Bart wrote:Hello Chris;
Many thanks for this info.
Did you meet "The man" in Warsaw?
Do you have a link to a website where this program is announced (So I can add it to the news section on the main page) ?
And these 2 or 3 interviews / press release you talk about; do you have them from internet, or somewhere else. Although they are in Polish, perhaps I can still add them to the interview section (the press release will be in English, isn't it ?). Please let me know ! Thanks in advance !
Hello to you Bart,
No, I didn't have a chance to meet Chris in person, talk to him nor get his autograph in Warsaw.
There were several news items in Polish on his visit, though. Polish press treated him, as always, very gently. He was not criticized nor blamed for his mammoth 11 CD project, except that a few journalist have mentioned that "it's too heavy a load" and that the album is, perhaps, "a little bit too expensive for some (young) people." The running price for "Blue Guitars" at Polish record stores, including the big media centers, such as the "Saturn", "Media Markt" or the "Traffic", is about 55,00 to 60,00 Euro.
To get the original English-language statements I would have to go the press office at the Warner Music-Poland, and yet I'm not accredited as a journalist, you know.
I've read most of the Polish press material related to the Man and I intend to watch the TV4 over the weekend. The TV4 (should someone be interested), is available free on one of the satellites hanging over Europe (I don't know which one, maybe someone knows better and is more knowledgeable on this subject?)
The interview with Chris is to be broadcast this Saturday, December 17 at 12:30 on TV4
http://viptv4.interia.pl/news_vip?inf=695379
Best regards,
Chris
Here is yet another interesting piece on Chris's visit
Title: "Chris Rea Feels the Blues"
http://muzyka.interia.pl/info/infid/694672
(excerpts)
The Interia.pl has asked the British musician, who on March 17, 2006, will be playing a concert in Warsaw, about his definition of blues.
"For me, the rules set forward by the British or the America 'scholars', who claim that only and exclusively certain types of music one can call the blues, are just an utter (pure) nonsense!", said Rea. "Is it possible that these people, who lived earlier that 200 years, didn't have the blues? After all the Africans, who as slaves ended up in America, had certain sensitivities and emotions, and they converted their feelings into certain music. That's how the Mississippi blues was born", pointed our Chris. "But this doesn't at all mean, that if you are not a black man and are not a descendant of slaves, that you don't feel the blues. Quite often I'm wrangling with such questions put to me by the British or the America journalists, who are asking me, just like a teacher in school: what is the blues and what isn't?
But one cannot classify that way neither the music, painting nor - for that matter - any other form of art", said the British vocalist and guitarist.
For Chris Rea, "the blues is simply a bundle of feelings, which doesn't have to be depressive." Chris pointed out that "the careful ability to reproduce the feelings of sadness in music makes a blues man out of a musician. Miles Davis created after all one of the best blues records, the 'Kind of Blue.' The blues is changeable and that's how I wrote about it in the Blue Guitars book", said Rea to the Interia journalist.
"For me, one of the biggest blues men was (Peter) Tchaikovsky, and even though his music wasn't the Mississippi blues, but Russian, it was still the blues! And there is also the flamenco, which didn't find its place on the "Blue Guitars", because there was no space for it. The flamenco is the Spanish rhythm and blues (R&B.) It's the rhythm and the blues, especially when one understands what they singing about", said Rea.
(more to be published "soon", according to the Interia website)