Tin Angel PA

A duo is probably the most efficient way to describe Francis singing and playing guitar, with Tom on keys. I have reviewed several acoustic shows in pint-size venues before. Some have outperformed my expectations, others just seem to fade into the noise of claustrophobia.

An innocuous stage setup lay before me at the Tin Angel in Philadelphia.
I had never seen Francis Dunnery perform until that night. I am of course somewhat familiar with Tom Brislin’s career. Mr Dunnery it seems has had a fairly illustrious musical career, being the frontman for sometimes rock, other times pop, but mostly ProgRock band It Bites during the ‘80s. It Bites had a fair amount of success including a #6 with song ‘Calling All Heroes’ on the UK Singles Chart. According to what I read online, his career also saw him hobnob with some significant names in the British ProgRock scene, such as Chris Squire and Robert Plant.
His most current projects are his solo performances and the recently formed New Progressives. The latter it seems, has as its mission, to develop a new approach to progressive rock.

Prog music has its roots in the British movement against pop and rock music of the late ’60’s/early ‘70s. Those who championed this style chose to push the boundaries in composition and live performance; hence the term progressive. Many iterations later, prog music has in many ways become more of a show than a movement. I would very much like the opportunity to sit down with Mr Dunnery to discover what he thinks he has added to the ProgRock repertoire; so Francis, give me a call. (continue reading…)

Grapevine Opry at rehearsal (Dallas, Texas)

I first got a whiff of this ‘Country Road’ as a kid living in Singapore; Denver wrote fantastical lyrics that espoused all-American living with a tinge of the hippie culture; Woodstock was birthed in the year 1969.

As the power of marketing grew exponentially along with mass media, popular culture took the fast lane down the worldwide multimedia freeway with a grin on its cherubic face!

In my rear view mirror I watch as ‘Country Road’ overtook me to stop at Akasaka’s Bob Lounge where Tokyo’s Cowboy Bob sings soulfully with a twang.

A note for us living in America; the rest of the world gets a delayed effect on our syndicated programs and often live in a pop culture time warp.

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Nine Inch Nails (NIN) frontman Trent Reznor is saying goodbye to more than just the concert stage with the current NIN Wave Goodbye global tour. He’s also saying goodbye to his online persona he’s nurtured on Twitter, after recently quitting the microblogging service.

But even as he took the stage a few hours ago (Monday night) at Singapore’s Fort Canning Park in an effort to let his music, not his tweets, do the talking, there was no escaping that for many fans at the open-air gig, Reznor remains very much an Internet personality and NIN is clearly still an imitably tech-savvy band.

iPhone-toting concert goers chatted with each using the band’s NIN: Access mobile app, and NIN photographer/designer Rob Sheridan photo-blogged to the NIN website from his new iPhone 3GS right from his sweet spot at the foot of the stage. As you can see from his photo on the left, it’s pretty good, and a far cry from the noisy shot below on the right that I snapped on the exact same hardware.

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I must confess that I’ve overdramatized this post’s title but it’s my way of recapping a great week for classical music in Singapore.

On Wednesday, June 10, British pianist Joanna MacGregor played a two-hour set at the Esplanade Concert Hall. And the same venue hosted various combinations of viola virtuoso Yuri Bashmet, his Moscow Soloists string orchestra, and the Moscow State Chamber Choir that very Thursday to Saturday, June  12-14.

I’d like to look at the performing personalities of these musicians – not their artistic or technical calibres but how they behave on stage – and how that affected their relationship with Singaporean audiences, as well as what that could mean for the evolution of audience-artist interaction in general.

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Some of the people who heard jazz singer Richard Jackson perform at Singapore’s Esplanade Concert Hall last weekend (May 29-30) with Jeremy Monteiro, the T’ang Quartet, Randy Brecker, Ernie Watts and Christy Smith probably thought he flew in just for the Arts Festival, just like his fellow Americans Brecker and Watts did.

That couldn’t be further off the mark, however, because Jackson has been based in Singapore for over a year at the Boat Quay branch of Harry’s jazz bar, where bass player Smith is a veteran. His relative obscurity shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise though since in Singapore, more than many other places, familiarity breeds contempt.

Too often, the assumption is that you can’t possibly be all that talented if you had to come all the way to a cultural backwater like Singapore to get a gig; you’re only worth seeing if you deign to set foot here for an occasional performance before returning to New York.

However, that kind of cultural near-sightedness means that we Singaporeans too often miss what’s lurking right under our noses because we’re too busy gazing at Europe and the USA.

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The inaugural Asian edition of Jack Daniel’s Global Tour kicked off in Singapore tonight at the Hard Rock Cafe, but you’d be forgiven if you’ve never heard of it because I hadn’t either, even after I was invited by the PR people to attend it a couple of weeks ago. I thought it was going to be a Jack Daniel’s whisky-tasting event, with some music as ancillary entertainment.

Imagine my surprise then when I walked into the private room at the Hard Cafe tonight and found it packed with journalists from The Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia, all eager to find out more about Jack Daniel’s first Global Music Event in Asia.

That’s right, Jack Daniel’s Global Tour is a mini music festival, and the first of its kind to be held outside the USA. That makes two overlapping music festivals in Singapore at the same time. The difference is that while Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide Festival was properly marketed and made a distinct effort to include local talent, Jack Daniel’s seems to have pulled in talent from everywhere except Singapore.

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American genre-breaking jazz pianist Brad Mehldau, here in Singapore two weeks ago to perform in the Mosaic Music Festival with his eponymous jazz trio group, is an oddity in today’s jazz scene: someone who innovates not by changing jazz into a different form, but by steadfastly sticking to traditional jazz sensibilities.

He is like bass clarinet and sax maestro Eric Dolphy in that way. The latter – perhaps Mingus’ most talented sideman ever, and who was struck down cruelly at the prime of his life by undiagnosed diabetes in 1964 – was a free-spirited soul who slashed at jazz boundaries with his fearless invention of jazz choruses that shout advantgarde and free jazz but are really deeply grounded in the best of jazz traditions.

Mehldau, in the same way, uses hallowed jazz spirit to redraw jazz boundaries with classical, pop and rock music as his fodder.

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