Gillian Grassie – Singer Songwriter Harpist

Brotherly Love in the City of Lights

// September 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // Music, Performances, Travel

I managed to squeeze in a show here before I leave for Berlin – and it’s got an ALL PHILLY line-up! Jim Boggia and Zach Djanikian will be joining me for an evening of music in the Latin Quarter (6eme).

If you’re free Tuesday night and in the city of lights, drop by the Tennessee Jazz Bar around 9 PM. I’m hoping to finish some new material over the weekend and test-drive some songs!

Details here and on the Shows page:

September 29th: Paris, France
Tennessee Jazz Club
12 Rue André Mazet
75006 Paris
9 PM (21h)

I’ll miss this town for many reasons, including the fact that THIS happens twice a week:

pari_roller

What you’re watching are several thousand Parisian rollerbladers taking over the streets of Paris Friday night. It’d kind of like that bicycle takeover in Philly, only these guys get an official police escort to help divert traffic – twice a week! If you ever plan on visiting Paris with your rollerblades, visit Pari-Roller.com for the scoop. Suggested listening: Adrien Reju’s rendition of “Brand New Key” from her album A Million Hearts.

(belated) Normandy

// September 20th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Travel

In the month of August, the Parisians who can generally clear out of Paris and leave the city for the hordes of tourists who descend during vacation season. Because of this shift in population, the kitsch factor of the town goes way up and the ratio of decent, local live music to awful cover bands singing Oasis songs for drunken Expats gets completely skewed. I’d been planning to spend August traveling and learning about the music outside of Paris, so after an incredible ten days at the la Festival Interceltique de Lorient in Brittany, I was only too happy to accept a serendipitous invitation to play a house concert and follow-up on some new contacts in Normandy.

Jacques-Jean and Anna reading by the ivy

Through the graces of some dear friends, I was able to stay at the most unbelievably gorgeous farmhouse in Carentan, a small village not far from the coast. This place was the real deal. The ivy that covered the entire front façade was so old that the vines were as thick as my forearm and the glossy leaves bigger than my hand. Beyond the garden was an old boulangerie, a tiny building with an enormous wood oven for baking bread. Wild blackberries lined the sides of the single-lane roads running through the marshes and cow pastures, and there were hazelnuts and an old fig tree growing in the yard.

Jacques-Jean with the remains of the blackberry crumble (photo by Andrea Alessi)

On the last evening I was there, we gathered an obscene number of blackberries and made a delicious crumble with them and the hazelnuts we’d painstakingly gathered, shelled, roasted, and chopped. (Okay, so I wasn’t really involved in the actual gathering and shelling of the nuts. But I watched and later I ate the crumble and it was truly fantastic).

Also among the culinary adventures that week was the day we found a rusted, old-school rotisserie. We bought two chickens, stuffed their skin with rosemary, garlic, and shallots, and roasted them in front of an open fire in the den. About three to four hours later, we ate two gorgeous birds with a mushroom cream sauce.

the rotisserie

Every other evening, we would take this adorable tin milk pail with a wooden handle and walk to a nearby dairy farm to get our fresh milk, and when I say fresh I mean warm-from-the-cow, unpasteurized, full-cream deliciousness. When we came back, we’d pour the milk into a big glass bowl and leave it in the fridge overnight, skimming off the thick cream that had risen to the top with a large spoon in the morning and shaking it vigorously in old jam jars to make butter. Seriously.

One day I got to talking with the very nice dairy farmer and he let us go into the small barn and watch the milking process. After a little more chatting he even let me stick my finger in one of those milking machine suction valves to see what it felt like (gentle), which is way more than we got to do on my third grade class field trip.

attempting to convince these cows they should let us knuffle them

I confess to being irrationally excited by the milk pail and to wearing pigtails and skipping almost every time we did the dairy run (I’m REALLY sorry I don’t have a picture of this, don’t know how we missed it). My enthusiasm for the quaint factor was, however, a bit muted by a severe bout of indigestion that lasted for a week after I returned to Paris. I didn’t really think I’d have to break into the supplies of ciproflaxen and immodium until I got to India, but I guess the cows who made that delicious, unpasteurized milk didn’t want me to forget them when I left.

Even with the upset tummy, the trip to Normandy was a total treat. Sometimes when I’m in the city, squashed in the Metro at rush hour, I think about those long evening walks around the marshes, looking for cows amenable to the idea of koe knufflen. I hope I can visit again someday. Maybe next time I’ll run into David Sedaris.

nap time

(For more pictures, check out the photo gallery on my flickr account)

Bread and Roses

// September 5th, 2009 // 8 Comments » // Travel

in the poetry nook at Shakespeare & Co. I left a a poem tacked to the wall - If ever you're in Paris, look for it!

The thing about fresh bread that you don’t realize in America, when all you have at your disposal are pre-sliced bags of “seven grain wholesomeness” preserved to within an inch of its perpetually spongy life, is that fresh bread goes stale – quickly. Overnight, in fact. That’s okay though, because one of my favorite breakfasts in France involves dipping crusty chunks of leftover baguette, smothered in demi-sel butter and jam, into a steaming bowl of chocolate milk. The staleness of the bread becomes important here, because it softens as it sops up the hot milk and chocolate and becomes the most delicious, slightly chewy, juicy bite to start the day.

If I were more mature or had an earlier wake-up call or an actual desk job to get to, I might mix the milk with Ricoré, the chicory-blended instant coffee they sell right next to the powdered chocolate. As it happens, I’m on my own schedule and generally don’t wake up until around 9 AM, when the construction workers start banging holes into dry-wall and jack-hammering cement mercilessly. They seem to be converting several rooms between the sixth and seventh floors into a single, enormous apartment that will no doubt be magnificent when they’re finished. At the moment it’s mostly just dusty, and the stairwell and hallways fill with chalky clouds from the plaster demolition.

I made friends with some of the workers, to be polite, and also because I know approximately 3.5 people in Paris, and those not very well, so it’s nice to have the human interaction. One of the men is from Portugal originally and when he asks me out on dates I pretend that I can’t understand his heavily accented French, which is partially true. Still, I gave him one of my CDs and sort of sweet-talked him into fixing the lights in the hallway. Now, when I come home from concerts at 2 AM, I don’t have to rally quite so much courage to round the corners of the narrow, Tim Burton corridors with my shaky, LED flashlight and pocket-knife. The pocket-knife part of the all-in-one Handy Tool used to lend me that extra bit of confidence I needed to brave late-night bathroom excursions, when I would walk with measured steps, every nerve on edge, calming myself by imagining exactly which jiu-jitsu moves I would explode into when faced by the serial killer or vampire who was surely lurking in the shadows just ahead. I consider the Portuguese’ copy of Serpentine one of the best-placed CDs I’ve ever given away.

The garret I’m living in is strange, because it would be a lot like living in a student dormitory, if only there were anyone else here. There’s a collage covering the North wall of one of the bathrooms – torn off pieces of newspaper and magazine advertisements, heads of Obama and Sarkozy and Michael Jackson and kittens. It’s the sort of thing that seems like it was a collective, unspoken effort; when you’d wander to the bathroom at night you’d bring some tape and the latest quirky find from your favorite periodical. I wonder who did make it, and where they are now. I can imagine the little numbered doors clanging open and shut all night, Sorbonne kids sitting cross-legged in the hallways with flashlights, studying before exams, music from crappy stereo speakers spilling through the thin walls, cigarette smoke curling out open windows, someone knocking on a neighbor’s door for a condom. We’d laugh about the stairs, and the broken lights, and the Tim Burton aesthetic. Maybe we’d plan a group outing to see Number 9. But there’s no one. At first, I thought there might be someone else – a noisy someone else – until I realized that if I didn’t shut the bathroom door properly, it would blow open and bang shut with the wind all night.

chambre de bonne

Of course, the seventh floor could never be a student dormitory, for the simple reason that in this neighborhood, it’s illegal to rent out the chambres de bonne, since the good, upstanding residents of the Septième wouldn’t want rooms in their building sublet to untrustworthy, low-income, young, noisy strangers (quelle horreur!). As the name implies, these rooms were originally reserved for live-in servants, and the back staircase with separate entrance passes by the external laundry closets on each landing, and the backdoors of the main apartments, which open directly into the kitchen. My impression is that the rooms on the seventh floor are mostly used for storage now, since it’s a ghost town up here, but theoretically it’s still acceptable for each main apartment in the building to house, say, a nanny, in their chambre de bonne, or use it as a guest bedroom. This latter scenario is the case with the dear family friends who have been kind enough to let me stay here while I’m in Paris. It bears noting that they are a decidedly hip couple with an adorable five-year-old daughter and share none of the stuffiness that seems to afflict their neighbors.

The long staircase and grim hallways are more than made-up for by how cheerful my little room is once you’re inside.* It’s tiny in a sweet, charming way, with a comfortable bed, a kitchenette, a miniature shower, and a truly fantastic little wooden writing desk by big bay windows that let in an unbelievable amount of light from the courtyard. There is a fabulous set of enormous, old-school iron keys for the door. I especially like being here during rainstorms, when I can hear an entire symphony of water spilling off the rooftop into the gutters, and the diffused light extends the feeling of early-morning into mid-afternoon.

fabulous, enormous, old-school iron keys

It’s days like these that I do most of my writing (musical and otherwise) and reading. When I’m not doing research for my Watson project, I’ve tried to pair my pleasure-reading list with the places I’m visiting.** For Paris, that list has ranged from Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon, to Leila Sebbar’s Métros Instantanés, to Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity(totally different from the movie, by the way, and largely set in Paris circa 1980), to Hemmingway’s A Moveable Feast (which I picked up at the same Shakespeare and Co. mentioned repeatedly in the book).

I’ve especially enjoyed Hemmingway’s memoir, not least of all because he also spent most of his time in Paris living in tiny garret apartments (granted, in vastly worst conditions than mine, in much less posh neighborhoods, without plumbing, oh, and with a wife and young child). His descriptions of this time in his life, as a young writer discovering his craft and living humbly but happily abroad, really strike a chord with my own experience right now. Even though I daresay Paris has lost much of the charm it had in Hemmingway’s time – a charm that has been converted into a sort of nostalgic kitsch rather conspicuously clung to in some of the brasseries and certainly in the postcards stands that clutter every corner – I think there’s something special about being 23 and living in a funky apartment in any big, strange new city, where you don’t know anyone, and everything is new and foreign and exciting. It’s doubly special when you have some kind of creative outlet to channel all that into.

Métros Instantanés

There are several songs in the fire now, including one little tune that I wrote while in a terrible bout of homesickness, thinking of my sister. Mind you, it’s a very crappy little recording, done on my iPhone as I was writing it, and a long way from any final arrangement. It is also an instrumental, partially instigated by a recently rekindled love affair with the traditional world of harp at the Festival Interceltique in Lorient (blog about THAT forthcoming). I’m pretty sure “I Miss My Sister” is not going to be its working title. But still, I’m posting it here so that I can share with all of you a very genuine moment in this grand adventure I’ve embarked upon. Past experience tells me that the worst of the homesickness will pass over in a few more days. Then I should be good for about five months. After five months, I’m not sure what happens, but I’ll be sure to let you know.

I Miss My Sister

Bryn Mawr College came back to life for the fall semester this week and I can’t help thinking of all my dear, dear friends settling into those gorgeous gothic buildings that don’t look so unlike some of the older bâtiments here. I’ve been imagining the students gathering underneath the trees between Taylor’s bell tower and Thomas Great Hall for the first step-sing of the year, raising their colored lanterns each time the refrain, “hearts starve as well as bodies / give us bread but give us roses,” comes around. I remember sitting on a velvet, Queen Anne armchair in the blue room of the Wyndham Alumni house for my Watson interview, being asked what challenges I thought I might face during the year. I said that while I worried about many things – staying on budget, the logistics of traveling with a harp, language barriers and the limitations they might place on my interview subjects – I thought isolation might be one of the biggest hurtles to cross.

Loneliness is an inevitable part of any long-term traveling experience, and it’s not necessarily a bad part of it. Discovering the pleasure of my own company, learning how to forge new social networks, finding the courage and confidence to go out there and make a fool of myself in new languages – that’s all part of the Watson experience, and it’s important. But I’m finding the project aspect of the fellowship increasingly critical, since it lends a structure and purpose to days that would otherwise feel like an overwhelming, aimless void. There’s only so much wandering around city streets – even streets as pretty as those in Paris – you can do before you start to feel a hunger all the pain au chocolat in the world couldn’t fill. And it is at the edges of this place where I am most grateful for my work and for my music.

Footnotes:

*I wouldn’t moan and groan about the staircase so much, except that you have to remember that I’m traveling with a harp, which I carry generally on my back, and in the French system the first floor is the American second floor, so actually I’m on the eighth floor, and if you count the descent into the basement of the building upon the initial entry, then it’s a total of nine spiraling staircases I have to climb, with my harp. The good news is that my legs haven’t been in this great shape since I ran with the cross-country team in high school, and all that huffing and puffing definitely offsets the pain au chocolat and pâté I’ve fallen in love with.

the view down into the abyss that is my stairwell

**I also tried this approach with an iTunes movie rental one night, which resulted in the somewhat disastrous selection of “Taken.” In retrospect, I can see how insane that choice was, but at the time my train of thought wasn’t so much young-American-girls-in-peril as Liam Neeson kicking ass in Paris? Yum…