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Living for the moment

Talking with Toots Thielemans is like reading a history book on jazz

Toots Thielemans is the godfather of the Jazz Middelheim festival, so it was only right that he offered a preview of his new album there last month. In stores now, Toots Thielemans: European Quartet Live (Challenge Records) brings together 12 live concert tracks recorded over the last few years along with the harmonica virtuoso’s best live performances over several decades.

 

Jean “Toots” Thielemans was born in Brussels in 1922, but his special relationship with Antwerp was solidified by his grandparents, who lived there, and by his mother, who was born there. “I started playing accordion at the age of three,” he tells me from home in Belgium after a spate of festival appearances this summer. “Next I studied the accordion – but when I heard the harmonica, I made my decision.”

Marc Maes
(September 15, 2010)

Capsule

As I walked down the Park Duden hillside to the Brussels PleinOPENAir festival with a bunch of friends last month, a sudden crescendo of keyboards, drums and what sounded like clarinet, scared the magpies out of the trees. Playful electro riffs entwined around each other and a beautiful harmony of female voices rose into the air.

Then suddenly they began shouting in full riot-girl fashion and a saxophone broke out. We exploded into smiles. It was all at once an enthralling, uplifting and joyful outburst. "I really hope that's the band and not just a CD," said one of my friends. It wasn't a CD.

We hurried down the hill to find five girls clad in knee-length boots and futuristic grey and fluorescent yellow dresses. Those not on keyboards stomped furiously about the stage, keeping perfect pitch. They were clearly having a good time. Behind them skulked the male members of the band, on guitar and drums.

Saffina Rania
(September 8, 2010)

Ostend Film Festival

“A pox upon this damn fine weather” is probably what the organisers of the Ostend Film Festival were muttering last year, as the early September crowds tended to stick to the beach under warm, clear skies rather than enter a dark cinema. Determined, I sat in a Saturday afternoon screening with about five other people. Nothing kills a film festival in Belgium like sun.

You can imagine, then, the cheers that are going up this year, as the clouds become greyer and the air gets chillier. So after you watch the arrival of the cast of the new Flemish film, Adem (Oxygen), which opens the festival on 3 September, you may not regret having to duck inside to catch the movie, the premiere feature from Hans Van Nuffel.

(September 1, 2010)

Your own art gallery

Flemish brothers launch a website that makes browsing for original art easy

It can sometimes be difficult to combine your work and your passion, especially if you just graduated with a Master’s in Applied Economics. But Laurent Jacobs of Ghent has figured out how to do so and benefit you and me in the process.

The 23-year-old started up a web development company with his brother, and the two have launched Artplace, an online art gallery. Jacobs has always had an interest in art, has a collection of his own and followed a short art course in Paris.

I was actually hooked from my first visit to the site, browsing through the multiple disciplines - painting, drawing, sculpture, etc. You can search in a number of ways - by price, for instance, or time period or artist.

Lisa Bradshaw
(September 1, 2010)

The past is a foreign country

Ancient manuscripts come to life at Antwerp’s Laus Polyphoniae
© Luk van Eeckhout

The Medieval and Renaissance plainchant and polyphonies traditionally aired at Antwerp’s Laus Polyphoniae, the Festival of Flanders’ next stopover, can sometimes seem as baffling, uncouth but also as seductive to our modern ears as the music of distant lands. This edition will be no exception, focusing as it does on original music manuscripts from 1050 to 1550.

Manuscripts are our key to the musical life of the distant past as they contain innumerable songs and instrumental pieces for the church, the court, the street and the home that are often unavailable anywhere else. These unique, often richly illuminated volumes bearing exotic names such as Winchester Troparium and Codex Squarcialupi are today locked up in monasteries and libraries across Europe.

(August 3, 2010)

Visionary Africa: different visions of a continent

Aside from GEO-Graphics, Bozar is running several exhibitions, performances and concerts as part of the festival Visionary Africa.

There are two photo exhibitions well worth a visit. Pôze III / Africa Town is a compilation of work by amateurs and professionals of how they see Africa in Brussels. My favourite piece is of two suited black men eating cornets of fries in Troonplein next to the statue of Congo coloniser King Leopold II.

A Useful Dream, meanwhile, presents African photography through the last five decades, from shots of 1960s chicks with bouffant hair to modern-day drag queens. In one, a nude woman strides proudly down the street while a shopkeeper gawps from his window.

(July 14, 2010)

Deconstructing colonial Africa

GEO-Graphics rips up Africa's borders and mixes the old with the new
© Cape Town - Essop Brothers

What do you get if you tear up all the colonial maps of Africa and redraw the continent's borders on the basis of its geographic zones? This is exactly what curators set out to do in Bozar's GEO-Graphics exhibition.

Dividing Africa into six regions – Maghreb, Savannah, Sahel, Forest, Mountain and Desert – this show, the cornerstone of the Visionary Africa festival, celebrates the art of the 17 African countries that won their independence from colonialism in 1960.

"This was an ideological statement, a way of saying we didn't want to take into account the colonial borders of the past," says Anne-Marie Bouttiaux, one of the curators of the exhibition and head of ethnographic art at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren.

Emma Portier Davis
(July 14, 2010)

Culture News

The Flemish government has awarded an annual subsidy of €205,000 to the digital image bank Lukas - Art in Flanders, which gathers images of artworks held in various collections.

The website was set up in 2006 and provides high-quality images as well as information on the works. The subsidy will run until 2013, when it may be renewed.

www.lukasweb.be

(July 14, 2010)

Écran Total

Some people may be left scratching their heads at the choice of Jonathan Nossiter as the guest programmer at Écran Total, the annual summer film festival at the Arenberg Cinema in Brussels. If the American is known to the film-going public at all, it is for Mondovino, his combative 2004 documentary about the wine trade, although he also has a handful of fiction films to his name.

"We decided to give the carte blanche this year to a director who is perhaps a little less well-known because he has such an interesting personality and an outspokenness that is increasingly rare in cinema," explains Emmanuel Gaspart, Écran Total programmer. "We really liked his frankness and accessibility, and that's apparent in his choice of films."

Ian Mundell
(June 30, 2010)

Love immigrants, hate tourists

The Nadaar collective’s new book and exhibition on the people of Brussels

In Facing Brussels, the Nadaar collective has brought together 11 photographers to look at the people who live in the Belgian capital, from the privileged of the country club set to the slum-dwelling poor, from illegal immigrants to the bureaucrats of the European quarter. Each photographer has his or her own project, bringing to it a distinct style.

Eric De Mildt produces intimate images of rail travellers at Brussels' stations, catching them contemplating books, text messages or the departure screens. He makes a virtue of low light to produce atmospheric, grainy shots. One of the best uses reflections in the windows at North Station to build up layers in the image, bringing together people in the train, on the platform and on the descending a staircase.

Ian Mundell
(June 23, 2010)