Life in Cartagena

It wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that Maggie loves the musician Pat Metheny. But for her I'd know him vaguely as a bloke who made a record with David Bowie years and years ago. Cartagena has an annual Jazz Festival. We went to see Ryuichi Sakamoto a couple of years ago, possibly someone else too . This year people on the bill have included Wanda Jackson, Bettye Lavette, Herman Dune, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Sly Johnson, Ryuichi Sakamoto (again), the Cowboy Junkies and lots more. A new conference centre, El Batel, was recently completed in Cartagena. It's all walls of light and big open spaces. The auditorium has been used for some of the jazz concerts. And guess who was on the bill of the Cartagena Jazz Festival programme at the new conference centre tonight - got it in one eh?, Pat Metheny. And we went. He's not a personal favourite of mine but I thought it was a good concert and as we were on the front row we had a good view. Such a good view inde...

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 tha...