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Street musicians…

One of my favorite things about travel is discovering street musicians…

My husband Bill and I just got home from Italy and Greece. We’ve been fortunate enough to have traveled quite extensively in Europe. I’ve probably seen more of Europe than I have of the United States. One thing I’ve noticed both in Europe and abroad is that there’s no shortage of talented street musicians to keep the masses entertained. I often enjoy listening to the folks who play music on the streets of whatever city I happen to be visiting. If they’re especially good, I might even whip out my iPhone or a digital camera and film them. If they’re selling a CD, I’m now more than ever inclined to purchase a copy. Bill and I once heard a hilarious band playing near the port in Barcelona and didn’t think to buy a CD. I’ve regretted that decision ever since.

Most recently, I made a great discovery in Florence, Italy. It was our second and last night in Florence and we’d spent the day walking around that fascinating city, looking at art, eating great food, and people watching. As we made our way to the taxi stand to get a cab back to our hotel, we ran across a man playing Latin guitar. He was playing so beautifully that it stopped me dead in my tracks. Within a couple of minutes, I had tears streaming down my cheeks. Bill bought both of the guitar player’s CDs and we learned that his name is Piotr Tomaszewski. He’s from Poland and, according to the bios I’ve found on him, is quite a decorated musician. More telling are the YouTube videos I’ve found posted by people who, like me, ran into him in Florence and were moved by his playing.

Piotr Tomaszewski is caught on video by a German speaking tourist…

I made videos of Florence and Venice set to music on Tomaszewski’s CDs

In Greece, we ran across a few more street musicians who were also quite skilled, though their music didn’t move me in quite the same way. Nevertheless, I took a couple of videos and made a short film to help preserve the memories of our trip.

Last year, we visited Salzburg, Austria, where there was a small group of Russian men standing around singing so beautifully that I started crying. Their music was classical and very skillfully performed. They had a CD, which we bought. I don’t listen to it often because I have to be in a certain mood to listen to classical choral music. I’m glad to have the disc, though, because running into members of the Don Kosaken Choir is now a precious memory.

It’s not just street musicians we like to support. We also like to buy stuff from street artists if they have a style that speaks to us. A few years ago, Bill and I were in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic. It was a bitterly cold February day and there was a man selling original paintings in the main square. I was struck by a painting he had done of dragons. It was a bit childlike, but very colorful and whimsical. We went over to talk to him and he said he was originally from Russia and was now living in Prague. He had spent a couple of years in Los Angeles, working for Virgin Records designing album covers. His name was Nikolaj Korelov. We bought one of his paintings; he had talked me out of buying the dragon one, because he said it was expensive. When we got back to our home, which was then in Germany, I decided I had to have it anyway. We wrote to him and he agreed to sell it to us. Click through his gallery and you’ll find it pictured on the last page.

I can honestly say that street musicians have also helped me make travel decisions. For instance, in June 2011, Bill and I were in Portland, Maine, celebrating my birthday. I had it in my mind that I wanted to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary in Scotland. Our tenth anniversary was in November 2012, so in June 2011, we still had plenty of time to plan and save. Bill was kind of on the fence about it. We went out to dinner in Portland and when we came out, a lone street musician was standing on a corner blowing bagpipes. He was playing “Highland Cathedral”, which was the piece I used to walk down the aisle on our wedding day. I turned to Bill and said, “I think that’s a sign.” He agreed and sure enough, we went to Scotland in November 2012 to celebrate our anniversary.

The one thing we’ve learned from all our travels is that it’s worth it to support street musicians. If you run into a street musician whose music you love and they offer a CD, buy it. You’re supporting the arts and may just end up coming home with a favorite souvenir. And, as I’ve found out by looking up Piotr Tomaszewski on Amazon.com, you will find that buying from the source can be a lot less expensive than trying to find a copy of the CD online.

We found a wonderful street musician in Florence, Italy.

May 28, 2013
The Piano Bar…

There was a lot of bonding going on at the piano bar last week…

My husband Bill and I have just come back from a two week vacation in Italy and Greece. We always have a great time when we take trips and this last one was no exception. We spent a night in Venice, two nights in Florence, two nights in Rome, a week cruising on SeaDream I, and three nights in Athens. Our trip was surprisingly musical, too. I discovered an amazingly talented guitar player in Florence and bought a couple of his CDs while he was playing in a piazza. I bought a couple of CDs in Greece, which I haven’t listened to yet. And I also spent quite a lot of time singing at the piano bar on SeaDream I.

Gather ’round the bar…

SeaDream I is one of two ships owned by SeaDream Yacht Club. It carries no more than 112 passengers and 95 staff members at a time. There were 99 people on our cruise and since there aren’t any shows or revues, after dinner, people have to make their own entertainment. Since I like to sing, I usually head to the piano bar, where George the Filipino pianist plays hits for the masses. He seems to specialize in music from the 70s and 80s, which is also the music I know best. He has several books with lyrics in them and there’s a microphone, which gets passed around to those who want to sing. I like to show up early, so I can sing Bill a song in relative privacy, before all the other guests come in and it turns into a rowdy party.

The first time we cruised on SeaDream, it was April 2010. I didn’t go to the piano bar once during that trip, but I did take part in a rather pathetic karaoke session led by the ship’s guitar player, who wasn’t at all interested in putting on a good show and didn’t have the best materials for doing karaoke, anyway. Ironically, I ended up meeting someone in the music business that night during the lame karaoke session, which was only attended by about half a dozen people. After a rousing rendition of Carole King’s “I Feel The Earth Move”, a slender woman approached me and asked if I was in the music business. I said I was a housewife. She introduced herself to me and said that she and her husband, Kenny, work with Joan Jett. Then she asked me if I knew who Joan Jett was. Of course, having grown up in the 1980s, I knew exactly who Joan Jett is.

I didn’t think much of the meeting at the time. Her husband had stopped my husband in the hall to thank him for serving in the US Army and he told him stories of working with the USO with Joan Jett. I figured maybe the man was in her band, since I later heard his wife making a comment about how he didn’t like it when she goaded him into playing piano. When we got home after that trip, I looked them up and discovered that Bill and I had just met Kenny and Meryl Laguna, Joan Jett’s managers. They had taken a chance on helping launch Jett’s career at a time when no one else wanted to work with her because of her edgy style. The move paid off handsomely. I became Facebook friends with Meryl, who is a very charming and friendly lady and as down to earth as a person can possibly be.

On our next cruise, in November 2011, we were celebrating our anniversary. Karaoke was not offered that week; but even if it had been, I was determined to try singing in the piano bar. So Bill and I went there at 9:30pm and I shyly asked George if he could play “Someone To Watch Over Me”, which was the song Bill and I danced to at our wedding reception. I sang along and about midway through my song, one of the passengers we had befriended on the first day came in. He was surprised to hear me singing and said to Bill, “Now I see why you love her…” Yes, he really did say that. But I give him a pass because he was cruising alone, having just lost his wife to breast cancer. I think it was a rough week for him.

On that cruise, Bill and I befriended a couple from England, with whom I still correspond, mainly to pass along cruise ship gossip. The husband is a pilot for EasyJet, and when we weren’t hanging around the piano bar singing hits from the 70s and 80s, we were sitting at a table near the pool bar, talking about his job while sinking cocktails. Later that week, while we were in the piano bar, a bunch of rowdy Norwegians came in and hijacked my camera. They took a bunch of pictures of me having fun at the piano bar. Personally, I think my photos are best when I’m not in them, but I can’t deny that they got a couple of shots that show me with a sunburn looking like I’m genuinely enjoying myself. That’s what vacations are all about, right?

Me and Bill at the piano bar…

So last week, we were on our third SeaDream cruise. George noticed me waving at him, though I don’t think he remembered me from that last cruise in 2011. I didn’t expect him to, since he sees thousands of people every year. He asked me why I was so friendly and I said it was because I’m a big fan of the piano bar. And sure enough, at 9:30pm, I was there ready to sing. The first night went very well, but then I caught a nasty cold, which forced me to take a couple of nights off. I like to take a couple of nights off anyway, just to give other people the chance to enjoy the piano bar without me there, bogarting the mic!

There weren’t a whole lot of other singers on last week’s cruise. However, there was one German guy who was a hell of a piano player. I never caught his name, though he did come over and sing with me a couple of times. And one night, he managed to get George to let him tickle the ivories. George was a very good sport, since the guy turned out to be very accomplished. After the guy played a few songs, he gave George his spotlight back.

Bill never sings because he can’t. The only songs he can do are ones that require speaking, like King Missile’s “Detachable Penis”; and that’s not the most appropriate song for a cruise ship lounge. But Bill does sit around and watch people, which can be fascinating. A lot of times, people come up to him and ask about me. He tells them about my musical family who never heard me sing until I was 18 years old. Last week, we met a lovely couple from Belfast, Northern Ireland who lit up when I sang “Danny Boy” for them. The husband ended up bonding with Bill over glasses of scotch.

George at the piano bar…

I know a lot of people like big cruise ships because there’s so much to do on those big vessels. For me, give me a small ship with a little piano bar and a pianist with game, where I can fulfill my fantasies of being a lounge singer for a few nights. I find the piano bar is a great place to meet people of all walks of life; bonding with people through music is a great way to break the ice. As one of our fellow passengers last week said, “Music is the universal language.” I was reminded last week of how very true that is.

May 24, 2013
#3 album of 2012 – Harakiri by Serj Tankian

Artist: Serj Tankian

Album: Harakiri

I’m not sure how famous Serj Tankian is on his own, but through 2006 he spent a decade as lead singer, rhythm guitarist, and occasional keyboardist for System of a Down, who scored the flat-out weirdest series of major hit songs (Chop Suey, Toxicity, B.Y.O.B.) of any band since the 1970s. I’d only recommend three of their five albums, but those include Toxicity (’01) and Mezmerize (’05), each a fair candidate for my favorite heavy-metal album — or do I mean favorite punk album? — of all time. Their songs were smart, well-constructed, and well-played, but their sound also fit well the pleasure center of my brain. Theatrical vocals that switched from soaring and melodic, to fierce, to raspy, to cartoonish? Loud, choppy riffs? Israeli folk-dance tunes and propulsion (actually Armenian, but I can’t tell the difference)? Righteous semi-coherent political fury? An attention span that was happy to develop an idea for four minutes, but only if you agreed to spend at least one of them madly dashing with them after something that suddenly caught their eye? I have no idea how this combination sold millions of copies, but it was perfect for me.

When System of a Down broke up, Serj Tankian had no trouble finding talented new band-mates. But the majority of his old band’s lightness and humor had come from co-writer / second vocalist Daron Malakian, so at first it wasn’t clear what Tankian had to offer besides slightly clumsy, earnest imitations of System of a Down. Although I put his solo debut Elect the Dead in my Top 10 of 2007, I then kind of ignored and dismissed it for years, especially when Imperfect Harmonies was his rather leaden follow-up. I was almost stunned to rediscover Elect the Dead last summer and fall hard for it again: why the heck *shouldn’t* I enjoy a slightly inferior sequel to maybe my favorite punk/metal albums ever, after all? But that discovery was made easier by his release of solo album #3, Harakiri, which for the first time provided answers to the question of “Where else can Serj go from here?”.

A few songs on Harakiri disproportionately shape my reaction. Two are unexpectedly beautiful. Deafening Silence opens with glittering note-by-note acoustic guitar, but that becomes a soft backdrop to gorgeous synth-pop, in which several different sound patches at a time each provide their wobbling melodies and rhythmic variations like quantized electric birds. Tankian croons most of the song in a heartfelt if not-completely-steady baritone, though he sings the bridge in a rap cadence. Forget Me Knot builds its verses — each with new arrangement touches — on rippling piano, aided by ticking drum machine, soft synth, and wordless female backing vox; it smoothly transitions into a chorus of soaring heavy rock and a bridge with female-sung operatics. The lyrics on both are evocative rather than clear, but seemingly the narrator of each is addressing a former close friend or lover who’s become a public figure. “You speak to millions, but talk to no one/ Home is the place you can’t walk away from/ You seek opinions, but listen to no one/ You throw up your hands and tell me it’s all done…/ I want you, I need you/ I pray that God absolves you/ Can’t live this life without you/ I’ve cleared this coffin for two…/ Sheath your swords, and take the eagle’s peace”.

Ching Chime is a different triumph. It has a great groove — over snake-charmer guitar, it builds layers of subtle synthesizer and drum machine, then loudens the guitar and kicks in the beats — and another soaring heavy rock chorus, a core strength of Tankian’s, after which he breaks out in Middle Eastern prayer-style ululations. But it’s also, on the verses, the silliest he’s been since his old band broke up, and silly in a way he never tried before: imagine Speedy Gonzalez and the Tasmanian Devil of the old Bugs Bunny cartoons as a melodic-rap duo making sure 25% of their syllables rhyme with “chime”, and you’re not far from his delivery. It is a new thing unto this world.

Cornucopia isn’t, but it’s a rock song that doesn’t sound like System of a Down: leaner, sleeker, more radio-catchy and very good at it. It’s at once a eco-political song, old territory for him, and a relationship song. He’s talking, this time, of the destruction of both Eden and early, easy romantic love when he sings — with his usual weakness for too-violent metaphor — “Sever the head of cornucopia/ We rape the earth and don’t know why it strikes/ Do you believe in stormy weather, stormy weather?/ Hurricanes play musical chairs with homes and chateau”. Yet he also means both when he sings “Don’t you think we’re extraordinary?/ Believing and seeing, realizing the imaginary”. I do, and we’d better be; the earth is much more interesting for having us modern humanfolk around, and we’ll need to invent extraordinary solutions to still happily be here in a few decades. I’m not used to Serj Tankian talking up our chances.

The rest of Harakiri sounds like System of a Down. But he’s proven he doesn’t *need* to, allowing me 100% guilt-free enjoyment thereof. Figure It Out is a particularly intriguing musical mix of the brutishly blunt, the rapid-fire, and the anthemic. Uneducated Democracy has the largest number of really catchy riffs. Reality TV stars several of Tankian’s most entertaining singing voices, and while I think it may be trying, in a bout of neo-Andy Rooney crankiness, to imply some criticism of body piercing, the relish with which he chants “Nipples! Tongues! Testicles! Cheeks!” makes it clear he’s far too much a naughty 10-year-old to ever carry it off. A smart, gifted, spazzy, naughty 10-year-old. Why wouldn’t I adore an album of that?

– Brian Block

To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2012 page!

May 21, 2013