Yasmin Levy

at Union Chapel Islington, 18 Oct 2006

"I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do with your tickets", said the usher woman as she ripped my credit card receipt by mistake. One gets the feeling that the event organizers at Union Chapel aren't very organized, judging by the shambolic queues outside that left people waiting 40 minutes to collect pre-booked tickets. Having said that, it's a great venue for an intimate concert - an octagonal church with a high, vaulted, wood-panelled ceiling, with great natural acoustics. Although I don't know about people having kebabs and diet Coke in a church, and I'd suggest you bring yourself a cushion.

The supporting act was a half-hour set by Roxy Rawson, a singer-songwriter-violinist playing an interesting mix of folk-rock-blues. It's all a little hippie for my liking and, although she has a nice voice (I think we decided on a cross between Eva Cassidy, Alanis Morissette, Björk and someone else I can't remember), I couldn't understand a word she was saying and she looked kind of awkward on stage, more like a 12-year old at a school concert. But I'm being unkind - check out Roxy Rawson's MySpace page. Perhaps you can get it to stop playing Philanthropy.

Yasmin Levy is an Israeli Ladino singer, interpreter of Sephardi songs. Her father, Itzhak Levy, collected and transcribed thousands of songs from Sephardi families, passed down from 15th Century Jews expelled from the Iberian peninsula. The songs are mainly in Ladino, old Spanish subsequently mixed with Turkish and Hungarian. Befitting the mixed origins of the music, Levy's band comprises a Chilean cajón player, an Israeli guitar player and percussionist, an Egyptian violinist and an Armenian duduk player. The result is a unique blend of middle eastern and flamenco rhythms, and old and modern Sephardi and Spanish song, perhaps not so popular with the purists, but a totally absorbing experience. Levy not only has a great voice, but is also a charming story-teller, taking you back to her childhood learning songs from her mother drumming rhythms on a cooking pot (which she re-enacted with a traditional prayer on stage), describing the Ladino lyrics or re-telling experiences that inspired her own songwriting. The Sephardi songs in particular are tinged with dark irony, with harshly vicious lyrics often sung over beautiful melodies - Mi suegra la negra (my mother-in-law the wench) and Adio Kerida
("Goodbye, goodbye, my darling, I don't want this life, you've made it miserable for me") are great examples. Levy also has more mainstream, light flamenco crowd-pleasers, such her cover of Mayte Martin's Inténtalo encontrar and the gypsy Nací en Alamo. Her surprise of the evening was a duet with Navroz, a Kurdish singer who can do amazing things with his voice. But the evening ended with Ora y media al balkon, a roaring, riotous song that takes you on a trip to medieval Turkey, drunken old men with cigars drumming on table tops and glasses and singing of duelling over their bewitching beloved up on the balcony, watched over by her snake of a sister.

Check out Yasmin Levy's website.

See also:

• Music
• Yasmin
• Levy

Random acts of ranting

This is a set of random act about random things.

First of all, how hard is it to get a decent cappuccino in this city? Do we get up at 6am, leave the house caffeine-free, rush to Waterloo station to check in for a Eurostar train to Paris, only to get a 1.95GBP cup of water soaked in burnt beans? Do we rush out of the house to catch a late-running, over-crowded train, only to stop at the café on the way to the station and be made to wait 10 minutes for a nasty, frothed up cup of ashtray residue? Seriously, if you're gonna serve crap coffee, then don't serve it. It's so uncivilized. Stressed out commuters take the time out of their hectic journeys to patronize your establishment and they don't ask for much - the least you could do is give them a decent cappuccino. Really, it doesn't take much, and it certainly doesn't take 10 friggin' minutes. And wash out the spout between cups, or at least change the grounds so it doesn't taste like you've passed garden compost through your espresso machine.

Speaking of Waterloo station, there was a guy outside there the other day dressed as a gorilla, collecting funds for Childline. Now, I'm all for giving money for charity and all that, but what's with the gorilla suit? What is it that would make us give more money for a children's charity to a guy dressed as a gorilla than a guy, say, not dressed as a gorilla? Do we somehow think that a
man who decides to hide inside a gorilla suit is more trustworthy? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense... in fact, I think the whole sociology of donation would make an interesting thesis for some poor PhD student - see how much money you can wrangle out of people without dressing up as a mammal.

My last rant is about stupid people. I happened to be (yet again - there's a rant in there somewhere) queueing up to pay for a halogen bulb in the lighting department at John Lewis. My main objection to being made to queue is that you're invariably forced to hear the conversations of your fellow shoppers, some of whom simply shouldn't be allowed to consume our oxygen and pollute our atmosphere with the carbon by-products of their pointless respiration. For near the cashier was a stand with 'Blinky Lights'. Blinky Lights, it seems, are pointless, tacky, plastic, battery-operated cubes with flashing LEDs inside, which you can put inside a vase or some other container to impress your guests with your utter cheapness and complete disregard for the environment. It would take a person completely without taste to stop and admire Blinky Lights for more than two seconds. But would you believe it, there are such middle-aged women in the world, who would not only admire said tack, but would even contemplate buying them so she could serve them in a glass with a gin and tonic as a means of impressing some unfortunate acquaintance. Fortunately for her, there was another man in the queue with better temperament than myself, who politely pointed out that, actually, that might not be such a great idea, as gin and tonic probably doesn't go so well served with a Nickel Cadmium battery. "Oh yes, that's true!", she says, "I might give them lead poisoning!" (errm.... yes, if you served it with, say, filings from your Victorian water pipes!) "It takes a man to think of these things, doesn't it?" Well, no, actually, it takes a complete moron to have such a friggin' stupid idea in the first place.......

See also:

• London
• coffee
• queue
• charity

The Departed

Martin Scorsese, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg

It is rather apt that the title for Scorsese's latest movie also appears to be an anagram for The Predated and almost for The Repeated, for it is a competent remake of Lau Keung Wai's Hong Kong cop and gangster classic, Infernal Affairs. To his credit, Scorsese doesn't try to out-do Infernal Affairs; the plot never strays far from the original and the departed even depart in the same way. There are, in fact, rather a lot of departeds in this movie, but for all the body count, the film has neither the style nor the tension of the original. Scorsese is compelled to give away too much early on, spoonfeeding viewers information that they would have much more fun trying to figure out for themselves as the plot unravels. The result is a much slower and far less engaging movie than the original. The film gains little from being transplanted from the bright lights and triad turf of Hong Kong to the ganglands of the US, other than some dodgy Bostonian accents, some even more questionable hairdos (really, who's idea was it to give Mark Wahlberg THAT?!?), and a lot of cursing.

The performances are competent, although one gets tired of Matt Damon after about 10 minutes, with DiCaprio being by far the better of the two protagonists. It's always fun to watch Nicholson act like a complete whackjob, although some of it is unnecessarily indulgent. Mark Wahlberg's added character, however, seems completely pointless other than to add more deadweight (although he doesn't actually die...) and a few moments of humour. Being re-made for a Western audience, the ending invariably had to be changed, which is a huge disappointment. Although at least we can be certain that Scorsese won't attempt the next two installments in the Infernal Affairs trilogy.

My advice, go rent the original on DVD.

See also:

• Films

The Gotan Project Live at L'Olympia Hall, Paris

The Gotan Project is playing again at the Brixton Academy on November 3rd. Get tickets now. If there aren't any left, find someone with tickets and bribe, steal, blackmail. Whatever it takes.

Their gig at L'Olympia in Paris last Thursday was preceded by a set from Martinique singer-songwriter David Walters, an impressive one-man band fusing French song with Afro-Caribbean rhythms, using a mix of guitar, drums and synths. Walters was followed by a set of five jazzed up tangos on piano.

After a 20-minute set change, The Gotan Project came on, dressed all in white suits and red ties. The line-up included MCs Philippe Cohen Solal and Christoph H. Müller, bandoneón player Nini Flores, guitarist Eduardo Makaroff, pianist Gustavo Beytelmann, and vocalist Cristina Vilallonga, backed by a string quartet. The group's renowned visuals threatened to cause some embarrassment at the opening of Diferente; nobody wants to start a concert with a giant screen behind them saying "No signal"! But eventually the techie gods got it straight, and the projection for the Diferente video came on (it's cool, by the way, you can check it out on their website). The latest album, Lunático, is named after Carlos Gardel's racehorse, and the title track was appropriately accompanied by a black and white projection of a race track. The gig included tracks from their new album, with excellent smokey vocals from Vilallonga, and tracks from La Revancha del Tango. Particular highlights were a medley of El Capitalismo Foráneo and Vuelvo al Sur played over each other, and a cool extended version of Tríptico. Mí confesión was definitely the most original number, featuring Argentine rap artists Apolo Novax and Chili Parker projected onto see-through screens above the band.

All in all, an excellent evening. Can't wait for my copy of Lunático!

See also:

• Gotan
• Project
• Paris

Children of Men

Alfonso Cuarón, Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor

I'm now recommending that everyone go see Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón's (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Y Tu Mamá Tambien) adaptation of the novel by PD James. Set in 2027, the film portrays a future in which women are infertile and no child has been born for 18 years. The story is set against an Orwellian vision of London: the State, portraying the UK as the only world state not to have fallen apart, outlaws immigrants, rounding them up and placing them in prison camps, and reminding citizens that harbouring fugitives ("'fugees") is a crime. Theo Faron (Clive Owen), a former activist, but now indifferent journalist, becomes entangled in a plot that could determine the world's future when he is abducted by the Fishes, an underground insurgency headed by Julian Taylor (Julianne Moore). The Fishes are harbouring a pregnant refugee, and it becomes Theo's responsibility to get her safely to Tomorrow, a ship housing the Human Project, where research into humanity's infertility is being conducted.

Cuarón's film touches on many pertinent contemporary issues, including the ageing population, civil liberties, immigration concerns, policies on "soft" drugs, and opportunistic politicization by activist groups. These are highlighted with some nice audio-visual touches, including a shot of Picasso's Gernika at the culture archive of the future (The Ark of Art, actually Battersea power station), and a quick clip of the Allegro from Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony. While setting his film in the future, he is careful to retain a very contemporary feel; the buses are still red double deckers and, rather depressingly, the trains are still the same ones that have been running since the 1930s. Clive Owen's sporting of an aged "London 2012" sweater is another ironic touch.

The film's main message, however, revolves around the conflicts of the State's will for control to the sacrifice of freedom and the rebellion's will for freedom to the demise of reason, which culminate in the epic climax: a masterfully shot gun battle of insane proportions to rival that of any major war movie. Despite this, the message is finally one of optimism, of the unifying power of children, of humanity's responsibility to safeguard future generations, and of the hope that they bring for a better society. John Tavener's score adds poignancy to this statement, particularly in Fragments of a Prayer, which accompanies the film's most indulgent but effective scene.

See also:

• Films