My friend Marcello Aldega opened his gallery in Amelia.
On exhibition is a stunning collection of drawings from Italian artists in Rome, 1500-1850.
A lovely evening, and an honour to be there.
10.5.12
To Reading University, where – with pride, sorrow, pride – we attended the opening of the new (Anthony) Minghella Building for Film, TV and Theatre.
David Puttnam did the opening honours. Anthony would have been delighted, embarrassed, delighted.
We asked, and she delivered.
Edana Minghella, just one of my amazing sisters, has finally given in to our demands for a recorded album.
Here’s the press release:
Edana Minghella – ‘Still on my Feet’
Friday 11 November sees the release of the stunning debut album, ‘Still on my Feet’ by Brighton-based jazz singer, Edana Minghella. Featuring stellar contributions from the likes of Guy Barker and Liane Carroll, this classy collection of standard, and not so standard, tunes, marks Edana out as a ‘new’ jazz voice demanding to be heard.
The effortlessly tasteful backing of regular quartet, Mick Smith (piano), Ken Black (drums), Sarah Bolter (saxophones) and Pete Maxfield (double bass) only serves to reinforce the deep vein of cool that underpins each of the nine tracks on offer here.
“I hope people will pick up on the beauty of these tunes,” says Edana. “How jazz can have a wonderful simplicity, that talented musicians can deliver a ‘less is more’ feel to the music, even when there are strong emotions. And I do want people to be moved by the music.”
No danger there. With a close-up and deeply personal rendition of ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is’, which explodes into an emotionally shredding Barker trumpet solo at its finale, and a raw, yet stunningly controlled, interpretation of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Case of You’, it is clear that here is a singer, and woman, who has been forced to face some of life’s more painful, and bewildering, episodes head on.
“I chose those songs because they were in Ant’s films, says the singer,” (Edana’s elder brother is the Oscar-winning director, Anthony Minghella, who died tragically back in 2008). “They both have huge emotional resonance for me – and I think you hear it in my voice.”
And yet, being Edana, there’s room for effervescence and fun here too. ‘Fifty Ways To leave Your Lover’ teases its way on a stalking double bass before breaking into an outright 70s’ funk stomp that Stevie Wonder would be proud of, while ‘How Deep Is The Ocean’ simply bursts with the pure celebration of love itself.
Production credits on the album go to award-winning vocalist Liane Carroll. “Working with Liane was amazing,” enthuses Edana. “She is the most brilliant jazz vocalist so to have her involved was a real honour.”
The results of this collaboration speak for themselves on ‘Still on my Feet’.
Edana Minghella marks the album’s release with a string of live dates at: Quay Arts Centre, Newport IOW Friday 11 Nov, Bournemouth Swing Unlimited 30 Nov, Brighton The Brunswick 15 Dec and Colour House Theatre, Merton Abbey Mills 17 Dec.
For more information call Andy Strickland on 07803 212 095 or go to: www.edanaminghellajazz.com
14 March, 2011
The 3rd Annual Minghella Film Festival closed last night with a June Tabor concert in the unlikely – but wonderful – venue of Freshwater’s Memorial Hall. (June and her collaborator, pianist Huw Warren, needed a Steinway, and the Mem Hall has one, not to mention an established reputation for world-class concerts.)
June has been part of our family soundtrack ever since she recorded Anthony’s songs for the television version of his play, Whale Music, in 1982. It was such a thrill to have her on the Island and performing live, after nearly three decades of knowing her only through her recordings.
She themed her sets around ideas of the sea and our maritime history – appropriate to the Isle of Wight setting, but also to her latest album, Ashore.
It was a wonderful, transporting night. June doesn’t do frills, in music or in presentation. Her concession to image was a smart black Chinese silky jacket with red trim, but she wore it over what might have been her gardening clothes. On each wrist there was a watch, with the face inside rather than out. Her focus is on unadorned purity and simplicity of sound, and in this there is no lack of passion. At her most intense moments, as for example in her haunting solo King of Rome, she clenches her left fist in apparent pain.
Her voice is one of the most distinctive in English folk, resonant in the lower registers but with a capacity for dainty jauntiness when the mood takes her. Her speaking voice is surprising, almost girlish. She has no interest in being cool. She’ll sing daft ditties by William Makepeace Thackeray. Then she’ll take your breath away with a superb, simple, angry rendition of Elvis Costello’s Shipbuilding.
My favourite, King of Rome – I confess I requested it weeks in advance – tells the true story of Charlie, a pigeon racer from the west end of Derby, who sends his bird to Rome in 1913. On the day of the race, a storm blows in and a thousand birds are lost. Everyone tells him he should have known better. All that land and sea! Charlie says: “Yeah, I know – but I had to try. A man can crawl around, or he can learn to fly. And when you live round here, the ground seems awful near…”
That sense of dreams seeming a long way from coming true chimes with our experience of growing up on the Isle of Wight in the 1970s and 1980s. You looked across at Portsmouth and the mainland and you knew the action was somewhere that way, but never here. Youth was one big wait – for the time to go to college and not come back.
It’s not that we didn’t feel pride in the Island. We did. We felt a deep sense of belonging – to a place distinctive, beautiful and unique. You can’t grow up on the Island and not have the images of its cliffs and bays burned into your brain. You can’t spend your formative summers there without carrying forever the ability somehow to smell the warm red of its local brick. Nettles. 1976. Ladybirds. I can close my eyes any day in London and hear the old SRN6 Hovercraft booming across Ryde sands onto the slipway.
But you always knew you’d be going. And that created a forlorn relationship, not just between generations, but also between youth and home. The story, however idyllic, had tragedy built in. The Victorian shelters on the Esplanade, where small dramas of smoking and snogging were played out in grey off-season drizzle, were hardly “ours” any more than they belonged to summer’s “grockles”. Because we were all visitors in the end. Of all the inhaled images of the Island, the most intoxicating are those connected with arrivals and departures.
King of Rome speaks to me because it is about the need to dream and to act on dreams, however small. The possibility, even the likelihood, of being blown off course, swept away and never seen again. And despite that, the need to try. Anyone who grew up on the Island in that period knows that sensation.
When my brother was young, he used to accompany our granny down to the beach at Ryde, where she used to dream of love returning. Her sad story inspired Anthony to write, and to escape. The ground seemed awful near.
As June Tabor paints her picture of lost dreams, the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. You cannot help but wallow in the inexpressible sadness of it all. “Charlie we told you so. Surely by now you’d know – when you’re living in the west end, there ain’t many dreams come true.”
It comes as such a shock, even if you know the song, that suddenly there’s a wing-flash up in the blue; that the bird, after weeks of battling, has somehow made it back. Charlie come outside quick, he’s perched up on your roof! The King of Rome!
It is fitting, then, that the Film Festival inspired by Anthony happens on the Isle of Wight and not anywhere else. It’s where the dreams are formed that matters, not where they are played out. It’s about returning to the perch, coming home, about knowing where you belong.
If you can pin a life of achievement onto one moment, Anthony’s was perhaps Oscar night, 1997, when The English Patient swept the board. This was a film shot mostly, of course, in Rome. And feted five thousand miles away in LA.
And yet it felt like a homecoming. Nobody thought it was odd, least of all us, when he held his trophy aloft and declared, “this is a great day for the Isle of Wight.”