Sunday Nights at Blue Frog

I have said this earlier and will say it again: Sundays are the best nights at Blue Frog. Last Sunday was no exception. In fact, I felt that Sunday’s gig kind of defined Blue Frog’s musical sojourn for me.

Georg Gratzer is a classically trained musician and plays saxophones, bass clarinet, flute and percussion. He has studied jazz saxophone in Austria and plays in a successful folk band there. Thomas Mauerhofer trained in classical guitar, studied jazz guitar at the prestigious Graz University, and plays in rock bands. Raul Sengupta, born in Hannover, Germany, studied various world percussions with international musicians like Luis Conte and Ismail Sané, and tabla with Pandit Shankar Ghosh (no relative of mine).

Together these three talented young men – can be loosely defined as world musicians – created magic on the stage. Bringing elements from all over the musical world to jazz compositions, Georg on his trumpet and Thomas with a huge repertoire of guitar music and styles, roped in Raul’s percussion rhythms to create jazz improvisations with sublime ease.

In a way this truly defines Blue Frog for me. Here’s a stage where some extremely talented musicians jam together, improvise together, discover new chemistry of sounds and use the energy of an applauding and appreciating audience to marvel at the revelatory harmonies and sounds that seem to be magically produced. That’s history in the making. That one new sound, that one new tempo, that one new octave, that one new unison that suddenly revealed itself while playing could well become the inflexion point of a defining musical chapter in later years. And acknowledge it or not, it all happened at Blue Frog.

And when this “jam” showcases a dance performance by Hina Sarojini, a name I was totally unfamiliar with, who brought in classic Indian dance forms ranging from Kathak, kathakali, Bharat Natyam, Odyssey, permuted and combined them with oriental kabuki kinda dance drama and displayed the power of Indian mudras that swayed with each change of scale, the result was mesmerising.

Suddenly, that Sunday gig transformed itself into a performance. A performance that would captivate any audience anywhere in any setting! It was clearly impromptu, but Ms Sarojini unravelled lots of grey areas for me. For once, the intricacies of Indian classic dance forms, the exaggerated eye movements, the sudden fluid change of dance scale (so to speak) made perfect sense when she started narrating the story of a jazz improvisation through her dance. I’m not kiddin’ but Hina added that fictional flesh to an esoteric jazz live act. Her dancing brought out the range of the music being improvised on the stage – from mellowness to sensuousness, from prankster fun to primal joy, it was all there. That to me was a revelation, a moment of bliss.

I been thinking about this for a while now, and discussing with friends, but the audience too plays an important part in getting the best out of acts. Several musicians have told me that they draw energy from the audience during their live acts. A positive energy from the audience enhances the quality, often surprising the musicians itself. An indifferent or negative energy so affects the act. One large, noisy table at Blue Frog ruins the experience for all of us. Its alright when electronica and thumping beats are deafening the senses anyway, but for crying out loud, when music is sublime, shrieking out loud even if four pair of cleavages get entangled is not kosher.

The musicians feel insulted, the audience helpless and frustrated.

I would definitely urge all true music lovers to drop by on Sunday evenings at Blue Frog. The music is great, the ambience mellow, the ladies are elegant, the men engrossed, the band often engages with you, everybody likes to stop and speak and perhaps say hello with just a glance.