Sublime Contradictions

I don't think I can adequately describe how utterly French are the towns around where we have our barn and little farmhouse. In our tiny hamlet there are really only three family names in the whole village and the folks refer to each other through three generations of connections.... 'Pierre's Thierry's Marguerite'. The nearest town of any size, Corbigny, has a little winding market street that has cheese shops, butchers, bakeries, wine shops... and on the edge of the town an old roman road still pokes its flagstones out of the grass. So these places have been around for a long time and feel so deeply French.. multiculturalism hasn't exactly made a lot of inroads here. It is amazing down here...but occasionally you just would die to see a larger mix of people and backgrounds on the streets


So it was with a sense of sublime discombobulation and satisfaction that we stumbled upon a parade that was held to publicize a festival of the arts in another little village nearby. These guys were the Rajasthan Gitane Orchestra. As near as I could understand from the little bit of information they are a branch of the Gypsies that still live in India.



They walked, and danced through the centre of town playing brass band instruments. I guess they are a heritage from the British military marching bands of India. The two drummers had managed to turn themselves into a sort of Tabla for two...but played on marching drums. They were quite amazing and obviously were enjoying themselves immensely... probably just from watching the expressions of complete astonishment on the faces of the villagers.






They played a short set in the local park and then drifted away. Leaving the village as calm and unperturbed as before.... but maybe ever so slightly less 'french'...

Harvest

Ah...the fall: spent the last few days in Burgundy pulling fruit from the trees and grapes from the vines... I wish we had the know how to make wine from the grapes, but the juice is amazing, so we just cook them down and live on pure purple anti-oxidants for a couple of weeks



it's been a funny summer here (hasn't it been everywhere) and so everything is ripening early.



We won't be down again till the end of september, so we took everything off the trees early in expectation that it will be overripe when we get back.



The entire kitchen had become purple by the end of the grape experience...

Cycles and Sore Legs

Paris has yet another amazing thing it is doing for the folks that live here ( sometimes it gets a little daunting how many perks the city offers to the residents)... there are now free bikes all across town... 10, 000 of them at the moment, with 20,000 projected by the end of the year. They're not totally free. You have to take a year's 'subscription' for 30 euros, but then every ride under a half hour is free and it's about one euro an hour after that.

Here is Lisa showing off her ability to ride through the 2nd busiest intersection in the city (Place de la Concorde) in high heels.



The city isn't completely a bunch of trusting fools handing out bikes to all and sundry. You have to register your credit card and there is a fine if you damage or lose the bike... but they're very sturdy little things and it would be hard to do much damage to them.

We rode all over the city on a beautiful, but chilly Saturday and then down onto the Quai of the Seine and over to the left bank.




The only flaw in the system is that we picked up the bikes on the edges of the city and tried to drop them off in the centre, but we weren't the only ones with the same idea, so all the drop off points were already full. But, cycling around Paris for 15 minutes looking for a space on a calm afternoon is not exactly the worst thing in the world, and eventually we found a space near St. Sulpice and clicked them and headed into the pedestrian throng...

Cortin

Prince has a song on his new album with lyrics that go something like 'I love you baby, but not like I love my guitar"... I don't know if I'd go that far... (especially with Lisa being able to read this blog and all) but I'm powerful fond of this new guitar.. It's a Cort Electro-Acoustic and it's just a lovely little thing... not an expensive machine, but with a great finish, a gorgeous back made of American Maple and (at least according to my research on the net) some really good technology packed into the pickup in the body. Certainly the sound that's coming out is very fine. I'm looking forward to getting on stage with it in the fall.

Rocks and Pigs

Well it is great to back in France and down in Burgundy for a while... and what better way to welcome ourselves back to the rich and wacky history then a visit to a (surprisingly not wacky) medieval castle in process. Yeah, in process: about 10 years ago the owner of a chateau in Burgundy came up with the idea to find some wild land and build a 12th Century Castle.



They're using the plans that have been found from the period and working with archaeologists and historians to try and recreate the construction techniques of the period, and experiment with theories in places where they are not sure of how they did it.





All the material comes from the neighbourhood of the Castle... i.e. the Castle itself is built out of the quarry that will become the moat, the mortar is mixed from the chalk that they've dug out of the land beside them, the forest around is their supply for wood, they weave their own rope from the sheep on their land...etc, etc... our fear was that it would be kind of disney, but it was very serious and calm and informative.



The workman break their tasks to explain to you how and why they are doing their work and the work itself progresses very slowly and steadily. I was struck by how quiet the enormous worksite was. I'm used to thinking of a construction site being all pounding and noise and metal on metal, but here there is only the slow movement of stones and wood and the chinking of chisels... i guess in medieval ages when there would have been a whole rowdy village around the site it would have been a little more lively... as it was the snorting pigs were the rowdiest things there that afternoon....

Stampedin it

Just back from our 2nd effort at the Western Art Show of the Calgary stampede. I was there with Lisa as 'Artist's Assistants'.






Assistants to my Mom whose western work has been hanging on walls across western Canada and the States for a while now. The stampede was another chance to have her work accessible to private collectors and corporate collections.





I flew over to Vancouver and we made a 'triage' of the many paintings in her home and found a good assortment that showed off her old and new material and then we loaded that into the car and headed for Calgary.

The show is in the immense Round-Up centre: there must be 40 or 50 other artists also showing their work. Jay Contway, who does super detailed bronzes of western subjects, has been there since 1972, and his work now sells in the 15 - 50 thousand range.


Mom mostly stayed put in the (air conditioned and out of the 32C heat) art gallery, but Lisa and I wandered back and forth across the blistering tarmac to see everything we could.

We checked out the heavy horse pull. The animals are magnificent: they range from 1600 to 2500 pounds and pull up to 15,000 pounds with a two man team.



also the Working Cow Horse competition was incredible: I could never be sure who was doing all the thinking during this one - the horse or the rider.... it certainly wasn't the cow!

And of course there was no shortage of the weird and the wacky and the wonderful

- cowboy bands,


very big horses



roast beef in the cowhands cantines in the animal barns,

immense teams of immense Clydesdale horses pulling immense black carriages



the Calgary Police Choir (who sang an unnervingly straightfaced and strange cover of David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust),



innumerable ways in the midway to fall from the skies and, of course,



a new cowboy hat for Lisa.....


Mom's work did really well. It was, as usual, wonderful to sit there and see the delighted faces of the crowds as they turned into her stand.


She sold a bunch of work and we celebrated with a glass of champagne and burgers!




the ride home west over the Rockies was filled with the lights of the setting sun and the endless trees and peaks...





we made a pit stop in an old Copper Mining town




and, of course, one last latte in Vancouver....

And fun was had by all

Some photos of the 'launch' on Tuesday night. It was a great event (speaking personally...'cause I certainly had a great time!). We had a really nice crowd at the 7 Lezards jazz bar. It is a tiny bar of 60 seats at the most, so our 40 or 45 folks really filled it up nicely. And the sound is fabulous.... We sang Chelsea Hotel by Leonard Cohen without mics and I think it was one of the highlights. Two sets, with all the songs from the album, and one composition from the pianist Remi Amblard.



It was a little rough getting going... mostly in getting a good feeling for playing the songs live and not being in a rehearsal hall or in the studio... and, I guess, because we really had no idea how people were going to react to the arrangements. But by the 2nd set all of us on stage began to relax into it and it began to get moving.



Now I have to get back into the studio and do a final mix on the songs and then there's a couple of months off the whole project - I'm heading to Vancouver to help my mom put up her art show and when I return at the end of July all of France will be on vacation - so there's not a lot to be done till the beginning of September. I'll keep blogging here and at www.parislovesjazz.com on the next developments

Songs for All

Songs for All

I'm pleased and delighted to say that I stumbled out of the Bopcity studios last night (after a long day of watching a sound engineer mix tracks - odd how that can be sooo tiring) with the first mastered tracks from my new album 'The Sky Was Blue'. It's an album of standards with a jazz quartet, but it ain't necessarily a jazz standards album.... there's some crooner stuff, there's some caramelized, tangy pop, there's the saddest new-wave song ever written and there's a funk version of a joni mitchell tune. (trying to cover all the demographics....)

And, in this age of instant access and globalization I walked out of the studio last night with high quality digital masters and they are now available worldwide on my 'myspace' site as low quality digital mp3's. The site is www.myspace.com/bremnerduthie . I hope you enjoy the ones up there. I only have place for four or five, so I'll be rotating them over the next few days, so check back in if you enjoy what you hear. I'll have them up on CDBaby in the next few weeks for high quality downloads

all the best
Bremner

p.s. for those in Paris, I'll be doing them in concert with the quartet at the 7 Lezards jazz bar, 10 rue de Rosiers on the 26^th of June at 21h.

Well, that was....great! Three long days of work with the musicians in the studio. They were amazing: creative, hard working, inventive... they rocked! (ok...sometimes they rocked too much) I'm completely wiped. We got thirteen tracks down and now I have a week to work with the music and then in a week I'll go back and do the vocal retakes. Remi Amblard on piano and synth, Theirry Tardieu on percussion, Tommaso Montangani on Bass and Benoit Gil on guitar. And me, the singer, although really the last three days were about getting the musical tracks down...the word for what I was doing 'voix temoin' - the witness voice. I like the term...and to be honest by the last takes on friday afternoon that really, really, really was what I was doing. After three days of organizing, motivating, heading off confrontations, trying to pull out the best ideas and sidetrack the less good, I was on my last legs. I kept thinking 'Just keep singing something and get these beautiful tracks down on tape, and you come back and do it all again after a week of sleep". The Magic of electronic recording!





We did most of the tracks in the first two days and the last day was given over to a lot of retakes and drop-ins at places where the take as a whole was good but one person had screwed up or didn't like their work. Max - the engineer who runs Bopcity- would wind the track back, mute that particular instrument and then the player would just overdub what he'd done before. All the takes happened pretty quickly, there was only one piece that we couldn't get right and had to do about seven takes. I think some of the best ones happened with two or three takes. For the version of version of Heaven we did, we suddenly decided to throw away the arrangement from the rehearsal hall and do something completely different. The new version was put together in fifteen minutes and then we did three takes and I think it's kind of beautiful...


What surprised me was how much like theatre direction it was. I guess that's 'cause I'm producer and singer. All the issues of dealing with personalities, (i.e. -one person works best after about ten cups of coffee and another wants to get straight to work, or somebody else has a great idea they love and somebody thinks that idea is crap and a discussion starts which could well take up half the morning etc etc) and motivating people, scheduling, dealing with problems fell onto my shoulders as well. It was great fun to be part of this process but I'll also be glad to be in the studio alone next week with just the music and my voice.

the final mixes should be done by june 15th and I'll put some up on myspace ... meanwhile I might post some of the rehearsal takes from the studio www.myspace.com/bremnerduthie

Damn the sniffles

Well, thank god for France's amazing medical system... came down with a terrible cold this week (8 days from going into the studio). My nose is plugged, my throat is raw, my head is pounding, my joints ache... ack! Nothing like having a jazz album where the singer doesn't actually pronounce any of the words... yes: now folks that immortal classic: 'I'be Got You Udder My Skid'... So, I headed for my local drug purveyor, then strolled into the pharmacy and walked out with a plastic bag full of drugs... anti-inflammatorys, anti-biotics, nasal thingys, throat thingys, pain killers, sleeping tablets..(I swear to god I didn't ask for more than a simple anti-biotic).... She kind of went over the top when I told her I was doing a recording next week... even the Pharmacist was impressed with the list. I have a feeling most of this stuff will languish in my bathroom, but it kind of feels nice to know it's there... Thank the lord for socialised medicine..

Frozen Fish

Headed to the open galleries on the left bank at the Frigos (the old industrial refrigeration building). It's a strange building: squatted since the 70's and filled with creative people but with an odd intense atmostphere from the incredible heavy architecture of immense concrete walls and dark hallways covered in graffiti.


A lot of the work is typically 'squat' semi-anarchist kind of ok stuff but there were a few highlights. These fish must have been eight feet high and filled the walls of one studio. They were amazing!