Missing the Big Band Bravado

Homage to Thad Jones
HR Big Band conducted by Jim McNeely
Suedbahnhof Musik Lokal, Frankfurt/Main, 27.01.2012
Tickets: 17 Euros

I had high hopes of the HR Big Band homage to Thad Jones, not least because it was led by Jim McNeely a seasoned veteran of The Thad Jones / Mel Lewis Orchestra and a stunning jazz pianist in his own right. However, in the end the concert was rather a mixed bag.

Given that the halcyon days of big band music are long gone, it was fantastic to see such music performed live and to a sell-out crowd of some 300 fans. Indeed, the big bands funded by the German state broadcasters (in this case Hessische Rundfunk, hence HR) are amongst the few practitioners of this music remaining in Europe.

The 17-piece ensemble put in a professional performance of an impressive set-list that spanned Thad's entire career. Jim introduced each piece, giving just the right dose of anecdote in his smooth American accent.

The band took a while to get going and poor amplification did not help proceedings. Much of the original power and drive of the music was lost, especially since the drums were virtually relying on natural acoustics alone. Germany may be green, but who wants a sleepy windmill, when atomic energy is needed?

Nevertheless, 'A Child Is Born' with Jim McNeely himself taking the piano chair was an undoubted highlight of the concert. The audience stopped chewing their Wurst (sausage) for once, as the sheer beauty of this moving waltz demanded full sensory attention.

The set-up in the venue did not facilitate a full-out big band bash. The whole audience was seated at long tables and there was barely room for standing let alone dancing. In a mirror image to the aging audience, there was little kinetic energy on stage. At times, it looked as though these professional jazzers were just going through the motions, waiting for the next paycheck.

However, the finale went some way to bringing the house down. 'Suite For Pops' was a worthy blast of bebop magic and would have done Louis Armstrong proud. If only Jim could have whipped the band into such a frenzy earlier on, then this could have been a true revival of Thad's music. Like so many tributes, this could only hint at the genius of the original.

Book review: The Fat Years

Shanghai-born author, Chan Koonchung

The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung

First published in Chinese in 2009 by OUP, Hong Kong as Shengshi: Zhongguo 2013

English translation by Michael S. Duke, 2011

318 pages, £6.50 on amazon.co.uk

The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung has been billed by some as the Chinese Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although the novel has been banned in China, it is far less radical than George Orwell's masterpiece that was first published in 1949.

 
Koonchung's story is set in the China of 2013. Whilst the rest of the world languishes in economic depression, China has forged ahead to a 'Golden Age of Properity'. As Old Chen sips his Lychee Black Dragon Latte in the local Starbucks, it barely crosses his mind to question his own feeling of contentment or that of anybody else around him. On the surface, everybody is happy.

It takes several encounters with old friends before he seriously starts to suspect that something is wrong with reality. First, the spiritual traveller, Fang Caodi, insists that a whole month has been wiped from people's memories. Second, Chen's ex-girlfriend Little Xi is constantly shadowed by undercover agents because of her internet activism.

The story follow's Chen's somewhat rambling path to unveiling the truth. Along the way there are plenty of essayistic style dialogues with wizened Party official, He Dongsheng. Although these offer interesting perspectives on Chinese history and politics, they clog up the action.

In the end, the book is more philosophical treatise, than straight thriller. Is it better to live a lie and be happy or live in truth and be unhappy?

Crisis - What Crisis?

How long will this economic doom and gloom in Europe last? Since a bank collapsed in the US three years ago, politicians have been ranting on about a 'crisis'. Surely it is now time for governments to stop moaning on about the economy and take some positive action.

A real crisis is a short and sudden critical event with potentially devastating consequences. It is not something that drags on so long that it makes you yawn with utter boredom.

OK, so the Euro is in trouble. Greece was a little naughty and fiddled her accounts. But why did the rest of Europe make such a huge tragedy out of this? As former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt pointed out, Greece has the economic weight of a single German state. So why all the agonizing from Merkel and co. over whether to bail Greece out or not?

The answer of course lies in winning political capital. The current 'crisis' is quite a handy little tool for our governments. First, they make us worry about losing our jobs, then they say they'll save us, if we go along with funding cuts to public services. 'We're all in this together!' - 'Hang on, austerity is quite good fun actually!'

At the same time, all attention to more serious issues such as improving healthcare, schemes for affordable housing, ensuring accessible top-quality university education let alone reducing world poverty, combating climate change and building good multi-lateral relations on a global level get conveniently swept under the proverbial carpet of crisis.

Sadly, the 'occupy' protest movement merely proves that plenty of people have been fooled into believing in the 'crisis'. And how does this affect the rest of us? We can't even clear our heads with a refreshing stroll in the park anymore!

Anti-Immigrant Politics in Europe

More and more European leaders are jumping on the anti-immigrant bandwagon of the far right. First Merkel, then Cameron and Sarkozy have attacked multiculturalism as a failure. They stated that it had led to segregation and 'parallel communities'.

However, what action had their governments really taken to promote an inclusive multiculturalism? Promoting nationalistic monoculturalism and exclusion of 'others' seemed to be a simpler and more cost-effective vote-winner.

What happened to liberal democratic Europe? Every country now has its very own fascist party, sometimes several. There's the British National Party and English Defence League in good old Britain, not to mention UKIP. 

Moving over the Channel to France, you have Marine Le Pen of the French National Front who has a decent chance of becoming the next president in 2012.

The Islamophobic Geert Wilders leads the third biggest party in the Netherlands, the Party for Freedom.

Germany has its NPD, whilst even social democratic politicians are joining the patriotic act: see Thilo Sarrazin's bestseller, 'Germany Abolishes Itself'.

A few months ago the True Finns won 19.1 per cent of the vote in the general elections, bringing right wing politics to the scene. Then there's the Progress Party in Norway, Sweden Democrats who have 20 seats in the Swedish parliament and the Danish People's Party (see last post).

It is simply a bewildering array of populist trash that makes one think again before laughing about Sarah Palin and her nutty Tea Party in the US.

I've missed plenty of far right parties out, so watch this space for more naming and shaming to come.

Re-Imagining Denmark

The historian Benedict Anderson called the nation-state an 'imagined community'. In other words, the nation is an artificial man-made construction. Who belongs and who does not is simply all in the mind. Currently, a few small-minds in Denmark are trying to reconstruct what it means to be Danish.

Today, Denmark deployed 50 additional customs agents to its borders with Germany and Sweden. Not content with just restricting immigration from outside of the EU, the Danish government now feels that it is time to impose border checks on European travellers too.

Pia Kjærsgaard and her Danish People's Party (Dansk Folkeparti, DF) must be celebrating tonight. They have scored another symbolic highly-publicized blow against a Europe without borders. At the same time, they are constricting the development of a free and open society in Denmark.

The Schengen Area of 25 nation states is based on mutual trust, cooperation and extremely tight external border control. Denmark sits geographically in the very middle of this exclusive zone and yet it is the first country to contravene the spirit and purpose of the agreement.

If Kjærsgaard and her cronies are only able to imagine a return to the parochial and backward Denmark of the past, then let us hope that their myopic view does not take hold. For breaking down borders begins in the mind.

Immigration Crisis in Europe?

On the surface the 'Arab Spring' is welcomed in Europe as the democratic awakening of a people. The authoritarian regimes in North Africa are crumbling: hurrah! But beneath the rhetoric lurk serious concerns about instability in Europe's neighbourhood.

It has brought an end to lucrative arms deals with dictators and disrupted the oil trade. But this doesn't excite the people of Europe as much as the threat from illegal immigrants. So this is what Europe's stagnant Right have seized upon.

Thousands of Tunisians have risked their lives on small boats trying to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa. Those that made it were given a foil cape and a bottle of mineral water to suck on by the Italian authorities. Then they were left to languish in the open for nearly two weeks. Italy wanted help from her EU friends. But these friends did not help.

So Italy started shipping the Tunisians to the mainland and granting them temporary residence permits. In principle the migrants could now enjoy the benefits of freedom of movement across the Schengen area. France assumed that these migrants would now all head for their great capital Paris and promptly started checking trains crossing their border.

Sarkozy and Berlusconi engineered a little crisis and called the EU's freedom of movement into question.

Is this really about a few thousand desperate Tunisian migrants? No, this is about undermining community spirit and clawing back national privileges. In the wake of Sarko's and Silvio's antics, the Commission has little power to reign in similar action from other member states.

Ludicrously, Denmark has reinstated checks on its border with Germany and the bridge from Sweden

So rather than fully supporting the Arab Spring as a united body, EU member states have used it as an excuse to pander to the xenophobic far right. When the going gets tough, there is a marked lack of community spirit.

Links:

Guardian video witness follows a Tunisian migrant

Aircraft carrier left us to die, say migrants

Eurozone Über Alles

In the midst of economic crisis for the Euro, Germany and France are pushing through plans for 'economic government' across the 17 European states that use the currency.

So far, the bailouts of Greece and Ireland have been heavily subsidised by the German economic powerhouse and Chancellor Angela Merkel is understandably keen to make sure the burden is spread more evenly in the future.

Are France and Germany using the crisis as a convenient justification for pushing through their 'Pact for Competitiveness'?  What happens when the financial crisis is over and things return to normal?  Perhaps the EU's big mummy and daddy are trying to look after themselves too much, with little concern for their southern and eastern family members.

The proposed harmonisation of tax, labour and pension policies seems to be a move to roll out the welfare state/high tax model of Germany and France across the eurozone. Whilst this may strengthen their position, it can only weaken that of poorer members.

Meanwhile, Britain sits by on the periphery with shockingly little to say about matters EU.  As Anatole Kalestsky writes in The Times today: eurozone countries are moving ever closer to political union leaving non-euro countries excluded from key decision-making.

Is a 'multi-speed' Europe really desirable?

See also:

MEPs vent fury at Van Rompuy over Franco-German plan
BBC Gavin Hewitt's Europe blog: France-Germany pact resisted