A Tour Journal from Ken Thompson, bravely subbing for Evan Ziporyn with the Bang on a Can All-Stars, on the road in Italy (Naples and Monfalcone) and Portugal (Porto).
Wed AM 2/7
It is hard to say goodbye to Naples on a beautiful and surprisingly warm sunny day this morning coming out of the hotel. 2 cappuccinos already in me at 10am and things are good.
I've played Italy before, but yesterday seemed like a "genuine" Italian concert experience. After a visit to Northern Italy (near Bologna) with my group Gutbucket a couple weeks ago and being surprised at how on-time and organized everything seemed to be, Naples delivered a truly laid-back schedule and great food to linger over. The 5:00pm soundcheck started at 6:30 (due to traffic to the venue), the 9:00 concert at 9:30. Watching traffic from a moving car was an amazing experience in controlled chaos, and the tiny cobblestone streets were breathtakingly beautiful. We ate well – I shared a great pizza lunch with David Cossin when I arrived, then pasta with stunning seafood at night.
We were a little nervous about the reception, due to the concert being on the town's Mozart festival. Think Mozart, Bach, Brahms for 10 days, then a concert by Chistina Zavalloni's group (she is part of Milan's Sentieri Selvaggi collective), then Bang on a Can plays its rock-n-roll "The New Yorkers" program. Gordon, Lang and Wolfe, then Tan Dun, Don Byron and Thurston Moore. Turns out our fears were unfounded.
The concert was great, especially for my first gig playing their usual rep with the All-Stars. I had fun getting to really dig into the material beyond the rehearsal and personal practice. Also, an improvisation-heavy program plays well to my interests, and I had fun breaking out the alto saxophone on Thurston Moore's freakout "Stroking Piece #2." (I was still lugging the Alto around from the Gutbucket Europe tour that had just ended. It also came in handy on Julia Wolfe's "Lick" – which was originally written for soprano).
The 100+ audience responded strongly to the concert – done all at once with no intermission – and demanded an encore, for which we took Don Byron's "Eugene II" at about double-time. I wouldn't call it our best musical success, but it sounded completely different from when we played it the first time just a half hour before!
There's no doubt that this music was new to the audience. I got a lot of "not usually what I like, but this was cool" kind of reactions; and one of the crew members asked me if I had written all the music.
Now to fly north to Trieste for Monfalcone.
Fri 2/9/07
Repeat after me. Northern Italy is a different country. Northern Italy is a different country. The concert was in a town called Monfalcone, Italy, which is situated near to Trieste, and not much more than an hour from the borders of Austria and Slovenia. Everything was on time. Everything was efficient. The buildings were clearly organized; there was a large, very clear town square that we stayed on. The concert hall was new and modern. When the band members' coffee arrived just at the official concert start time, they were instructed to pound them so that the band could get on stage not a minute late. I missed Naples!
Nonetheless, we did find a very good restaurant that we ate at not 1, not 2, but 3 times… with an amazing collection of hanging meats and cheeses behind the counter when you walked in, as well as one person stationed there who seemed to be the designated cutter. Wonderful olive oil, fresh salads and great pasta – gnocchi is the regional specialty here.
We stayed in a wonderful hotel, though (in fact, it later paled to Porto's "Palace," but nice nonetheless), and I think the day off before the show was a good (and necessary) time to rest for all of us. Day of the show, I made sure to buy some olive oil for the road, and do some practicing before the gig started.
The show was received well – and this time, we had a proper encore ready in Don Byron's "Credits," which the band "opens up" on tour (meaning extending it), and I got a chance to have some fun improvising on bass clarinet over the groove. The audience was larger and more supportive than in Napoli, and clearly liked the uptempo stuff – so much so that one audience member yelled "Play something funky!" before we started the encore. I turned to him and yelled back, "OK we will!" – the perfect cue for the beginning backbeat of the tune. I would wager that this is one of the few times that an audience member has yelled this during a Bang on a Can concert… in fact I haven't heard that since my college band J. Again, a nice dinner after the show – Banglewood composer Peter Kus came across the border from Slovenia and shared the meal with us, along with David Cossin's wife Alessandra and baby Nina.
Sun 2/11/07
Bang on a Can's first visit to Portugal.
An exhausting yet successful time in Porto; upon arrival after an early start and two flights (via Lisbon), I got some last-minute practicing and tech work done with soundman Andy Cotton before the band went out. The plan was drinks, dinner, and more drinks, and we had a good time; we ate some very fresh fish in the town next to Porto, which was cooked outside on coals while we sat inside and ate wonderful shrimp appetizers. After grabbing the necessary glass of port wine, we headed to the old town in Porto to check out some of the bars and absorb some of the scene. The old town is near the river, and has some lovely narrow cobblestone streets.
After eventually waking up, we trekked over to the brand new concert hall – and though we were impressed just looking at this thing from the outside, the inside was spectacular. Designed by superstar architect Rem Koolhaas, we saw what was probably a very small portion of the total labyrinth layout – with many different kinds of glass walls, everywhere you looked, you would see a vista into a new room, a different concert hall, some musicians rehearsing….. The dressing rooms are viewable from the street, just one floor up, with gigantic diagonal glass jutting out over the sidewalk – which pianist Cristina Valdes pressed herself against as if having fallen from a great height – and more than once we exchanged waves with curious passers-by. The concert room itself was nothing exciting, and it seemed it probably wasn't designed for the kind of music we were doing – Andy worked wonders with an underpowered system.
Being the band's first time in Portugal, we weren't sure what to expect as far as audience, and were happy to see a completely full house for both concerts. The first, at 6:00, was similar to the New Yorkers program we'd been doing on the other two nights but with the addition of the complete Don Byron "Eugene" done live with a projection of the Ernie Kovacs TV Show episode. A new challenge for me on the tour, it usually fell in my place to cue the band and make sure that we were on with the movie. I'm pleased to say it went well, and my experience scoring films with Gutbucket really helped. We played the rest of the program as before, only with an intermission. Cellist Felix Fan stepped up to sub for Wendy Sutter for this final gig on the tour. He fit in perfectly, and you wouldn't have known that he'd never played Julia Wolfe's "Lick" before (In fact, this was the most requested "Where can I find this on CD?" item after the concert).
After a dinner break and a re-setup, it was time for the complete Music for Airports by Brian Eno, start time 11:00pm. After a long night the night before and a long day of soundchecking and rehearsing, this was a dizzying prospect – and some band members expressed concern about staying awake on stage! This was also my Bang on a Can keyboards debut, which was certainly fun, and made it really like a new show for me. The hour-long piece goes surprisingly quickly – you can't fall asleep because if you lose count, you're in big trouble – but it does give you kind of a meditative state, playing very slowly, sort of a tonic after a week of playing fast and often tricky music. The audience loved it and asked for an encore, which we gave them in the form of Evan Ziporyn's arrangement of Eno's "Everything Merges into Night." After the long Music for Airports performance, we ratcheted up the tempo a little, and I discovered that this is kind of a nice bluesy pop song if phrased the right way. It is a relief to play music that has some movement in it after an hour of concentrated stillness –the encore was almost more therapeutic for the band than the audience!
So, a successful debut in Portugal, three great gigs, and great times with the band!