nekomatic

On Saturday night Stockport Symphony Orchestra (in which mrs nekomatic plays violin) are doing Tchaikovsky’s 4th symphony and the Brahms piano concerto… with Joanna MacGregor as soloist, quite a coup for them as she’s a big name and mrs nekomatic has just come back from the rehearsal with her and reports she is amazing. It’s in the Town Hall, if you’re in the area do come down.

Marshall MB15s show up secondhand fairly often, and sound good.

Honeyfeet at Band on the Wall on Friday night, who were every bit as good as expected.

Nope, playing and drinking don't mix for me - you'd have to ask the audience whether my playing suffers but I really notice the loss of focus and it's no fun. Which is a shame because otherwise I'd quite enjoy a beer or two (not much more, I'm cheap to run) in the atmosphere of a gig or jam session. Maybe I just need to practice more, or practice drinking more, or practice more, drinking. It has to be said that there are alcohol-free or very low alcohol beers now that are actually not bad, which is a revolution compared to a few years back.

That’s what’s on our floorboards!

One set of strings posted promptly and received just as described, thank you very much!

Hello, my name is nekomatic and I also have a collection of microcontroller boards that I bought because they sounded cool but have never done anything with 😄 Fortunately I don’t have anything MIDI controllable so this thread hasn’t had me ordering any new ones - yet. Nice project tho!

Yeah but… as noted upthread, the amp probably can’t drive another cab in parallel and it probably won’t work well to connect two different cabs in series.

That’s a signature model I wasn’t previously aware of…

Jacob Collier on Thursday - feels like a year ago that we booked it, just realised it's this week!

Don't let me stop you trying out the fabric options if you're brave enough (I would be terrified of messing it up), but I used Tuff Cab on my recent cabinet refurb project and was very happy with the results. I used the Black Brown colour rather than plain black and although it's a very dark brown, I really think it helps the cab look a bit less like a big ugly black box in the house. Blue Aran will send you small samples of Tuff Cab painted board for a nominal price, although if you're outside the UK then the postage might knock the price up a bit. If you do go with Tuff Cab then do read the Blue Aran blog post and the advice from various people on my cab thread, as both were helpful to me.

Having listened to a bit of that, it is my opinion that Youth should never have wasted his time being in Killing Joke, and should have just got on with producing.

That sounds like a brilliant line-up. If I walked into a venue and saw that lot set up on stage I would be like WHOAH, this is going to be AWESOME. So lucky they managed to reanimate one of the chaste young women to play the theme from Get Carter. So weird that she came back looking like Roy Budd.

I feel I ought to do a round-up of the Manchester Jazz Festival, as we did quite a lot of it this year. (If you feel otherwise, please skip to the next post.) Daniel Casimir was great, I hadn't heard him live before and I'd seek him out in future. Jasmine Myra, The Deportees and Emma Johnson's Gravy Boat all played fine lyrical contemporary jazz and Secret Night Gang decent jazz-funk or neo-soul or something. Kara stood out, three singers (plus band) singing quirky soul type stuff in close harmony (apparently there's also a K-pop band by this name… it wasn't them). Nguvu didn't quite live up to their billing for me, basically a competent funk covers band with a couple of good originals. Laetitia Alexandratos deserves mention for tearing it up on six-string bass though, especially as she was just depping and is usually their sax player 😮 The Intergalactic Brasstronauts played ska and reggae with a brass-heavy line-up including sousaphone and contrabass clarinet covering bass duties. Good party band but not mrs nekomatic's cup of tea. Ruth Goller's SKYLLA was an absolute highlight for me - the sort of thing that you will either love, hate or ridicule, the latter not discouraged by the fact that the three of them perform in paper headdresses like goat or dog skulls, but I thought it was incredible. Goller creates sound textures on the bass, using a lot of harmonics and unpitched notes, and she and the two singers add vocals I assume are mostly improvised and for which my nearest reference point was Maggie Nichols, but to my ears often sounding a bit Lappish or otherwise Nordic. It was in the perfect setting of St. Ann's Church on a Wednesday lunchtime and I dragged a friend along who was generous enough to say he quite liked some of it. If that description makes you want to run a mile then fair enough, but you won't hear anyone creating a more individual sound with a bass guitar any time soon. Zoë Rahman played a solo piano gig also in St. Ann's and was brilliant. Gary Crosby brought a sextet to do a show dedicated to Mingus and obviously this was a fine band and should have been bass heaven, but I couldn't shake off the feeling that it was all a bit polite compared to what Mingus must have been like live. I also can't quite shake off the feeling that I've never really got Mingus though, so maybe it's just me. Ayanna Witter-Johnson was another great discovery - she sings (and would be talented enough if she just did that) while simultaneously funking out on cello, and is well worth checking out if you get the chance. And last of all Tim Garland and his group themed around Chick Corea, who you would expect to be superb and yes, they were. I hadn't heard Conor Chaplin on bass before, and also Ant Law on guitar who was ace.

Do you know about hive.co.uk for CDs? They aren’t always as cheap as Amazon but give a percentage to a local shop of your choice.

Delighted to see the Derek Bailey and Stockhausen fans representing. You should check out Ruth Goller’s SKYLLA who I may get round to writing up in the gig review thread.

I’m no PA guru but I find it hard to imagine the use case where you need to put 1200 W into a single load but couldn’t split the load across two channels instead.

It turned out I lied about Nubya Garcia (as did the programme, but they’ve edited it now). Sorry. Daniel Casimir was great though, as were Emma Johnson’s Gravy Boat who we caught earlier today. Terrible name, great band!

I knew I had an unpopular opinion on something, thanks for reminding me what it is! Trouble is, you won’t get far criticising them in this country, as their position is deeply entrenched by long-standing constitutional convention. Well now that I’m here: Tina Turner should have been a jazz singer. I know Christian McBride and Esperanza Spalding are both prodigiously talented and highly acclaimed, but I’ve always struggled to really like their music. Accordions are brilliant. I’ll stop now.

I imagine the planning process for mounting such a gargantuan event starts pretty much the second the winner’s name leaves the presenters’ lips, so I imagine there are a lot of people at the EBU having absolute kittens right now. After all, they can’t possibly show a lack of faith in Ukraine by entertaining the possibility of an alternative host being necessary…

The Eurovision result clearly demonstrated the sympathy that many Europeans feel for a fellow nation oppressed by a malicious, dictatorial regime. Ukraine also benefited from the same phenomenon.

And now I've also lined up Honeyfeet at Band on the Wall on 17th June. The awesome Rioghnach Connolly's blues project on home turf - should be raucous!

Booked tix for a rake of gigs in the Manchester Jazz Festival: Daniel Casimir, Mamilah, Kara, Nguvu, Intergalactic Brasstronauts, The Deportees, Secret Night Gang, Zoë Rahman, Gary Crosby, Ayanna Witter-Johnson, Tim Garland. Very much looking forward to all of them but most especially Casimir, Rahman, Crosby and Garland. Top tip for fans of the sax player Nubya Garcia (and you should be): her own gig in the festival is twenty five quid a pop, but she's also in the line-up for Daniel Casimir's band which is a princely one pound booking fee only. Albeit it's in the less than perfect setting of Escape To Freight Island rather than the unimpeachable Band on the Wall.

Only one bass here. I can see the attraction of having more, but I’d have to be playing a lot more to justify it… either to myself or to the rest of the household