Howard Who?

In Paris, there is live music everywhere you go. You have a copious amount of street musicians, some who have no qualms about jumping on the metro with you and playing to the captive audience. Other times you have semi-professional people who play with a very polished sound, but more intriguingly you have a variety of non-western instrumentalists who play something other than pop. Take a listen:

Sounds of Parisian street musicians - recordings by Howard Ho

I’m often at a loss of words to describe my experience abroad, but perhaps it is possible to describe Paris by numbers. For my 20 days there, I lived in seven places, representing six arrondissements. The breakdown is two hotels, two apartments, and three hostels in the 10th, 11th, 13th, 16th, and 18th arrondissements. I went to French school for eight days and Barcelona for one. I attended two concerts, danced in one club, and watched one French movie. I would buy time in the Paris internet café called Milk by three-hour or five-hour chunks. I took 294 photos, made seven videos, and recorded six audio tracks of street performers. I had escargots once.

But numbers feel inadequate even though they are very accurate. For example, the two concerts I went to couldn’t have been more different in every way.

One took place at an established classical venue called Salle Pleyel. It was the place that Chopin would often perform, and when he did, he played on the Pleyel piano, a French brand. Attending the concert were mainly older natives with a smattering of younger Asian people, mostly Korean and Japanese. This made sense since two of the performers were Korean and one Japanese. To be exact, this was the Long-Thibaud International Piano Competition, and nation of origin commonly naturally comes out as a defining characteristic as it does at the Olympics.

Walking around there, I felt out of place, like this was an exclusive club of wealth and high culture. I felt this especially from the Korean and Japanese crowd who obviously were very protective of their cultural status in a foreign land. Of course, the irony was that being a classical music fan, composer and pianist, I nevertheless felt at home. Serendipity came in the form of a ticket holder who sold me hers located in the middle balcony. I sat there flanked by a French family on one side and an elder French lady on the other. The lady had no qualms speaking to me in French, and I was a bit flattered by it but responded with hesitant phrases. As I’ve come to realize, older French people love to assume you can understand and speak in French, a trait which the younger generation eschews, because their English is good enough that they can easily detect one of us and switch their tongue to the modern world’s lingua franca.

As a tangent, the older lady is a perfect example of something I like about Paris. I’m fond of saying that French culture is actually the way people act. And as the concert wore on, her cell phone kept beeping every few minutes. No one could figure out why but during a break, the battery was removed ending that debacle. In America, I’ve seen most noisy concertgoers try to downplay their role in creating the noise, avoiding eye contact and maintaining “what are you looking at?” innocence. Some violators even are proud and talk back to those who declare annoyance. This lady, however, took great pains to be contrite and show desperation in regard to her lack of cell phone savoir-faire. She begged me to help her turn it off. And then she took the further step of personally apologizing to those who sat around her. “Je m’excuse,” she repeated over and over to those in front, on the sides, and behind her. After such a display, it was hard to not forgive her.

The concert itself was extraordinary as well, because it featured one of the best piano concertos ever written and one of my personal favorites as well: Sergei Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto. Not only that, but the concert featured this nearly 40-minute work three times consecutively with three different pianists from three different countries with three vastly different interpretations. First up was a French pianist, Tristan Pfaff, batting for the home team. Unfortunately, Parisians couldn’t have been more ashamed than by this guy who was borderline incompetent, which is saying something since he is one of six finalists at a major international competition. He kept trying unsuccessfully to finagle Rachmaninoff into impressionist mist, which did two things. One, it kept him woefully behind the beat, even from the very beginning. Two, it was difficult to even hear him play because everything was done too delicately. The soft interpretation and technical discomfort were appalling, and deserved the last place standing he eventually received. Any listen to Russian pianists, Rachmaninoff included, would indicate they have no qualms about playing piano to the rafters.

Next was the Japanese Hibiki Tamura. Immediately, he was a great improvement on the French. His tempo matched the conductor’s, and he made the climaxes in that piece rather thrilling. It was possible to hear him play without losing any of the emotional depth or variations in phrasing. All this was done rather modestly without exaggerated displays of virtuosity and elegantly with subtle touches that demonstrated an understanding of the music. I would have paid to see that performance, and I was very glad that he ended up winning the competition. However, I wasn’t convinced that he would that night because of what followed.

The final Rachmaninoff performance was by Russian Sofya Gulyak. Like the image I have of the Russian school of pianists, she was forceful, virtuosic, and commanding. However, she would often speed up the tempo, as if needing to show off her excessive dexterity. Additionally, those emotional climaxes sounded rather bored with very little dramatic tension as she ripped through it like a piano warm-up exercise. It was certainly a let-down after the touching Japanese performance. But even more a let-down was the standing ovation she received for what I thought was a great show of force but not much more. I simply assumed that she must have really wowed these people in the preliminary stages of the competition. As I left the lobby, again I heard a Frenchman saying that the Russian had really gotten his goat. I didn’t get it, and now chalk it up to people favoring virtuosity over expressiveness, muscularity over gracefulness. She ended up third, which was fine by me.

This was a great concert experience in my book. Granted, I didn’t want to hear another Rachmaninoff concerto for a couple weeks after that. But it was a great musical case-study, something Leonard Bernstein used to do on national television with the New York Philharmonic as he explained how various chords, melodies, interpretations, structures worked by playing them incorrectly as a what-if scenario. Today, we have it on trust that Yo Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, and the rest are amazing musicians. It’s not to say that they aren’t, but without contrast, their achievements seem paler than they should. I walked away that day in Paris feeling quite elated by the whole laboratory experiment.

But that was a far away world from the other concert, an Animal Collective performance. This one took place across town at the northeast corner of Paris near the Cite des Sciences, a science museum that is surrounded by two canals and is encased in grand modern architecture. I arrived there with hardly any instructions to go on. Some people came up to me and asked me if I knew where their destination was. I responded by asking them if they knew where my destination was. At an impasse, we wished luck to each other and went on our merry ways. Next, a security officer gave me some solid footing. As I traveled around this elaborate complex, I was joined by other concert-goers, some of whom were English speakers and seemed like people I’d run into at a rock concert in L.A. I certainly felt at home here as well.

As we approached what seemed like a dead-end, we looked on a map and saw nothing to help us. Then we were over some bridges and soon arrived at the brink of the canal under moonlight. In the distance was a small, unassuming shack that said Caberet Sauvage. We had arrived.

The place was not big, although more spacious than places like the Troubadour in L.A. The décor was retro in the form of a turn-of-the-century circus big top. The main floor was round, and people could eat meals and see the show from the vantage point of seats near the walls. I entered the circle and did what any good Frenchman would have done; I started smoking. The opening act came on (their name escapes me but if you know, please tell me!), and generally speaking they were a quiet band specializing in very specific noise-making from a variety of hand-held instruments. Later on this duo’s set included traditional things like guitar and bass (but played by a fiddle sometimes) and finally a drum machine. While not exactly rocking, they were intriguing in the ways they were experimenting with sound creation. I’m pretty sure they’re from Iceland, which made sense given the sensibility of the bands I know from there and since Animal Collective has opened for Mum. I realized how interested in their sound I was when I aggressively told a guy standing next to me who was jabbering away to shut up.

After they ended, I had a couple beers and then returned to the inner circle for the main course. Animal Collective has been the rock band I’ve fallen in love with the most this year. It isn’t that I didn’t like their stuff before this year. But somehow their music on the latest album, Strawberry Jam, is for me just far and away the most rocking, fascinating, complex, and emotional experience. Their music sounds like it’s tapping directly into some primordial essence, like a nursery rhyme that triggers all the forgotten memories of childhood. Consequently, it’s the album that I’ve probably listened to the most this year.

To hear the music live however is to understand it more completely. The sound system brought in that thumping bass that is sometimes lost on an mp3 player. The fluidity of the songs, which sometimes took detours into other songs, created an air of unpredictability. And the length of the songs are admirably epic, extending into the ten minute range. However, despite the title of the latest album, I can’t exactly call what they’re doing jamming since it feels so precise, so controlled in tempo and dynamics, and so effective in generating transcendent euphoria. My favorite song, Fireworks, in particular was treated to what has become a staple extended medley on their tour. It was the perfect complement to my feelings of being in Paris.

In homage to my own musical geekiness, a minor epiphany occurred as I realized that the intro to the song, “#1,” was a perfectly executed Steve Reich phase pattern on an organ sound, similar to one Reich might have done in the late 60s and early 70s. I suppose I could come up with a top ten list of recent pop music that references musical minimalism. That such a blatant example of musical homage escaped my notice was perhaps my cynicism in doubting that a rock band would even attempt something like that other than to appropriate the sound and leave the process that generates the sound in the dust. That I experienced this in Paris was a blessing given how receptive and sophisticated (except for the excessive talker) the crowd was and how annoying the Animal Collective crowd in L.A. was according to a friend.

The encore featured a song so otherworldly, so transcendent, that the lighting design for it simply turned to white. During the chorus, which climaxes into a primitive sequence of syllabic yelling, the multi-color screens behind the trio go bright as if shining down revelation. It was in this state that Animal Collective ended their show, the perfect finale.

I was initially curious as to how this group makes their sound. Nothing on the album really prepares you for what happens on stage. I somehow thought that by “collective” the group must have been a lot of people. But, there were only three people, and Brian Weitz wasn’t even playing any organic instruments and the whole time fiddled with an array of electronic apparatuses while wearing a ridiculous headband flashlight. That leaves the two songwriters for the band, Noah and Avery, who generally sing while banging other instruments, playing guitar and keyboards, or also using electronics. They got a lot of mileage off a suspended cymbal that got banged around. But the real show came from their use of vocals. With very precise dynamics and pitch ranges, they remind me of Bobby McFerrin. They go comfortably from yelling to whispering, from high pitch falsetto to normal range, from slow to fast. What I thought was the work of samplers they can actually do live with exactness.

After these two concerts, I felt that I had done the gamut. Of course, there were many other things I didn’t get to do like the opera, the IRCAM experimental music facility, or the Shins, who were there on my last night in Paris. Yet I did have one more musical experience, which was attending what many regard as the finest techno club in Paris, Rex Club. The people I’ve said this to have a kind of aversion immediately to the word “techno,” but really that’s what it was, and it was good. And like my other experiences, it was delightfully Parisian, with cigarette smoke dangling in the lights, lovers kissing all too passionately, and many casually-dressed people looking for a good time and not trying too hard to impress others. What happened before I entered the club, however, was as American as apple pie. A Star Wars convention of sorts let out in the adjacent theatre just before I got into the club, and before me was a parade of imperial troops, jedi masters, and kids getting initiated by their parents.

The influence of American pop culture is slowly integrating into French pop culture. But the way I see it, French culture sans pop remains as solid as ever. Students still join protests. Older people converse with younger ones as plainly as if they came from the same generation. There is a sense of continuity that keeps the sensibility intact even if they use it to watch MTV. Fast food has made definite inroads, but there is not exactly a shortage of French food in Paris nor will there ever be. They are just more accepting of the place they occupy in the world, which is a kind of adopted land where people come from everywhere to begin a cultural journey. I can’t wait to return.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 10:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Classical Music, Pop Music, TV, Minimalism, Howard Who?, France. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.