My World Music Blog : February 2007

Most of my spare time this week has been spent writing the backing tracks for my girlfriends new play - Aladdin. It's lots of fun, albeit a little scary writing music for someone close to you.

I only have to write the backing parts for 5 songs - 3 of which are Eastern flavoured - 2 Beladi style pieces and another Egyptian piece where she'll teach the kids how to Bellydance.

The other 2 pieces are World Pop and and Swing-jazz style.

In other news, I got a call at 8:15am yesterday morning asking if I could fill in for a friend's band a few hours later. I turned it down though as I really needed to get a whole heap of work done - plus I didn't think I'd play so well on only 6 hours sleep and no rehearsal (I last played with them in November).

This week I have to find time to get my Accordion and Whistle chops back up to scratch for Saint Pat's Day as I'm off to Canberra for the annual St Paddies gigs. We're doing a Bluegrass gig on the Friday night and then almost 8 hours gigging on Saturday - start at 10:30am and finish well after midnight. These days I tend to stay completely sober until the final gig or I risk falling over in a gutter somewhere (or falling off stage). It's definitely a day to look forward to though!!!

Here in Melbourne (Australia) there seems to be some sort of free music festival on almost every weekend. The weekend before we'd gone along to the St Kilda Festival down by the beach along with around 400,000 other people and the last weekend went to the Sounds of Harmony concert which had around 200 people, mainly friends and family of the performers from what we could gather.

Despite being small (and not really advertised anywhere), there was a huge range of music over 3 1/2 hours and we saw The Central Shule Choir and Liron Choir, both Jewish (the area is predominantly Jewish), Noriko Tadano & Shamys playing the Japanese Shamisen, some cool Sri Lankan dancers and some Sudanese Dancers where the girls did nothing but stand there and wiggle their butts up and down the whole time - I kid you not - they hardly moved apart from their pom-pom covered buttocks.

The last couple of bands were the highlight of the day - Inka Marka, a popular local South American/Andean band and The HaBiBi's an excellent Greek band who I've been fond of for years. Somehow the Clarinetist in The HaBiBi's made his instrument sound like it had a double-reed - no idea how he managed that!!!

I borrowed the soundtrack to Latcho Drom today and listened to it at work. It's the soundtrack to one of the many great Tony Gatlif movies. It's a movie well worth seeing, as is his other famous one Gadjo Dilo (I recently bought both of them on DVD).

After being pretty lazy since Christmas, I've been trying to get my Accordion chops back up to scratch with a bunch of fast, furious Bulgarian tunes interspersed with slower Swedish Polskas. It's amazing how quickly your fingers forget what to do - especially on those pieces with lots and lots of notes like the Bulgarian ones.

The next few weeks will see me writing the arrangements to my girlfriends new childrens play based on Aladdin. She written half the songs and I'm eagerly waiting for the charts so I can begin scoring them up - it should be fun and will be the first time I've had to arrange something for someone elses musical project (so it's a tad scary). But I'm really looking forward to it as it has an Eastern influence which I love.

My girlfriend and I also popped along to the St Kilda Festival (a huge street festival here in Melbourne) and saw a few good bands - Four Play (a string quartet), some funk bands, a bit of Regurgitator (a heavy rock band) and Dallas Crane (another rock band). Lots of good fun and all the more fun for drinking beers among 400,000 similar minded punters!