Tag: Gavin Friday

Gavin Friday, catholic, artist, Dublin, artist, musician, The Virgin Prunes

Gavin Friday: “I’m Interested In Telling Stories”

Everyone comes to Peter And The Wolf in their own way, but there’s a good chance many may now be introduced to the Prokofiev classic through a new animated short. Reimagining a beloved Russian classic is no small thing, but such bold creativity seems par for the course if one considers the man behind its realization.

Musician, actor, painter, performer, producer, poet, muse; it’s impossible to put Gavin Friday in a box, and one suspects that’s just how he likes things. The Irish artist, a founder of avant-garde band The Virgin Prunes and an accomplished solo musician, spent the better part of the 2020 pandemic lockdown thinking about wolves, family, one little boy – and how the drawings of a longtime childhood friend could work with all of it. That friend is, as many know, Bono, someone with whom he has maintained a decades-long connection which began in North Dublin in the mid 1970s. Born Fionan Hanvey, he met Bono (Paul Hewson) and future Virgin Prunes colleague Guggi (Derek Rowen) at a house party in his teens. The Virgin Prunes (active between 1977 and 1986) were a thing apart in Dublin – and elsewhere, really– with The Irish Times describing the band in 2022 as  “right in the middle of grand guignol performance art, melodic lucidity, and hard-as-nails post-punk“; their daringly theatrical presentations and fusion of genres set Friday up for an assortment of future creative pursuits. Following his time with the band Friday released four solo albums, with many respective tracks strongly influenced by the work of Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg: Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves (1989); Adam ‘n’ Eve (1992); Shag Tobacco (1995), and catholic (2011). He’s held art exhibitions, sound installations, and contributed to numerous film scores and soundtracks, including Jim Sheridan’s In The Name Of The Father (1993), The Boxer (1997), and In America (2003). In 2005 Friday acted opposite Cillian Murphy in Breakfast On Pluto, Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s 1998 novel of the same name, and in 2007 contributed music to McCabe’s theatre piece The Revenant, which opened that year’s Galway Arts Festival.

2007 also saw Friday also work with English composer Gavin Bryars on a new version of Shakespeare’s Sonnets together with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Opera North, a project he referenced more than once through the course of a recent conversation. Other collaborators have included Quincy Jones, Hal Willner (the latter produced Friday’s first two solo albums), post-punk artists Mark E. Smith, Dave Ball, and members of The Talking Heads, electronic music artists Howie B. and Atonalist, as well as Sinead O’Connor, whom he recently eulogized in a year-end special for The Observer (sister paper to The Guardian). Perhaps most famously, Friday has acted as longtime creative consultant to U2 (he calls himself their “midwife“), notably within the realm of their ambitious live presentations.

And then there is Peter And The Wolf, the legendary Prokofiev work of which Friday is a longtime fan. Originally commissioned in early 1936 by Natalya Sats, director of the Central Children’s Theatre in Moscow, the story revolves around a boy who lives with his grandfather and eventually traps a wolf with the help of forest-dwelling friends. The work premiered in the Large Hall of the Moscow Conservatory that same year, with its American premiere presented in 1938. Friday had narrated a formal orchestral presentation in Dublin in the early 2000s; that performance morphed into a book-and-CD project (published by Bloomsbury) in aid of the Irish Hospice Foundation in 2003, with musical rearrangement by Friday and longtime collaborator Maurice Seezer and artwork by Bono. Resemblances between the fairytale world of Peter and the Hewson clan were not, as Friday shared recently, accidental, and are most pronounced via the character of Grandfather, sketched in the book and the new animated short as Bono’s own father, Bob Hewson, who had been under the hospice’s care until his passing from cancer in 2001.

The new project, produced by BMG and animation studio Blink Industries, brings the drawings to poetic life with thoughtful narrative expansions and moments of true, unfiltered joy. There’s a sometimes fine but important difference between cute and contemplative, childish and childlike, and the thirty-minute work, directed by Stephen McNally and Elliot Dear, gets the balance just right. The musical rearrangement recalls the angular sounds of Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and Krzysztof Penderecki; it is an intelligent fusion of spiky textures, careful momentum, and Prokofiev’s folkloric melodicism. Connecting it all is Friday’s warm narration, injected with alternating doses of tension and tenderness. His accompanying song for the project, “There’s Nothing To Be Afraid Of“, is a touching (and very earworm-worthy) epilogue. This new Peter And The Wolf is as much a band-aid to sorrow as a pure hymn to happiness, a tribute to Prokofiev’s original and an ambitious broadening of the parameters binding its long-known universe. It is also a testament to the incredible breadth of Friday’s ambitions and talents. Released in October on the streaming platform MAX in North America and comes with a new book as well as a soundtrack in CD and vinyl formats. Peter And The Wolf airs on Irish national broadcaster RTE One on December 25th.

Between promoting the new Peter And The Wolf short, mixing his much-anticipated new album (working title: Ecce Homo), and overseeing the remastering and re-release of works by The Virgin Prunes, Friday is a busy man who seems more inspired and curious than ever. Might opera – in some form or fashion – be in Friday’s future? He isn’t talking, but Peter And The Wolf certainly cements his position as a go-to man for all things musicodramatitheatre. One can hardly wait for Friday’s next act.

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A frame from Peter And the Wolf. Photo: Blink Industries

How did this version of Peter And The Wolf come about?

The piece it’s based on celebrated its 20th anniversary this past autumn – that book-and-CD project did really well and we put it to bed, though there was a suggestion of animating it at some stage. About five years ago we got the rights to the recording back and I thought, “Wow, we should re-release this, stream it, look after it.” At the same time, (BMG’s UK President, Repertoire & Marketing) Alistair Norbury rang me up asking, “Is there a new Gavin Friday album coming? Or would you be interested in doing some re-releases?” We met in London and I mentioned getting the music rights back, and he said, “Why don’t we look at animating it?” We set up a few meetings and the animators we embraced the most belonged to a British company called Blink Industries. Then we went back to the Irish Hospice Foundation; since it was created for them originally, it would be so again.

What was the biggest challenge?

To try and animate Bono’s drawings was really the big conundrum; I didn’t want them to be overly nice or homogenized. I wanted them to have a punky aesthetic, that same scratched-up look as the book. Bono said, “Look, you curate them, and once it’s to your taste, I’ll give it my blessing.” So we started developing characters and came up with a little five-minute trailer, like a demo, and we went around to a few companies, and HBO fell in love with it. And we started meetings with them – but just around then, as we started getting going, lockdown came in and the whole world went into quietness. HBO said, “We can still start development via Zoom, so why don’t we?” Also we had a great team at HBO – which since became MAX – but they did remind us that twenty years ago was a different world so we’d have to edit the words in the old text, since it has Dublinese nuances and influences.

Going back to the early 2000s: how did the very first project transpire?

I had been working with the Irish Hospice Foundation for the last 25 years – they came and asked me for innovative stuff for charity rather than simply, “Here’s a daffodil; here’s a calendar” – we have done various projects together including cards and books and so on. At one stage they told me about a children’s orchestra in the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts and how they’d love to do something with me for charity, and I said, “Why don’t we do Peter And The Wolf?” That’s how it started. As you know Prokofiev wrote this in 1936 for children; the instruments of the orchestra are meant to be characters. And everyone knows the story…

I’ve introduced students to it through the years and nearly all of them have never heard of it.

Really?! Maybe it’s because I’m European so I know it – it’s a Russian fairytale but everyone I know is aware of and loves it!

Peter And The Wolf, Prokofiev, HBO, Max, BMG, Blink Industries, Gavin Friday, animation, Bono, short, forest

A frame from Peter And the Wolf. Photo: Blink Industries

What’s your very first memory of Peter And The Wolf? 

I heard Danny Kaye’s version – it was one of my aunt’s vinyls. But I’d heard it being played on the radio and things like the Proms and other specials; the BBC are quite good at classical. But I really woke up to it with David Bowie’s version, though I didn’t actually like that one! But the overall idea, yes, I love the gothic-ness of the story, the wolf and all that. So when it came to me performing it with this orchestra, it was a straightforward, live presentation with student musicians. We did it at the concert hall and it was a success. After that I wondered about doing our own arrangement. You know how, when you jump into something that’s new, or not-entirely new to you, you really really go for it? Whether it’s Stravinsky or whatever, you just go, “Oh Jesus, so much to learn! So much to listen to! So much to read!” – maybe too much! It happened when I was working with Gavin Bryars for the first time on the sonnets. With Shakespeare I had done this (gives middle finger) all my life – I think that’s an Irish thing – but when you read the sonnets you go, “Oh my Jesus, this guy’s a genius! Why haven’t I been reading this all my life?! Oh but wait, it’s so bloody much to learn…!”

So that obsessive streak happened with Peter And The Wolf?

… yes, I got very obsessive. I got hold of every version I possibly could. I think I have about 40 different recordings of it now; the Dame Edna one is brilliant, but one of my big favourites is by Sean Connery – what a gorgeous voice. When I did it with the orchestra in Dublin I did notice that the kids weren’t terribly interested, though – well, they were interested in my story, and how I was going into the wolf voice, but the music didn’t entirely engage them, so I thought, “Okay, it’s no longer an interesting thing on its own for kids, it has to be something they want to hear.” So when we went to do the 2003 version I said, “Let’s treat it was a movie score, let’s imagine we’re orchestrating and arranging this for a Tim Burton movie.” We had just started a big Kurt Weill show in Dublin and we were using banjos and horns; I thought maybe we could use them for the rearrangement – like, go punky on it, and so we did. We recorded it in two days in Dublin with some wonderful musicians. We had to send it to Prokofiev’s son for approval – he absolutely loved it – and we met (grandson) Gabriel Prokofiev for drinks as well; he thought it was punky, dangerous, and said, “It’ll get kids listening.” We embraced that; it’s what we wanted. Rather than saying, ‘The bird is the flute, the clarinet is the cat’ we say: this is what music and theatre are. We got the sign-off from the Prokofiev family again for the new animation.

How was that 2003 version realized in 2023?

HBO said they wanted the project and they had no problems with the music. They did want Bono’s voice and I said no, but since he had done the original drawings, I wondered, “How do I get him into this without speaking?” – which is a hard thing, I have to say! (laughs) There’s this old video of Picasso painting in front of a piece of glass, so we used that idea as a prologue; you see Bono painting the wolf and it morphs into Peter in the car, and then he does a little reprise at the end. It makes everyone happy that he’s in it, but without him actually speaking. We also had to change certain points of the story, particularly the ending. There’s a bit of ambiguousness in the original; the wolf is carted off, but where’s he going? Kids especially want to know: did they hurt the wolf? Is he dead? But wait, is the wolf really a “he” or is it a “she” or what? The HBO/Max team asked me and I thought, hmmm…

I reread the 2003 book recently and thought certain phrases probably wouldn’t work today – especially how you describe the wolf going “mental” when he’s caught.

Yes, and that’s a real Dublinism – but it had to be removed. The real thing that tipped my head was the question of why Peter lives with his grandfather. I thought, “Okay, this is for the hospice: his mother died, he’s dealing with loss. He’s coming from his mum’s funeral; you see pictures of her at some point – these are little symbols that say everything.” As to the wolf, well, what is it? Really, it is fear, at its essence. When horrible shit happens, like a parent dying – which is your whole world if you’re a kid – that’s the wolf. So we made Bono’s chalky drawing outside the box; the real wolf is in there, but you only see this white shape, which makes it otherworldly and surreal. It’s how Peter sees the world. We went through the whole process of rewriting and animating for basically a year. I am not a fan of digital animation personally, so all the sets were built, they’re handmade – so small trees, the car is a small car, they made little chairs, and it all mixes with 2D. The result is, I think, very beautiful.

It keeps the theme of the journey to adulthood intact also.

Yes, along this journey Peter befriends his grandfather; the wolf brings them together. It’s making what was an old piece of Russian folklore that Prokofiev put to music into this balm on how to deal with fear and loss. There was a question in terms of the narration; at the start the animators wisely said to me, “You’re taking the persona of the duck and the wolf and speaking the parts, but what about you as a narrator? What are you, exactly?” And they came up with a new character, a fly who hops around and sits on Peter’s shoulder and buzzes around as the wolf is being caught. The fly-narrator is me, this dandy version of Jiminy Cricket.

That inclusion facilitates narrative clarity, but it made me wonder if you’d be open to doing more classical-theatre-type work – I think you’d be perfect for Stravinsky’s L’Histoire Soldat, and Henze’s Aristaeus, for instance.

Well there’s a lot coming from me yet! When lockdown happened this landed on my plate – I was going to mix my album that I am finally mixing now. Peter And The Wolf did become a focus during lockdown, and I just fell in love with it. Building the story and working on the sets, the scripting going on – it was my first really big venture into narrative performance in a public way, and in retrospect it was a beautiful way to get through lockdown. The biggest thing I’ve done other than this is Nothing Like The Sun with Gavin Bryars, who picks it up and tours it every now and again. When I first did it I worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company for a month, which was hard-going. But people still ask me, why be so theatrical in all of your work? Well, because I’m interested in telling stories – it’s taking a character, it’s acting, having fun. I’m in my 60s, and I think, for f**k’s sakes, I still have a lot of stuff I want to do – when I’m 75 I might not be able to, so now’s the time!

Top photo: Barry McCall
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An Update & An Inspiration (or two)

First things first: I will be teaching in January 2024 after all.

More specifically, I will be leading a class at the University of Guelph Humber on freelancing and small business development for third-year Media & Communications students. Huzzah!

Secondly, calling attention to an article by Alexandra Wilson published recently in The Critic. Wilson is Professor of Music and Cultural History at Oxford Brookes University, and has published extensively on various aspects of opera. (Her 2021 book on Puccini’s La bohème is on my wish-list.) These lines near the end of the article caught me:

Yes, classical music does help mind, body, and soul. But if we make the point of opera its capacity to improve “wellbeing”, or if we sell classical music on its ability to make you better at maths, or indeed if we campaign for the arts on the basis of their contribution to GDP, we have succumbed to a utilitarian mentality. And the problem is that this makes it very much harder to advocate for the arts on their own merits.

This utilitarian mentality greatly (if not solely) contributes to North American perceptions around classical being an “elite” world, an idea I’ve covered here in the past, but hope to write about in more detail soon. It’s inspiring to see Wilson’s words at this point in time – more please!

More seasonally: Journalist Uwe Friedrich recently did a fascinating and detailed comparative of recordings of The Nutcracker for Bavarian broadcaster BR Klassik. It made me especially happy to hear my own personal favorite (by conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky) made the list. Very often I explore the idea of ‘evocative sounds’ with my students, what that means, and why to use it; Rozhdestvensky’s 1961 recording with the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra and Bolshoi Theatre Children’s Choir is a perfect example. The conductor beautifully conjures Tchaikovsky’s various sonic landscapes with an alert, alive eye to every fine, delicate detail, and carefully avoids the far-too-easy showiness of the score while leaning into the vibrant textures inherent within its hypnotic melodicism.

Finally: thanks to everyone far and wide for the kind wishes for my birthday yesterday (the 14th). When people ask me my age now, this is the exact face I’m going to pull:

Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without express written permission.

My interview with Gavin Friday about the new version of Peter And The Wolf is coming next week; stay tuned and stay warm.

snow, winter, branches, cold, trees, twisting, scene, snowy

Essay: Ch-ch-ch-changes

Update 15 December: I have a January position, but not at Seneca Polytechnic.

This announcement was made on Facebook recently, but for the sake of  clarity I am announcing it here also: I will not be teaching at Seneca Polytechnic Institute in January (For further clarification: I was not fired but it was also not my decision.)

I graduated from Seneca’s Radio Broadcasting program in 2005, with the teaching offer coming a decade later. It was the first time I’d taught in a formal classroom, the first time I’d stood in front of a group, having only taught piano one-on-one for many years prior. I’d been an Associate Producer at CBC Radio but I wasn’t sure how to transfer that knowledge, or indeed, anything I’d gained from working so long in the worlds of writing, chasing, interviewing, recording, and producing. I remember the stomach-churning nerves of that first class, repeatedly losing my train of thought and looking down to my notes for reassurance. What am I doing here? Who do I think I am?! Fraudster syndrome is not a new experience for me, but I remember how sharp its edges felt that day in January 2015. It was a sign of things to come, particularly when I returned to writing within the classical world.

Despite the nervousness that day, I’d made my mother proud. It felt good to have the approval of the person who had been my most ferocious critic. The praise came with an addendum  (“I told you you should have gone to teacher’s college all along…”) – and was short-lived. I became ill (there were suspicions of Crohn’s disease, not ultimately found) and I couldn’t finish teaching the term. This was the time before Zoom classes. I couldn’t do a requested opera review for The Globe & Mail during that time either, and I remember crying over everything one grey early-spring afternoon, bemoaning the inertia of an existence that couldn’t – wouldn’t, refused – to move forwards, despite every hard push and expensive effort. Living abroad, graduate school, New York (twice!), tutoring, teaching, workshopping, networking, writing – so much writing – balanced with looking after my mother, and just when it seemed things were finally, at last, moving… kaboom, by accident or design, the wheels stopped turning. Sometimes I wonder if my illness was a reaction to her obvious decline. I remember her tiny frame perched just outside the doorway of my bedroom after one of my surgeries, her saucer eyes peering in. She would be dead four months later. I remained, barely, and the school term was over.

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Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without express written permission.

I would go on to teach at Seneca every winter thereafter, and subsequently instruct Media And Communications students at the University of Guelph Humber every autumn. All those things I pushed for and lived through I now use, in one form or another; everything had a purpose, and continues to. The stress of teaching can be intense at points, but what job comes without that? Creativity, logic, and process are partners in the classroom. To borrow Byron’s line from Don Juan (written in a highly different context), “explaining my explanation” is something I think about a lot, as much as for teaching as for writing. But such educational basics (including standing in front of a group) don’t scare me anymore. Communicating, after all, is what musicians (actors, writers, painters, playwrights) also do, and like an artist I try to be both creative and chewy in my delivery, a mix of the blunt, the bizarre, the theatrical, a kind of Bernsteinian flight of ideas and history, approach and practice. (I don’t think Lenny would mind my taking inspiration from his speaking/lecturing style.) Encouraging young people to explore their own talents, demonstrate a capacity to meet real-world demands and exercise their curiosity has been a special blessing for someone who never had children of her own. I like students; I like their energy. Seeing (and sometimes hearing) the lights go on – formulating unique thoughts and ideas, planning and dreaming, standing outside (creatively, intellectually, mentally) the influence and validation of the known – communication!

At the moment I am in the midst of term-end grading. It is odd to think that in a few days, there will be no classroom to go to, no externally-imposed schedule to keep, no student things to grade, no new slate of new faces to greet. January will be a big empty slate for the first time since 2014. “Turn and face the strange” indeed. Exacerbating this surreal feeling is a (big) birthday on Thursday. Maybe pushing for the things society tells us we “should” have by a certain age isn’t as effective a recipe for contentment as acceptance of and gratitude for present circumstances. True,  there is no castle in the sky, no Prince Charming, no sharing the washing-up or small joys or exasperated sighs. I am my own roommate, and it’s not a question of “strange” or “fail” or even “like”; it simply is.

Recently I had a conversation with someone working in the European classical industry who noted that while I seem “split down the middle” in terms of my professional life, I really should give serious thought to pursuing the things related to the classical self, the self who must try to stay quiet amidst the focus, that side I can barely silence, even (or especially) in lectures. Of course my readers may have noticed there’s been little published here the last few months – there’s been so little energy to do so. But I am called The Opera Queen, FFS! I should have written about Callas’s birthday! I should have written about Turandot(s) and Don Carlo! I should have written tributes to Marlena Malas and Pauline Tambling! I should have asked for interviews with x-y-z! Alas, time and energy are finite at this point (this is where nightly cooking/washing-up help would come in handy) and lately it’s gone to my students, and I don’t really mind, but I worry my readers do.

torso, sculpture, Glyptothek, Munich, Apollo, physique, chest, ancient, antiquity

Torso of Apollo; copy, probably after a statue of Onatas from Aegina (ca. 460 BC). Taken at the Glyptothek Munich. Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without express written permission.

Rilke’s 1908 poem “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” (Torso of an Archaic Apollo), with its striking paradox of the complete and the incomplete, comes to mind often, and not solely for its famous last line. Lately I am less statuesque and immobile, more messy and unsettled, as if I’m being shoved onto an empty dance floor in naught but socks, sweats, and dishevelled hair; all I can do is dance with myself – figure out next steps, tiptoe through financial terror, pirouette around expected hardship, kick at the doubts and do jazz hands to the doubters. Maybe I know the steps better than I think, else I am a good improviser. It’s nice to move in winter anyway; something about the season’s stillness makes things easier, its cold temperatures offering a brisk clarity. I am looking forward to long walks in the snow (if it ever comes) and listening to Sibelius, Strauss, Shostakovich… and silence.

In the meantime, I’ve an interview posting soon featuring Irish artist Gavin Friday, the driving force behind a new animated version of Peter And The Wolf done with childhood friend Bono – an update to their 2003 project for the Irish Hospice Foundation. Culture and rebellion, change, theatre, performance; creativity; shifting identities: Mr. Friday is every bit opera. The feature is posting prior to the short’s broadcast on Irish television December 25th.

Until then, enjoy the eierpunsch, dance with yourselves, and most importantly: remember the c-word. My students, I think, already know it by heart.

Unearthing Ireland

As has been noted, part of my mission this summer is to educate myself about music a little more – new music, old music, everything in-between. Being an arts journalist has afforded me a ton of opportunities to go exploring, even if time constraints mean I frequently feel a bit of a musical dilettante, skipping from one artist/band/era/genre to the next. But one thing caught my attention, and it’s stayed glued there for months now. It even resulted in my writing a formal feature.

July 16th saw the release of Strange Passion, a compilation of sounds from the Irish post punk era. The first tune I heard from it (back in June) was SM Corporation’s “Fire From Above”, which has since become my unofficial summer anthem. With its bouncy beat and bleepy-bloopy electronic sound, along with a vaguely keening-esque vocal line, it’s really the best sort of earworm to have through the heat waves and hot storms dominating the last couple weeks. In deciding to do a feature length story on Strange Passion and post punk in Ireland, I knew I’d be falling, delightedly head-first, into a cultural landscape I find deeply fascinating, even now.
The Dublin of the late 1970s and early ’80s was anything but glamorous, but, based on research and interviews (and frankly, the music), it was an inspiring time for artists. As Gavin Friday told me, sometimes the best art can come from the smaller, less glamorous cities; I turned this over in my mind after he said it, considering the home cities of some of my favorite artists (Prince is from Minneapolis; R.E.M., from Athens, Georgia; even The Beatles are from Liverpool, which was hardly a hotbed of hip cultural life in the late 1950s). There’s something to be said for geography being destiny for artists: why, how, if (or when) they leave, they always carry a piece of their locale with them in song and sketch and spirit.

Bands like Major Thinkers, Chant Chant Chant, and The Threat may not have lasted in any literal sense, but I’d like to think that listening to them affords me a peek into a creatively compelling place and time, one that’s bled over into our own multi-faceted era of mixed sounds and places and experiences.

Addendum: For a detailed examination of the bands on Strange Passion, do check out Ian Maleney’s excellent piece over at The Quietus.

To Be Able

I love this video. And I love this song.

Gavin Friday’s last album was Shag Tobacco, from 1995. It was sexy and scintillating, but it was equally thought-provoking and deeply soul-searching. Gavin Friday has always been a favorite artist of mine for his ability to balance these elements, and to merrily juggle the clever, the absurd, the arch and the painfully personal. His latest is catholic, available through his website and iTunes.

Being the sensualist I am, I want to go and get a physical copy. There’s something about the direct, tangible nature of the experience -finding a music store (no mean feat in this digital age), coming upon the album, paying, opening the packaging, leafing through the booklet as the CD plays. It’s all so old-fashioned, from another era, but outside of concert-going, it’s how I enjoy the artistry of music-making most.

And it feels right for an artist like Gavin Friday. The Irish-born singer/songwriter/painter/actor excels at integrating sounds of the past and present into something both classic and futuristic, with a heavy nod toward exploring the sensual aspects of life:

She’s upstairs, I’m downstairs,
Drinking coffee in the kitchen
Spoon in the sugar, knife in the butter… I want you.
Do you love me? Say you do.

I’d like to see you undress…

The first single from catholic is called “Able.” With its thought-provoking lyrics and stirring electronic swirl driven by heavy beats and Gavin’s beautifully low voice rumbling throughout like a sort of world-weary anchor, it’s the the sort of grown-up pop that keeps me awake at night, writing and drawing and thinking and returning to volumes of poetry I haven’t read in ages. What with the attempts lately to balance practicality, sensuality, desire, want and progress in my life, “Able”is the right song (and video, directed by Kevin Godley), at the right time.

I wanna be able
to hold my own
to breathe without drowning
to find a home.
I want you to love me
don’t want you to lie.

Excelsior, Gavin. It’s been too long. Next stop, Manhattan, please.

Luminato Lights Up

Luminato has announced its music line-up, and wow, what a gaggle of goodies to behold.

For those of you wondering what the heck Luminato is, voila: it’s a ten-day, kick-ass culture fest that’s happened in Toronto every June since 2007. When it began, some people sniped that the money being poured into it would be better invested with various Toronto-based arts companies, but frankly, David Pecaut & Co. had something far more larger -and more worldly -than the local yokels envisioned. Partnering with cosmetics giant L’Oreal, the arts leader helped to bring a myriad of accessible, fun, internationally-minded cultural happenings and figures to the city. For ten days every June, Torontonians of all stripes get excited about all things artistic -which is quite a feat, considering how hockey-obsessed a town this usually is.

Past years have featured some truly beautiful programming, including a sexy, gorgeous, East Asian version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Tim Supple and the award-winning Black Watch by the National Theatre of Scotland. Last year’s music events included a tremendous Neil Young tribute (featuring Sarah Slean and Steven Page, among many others) and two concerts (one free) by Balkan superstar Goran Bregovic, whom I interviewed. As Luminato CEO Janice Price reminded the assembled guests this morning, 80% of Luminato events are free; to me, this means they want the biggest number of eyeballs gawking at their stuff -or, to put it another way, the greatest numbers of bodies dancing, laughing, and enjoying the being-togetherness of arts events as possible. I’ve seen some combination of all of those at various Luminato events through the years. English, French, Sanskrit, Serbian -language melts away in those moments when you’re sharing a cultural event with a crowd. I suspect it’s that kind of wordless joy Luminato’s aiming at.

This year’s music selections are proof positive of the fest’s approachability and range. Rufus Wainwright‘s opera Prima Donna is making its North American premiere (I listed it as one of the things I most want to see in 2010), and he’ll also be doing a solo concert based on his recent record release, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu (Universal Music). There’s something so unapologetically European about Wainwright; despite his Canadian musical pedigree, I’ve always found him to have a style, sound, and sensibility far more suited to ‘the continent‘. His participation in last fall’s tribute to Irish artist Gavin Friday (at Carnegie Hall; produced by Hal Willner) only cemented his worldly, exploratory approach to artistry. I can hardly wait to see him.

Luminato 2010 will also feature an outdoor concert called Rock the Casbah, to feature the terrific, lively French/North African band Lo’Jo, as well as the punk-meets-Arab sounds of Rachid Taha, whose 2008 Toronto concert was one of the best live shows I’ve ever attended. Taha and his band are infectiously good; like Brega, they don’t sing in English, but it hardly matters. When you’re dancing, you don’t really notice, though you might recognize Taha’s cover of The Clash classic song the event is named after. Both his and Lo’Jo’s inclusion in Luminato is a testament to the festival’s breadth of vision and its open embrace of wider cultural patterns. So too is Malian master Salif Keita, who will be taking part in Global Blues along with Cuban band Mezcla, a danceable jazz-blues fusion group led by Pablo Menendez. There’s also John Malkovich -not sure if he’s singing, but playing a murderer, with music provided by the Vienna Academy Orchestra, has to be pregnant with all kinds of operatic-like drama. Called The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer, the work is based on the true story of celebrated Austrian author and notorious murderer Jack Unterweger. Talk about a worldly vision.

That doesn’t mean Luminato forgets about their home and native land, however. The Canadian Songbook has been a staple of the fest, and this year will feature a tribute to the work of Bruce Cockburn. He’ll be sharing the stage with friends and musicians, including fellow Canucks Hawksley Workman, Margo Timmins (of the Cowboy Junkies) and Michael Occhipinti, with more to come. At today’s announcement, Cockburn called his inclusion in the festival a testament to his “longevity, persistence, and refusal to disappear” and added, smiling, that he’s “looking forward to the peculiar things they’re gonna do with my stuff.” He seemed genuinely chuffed at the tribute, observing that his usual creative method in the past would be to “record the songs, forget about them, and make room in my head for new ones.”

Cockburn’s inclusion is interesting in light of his previous anti-corporate past; Luminato has always been upfront about its close partnership with L’Oreal. The cosmetic giant’s Canadian section President and CEO, Javier San Juan, noted in his opening remarks that there had been, at the beginning of the fest, concerns in the combination between arts and business. San Juan emphasized the equal partnerships that exist between all facets of Luminato; concepts of working together closely and demonstrating a larger vision of the arts and its relationship to everyday life, were always priorities, and in case you have doubts, look at the programming. Even Cockburn, with his anti-logging, pro-environment, fantasy-rocket-launcher tunes, is getting on the train for the sake of his art. It’s just one event I’m deeply looking forward to. June is going to be full of celebration.

Gracias, Lhasa

It was with great sadness, and more than a little shock, that I learned of Lhasa de Sela‘s recent passing. The gypsy-esque, European-influenced singer has become a favourite of mine, with her hauntingly sensual low voice, poetic, surreal lyrics, and open embrace of various cultural sounds, from Latin-influenced to Eastern European, and all genres – folk, rock, electronica, klezmer -in-between

I remember being excited and little nervous when I interviewed Lhasa last spring about her new album. After the rich, gleeful sounds of 1998’s La Llorona, and the world-folk sounds of 2003’s The Living Road, she wasn’t sure people would be prepared for the moody, stripped-down atmosphere of her newest, self-titled offering, recorded entirely live. Our conversation ran the gamut, from background to influences to singing styles. We tossed around the benefit and drawbacks of analog and digital technologies; we talked about soul music, and since visual art played a big part in her albums, we talked about the relationships between music and visuals. I’ll never forget what she said: “music is a conversation; art is just for yourself.”

Lhasa’s music defiantly (fabulously) rejects any easy categorization or definition, in the same manner that many of my favourite artists do, including, notably, Gavin Friday. In these days where pop, rock, dance, rap, hip-hop and country are both more loosely defined and yet more rigorously defined (and defining) than ever, Lhasa’s music was (and remains) a breath of fresh air. Curiosity, passion, and an indefatigable spirit to explore new-meets-old sonic territory in unusual, challenging ways is a hallmark of good artistry, and a demonstration of commitment to one’s craft (or muse, if you will). Lhasa was committed. Her music doesn’t always make you comfortable; it makes you think. It takes you to places where you’d rather not venture, but can’t say “no” to. Her voice was a call to stumble, trance-like, up a hill, in the dark, knees bleeding, hands scraping at dirt, and then stand at the edge of a windy cliff, not merely admiring the view but wondering at horrors you left lurking below, and distorting them into shapes you could at least live with -until the next siren song, anyway.

Losing her is upsetting for so many reasons: she was so young; she hadn’t found the kind of acclaim at home that she’d found overseas; there’s still so much she had to give the world. Lhasa had an uncanny ability to pull her own experiences through the intricate, beautiful webs of tone, timbre, syllables and symbols, rendering the intimate epic, and shrinking the absolute to lacy uncertainty. As she told me in the spring,

That’s one of the wonderful things about music: you can say very intimate things, and they become universal – other people can relate to them. If it was just me singing about me, then I would feel embarrassed. I feel like I’m searching for the grain of something other people can understand.

Ultimately, art is about connection. Getting the chance to connect with Lhasa for twenty minute was a treat I’ll always cherish. “Now that my heart is open / there is no way it can be closed or broken.”

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