I haven't written much lately, and the chief reason for this is that I haven't DONE much lately! This week has mainly seen me bumming around the flat applying for jobs, listening to music, reading, and playing on the XBox. Not that I'm complaining mind you – it's been nice and relaxing! Hopefully one of these job leads progresses through its chrysalis stage and mutates into an actual JOB soon though.
Last Friday night I went to the Barbican Centre with Tim (no arse photo this time – he's suffered enough) and saw one of the coolest Jazz Maestros alive today – Mr Herbie Hancock !
Wow…
I thought I'd heard top flight jazz, but then I heard these guys. What can you say – if you didn't *know* it was improv, you'd swear they'd rehearsed it hundreds of times. And the really cool part was that none of it was too egotistical – like it wasn't a series of people grabbing extended solos and saying “how good am I!!”, it was just 4 extremely talented musicians playing together, listening to the direction each other was taking and complementing that to provide an exciting collage of sound.
Herbie may be an awesome musician, but he's a shite public speaker – at one point he stood up with a microphone, and then realised he was standing in front of a large crowd and holding a microphone, so he might as well address that crowd. He didn't say a hell of a lot, although it was pretty cool when he was listing the tunes they were most likely going to play and then added that what came out didn't always resemble those tunes. They had a series of “musical skeletons” to work from, and they'd piece together their music around that. At which point Wayne Shorter leant over and said “It's like Forensic Music”. OK, I guess you had to be there. And then about 2 minutes later Herbie came up with the term “Musical Decompositions”, which sort of tied back in. Hmm. Look, it was just awesome, OK?
That night I ended up getting to bed at about 3am, because whilst sitting in the loungeroom, Ciaran and I could smell smoke. It turned out to be originating from the building over the road and a few doors down, which proved to be fairly seriously on fire. The 3 or 4 fire engines that rolled up ensured both that the fire was out, that the occupants of the building were safe, and that nobody in the street got any sleep.
What else is there to tell at this stage ? Umm… I caught a bus in to the city the other day, and as I bounded up the stairs and sat in the front window seat it occurred to me that though this seems to be the best seat in the bus, it probably isn't.
See, the thing about London Buses – and Tim will back me up on this – is that they're all driven by raving psychopaths. Sitting in the front of the upper deck means that you get a first hand view of all the things that the driver is swerving around, hooting at, shunting, and generally using to bolster their reputation as a blood-hungry road maniac. My main reason for wanting to be up the front is so I could get a better vantage point with which to figure out which bus stop I need to get out at, but it doesn't really help seeing as everything looks so much different from 10 feet in the air.
Incidentally, I'm WELL impressed with everyone's efforts for my photo caption contest ! They've all been solidly giggleworthy, although my personal favourite so far is Kev's effort – “So many windows, only one bare arse…”. Champagne Comedy ! Keep up the sterling work folks !