Jazz on a Thursday evening

We have a Jazz Festival in Cartagena with ten concerts spread over a couple of weeks. It's held in a most unlikely looking theatre which seems to form the ground floor of a block of flats. As soon as the tickets went on sale I was dispatched to the box office to get some. My guess is that Maggie chose the two acts on the basis that one of them (Brad Mehldau) made an album with her hero Pat Metheny whilst the other Ryuichi Sakamoto had a brief period of fame along with David Sylvian, the one who painted his face white and had a band called Japan, around 1984. Sakamoto was also in the film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence along with David Bowie around the same time.

Now I don't mind jazz. It's an awful lot better than that Simply Red/Norah Jones stuff you have to put on otherwise when people come to eat at your house. In a boozer, with a cigar in one hand, a beer in the other (and with the music reduced to background noise), it's more or less perfect. Actually I suppose that doesn't happen any more - there aren't any fags in boozers in the UK anymore are there? There's almost no restriction on smoking in bars here, though, in a bid to grow obese, I've not taken advantage of that opportunity for the last couple of months. Breathing better, likely to breath longer but not enjoying each breath quite so much.

Anyway, back to this jazz. So we went to the Brad Mehldau concert this evening. The crowd was the usual sort of jazz crowd, a disproportionate number of men with beards or with long hair and a bald spot, lots of young boys who looked like they would get bullied at school and not much evidence of regualr clothes buying amongst either the male or female crowd. Nearly everyone was taking pictures with their phones, iPods or PSPs - hardly anyone had a recognisable camera. The theatre was a bit scruffy, probably built about thirty to forty years ago and waiting for its first refit and it was maybe half to three quarters full - I'd guess around 400 people. Brad didn't have a lot to say. He got cross, threw his sweat towel on the floor and swore at a bloke taking photos with a proper camera at one point and he introduced the other two members of the trio just before they left the stage. That was it. He was fine, I'm sure he'd be good at a dinner party.