Fringe Music
The Great Song Cycle, Song Cycle, the Space at Surgeons Hall
****
The Shakuhachi Experience, the Space on North Bridge
***
Rob Adams
A SPECIAL Fringe survivor’s award goes to Joanna Wallfisch who endured the attentions of not one but two technicians on her opening day and got through an equipment breakdown with the briefest of pauses. Clearly, if you’ve cycled from Portland, Oregon to San Luis Obispo, California, you’re made of resourceful stuff.
Wallfisch’s eventful, 1100-plus-mile trip gave her the raw material for her show, which she presents in a cool but involving storytelling style, creating lush harmonies and vocal backdrops with her loop pedal and singing softly and melodiously about the people she met and the places her wheels took her.
There are a lot of intriguing characters and stories here and Wallfisch is a very talented musician who brings it all together seamlessly – rogue cables notwithstanding – with her baritone ukulele, an impressively groovy toy piano riff and an even more impressive kazoo solo. A lunchtime treat that runs until August 25.
Markus Guhe gives an informative introduction to the shakuhachi, the five-hole Japanese bamboo flute, and its history in the Shakuhachi Experience with occasional percussive assistance and props such as the basket that shakuhachi players wore over their faces when operating as government spies.
His musical examples are very capably played, if a little lacking in the soulful expression that has drawn jazz musicians including the trumpeter Arve Henricksen and saxophonist Tryge Seim into the shakuhachi’s orbit, and it’s a light-hearted presentation overall, not least when the German-born but Lanarkashire-based Guhe returns to his teenage years and mixes Japanese lore and percussion with Kraftwerk-style electronics. Run ends August 25.
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