Shirley Smart Trio - Jewelling currents

Shirley Smart

Shirley Smart - cello
Maurizio Minardi - accordion
Demi Garcia Sabat - percussion

Demi Garcia Sabat

Date - 8 March 2016
Venue -  Performance Space, City University, London
Current Album - Random Road by Melange

Shirley Smart live dates -
6 APRIL - Gypsy Nights with Melange, Brixton Ritzy
21 APRIL - Balagan Café Band, Book and Kitchen
24 APRIL - Last Summer's Tealights, Arts Depot, Finchley

The Shirley Smart Trio presents a fresh new approach to the cello, taking the listener on an improvised journey incorporating music from North Africa, Middle East, Balkans, and South America, and jazz as well as original compositions. Shirley will be heading the London Cello Society's "Beyond Cello" division beginning in 2016.

Maurizio Minardi

The urgency of broken pieces dot the river bed like the hand of an overexcited Seurat. Maurizio Minardi is the stone, the boulders as smooth as the accordionists naked pate. His varied hues and heavyweight shapes shimmering beneath the cool waters of Shirley Smart's cello. She is the flow, her notes run around and over Minardi. Dominating and swamping when the swell is high, yet playful and alive when they work together. Smart has both a river's predictability and unpredictability, remaining mostly within the boundaries of her melodies but dancing and jinking within those running currents. She flows and stops, but always with a wistful race towards the future, to be swept downstream where we can only see the light jewelling on the river's surface.

AL.

Shirley Smart - Maurizio Minardi - Kate Shortt

Shirley Smart - Cello

Shirley Smart is one of the 'fixers' on London's music scene, creating groups, projects and collaborations on a regular basis. Rarely is a gig the same twice, either a twist in terms of personnel or a shuffle of the musical pack. This night (15/03/2015) at the Green Note she was alongside accordionist Maurizio Minardi and followed by the multi-talents of Kate Shortt.

Not only was it the birthday of Shirley Smart but also Mother's Day, and being a caring daughter she had her mother close by in the crowd. It gave this inquisitive artist the chance to learn a little more about Smart's roots. It is quite a musical family tree that grows around her, brother Tim is a trombonist of note but the line of musicality stretches further as her grandfather was an accomplished pianist as is her uncle and mother.

Maurizio Minardi - Accordion

Early exchanges with her stage partner Maurizio Minardi yielded dancing cutlasses, adventure and whole cycles of narratives. There was pathos too, long drawn breaths from Minardi's accordion, drags of pity and salty beauty. There was a primness in the Shirley Smart penned Waltz that descended into several lines of enquiry like an Agatha Christie novel. It was traditional but with a side order of murder and humour.

We heard that chuckle again within Marcello, who's theme reached us from another century, from a time of imagination, one that unfurled at a slower pace. You could see the narrative etched into the face of the song's protagonist, perhaps he inhabited the light and dark of the fairground. The extent of our collective 'perhaps' were endless, such was the number of mental worlds created by this composition. The black book opened our mouths with slack wonder, it's dramatic surges left us all gasping for more but alas the climax was all too soon, even in the hands of Minardi, our Italian lover.

Kate Shortt - Cello and wit

The second half of the night was a one-hander from Kate Shortt, bringing us her unique combination of cello and comedy. It was a performance that twisted the dials of our genre-sensitive minds, hopping from station to station like a pre-digital radio sliding in and out of wave bands. Linear time doesn't exist with Shortt, she occupies a zone of her own, a world where everything and everyone becomes either subject matter or an instrument to play with.

Shirley Smart and Maurizio Minardi will be playing at The Crypt, St.Martin-in-the-Fields on the 20th May 2015 with Minardi's quartet.
Book tickets HERE.

AL.

Maurizio Minardi - Blind Bee Jazz

Maurizio Minardi - Accordion

A second visit within a fortnight to Jazz at Blind Bee (1 CHANGE ALLEY, LONDON EC3V 3ND) saw this night start to evolve from chrysalis to butterfly with the performance of Maurizio Minardi's quartet (18/09/2014).

Shirley Smart - Cello

If you haven't visited the venue then give it a go, with free entry and a sophisticated ambience it has the wind behind it, but there are the twin issues of background noise and lighting still overcome. Despite all 4 musicians dwelling in the darkest corner you cannot ignore the figurehead of Maurizio Minardi and his accordion. A man who reveals so little through his persona yet lays a whole gamut of emotions at your feet through his music.

You never forget the first time that Michael Nyman's music cascades over you. Its unrelenting waves, the pulse, the queer emotions that release themselves. Minardi undoubtedly possesses this power of simplicity too. At first his accordion marched us along with wheeze and guff, but alongside Shirley Smart on cello this soon turned to drama. Our emotions squirming out of safe hands and physically it felt though they had spilled out onto the floor before us.

Milko Ambrogini - Bass

It was such a broad range of speeds, themes and colours from Maurizio Minardi, with joy and menace in tunes that spoke of Germanic deaths, darker corners and Grimm fairytales. Alongside Shirley Smart they painted the pastoral too, a slow hollow-hearted start led to a landscape at peace, with a fresh wetness to the grass and a vastness to the sky ranging above us.

Marco Quarantotto - bass

Marco Quarantotto is fast becoming a favourite of mine to draw, his mushroom cloud of hair always appears to have exploded after a particularly strenuous attack of the drums. He imbibes in quiet moments and I catch the thought of Henry Spencer of Eraserhead fame under the Blind Bee's electric blue light. Milko Ambrogini unfortunately languished (only pictorially) in the pit of the dark. I made a sketch of what I saw but it might have been Nosferatu playing the bass for all I knew, such was the cloak of blackness that surrounded him.

The music was so strong it transcended light and dark, it rose and fell, it sparked with emotive charge. We even had time for a chase sequence that propelled the quartet along the narrowed streets of ours mind. Though we ran and ran, throats burning and with oversized hearts bursting, it was joy we felt. Pure unadulterated joy.

You/we have the opportunity to hear both Maurizio Minardi and Shirley Smart with Melange tomorrow night September 24th at The Vortex.

AL.

Shirley Smart - Melange

Shirley Smart - Cello

Sometimes a group of musicians suit their venue so well it makes the evening all the more powerful. The faded glory and peeling walls of Wilton's Music Hall played host to the flavoursome music of Melange last month (20/06/2014). Wait a minute, this 7 piece group are neither fading in their talents nor afflicted with shabbiness. It was the earthy and rooted quality of their music that sat so wonderfully at Wilton's. The grade II listed building was built in 1859 and understandably still wears it scars. It has a pock marked honesty that interior decorators often try to imitate but everything on show here had authenticity.

Like their surroundings the Melange Collective have gathered their music and narratives through an equally interesting journey. Formed by cellist Shirley Smart after returning from 10 years living, working and studying in Jerusalem they blend music from North  Africa, Turkey, Asia, Brazil and the Middle East anmongst other

Stefanos Tsourelis - Oud

Despite Smart taking centre stage it was Stefanos Tsourelis who immediately caught the eye with his oud. It is my job to translate what I hear to the sketchbook and before me was the musical equivalent. The sound of Tsourelis' pear shaped palette was light and colourful, more watercolour but with the occasional charcoal swipe. His pursed lips also gave him the air of a painter who, standing back from his canvas, squints his eyes to admire his handiwork.

Peter Michaels - Guitar

The stage lighting shot off the guitar of Peter Michaels as if he were being baked under the midday sun or trying to send Morse code via signal mirror. On his Bulgarian yogurt inspired tune his playing was fractious and bubbling. His head was bowed with the memory of the after-effects of eating the aforementioned bacterially fermented milk product.

One of the delights of this performance was the interaction between Shirley Smart and her fellow collective members. Amongst Michaels whirls and slides she was messy in the most seductive of ways. We picked through her repertoire as though she had spread it out on her bedroom floor, exotic coloured scarfs churned with postcards. There was intricate jewellery and a rich but pungent layer of foreign detritus like a gap-year student who had just returned from 6 months InterRailing. It was a delight to pick through her Turkish souvenirs in particular.

Maurizio Minardi - Accordion

Like any good collective, Melange were only as good as the sum of their parts. Lets kick fair play into the long grass though, we didn't hear enough of Maurizio Minardi. His 'This is not a Rhumba' was one of the tunes that the rest of the evening pivoted around. Wilton's Hall was so busy that I viewed just a flank of the dynamic accordionist, and amongst the further tunes we tasted his talents but were never sated.

Joe Browne - Saxophone

Joe Browne featured on selected tunes throughout the evening and he made up for his absences with a spirited performance when he did step into the spotlight. He blowed hard and fervent on soprano saxophone in particular, often his face turned a scorching puce, the commitment to the cause evident even to those in the rear seats.

Often second sets can be a disappointment after a successful first but Melange came back stronger. Michele Montolli bowing on bass, his resonance filling the high ceilinged hall. The tension as Demi Garcia Sabat worked up a lather on percussion and those glasses which slid closer and closer to the end of his nose. Fortunately never falling into his lap.

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The oud with its throaty beginning was conversational on the Iraqi tune 'Foq El-Nakhal' and Stefanos Tsourelis brought to it a humour that was thoughtful and dare I say (without sounding pretentious) philosophical. It was the playful jousting between Michaels and Minardi that brought the most joy. They teased one another with affection, like two old friends.

Demi Garcia Sabat - Percussion

Relationships were the theme for the night, of the future and the past, east and west and that between music and the atmospheric hall it flourished in. The mind and the hand which guided my pencil were happy bedfellows too. Both eye and ear would like to experience the richness of Melange again, and so shall I, for where they go I shall follow.

AL.