Friday, January 22, 2010

Difficult decisions

I had been planning to head out to 2 Kolegas tomorrow to enjoy the storming line-up of Ziyo (I lurve you, Helen Feng!), Wu & The Side Effects, and The Amazing Insurance Salesman (haven't seen them before, but I hear pretty good things about them, and it is a pretty funky band name).


However, I learned last night that some of my musician buddies are putting on a special concert in my neighbourhood tomorrow (at Luce, an Italian restaurant that is little more than a stone's throw from my apartment) to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great Django Reinhardt. We are promised no fewer than 5 French gypsy-style guitarists (so, that'll be Nico, Dan, Mathieu... is Jean-Sebastian still around? And, er, who else?? Maybe Jean-Seb's Chinese protégé? Well, we shall see...), along with the lovely Zoe Wang on accordion, and one or two other musicians filling out the sound as well. Should be good.

Oh dear. Decisions, decisions.

1 comment:

Froog said...

Rather vexingly, Ziyo and Wu & The Side Effects both cancelled. Helen cried off with a sore throat, Wu's bass player Chico has apparently injured a thumb and will be sidelined for a while (get better soon, man).

However, The Amazing Insurance Salesmen were almost worth the price of admission on their own: they're a trio put together by French guitarist Jean-Seb (more usually to be found playing acoustic gypsy jazz), with Ziyo's great drummer Mao Mao and another foreigner on bass (don't know who he is, but he's brilliant) playing very bluesy, 60s-style rock'n'roll, reminiscent of Cream and The Who.

The sudden absence of the two headliners was filled by Brazilian-style mass drumming troupe Sambasia (although I gather the chap who started it is in fact a Fillipino, and the people I recognised in the group were Israeli or Korean). These guys are fun, but it does get a bit samey after a while..... and they played a 1hr 40min set!! It started to feel like they'd been playing the same song the whole time. I'm afraid that was probably at least 30 or 40 minutes too long.


Luckily, I managed to catch the tail-end of the Django jam at Luce at 2am.....