Our classes finished earlier this month, and although we still have some admin to finish it can all be done online, so we decided to head back up north to take a little holiday in La Serena - the beautiful city in norte chico Chile that we visited on bicentenario (see previous post). Although we've been there before, for various reasons we planned to go back sometime - we'll do another post on our time there more generally, but this one is another about music. We managed to get into the La Serena Jazz Club!
The jazz club in La Serena is in a beautiful old building, a cafe during the day with live jazz some nights of the week. It's very well regarded, and gets well-known jazz musicians from around South America - though several of the house band serve coffee during the day.
We had a coffee there one morning during our stay in La Serena and asked the waitress about when there would next be live jazz - she said this weekend and offered to get us in for free! Whoop! A well known jazz trumpeter, Cristian Cuturrufo, was coming to play with the house band.
So we turned up at the right time and gave the suspicious looking guy on the door the code word we'd been told, then went in and ordered a lovely bottle of carmenere reserva and settled in... it was an amazing intimate venue, no more than about 30 people in total, and we were about 2 metres away from the band. There was even a point when the compere, reintroducing the band after a break, turned to us and asked where we were from. The music was excellent, a good balance of jazz wizardry and good old fashioned raucous tunes, played by one of the most enthusiastic sets of musicians ever.
Here's a few pics, with some videos. If you don't fancy all of the vids then we recommend the "Tequila" ones, but they're all worth a watch, or at least we think so.
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| this guy was an awesome bongo monster! |
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| parp |
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| the talented old boy on the accordian |
This is also great:
After being persuaded to come back and play some more, they finished with this - it's weird but cool being in a room full of chileans shouting "when the Saints... go marching in" at each other... and if you look carefully at some points during this video you can see that by this time a crowd of people had gathered outside and were dancing away on the pavement (plus an overweight man in an orange t-shirt) - the doors behind the drummer were wide open with just the security grilles on so everyone outside got a pretty good sound too! You can also see at points one of the kids of a bandmember going crazy at the front...
Finally a picture of Struan with the man himself, believe it or not they are pretty much both the same distance from the camera:
Awesome raucous jazz, certainly one of the best things we've ever been to and we feel very privileged to have seen such talent!
chao!
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