2010年 05月 2日 日曜日 09:36

Sat 1 May – Rumor festival
Sat 1 May – Rumor 61,
Vredenburgh Leeuwenbergh, Ekko, SJU Jazzpodium, Utrecht.

After having a very relaxed Queens Day (on which Coach Bertels slept till noon, had a solid breakfast, drove to the dunes and walked for three hours in no mans land to test the legs and new binoculars), Bertels woke up at ten and discovered the weather to be extremely good for the garden, wet! Slowly Coach started up the PC, released a piss and decided to take it easy. Only just a few minutes later Bertels wondered if he could still make it to the live radio show in Utrecht; Washing up, getting dressed, biking to Central station, buying a ticket, boarding the train, walking from Utrecht Central to the pub where the show is broadcasted from: all together one and a half hours, without delays! This could be done! Next question for Coach was if there was something to do in town to combine things? It would be pure nonsense to travel all the way to Utrecht just for a show that can be listened to live at home! A quick search in last.fm events amongst friends and venues resulted in a funny described little Festival: Rumor Edition 61. Three different styles of music in three different locations, great! With this event in mind, Bertels was confident and speeded up the plan by washing up, getting dressed etc. With no delays at all, Coach did arrive at the pub fifteen minutes before broadcast. Time for a cappuccino and relaxation whilst waiting for the show to unfold in front of Bertels. Two delicious buns with mozzarella and tuna, quickly bought at Utrecht Central, tasted very well as breakfast! Twelve o clock, the show starts with presenters Felix Meurders and Dolf Jansen talking about sad, funny and political subjects with comics, authors and politicians. The quests were good, so were the conversations and satire. But somehow the atmosphere was less spontaneous due to the half filled pub. Normally the place is super crowded, resulting in a far better, louder and more spontaneous interaction with the crowd, which is essential for this live radio show! There was this Belgian couple who wrote a book about being happy without kids, and a dude who wrote the exact opposite book: happy with kids! Funny thing is that the couple wasn’t really a couple and they have kids too! Another guest was reserve keeper for FC Twente back in 1974, and saw the Championship go to the Rotterdam Club Feyenoord. This dude claims that it was the fault of the Twente keeper in the game at that time, for he signed a contract with Ajax just days before! That’s why that keeper was busy with other stuff in his head and couldn’t prevent the ball to fall in his net… an Arabic dude told about his book in which he tells all about hallucinating stuff like, Mescal, Opium, Magic Mushrooms, Absinth, etc. being very effective on creative minds. Artists, writers and geeks use it all the time and why not? The effectiveness depends strongly on the person, so don’t take it for granted, you could easily go insane! Last but not least a story on two younger folks who got interested in elderly peoples love! A ninety year old having a new babe, thirty years younger. Grandpa in love again saying “all these songs on the radio seemed to evolve around me” and the fourteen year old kid forcing his way into the bathroom after hearing his Granny drown, but finds his Grandmother in bath hugging someone else’s Grandfather, counting each others wrinkles! Weird stories, fun times! The live music was from Esther Groenenberg with band good songs in Dutch, sounded like Spinvis with a dash of Doe Maar. After the show, Coach went looking for Rumor61 Tickets at several record shops. But what the hell! Where are these record shops hidden? Bertels is not unknown in this city, but somehow several record shops have been quitting their business since Coach was there. After a while finally a FRS was in sight, and Bertels walked in and asked for tickets. But this dude couldn’t find any for the festival! That’s strange… Anna provided the shortest route to Plato’s, here the same answer, this festival is not in the computer! But they had a leaflet with a phone number for reservations… A lead! Coach thanked the nice Plato girl and dialled the number, “the number you’re trying to connect to cannot be reached, please try again later” Darn! What a shitty organisation, Bertels thought. Coach set it all aside and decided to go to the movies first: Nothing Personal, a Dutch Irish film about a girl leaving everything behind, being an emotional wreck. Wandering through England and arriving at a small house on a small island in Ireland. Slowly she establishes a better contact with the old man living there, his wife died years ago. Emotions caught on camera, with the magnificent scenery of the Irish landscape: Beautiful! The film had a lot of silent moments, these moments were less magical due to the monotone noise of the projector, there were also yellow stripes on the screen that interfered with the bright skies and so on: Movie theatre t’Hoogt, fix these things! Or stop charging eight Euros! Outside in the fresh air again, Coach strolled over the market in search for the Vredenburgh venue. But the building where it used to be situated is being reconstructed and not reachable. Bertels asked around and finds that there is another location ten kilometres south! That can’t be true, since all attendees of the Rumor61 Festival have to walk from one venue to the other in-between concerts. Coach tries the reservation phone number again. Bingo! Someone picks up and Bertels makes the reservation and asks where this Vredenburgh Leeuwenbergh venue is: it seems to be a little church ten minutes from the city centre, just within the canal structure of Utrecht. OK, thanx. Now Coach has a clue where to go. All along the Oude Gracht to the Louis Hartlooper Complex, having Gnome beers on the terrace. Enjoying the sun and the folks around, Bertels observes: The woman next to Coach is having a high class conversation with her daughter while eating a salmon salad, she speaks Dutch with a potato in her throat and mixes American terms with French pronouncements in her vocabulary…. Scary! Having finished their salads they seemed charmed by a little dog that sits on a chair also, allowed by it’s boss. As Mum goes to the toilets, the dude with the dog splits leaving an unpaid check and a mad waiter. Then Mum and daughter ask the waiter what movie they should pick from the list, the waiter recommends “Fantastic Mr. Fox”. “Ah! Roald Dahl!” Mum exclaims… “That’s a good story naturally! But it’s animation, that means for kids?” she asks the waiter. “Oh no, madam, it is with humour for grown ups”. Finally they left the terrace and Bertels ordered another Gnome beer. A little later a taxi stops and a big gipsy like character steps out holding a pizza box in his hand. He is drunk, without a doubt and waggles his way to the terrace to claim the chair where Mum was sitting, next to Coach! His belt hangs loose from his pants and his socks are worn out in his slippers. Throwing the pizza box on his table an muttering strange words in a foreign language. But he can speak Dutch as well! As a waitress walks by, he thinks aloud in foreign with suddenly “Lekker ding” in the sentence! That look on that waitresses face! Time for Bertels to move, a slow walk along the canal in the very nice spring evening. The path along the canal seems a place for joggers to shape up in the evenings, boys and girls run by all the time and Coach enjoys the heavy breathing and swinging breasts! A little later Bertels arrives at the Vredenburgh Leeuwenbergh venue and walks in to collect his reservation. All is well and Coach orders a cappuccino to overcome the thirty minutes before the festival starts. In the setting sun, with a delicious cappuccino, on a park bench, Bertels sits first rang on the joggers track listening to Gravenhurst sung by Valerie. Twenty minutes later things start to become a little chilly, so Coach decides to go inside. Several folks are already in the venue and ten minutes later everybody is allowed to go to the room where the first part of this Festival is about to take place. Up the stairs into the nice church, redecorated as full music theatre. Lots of chairs in rows before a stage with a big shiny black Steinway & Sons concert piano on it! Wow! A dude steps up to the stage and explains the crowd what to expect tonight: First of all Daan Vandewalle plays ”The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” by the American composer Frederic Rzewski (1938). This work is one of the vastest variations for piano, ever written: 36 variations! Rzewski wrote these variations as a support for the Chilean People during the Pinochet Regime. It describes a battle, gulfing from variation to variation, from victory to defeat, from joy to mourning. Bertels picked a spot from where the hands of Daan could be seen dancing over the keys. One hour non stop power play on piano! Coach really loved it! Quick dark and chaotic parts, loud and clear, followed by more silent ambient parts and vice versa. Daan read the notes as the pages were turned by a boy who had to read along in utter concentration in order to turn just on time. There were several shouts in the piece, a bang (the flap?) and whistling. Then there was a moment where Daan pointed out a sign on the page where the boy could take a brief pause, time for a small variation by the player himself! Then Daan nodded and continued the theme and the boy continued turning the pages. Real fun to see what different aspects piano play can contain! Great show, great piece and a great achievement by Daan Vandewalle. Downstairs again, Bertels recognized some Moi, le Voisin band members and asked them to show the way to the next venue, at first they didn’t really feel like it because they where by bike, but then Coach found that Jan and his Aunt where also walking and lost in the city. That did the trick and Moi, le Voisin walked Coach, Jan and his Aunt to the Ekko venue. Jan and his Aunt came all the way from Nistelroode to Utrecht for this festival, they really liked the piano concert but had concerns on the next concert: Fender Stratocaster feedback storms with tearing drum solo’s from this German dude Caspar Brötzmann from Kreuzberg, Berlin. Many see this son of famous Peter Brötzmann (free jazz saxophonist) as the new Jimi Hendrix because of how he handles the Fender. Arriving at the Ekko venue, Caspar and band are already playing their, indeed, harsh loud deafening noise! This show is called Massaker (Massacre), and that it is for the ears! Bertels likes feedback, and hard sounds very now and then, but this time Coach just couldn’t see the purpose of it. The parts where Caspar sang like Allerseelen (sprechgesang) were good, but the immense loud and chaotic drum pieces in-between were totally Avant-Garde crap! Halfway the concert Bertels tried to make a picture of the band, but the dark corner where Caspar stood in dark clothes was not visible in all attempts. Exit the black Ekko box! Fresh air and no more ear defeating noise! Jan and his Aunt pulled the eject button much earlier, so Coach took them along to the next and last venue of the night: SJU Jazz podium. Long before the mass arrived, Jan, his Aunt and Bertels picked the best seats and ordered the best drinks: Chocolate milk. Spring water and Leffe. Aunty talked on and on about all the fun stuff she does in her spare time and showed all the photo functions on her mobile phone. At one point she spotted the guitar player, of the jazz band that was going to play, with a cap just like hers. She quickly put her cap on her head and said, look I’m being hip too! Several conversations and Leffe’s later the crowd started to drip in and occupied the cosy seats around tables with candles on them in front of the stage. Then the band came on: Das Kapital, a Danish guitar player that looked just like Junkie XL, a French Drummer with a lot of different drum sticks and the German tenor saxophonist. This trio explained that they would perform work by and inspired by the German composer Hanss Eisler (1898-1962). Eisler is known as the “The Karl Marx of Music” and composed music for theatre pieces by Brecht, a close friend of his. Das Kapital performed a great show with lots of jazzy influences, the Junkie XL look alike was playing an ordinary acoustic guitar with piezo element connected to a device that made it sound like a Stratocaster, Hawaii guitar, mandolin or plain and simple country guitar. The drummer was a show apart, always trying different sounds and sticks and tricks to both entertain the public and to create a vast array of sounds in these compositions. It came to Coach’s mind that these guys played Eisler’s music in a jazzy DAAU way. Real great! Half way the concert Jan and his Aunt had to go, finding their car and driving back to the south. Bertels stayed and enjoyed the last show. After the Festival, Coach walked to Central Station and found the train to Leiden to be on night schedule, that means over Amsterdam! That’s crap.
The train left at one o clock and finally arrived at Leiden Central at two thirty! The relaxed bike ride to Bertels Cube in the fresh air did good and Coach went to his nest at three. Good night Bertels! Dream sweet things……

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