Alan Coady’s Musical Blog

Here is a list of links to concerts in the Fringe featuring solo guitar, guitar duo, guitar in mixed ensemble & guitar/vocals. These links will take you to their entries in the fringe programme – giving details of dates, times, prices. Many of these artists have their own websites, or MySpace sites, where you can hear samples of their playing.

Antonio Forcione (acoustic)

Bach For Breakfast (featuring Sean Shibe on classical guitar)

Bert Jansch (acoustic)

Bon Iver (acoustic)

Camera Ritmata (featuring Simon Thacker on classical guitar)

Classical & World Guitar (featuring Neil Wilson on classical guitar)

Classical Guitar Recital (featuring Spyros Dendrinos)

Classical Guitars & St. Cecilia’s (featuring Luca Villani)

Claude Bourbon (acoustic)

Darren Dutson-Bromley (jazz)

Electric Avenue Band (world/rock)

Flamenco Jazz Late Night (featuring Ricardo Garcia)

Guitar Fiesta (featuring Luca Villani)

Guitar Music – Transatlantic (featuring Stefan Grasse)

Guitars at St. Cecilia’s (featuring Gordon Ferries - baroque)

Jonathan Prag (classical)

Lotte’s Gift (featuring Karin Schaupp – classical)

Mayhew: Live – Free (featuring classical/folk guitar and more)

Preston Reed (acoustic – unusual technique!)

Spanish Spectacular (featuring Sorros Duo – Phillip Thorne & Selina Madley - classical)

Tony Cox – Guitar, me and South Africa

Two-five-one (featuring Duncan Findlay & Adam Bulley – jazz)

Wingin It (acoustic/traditional)

This has been quite a performance-heavy week. Mon – Wed saw three evangelising concerts, where guitarists performed to younger pupils who will be eligible for guitar instruction next session.

On Monday, P5 – P7 pupils from Campie PS played a short concert for the current P4s. The repertoire was a mix of group items and solos, the latter of which would give them some idea of what they might be doing next year. The atmosphere was great and there were some very interesting questions for the pupils from the audience. Recordings from this event can be found on the Campie PS page.

In a similar vein, Tuesday saw a visit of NBHS guitarists to Law PS and Wednesday, a visit of Knox guitarists to King’s Meadow PS. Technical glitches e.g. batteries running out during performances, resulted in their being fewer recordings than I’d hoped, but there are enough to give some idea of the day. The explosive applause of P7 pupils should also convey how much the pupils enjoyed the visit. (NBHS page; Knox page).

Thursday evening was the Musselburgh Grammar School Summer Concert in which the school’s Guitar Group played two items – a Scottish Medley and a Brazilian Choro. You can hear these items on the MGS page.

Many thanks to all the pupils concerned for the hard work, joie de vivre and savoir faire.

This afternoon I was proud to take part in a performance with 9 guitarists and 2 singers from Knox Academy & North Berwick High School. Organised by Health Scotland, the theme was mental well-being and the idea of the performance was to allow delegates to see the benefits conferred upon young people by engagement in positive activity. This resonates with my own view (not mine alone, of course) that involvement in something, which is both meaningful and bigger than oneself, is one of the key ingredients of good mental health. Music and sport provide many and varied opportunities for the natural occurrence of this phenomenon.

Impromptu MC, I was keen to highlight the relevance of the way in which much of the music had been put together to the themes of the day. Many of the pupils had been on exam leave for several weeks and, nevertheless, were game to take on new material for public performance at very short notice. One example of positive attitude was to be seen in two pupils who agreed to join in the accompaniment of two songs only yesterday. Another was in the willingness of the whole group to perform a blues put together in a few minutes with neither notes nor overall plan written out. Four individuals volunteered improvised solos in this blues, and I was keen that the audience enjoy the quality of living in the moment, which always adds an immediacy to performance. I decided to dedicate this blues to Carol Craig of the Centre for Confidence and Well-being who was seated quite near the group. Her talk on well-being at the 2007 Scottish Learning Festival was one of those rare events where someone appears to be articulating inchoate thoughts you’ve had for years.

Our final item, an arrangement of The Average White Band’s Pick Up The Pieces, seemed apposite. The young people playing have most of their lives before them. Things are bound to go wrong in the remaining decades but the thing is to pick up the pieces and keep on keeping on.

Thanks to everybody involved* for representing East Lothian in general, and these two schools in particular. The audience seemed both engaged and moved and the organisers were very grateful to the pupils for providing exactly the positive effects they had envisioned.

* the day had kicked off with a performance by some hip-hop dancers from Dunbar Grammar School – unfortunately this was long before we arrived for our lunchtime slot.

New play-along midi files for the MGS Summer Concert have been placed on the Guitar Group Midis page.

Haddington’s own Malcolm MacFarlane let me know of a couple of forthcoming Scottish Guitar Quartet gigs:

Fri, 24 April, 8pm, The Lot, 4 Grassmarket, Edinburgh Tel: 0131 668 2019

Sun, 26 April, 8pm, City Halls (Recital Room), Glasgow Tel: 0141 353 8000

I seem to have fallen behind with the dusting :-) possibly due to having spent 10 of the last 16 nights in schools. Here are some of the highlights of items featuring NBHS guitarists this evening:

Guitar Ensemble Scottish Medley 2009 scottish-medley-2009

Zoe & Senior Guitarists Ca’ The Yowes ca-the-yowes-live

Zoe & Senior Guitarists John Anderson My Jo john-anderson-my-jo

I was keen to clarify, to the audience, an important nuance in accreditation. The musical arrangements were my own but in the case of the Ca’ The Yowes, Zoe had brought as much to the project as I had in creative/interpretative terms and certainly a good deal more in performance terms. My role had simply been to find the nicest harmonies I could and sprinkle notes, like so many dew drops, around the fingertips of my fine young friends in the ensemble. The melodic variation wrought by Zoe (entirely her own idea) provided, for me, the lion’s share of the transformational and affective content of the performance.

Have a great Easter, everyone!

It’s always special to take part in concerts in a school you attended as a child - one obvious element is that you bump into people you’ve known for quite a long time.

I was especially happy with the performance of the Knox Academy Guitar Group this evening’s Spring Concert. The piece was rhytmically tricky, relying upon fierce concentration but, once on stage, it felt more as though the group had secured the right feeling for the piece. Not only had many of the members performed 6 pages of music on Friday night as members of the East Lothian Guitar Ensemble, but several of them were instrumental (and/or vocal) in many other ensembles this evening.

Here is a clip of us during our rehearsal this morning: pick-up-the-pieces

This year’s East Lothian Showcase Concert took place last night in the Brunton Hall, Musselburgh. The evening showcases, to a packed house, the inter-school String, Wind, Jazz, Percussion & Guitar Ensembles.

I have to confess to loathing the acoustic of the Brunton Hall which constantly threatens to undermine the many, many hours of work put in by guitar pupils, as it’s virtually impossible for them to hear one another. Rhythmic cues necessary for timing are often inaudible as, for example, a cough by one member of the audience reverberates as loudly as the sound of 40 guitars. Our preference is the magnificent acoustic of Musselburgh Grammar School’s hall, where the event has been hosted in years when the Brunton Hall was mercifully unavailable.

That said, tragedy was averted for another year and the pupils turned in a commendable performance. You can hear mp3s of the East Lothian Guitar Ensemble’s contribution to this year’s event on the East Lothian Guitar Ensemble page.

Other ensembles seem to thrive in this acoutic. The magnificent Wind Ensemble nearly took the roof off!

The many stages involved in running the East Lothian Guitar Ensemble include: recruiting; selecting repertoire, arranging and distributing music; preparation of play-along files and (lately) videos; various admin tasks. One final verb remains – pruning. Parts issued in September are not performed until March and in the intervening months one of two things may happen:

• a pupil’s ensemble skills, progress, enthusiasm, inclination to practise and to make the most of resources provided may take both of us by surprise and they may ask for a more challenging part (on the understanding that they can revert to the existing part if it turns out that we have shot for the wrong moon)

• for a variety of reasons, the anticipated amount of flourishing may not fully materialise and a pupil may face the prospect of playing a part (in front of approx 500 people) with which they are not completely comfortable

In the latter case there is insufficient time to step down to a new part and a more likely solution is to prune the existing part so that no daunting passages remain to darken the psychology of an otherwise celebratory evening. What interests me is the varied response to this suggestion. Some are gratefully relieved*, while for others the very suggestion is the final spur required to complete the task as planned. Often the outcomes confound expectation and this is one of the things that keeps life interesting – the tension between accumulated professional experience and the continuing surprise of human behaviour.

* the burden of ensemble work is quite heavy for pupils. Depending on involvement in school and authority concerts, Burns Suppers etc. they could be asked to learn anywhere between 12 and 18 A4 pages of music each year.

New videos of Scottish Medley 2009 have been posted on the Video Page. This will be played by NBHS in the Spring Concert (Thu 2 April, 2009) and MGS (Thu 18 June, 2009)