It’s difficult to describe the deep and enduring appeal of Pink Martini, a group of highly literate musicians performing a decidedly popular repertoire with absolute sincerity.

The band hails from Portland, Oregon – a city with more than its fair share of oddballs – but it could claim to be from everywhere, with songs in languages as diverse as Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.

The Pink Martini sound is rich, mature and accomplished, yet somehow kitsch and even fetishistic.

It’s a curiosity shop of old brasileiro records mixed in amongst recordings of forgotten music hall revues and Japanese softcore soundtracks. It’s Chopin dancing the tango with Doris Day.

There really is something for everyone. And it’s all heart-on-your-sleeve stuff. This is probably what first attracted me to Pink Martini. I’d be listening to a brassy, rather loungecore take on a tempestuous Italian love affair and all of a sudden my eyes would fill up at the sheer candour of it. Pink Martini defies you to be cynical, while reminding you that it’s probably far more worldly and grown-up than you.

With singer China Forbes out on long-term sick leave, the band has recruited a reality-TV rock singer. And of course such an unpredictable move is classic Pink Martini: the brash, imposing Storm Large applies her own considerable vocal capabilities to the material while maintaining just a soupçon of vulnerability.

A cold February night descends over the Karlsplatz in Vienna. At the far end of the square, the outline of the eighteenth century Church of St Charles Borromeo is illuminated by a ghostly white light.

It’s a building full of florid gestures. Even for Vienna – a city famed for its baroque eclecticism – this is pretty strong stuff. There are obvious Roman influences, including the entrance porch and a pair of tall, spiralled columns recalling Trajan’s Column.

We repair inside, where heat-conducting pads have been installed on the pews. The audience breathes clouds of vapour into the chilly air. Every performance for the last month must have been thus. We’re here for a recital of Mozart’s Requiem by members of the Salzburger Konzertgesellschaft and even the musicians are wrapped up against the elements.

Mozart did not manage to complete the Requiem before his death in 1791, a few weeks away from his 36th birthday. Having spent time in Prague, he fell ill and his condition worsened on his return to Vienna. So although the Requiem was a commission, Mozart’s biographer suggests that he felt as though he was writing it for himself.

The composer Franz Xaver Süssmayr stepped in almost immediately after Mozart’s death and completed the work, though this fact did not become known until later in order to protect the interests of the Mozart estate.

We attended the recital as a birthday treat for J. She heard a performance of the Requiem in Oxford some years ago. The piece is an emotive one and here in Vienna the small orchestra takes advantage of the extraordinary setting to deliver a powerful rendition of it, delivering intensity in the key third movement.

World Circuit’s Nick Gold didn’t get to make his Afro-Cuban project at Havana’s Egrem studios in 1996 due to visa problems encountered by the African contingent. What he ended up with instead was the Buena Vista Social Club.

Fourteen years on, the original show is back on the road: a band of Cubans led by BVSC veteran Eliades Ochoa joins forces with Toumani Diabaté and several of Mali’s best musicians for that long-postponed soundclash.

Any doubts that the traditional music of two continents might not gel were dispelled within just a few bars of the opening track. Those who already knew Toumani’s work with Danny Thompson and Ketama (1991′s delirious Songhai album) found themselves immediately on familiar ground.

The acoustics in the concert hall of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels were rather poor we felt, but that did nothing to put off the crowd. Many were quickly out of their seats and dancing in the aisles.

Due consideration was given to the solos of the respective musicians. Bassekou Kouyate’s trilling n’goni featured high in the mix, together with Toumani’s unique, dual-tone kora playing and Ochoa’s hard-picked guitar. Djelimady Tounkara added body to the ensemble with his warm electric guitar and Kasse Mady Diabaté’s famously strong and true vocals made several important contributions.

While Buena Vista fever swept the world, there was probably little time to reflect on what might have been with the Afro-Cuban project. Fortunately, this combination of timeless music can afford to be patient. And now it’s time has finally come.

My user experiences were a mixed bag: from the dirty, stifling and claustrophobic (Lille, London) to the clinically efficient (Fukuoka, Seoul), via the downright airy and arty (Washington DC).

The age of the system certainly has plenty to do with it (DC dates from 1976, London a century earlier), as does atmosphere. Atmosphere or lack of it.

Source: Adrian Pingstone (2004), Wikimedia Commons

Reading a post at the French language bxl.blog reminded me that I’d wanted to write something about subway music.

I can’t recall having heard subway music before I first visited Brussels in 2001. That’s not the kind produced by buskers but rather the strangely disembodied sounds coming from discreetly placed PAs.

Subway subliminal

There’s more than a faint echo of irony associated with listening to piped music while waiting to be piped around a city. Furthermore Mélissa, in the post linked above, seems to be hinting that the Brussels métro playlist is anything but random. Could it be subliminal muzak, a 1950s experimental scientist’s wet dream?

Certainly, it’s no secret that general behaviour is being targeted. Just as I once learned in Criminology 101 that the best way to prevent graffiti in public spaces is to fill them yourself, a Saturday night assault from a string quartet will almost certainly damage the prospect of a knuckle-fisted one. Unless of course you’re a droog and you speak Nadsat.

Individualism and choice

Since humanity is a thing of rich diversity, the opinions of subway users can and do vary.¹

In return for a spot of Mozart, the organisation running the subway system gets significantly improved public order. Naturally, this benefits users too, though it’s probably less obvious to them. Muzak can also help to pass the time while users await the next train, if it’s agreeable.

Now I don’t have any figures, but I’m pretty confident that the majority of those who do not care for subway music are the majority European and North American. Any organised, mass-transit system in those parts of the world must design against ingrained Western individualism. We do not appreciate being couped up in a small cylinder with an accompanying lack of personal choice on which to exercise our free will.

We are given to the celebration of a rebellious sheep, whereas in Eastern cultures, the success of the flock is predicated on social harmony. Tokyo’s underground, for example, uses jingles but it has no need of pacifying muzak.

The next stop will be Our Great Leader

There is a notable Eastern exception however. Spare a thought if you will for North Koreans living in Pyongyang, whose subterranean journeys are apparently subject to a constant aural barrage of strident marches and patriotic anthems. Simon Bone has actually made available some of this music on his fascinating website, as part of a wealth of information about the capital’s underground system. Simon’s site is all the more enigmatic for its understandable lack of credited sources.

Notes

1. All those in favour say “yea”: Matthew Yglesias; all those who are on the fence say “could be”: The Independent; all those against say “nay”: Angry New York Times reader.

The story goes that Rodrigo Sánchez and Gabriela Quintero played in a thrash metal band in their native Mexico. Presumably having failed to thrash the charts the band split, jettisoning our nimble-fingered duo to Dublin, the buskers’ paradise. There they were spotted and snagged by the festival circuit. Massive success followed, with an album produced by none other than John Leckie.

At times it seems as if Rodrigo and Gabriela pick and strum faster than a hummingbird’s wing action. So given that tonight’s the last date on their world tour, their overworked digits must be pretty sore by now. Heedless, they tear through their set with an engaging gusto.

Personally, I prefer these guys in small doses. Something of the miracle of how they coax an extraordinary, polyphonic array of sound from two simple guitars tends to get lost after half an hour of driving rhythms. Every track’s got the same high energy – they cite Megadeth and Slayer as influences after all – but that perhaps removes some of the focus on musicianship that should give them the longevity they deserve.

I first heard of Scottish band Salsa Celtica back in 2004, courtesy of WFMU radio’s Doug Schulkind.

I was just starting to get interested in latin and world music at the time and I hoovered up Schulkind’s Culture Shock collection. The Give The Drummer Some DJ had put together twenty soundclashes in which Latin would rub up against Blues, African musicians did turns on Hawaiian guitar and Brazilians paid homage to the funk of James Brown.

Salsa Celtica’s Fuerte opened the collection. It appears on the band’s second album The Great Scottish Latin Adventure and represents a perfect summary of what the band is about: salsa and bagpipes, Latin and Celtic.

Somehow, against first impressions, the combination works perfectly.

Catching up with them isn’t easy. Their fairly infrequent tours take them to some pretty obscure places. However, only a couple of weeks ago I learned that they were doing a gig in Saltaire, West Yorkshire.

Accordingly, Saltaire became the unlikely destination of our third visit to a UNESCO World Heritage Site in two months.

Salsa Celtica formed in 1995 and has gained considerable popularity since then, receiving acclaim in the UK and further afield. The Saltaire date was their eleventh in a long list that continues until mid August 2008.

There were times during the gig, which was split over two sets, when the wooden floors of the Victoria Hall felt and actually looked like they would cave in. Stacks of sound equipment by the stage wobbled precariously.

The large crowd consisted of those more used to the Celtic-only fare usually heard at the venue, a significant number of salsa dancers and the rest of us there specifically for the band, or just out of curiosity.

Of course, the salsa dancers were by no means the only ones dancing and we all had a bit of a shuffle ourselves. I’d been watching YouTube videos all last week to pick up the basic steps!

The atmosphere was terrific once the crowd had warmed up, with Venezuelan singer Lino Rocha expertly working the crowd. By the second set, the overwhelming majority were on their feet.

With a unusual, totally unique mix of sounds, the eleven members of Salsa Celtica have found a niche but more importantly, an audience.

The problem with being a covers band is that your audience tends to judge you on the quality of your renditions rather than the quality of your musicianship.

Cadillac Jukebox singer Ian McMullen acknowledges this, but for him the enjoyment comes from being able to play a wide, often surprisingly eclectic repertoire. “I don’t even like playing gigs,” he claims, “I do them for the other guys.”

Despite only playing together since March, the band has developed a distinctive sound, making their renditions personal and occasionally peculiar. McMullen’s sharp, high voice is backed by restrained guitars and fizzy keyboards, with time kept by a remarkably florid display of drumming the likes of which the pub circuit is unlikely to see elsewhere.

The music is drawn from styles as diverse as mod, disco, rock and soul. Such a mixed repertoire means taking the odd risk and not every track worked on the night. So whilst the band never seemed completely at ease with Noughties numbers, the barnstorming turns of Town Called Malice, Foxy Lady, Superstition and Land Of 1000 Dances were terrific highlights.