Amsterdam Klezmer Band has been around for twenty-five years but its music is never stagnant, they are constantly adding to and developing their repertoire. The line-up of the seven piece (only six yesterday as the Ukranian vocalist was sick) consisting of bass, accordion, trombone, tenor sax, trumpet and clarinet could easily at times been that of an old trad/New Orleans jazz band with each instrumentalist taking turns for a solo. The band, I imagine, could be all things to all men.
Essentially a requiem, but also an attempt to define heroism, Song of a Dark Forest began its development as a consequence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, in addition to being a protest against war in general, it laments the lost glory that was once Russian.
This fascinating exhibition, which has just arrived at the Kunstmuseum in The Hague hot-foot from Tate Modern in London, is a bit of an eye opener. Ms af Klint (1862-1944) and Mr Mondrian (1872–1944) in their early years – we are talking about the first two decades of the last century – were interested in plants and flowers and the beginning of the exhibition has dozens of almost botanical studies by both artists of flowers and plants as water colours, drawings and finished oil paintings
One of the original initiators of happenings and one of their most famous exponents was Yoko Ono, but another Japanese woman was at it too. Her work can be seen in Yayoi Kusama The Dutch Years 1965 – 1970, a small retrospective at the always worth-visiting Stedelijk Museum in Schiedam, a short tram ride from the centre of Rotterdam.
Ai Weiwei engages both with past and present of China, openly protesting against the destruction of the country’s culture. He professes not to seek to make art for the sake of beauty, although everything he has created is in fact beautiful and executed to perfection. But the message is always beyond the objects’ surface appearance. His is the visual language of activism, of protest against injustice, the pernicious state control over information, denial of free speech to the Chinese population in particular and human rights abuses world wide.
Extracurricular is a feature which enables us to include items that are perhaps outside our normal remit . . . On a recent visit to Brussels I spent an exceptionally entertaining and pleasant evening at the Théâtre Royal de Toone. Hidden down a dark and dingy alley off one of the city’s main shopping streets, and only 100m from the Grande Place , . .
The performance got under way with a reprise of Marco Goecke’s 2022 I Love You, Ghosts, a rather sombre, macabre even, event with lots of black and chiaroscuro. The opening music, Harry Belafonte singing the soothing Try to Remember from the 1960 musical The Fantasticks, augured perhaps a sentimental journey, but this turned out not to be.
To modern jazz aficionados the name Bill Evans is mentioned with a degree of reverence; for Delft guitarist Erwin Beijersbergen the American pianist has been an inspiration for the best part of thirty years. Evans, who died in 1980, is perhaps not that well known to the general public but he was widely regarded as one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time. When Beijersbergen first heard him there was an instant connection. They shared the same love of classical music – Chopin, Debussy and Bach and for Beijersbergen, Bill Evans created the same divine experience as Bach’s Art of Fugue, Well-Tempered Clavier and St. Matthew Passion.
