This last weekend enabled me to enjoy, or at the very least be exposed to music I had never heard before.

In many an Early Music Vancouver sponsored concert, Executive & Artistic Director Director Matthew White poses the question,  “What is new music?” I think both of us (he the trained musician and countertenor) and this amateur that new music is not 20^th century or 21^st century music. It is not 17^th century baroque. It is all of them if you have not heard them before.

Los Dos Amigos - Bramwell Tovey  & Alexander Weimann - Christ Church Cathedral January 28 2017

All of them bring the anticipation (before you hear them performed) of what they will be like?  What surprises will be in them? And so on.

What you hear for the first time is not always easy. You have to be exposed to it longer and immerse yourself in it. Thelonious Monk sounded odd the first time I listened to him in early 60s. Bruckner seemed longwinded and much too complex for the first time (and I must admit for a few times after). That Vancouver punk band the Subhumans’ “Fuck You” seemed all noise at first but not any longer.

So my Rosemary and I attended with some measure of “what is in store for us?” this last Saturday’s  second variant of New Music For Old Instruments at the sonically challenged Christ Church Cathedral whose sound man should have been excommunicated on the spot. I will stop my rant right there!

Let us hope that we will be able to listen to this truly new music from composers Jocelyn Morlock, Linda Caitlin Smith, André Ristic, Patrick Giguere, Emily Doolittle, Thierry Didrow and Rodney Sharman again so that it will perhaps grow on us.

Los Cuatro Amigos Alexander Weimann, Bramwell Tovey, Rodney Sharman & Reginald Mobley

This concert confirmed my suspicion that I have been going to EMV and Pacific Baroque concerts with the idea that I am going to listen to something that is comfortably predictable, within the confines of this amateur who might not entirely understand what scordatura is all about. These wonderful baroque concerts, now stressing the composers, once sort of unknown in the latter part of the 20^th century, were comfortable. But many became blurs in my memory moments after leaving the concert venue.

Matthew White, in conjunction with composer Rodney Sharman, and the wonderfully unsatisfied in his milieu keyboardist and Artistic Director of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra Alexander Weimann got together with the blessings of Vancouver Symphony’s Artistic Director Bramwell Tovey to happily attempt (and they succeeded) our level of predictable comfort.

I cite Alexander Weimann who can also play a mean jazz piano about the positive attitude of being unsettled and unsatisfied in what one does (and he does lots) and the impetus to (that almost hackneyed political expression) to move forward.

Konstantin Bozhinov & Reginald Mobley

I cite the third piece of Saturday’s program by composer Thierry Tidrow (b. 1986 when you could finally drink without eating at a Vancouver restaurant!)  Ricercar in which French-Canadian Noemi Gagnon-Lefrenais (am I sexist to point out she is especially lovely and my baroque bassist friend Curtis Daily would concur) which was a solo piece for her violin.

After the concert I chatted with concertmaster Chloe Meyers and told her that the first two movements had been much too quiet for me to discern but that the third movement had loud passages and interesting stuff I could appreciate. With a smile Meyers told me that Ricercar had no three movements but a complex turning of pages which is why I had thought to the contrary!

Reginald Mobley & the Pacific Baroque Orchestra

I want to hear Ricercar again and listen to all of it. I want to be challenged and adopt the unpredictable. Thanks to White and company I think more of this will happen in the future.

I want to also listen to Jocelyn Morlock’s Golden which I have heard before performed by that Pacific Baroque Orchestra (just like Saturday) but with soprano (she of the red hair) Phoebe McRae. This time we had countertenor Reginald Mobley ( Mob pronounced like those experts on cement feet and not spats) doing his wonders. The lovely piece has some water-filled glasses that were played by Mobley ( we all call him Reggie). Weimann had the orchestra play extra pianissimo so this man in his sonically challenged ( a black hole pocket perhaps) very good 7^th row seat could hear them!

Alexander Weimann & Bramwell Tovey

Mobley sang some jazz standards (does anybody besides me know that he took lessons with Ella Fitzgerald?) arranged by Sharman and Weimann and a trio of songs Obsessions, Liebesleid/Lovepain and Songs from Faust that satisfied my desire to listen to new. And I could not finish here without also mentioning the presence of Bulgarian lutenist (it was a theorbo wasn’t it?) Konstantin Bozhinov (who also is a master of the accordion) playing with the orchestra but also in Rodney Sharman’s piece for voice (expressly written for Reginald Mobley’s countertenor voice) and lute She Walks in Beauty.

All in all it was an evening of challenging and truly (as it should be) challenging music that pushes borders.

My friend, writer Les Wiseman and I worked together at Vancouver Magazine from the late 70s until sometime in the early 90s. We also did stuff for TV Guide while it had money to pay contributors.

Any time I write about our experiences Mr. Wiseman points out that my memory of things stretches strict and ethical journalism. My only defence, a two fold one, is that I am older than he is so my memory is spotty and that in fact I am not a journalist but a photographer. During our tenure at Vancouver Magazine a couple of writers (I will not name them even though if I did Mr. Wiseman would not question their validity) championed “creative non-fiction.”

What you may read below should be taken with a grain of salt.

In the last few days I have become obsessed in remembering in the middle of the night more photographs (for my blog here ) in my files of women with red lips.  A last one was one whose name escaped me. If I cannot remember a name I cannot find the photographs in my files.

With the name in my head again I remembered the circumstances of how it was I took her photograph in 1987.

During those 80s Mr. Wiseman and I were often dispatched to media junkets that included paid hotel rooms in very good establishments. The idea was to lure us into writing and taking photographs that would then appear in Vancouver Magazine.

One of those junkets was a yearly trek to Whistler, BC  for what was called (I believe!) the Whistler Celebrity Ski-athon. Mr. Wiseman, no great skier insisted on going with the every year promise from the organizers that Brooke Shields would attend (she never did even though the carrot was dangle many times).

In 1987 when we arrived at our Whistler hotel, Mr Wiseman suggested we seek the comfort of a good drink. We sat in the bar and a lovely woman came to us and with an “ah shucks” sort of voice told us she was new and from Newfoundland after we ordered or Scotch and sodas. I have to admit that what came to my head involved us taking advantage of a woman with a pure soul. I asked her if she could pour Glenfiddich  into our drinks. She did not seem to understand what that was so I asked her to bring the bill with our drinks. When she did I noticed what I thought would be the case that we were being charged for a cheaper bar Scotch. You can imagine that we took advantage of this during our stay at the hotel. Some have criticized the cardinal sin of diluting Glenfiddich. My only defence is that indeed it makes a very good Scotch and soda.

The evening of that day (it could have been the next, I am not going to worry about the facts!) we were sitting at a table with a woman I had no idea who she was except that she was an apparition of beauty and sex. Her name was Elen Bry. When I took her pictures in b+w ,(Alas! none In colour) so I have no recollection if she wore red lipstick) using my Hollywood style pseudo George Hurrell lighting I had an uncomfortable time looking straight into her eyes.

Ellen Bry

Mr. Wiseman recalls (I am sure with exactitude) that I told Bry and subsequently embarrased us as we were not savvy journalists  that we (both Wiseman and I) did not know who a woman in red was. She was sitting at another table.

I was able to photograph Elvira in colour and indeed she was wearing red lipstick.

This blog is about the colour red and in particular about red lips. It will meander. Right off the bat when I posted it, Canadian Poet George Bowering wrote "tinto". Of course he is right. In Spanish it means red wine.

In March I am taking my wife and granddaughter Lauren, 14, to Buenos Aires. I firmly believe that Lauren’s ability to read music (she is studying the violin and the clarinet) plus she dances at Arts Umbrella (all by her choice and not by parental pressure) puts her at an advantage in our increasingly strange times.

To me just being able to read music opens some spot in her brain that makes her think differently and with a better scope on reality.

Unfortunately she did not do well in French at school so she speaks only one language. But now she suddenly has an interest in her grandfather’s Spanish and is busy with Rosetta Stone on the computer.

How the above will somehow lead into this blog about red lips might tempt those who are reading at this point to trust me that it just might be worthwhile.

If Lauren were here in my oficina now I would tell her that in English you have the colour red and if you are ever so sophisticated you might know of the word carmine, or the French Rouge. I do recall that favourite film of mine, The Crimson Pirate and that some of my red roses are described as being crimson. In Spanish we have the same words for those colours. There is rojo and there is colorado. My Argentine compatriots consider rojo to be low class and only use colorado!  And there is carmesí (crimson) and carmin.

Just citing poetry would give you a many more chances of rhyming in Spanish  or in English if you were thinking of the colour red.

My mother liked to use bright red lipstick. I recall that her choice was Revlon. My preference for and delight of bright red lips has to have come from that.

I noticed red lips (which confirmed my choice) on the cover of the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Jazz Red Hot and Cool  in the early 60s. The cover is a beautiful photograph taken by Richard Avedon. Somehow I was told by someone that the model on the cover was wearing a lipstick called Jazz Red Hot & Cool. I have confirmed that in my Wikipedia:

Cover art

Red lips are hardly ever subtle but I eschew those photographs of tacky boudoir where the photographer has lipstick and nails to match, perhaps with added red pumps. Red cannot shock (as it should) if it is so evident. Look at the pictures here and decide.