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!

Dawson City Yukon Angel Eyed Blues

Postdated Dawson

Just arrived in surreal warm and sunny and green Vancouver. I feel like I'm in Mexico City... the culture shock is all a bit much...

so, on last posting of Dawson material before the northern landscapes all start to fade. The Pit Bar at the Westminster Hotel haven't changed their interior decor for 20 years, since the last owner sold it, and for who knows how long before that. And the last owner filled the bar with portraits of the community from years earlier. I think they're amazing. Talk about Canadian Folk Art: this bar should just be airlifted straight into an art gallery: nicotine stains and all. Here are a few of them. The last 'romance' painting is actually a painting of Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth II being felt up by the painter... who apparently had a crush on her...

The Carpet of the North

Well, we seem to be leaving the harsh realities of the frozen north. Whitehorse is a good half way point... lots of snow and ice but things are slightly 'softer'. Voila - a picture of my feet on the carpeting (!) of one of the local bars. We eventually were driven out of this bar by the incessant always-on wide screen TV's that surrounded us with the intimate details of Anna Nicole Smith's love life: god it's been nice to be away from that stuff for three months.

Had a great response to Whiskey Bars on Saturday night. A fabulous little black box theatre that was incredibly intimate and also incredibly live, so I could play with the songs as much as I wanted and I was really close to the audience. It's my favorite way to do the show. It went fabulously. I had thought that it would be a free show, but the organizers decided to use it as a fundraiser for their theatre space and so we had a really enthusiastic full house of every theatre person in Whitehorse... which means they got all the theatre jokes, which always livens up the evening and the whole thing raised a bunch of money for theatre in Whitehorse.

Comings and Goings

Well, I'm off. The Air North plane leaves for Whitehorse at 3:15 (though with the blowing sideways snow who knows what time it will get to Dawson from the Inuvik/Old Crow/Fairbanks run). The light is now about 50/50 and the thaw has started with huge slides of snow pounding into the ground from various tin roofs around the Town. The City has moved snowplows and dump trucks and they are scraping the top foot of snow and ice off the streets (I guess it's easier to do now then when it turns to slush). We've had one last drink at the best bar in town (perhaps in the north) and admired their canoes and their gallery of paintings. It seems like a good time to get moving. I'll be in Whitehorse for a few days, then I meet up with Lisa there and then we head to Vancouver and Toronto and then home to Paris. I'll miss our temporary home in the north... we have to come back sometime in summer...






I'll put up one more 'Song of The Day' on myspace and then that will be done for a week or so while I try and edit the ones I have into some sort of functional mix....

Troglodytes

Wandered across the river with Barclay to see the ice hut that I've been watching grow over the course of the last three months. I found it to be a nice little ice fishing hut that someone has lavished attention on. Huge ice-glass windows and a radio stuck in the walls with a deep hole in the river ice.





Then I wandered up the trail that led from it to the cliff face. Thought I'd find just some gear stashed, or a place to shelter from the wind. Instead I found someone's house! Dawson has some people seriously committed to roughing it. The dogs inside started barking and a gruff voice asked me what I wanted... I beat a hasty retreat and continued my wander down the river and pondered the many possibilities of what is a home...





and the song for the day will be Sweethearts on Parade... another old jazz era tune by a Canadian... up tomorrow at www.myspace.com/bremnerduthie

Sun Dogs in Tombstone

My old friend Joe came up from Whitehorse with his four wheel drive truck and we took an amazing trip up the Dempster Highway to Tombstone: a provincial park on the road to the Arctic Ocean. It was spectacular spectacular. -28 with a brutal windchill, so we didn't spend a lot of time out of the truck, but we managed to get over the Continental Divide, so when we crossed over the Klondike watershed into the Blackstone watershed then all the water was flowing North to the Arctic.







The Viewpoint from Tombstone... major windchill but too beautiful not too appreciate..



The ice crystals gave us some amazing sun dogs on the road ahead and in a huge circle around the Sun ...










The glare from the snow was pretty out of control... Joe resorted to extreme measures to combat it for driving








It was about 4 hours from Dawson, so we had time to get up there and get back in time for Martinis at Bombay Peggy's and a quick game (sadly short...) of Roulette at Diamond Tooth Gerties... all in all a satisfying day! The song of the day will be an old Velvet Underground song jazzed up a little... I'll put it up this evening at www.myspace.com/bremnerduthie