A Jazz Legend in Singapore

Last Wednesday night at the Esplanade Concert Hall, the legendary tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins gave a single concert, his first in Singapore he said as he introduced his ensemble at the beginning of the concert.

The most amazing thing about the fact that this concert happened at all is that Sonny Rollins is 78 years old. He was born in 1930 and started his career as a jazz musician when he was a teenager in the 1940s in the Bronx. His age, as well as his name, was the draw, and the hall was full. There were many caucasians in the audience, and they greeted him with enthusiasm when he appeared on stage with his group.

It was an unusual group, a sextet with a tenor saxophone, a trombone, a guitar, a bass, drums and percussions.

Sonny Rollins is tall with still an abundance of hair, sparse on the top only, white and grey, standing on his head, and a big white beard, very unusual for a Jazz musician. He walks like an old man, with a rather unsteady gait, but as soon as he blows his horn, his age becomes irrelevant and he is like a lion with a white mane, roaring with the most extraordinary energy.

His dress also was unusual. He wore a red shirt falling over white pants. When he soloed, he would often walk back and forth on the stage, or suddenly stop and bend over to extract the last gasp of air from his lungs catching a high note, as all saxophonists do. His soloes were amazingly long and energetic. He would then turn his back to the audience and face his group, going from one musician to the next, prompting them to launch into their own improvisations, which he would accompany with just a few syncopated notes.

It was for me a special experience, for, as a teenager, I was always eagerly waiting for Sonny Rollins' next recording and would never miss his rare concerts in Paris. I was a little apprehensive before this concert, wondering how he would sound now.

It was hard to believe that this man was almost 80 years old. The concert lasted without an interruption for almost two hours. The audience was wild with enthusiasm and he got a standing ovation after playing an encore.

Qingdao revisited

Last week, I had three days of meetings in Qingdao, a large port in Shandong Province. It was an opportunity to stay at the Shangri-La Hotel, always a pleasure. The temperature was cool the night I walked around the hotel, on large modern avenues, and the thick fog chilled me to the bone.


A strangely shaped red building (looking a bit like a top) stood in the night near the waterfront.


I mentioned how much I had liked a foot massage on my last trip to Qingdao. Our local office hosted a visit to a place reputed to be the best in town. No large room was available, so our group had to split. A colleague from Singapore and I found ourselves sitting in deep cushioned armchairs and these two young women worked on us for a good hour.



They were in their early twenties and really skilled at what they were doing, but the most extraordinary thing was their genuine mirth as they were joking with us (fortunately my colleague could speak Chinese, so we could have a rudimentary conversation). They were happy, giggling at us and merry. I found it extraordinary that they could display so much enthusiasm at doing this lowly task, that they could still love what they were doing after massaging so many feet. I had noticed the same thing when I had my first foot massage experience two and a half years ago in Qingdao. After such a satisfying experience, I wanted to tip the girl, but was told by our local people that no tips were allowed and that none would be accepted.

This is the great strength of the Chinese people: their spirit, their sincerity, their hard work. I could see it displayed also, but in a different way, in the high ranking officials of the Port Group with whom we had meetings earlier. They had the same conviction, dedication and energy. But, in them, it was a bit upsetting, for it betrayed a desire for supremacy, and a highly political motivation.

They showed us a movie about their port, which has grown enormously over the last few years. The English voice-over sounded like propaganda: over images of workers marching in military formation, it said that the port was working very hard to build socialism. Then the chairman gave us a harangue, comparing the inefficiency of US ports compared to Chinese ports, in particular Qingdao, quoting numbers of employees compared to throughputs at the ports.

This was a reminder that government-owned enterprises in China (always led by high ranking Communist Party members) have a political purpose as much as a commercial one. This, coupled with the remarkable drive of the company leaders and the discipline and eagerness of the workers (exemplified by the two young women at the foot massage place) makes a very powerful and scary combination.

L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon

In New York two weeks ago, three decorative vases at the counter of l'Atelier.

Dempsey Road craziness

After a fruitless search for a new restaurant around the Dempsey Road cluster a few weeks ago, I ended at a familiar place, sitting alone at the counter of the Wine Company for a glass of wine and some finger food.

This was refreshing ... an unpretentious place with a selection of good wines and tasty and simple food, served without any unnecessary flourish. The tables are arranged on an unadorned concrete floor. The place was busy on that Friday night, and there was room only at the counter, which gave me an unobstructed view of this funny line-up of wine decanters drying upside down on their stands.



A good ending to an evening that started badly. The parking for the Dempsey Road restaurants lining Napier Road (perhaps it is already Holland Road at that level) was full. I finally managed to park my car in a spot that was not really a parking spot ... but I figured it would not matter in this crowded parking lot: nobody would notice or care.

I wanted to try a place called "Fondue" which I had discovered on the internet, but, as I was climbing the stairs leading to it, I could hear a loudspeaker touting some prizes ... I thought 'this is not for me', as eating a meal in such a crowded and noisy place where what sounded like a lottery was taking place was decidedly not my idea of fun.

After looking at a couple of big restaurants nearby that did not appeal to me at all, I walked back to my car and tried to find my way to 'Au Petit Salut', which I had noticed on my way over. This required going in circles a couple of time, due to the irritating and confusing Singapore traffic flows. That restaurant was extremely crowded and I was given the only (small) table left, sandwiched between another table and a huge column. I looked at the menu, which displayed, I suppose, the Singaporeans' idea of French food: very traditional and heavy dishes were on offer, at prices that seemed quite inflated for such pedestrian cuisine. I stood up and walked out, after having sat there ten minutes without anyone paying any attention to me, as the staff was busy serving the numerous tables in the dining room, occupied mostly by Chinese families.

Back to the cluster of restaurants and shops of Dempsey Road, I gave my car to valet parking, and walked around to explore. No restaurant really appealed to me and all were very busy.

In the end, after a frustrating chase that lasted one hour, this familiar wine bar was just the place for me. But Singapore is getting overcrowded. And the Government wants to increase the population from its current 4.5 million to 6 million in thirty years or so ... Where are they going to put all these people?

Baroque Hamburg

The Park Hyatt Hotel in Hamburg is a special place. I discovered it in November last year, and I had the opportunity to stay there again two weeks ago.

Inside the hotel, all is calm, beauty, luxury and exquisite pleasure.



But it is not only the choice of furniture, wood paneling and art hanging on the walls that seduces me, it is also the extraordinarily charming and attentive service of the staff. There are not many places in the world where, at the end of a meal, a beautiful and impeccably but soberly dressed hostess asks you in perfect English: "Are there any more wishes that I can fulfill for you?" I could have thought of a few ... but the manner of the young woman did not invite the utterance of them, and I simply had to say "No thank you, I am perfectly satisfied", and it was true ...

The back entrance of the hotel is on a circular lobby to a gallery inside the "Levantehaus" (I suppose this means "the house of the Orient", probably the historical location of stores selling goods from the Orient), full of interesting shops. This lobby's ceiling has a circular opening to an upper level gallery, adorned with the most baroque and realistic plaster sculptures of wild animals.






Somehow, the juxtaposition of this hotel's luxury and comfort with the baroque character of this glorification of wild life makes a powerful impression on me. Perhaps it exemplifies the ambivalence of man: the sophisticated human search for beauty and truth and the scream of the savage beast.

Indeed, that theme could not be better summarized than in the powerful bronze centaur hanging at the top of the street entrance to the gallery leading to the hotel.


But inside the gallery, the most sophisticated shop windows, full of sweet, beautiful and precious things could be seen, in contrast to this forbidding and wildly Dyonisiac ensign.







Sometimes with an unintended ironic touch: A "Christ" ensign on a Gucci store ...


A block away from the hotel, there was a large department store called "Saturn". It was full of electronic goods at all levels. On the top floor, dedicated to CDs and DVDs, there was a huge section reserved for classical music. This surprised me. It is increasingly rare to find such stores. I saw Tower Records' classical section shrink 15 years ago in California. Then HMV in Singapore, which used to have a large enclosed section for classical music, let that space be invaded by other music as well several years ago. Presumably, there is not enough demand for this music and commercial imperatives dictate that floor space reserved to it be reduced.

But here in Germany, the country of many great composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Schubert and more), this store at least preserves the heritage of classical music. I was so pleased that I bought new recordings by Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra of vocal and harpsichord works of Buxtehude, another 17th century German composer who inspired Bach.

Paris Sans Fin

There is, until June 15, a great exhibition of Alberto Giacometti lithographs and other works at the Singapore Art Museum ("Seeing, Feeling, Being: Alberto Giacometti"). The centerpiece is a collection of lithographs of scenes of Paris streets assembled in a project that started in 1959, titled "Paris Sans Fin" (Unending Paris).

These are sketches of objects in his studio or of street scenes and landmarks in the areas frequented by the artist who spent most of his life in Paris from 1922, except when he went back to his native Stampa, in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, to visit his family and recharge his batteries.

The title of the collection is apt. It does indeed project the feel of timeless, endless Paris, and for me, those drawings pulsed with life, as they took me back to my youth. Rue d'Alesia, Quai de Bercy were not so far from where I lived. Saint Germain, the Cupola of the Invalids, the towers of Eglise Saint Sulpice, Le Dome, a cafe near Montparnasse, all feel so familiar to me. Giacometti captured the ephemeral yet eternal poetry of Paris' street scenes.

Also to be seen at this exhibition is a rather large collection of photographs of Giacometti at work in his studio and with his family, and a movie retracing his life and is artistic evolution, in which he speaks (in French) about his art.

I was amazed that such an exhibition would be staged in Singapore, where there is probably little interest for it. Indeed, the place had few visitors, even on a Saturday afternoon. It made the experience more pleasant, as I did not have to fight with a crowd to appreciate the works on display.

Sketches of Giacometti's studio. Elongated and emaciated figures are the signature of his sculptures, some of which are standing here in his studio.


A lithographic press in a printing shop in Paris.


His wife Annette, represented here in two drawings, and his brother Diego were frequent models for Giacometti's drawings and sculptures.


Eglise Saint Sulpice, in the Saint Germain des Pres area, which I often haunted when I was in college in Paris.


Quai de Bercy, where the Halles aux vins (the wholesale market for wines) still was at the time this drawing was made.


Scenes in the Cafe "Le Dome" in the Montparnasse area.


The cupola of the Invalids at the end of a street's perspective.


Diego, sitting on the terrace of a cafe, is intensely absorbed in the contemplation of the rich emptiness of a Paris street. This drawing, perhaps, best captures the Parisian atmosphere of poetic life.

Saint James Power Station

I wrote the piece below about a year ago, after an expedition to one of the most popular night spots of Singapore ...
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Friday night … after a late dinner I decide to explore the new night spot that opened in a disaffected power station of Singapore. I arrive there at about 11:45. A long line of cars is waiting to enter the parking. To avoid it, I veer into the underground garage of Vivo-City instead. It is full, but I finally find a spot and find my way out of the labyrinth of this huge shopping mall almost deserted at this late hour and the power station stands in front of me across the street, a large forbidding brick structure girded with steel beams. But where are all these people who parked their cars at Vivo-City?

They are in Saint James Power Station … the place is jam-packed. I avoid the line waiting to pay a cover charge and somehow manage to walk in, waiving away the Cerberus who wanted to imprint a mark on my wrist … 'none of this nonsense will do for me … I do not belong in this crowd and would not give a hoot for not being able to re-enter in the absence of a mark on my wrist' I say to myself … the Cerberus lets me go, he is too busy imprinting the wrists of the hundreds of people passing by him.

I climb a flight of stairs and find myself walking along a tube sometimes widening into bar areas. Low cushy chairs line up the walls or surround tables. Crowds everywhere … conversations appear to be going on in the din of background music. At some point, the tube has glass walls, and it is suspended over huge dark cavernous pits, one on each side. This is no doubt where the boilers used to be, and the wide tube in which I stand must have been built from the bridge that allowed workers to check the controls and pipes at the top of the huge boilers.

I look through the glass at the largest pit on my left. Its darkness is sometimes pierced by rotating beams of stroboscopic light emitted by devices hanging from the ceiling, slightly higher than my point of observation. In these beams of bluish light, I can distinguish, at the bottom of this cavern, in a mixed haze of cigarette smoke and steam from body heat, vaguely human shapes, packed like sardines against one another, with hardly any room to spare, and anchored to their feet that seem glued to the floor, wriggling their middles rhythmically and throwing their arms up in grotesque contortions, as if in an ecstatic trance of devotion to some demonic deity. A group of such humanoids emerges from this ant-hill, as they are performing their ritual standing on an elevated platform. These must be the most devoted practitioners, driven by their extraordinary and truly inspiring energy and conviction to lead the crowd in this orgiastic celebration of its total submission to the rhythms offered by the disc-jockey reigning supreme in the midst of his consoles.

Through the glass wall on the other side of the tube, the other pit displays, in more light, a more traditional and less scary scene … There, I can actually discern a dance floor and a stand for the band that distils, based on the musical waves wafting up to my elevated observatory, something that sounds like Latin rhythms.

I resolve to embark on an ethnological expedition down in the larger and darker cavern to see more closely its frantic creatures. Cerberus was at the gate, this time equipped with a device emitting a violet glow, designed to read the imprints on the wrists of this night's devotees. I waived him again, animated by my revulsion at being identified by a marking on my wrist, which was not there anyway, and, again, he decided not to argue with me.

I followed the convolutions of a dark tube that eventually vomited me and the accompanying crowd into this post modern Hades. The noise was deafening. My inner organs started vibrating rhythmically in response to the subsonic waves emitted by sub-woofers and the higher frequencies resonated as loud as if they originated from between my ears. Above these inchoate electronically generated sounds (to call them music would be a lie) a vaguely human voice was screaming some strange incantations over a loud, primitive beat that battered you into submission. I started fighting my way through the gyrating crowd of young people surrounding me.

From time to time the blue stroboscopic light beams emitted from above washed over the faces of people standing or sitting on high chairs at tables arranged against the cavern's walls. Although most of them were teenagers or hardly more, they looked stoned and bleary eyed, either totally passive and subjugated by the overwhelming noise or mildly moving their bodies in rhythm. Hardly any of them was involved in conversation, made impossible by the deafening noise anyway. When there was communication, it was mainly through signs and knowing smiles or grimaces accentuating an intensified body gyration. Very little touching was visible. A couple leaning against the wall next to me engaged in a chaste kiss and a mild embrace, but it was a rare exception. Hand holding was mainly in order to avoid being separated as a couple made its way through the heaving crowd.

This crowd was an ethnically representative sample of Singapore's population: mostly Chinese, with a few Malays, Indians and occasional off-springs of Caucasian expatriates. I noticed a tall Chinese, with tousled hair shooting in all directions from his scalp, wildly dancing in place near the table he shared with friends. Several had this hair-cut, which appears to be popular among male teenagers these days, and a majority of them had the standard accoutrement to go "clubbing": a white tailored shirt open on the chest, buttoned in the middle, with tails left hanging rather than tucked in jeans or similarly casual pants.

Walking around slowly, I observed, disbelieving, the goings-on. How could anyone find this kind of occupation on a Friday night fun? Looking at these young people's faces, they, in fact, did not seem to have fun. Except for the most enthusiastic and frenetic of them, they seemed bored. They were there out of conformity: clubbing and getting lost in a sea of deafening noise and a mist of cigarette smoke and sweat is the thing to do with your friends among teenagers and twenty something the world over.

But there is a difference. The hardly suppressed sarcastic smile on my face may have, in other parts, provoked anger, and perhaps a violent reaction from the crowd. Not here in Singapore: in spite of the primitive violence of the surrounding music, this young crowd remained tame. The few who noticed me looked at me with a puzzled stare and seemed to wonder what a man of my age was doing there.

Observing … just observing … across the chasm separating generations.

Spirituality in Singapore

It is easy to think of Singapore as an artificial place driven by commerce and economic growth, with little culture and no soul. Yet, there is spirituality in Singapore. To find one manifestation of it (in a non-religious form), you must wake up early and take a walk on a Saturday or Sunday morning in the Botanical Gardens.

Asian spirituality tends to blend physical and spiritual elements, in harmony with nature. You can see this in the meditations of Japanese and Chinese Zen Buddhists, the yoga exercises of Indians, the Chinese Tai Chi and the Chinese and Japanese martial arts. All these disciplines stress harmonious development of body and soul and a reverence for nature.

Those spiritual exercises were practiced in the beautiful setting of the Botanical Gardens this morning, in spite of almost suffocating heat and humidity.

A group of Tai Chi practitioners


A private Tai Chi lesson ...


A study in immobility. This group of men and women, arranged in a marching phalanx of three rows, remained completely immobile in this pose, with their eyes closed, for perhaps as long as ten minutes.


Then, they moved their arms and hands in slow motion, describing curves in the air in front of them, Tai Chi style, with their bodies still frozen in the initial position.


Slowly they moved a foot up to start their march ...


and then, following the rythm of music from a portable CD player carried by a man at the back of the group, they advanced balancing their heads and arms from right to left.


Two members of the same group remained behind, preferring to continue their practice of immobility, completely frozen and glued to the ground.


Men practiced a version of Tai Chi with swords ...


and women too.


A woman, dressed in a loose light blue silk outfit, was leading a group of men and women arrayed behind her in calesthenics involving only arm movements. Complete serenity and harmony with her environment emanated from her slow movements.


Two women (mother or grandmother and daughter or grand-daughter?) simply enjoyed spending a few moments in this haven of beauty and calm in the middle of busy Singapore, simply sitting on a bench ...


A woman walked her dog, under the protection of a colorful umbrella ...


A toddler rushed to the edge of a fountain's basin and her mother quickly caught up with him and crouched next to him, laying a protective hand on his back to make sure that he would not fall.


A woman, after a jog perhaps, or before, stood in a meditative pose, absorbed in the contemplation of a beautifully landscaped fountain ...


A wonderful way to start the day.

Celebration of Spring

I went for a late afternoon walk in the Botanical Gardens last Sunday, with the intention of taking pictures, but I was rewarded beyond expectations: a concert was being given by the Singapore Chinese Orchestra in the beautiful setting of a pavillion in the middle of a pond facing a large sloping lawn where families, groups of friends and couples sat on blankets for a picnic or just to listen to the music.

Vivaldi's Spring Concerto certainly sounded different on Chinese string instruments, but the spirit was all there. And I had at my disposal a gold-mine of interesting shots.

The canopy of the orchestra's stage opens up like a huge oyster shell over a water-lily pond ...


A section of Chinese strings practices Vivaldi's Spring Concerto before the concert ...


Two youg women with interesting faces ...


An old Chinese couple, looking a bit sceptical listening to the music ...


On a bench off the lawn and on the side, an old lady enjoys her time sitting next to a young girl (her grand-daughter?) while fanning herself, trying to stay cool on this still hot late Sunday afternoon ...


A princess ...


A dreamy girl ...


A couple just arrived and is getting settled to enjoy the music ...


Further up the sloping hill, far from the stage and the music, a girl plays badminton with her father ...


and an old man meditates, listening to his own music ...