The last concert we had in Kyrgyzstan nwas in a very nice venue, it was part of a cultural centre. It had a marvelous ceiling, with a beautiful chandelier. A nice stage, and a quiet nice soundsystem, although the local soundman didn’t know how to use it properly. At the end we had to stop a little bit earlier because some authorities demanded us to stop, without any clear reasons, so the gig was a little bit shorter, but not too bad. (in the end we played at a lot of different places, with all very unusual names, like Sokuluk, Balikchy, Cholpon Ata, Kadjisay,Bishkek Alamedin Erea, Novopokrovka, Kara Balta)
The last day we packed all our stuff and were planing to do some sightseeing in Bishkek, (it was the first day when it was snowing) but the car that was supposed to take us there broke down, so in the end we went at the end of the afternoon to Bishkek on our way to the airport. We did some shopping in a shopping mall. It was a big building with a lot of stuff, and in some way sorted by products, but in the end i found out that it was actually a big gathering of small kiosks, with all there own owner, and that everyone was renting a piece of the building of the owner of the building. That’s why a lot of products where sold at a lot of different places in the same building, although all the similar kind of products were on the same floor.
Before heading to the airport, we went to a nice restaurant were they had some really good nice ‘live’ music. Good balanced, not too loud, and well played. We had a very good pizza, did some debiefring of the tour with our two hosts, who did all the organisation and logistics. And we went to the airport, where we would leave at four o’clock in the morning to arrive at Ataturk Airport at five o’clock in the morning (the flight took four hours).
At the meantime i am already in istanbul for about four days, learning some basic turkish phrases, meating new people, seeing new things, travelling on my own through this huge metropolic city, which is very challenging.
At the moment TACO (the organisation who arranged our tour in Kyrgyzstan) is organizing a tour for a flamenco/classical guitar player, Jason Carter. He’s playing marvelous guitar. (check his website: www.jasoncarter.net). The first day here, we had lunch and yesterday we had a nice meeting in his hotel and visited a concert of him in a small club in Istanbul. He’s actually in Istanbul because he’s speaking at the 3rd freemuse world conference on music and censorship (www.freemuse.org). The conference has some nice speeches up to now, and on monday evening there will be a jamsession between all the musicians in Babylon. I’ll keep you informed. At the moment he’s busy with a new project, the helsinki project. He asked me to play some bass parts for a few of the songs, so probably tomorrow or monday, we will record some bass stuff, just on his hotelroom, very funny and a nice new experience. His music is a bit similar to Nitin Sawhney, and very nice acoustic guitar stuff.
posted by bASSIc aRTs @ 2:04 PM
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