Why oh why do they sit there...

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

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

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...

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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...

a new toy

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...

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

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

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