New York Music

-
Brilliant flutist Itai Kriss (who happens to be a close relation) playing Latin music at the Fat Cat club with his excellent band Cachimba. See Itai's site.

Back on the Rooftop again after almost two weeks in New York. It was great fun (thanks to Itai & Adeola again) and provided plenty of food for thought and blogs but meanwhile here are a few more of the almost 400 photos (!) I took there, concentrating this time on music

Music is to be heard everywhere in New York and particularly in subway stations where musicians of every imaginable style play to a hostage audience of waiting passengers. My personal favourite was a drummer (unfortunately not pictured) who played brilliantly on a set of upturned plastic paint containers (with bits of dried paint still falling out of them). Apart from the subway and enjoying Itai and friends at various venues we went to hear two concerts by musicians we'd never heard of: the New Orleans based Subdudes at the B.B. King Club and Brazilian superstar Caetano Veloso at the Nokia Theatre - both excellent.

Here's a saw player who managed to draw the most convincing sounds out of her weird instrument.


This drummer schlepped an entire set into the depths of the subway. In some places there were groups of up to ten musicians.


Chinese music played on a banjo is not my personal bag but it too helped to while away the minutes before the arrival of the G or the L train.


An equally happy looking accordionist.

Brilliant pianist Jack Glottman, also with Cachimba.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Unfinished Apartheid Thriller

-
Image
                 An Israeli Prime Minister as imagined by the DALL-E AI programme     About six months ago, I was revisited by the writing bug and decided to try my hand at fiction  - a "diplomatic thriller" to be more specific. The choice of genre was not dictated by any literary preferences. I'm not a big fan of thrillers. But the idea was to use the thriller as the most suitable vehicle to write about what was really bugging me - Israel's inevitable slide into apartheid.      I also thought that my professional experience might come in handy. For more than two decades I worked as the press officer for the EU Delegation to Israel and followed the sometimes turbulent relations between Israel and the European Union from the vantage point of an Israeli working inside the EU, in other words as someone with a split identity. I believed that this familiarity with the mind-sets and decision making processes of both sides would somehow provide me with the tools to weave a b
Read more

Zoltan Kluger

-
Image
A Hagana despatcher in the 1948 War of Independence on what seems to be a stationary motorbike. I took the photos in this post at today's exhibition. Went to see an exhibition at the Eeretz Yisrael Museum. Zoltan Kluger, Chief Photographer 1933-1958." These are official Zionist propaganda photos, some of them staged, but many of them impressive nevertheless. He also photographed Palestinian refugees (although not for the Zionist institutions) and workers clearing the rubble from abandoned Palestinian villages after the War of Independence. Although a staunch Zionist, the Hungarian born Zoltan also had an uneasy relationship with the Zionist institutions that provided his livelihood and, like many Israeli artists even today, fretted about being unnoticed because he was working in a Levantine backwater. Well to do residents of British Mandated Palestine taking a flight from Haifa to Tel Aviv (1930s) "I'm suffocating," he was quoted as saying. "I'll die.
Read more