New ways to watch World Cup matches, number 2: accompanied by two competing jazz trios, one representing each team, simultaneously improvising a score as the match plays live on a big screen. The publicity promised 'squeaky bonk impro', but it worked out much better than that sounds, swinging between old fashioned silent movie scoring and amusing quotes from old favourites. ('The Winner Takes It All' when Sweden equalised, and 'The Death March' when Owen was stretchered off.)
20th Jun 2006, 23:05
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tags:#ingrid laubrock,#liam noble,#martin hathaway,#matt miles,#maurizio ravalico,#monkeyreview,#music,#nick ramm,#sweden v england,#world cup,#world cup jazz ballcomments (2)
It's on days like these that I have difficulty deciding whether the lack of an optical zoom on the Nokia 7610 is a good thing or a bad thing.
For nine quid, you can see the England games live on the Odeon's ginormous screen in HD, which is at least some consolation for those people let down by Sky's rubbish HD box installation process. The picture quality breaks down a little during fast-moving closeups, and channel HD2's commentary team isn't the best - at one point, I'm sure they said we were playing Colombia. But apart from that, it looks superb, and the cinema audience added just enough atmosphere.
Elephants! Yeah! The show reaches St. James's Street on a wet Saturday afternoon, and proceeds to make it even wetter for the people on the opposite side of the street from me. Heh heh heh.
The
Fight Club guy signing books after a public reading from his latest one,
Haunted. Sadly, he didn't read
Guts (widely regarded as
The Most Disgusting Short Story In The World), but the one he read instead totally justified his decision to give every audience member an air freshener that smelled like barbecued meat.
Yes, I know there's a severed hand on the table next to him.
It bloody is, honestly. (And that's former Small Face Ian McLagen on keyboards in the second picture.) The usual mixture of politics, jokes and yellable tunes. You could complain about how little new material Bragg has in this set, but those objections melt away in the final encore of the night - a lightning run through all seven tracks from his 23-year-old debut record, still sounding as good as ever (even though he admits the high end of his vocal register is shot to shit nowadays).
Excellently frenetic jazz outfit from Tokyo. I stood too close to the front of the stage throughout the show, and ended up with my hair full of trumpeter flob.
Yes, violence against women is undeniably a bad thing. But does this strike anyone else as just a tad overfuckingsensitive?
