EMMA RAWICZ

EMMA RAWICZ QUARTET AT TURNER SIMS, SOUTHAMPTON – 18/04/23

My attempts at being friendly are meeting with dwindling returns. Twice I’ve asked people how they are this evening without being asked in return or any further conversation ensuing. The first time the lady at the drinks kiosk looked at me with something almost verging on suspicion and certainly at least enjoying some common ground with wariness. The second time the white-haired man checking tickets – a staple of the TURNER SIMS scene – just sort of snorted as if me asking him how he is is just completely absurd, or at least rather droll, and certainly not to be entertained. Strange, I think. And I wonder where I am going wrong, because certain it is that I am going wrong somewhere. The fault, I’m certain, is sure to be mine.

All about me.

The people sitting behind me are talking about someone called Beatrice who went to see Titanic The Musical and found it “really enjoyable”.

The band is introduced by the grey-haired woman from the Southampton Jazz Club. She seems nervous here, in the more formal surroundings of the Turner Sims concert hall, but she does the job. She gets her point across. There’s no raffle tonight though, which seems a shame. 

The music begins with some lyrical piano playing from Ivo Neame, and it creates this mental image of my writer self as a leaking ceiling with a bucket beneath it. The leaking ceiling is my mind and the bucket is my writing. Every so often I have to empty the bucket. How often I empty the bucket depends on factors outwith my control, like how much it rains, for example, or the things other people do or say. Neame reminds me in appearance of what I imagine French philosophers to look like. I imagine him enjoying a stereotypical cup of coffee with Jean-Paul Sartre, even though I’ve got no idea what Jean-Paul Sartre looks like, and I just looked up what he looked like and he looked nothing like what I imagined, and actually couldn’t have looked less like I imagined him to look. The jazz seems kind of philosophical too – at first, certainly – as if it’s trying to work itself out as it goes along, and sees Neame reaching into the bowels of the Steinway grand piano he is playing, as if the metal and wood it appears to be made of are just a façade that hides a deeper reality. 

It’s interesting what saxophone players/band leaders do when they’re not playing. Some consult their sheet music; some close their eyes, nod their heads and drift off; some sit stony-faced, eyes fixed ahead; others pace back and forth at the back of the stage. EMMA RAWICZ watches her bandmates appreciatively, smiling often, even sometimes making expressions of disbelief, when they do something particularly impressive, which is often. I like that because I find it incredible too. I just have no idea how anyone gets so good at something. Actually, I think I do: they just practise a lot and focus all their energy on one thing, rather than a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, like dilettantes like me. A bit of drawing, some writing, ooh I think I’ll make an album, take a few photographs, make a little collage ... all the while having a full time job and two young children to help look after. That’s not how you get good at something, is it? You’ve got to focus on one thing. You gotta focus, dude. Jesus.

During the interval I go and buy a CD from Rawicz. She signs it with a gold sharpie. I ask her how she got into jazz growing up in Devon. She says she started off playing classical on the violin, but then saw a big band and that was it. Jazz took hold.

Back on stage Rawicz is having a good night. “Can you tell?” she asks. She sold all her CDs, which “never happens”, and seems really pleased with how things are going, which is as it should be because it does seem to be going very well indeed. There’s a clarity and liveliness to her playing, like fresh air or running water or a cold glass of orange juice, which reminds me of the way that squirrels run around the trunks of trees chasing each other and jump from branch to branch for whatever reason it is that squirrels jump from branch to branch – just for the hell of it maybe, and why not? One of her songs – a new one, I think she said – is named after a German word that means the feeling of being alone in the woods (I think the word is “Waldeinsamkeit”) and I like that. I like the thought of that feeling and there being a special word for it. And I think, maybe that’s how music makes me feel: like I’m alone in the woods.

Alone in the woods

NATURE

 

people always say, “Oh, nature’s brilliant, isn’t it, I love nature,” but, I tell you what, I’m bloody sick of nature, it’s just bloody boring, it’s just the same old bloody stuff day in day out, ooh plants, water, fucking air, it’s shit, oh yeah, and shit, that’s nature, which is fucking shit, and fucking pigeons, I fucking hate pigeons, and fucking seagulls, with that fucking squawking sound they make, it’s just fucking annoying, isn’t it about time we had some new birds, I mean it’s just lazy isn’t it, never doing anything new, just relying on stuff you did in the past, I mean, it’s not like any of us could just say, “Oh, sorry, I’m not doing any work today because I, like, did all my work, like, billions of years ago or whatever, and now I’m just going to sit on my arse, and do fuck all,” I mean, wouldn’t it would be nice, just once, to be surprised, to be like, “Oh, there’s a fucking lion walking down my street!” or, you know, an animal with, like, five faces or whatever, that would be all right, but instead all we fucking get are fucking dogs and cats and fucking pigeons, I wouldn’t even mind if they ever did anything interesting, or helped out a bit, but when did a dog or a cat ever do anything interesting or help out a bit, all they ever fucking do is make more fucking mess, it’s fucking bullshit, you know

YO LA TENGO

YO LA TENGO AT LONDON PALLADIUM – 14/04/23

“It’s nice to hear London accents again,” I say as we walk down Oxford Street. We don’t live in London any more, and so don’t hear London accents as part of our daily lives. Wife, for her part, identifies a way of walking particular to busy London streets, a sort of pacy purposeful parade, as different as it could possibly be to the kind of dithering, directionless dawdle more common in the provinces.

London walk

There’s no support band tonight; YO LA TENGO are playing two sets instead. “Oh, there’s an interval,” says a person, upon seeing the stage times. “I love that!”

No support band

In many ways they are the most unlikely of bands to be filling the PALLADIUM. They’re not cool, or attractive, or edgy, or innovative, they’re not virtuosos, or particularly great lyricists or singers (in fact, they’re not even really singing; it’s more a sort of melodic talking, or even, at times, tuneful whispering), there’s no lightshow, no posing or posturing, no anthemic sing-alongs, no hits. No one cheers when they recognise a song they like. They’re just not that kind of band. So, what is it about them? Is it their honesty, their authenticity, their simplicity, their melodicism, their reliability, their quietness, their loudness, their warmth, their humanity? Yes, I think it must be. All those things, probably. “We’ve been in this band for a long time,” says Ira Kaplin, and, when everyone cheers adds, “Thanks for cheering our longevity.” Maybe that’s part of the appeal too: longevity. The fact that they have kept going. They haven’t stopped or given up or died. They just keep going. And they haven’t lost it. They’ve still got whatever it was they had to begin with. “He never looks particularly happy to be performing,” says wife of Kaplin. “None of them look terrifically happy,” I observe. I couldn’t tell you what any of the songs are called, but they all sound familiar and terribly lovely, like a warm blanket you can wrap around your legs on a chilly day. After a while it begins to have a soporific effect. Wife is yawning. “I’m getting sleepy,” she says. “Have a little nap,” I suggest. 

Soporific

The second half is a bit more upbeat. Well, it’s equally ponderous and unhurried, but louder, put it like that. People are wigging out in their seats. At one point a man gets a bit overexcited, jumps to his feet and starts pumping his fist in the air, as if trying to inspire a sort of mass stand-up. But it doesn’t catch on. It’s just not that sort of thing. One thing that makes me laugh about Yo La Tengo is the way that when they walk on and off stage and when they move about the stage swapping instruments and what have you, there is a real urgency and purposefulness to their movements which is almost entirely lacking when they are playing. But that’s OK. That’s just who they are, and that’s probably why we’ve loved them all these years.

ISHMAEL ENSEMBLE

ISHMAEL ENSEMBLE/JOIN THE DIN AT GUILDHALL, PORTSMOUTH – 13/04/23

It’s a moody sort of evening in the forest. One minute there are splodges of ice splattering on the windscreen, and the next brilliant sunshine, but with rainclouds always looming in the distance, like a graphite smudge. It's like it can’t quite decide what kind of evening it wants to be, caught between multiple possible evenings.

Moody

Multiple possible evenings

In the car park there is a man standing by the meter. He says he needs four pounds eighty for a bus home. He asks me if I can give him some money. I ask him to wait a minute. I might need the change for the car park, I explain. He says it’s a card machine and starts showing me how to use it. “You tap your card there,” he says, showing me where to tap my card. I tell him that I know how to use the machine. “Sorry,” he says. When I’m done I give him all the change I have. It amounts to one pound ninety-five. I count it out for him. “I need four pounds eighty,” he says.

Portsmouth sells itself as “the great waterfront city” and the GUILDHALL is situated in a Barbican-like network of civic architecture, and I think that, really, there ought to be more going on here. Having said that there are two gigs going on tonight at the Guildhall alone. As well as ISHMAEL ENSEMBLE, nineties rocker surf dude types Reef are playing in the main hall, and it kind of amazes me that they can still draw a crowd after all these years. Ishmael Ensemble are playing in a smaller side “studio”. Two Reef fans wander in. “That’s not it,” one of them says. “There’s no way they’d fit everyone in there.” It’s weirdly quiet inside. I stand in the shadows but it’s too dark to see my notepad, so I go and sit in a little pool of blue light by the stage.

Little pool of blue light

Six-piece JOIN THE DIN are “from London” and seem, to my withered mind, to represent a sort of nexus between the contemporary London jazz scene and the seventies Canterbury scene. Like the best of today’s London jazz they seem to connect different traditions while looking forward with some hope to a brighter future. The bass player looks like a wizard, or one of those people who might refer to themselves as a warlock, and have a drawer full of cloaks and robes and stuff like that. They’ve got two drummers, which is always a good look, and a healthy smattering of tie-dye. So I feel right at home in my double-sided, glow-in-the-dark, tie-dye, giant cat t-shirt. These are my people, I think, and they all seem quite nice, apart from the bass player, who maintains a sinister demeanour throughout. By the end of the set, at one of the drummer’s insistence, people start dancing, which is OK, but someone treads on my toes, and I do generally prefer it when people don’t dance.

My people

There’s a man behind me who keeps commenting after every song that Ishmael Ensemble play. “Unbelievable,” he says after the first song. “Legends,” after the second. “Amazing,” after the third. I like him; I like his commentary. The music is a kind of unlikely amalgamation of disparate strands: jazz, triphop, post-rock, etc. Maybe not so disparate or unlikely, actually, after all, come to think of it. Holysseus Fly’s vocals sit like croutons on top of a muscular soup of beats and synths, like icing on a cake, like a butterfly in a car park, like a deer by the side of the motorway, etc. She makes it for me. The guitarist has the largest rack of pedals I’ve ever seen. It all gets a bit blokey when Fly leaves the stage midway through for a couple of songs. Nothing wrong with that, but is there? Maybe not. I don’t know. But doesn’t it then just become about who’s the hardest, or the heaviest, or the loudest, or the lowest, or the fanciest? Oh well, I just like it when there’s a bit of femininity in the mix these days. It makes a difference, it does. “Absolutely unbelievable,” is the commentary from behind. “Fucking hell,” he adds. “I need a lie down here. Rave central!” Things get floatier and dreamier and stretch out a bit when Fly returns, which is my kind of vibe. I’m just a soft sort of guy, I suppose. But this isn’t about me, is it, except that it is. It is all about me, don’t you see? All this time, it’s just been all about me.

Hello, I accidentally deleted all my photos of Ishmael Ensemble, so you’ll just have to use your imagination. I hope you don't mind. Thank you.

THE TOILET PEOPLE

Sometimes you might catch a sight of them. A blur of light or smudged colour. Like a seagull in a storm. Or you might hear them as they pass. A shriek or speeding obscenity. 

  The toilet people.
  That was what we called them. Or that was what I called them at least. Because wherever they started off they always ended up in the same place: the toilet. 
  Some of them seemed to live virtually their whole lives in the toilet. 
  “What the hell are they doing in there?” said one of my colleagues one day. It must have been a Tuesday though there’s no way to tell.
  “I don’t know,” I replied. “Could be anything.” 
  It was the not knowing that did it for us in the end. So they took the doors off so we could see.
  But the toilet people lived by their own rules. They were as alien to us as rats or beetles and their behaviour just as indecipherable.
  “What are you doing in there?” we would say.
  “Nothing,” they would reply. 
  And that was as far as the conversation, if you could call it that, went.
  But, by God, we loved to talk and speculate and complain about them.
  “If it’s privacy they want, I don’t know why they don’t just go outside,” we would say, and, “Are they eating in there? I think they might be eating in there,” and “It’s bloody disgusting, eating where you shit!” 
  And we all used to get involved. None of us could even feign disinterest. The toilet people fascinated us, compelled and repelled in equal measure. The tension kept us gripped.
  One morning they set off the fire alarm. “One of them was vaping in there, apparently,” a colleague informed me. 
  “I didn’t know that vapour could set off a smoke alarm,” I said, pointlessly.
  “Yeah, it can, apparently.” 
  Everyone was talking about it for the rest of the day; complaining about the toilet people’s selfishness, and speculating about who exactly it might have been. But no one knew and we never found out.
  The next thing was that they installed CCTV in the toilet. Not in the cubicles, we were given to understand, just in the communal area where you were supposed to wash your hands, but where the toilet people, it was supposed, ate their lunches and vaped with such impunity.
  There was a live feed that you could watch. We needed to monitor the situation. It was part of our job. I watched it from time to time, because not to do so was frowned upon. You were seen as not being a “team player” if you never watched it, like you were just selfishly leaving the supervision of the toilet people to your colleagues.
  But you could never see anyone. You could never catch them doing anything wrong. 
  The toilet people eluded us at every turn.
  And then, one day, they were gone. It all went quiet. The wind died down. The seagulls stopped trying to navigate the storm. It went quiet.
  “I wonder what happened to them?” I said.
  “They just vanished, apparently,” a colleague replied. 
  “Here one day; gone the next.”
  Suddenly, just like that, our lives were empty.
  By God, we missed them.