…and day…. Post festival fatigue…erch! We made it down to Paris and thence to Burgundy and the farmhouse. Managed to crawl to the nearest little town and buy piles of still warm baguettes, a huge square of fresh butter and jars of dark, syrupy honey from hives on the local mountains… intend to live on this for the next several days and spend that time on the couch staring at the roof far overhead. I have good books (Bulgakoff’s The Dog, Complete works of William S., a Scottish Murder mystery) and tea. that’s all that’s necessary for existence till the weekend.

Wrapping it up

2008-08-25T23:19:00.000-07:00

It rained in Edinburgh. A lot. In fact, this was the rainiest year in over 100 years. And since Scotland is renowned for its normally soggy climate, you can imagine just how wet it was. It rained on the castle, it rained on the cobblestone streets and it rained on the umbrellas of folk waiting in line to buy tickets for my show Whiskey Bars.

But the record rainfall didn’t stop another record being set – and that's on the number of tickets sold on the opening weekend of this gargantuan Edinburgh theatre festival. Over 2000 different theatre shows were performing in town, 19 000 (that's right - nineteen thousand!) performers were wandering the streets trying to get audiences to come to their shows, and over the course of the three week festival around 1.7 million tickets were sold.

And now I'm watching the rain fall on the afternoon after the last night of a glorious run over here. On the last week we sold-out several nights – and since the average size for an audience in Edinburgh is 8 people, a full house was a dream come true.

We arrived here on August 1st as an unknown Canadian one-man show. When we walked into our tiny venue we didn't expect much – it's seedy, to put it mildly. I was performing at the end of a dank alleyway across from a gloomy ancient cemetery; the theatre space is tucked into the 500-year-old vaulted church basement. The address is 11 Merchant Street; number 9 is one of Edinburgh's least glamorous massage parlours, and number 10 is where the armoured cars bring in criminals for their day in court. Reviewers have said complimentary things like "the seedy, dank atmosphere of the Vault creeps into every sinew of this performance".

I can't argue...but the locale was perfect for a one-man exploration of the music of Kurt Weill--composer of Mack the Knife. Weill basically invented a whole new style of music theatre in the 1920's, working with Bertold Brecht. I've been obsessed with Weill's music for years - I first heard his songs in a cabaret in East Berlin in the 1980's while I was living in a squat in West Berlin. We squeaked through Checkpoint Charlie and sat in a dank bar watching a cabaret show and drinking harsh Eastern Bloc vodka. Maybe I had heard his music before, but this was the first time I said to myself that this was music that I wanted to sing.

Fifty years after his death, Weill's music is constantly performed. Shortly after he died Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin set "Mack the Knife" as a jazz standard; The Doors, Judy Collins, Lou Reed, John Zorn, Dagmar Krause, PJ Harvey, Teresa Stratas, Ute Lemper, Anne Sofie von Otter, the Dresden Dolls, The Young Gods and Marianne Faithfull have all recorded his music.

We had already toured the show across Canada and the US, from Hamilton to Vancouver to Florida at different Fringes. We spent months on the road, reworking the show between festivals--tweaking the script, changing the songs, playing with lights and staging. It paid off: we sold out houses in Winnipeg and other festivals in Canada. But in Edinburgh - no one cared! For the first week we played to audiences of three and four enthusiastic friends. We begged the folk who work in the theatres to come and check out the show, hoping to start some buzz. And amazingly, it worked. Britain's prestigious theatre mag, The Stage, dropped by & gave us a double thumbs-up: "Like Hedwig with far better melodies" they said. And, luckily we also fell in with a great scottish theatre tech who ran our show flawlessly and maintained our sense of humour when the audiences were sparse at the beginning of the run.

And in that first week, we got Five Stars from The Edinburgh Fringe Review, and Five Stars from Edinburgh's Broadway Baby Review, and then later had great write ups in the Scotsman, Three Weeks Magazine, MTM – the music theatre organization, and a great nod from a writer from the Sunday Times. The reviews are a real help to lure audience – it's tough trying to get the word out about a one-man show when we're competing for publicity with gangs of cheerful samurai, tap-dancing girls in top hats, sexy stilt walkers in low cut corsets and the whole cast of a broadway musical dressed entirely in tight bright green jump suits and platform heels.

And, we avoided the terrible fallout from the biggest scandal of the festival season. The whole Fringe ticketing system collapsed the week before the festival started. A badly planned IT contract was awarded late, creating web chaos at the central office, and meaning that those 1.7 million tickets were being processed by hand. There is a lot of name calling going on in the Edinburgh Fringe community right now! But if anything it helped our show, since the frustration of trying to get into some of the more well-publicized events has led some ticket buyers to search for smaller shows.

And we hung in for the whole run. Many shows drop in for a week or two, but staying for that extra week meant that for the last week almost every night we had a different producer or promoter come by who’d heard about the show. We had interest from theatres across Britain, questions about translating the show into German and Portuguese, and one booker, who runs a show slew of shows at this festival, hang around after to tell me show she wanted to book the show into an international tour.

So, amazingly, for a little show that wandered into town on a wing and a prayer, our whole gamble has paid off... Now of course, our only question has to be – can we handle any more British weather?

and for the record...here's what they said...

FIVE STARS
"This really is Fringe theatre at its very best. Duthie’s classical training and background as a many-year veteran in musicals and jazz bands is evident from the outset. By the time we arrived at the chillingly Speak Low - calm on the surface, yet bubbling with undercurrents of febrile yearning - we were left with no doubt whatsoever that we were in the presence of a true master of his craft.
This show is, like the best of Weill's own works for the stage, a seamless blend of gripping entertainment and genuinely moving art."
The Edinburgh Fringe Review

FOUR STARS
"This one-man show was dark, glitzy, dingy and sparkled with the life of a performer down on his luck. Written and performed by Bremner Duthie, it betrays the author's passion for Kurt Weill, whose music inspired the piece and permeates the show's central character. Innocent and at the same time far too world-weary, Bremner's voice was strong and beautiful. Darlings, life is a cabaret."
Three Weeks Magazine

"brave and inventive...a compelling and boldly-delivered one man show full of energy and impassioned acting."
Music Theatre Matters

"Kurt Weill grew up," states actor Bremner Duthie's character impassionedly near the end of this show, "between a synagogue and a music hall theatre." Thus, Duthie asserts, the composer's life and music reached a perfect balance between the sacred and the profane early on, and there's a real sense of both in his show. The music is sung with all the passion the character brings to bear when introducing it. Duthie's voice and performance give songs like I'm a Stranger Here Myself the perfect level of sexuality and tenderness, while his version of Je ne t'aime pas demonstrates what he means when he says "Weill can break your heart in any language"."
-The Scotsman

FIVE STARS
"Bremner Duthie, brings his one man “Kabarett” to Edinburgh, featuring the music of Kurt Weill - and it wonderfully showcases his multitude of talents as a writer and performer.
The character pays homage to the life of Kurt Weill, punctuating the interview with captivating performances of his songs. These are beautifully delivered with power and emotion, set to a hauntingly sparse piano accompaniment."
Edinburgh Broadway Baby Review

A Good Time of Year

2008-08-11T12:00:00.001-07:00

Its our anniversary today, and we celebrated with a long walk up Arthur's Seat to the Sheep's Head pub - the oldest pub in Scotland...where we ate a great dinner of Haggis and Turnips and locally brewed beer... A gorgeous day - for Scotland that is... intermittent rain, clouds and sun. On the way home we discussed what time of year we would guess it to be if plopped down here unaware of the season - Lisa settled for early May, I settled for early October. Neither of us would have guessed August! Still, its pretty spectacular, even in the drizzle - we walked back past a 14th century Kirk and then down into Edinburgh past Holyrood Park (the royal park of Mary Queen of Scots)

Since this is my evening off we went to see a show and picked Camille at the Queen's Hall. She's an Irish Cabaret singer and the show was fascinating - I'm looking for a new direction for these songs that isn't so structured around the theatrical devices of Whiskey Bars, and it gave me a lot to think about...

1st Edinburgh Fringe Week in the bag

2008-08-11T01:50:00.000-07:00

and so we're dark on monday - and the first week at the Ed Fringe is over and it was indeed a tumultuous thrill fest rollercoaster adventure ride .... two five star reviews, a recommendation in Britain's 'The Stage', great and enthusiastic houses, a lovely and amazing place to stay in the historic West End of the city (right beside the New Town - New, that is, since it was built in 1760 after the 'Old Town'......) And now its a day off - a day to get away completely from this madness and see a bit of the city...and a day (if the insane rains hold off) to tromp up Arthur's Seat (the little mountain that overshadows Hollyrood Palace) and down to have dinner at the Sheep's Head inn - a little pub dating from 1500 that apparently serves a mean Haggis and Neaps....

and here's what they said...

http://www.broadwaybaby.com/fringe/reviews/whiskeybars

http://www.fringereview.co.uk/fringeReview.php?showName=Whiskey%20Bars

Kurt Weill and Whiskey Bars on the Fringe, Edinburgh pitches in..

2008-08-07T07:03:00.000-07:00

The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagony by Kurt Weill is opening the Edinburgh Festival and I’m thrilled and daunted to be doing a Cabaret of Weill’s material at the same time (literally the same time, so sadly I can’t even go to the show) Our resources are vastly different – they have the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and are in the Festival Hall, and I’m by myself down at the end of Merchant St, (just across the road from the ‘No 9.- Massage, Sauna and Escort Agency’). But I like to think that maybe I’m a little closer to the spirit of Kurt Weill and his music.

Kurt Weill was born in Dessau, Germany in 1900, the son of a synagogue cantor. and studied composition with Humperdink and Busoni, and by 22, the Berlin Philharmonic had premiered two of his compositions. He came of age at the end of World War I, in a Europe spiritually exhausted, ghastly, frightening, desperate -- and remarkably creative. Weill's musical legacy is enormous, and all of it broke new musical and theatrical ground. His most famous and enduring works were his Berlin cabaret and theater collaborations with the poet Bertolt Brecht, "The Threepenny Opera" and "The Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny."

I first heard Weill’s music in a cabaret in East Berlin in the early 80’s when I was living in a squat in West Berlin. We squeaked through Checkpoint Charlie and sat in a dank bar watching a cabaret show and drinking harsh Eastern Bloc vodka from bottles that arrived at the table with tinfoil peel-back bottle tops (once open it was assumed you wouldn’t be resealing them…). I’m sure I had heard his music before, but this was the first time I said to myself that this was music that I wanted to sing.

Perhaps if I’d known what kind of footprints I’d be walking in I would have been too daunted to begin – since fifty years after his death, Weill's music is constantly performed in pop and classical worlds. Shortly after he died Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin set "Mack the Knife" as a jazz standard, and since then performers as diverse as The Doors, Judy Collins, Lou Reed, Todd Rundgren, John Zorn, Dagmar Krause, PJ Harvey, Teresa Stratas, Ute Lemper, Anne Sofie von Otter, the Dresden Dolls, The Young Gods and Marianne Faithfull have recorded entire albums of his music.

Weill helped create a new kind of musical theatre in the bleak and gritty settings of his first music theatre works. London in Three Penny Opera is populated with Robber Kings and brutal women, and the imaginary American frontier city of Mahagony symbolized the ultimate city of Capitalism; Weill and Brecht decided that gangsters, gold-diggers, hurricanes, the FBI and lumberjacks might all meet up the fleshpots of this mythical Western city. And when Weill fled the Nazi’s in the 30’s he sought projects with serious political and human themes and linked up with the brightest and most politically engaged of Broadway’s lyricists – Maxwell Anderson, Langston Hughes, Ogden Nash, Elmer Rice as well as Ira Gershwin and Oscar Hammerstein. Weill also adapted "Lost in the Stars" from the tragic novel of South African racial oppression, "Cry, the Beloved Country" by Alan Patton. Though Weill was in the avant-garde of 20th-century European composition, none of his music is detached, technical and cold; all of it is infused with constant, tumultuous, immediate passion. Every note of Weill's music expresses love and hope as much as it expresses rage and despair.

So even if I don’t have the resources of the Festival Hall behind me, I think Edinburgh is providing me with some even better assistance. Since, every night, just before my show, I leave the cheerful crowds in the Grassmarket, trot down a gloomy cobblestone dead end and walk under a dank and odorous tunnel below George IV Bridge, where I wait on the curbstone of the No. 9 Sauna at the end of Merchant St. And I stay there contemplating the walls around me while the show before mine finishes performing in the converted cellar that is the Vault venue. And though once they finish I only have 15 minutes to get ready to do the show, by that time I’ve had the best psychological preparation that you could want for singing Kurt Weill’s music and talking about his life. I can’t think of a corner of Edinburgh that could better serve as a set for his works. Perhaps next time the Festival does a Weill show they should look around their own atmosphere filled city and take advantage of the history and and resources. I know that I’m delighted to be getting that chance.

Whiskey Bars by Bremner Duthie...suspicious behaviours

2008-07-28T15:47:00.001-07:00

As the US border guard held the suspicious device he’d found in my car, I wondered why I had been pulled over. And why I was being treated like a terrorist. When I crossed the border from Canada to perform at the Minneapolis Fringe Festival I didn’t think I fit the usual profiling – I wasn’t trying to be anonymous – after all, I was driving my vintage cherry-red 1964 Buick Skylark. I’m part of that large, bland demographic – white, anglo-saxon, male, and I’m not even a suspicious foreigner – I was born in New York City and proudly carry a well traveled American passport. Perhaps I fell into some random selection process, or perhaps the guard had indigestion. Suffice to say I found myself in a small office while the red faced guard in mirrored sunglasses popped back and forth to show me items he’d pulled from the car. He seemed to be waiting for me to fall to my knees and admit that this flimsy ‘performing in musical theatre’ story was actually a front for the international white slave trade (well… OK, sometimes, at the going rates of pay in theatre, I think I might agree with him…). At one point he wandered in with my top hat from the show. ‘And just where will you be wearing this?’ I drew his attention to the flyer for the show that I’d already given him – ‘On stage, like in the picture’. He left unimpressed.

Finally, he came back in with a triumphant, grim smile. He was brandishing a piece of wood with a hole bored through the middle, and now behind him stood another border guard with his hand hovering close to his gun. ‘I found this in your trunk, what is the purpose of this device’. I paused. He was waving a section of a portable coat rack I’d borrowed from my Mom to use in the show. I had a vision of myself driving to Washington DC in my Skylark to thwack George W. Bush with the piece of wood. It was a very unlikely vision, but hey, I guess you can’t be too careful in the war against terror. He flourished my Mom’s old coat rack in the air, staring at me like I was his prize for the day. My Dad’s words came back to me – ‘never, ever, ever joke with a customs guards, they are not hired for their senses of humour’.

I explained the purpose of the ‘device’. There was a long pause. His armed friend coughed discreetly and drifted tactfully away. ‘Would you like me to show you how it works?’ I asked innocently. He glared. ‘No, I think I’ve seen enough! Please move your car.’ And I drove off thinking I’m glad my government is protecting me from all those coat rack wielding music theatre performers who might be trying to sneak into the US in a 40 year old classic car, yes, indeedy… it makes me feel so, so much safer….

The Whiskey Wars of Whiskey Bars ( a kabarett by Bremner Duthie with the songs of Kurt Weill)

2008-07-24T10:16:00.000-07:00

Ouch…when I decided to take Whiskey Bars, a Kabarett by Bremner Duthie with songs by Kurt Weill, to the Edinburgh Fringe, I stumbled into this without any idea of how extremely tender Scottish feelings are on the subject of Whiskey... or is it Whisky. Please calm down, oh annoyed Scottish friends!

I'm bringing my show from Canada to Edinburgh and it's called 'Whiskey Bars'. Yes, with an "e" in the whisky.

The show's based around the songs of Kurt Weill—the guy who wrote Mack the Knife, among other songs. And before the Fringe has even started, I've had too many emails reminding me curtly that the correct spelling of Whiskey is Whisky, and that the Irish stole the word and added an 'E' to indicate their inferior product, and that the ignorant Americans began using the Irish spelling, (probably because there were way more Irish than Scots arriving State-side) and that adding an 'e' to the word is like adding Coca Cola to a single malt, (all right, all right, I've seen folks do that in the States and I agree it's disgusting) and that if I'm going to do a show in Scotland I should be aware of the correct spelling.

Well, normally on matters of cultural heritage I bow down and back off to the aggrieved cultures involved, but for once, I have history on my side. Because Kurt Weill wrote music theatre pieces with the brilliant Bertolt Brecht in the 1920's in Germany, and the 'Alabama Song' was one of his hits, and the title of my show comes from one of the lyrics.

You know the song—it was a huge hit for The Doors and David Bowie ("Oh, show me the way to the next Whiskey Bar…").

So this song comes from a show called the 'Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny'. It's a satire; Mahagonny symbolized the ultimate city of Capitalism, so Weill and Brecht imagined a city on the American frontier—although at that point they'd never been to America (and though the show was really a satire on 1920's Weimar Berlin).

Weill and Brecht decided that gangsters, gold-diggers, hurricanes, the FBI and lumberjacks might all meet up in this mythical Western city. And while the show is in German,Alabama Song is in English, and Weill and Brecht chosen American spelling simply because the song is set in the Wild (Weimar-tinted) West.

So…I know that Scottish Whisky is the best (though a fine single cask Kentucky Bourbon can go down pretty well), but for this one situation, my spelling of Whiskey is right.

To redeem myself, I promise to consume all the Whisky that I can once I get to Edinburgh…

Quick Quiz - Bremner Duthie's Whiskey Bars with songs by Kurt Weill at the Edinburgh Fringe at 'The Vault'

2008-07-21T13:08:00.000-07:00

Three Weeks Magazine in Britain asked me to fill out a quick quiz about my show Whiskey Bars, with the songs of Kurt Weill that will be going up at the Edinburgh Fringe at The Vault venue. I think this about sums it up...

1. What is your 2008 show all about?

"Whiskey Bars" is a tell-all, behind the scenes, no holds barred, backstage peek at the torrid and neurotic life of a fading cabaret singer teetering between a stunning future and a plunge into obscurity. It takes place as he prepares himself with innumerable shots of cheap vodka in the dressing room before a 'comeback' performance. Casting the audience as his critic, he lies, seduces, threatens, cajoles and bargains to secure a good review for the show he's about to do...all while performing a reverse striptease. He starts in a towel and ends in full tuxedo and whiteface. And best of all - he illustrates his story with the dark and daring songs of Kurt Weill.

2. Why should we come and see it?

Because folks say 'Wow' after hearing Weill's songs in this context--songs like Mack the Knife, September Song and soooooo many others, with lyrics by writers from Bertolt Brecht to Ira Gershwin. Because how often to you get to spend an evening with someone who believes they were captured by aliens? And because everyone can relate to the story of trying to get up and do what most scares them.

3. If your show was an olympic sport, what would it be and why?

Gossima. Whiff-Whaff. Flim-Flam. Ping-Pong – that's right – Table Tennis!!

Why? Because it's a breathless, nonstop, frighteningly precise yet totally nerdy battle of wits and speed where every move counts. Because you need to keep your eyes glued to the show for every tense, thrilling and yet somehow hilarious moment. Because Ping Pong was invented in 1890 in England using cigar box lids for rackets and a carved champagne cork for a ball, and we feel any game that has its roots in nicotine and alcohol has a lot in common with our show.

4. What are you most looking forward to about this year's Festival?

We're looking forward to sharing our own art and work and struggles equally amidst a collective community of the best of international theatre dedicated to artistic excellence...no, wait...that's the first line from the grant proposal…damn! …OK…we're looking forward to single malts, the fringe club, late night music jams, a distant shot at fame & glory, and a brief sleazy fling with some hot dancer with an amazing physique (we can dream, right?)

5. What are you least looking forward to about this year's Festival?

Now look - before heading for Canada I spent my youth in Fraserburgh in Aberdeenshire...not that far from Edinburgh...so I know...I know ALL ABOUT the friggin' awful weather. None of those carefully selected edfringe.com photos where happy performers busk in warm sunlight fool me. In Canada, August means a chance to soak up some sun, but in the capital city of Scotland I remember those North Sea squalls sweeping through at any time of year! Normally I do the busking in white face, so hopefully drizzled, dripping and streaked makeup will give me that lovely dramatic touch...

6. What advice would you have for someone trying to navigate the Fringe?

Trust your instincts and pick the shows that really appeal to you on some dark and daring level…better to see an exciting flop then a dull success! Don't follow the reviews – ask the person waiting in line in front of you, or eavesdrop on the conversation going on behind you – they'll give you much more exciting advice. Performers LOVE audiences who've been drinking – so don't forget to take advantage of all the great pubs and fine drinking establishments!

7. What advice would you have for someone trying to survive the Fringe?

Just three words – Alcohol, Caffeine, Baked Tatties

8. Describe your show in three words

Terrifyingly pleasurable schmaltz

WHISKEY BARS

by Bremner Duthie

at The Vault, 11 Merchant Street

preview Aug 3, 9pm (1hr) £3.00

Aug 4-10, 12-17, 19-25, 8:40pm (1hr) £6.00(£5.00)

WHISKEY BARS - AT THE ED FRINGE THIS SUMMER

http://pagesperso-orange.fr/whiskey.bars/whiskey.html

Lisa Pasold reading from her book Weave

2008-07-19T11:26:00.000-07:00

Lisa Pasold reading from Weave in a June reading at the Art Bar reading series in Toronto at Clinton's on Bloor St.

Lisa did a great reading

Geist Magazine said

"Weave reads as a memoir of the twentieth century in a world bounded by Prague and Peru and the Russian Front and the shores of Lake Ontario. The narrator is a traveler and an exile, and she seems to be perpetually in transit. Her brother Wilhelm serves as mythical interlocutor, and we are led by their sibling love into and out of the darkness of Europe. Weave is quite simply a masterpiece: there is more in these eighty odd pages than in most novels." ~Stephen Osborne, Geist

and you can buy it now, today, immediately at

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Weave-Lisa-Pasold/9780973238075-item.html?ref=Search+Books%3a+%2527lisa+pasold%2527

2008-07-03T05:24:00.001-07:00

when there's so much going on in the news sometimes the really great stories just get lost - I heard this guy on radio and he said that the only moment that scared him was when he thought that the bear might drown and he was scared for it... not for himself! ... extraordinary...

http://myfwc.com/whatsnew/08/statewide/News_08_X_BearRescue.htm

NXNE Conference Species

2008-06-23T18:14:00.001-07:00

I went to the NXNE Music conference last week and observed the different species of music industry people.... yes..different species - highly specialized for specific niches in the environment... I sat in on 4 panel discussions - New Media, Music Festivals, Producers, Promoters - and the panelists were all wildly different from the others, and all so much alike in each group. The New Media/Marketing group were filled with energy and enthusiasm and optimism, the Music Festival directors were so bored to be facing another group of eager young musicians, the Producers were all about the music, and the promoters were sharp eyed capitalists.

The New Media folk were David Usher, a musician who has a very active blog, and Mitch Joel, an online marketer whiz, and Michael McCarty from Emi Music Publishing. They were really great, filled with energy and ideas and incredibly keen on sharing - in fact sharing might have been the key word of the panel - since most of their encouragement was about how to share yourself and your creative process with a fanbase. I'll scrape the info from David Usher who summed up the info on his blog www.cloudid.com. I stumbled out of this panel filled with enthusiasm and excitement about the future of media marketing and connecting with musicians and people who love music - and crashed into the Festival Organizer's Panel, which was a crash course in 'People Who Don't Care and Don't Want to Know Your Name'... but perhaps I'll leave those notes for later... meanwhile this is what David Usher has to say..

At NXNE a lot of musicians were asking the question: What should I do?

Here’s my 20 cents:

1. There are no gatekeepers, don’t wait for that deal. They are few and far between these days. Try and get your music out to as many people as possible. That means building your community on the web. That’s were everyone goes to discover, listen and buy music. So that’s were you need to be.

2. Forget the traditional website. Think about the sites you visit everyday. Do any of them have content that’s 6 months old? No, so…

Move to a blog based platform where your blog is front and center. Use blogging and micro blogging (your Status) to keep your page fresh and always updated. No more old news, old photos, old videos, old tour dates. Make it about what your doing today. Open up your creative process to your audience. It’s a bit frightening at first but once you start it can become addictive. Trust me, this can lead you to being even more creative.

Note: you can get a simple blog page at wordpress.com or blogger, there are lots of free alternatives. You can use them with your own URL. Pay a designer by the hour to help customize the look and feel. I shouldn’t cost a fortune. Because blog platforms are built like social networks, they have a simple backend and you can easily do all the updating of your content yourself.

3.Hub out your blog page.
The idea is to blog and micro blog in one place, and then have that information feed to the rest your social networks automatically through RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Your goal is to have a simple system so you can upload once and get your art/process out to as many places as possible on the web.

Note: Start with Flickr, Youtube, Myspace, Facebook, Ilike, LastFM and Twitter.

Remember. Go where the people are.

Weill Inspirations

2008-06-17T15:48:00.000-07:00

When I first started working on my CD of the songs of Kurt Weill, I knew I wanted to do the gorgeous Speak Low, but the coaches I saw in New York all advised me to do it as this shlocky uptempo musical theatre thing. And it made me itch - probably because the words are so heartbreaking... I couldn't see myself believing in an interpretation of these words

Speak low when you speak, love
Our summer day withers away too soon, too soon
Speak low when you speak, love
Our moment is swift, like ships adrift,
we're swept apart, too soon

as some bouncy fingersnappin' uptempo thing. So I was delighted to stumble upon a strange recording of the amazing bassist, Charlie Haden, jamming on this song with a recording of Kurt Weill, the man himself, apparently taken from some rehearsal where he was coaching the song. And it's heartbreaking. (ok...the video itself is kind of kitsch...but it was the 80's.... however the song is gorgeous... hell, anything Haden ever did is gorgeous...)

so Stan (my amazing pianist) and I decided to do it as slow as possible and just let all those beautiful words and harmonies just flow out. This is live from the show...

and you can hear the version from the CD here... or here - on Amazon, or itunes..

Edfringe Launches

2008-06-17T15:31:00.001-07:00

The Edinburgh Fringe is on-line at last (after a bunch of server problems) with their program for the summer. www.edfringe.com and Whiskey Bars is up and listed in The Vault venue... God! - one little 40 word listing on the web is going to be so much amazing work for the summer. Luckily we now have the amazing and indomitable Irish playwright Maureen Mcmanus on our side - she's an old friend from when I lived in London and will be in Edinburgh for the first week and giving us a hand doing publicity and keeping our spirits up in the competition with the 2000 or so (Ack!) other shows going on at the same time...

"I lock myself inside a pantry of despair....."

2008-06-16T19:39:00.000-07:00

Worked for NXNE music fest at the Kathedral venue... taped a few seconds of all the bands on Saturday night, and a few in the upstairs venues... spot the Gold Lame funk band - what were they thinking!

Bands are

From Toronto
Run With Kitten's
Oh No Forest Fires
Infighter
Dance Yourself to Death

then from Madrid - FRIDA

Philadelphia's - Adam and Dave's Bloodline

Spain again with - We are Balboa

from Toronto
The Hip Hop/Djembe group - Grand Analog
The fashion challenged - Foxfire
The trying very hard funk band - God Made me Funky

Winnipeg's - The Sons of York

and finally the fabulous toronto neo-punk band Tin Bangs

Lennie the Magnificent

2008-06-11T14:12:00.000-07:00

honestly... he was... just amazing... 73 and brimming with charisma and charm and honesty.. it was a totally brave concert... he could have walked out and coasted on his hits and just walked through the evening, but he made it extraordinary...

OMG!

2008-06-06T08:25:00.001-07:00

Why does this kind of freak me out... just checked itunes and amazon.com and the CD is up there as well... available in whole or by single song download... i guess that something about being a part of the apple empire and actually participating in this 'new economy' is very odd... I had enough trouble with the old economy, much less the new one...

anyway... for those who swing that way - its now searchable, viewable, buyable on

Amazon
Rhapsody
Tradebit
Apple iTunes
GreatIndieMusic
PayPlay
Inprodicon (whatever that is...)

Virtual CD Launch Party

2008-06-06T07:58:00.001-07:00

At last the digital age. My first CD goes up on sale for downloads at CD Baby. You can just click on a button and the songs will arrive in your computer - no clumsy jewel case, no CD to get scratched - it is all virtual. I feel so light and modern and new... I'm thinking of following the example of Jane Siberry and changing my name, renouncing possessions and travelling the world with nothing but a macbook and a great set of clothes.... but then I'd also feel a bit too much like a character in a William Gibson novel...

anyway, I digress... the songs are available at http://cdbaby.com/cd/bremner or just click on

it features 14 songs from Weill's early works with Brecht to his last unfinished Broadway show: Huck Finn. The pianist is the wonderful Stan Cramer. This CD came out of a collaboration between Stan and Bremner on a show of Kurt Weill’s songs that has since toured across the world. Critics have said…

"Bremner Duthie has a voice of power and inner beauty that commands the whole space..... One feels seduced by the sheer power and beauty of this performance"
-- Musical Stages Magazine: London, England

“And my god, does he ever sing. Bremner's performance is jaw-dropping-my jaw literally dropped-as he not only sings beautifully but actually performs the songs beautifully as well. " --View Magazine, Hamilton , Ontario

"When he sings, his voice is like a big, dark, sultry room --full of emotive and expressive possibilities. Even when Duthie sings in languages other than English, the passion and subtext come startlingly alive." -- The Georgia Straight, Vancouver

“For many of us, our first exposure to Kurt Weill was on Bette Midler's early albums. Since then, such performers as Ute Lemper and Teresa Statas have become great interpreters of his music. Add Bremner Duthie, the star of 'Whiskey Bars' to that list. He delivers a stunning, stirring rendition of "What Keeps a Man Alive?" and his 'Mack the Knife' is done slowly and seductively, because it's a song for a bad boy. – Stephen Lavigne, Minneapolis Web Reviewer

“Bremner Sings Weill is a 15-song collection of some of the best work of German-born composer Kurt Weill, most famous for his collaborations with writer Bertolt Brecht but who also worked with such lyricists as Ira Gershwin and Oscar Hammerstein. Duthie - with fabulous accompaniment by pianist Stan Cramer - savours each word as a succulent morsel. With Duthie's comforting, soothing baritone voice, this is music to satiate the soul.

Thanks to his background in opera, and talent for cabaret and broadway song styles, Duthie "pays close attention to text," as the expression goes. Indeed, he treats every song as a script and each is quite scenic - none more so than his unique and pleasing interpretation of Weill & Brecht's "Mack The Knife". His vocal presentations also range from celebratory ("Bilbao Song") to mischievous ("Apple Jack") to soft and gentle ("Speak Low"), and then immediately to passionate and with gusto for a trio of tunes ("The Song Of The Big Shot", "What Keeps Mankind Alive" and "Alabama Song"). If you're at all interested in the music of Weill, this is a CD to add to your collection. If you're not familiar with his work, this CD would make an excellent primer. Bremner Sings Weill ... he also sings well ... exceedingly well, as a matter of fact."
Robin Chase, Winnipeg Web Reviewer

FEATURING:

Mack The Knife
(lyrics by Bertold Brecht, from Three Penny Opera)

Youkali
(lyrics by Rodger Fernay)

Bilbao Song
(lyrics by Bertold Brecht, from Happy End)

You Gentlemen Who Think You have a Mission
(lyrics by Bertold Brecht, from Three Penny Opera)

Alabama Song
(lyrics by Bertold Brecht, from Mahagonny)

I'm a Stranger Here Myself
(lyrics by Odgen Nash, from One Touch of Venus)

Je ne t'aime pas
(lyrics by Maurice Magre)

Lost in the Stars
(lyrics by Maxwell Anderson and Alan Paton, from Lost in the Stars)

My Ship.
(lyrics by Ira Gershwin, from Lady in the Dark)

Speak Low
(lyrics by Ogden Nash, from One Touch of Venus)

The Song of the Big Shot
(lyrics by Bertold Brecht, from Happy End)

Nowhere to Go But Up
(lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, from Knickerbocker Holiday)

Apple Jack (backing vocals: Stan Cramer)
(lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, from Huck Finn)

Moon Faced Starry Eyed
(Lyrics by Langston Hughes, from Streetscene)

One Life to Live
(lyrics by Ira Gershwin, from Lady in the Dark)

Gators and Chicks

2008-05-29T07:55:00.000-07:00

One last post on Florida. Incredible that these two things can co-exist in the same cheezy theme park - unbelievable delicate nesting birds inches from the camera, and huge fat sleepy overfed gators teased into tearing up raw chicken carcasses...

on the way

2008-05-26T21:59:00.000-07:00

and a final highway shot ... ah the glorious tackiness of my home country... I'm gonna miss it... 'cause you know, you just can't beat a big plastic lizard..

the South

2008-05-26T21:51:00.000-07:00

so everywhere we go they tell us that Florida is not the south... even though it is south of the south, its still the north! OK....whatever.. but its not till we drive five hours north to visit a friend in Savannah Georgia, that I realize that they were right... north of florida is actually the south. The accents change, everything gets slower and older and suddenly you're in Savannah, where a series of garden squares defines the whole of the old town and moss drips off the Live Oak trees that loom over the ornate buildings. Its just gorgeous... and after the sprawling modern city of Orlando, where you can't get anywhere without a car, it was a pleasure to just walk and walk and walk. Our friend Christian took us out to great jazz bars and restaurants and sent us on our way the next morning filled with a fab breakfast of fried peanut butter and honey sandwiches... now that's the south...

Over and Out

2008-05-26T16:12:00.001-07:00

So the Orlando Fringe is over. We rushed out of there and were on the road 30 minutes after the last performance, hightailing it for Sarasota to meet up with Lisa's Parents.... ok, ok... we stopped briefly to get some Krispy Kreme donuts... it only seemed right after weeks of dieting to be able to do this damn show in my underwear... It was great to be back on stage with this show. I miss this goofy and angst ridden character. Its interesting to do the show again and again over the course of several years and see how he and I are evolving. Its harder to get the mix of total confusion he had 7 years ago when I wrote this piece, but I think that he has more conviction on stage. I'll be doing a presentation of it as a fund raiser in Toronto at the end of June... and, for what it's worth, here is what one reviewer thought of it in Orlando... I think he captures the show pretty well..

Whiskey Bars, A Kabarette with the Songs of Kurt Weill
May 17th, 2008 by carl-gauze

Whiskey Bars, A Kabarette with the Songs of Kurt Weill
By Bremner Duthie
Big Empty Barn Productions
Yellow Venue
Orlando International Theater Fringe Festival, Orlando, FL

The whole point of cabaret is that seedy decline into nothingness. But just as a drowning man rises 3 times before the end, the true cabaret singer occasional returns to his former glory and produces one heroic heart rendering performance. Bremner Duthie's "Performer" is on that journey, preparing for a self-financed comeback show that feels doomed from the start. We meet him back stage as an unseen theater critic attempts to fill a few column inches with a readable story, and the Performer makes an attempt to win a new and seducible friend for the evening.

Punctuation this bitter sweet story are the songs of Kurt Weill, sung to a recorded accompaniment from an impossibly large boom box. You know some of them, "Mack The Knife", perhaps "Bilboa Song", "You Gentlemen Who Think You Have A Mission" and a few more obscure ones, including two with lyrics by Ogden Nash, the king of 1950's doggerel verse. By the time he reaches "Speak Low", he has complete stolen your soul, and you wouldn't dream of asking for it back.

Duthie dresses as we watch, building his persona on a base of white face, black tuxedo, and a Soviet-sized glass of cheap vodka. His nearly flat but vaguely European accent gives the songs depth, and a happy set of available lighting makes the show incredibly theatrical. All that's missing is a haze of cigarette smoke and our own glassfuls of cheap liquor.

from http://columns.ink19.com/archikulture/

A Cracker Bird Lover's Paradise

2008-05-22T09:53:00.000-07:00

So the oldest theme park in Orlando is not Disney's Magic Kingdom - it's Gatorland! When we told our friends we were heading there they called it 'Crackerville' (Cracker of course being slang for poor white trash in Florida). And it lived up to its name - alligator wrestling, alligator jumping competitions (upcoming video on that), alligator tidbits at the greasy cafe... But weirdly enough, it also turned out to be a nesting paradise for all these super delicate beautiful Florida storks and wading birds. And it was breeding season so we got up close and personal with some very new birds.... but first we visited the Gators...

But round the edges of the swamp where they have the very very fat and very very sleepy alligators (spoiled things get fed tons of Turkey hot dogs by the tourists... ok, ok... I admit it... I fed them turkey hot dogs as well... ) there are the nesting places of marsh birds, which nest naturally over alligators and crocodiles: thus avoiding the possibility of being raided by Racoons or other rodents... smart little birds... They were amazing. Innumerable nests filled with tiny just hatched storks and ducks and herons... and some very protective mama birds.

Flotilla at Sunset on Key West

2008-05-22T08:04:00.001-07:00

Sat on the dock and watched the sun go down, then unexpectedly a whole string of spectacular sailing ships went by right in front of us... a great end to the trip to Key West...

Pelican's on Bahia Honda

2008-05-21T13:11:00.000-07:00

I had just swum through an immense school of flashing silver fish... felt like a million fish all around me... and then these guys appeared to appreciate the little fish in a different kind of way...

houses and stripes

2008-05-20T11:36:00.001-07:00

a few more pics of the amazing houses in Key West...and one of Lisa looking tropical....