Time Passes: Moments Musicaux at Zilverhof

As Christmas and an impending visit to family and friends in London drew near, my mind fell upon a new plan. It came to me during a day dream in Dutch class, at the House of the Netherlands on Congostraat. What could I prepare for my dad that would please him at a low budget, yet satiate my desire to be creative? Then I had it: make him a CD, an album of the jazz standards that Lukas and I had been informally running through at Zilverhof for months. I could see this mini-Christmas project as something that would perform dual functions: alleviating the pressure of buying presents and giving us both a sense of creative direction and focus.

The next five or six days passed by in a flurry of activity. It was over the weekend, so naturally I was very busy with work at the pub, but now I was also in official recording cahoots with Lukas, who had instantly taken to the Christmas gift idea after sacking off one of his guitar buddies.

“Irreconcilable artistic differences,” he informed me.

It seemed that Lukas’s music partner had insulted him in a moment of drink-fuelled honesty.

“I cannot play with someone who doesn’t like my music,” said Lukas to me afterwards, severely wounded.

So it was really more of a mutual sacking-off. Anyway, the conflict made Lukas endorse my own musical project with renewed relish and excitement.

“How long have we got?” he asked.

“Four days tops.”

“How many songs?”

“I think a full album – ten with piano and vocals, two as piano solos.”

Lukas almost fell off his stool with laughter.

“You think that recording is that easy? It can take months to do a proper recording of a song!” he replied.

“Well, I’m not after perfection in jazz, just something that will warm my father’s heart from time to time.”

I had no pride to defend. I knew I was completely inexperienced and that he was the ‘musician’, and I also realised that he was probably selling himself short by agreeing to work with me. But sometimes artistic stuffiness gets in the way of so much real progress. Maybe sometimes projects need amateurs to push them along into realisation. In any case, the process was set in motion that Friday afternoon.

We began work straight away, recording some of those jazz standards that we believed worked best. Which ones were they? Well ‘Can’t Help Loving Dat Man’ done up-tempo or ‘honky tonk style’ as Lukas always says, ‘My Romance’ and ‘People Will Say We’re In Love’. I was surprised to see some of these songs in our jazz anthology (loaned to us courtesy of the magnificent Ghent public library): I was familiar with them from the great Roger & Hammerstein musicals such as Show Boat and Oklahoma, that I watched with obsessive interest as a little girl. But in any case, they instantly magnetized me; they were melodies that I knew as instinctively as primary school hymns. Then there were also the more difficult ones, the elusive, broken discordancies of ‘But Beautiful’ with its tapping insistence on B flat, and then others — more ‘bluesy’ numbers that required a bit of vocal sass, such as ‘Is You Is or Is You Aint my Baby?’

It was a marvellous experience. Often, the best recording moments were in the early hours of the morning when I returned home from my night-shift. Then we would sit, penny a piece, in Lukas’ dank, messy room, knotted and overcrossed with wires and cables – I with my black waitressing apron tied in a ribbon round my waist, and he at the piano; bow-backed, beautiful.

It was during those nocturnal sessions, snatched between shifts and ‘good’ as opposed to ‘bad’ voice moments, that I realised how rewarding the collaborative and highly demanding work of recording music together really is. I mean, I had been recorded before – I had done it informally myself on a dictaphone with my piano teacher, and for school projects, but I had never done it with a computer programme and a microphone and one of the most brilliant jazz pianists in Belgium. Lukas was also in his element – the beautiful piano solos, intros and outros he carved out of the air in moments, his inherent ability to spot what key I should sing in – the sessions muscled out in him, what I already knew to exist but had lain dormant beforehand, that Lukas was a producer and musician of the highest possible calibre.

The strange and illuminating process of trying to capture that  elusive ‘wrap’ number was also of great educational value to me. What was it, we both wondered and questioned together, that conspired to make one recording mediocre or another definitive? How could you harness the ‘magic’ — as we began to call it – trying to identify a quality that evades easy definition with words. Sometimes we found that it was grinding re-rehearsal that produced what we were looking for, at other times true teamwork, feedback and assessment, constructive criticism from listening to previous recordings. These felt like familiar tag-lines from teaching. However, ultimately more often than not the final cinch numbers came about mysteriously and unpredictably.

It was that weekend that I realised what an intimate, probing test and experience recording is for the vocalist. The mic, poised before your salivated mouth, captures everything: every false intonation, every flat note and hesitation. To achieve great recording requires mastery over your instrument but it also requires a deep degree of control over yourself, and feeling, a feeling for the beauty and pathos of the songs that you are singing. The mic can capture belief. It was astounding. Those recording sessions were some of the most profoundly honest self-encounters I had had for years, and more profound because they were witnessed by another. So great recording is about honesty, self-knowledge and also about trust. I realise now that those recording sessions with Lukas were also an act of love: they were nourished, enriched, ‘produced’ and structured by a feeling we shared between us.

And the result? Of course they were not all ‘great’. But some of them weren’t bad at all, considering that I am not a professional singer or even, really a talented enthusiast. Plus, those bitterly cold nights and comradely feelings of shared purpose and achievement also furnished me with another important realisation. The production of art should be collaborative. If for music, why not for writing? My experiences recording with Lukas, tapping out blues rhythms and debating about keys and tonal harmonies made me realise that great art should not only be encountered and received socially – but should be produced, as part of a more general benediction and grace, socially – in commune with another. In Campo Santo W.G. Sebald writes that “we make music to defend ourselves against being overwhelmed by the terrors of reality.” This seems to me a rather cynical point of view. Perhaps sometimes music is defensive or escapist, perhaps all art is; but it is also enriching – it works towards eliminating and palliating some of the very ‘terrors’ that we do see in life.

Scoop Cinema

Two nights ago I went to see Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece  at the Scoop Cinema in Ghent. It was not the first time I had been to the cinema – I had already visited on a few occasions during the Ghent Film Festival; but it was the first time that I felt inspired enough about my time there to write about it.

Any real cinema buff would be delighted by Scoop. It is a large, draughty building on the Sint-Annasplein, not far from the lurid incarnadine city lights of Ghent’s very own Red Light District. Situated on the edge of the scenic roundabout – also very near to the Bibliotheek – and at the inception of the beautifully-named Violette-Lange Straat, for me Scoop is has always been poised at the edge of the recognisable world. Its limit is the cinematic limit – which is actually no limit – as Nolan’s film demonstrates so well. There is no space that film cannot represent, just, as I suppose, there is no space that literature cannot re-create or create, at least in theory.

What distinguishes a really unique cinema from the run-of-the-mill over-priced art house cinema? As I used to have a boyfriend who took pleasure in unearthing Art Deco cinemas across the UK, I feel I have some idea. The main tenet is that charm and not profit is the operational driving force behind the institution. So great cinemas – like the Cowley Picture House in Oxford – with noisy aluminium fold-out chairs instead of upholstered stools, will always claim first place in my heart. Of course, it’s not just about aesthetics.  I wonder if any cinemas are now left in the UK which still use 33mm. The shift towards digital happened so rapidly and comprehensively that there was barely a swan song for the highly impractical, clunking cinematic reel – an object that I fear will even be an art object and collector’s item in a few year’s time. I remember a great film critic at Edinburgh University – Martine Beugnet – once speaking very poignantly about the death of 33mm. It is not the transition or upgrade. It is the death of one medium as we know it. Cinema, as it was originally conceived, no longer exists. What, one might reply, is the material difference between a digital and analogue image? Who cares if the apparatus is different? Well, Martine, would reply, many things. To take one example, digital film cannot reproduce the same tonality of black as 33 mm. Velvety blackness was how she put it.

So Scoop is large, draughty building on a roundabout formed from the hollowed-out shell of two or three adjoining 19th century townhouses.  The auditoriums are not especially grand but have the requisite ruby-red stalls for seating. Screen one is the exception as there are a number of fin-de-siecle inspired mermaids drifting among a wall colonnade. But it is the atmosphere of the place as a whole that I love: it is a vast cinemapolis, a cinematic maze, but with the dishevelled vibe of a surburban garage. In the corridors, vintage movie posters peel on faded-apricot walls. The box-office girl, with two fish-tails of red lipstick, will print out tiny ticket-stubs on madder pink sugar paper. It is all so typically understated and chic. And then the bar — I have sometimes wanted to watch films at Scoop just for the post-film run-down afterwards. It is a narrow space with an extremely high ceiling and mezzanine floor. The slender stairs to ascend it are so steep that they are almost a ladder. The heavy, varnished tables; the slinking, silhouetted  figures at the bar. This is certainly a venue where the Flemish literati appear in all their vanquishing brilliance and beauty.

However, it is not only the architectural and aesthetic virtues of the cinema that I adore, but also their programming culture. It is almost impossible to keep up to speed on the myriad number of films screening at Scoop. There are often simply announced on two A4 print-outs bluetacked to the box office window.Comprehensive listings very difficult to negotiate online. So I feel that my cinematic experience at Scoop is very much like the old days: I will turn up at 7.45 and pick which of the five films showing at that time most tickles my fancy. The films are on a fast enough rotation to ensure that this exercise never becomes stale. So I rarely go to Scoop with a plan to see a particular film. Instead I go in good faith that the cinema will supply me with something – and it always does. Of the five different films screening at 8, any number of them will be off-the-beaten-track prize winners, well received at Cannes or Berlin, beloved of critics but not the mainstream. I suppose the programming culture of the cinema could be described as a little pretentious – or at least especially discerning. Last year’s La Grande Bellezza has had an unbelievably protracted run. I believe they still screen it every week for the acoloytes and modern aesthetes to whom it is their non plus ultra.

Interstellar is the only film that I have ever seen twice there. The first time, with the Magpie, we roosted irreverently in the front row, kicking our feet up in the air and taking occasional puffs from our e-cigarettes. The second time was very different, I was with one of the Ghent scenesters, a young entrepreneur who wore more black and leather than a new-age Goth. He was not very moved by the film – why was I? Despite the fact that it was such a big American production, pictorially I felt it was a throw-back to the Cold War era of cinema. The grainy picture quality, the reliquary of Sov-tech machinery, all seemed inspired by photographs of the 1960s Space Race. So its very futurism was nostalgic. Does that make sense? Its allegorical qualities too, reminded me of Tarkovsky — especially that wonderful sequence where Cooper is transported into the black hole, below or beyond a quantum mechanical horizon. It felt to me like Cinema at its most abstract and metaphysical – and therefore, also, at its most poetic. It was meta-cinema. Nolan was flirting with the outer possibilities of his chosen form. To represent the unrepresentable – a space outside of time and the conventional laws of physics. Then there was the clever link with the book-shelf.  For me it was a powerful metaphor for the limitless possibilities of art in general. I am reminded, perhaps for no very good reason, of that famous Hawking-derived idea: The limit of human endeavour is only the limit of our own imaginations. So bravo Nolan – aside from the ending, too trite – quite an achievement.