Spassiva!

Este debe ser de 2008

My daughter is having ballet lessons since she is four years old. She is now eight.

Two weeks ago I picked her up at the ballet school after her Friday lesson, when the ballet teacher –a Romanian who has been living here for years, named Gelu Barbu- told me: “Look, the Russia Imperial Ballet is coming to town and they’ve asked me if some of my pupils would like to have a role in the play, as several kids are involved in it, you know, -he went on- it would be great for your daughter, it would be a superb experience for her and bla, bla, bla.”

At first, I got impressed by the name of the ballet company: folks, the Russia Imperial Ballet! But also by the fact that my daughter could have a role –even when it was a tiny one- in a play with such an important company. Suddenly, the teacher gave me the rehearsal schedule and the dates of the shows, and folks, for sure it was not so great, nor superb.

Rehearsals expected to take place on the 28^th 29^th 30^th 31^st of December and 2^nd of January. Each rehearsal lasted four hours.

The shows were going to take place at 20.30 on the 3^rd, at 12.00 and at 20.30 on the 4^th, at 12.00 on the 5^th and at 19.30 on the 6^th of January. Kids at the theater, two hours before the show starts off.

So soon I realized that all this dancing stuff was really a very tough and sacrificed task. She would have to spend most of her holiday time at the rehearsals and at the theater. I began to consider that, probably, it would be better to forget everything about dancing and have proper “kids” holidays instead.

Kids in Spain are on Xmas holidays from the 21^st of December ‘till the 8^th of January and there are two big “dates” for them: the night of the 24^th of December, Santa and the night of the 5^th of January, the Three Kings of the Far East. My daughter and two of her cousins, more or less on her age, traditionally spent four o five days in Xmas staying at my parents’ as two of them do not live in Gran Canaria, so they two both come across every year because my mum always  insists: “I want to have my granddaughters together with me for a few days”, you know how grandmothers are, and also because there is a very good feeling among the three girls.

Even when I was trying to make her forget all about the ballet, she decided she wanted to take the chance and we supported her.

The first rehearsal came and went but after the second, the girl came back home really tired, showing not very good “vibrations” about all the dancing stuff and pointing out that, perhaps, she would have more fun, staying at her grandmum’s with her cousins. “It is too tough, dad, it is four hours, and when I’m back home I still have to do all the Xmas homework, the director of the company make us repeat and repeat and repeat”.

I was with her. I was confidence that it was too tough, that she was having ballet lessons as part of her education, there was not any other reason but her tuition and that if we had to choose between ballet and a nice holidays with family……………………………I was sure about my choice.

But wife was sure about hers too.

Wife insisted. A very important psychologist strategy was suddenly developed and carried out. The girl’s attitude towards the rehearsals and shows was turned upside down in less than half an hour. All my efforts to avoid the “feared” ballet stuff……….in the rubbish bin, folks.  

My wife told me: “let me try please, just one more rehearsal, if she still does not want to go after this one, I’ll be OK”

The next day, after the rehearsal, finally my daughter decided to take part in the show.

Thanks God she did! Everybody was right except me.

After the first show the girl was very excited, “I was nervous, I had a stomach ache when I saw how many people there was at the theater, dad, it was crowded, there was not a single empty seat”. I must admit that she will never forget this experience, you know, everything involving a theater play lived from the inside, sharing that time with a professional ballet company, ballerinas,  make up and hairdresser, being on the stage, behind of it, the lights, the discipline of the ballet itself.

We were not able to see her on stage more than once. As parents of the girl they gave us only two tickets for the first show. When we asked for more, we were told that all the shows were sold out and there was not a single ticket left.

We picked her up after the last show and she told me “dad, If I had my way I'd go touring with the ballet company from tomorrow”.

Last week at the ballet school, I saw the teacher giving the pupils a diploma, a 30/40 euros check to spend in leotards and things like that. I thought to myself that it would have been unforgivable to make my daughter not to enjoy this marvelous chance that the Russian Imperial ballet has given her, an experience that she will remember her entire life.

39 lashes in my back as punishment.

Faceboook se cargó los foros de internet

Este año de 2017 está siendo el menos productivo en el blog. Hasta anteayer no había más de 6 o 7 artículos y estamos en agosto.

Hace un par de días me encontré con artículos que había estado subiendo con el tiempo al foro guiri del que soy miembro desde hace no se ni cuánto.

Recuerdo que después de varios años de experiencia, terminé harto de los foros en español. Eran un pozo de malcriadez, de falta de respeto y de intolerancia sectaria alentada por el anonimato de la red, cuando no por los propios administradores de los mismos.

Total, que me dio por probar en foros de habla inglesa y llegué a Harmony Central allá por 2002. Cuando me registré me encontré dentro de un grupo formado por varios cientos de miles de miembros de todo el mundo unidos por una única cuestión: la música. 

En Harmony empezó mi "journey" por el mundo anglosajón de los foros y fue Harmony quien me descubrió que mi inglés estaba al borde de la extinción. 

Pasaron los años y mi dominio del  idioma se iba recuperando. Estaba solo dormido. Cada vez intervenía con más soltura, ya subía algunas de mis reseñas de conciertos a la sección del foro correspondiente.

Luego, no recuerdo cómo, me registré en "Political Forum.com" formado por unos 50 miembros. Más de la mitad eran del Reino Unido. El resto norteamericanos, y yo, la nota de color.

Ya mi inglés escrito estaba más que bien a estas alturas aunque mis intervenciones eran muchísimas menos que las de cualquiera de ellos, lógicamente. Leía la guerras entre los anglosajones y los insultos que se lanzaban entre ellos y eran muy parecidas a las nuestras aquí, pero allí, por lo menos, practicaba inglés. Subía ya no sólo las reseñas de los conciertos, sino las cosas que hacía los sábados en Valsequillo o lo que me ocurría en mi vida diaria

Pero aquello comenzó a degenerar y de pronto recibí un mensaje privado. "My name is Mr. Spock -era uno de los miembros- this board is dying. I consider you a quality poster and it will be a pleasure for me to have you in the new board I'm running". ("Mi nombre es señor Spock. Este foro se muere. Considero que tus intervenciones son de calidad y sería para mi un placer tenerte en el nuevo foro que he abierto".) Este mensaje privado del señor Spock fue muy gratificante para mi y me fui al recién inaugurado foro. Solo catorce miembros. Todos yanquis menos yo. Ha estado funcionando bien hasta 2012 en el que el auge de Facebook y otras redes sociales han acabado con los foros de internet. Sigo dejándome caer casi a diario. Sigo subiendo comentarios más o menos elaborados, pero soy el único miembro que queda. Todos se han largado. Y en una de esas visitas estaba cuando vi que había numerosos artículos en el foro pero no en el blog y me dije ¡pues vamos a aprovecharlos!

Son algo viejillos pero servirán para aumentar mi cuota anual de artículos.

Lady Dottie and The Diamonds

 

Weeks ago I had a look at the music program for November and December to find out that three shows were going to take place the same day and at the same time. This disgusting coincidence seemed strange to me because there are two things that are out of any question: first, it is not cheap to bring a band from abroad to performance in a small island and second, there are not enough people in this town to grant a minimum audience to attend each of any of those three shows. Jazz or blues music do not have many “supporters” over here, in fact, I always see the same faces and the same people in most of the shows I usually go to, so we were forced to choose between Polo Ortí Quintet, who was going to play along with vibraphonist Gary Burton, the MGT Guitarists Trio, (MGT stands for Wolfgang Muthspiel, Slava Grigoryan y Ralph Towner) and finally, Lady Dottie and The Diamonds, a Californian band from San Diego.

So after a while our decision was taken. Lady Dottie and The Diamonds got our curiosity, mainly because we wanted to check out how this combination between a 66 years old black woman and four long haired white guys (4 melenudos blancos) in their thirties would work. I guess we did the right election. There was not an empty seat in the hall.

As always, we had a couple of beers at the Hotel Madrid bar just before the show, you know, to warm up our muscles.

The show started off on time. At 20.30 hours Joey Guevara piano, harmonica and vocals, Stephen Rey on bass guitar, Nathan Beale on guitar, Richard Larson on drums stepped on to the stage and with the first chords, we had Lady Dottie in front of us.

Since the very first track they performed we saw ourselves in front of a powerful band that delivered a compact and superb sound. Quickly, the hall was loaded with a high explosion of non adulterer blues and rock and roll that went always in crescendo through out the whole show.

Fender musical instruments ruled the performance.

Guitarist Nathan Beale played a Telecaster, plugged into a Fender Twin Reverb that displayed the thin, flat, slender tone that that particular axe can deliver and even when I’m more on Gibson guitars tone, I swear that if I ever own a Fender guitar, it would be a Telecaster. 

Bassist Stephen Rey played a four strings Fender Jazz Bass plugged into a 4x10 Ampeg cabinet.

The whole band showed a superb playing technique and a very important mutual understanding.
 
Beale executed powerful solos filled up with intuition and accuracy, riffs and bendings that he melted down with a fresh guitar phrasing, that invited the audience to do everything but remained sat in their seats.
 
Lady Dottie and The Diamonds pushed us to stand up and……..dance! I swear I found very few people that were not dancing/moving in their seats

I also found out that Beale only used two or three fx’s pedals, distortion and delay among them, transmitting the feeling of the early rock and roll from the Fifties.

IMO the best of his solos were those he performed using saturated tones played through a fast, instinctive and straight powerful fretwork.
 
Joey Guevara seemed to me a superb player, not only on keyboards but on harmonica too. Quiet and intense, he showed a sweet phrasing, attacking with sensibility the different tracks they performed. He also did the chorus, which wasn’t an easy task due to the very powerful Lady Dottie’s bass tone voice he had to cover.

The rhythmic section, perfectly disciplined, showed an accurate performance too.

Stephen Rey on bass –who stepped on the stage wearing sun glasses- did a good job. But anyway, both, bassist and drummer, did a correct job altough they didn’t have the chance for soloing as Beale and Guevara did.

The concert was well planned. IMHO one hour and a half of non stop blues or non stop rockabilly music might bore the audience, so the musicians do have to be very careful regarding the way they plan the concert and Lady Dottie and 
The Diamonds were aware of this fact: they first played a blues song, followed by a rock and roll tune, a blues track and then a rock and roll one, so they kept the audience’s attention for the whole show.

And finally Lady Dottie. IMO she was the best.

Born Dorothy Mae Whitsett, in Alabama, a woman whose father worked three jobs and carried his kids to the picking fields in the family’s only source of transportation—a mule and buggy. A woman who quit school after the eighth grade to raise her 12 brothers and sisters and then, at 16, was carried off to the chicken factory by her mother.

Lady Dottie owns a superb curriculum vitae: she has collaborated with The Rolling Stones, Ike and Tina, Kool and The Gang, Muddy Waters, Budy Holly, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Ottis Redding, Little Richard and folks, after the show I understood why these amazing bunch of artists wanted her to work with them.

She stepped on the stage as a hurricane, only armed with her amazing and powerful voice. Just one tonal range with no significant vocal modulations but folks, what an spectacular tone voice. Sometimes she reminded me James Brown’s voice, sometimes I felt I was listening to Tina Turner.

Lady Dottie is a true blueswoman deeply rooted in Gospel music that performed warm, hearty blues and soul tracks melted with rock and roll songs perfectly executed, thanks to her solid and strong voice.

The show went on with one track after another 'till we reached the end of it, after more than two hours of a non stop blues and rock and roll session.

I gotta admit I had a good time with this Californian band. I had the chance to enjoy a very nice show where musicians did a great job and the only mistake I found was that volume was a bit loud; there was a hiss in my ears when we left the hall.

Richard Bona in concert

Since 2007, I ussually spend my Saturdays at my parents tiny cottage, as my father is too old to carry out agricultural tasks. For me it is some sort of a “non stop farmer journey” from 8:00 that we arrive there to 15:00 I am back at home. When I get home, I’m often quite tired, so the idea of a concert, on Saturday at 20:30 is not always desirable.
The " Autumn Jazz 2015" festival taking place in my town ‘till netx December, 3, features a set of five concerts. I had agreed with my cousin to attend some of them.
The first chosen one was “Richard Bona Group”. Saturday, November 7 at the Cuyás Theatre. 20:30

We had already had the chance to see this Cameroonian bassist live last time he visited our island back in 2006 and I had fond memories of that performance.

Our seats were in the second amphitheater and mine in particular in the second row. My mates were in the first row. I was the last one to buy the tickets and I found no seats avalaible netx to them.

With ten minutes delay, Richard Bonna stepped on the stage. He introduced the band members. The Italian Cirrus Manna on guitar, the Cuban Ludwig Afonso on drums and the North Americans, Isamu McGregor and Tatum Greenblat on keyboards and trumpet respectively.

Richard Bona is an exceptional bassist that offers a superb and highly recommended live show. With his phrasing, exquisite and delicate on some ocassions, powerful and vigorous on others, he chained track after track in front of an audience, surrended almost from the beggining of the concert.

The Cameroonian on the other hand, is such a friendly guy that he just needed five minutes to have the audience eating on the palm of his hand. He made the public sing letting them interact with him quite often. He said he had bet $ 500 to someone on the team to sing a song in Spanish and he did it. When nobody expected, no drums, no keyboard, no trumpet…….just him and his bass guitar…….. and he began to play “Quizas, quizas, quizas” asking the audience for collaboration –Bona didn’t know the lyrics- but the most of the audience did know the lyrics for sure. Nat King Cole used to be very popular in España by the end of the Fifties. It was a very cool performance.

The rest of the band did a superb job too. They sounded perfectly assembled.

Perhaps, Tatum Greenblat –apart from Bona- was the one who got my attention the most. His trumpet sounded warm, enveloping, complete. He executed riffs that merged nicely with Bona’s bass guitar playing, filling up the venue with a deliciously rounded tone. When they both performed what the Cameroonian called a “ballad” , -it looked to me more a “bolero”-, they offered the most sublime moments of the concert, IMHO.

With the exception of this delicious, full of good taste ballad in which Bona with its measured silences, with a clean sound coming from a very slow phrasing, all wrapped with an accurate execution plus an astonished fretwork that made sound clear and diaphanous, almost tangible, every single note coming out from that bass guitar, one more track I can’t recall its name and one more from Jaco Pastorius that I loved, the rest of the repertoire was loaded with a deep and elegantly arranged ethnic flavour, due, IMHO, to Bona’s peculiar voice timbre when he sings in his mother tongue, a timbre however, that sounded completely different when he was singing in English, a radical shift in his vocal register my ear was able to distinguish with clarity. His vocal versatility is outstanding, but I gotta admit that I rather prefer him when he sings in English.

The Cameroonian made a superb demonstration of technique throughout the entire show, but he performed a duo with drummer Ludwig Afonso that removed me on the seat. Quite impressive!

More than half of the concert had gone when I noticed that part of the audience showed an inordinate desire to express Bona and his band mates, some sort of “unconditional devotion”. The irruption of gratuitous applauses in the middle of the songs or before the ending of the track, went in crescendo. One of these particular interruptions was…….disgusting! The tension-release thing of this track was about to be resolved, the band executes a silence that anticipate that last chord, the one that finally release that accumulated tension, and that silence is covered by unacceptables applauses that ruined the whole track. I swear I still don’t know how, but at that moment there was a gun in my hand, Your Honor!

From my seat the stage was reasonably well at sight despite the distance, but in the first row, just in front of me, -I remember this episode with renovated affection- two girls, not in their twenties, spent part of the show joining their heads to whisper, inviting me soon to turn my portable heart pacemaker on and forcing me to resort, as Dr. Sheldon Cooper often does, to "Kolinaar " –a Vulcan ritual by which emotions are removed-, to prevent myself from a heart attack, so when the band was performed the last track ......... ..the people was already up from their seats ... .. ... ..the two girls in front of me……….too...............I suddenly saw myself sourrounded but people that were not sat……..........folks, I swear that with the agricultural morning and the irrepressible public frenzy, I had had enough, I got up and left the venue without waiting for the encore.

By the way, as he did back in 2006, Bona went alone on stage just to build up a song using multitrack looping recorder. I remember Bona then, kindly asking the audience for silence while he was constructing the track…….the public started clapping every time a new loop was added to the song ............ .

One more Sunday excursion

I went out last Sunday morning with the bike. I spent the most of the time within the city borders even when I finally drove, once again, to the Southeast of the island. It was 8:30 when I left home.

I usually drop by Las Palmas Marina first to spot the harbour in order to evaluate if a visit is or is not worth. Only platforms. Not really interested

As soon as I left the Marina, I noticed that there were several churches in town missed in my photographic-bike-excursions album, so that is what I did.

I shot nearly 100 pictures. Here you've got some of them

Nuestra Señora de los Dolores Church. Building not in good shape. Founded in 1959.

San Francisco de Asís Church in the old part of town. Not able to shot pictures in the inside of the building because there was a service on. Founded in 1840.
 

San Sebastián Church. Southeast of the island. Founded in 1540.

Some more pictures of the inside

Indoor pictures were shot with my kick ass LG4 cellphone. Outdoor pictures were shot with my Nikon D-200

I got back home right around 12:30/12:45

The awning

We have decided to replace the awning because after ten years it was almost "dead". It hardly protected from sun or rain but it's done it's job at full satisfaction.

We've though about crossing 9 wooden sticks from left to right as a structure to support the 5 meters long new awning.

The 4 meters long sticks painting job took me 7 hours. 

 

OK. Here's the plan
We're gonna hammer nails to stick those rectangular pieces to those 4 meters long sticks 

But first we got to set the sticks on their spot. Up here.

Thing is that,.... I can't count with my 82 y/o father so I have to carry out "the job" by myself. I gotta admit that I've been coming back home on Saturday, way more tired than what is usual.

 
I've finally set the 4 meters long sticks at their spot. 

Next Saturday we started off with the planks we want to set between the 9 sticks. 

 

 

It is finally over folks. Two of my brothers and my brother in law came up last Saturday and they completed the job. 

Here you have some more pictures

 

 

 

 It took us nearly 12 Saturdays

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Venezuela

Muy mal está la cosa en Venezuela. Estos dos vídeos me los enviaron ayer y todavía estoy alucinado. ¿Cómo puede haber alguien que defienda a semejantes facinerosos?