Cloudland Blue Quartet - New Recordings
A break from working on the new music tonight as I made my way to the Queens Hall to meet up with Dr Prog for ECAT's presentation of "Works from the Experimental Music Catalogue"...
A cooling drink in the bar preceeded the concert, which opened with an interesting eight minute percussion piece by Christopher Hobbs...
This was followed by a Gavin Bryars composition entitled "The Ride Cymbal and the Band that Caused the Fire in the Sycamore Tree" - which was as bad as the title suggests - two cellists setting out some drones over which the pianist played various cliched jazz idioms on a "prepared" piano...
Ouch...
During the third item, John White's "Purple Passage", another (very quiet) percussion piece, performed by the same two percussionists as the Hobbs piece earlier, I'm afraid to say your correspondent fell asleep and, much to Dr Prog's embarrassment, my snoring rang out across the hall...
Oh dear...
To make mattters worse, I was in the very front row and no doubt managed to drown out the performers for a couple of bars before being nudged awake by the good doctor...
Another drink at the interval, alchoholic ginger beer - which certainly carried a bit of a kick - and it was back to the hall for the second half - I left Dr Prog up the front and took a pew (literally, it's an ex-church) right up the back...
Then, piece of the night - fifteen minutes of some very beautiful solo piano misic by Howard Skempton - preceeded Gavin Bryars' "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet" which, to my mind, is a reasonable idea stretched to exasperation point...
I would like to hear the string ensemble with harp without the seemingly never-ending loop of the tramp singing the title...
Just my view...
A chat in the bar with the progmeister before a bus home...
A good, if somewhat embarrassing, night....
highlight of the Day : The Skempton piece...
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