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AUGUST 2007
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> OCTOBER 2007
NOVEMBER 2007
DECEMBER 2007
ductac - dubai community theatre & arts centre entrance
four seasons golf club
music and dancing return to festival city for eid
nadd al hamar road outside our building - kadooli is further down on the left
(top) our swimming pool
(mid) asteco heights
(bottom) dusty view of downtown
al badia hillside village
sunset behind the huge "burj" tower - still under construction
hannah chillin' at "spikes" bar
I've had some luck on the vitally important finding-some-musicians-to-play-jazz-with front. All the teachers at work are classical musicians so there's no joy there with regard to forming a working band. As luck would have it, an email I sent while I was still in Mongolia to the people who organise the jazz festival in Dubai found its way to a lady who runs a music agency and through her I've been put in touch with a guy called Richard de Guzman, a bass player (it's crucial to find a great bass player - Mike Green, Andrew Colwell to name only two). I'm going to rehearse with him and a drummer (not sure of his name yet!) tomorrow at one of their friends apartments and we're going to play through some standards etc, to see how we get on musically with a view to working together. These guys are veterans of the Dubai music scene, having been gigging here since the 80's, so I'm keen to find out what the scene consists of and how to get onto it. Will write more after tomorrow morning.
On the recital front, I've got a definite date for my debut appearance over here - 8th November for the "Seven Ages of Jazz" recital series opening concert - essentially a selection of music from the last 100 years of jazz, arranged by myself for solo piano. Alongside some familiar standards and a couple of less-heard pieces, I've also written two news tunes for the occasion, "Blues for Nuthin'" and "Dubai Dubop" (yup, I managed to squeeze another Debop/UBop variation in there - maybe Steve Tromans and the Dubop Band will be forming very shortly once I've found a regular venue and night to play). The concert will take place at DUCTAC, Sheikh Zayed Road, and if you're in the neighbourhood, come along - it's FREE entry!
Wed 3rd October 2007
Well, I'm back from the trio rehearsal and also from my last teaching day of the week. The rehearsal: in a word - great! Great to be able to play in a trio again (last time was back in Mongolia on the 31st March with the UBop Band at the last ever Mealody gig), and also great to meet some really friendly musos. It turns out that Richard, Andre (the drummer) and the guy whose apartment we rehearsed in (also a drummer by the name of Paul) have been listening to some of the tracks on this website and really dug the Green Troman Street album tracks. Mike and Steve - nice one, chaps, you're already hip in Dubai and you're so cool that you don't even need to be here, you gone cats!
Wed 10th October 2007
Last day at work before the Eid break. This afternoon there were only five students - four of mine, plus another for a teacher who's sick at the moment - so it went very quickly indeed and now I've got a week-and-a-bit off as part of the Eid celebrations marking the end of Ramadan. We have not long returned from the Four Seasons Golf Club near the Al Badia Hillside Village and Festival City. It has sort of become our "local", although I never would've had a golf club as a local back in the UK! The place is only 15-20 minutes on foot from our apartment block and the views from the two terrace bars, "Spikes" and "Blades" (cracking names) are great. Now the weather is down to a bearable level in the evenings, going there is a nice way to relax after the working week. They should put this on their website - I sound one of those people in adverts saying why they go to One-Stop Shop or Safebury's (yes, Safebury's - it's by the Ivy Bush on Hagley Road in Birmingham, just ask Richard Young).
Sat 13th October 2007
Ramadan has gone on longer than anyone expected, but rumour is that today is the last day (the actual dates are always a mystery each year, since they are calculated based on "observations of the moon", and are usually not announced till the day or the day before). So I'm not sure if it's Eid yet or not, but I'm definitely not at work today, which is great - Saturday is my longest teaching day. [Ed's note: Eid al Fitr did indeed begin on this day, as I discovered later that afternoon from the unfamiliar smell of daytime cooking down near the supermarket]
With a bit of time off work we should have been able to look around the local area a little, but since we appear to live in the middle of a building site, there's not much to see! The Kadooli supermarket just down the road is great since it's walking distance and stocks most things, and there's a pharmacist and a barber shop a little further on (plus a small mosque tucked away behind a petrol station). The barber shop was a good find, since a haircut only costs 15 dirhams (about £2) as opposed to 60 dirhams (about £8) in the malls. In a year or two, this area will be a teeming hub of expat life, with its own dedicated station on the Dubai Metro line (ETA 2010), but at the moment (and this is why the rent is cheap by Dubai standards - 4,500 Dirhams per month) it feels like we've been posted to a remote base in Antartica, only surrounded by desert not polar ice!
We live in a part of Dubai known as Ras Al Khor ("head of the creek" in Arabic) at Asteco Heights (the name of our building - oh, ok, I made up the "Heights" bit...) there is the usual swimming pool, gym and sauna, but it's been a little too hot yet for us to get around to using the facilities. The view from our apartment window is unfortunately of the offices at the front of the development, so that's why the views at the gold club are so appealing! We get a dusty view of downtown Dubai from the roadside outside Asteco, but usually we are too busy trying to ignore the three lanes of speeding cars on Nadd Al Hamar Road, only a few inches away from the hard-shoulder every car-less person has to walk along. There is a shocking lack of pavements around these parts, and it is a rare treat to occasionally find yourself on one. There is a park visible on the other side of the highway, but absolutely no way for pedestrians to get at it without dashing across Nadd Al Hamar Road, which we have seen some people doing, but would rather not get into the habit of doing ourselves. The bored boy racers love to use Nadd Al Hamar Road as their racetrack, and we don't fancy being their roadkill...
On the way to the golf club or the Festival City mall, we pass through the Al Badia area. This has obviously been around a little longer than our building, since the builders are putting the finishing touches to the development - flower beds, traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, a great "wadi theme" walk-through mini-park, kiddies play area, supermarket and sports club with infinity pool. Lucky buggers! This all seems to be connected to the Universal American School which the Al Badia residence encircles. A little further on there's also the Al Badia Hillside Village, which is designed to look as if it's been carved out of a hillside. It's pretty big and looks pretty damn impressive when you're right up close. There don't seem to be many people living there at the moment, judging from the small amount of lights that are on after sundown.
Mon 15th October 2007
Congratulations Kate and Andy on the new arrival!!! Little Archie (or is it Edward?) finally made his appearance yesterday. Best wishes to you both and to Sophie and the little 'un and we'll see you in December to wet the baby's head properly. It was mine and Hannah's six-year anniversary yesterday, too - an auspicious day on all fronts then!
Wed 17th October 2007
Another couple of days investigating the local area on foot. The whole Festival City area has the feeling of being a ghost town. Maybe it's because of the (still!) oppressive heat of the daytime sun, or maybe it's because not enough people have moved here yet, but there's a definite eerie feeling one gets when walking through the half-empty residential areas, a post-apocalyptic feeling. You feel like the last humans on Earth, left with all the trappings of society, but no other humanity around to share it with. Sometimes it feels great - like walking through those fogs we used to have in England when I was younger, and everything seemed strange and exciting and dreamily detached from normal existence - but other times it feels inhuman and a little clinical - an alien society's view of human existence, like at the end of the Arthur C. Clarke's "2001" in the hotel suite.
There are a few jeeps and hummers that zip past us on our walk, and some slow down at the (to them) unfathomable sight of two westerners walking instead of driving, but none stop and offer a lift, which was something that used to happen in Oman quite regularly (I think the Omanis used to think our Hummer must have broken down). Instead, we have been lucky enough to have made friends with a couple of Indian guys who work as security officers for Festival City, and who carry out regular patrols of the area. Three times now they have stopped and given us a lift - twice to the mall and once (last night) to the golf club. They are really friendly and hospitable to a fault and of course we are very grateful for their assistance - especially yesterday evening when the humidity was very high and even walking the 20 minutes to the club was an uncomfortably sticky experience. It turns out they work 12-hour days, 6-days-a-week, and live in the Satwa area of Dubai (one of the "older" parts of this ridiculously young city), from where their company buses them to work each day. They dropped us at the security gate of the gold club because the golf club's security guard wasn't allowed to let them in to drop us at the clubhouse. The club's security guard is also a nice chap, but I guess protocol is protocol. So we waved our friends goodbye and walked the last 200 metres instead as, ironically, yet another Hummer whizzed past us up to the clubhouse.