CHRISTMAS CRACKERS ON OFFER

CHRISTMAS CRACKERS ON OFFER

by Norman Warwick

We thank Rob Adams at Music That´s Going Places for his usual comprehensive preview of what´s happening on the jazz scene in various parts of the UK over the next month or so. We can do no better than re-publish hi9s easy-to-follow listings below.

Beneath that you will find an edited version of a press release containing 31features and 30 photographs of the live events scheduled on Lanzarote. Should any reader intending to visit the island over the next dew weeks they can find all details of dates, times, venues and ticket arrangements at www.culturalanzarote

There is surely something on the following pages though for everyone who follows the arts in any way and we hope we might bump into sidetracks & detours readers or those who follow our work at Miguel´s Lanzarote Information on-line

Hello, December is generally a quiet month for live jazz. There are gigs worth checking out though, so read on for those and have a great Christmas when it comes.

It’s a pleasure to welcome back Dutch trio under the Surface. Following enthusiastic responses to their appearances during the Going Dutch project in pre-pandemic times, the trio brings its spontaneous vocal, guitar and percussion magic to Nottingham on Saturday 11th, Newcastle (Sunday 12th), Bath (Monday 13th), Birmingham (Wednesday 15th) and Harwich (Thursday 16th). There’s a new album due in 2022 that’s quite a departure from the previous two – folkier, leaning more towards world music influences – but this tour will feature the group’s completely in-the-moment style that has charmed audiences internationally.      cover Playtime stages a special Cgristmas concert on Friday 17th in Pathhead Hall and online. Details have yet to be released but keep an eye on the Playtime website and if you want to be fearless and book in advance anyway, you can do that here.    Fresh from a triumphant tour with virtuosic vocal master Kurt Elling, the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra plays its final concert of the year, A Christmas Festival of Jazz at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh on Sunday 19th. Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite re-imagined by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn is included in a programme that’s suitable for all the family.    And just a reminder that the year’s final Bandcamp Friday, when the online music company waives its charges and gives all sales revenue to the musicians, falls on the Friday 3rd. It’s a good day to do your musical Christmas shopping and to support these musicians if you can: Leo Blanco & Alexis Cardenas, Matt Carmichael, Steve Hamilton, Lucien Johnson, Brian Kellock, Jasmine Lovell-Smith, Fergus McCreadie, Dave Milligan, Brian Molley, New Focus, Ola Onabule, Prime Trio, John Rae, Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, Tommy Smith, Tom Stephenson, Paul Towndrow, Ben Wilcock.

December Diary   Aberdeen Blue Lamp Thu 2: Tom Ollendorff Trio Sun 5: Aberdeen Jazz Orchestra (2pm) Thu 9: Odd Planet Thu 16: Aberdeen Jazz Orchestra Dundee The Caird Sun 5: The Sunnysiders (12:30pm) Sun 12: Bedford Falls (12:30pm) Edinburgh Jazz Bar Wed 1: Nayla Yenquis Group Thu 2: Tom Sochas Trio Fri 3: Mezcla Wed 8: Brian Molley Qrt Thu 9: Fine Men with Foul Tongues Fri 10: Act Shy Queen’s Hall Sun 19: Scottish National Jazz Orchestra Glasgow Blue Arrow Thu 2: Unoma Okudo Fri 3: Tom Ollendorff Trio Sun 5, 12, 19: West Coast Hot Club Fri 17: Stephen Henderson’s Modern Vikings London 606 Club Wed 1: Gareth Williams Trio Thu 2: Trish Clowes Wed 15: John Etheridge’s Blue Spirits  Ronnie Scott’s Fri 10, Sat 11: Dennis Rollins Mon 20 -Thu 23: Ray Gelato Sun 26, Mon 27: Liane Carroll      About Music That’s Going Places Since 2012 we have organised tours and festival and concert appearances by Leo Blanco, Tommy Smith & Brian Kellock, Arild Andersen Trio, New Focus, Christine Tobin, Ollie Howell, Tina May, Ola Onabule, Louis Durra, Nigel Clark, Guitar Journey, Jyotsna Srikanth, Don Paterson, Brian Molley, Alyn Cosker, Fergus McCreadie, Philip Clouts, Zoe Francis & Jim Mullen, Karen Marshalsay, Russian String Orchestra, Tim Garland, and Catriona McKay & Chris Stout. We’ve also helped Eyemouth Hippodrome, Craiglockhart Church, Jazz at St James in Leith and Red Door, Linlithgow with programming and given PR assistance to Playtime, The Jazz Bar, Bridge Music, Fat-Suit, and Paul Towndrow & Ryan Quigley’s ‘With Strings’ project. Clients also include Laura Macdonald & David Berkman, Spark Trio, Ron Davis, Going Dutch, Dave Milligan, SNJO, Thick Records (NZ), Matt Carmichael, Lucien Johnson, Prime Trio, STRATA, Jasmine Lovell-Smith, Ben Wilcock, and Tom Stephenson.

We have a variety of art performances in all formats throughout December here on Lanzarote too, with the visual arts scene having plenty to offer.

VISUAL ART

“Oscura” is an audio-visual project created by Iván Vilella and inspired by the exhibition “Sincretismo” by the artist Rigoberto Camacho that was exhibited in 2020 at the CIC El Almacén. It is an artistic proposal of symbiosis that moves between the sound installation and the subtle visual stimulus, to highlight and combine some of the scopes of anthropological syncretism: the cultural mixture and the native influence, as critical vectors of rupture with the current and paradigmatic homogeneous spaces of globalization. We are proposed to make an immersive experience through soundscapes that accentuate the value of absence, shadow, the recondite or impurity, where blackness and darkness are configured as a vindication of sublime beauty.

There is also an exhibition running at Cic El Almacen throughout the month of December and into January-

In 1998, Teresa Correa, carrying out a photographic documentation work with archaeological remains of the Canarian Museum, is in front of a skull of a woman of North African origin that has the same bone structure as hers. The skull 1383, baptized by the Gran Canarian artist as “Mother”, will be a fundamental turning point that will motivate a personal process of anthropological research and artistic reflection that will lead her not only to rethink the unique and hegemonic look that evaluates and excludes women from the cultural and social construct that surrounds them, but also to reformulate the concepts of identity,  time or memory, in the form of a dialogue that visually transits between visible (revealed) and invisible (undisclosed) reality.

Also running until 22^nd January 2022 at Cic El Almacen is Identity And Travellers by Guacimara Hernandez, taking as an inspiring reference the literary universe of the texts of the European travellers who visited the Canary Islands in the nineteenth century, such as the British writer Olivia Stone. The creator Guacimara Hernández offers us the possibility of immersing ourselves in an exercise of anthropological and cultural reflection through an artistic installation and several specific informative actions with the aim of activating and reformulating interpretative readings on the foreign gaze,  posing situations for interpretation and dialogue around concepts such as the island territory, the travel experience, otherness, identity or tourism. Afain, it would be well worth catching one of the walk and talk tours scheduled by Estefania Comejo.

Yet another visual arts exhibition project, curated by Adonay Bermúdez, is an artistic proposal that explores the machismo entrenched in society and, specifically, in sport, through plastic and visual works of public denunciation that seek and expose feminist formulas that show situations of inequality in different sports contexts. In this way, we stumble upon readings that dialogue about the lack of voice of women in football (Carmela García), hatred and violence towards women athletes in social networks (Acaymo S. Cuesta), the relationships between women, sport and motherhood (Noelia Villena), the links between women and football (Sara GDM) or the prevailing dominance of men in sport (Manuel Antonio Domínguez).

Within the context of the exhibition of the audiovisual work “Unpublished Materials” by Alby Alamo (Las Palmas, 1977), we are proposed not only a projection of the aforementioned piece of video art, but also a meeting between the aforementioned visual artist and the plastic artist Francisco Castro Ferrer (Francho) in order to get closer and know the ins and outs,  the problems, challenges and artistic processes faced by this creator from Gran Canaria, resident in Berlin, when executing this project that addresses aspects such as performance, sustainability and tourism in the space work of César Manrique and that was carried out during the confinement decreed in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic on the island. This work has the musical and sound collaboration of the artist Resonance (Javier Pérez Rodríguez).

CONFERENCE

“WOMAN, ARCHAEOLOGY AND ART IN THE CANARY ISLANDS” will include speakers like Verónica Alberto, Alejandra Calderón, Esther Chávez, Mª Cristo González, Teresa Delgado, Amelia Rodríguez and Javier Velasco

Based on the experience, publications and contributions of different professors and researchers around archaeological pieces of aboriginal women, this day seeks to articulate a process of reflection, debate and awareness of the need to seek and dynamize peripheral stories,  anthropological, archaeological and artistic from the gender perspective around themes such as the control of bodies, female cycles, care and maintenance tasks, women of clay and bone, violence, the transmission of lineage, maternal inheritance or the gaze of the other (the conqueror and the colonizer).  Recipients: Preferably, people linked to History, Archaeology, Anthropology, Art History, Humanities and Social Sciences or Plastic and Visual Arts.

Another mediated conference will take place to complement that exhibition “Identity and travelers” by Guacimara Hernández in El Almacén (see visual arts section)- This conference will be fuided by the professor of the University of La Laguna Teresa Gonzalez Pérez and that will deal with the traces of Canarian women in the travel literature of European writers who visited the Islands in the nineteenth century,  with special attention to the writer Olivia Stone and her look at the natural and human landscape of Lanzarote, as well as the women she met during her stay at Cabildo de Lanzarote.

PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION

Meanwhile, in The Cuba Room in the same venue Cic El Almacen, Karina Beltrán’s curious and intuitive gaze makes photography the ideal means of expression for her exhibition Los Ojos Adentro. She explores her nomadic existence, through a compulsive methodology based on the referential. The artist forms a cartography of interior fragments, objects, lights and atmospheres. Beltrán turns her visual work into a search for the eternal, into a form of melancholic and existential expression that gives body to a poetics of fragmentation. The final result is a great puzzle composed of metaphors of itself, a universe of the everyday and the small, of the ephemeral and the unforeseen, in which to find the only thing that can save us: beauty. Exhibitions at this venue often provide the added value of guided tours and artist and arts lover will deliver such a tour on three set dates, and we can recommend to you that Estefania´s walks and talks are well worth joining.

image TALK

Informative talks on the arts are very much a part of the cultural scene over here, an example of which is “Traces of Canarian women in the books of the European travellers of the XXI century”: by Teresa González Pérez, on Tuesday, December 14, at 7:30 p.m., in the Buñuel Cinema Room of the CIC El Almacén. 

CREATIVE WRITING

As a working poet and facilitator of creative writing groups I have always been pleased to see those two art forms on listings of forthcoming events. This month we stage an audience with Lanzarote writer Angel Guerra.

MUSIC

As regular readers of these pages will be aware of how wide  and eclectic is our coverage of the arts but will be well aware, too, that for us, music is where it all began, We are thereore always pleased to see how many live music gigs feature in our monthly diaries. Most of these are delivered in Spanish language and many of them are folk-lore, classical, or by timple-led instrumental ensembles. This month though we have the opportunioty to see a dinger guitaritst who is currently top of the pops and nymber one in the charts over here-

His last tour in 2019, of more than 40 dates throughout Spain, sold out most venues, including the Joy Eslava room in Madrid and Barts in Barcelona, both sold out. In 2020 he won the Revelation Artist award for Los40 Music Awards, an award that confirms the promising future of Nil Moliner (left) with upcoming musical developments. With his new zero tour he has already sold more than 15,000 tickets and travels through the main cities of Spain.

Twenty years after the premiere of Timples@2000 Benito Cabrera and Domingo Rodríguez ‘El Colorao’ share the stage again, this time with Germán López, Yone Rodríguez and Althay Páez. A commitment to bring up to date music and Popular Canarian culture. Tradition and contemporaneity go hand in hand again with the timple as a vehicle, a direct witness of the transit of our roots in these first years of the new millennium. The themes, meticulously chosen, have been arranged for the occasion by Manuel Bonino, Carlos Vega, Yul Ballesteros and José Brito.

YA NO TE QUIERO is a project led by Fernando Robayna that ventures into different genres and styles, with lyrics and sounds extracted from pop culture. Based in Lanzarote, on bass is Mame Hernández, José M. Pérez on drums and keyboards Javier Santiago. La casa del amor, Otra maldita canción or 10 min., are some of the songs that appear on his Spotify/Youtube channel

The journey of Los Sabandeños has been characterized by the rescue and rise, both of the music, culture and Canarian tradition, as well as of the countries and territories historically and socially related to our land. And Christmas is no less. On these special dates of the year we propose the combination of carols and pieces of the ancient tradition of the islands with the rhythms and melodies of Latin America, countries with which we identify and strengthen ties. In this way, we not only want to maintain the traditional carols but we want to bring Christmas closer from the different cultures and territories of Spanish speaking.

Therefore, our proposal for this magical and special time of the year is the combination between carols and ancestral pieces of the Islands and the traditional rhythms and melodies of countries with which we keep close union such as Latin Americans. With this, apart from preserving and publicizing carols not so heard currently in the Canary Islands, we intend to show the different ways of living Christmas in the different cultures and territories of Castilian speaking.

We are, nevertheless, already looking ahead to a couple of musical events in January 2022. The Romí International Flamenco Festival brings together, for the first time in Lanzarote, an authentic cast of legends in the show Ensamble Vientos Flamencos. A first-class show in which some of the most revolutionary figures in the history of flamenco participate.  Jorge Pardo (sax and flute), Carles Benavent (electric bass) and Tino di Giraldo on drums, who will show that flamenco jazz in which they were pioneers. There will be the guitars of Juan Carmona “El Camborio” and Josemi Carmona, key figures of the band “Ketama”. To the percussion, the master of the Bandolero drawer. Saray Muñoz, daughter of Tina (Las Grecas), currently the titular cantaora of the National Ballet of Spain, will show the enormous quality of her voice together with Montse Cortés, known as ‘La perla de La Mina’, the most requested voice for the dance and key piece.

On the 22nd January we will be at a concert The singer and composer Belén A. Doreste, as she gives shape to her new project, Lajalada, a more electronic adventure than the previous musical experience (Bel Bee Bee), with passages and songs written in English and Spanish.  After having stepped on different stages and devirgar, reinvent and rethink certain themes, in 2021 they present the first album: “DMÑNNS” (demañananosé), a creative work that without many resources tries to open 360º, take care of the sound plane, the aesthetic plane, and the visual journey that will accompany the presentation of each of the 10 tracks that make up the album.  For the live show, Belén is accompanied by Ner Suárez, Octavio Limiñana, Alberto Rodríguez and Francisco Navarro.

POETRY

To complement these music gigs we are also offered a poetry recital. “Saramago en compañía” is a poetic recital by José Luis Gómez, actor, stage director and member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Language, in honor and memory of the unforgettable José Saramago, Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, thus becoming the first Portuguese-language writer to win this award and who chose the island of Lanzarote as a place to live the last years of his existence.  On this occasion his poems will be accompanied by those of other Nobel laureates of the twentieth century, with whom he shared civic commitment, ability to give expression to the problems of his time, solidarity with the weak and pulse to capture the continuous heartbeat of life.  Cabildo Insular and Tías honor his memory.

COMEDY

Amidst top level musical performances and the gravitas of poetry and the visual arts we will also enjopy the light comedic relief of an effusive, different, direct, unique, new show by Kike Pérez. This will be a set in which he gives his most delirious version full of moments in the purest “Kike” style. At a time when we have reduced smiles to winks with our eyes; without glitter, without great artifice, we have Kike Pérez back on stage.

THEATRE

Yo, Mussolini is a provocative and fun play, conceived and performed by Leo Bassi, designed to generate optimism and give the audience that leaves the theater the desire to resist, or better: laugh! With intelligence to intolerance, mixing joke and provocation with a deep reflection on political manipulation, he proposes laughter and positive thinking as an antidote to fascism.

image SCULPTURE

Who or what is sculpture? The juggler or the artifact created? What is stability? What is the limit? These questions lead to the search for the most difficult yet, from the perfect balance to the architecture of juggling, the harmony between all the elements: pots, spoons, ropes, balls.   In Oyun (from the Turkish game) everything revolves around pots and other everyday elements and as he builds an artifact in balance, the juggler creates space, drawing the air, and above all playing and defying gravity.

This show is the result of years of research and experimentation whose inspiration has come mainly from the different artistic disciplines: sculpture, drawing, visual poetry, photography, architecture, music, painting, theater, circus …  Oyun has toured many stages in various countries: Turkey, Holland, Portugal, Spain… It is a unique and innovative show for all audiences that combines humour, originality, rhythm and refined juggling technique that will certainly not leave the viewer feeling indifferent.

And perhaps, after all the soul searching on these pages recently about what constitutes good art and the questioning of what good is art, and a forthcoming feature that looks at árt of purpose and the purpose of art, the answer to both those points might be found in the closing phrase of the paragraph above,

Perhaps the very point of art is to never leave its viewer feeling indifferent. And we are absolutely sure you will feel engaged and involved at any of the events we have listed here. Whether you are shivering in snow in the UK on factoring in the fifty five here on Lanzarote let the arts be your walking companion as you follow your own sidetracks & detours.