Ordinary Nothing

On Saturday evening I went to a performance by Shlomit Aharon.
A terrific singer, with a wonderful voice (She has been at it for a
number of years now, and a friend asked me if she isn’t too old by now,
so to make it absolutely clear, she’s far from it).
Also accompanying were:

• Peter Wertheimer on a saxophone. He was excellent, and
  it’s not the first time I get to hear him play in some capacity. He
  usually plays (at least the bit I got to hear) Jazz, as was also
  evident when in some of the songs in this show he did a little solo
  parts and slight improvs. He’s a good player, and has a good sound.
  Also seemed like a nice person, but that could have just been a little
  stage persona, hard to tell.
• Michal Rahat on the drums. Don’t think I heard her before.
  She played alright. But a bass drum was set to a resonant frequency for
  something most people carry inside their chests, which made all the
  bass strokes very uncomfortable. I know that music that touches your
  heart is supposed to be good, but I think that sentence really did not
  intend for it to be taken literally…
• Dror Alexander on the keyboards. Didn’t hear him before as
  well, and I may have misspelled the name here, not sure. Also did good
  enough a job, if there were any big glitches, I missed them. He ran
  some small banter with Shlomit, as a part of the show, and managed to
  sound almost like it’s all fresh, even though the conversations were
  apparently nearly identical to previous shows of them together.

Anyway, the show was excellent, I like her music, and love her singing.

The show took place in the hall at our city country-club. Tickets for members were at a ridiculously low price, as usual.

This was also the night of some big sport game (soccer?), between an
Israeli team and Ireland (I think). As you may sense, I’m not that much
into sports…

But plenty of other people are. Enough so that the country-club also
had, in their second large hall, a huge-screen cast of the game,
starting at 19:30 (Local time, that’s GMT+2).

The performance was supposed to start at 21:00, but at some point
they realized the game won’t be over, and many people are in the same
target audience, so they delayed it to 21:30. This only took place at
Thursday, two days in advance, so some people missed the notice and
arrived for 21:00, but better late than never.

Of course, sport games never end on time, or so I’m told. We arrived
in plenty to time to 21:30… Plenty of chair occupied by jackets and
bags, but the people were all in the other room watching the game.

The performance itself started only at about 22:00. But at least
people seemed happy, apparently the game was 1:0 against us (I use us
for Israel here, though I don’t particularly feel for any side in this
matter) from about 3 minutes after the game started, and changed to 1:1
at about 3 minutes before the game ended. Personally, it doesn’t strike
me as a huge victory, but what do I know?

It was interesting to see that Shlomit isn’t more of a sports buff
than I am. She mentioned the game, and seemed just as puzzled over the
whole thing. I’ll hazard a guess she wasn’t too thrilled about having
to sit and wait for an extra half an hour, but if that’s true, she
certainly didn’t show it.

March 29th, 2005 at 15:01 EET | Categories: Culture, Music | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.