Dubber recommends...

Things I find interesting, funny, or worth a mention 
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July 10, 2009

The Writing Contest

My father is an author. That's him, top left, with his older brother, younger sister and mother. Before retirement, his job title was Typesetter, and he spent his whole adult life working with words. Other people's words - but words nonetheless. At the beginning of 2007, he started blogging. We already knew he was a good writer. We'd had a family update email group for some years, with aunts, uncles and cousins on it - and he was one of several family members whose messages were eagerly awaited because they were always such a good read - well told and with a light satirical humour. He started his blog by telling stories from his day to day life. Then he decided his day to day life wasn't providing the rich material he wanted for the blog, so he started to tell stories from his youth and his travels. And the writing got better and better. And then, one day, he decided to try his hand at fiction. A handful of short stories that he handed around to a few people for comment. They were superb. So he decided to do a writing course or two. And now, with one of his stories published in an anthology, he's no longer a retired typesetter, he's simply an author. And he's started submitting some of his works to writing competitions.

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July 9, 2009

Thursday afternoon in Copenhagen

I've had my first taste of the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, and so far, it's pretty overwhelming. I've already missed several of the bands I'd planned to see - and have been in to see a few more that caught my ear as I wandered around the city. I'm taking a bit of break back at the hotel to catch my breath - but I'm heading out to see more jazz tonight. But this is a short video of some of the music I caught in my first four or five hours of the festival. This has been going on since last Friday.

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July 9, 2009

Copenhagen Jazz: A good start

Just been through the jazz festival programme with Christian, one of the organisers of the Copenhagen Jazz Festival. Together, we've managed to whittle the baffling array of 900 bands across 100 venues down to just 40 concerts over the next few days. Some of them are happening simultaneously, so it remains to be seen exactly how many of them I'll get to - but from the encyclopedia-sized programme, everything I've circled looks amazing. A lot of big names I'm really impressed by - and a lot of names I've never encountered, but who come highly recommended. Quite excited to go and see Daedelus with Jon Hopkins and the Universal Quartet with Yusef Lateef. There's also a lot of contemporary avant-garde stuff, which I'm really pleased about. I was worried there'd be a predominance of traditional, Dixieland jazz about, but it turns out there's only one significant band doing trad - and they're young guys who also play a lot of avant-garde stuff, so that'll at least be interesting. On the agenda today, at different venues across the city: 1430: George Garzone / Rasmus Ehlers Quartet 1600: Kolkhöze Printanium 1600: Mikkel Ploug Group feat. Joachim Badenhorst 1630: Junglebreed 1800: Sinne Eeg Group 1830: Barefoot Records presents EstherOrkester 2000: Snekkestad, Kjaergaard, Strønen 2000: Thirsty Ear - Lotte Anker & Fred Frith 2030: Maria Laurette Friis 2100: Provis, Tranberg & Friis 2100: Tim Exile 2230: Delirium 2230: Emil de Waal & Spejderrobot 2300: Mark Solberg 4 feat. Herb Robertson ...and then the evening ends with all-night weirdness and drinking on a ferry that's been reconditioned and turned into some sort of floating speakeasy. Apparently. They've given me a pass which will theoretically get me in free to all of the jazz venues around town, sat me down in their VIP chillout space (sofas, coffee tables, guitars, wifi, stereo... festival organisers and jazz journalists from around the world), told me to help myself to the beer fridge (Tuborg is a sponsor - and they like their beer to have ice crystals on it here, which suits me) - and there's a free lunch shortly. So my question is this: Who do these people think I am - and what happens when they find out?

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July 3, 2009

Outside the Box panel at UnConvention in Manchester

Steve, Amran, Abi, Stef & Caro in a church hall in Salford
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This is the audio recording of the panel session I chaired at Un-Convention in Manchester last month. It was about music that falls outside the indie rock band tradition you'd normally expect represented at these sorts of events. I wanted to know if there were any lessons that could be drawn from outside the margins. Some really amazing and insightful stuff from Stef Lewandowski, Steve Lawson, Amran Ellahi, Abigail Seabrook, and Caroline Churchill. You can listen to all of the panel sessions at the Un-Convention Soundcloud page.

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July 2, 2009

Qualified to tell you to go and read books

I'm now officially allowed to be your PhD supervisor. I did a three-day training course run by the university on Friday last week, Tuesday and Wednesday this week - and having come out the other side of that, we're all systems go. What's your theoretical framework? My first two doctoral students turn up in September, and it looks like the vast majority of my teaching from here on out is going to be post-graduate stuff. After a decade of teaching mostly undergrads, this is going to be an interesting change - though, that said, I have taught Masters programmes in the past... and there are certain topics I will still inevitably be called upon to lecture in for the BA students.

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June 25, 2009

Advice for Young Mothers-to-be

The title of this post is borrowed from a song by The Veils and it's kind of in response to all of the people I know who are having children right now. It's pretty much an epidemic. Everyone seems either about to have a baby, to have recently had a baby, or just found out they're pregnant. Of course, we were into that particular fad before any of you guys - and now Jake, at 16, has finished his GCSEs. That's a picture of him, taken yesterday at his high school prom. And yes, he's the only person in this family who owns a suit. He's just been accepted into CTC Kingshurst Academy - a 6th form college, where he is going to start doing the International Baccalaureate - a relief, since Solihull 6th Form College decided to drop the programme after he'd been accepted there. He's spending his holidays so far doing a bit of graphic design, some (paid) sound engineering work, a spot of skateboarding, staying up and making up for lost time on all of those computer games he wasn't able to play in the lead-up to his exams, a spot of drum practice and some full-on chilling out with his girlfriend Hannah, and his best friend Ethan. So this is just to say - to members of my family and the many of my friends (including some yet to make their news public) - if you're going through the early stages, the doctor's appointments, the morning sickness, the colic, the lost sleep, the midnight feeds and the constant full-attention responsibility for something so fragile (and, of course, so cute), then enjoy it, remember that it doesn't last forever, and in the end - if you're lucky - they turn out like this. Jake's awesome - intelligent, interesting, creative and funny - and we're really proud of him.

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June 25, 2009

Back in Birmingham

Boat trip from Genoa to Camogli As expected, I had a great time in Italy. I was busy pretty much the whole time, but I did make sure that I got to see a bit of the city, hang out with some great people and do some interesting things. I was in Genoa with Stef working on the Aftershock Project - a collaboration between composer Nitin Sawhney and about a dozen musicians from across Europe who had never met. Over the course of the week, they wrote and rehearsed an hours worth of new music for a one-off performance in the little fishing village of Camogli. Stef's job was to build them a website, and he brought me in because I'm the 'online music' guy. Our idea was rather than simply build an online brochure, we would tell the story of the collaboration as it happened. Instead of making a website about Aftershock, we put Aftershock online.

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June 18, 2009

Aftershock Genoa

The Aftershock musicians on a lunchbreak I wish there'd been time to blog what I've been doing over the past few days, but I've been so busy doing it that the opportunity just never presented itself. My friend Stef and I are working on a project in Italy called Aftershock. It's a collaboration between musicians from across Europe, led by Nitin Sawhney and culminating in a major concert event on Friday night. The musicians meet (mostly for the first time ever), and then compose a whole set of new pieces over 5 days. There's a real mix - vocalists, a drummer & beatboxer, a harpist, a percussionist, guitarist & bass-player, trumpeter... and Nitin leading the group, conducting workshops and overseeing the whole project. People from the UK, Italy, France and elsewhere. It's quite an amazing and unique event. Stef and I are building the website. Which is to say - Stef's building the website. What I do is less concrete but seemingly no less intensive. But the reason we're actually in Genoa doing it is because it's not just a website about Aftershock, it's the Aftershock project itself put online. That may not sound like a major difference - but where most events would be likely to have a website that is effectively an electronic brochure focused on promoting the event, we are more concerned with the underlying story: the creative process that takes place in the lead-up to the event, the characters of the musicians themselves, and the progress from the blank page to a full concert worth of music. The people are amazing and very individual - there are some really strong characters, and lots of really amazing stuff going on. So what we've done is to give all 12 musicians a handheld video camera and told them to film whatever they thought was interesting. In a way, it's like a reality show where the contestants get the cameras. What's great and interesting about that is that it allows the public to see into the development of the works, get to know the people involved, care about the characters and want to know the 'end' of the story - which is to say, come to the concert. In other words, I'm approaching this as storytelling, rather than as marketing.

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June 12, 2009

If there's no adventure, it's not really a journey

This man and this woman are remarkably kind & generous human beings My flight back from Holland to Birmingham today left at 10.15am. I was not on it. I stayed the night at Lykle's place in Groningen last night, and we were up at 5am getting ready so I could make it to the 6am train in plenty of time. A 'direct to the airport' express - two and a half hours journey. Plenty of time to get there. There'd been some amazing storms overnight, but it was already promising to be a beautiful day. Lykle saw me onto the train, we said our goodbyes and he went back home to bed. At five past six, there was an announcement in Dutch. A woman in my carriage kindly translated for me. The train track had been hit by lightning overnight, and there was going to be a bit of a delay until they'd fixed the problem. So we waited...

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June 11, 2009

Gallery

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