Jazz à l'ancienne

Ancienne Belgique is one of Brussels', and possibly Belgium's, best concert venues. It's right in the centre of town, and hosts a wide variety of contemporary music - not just rock and pop bands, but jazz, folk, hip-hop and others as well - and also arranges a number of free open-air gigs during the summer.

Lisa Ekdahl is a Swedish jazz singer/songwriter, who sings mostly in Swedish, but sometimes in English. She has a very delicate, almost child-like voice - very unlike the great jazz singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, but really very evocative, both in her own songs and in the jazz standards.

And on Sunday evening, I went to see the latter in the former, and very much enjoyed it.

As some of you know, I am... let us say not well-disposed towards the Swedes at the moment, and I was unsure about whether to go to this gig - I love Lisa Ekdahl's music, but I didn't know whether I could cope with a whole evening of Swedish. As it turned out, though, that wasn't an issue as her set was entirely in English - which was actually a bit disappointing, because I love some of her Swedish stuff. She mostly sang songs from her albums When Did You Leave Heaven and Back To Earth, and most of them were wonderful - the only one that didn't work for me was Björk's It's Oh So Quiet, because she didn't make a real contrast between the quiet and loud parts, and I don't think the song is anywhere near as effective without it. Her Cry Me A River, though, was beautiful.

Stand up and be counted

So, of all the things I didn't expect to be doing in Brussels, going to an English-language stand-up comedy show with a group of Greeks and Slovenes has to come fairly high up the list...

We saw two comedians:

Kevin Bridges is a relatively new name on the circuit. He's from Glasgow, and some of my companions had a certain amount of trouble understanding him. He was pretty good, but some parts of the act felt a bit flat to me.

Adam Hills is much better known and better established as a comedian - he's been going since 1989, and has been on Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Mock the Week. I thought he was really excellent, but I'm glad we weren't sitting near the front, because he really picked on some people in the audience. If you search for his name on YouTube you'll find quite a few videos from his stand-up act - strangely, in some of them he seems a lot flatter and less engaging than he was last night, so maybe he wasn't just being nice when he said he'd really enjoyed the evening.

After the show, we went for a drink at the Crystal Lounge (warning, website plays music automatically, which I find a bit irritating), which is in a very posh hotel in the Avenue Louise area. It's an amazing space, with an absolutely beautiful terrace, and it serves some great cocktails, including one which comes in a round glass with a lightbulb in it so that it glows blue. It's bloody expensive, but definitely worth a visit.

Holy and blessed three

It's Trinity Sunday, which seems an appropriate day to write about my brand-new church home, Holy Trinity Brussels.

Holy Trinity is the pro-cathedral of the diocese in Europe, no less. A pro-cathedral is, apparently, a church temporarily standing in as the cathedral for a diocese; I'm not sure why Holy Trinity is classified as such, but I suspect it has something to do with the fact that Brussels already has a (Catholic) cathedral. It's quite a big church - room for a couple of hundred people, I'd guess, and several other function rooms (including a bar downstairs, which is an excellent addition to any church!) - but you can't tell from the outside, as it's hidden away in a courtyard behind some other buildings, in the middle of one of Brussels' poshest shopping areas.

It's been there since 1902, though it was called Christ Church back then - it became Holy Trinity in 1958, when the congregation merged with another Anglican church nearby. There are four services every Sunday, all with very different styles, ranging from traditional communion using the Book of Common Prayer to a bilingual French/English service with African music. So far, I've only been to the main morning service, which is a fairly traditional sung communion with a robed choir; and, after only two weeks, I seem to have found myself singing in the said choir! It's amazing what can come from a casual conversation during the after-service coffee... It's a much bigger choir than I'm used to, and quite a few of the members seem to be scarily accomplished musicians, but I think I'm going to enjoy it.

Polyphonic heaven

Last night I went to a fabulous concert by these people, in a beautiful chapel literally 3 minutes walk from my apartment. I think I could get used to this.

It was a concert of Tallis and Byrd - the doyens of English (and in particular English-language) choral music. Especially in a resonant acoustic like an old stone church, you can just shut your eyes and let the music wash over you. Heavenly!

The programme was mostly Latin music - Byrd's five part mass and Tallis's Lamentations of Jeremiah - and they also did four of Tallis's English motets.

And I note from the website that they're back in September. I might not be living round here by then (though you never know), but I'm already putting it in my diary.

The joys of multilingual TV

One of the advantages of living here is the availability of foreign television stations: I currently have French French, Belgian French, Dutch, Flemish, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Turkish and English channels. It's great having BBC1 and 2, of course, and, at least in theory, watching the other channels is a great way of getting better at those languages.

Unfortunately, as anyone who has spent time over here can tell you, European TV is rubbish. In practice, I mostly watch the BBC, plus imported US and UK programmes - not only can I still get my NCIS and CSI fix, but now I have a choice of English with Dutch subtitles or French dubbing (obviously, the former is more satisfactory, but the latter has a certain entertainment value all of its own).

Can anyone recommend anything French, Dutch, Belgian or German that might actually be worth watching? I, and my language skills, would be most grateful for suggestions.