Outdoor Jazz Performance

A jazz performance at BDGMooi! Fest last weekend. I forgot to check who these musicians were, but their performance was really good. I enjoyed it.

Bandung World Jazz Festival 2010: Sound Through the Dimension

Here are some of the pictures that I took at Bandung World Jazz Festival 2010 which began today and will last till tomorrow at Sabuga.

Bandung World Jazz Festival is an annual event and this year's is the second. The first was held last year.

Fifty two jazz groups from Indonesia, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Ghana, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, and USA are performing in this year's festival which is themed "Sound Through Dimension".

The theme was chosen to reflect the uniquely diverse musical traditions of the participating groups and the collaborative projects that they are trying to forge to create mutual musical dialogs that are expected to produce new musical compositions, sensations, alteration, opinions, interpretations, and expressions.

Krakatao Band

Of the many stage performances staged at Pasar Seni ITB 2010 (ITB Art Market 2010), the Krakatao Band's performance was probably the most awaited.

Krakatau Band has a unique concept of music that combines Indonesian ancient Gamelan tonal system called Slendro or Salendro (which is known in Karawitan traditional music of Sunda, Java, and Bali) as the basis and the Western diatonic musical elements to form an energetic jazzy-feel fusion.

Their performance here I should say was very electrifying and managed to spell the audience (myself included) to sit (some even stand) still, cheer, and sing with them ever under the heat of the early afternoon sun. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to upload the video I took because of the slow internet connection. But you can listen to the sample of their musical compositions in their website that I linked above.

Ammy, the Violinist

His name's Ammy Kurniawan. He is a Fine Art-ist by education. He graduated from the Fine Art Department of Indonesia University of Education, Bandung. But he is best known as a violin soloist, music arranger and conductor, and an alternative strings and jazz musician. He is the founder and owner of Ammy Alternative Strings, a music school that he established to share his love for string instruments, and a member of 4Peniti (lit. 4 safety pins), an alternative indi music group that he established with his friends.

I love his performances, solo or with the 4Peniti. Here's a sample of his violin students' performance that I videotaped at Galeri Kriya Kulit Jawa Barat (West Java Leather Craft Exhibition) in Bandung on Augutst 7, 2010.

If you'd like to hear what kind of music the 4Peniti plays, you may want to go here. Let me know if you like and enjoy it. I do!

Sambasunda

It's not easy to do stage photography if you can't get close to the stage or don't have the right equipment. But I was happy doing this one with my pocket camera (my other cameras being out of batteries) and from a position that's not close enough to get good photographs. The music was simply great and electrifying. So even when I could not get decent pictures of this group's stage performance, I was just happy being there to listen to their music.

This is Sambasunda performing at last week's Bambu Nusantara World Music Festival. Sambasunda is a Bandung-based group of creative contemporary musicians whose unique musical compositions and performances have won them a number of worldwide acclaims. Their music is modern but deeply rooted in the rich varieties of Indonesian traditional musical traditions.

The group was established in 1990 with the name PRAWA. In 1997, the name was changed to CBMW. The current name - Samba Sunda - was adopted in 1998 when they launched their first album "Rhythmical Sundanese People" of which "Sambasunda" was one of the songs.

Contrary to what many people think about the name, Sambasunda has nothing to do with the Latin music of Samba. Sambasunda is a combination of "samba", a Cirebonese dialect word that means a pre-puberty teenager, and Sunda, the name of an Indonesian ethnic unit, the native population of the western part of the Java island.

I'll upload the video of their performance later at my other blog Bandung Daily Video.

Bambu Nusantara World Music Festival (Part 1): Balinese Jegog

This past weekend (Saturday and Sunday, October 17 & 18), Bandung again became the host of the Bambu Nusantara World Music Festival . 60 bamboo music groups from Indonesia and overseas were invited and performed at this annual festival held jointly by the Indonesian Department of Tourism and Culture, Bandung creative communities, and private sponsors. This year's festival is the third. The first was held in Jakarta in 2007, the second at SABUGA (Ganesha Cultural Convention Center) Bandung last year, and this year it's held in Bandung's Paris Van Java.

This year's Bambu Nusantara Festival is held as part of the Helarfest. As some of you may remember from last year, the Helarfest is a series of events showcasing the emerging creative culture in the city of Bandung. More information about it is available at the Helarfest 2009 website.

In addition to providing a forum for Indonesian bamboo artists to meet and showcase their works, this festival also aims at improving public awareness of the role of bamboo in arts, culture, and environment. Therefore, in addition to music and art performances, it also staged seminars and conducted bamboo planting in areas around the venue.

It was impossible for me to follow all the activities in this two-day packed event. But beginning today I'm going to share with you whatever photos, and videos of festival that I could manage to make.

And here's the first one: Jegog Bali (Balinese Jegog bamboo gamelan ensemble). To see what the performance is like and listen to the music, please check out this post at Bandung Daily Video.

Bandung Creative City: Creativity Nurtured

Creativity, a mental and social process whereby new concepts or ideas are generated, is a complex phenomenon. Different branches of sciece have studied it. However, up to this point, there are no unified authoritative explanations yet of how it is generated or how it can be nurtured. Some say, it's a Divine gift. Some others say it has to do with personality traits or social environment. There are even people who believe that it happens by chance.

Regardless of the theoretical debates, there is enough evidence that some communities are more creative than others as shown by the creative works they have produced. This phenomenon can probably show that creativity is to a large extent socially generated and nurtured. Based on this assumption, Nickerson (1999), for example, proposed some techniques whereby creativity can be generated and nurtured. Some of these techniques include encouraging confidence and willingness to take risks and providing opportunities for choice and discoveries.



Bandung Creative City is not just a title that has been awarded to this city for nothing. A lot of trend-setting creative products of fashion, designs, architecture, and music have been made in the city. 80 percent of Indonesia's top music groups, for example, originates from this city. Big names that are currently at the top music charts in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei, such as Peterpan, The Cangchuters, and Kuburan - just to mention a few - are originally from Bandung.

The emergence of these groups does not come by chance. This city nurtures creativity by providing a lot of opportunities for young aspiring talents to experiment, show, and perform their creative works. These photos of young emerging music groups performing on stages set on Braga street sometime ago are just some examples of how the city nurtures creativity.

Street Photography # 8: Street Percussionist

Although Bandung has quite a number of street percussionists performing on the streets for tips, this particular street percussionist does not normally perform on the street. He and his group usually perform on stage. His street performance pictured here is part his group's participation in Braga Festival last year.

Percussion, any musical intruments that produce sounds by means of vibrations and are played by hitting, shaking, rubbing, scrapping, is believed to be the first musical intrument ever created.

There are many musical instruments that can be categorized as percussion. Classified according to how the sounds are produced, the persussion would include:

- Idiophonic instuments, i.e. musical instruments that produce sounds by the vibration of the whole instrument's body, such as bells, chimes, etc.

- Membraphonic instuments, i.e. musical instruments that produce sounds by the vibration of some sort of membranes. All kinds of drums belong to this category.

- Chordophonic instruments (also called string instruments), i.e. musical instruments that produce sounds by the vibration of their string elements, such as the piano and the guitar.

- Aerophonic instruments (also called wind instruments), i.e. musical instruments that produce sounds by the air passing through the instruments, such as the saxophone and the flute.

- Electrophonic instruments, i.e. musical instruments that produce sounds by electronic signals or pulses, such as the electones and MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface).