Doek Festival 2015 : Blogs
Kevin Whitehead visited the whole programme of the festival and wrote a blog each day.
This is them:
Blog #1 by Kevin Whitehead
Doek Meets Tri-Centric: what a great idea. Ten musicians from the US (including Tri-Centric founder, saxophonist, official Jazz Master and classical composer Anthony Braxton) and ten-plus from Amsterdam, coming together to play big pieces by members of the ensemble, and to play in small, improvising combinations. This is my kind of festival; that combination of ad hoc groups and big anchor pieces recalls for me the Bimhuis’s 1991 October Meeting—the first place I saw many of the Dutch masters in person. Four years later, I was living in Amsterdam and writing a book about improvised music here.
The first couple of days of the six-day festival, Tuesday June 2 and today, Wednesday the 3rd, there are open rehearsals starting at noon in the concert hall of community center Zaal 100. There the players work on pieces to be performed in the same room the same evening. As a music journalist and curious fan, I love eavesdropping on rehearsals—that’s where you see how a composer’s mind works, and marvel at how quickly these players whip complex compositions together. After the morning session, someone commented, “It feels like we’ve been playing together for years”—and there’s some truth to that; among the Americans and the Hollanders, there are combinations of players who have worked together for a decade or three.
At the afternoon session, American cornet player Taylor Ho Bynum guided the more-or-less full ensemble through his three-movement piece, with all sorts of interjections cued in by the composer/conductor, superimposed lines moving at different speeds, brief solo segments that emerge from and recede into the pack, and what Taylor called a “super-tonal power-ballady part.” The music was complex to be sure, but he put the players at ease: “I trust your judgment.… When all else fails, trust your ears and you’ll be fine. I trust all of you guys’ ears.” (The “guys” in the band include five women, by the way.) At the end of the rehearsal, the ensemble did a quick run-through that sounded slightly shaky here and there—but on the Tuesday night concert before a packed house, everything gelled wonderfully; you had to marvel at the focus these players bring to the job.
First up on the evening program was “Offering” by Ingrid Laubrock, the German tenor saxophonist who’s a mainstay of New York’s creative music scene. It was inspired by full-bodied Tibetan chants, and really showed off the textural possibilities of an ensemble fortified by a double rhythm section: two guitars, two keyboards, two bassists and two drummers. (You can look all the players up.) There were thundering bursts from the terrific brass section, the rumble of two bass clarinets played at the bottom of their range, some intense shrieking from Mary Oliver’s violin, and fat mysterious chords from merged brass, reeds and strings.
The night’s third world premiere, by saxophonist James Fei from California, was a gloriously dense piece for nine players, as if a couple of ensembles had been superimposed on one another; Fei called the textures “static” but there was an a lot of lively byplay within that compressed sound—all the more so in the second half, where he opened things up to improvised variations. (These players are great at collective playing as unit—the ensemble improvising is about virtuoso listening and quick responses, and leaving your ego at the door.)
Interspersed among these big pieces were five improvising subgroups curated by Doek cornetist Eric Boeren, featuring almost every member of the ensemble. They ranged from the unlikely (a sort of loud chamber trio: Vincent Chancey on french horn, tenor sax howler John Dikeman, and skronky guitarist Brandon Seabrook) to a lyrical quintet (Bynum, Oliver, alto saxist Michael Moore, bassist Wilbert de Joode and pianist Kaja Draksler). And there were two fine improvised quartets. One mixed pairs of regular collaborators—Doek brassmen Boeren and trombonist Wolter Wierbos, Tri-Centric’s Laubrock and guitarist Mary Halvorson)—that started with fast chatter and quickly turned lyrical. The other quartet served up a terrific burst of improvised electronic music, with James Fei on the crackle synthesizer (an eccentric—and rarely heard—device developed at Amsterdam’s STEIM in the 1970s), and Oscar Jan Hoogland on its tiny cut-rate counterpart, the crackle box (as well as electric clavichord); they were buttressed by the band’s highly compatible drummers Michael Vatcher and Onno Govaert, who came up with some electronic-sounding timbres of their own.
I’d tell you more, but today’s rehearsals start in half an hour as I write this, and I’d hate to miss a thing. Sitting in the stands yesterday as the players ran though the music, looking at the ensemble, I thought, it’ll be a long time before we see/hear an international ensemble this rich and extraordinary again. Can’t wait to hear what they come up with in rehearsal today—and realize in concert tonight.
xxx
Blog #2: Braxton’s Birthday
Anthony Braxton turns 70 today, 4 June 2015, and I may not have to tell you he will be celebrating in high style at the Bimhuis tonight, as part of the ongoing Doek Meets Tri-Centric festival. Braxton the saxophonist will be playing some of his recent Falling River Music—ensemble improvising guided or stimulated by his abstract images and open-ended narrative elements, a way to tap into the intuitive side of music-making. He will also conduct some of his classic music for large groups (including at least one piece, Composition 89, which as far as I can determine has never appeared on record). That first segment will mostly involve the nine musicians who came over with him from the United States; the latter pieces will be played by the full 20 piece Amero-Dutch ensemble. There will also be improvisations exploring the musical vocabularies Braxton has developed over 40-some years in creative music.
It is sure to be a good day, kicking off what is likely to be another good year. At 70 Braxton is sitting pretty. A year and a half ago he retired from academia, after 23 years at Wesleyan University (and a few years at Mills College before that)—something he’d been looking forward to, to give him more time to work on his compositions. A month later—after many years of being badmouthed by certain members of the jazz community (cough Wynton Marsalis cough) for his broad-minded ways, he was declared an official Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, inducted at the same time as Keith Jarrett and others. Braxton’s spontaneous 25-minute acceptance speech—in which he namechecked such diverse heroes as Dave Brubeck and Cecil Taylor, doo-wop singer Frankie Lymon, singing cowboys the Sons of the Pioneers, and the University of Michigan halftime band—achieved instant notoriety, and can be found on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lODuJppBWxI
Thanks to his Tri-Centric Foundation, principally administered by his trusty aide, festival co-coordinator and ace cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, Braxton has been able to stage several operas from his ongoing Trillium cycle—playful, philosophical, even science-fictiony tales that explore his worldview, derived from his three volumes of Tri-Axium Writings from the 1980s. He’s always been incredibly productive, and shows no intention of slowing down.
Wednesday afternoon at Zaal 100, he conducted an open-to-the-public rehearsal of the big band/large ensemble music to be played in the Bimhuis tonight, and it was a great window into his operating method. His music can be dense and challenging, with melody lines that leap and zigzag and may begin on odd beats. But he has always favored robust interpretation with rough edges over note-perfect readings devoid of the right feeling. I daresay a little chaos around the edges suits his bustling esthetic.
He is great at setting the performers at ease, and giving them confidence to tackle such difficult music. Rehearsing sections of his boisterously swinging big-band opus Composition 92, at first he’d count the music off at a forbidding tempo, then on subsequent passes slow it down to a manageable level. “Okay—this is going to be fun,” he said, before moving on to the very different, chamber music-y Composition 56 (first heard under a graphic title as track 2 on his milestone album Creative Orchestra Music 1976). Here the time is floating, throughout the course of several notated episodes (to be interspersed with improvisations on the concert). Rehearsing Composition 89 with its collage effects—a piece “three-dimensional rather than linear”—he did his best to keep the interpreters’ enthusiasm in check. He directed them to perform it “in the pianissimo issimo issimo world.… Think it terms of transparency; if you can’t hear the piano or cello, you’re probably playing too loud. When indecision comes, default to the pianissimo.”
He lavishly complimented the players (with good reason—they are very quick studies). Two hours had been allotted for these run-throughs, but he called it a day well before that time ran out. Better that the music not be too fully cooked before the players hit the stage; he wants that creativity in the moment, to allow for surprising things to happen. “Now I think you have enough information to kick it about and have some fun—and to let it open up into a multi-dimensional space,” he told them. And finally, he told any multi-instrumentalists in the band to bring whatever instruments they would like: “I’m open to any variety of timbre that will come up.”
The players are primed, fully up to the challenge, and rarin’ to go. Okay—this is going to be fun.
xxx
Give It Up or the Band: Blog #3 Friday 5 June
by Kevin Whitehead
Jazz festivals love to slap together combinations of well-known musicians, but some star-studded bands that look good on paper fizzle on stage—sometimes, frankly, because certain stars turn out to be jerks who aren’t easy to work with. Of course 20 nice people don’t necessarily make an ensemble either. This transatlantic bunch are especially congenial; you can see how much they enjoy each other’s company. (Having a lot of funny people around always helps.) More important, everyone can really play, everyone listens, and everybody pulls together.
Exhibit A was the second set at the Bimhuis last night, devoted to Anthony Braxton’s large-ensemble compositions. Braxton likes his Charles Ives-y collage effects, and often during that continuous set, there were three conductors in front of the band. Braxton was flanked by Taylor Ho Bynum and James Fei, who using hand-signals carved players out of the main ensemble to follow their instructions—to play different music from the other players, sometimes in a conflicting tempo, or a radically different dynamic level. Yet the music still had the transparency that Braxton seeks. It was great theater, which yielded clear and invigorating music. (After the show Braxton was already talking about making that set a CD.)
You could really see the players’ co-operative attitudes during the public rehearsals earlier this week—how the musicians, approaching some brand-new work by another member of the Doek/Tri-Centric orchestra, sought to clarify and bring out a composer’s best ideas, asking a lot of questions, and making diplomatic suggestions about how to shore up any shaky bits. And the composers respond in kind: it’s all about the work, not the ego.
Now, a lot of that process is just the normal give and take and prodding of the rehearsal process. So let me give an example of how these musicians really rise to the occasion. One composer from the band, who could easily have written a rousing, catchy tune for the players to lay back and enjoy and embellish, came in with a rhythmically fiendish composition that had everybody sweating. After a few halting and apologetic run-throughs the composer said, we don’t have to play this; I’ve got lots of more manageable pieces we could swap in instead. Then cornetist Bynum (the de facto ringleader of the American contingent) spoke up: what if I try to conduct it? Which he then immediately did, without a full score, clarifying the tempo shifts between sections (and holding the basic tempo rock steady). Instantly an observer could hear the point of all the struggle: the piece gelled in minutes. But if Taylor conducts on the concert, we’ll lose his cornet part, someone said. No problem, piped in trumpeter Nate Wooley: there are only a few places where we both play at once; give me five minutes and I’ll figure out how to cover both parts. In 20 minutes things had gone from, maybe we should abandon this, to, hey this sounds really good!
That’s the band in a nutshell. It helps that the ensemble is full of composers, whose pieces we’ve been hearing all week. They see/hear things from the visionary side and the practical side: you can’t realize your dream if the players can’t play it. And you’re willing to work harder for that composer because they’ve worked just as hard on your music.
One other thing I touched on a couple of days ago: no matter how good the final rehearsal was, chances are good the gig will be appreciably better—because adrenaline kicks in, or players went back to practice that convoluted phrase that kept tripping them up, or because they had more time to ponder the materials and the composer’s intent. In Holland in the ’90s one used to hear grumbling about new commissioned compositions that were played once and then never heard again. The music these US- and Amsterdam-based performers have come up with is meant to be played and replayed—because with improvisation so much a part of the mix, it’s never going to sound the same way twice.
Which is why I’m looking forward to Friday night’s Bimhuis concert, when the players take a second pass at a few compositions heard at Zaal 100 earlier in the week; last I heard (hey, sometimes improvised music calls for impromptu schedule changes) the program was to include pieces by Bynum, Eric Boeren, Kaja Draksler and Carl Testa—a very diverse program, in terms of sound an compositional strategies. I am reasonably sure those pieces are going to sound more seasoned than they did last time around. The rapport just keeps growing.
(One element in the mix we have been missing: Oscar Jan Hoogland had to skip the last two concerts, sidelined with the flu. We are hoping for a speedy recovery.)
Also: grand master Misha Mengelberg turns 80 today! More on him tomorrow.
xxx
Blog #4 6 June Misha’s Weekend
Misha Mengelberg turned 80 yesterday, an event surrounded by some fanfare. Today, tweede mishadag, there’s a Mengelberg symposium in the Bimhuis (see you there), and music ahead on the same stage tonight. Yesterday afternoon there was an informal reception/preview for him in Amstelveen, where Koeien is rehearsing—his unfinished opera, newly realized and already sold-out: Mengelberg words and music, edited by Cherry Duyns (who wrote in a character who speaks in Misha interview quotes) and Guus Janssen, who added some operatic elaborations on Mengelberg melodies—literal soprano solos.
Misha has Alzheimer’s, doesn’t make many public appearances now. When he sees a friend at home, and words fail, he communicates by whistling and singing—and if you join in (I brought a harmonica), so much the better. You hear he’s still connected, still speaking the language of his beloved counterpoint, whose rules are so lovely, he loved to scrunch and subvert them: musical chess.
Mengelberg has been at the heart of so much good in Dutch music, it’s a little ridiculous. At the conservatory in the 50s chum Louis Andriessen said, Now I’ve really heard a boogie-woogie piano player who moves me. Misha: Jimmy Yancey. John Cage juggling cigarettes at Darmstadt? Misha was there for that. Also when multi-media Fluxus happenings hit Amsterdam in the ’60s. (ICP and his many theater collaborators thank them.)
Even before he was a bad-boy young composer, he was the Monkish pianist you’d stick behind visiting American oddballs like Eric Dolphy. The drummer would be Han Bennink, already his steadfast partner. Han and Misha had an acrimonious trio with Willem Breuker (three-way death chess). Their ’70s ICP Orchestra was a mess (when Breuker’s new Kollektief was kicking ass), but in the ’80s, everything came together, when Wolter Wierbos and Michael Moore formed the nucleus of a new band, smart and eager. ICP turned into one of the world’s most beautiful, versatile and weird pocket orchestras—because of the music Misha wrote, and the esthetic he imparted. They even took time out to help reintroduce the world to the music of Herbie Nichols.
Mengelberg’s influence on this week’s Dutch contingent (and the American too, from conversations I overhear) is deep, and direct in the case of ICP’s Wierbos, Moore and Mary Oliver—and Eric Boeren who’s toured with Misha and played forever with his people, and Oscar Jan Hoogland who’s very much in that Mengelberg-to-Janssen-to-Fuhler/Braam/Scheen trickster pianist tradition.
I wrote in the Doek festival program book about Mengelberg-Braxton parallels, and more and more keep popping out. After Thursday’s concert, there was a little panel discussion where Mary Halvorson, James Fei and Taylor Ho Bynum talked about what they’d learned from Anthony Braxton, and about him as a teacher: He didn’t even care if you were enrolled in school, he’d teach you just because you wanted the musical knowledge. But it was never about getting you to buy into any particular method, including his own. Find your own way. So many times in that little discussion, I wanted to interrupt: but that’s Misha!
That’s why the transatlantic bunch that braided at the festival this week has been such a knockout: compatible parents. Tonight the band will play (besides a new work by Michael Moore, and reprises of Fei’s gloriously dense and Ingrid Laubrock’s gloriously colorful compositions premiered a few days ago) a program of Misha tunes, picked by his sidefolk. Inevitably it will be played with same kind of focused freedom and love of conflicting signals and montage as an ICP gig. It won’t sound anything like ICP—not with the Doek/Tri-centric miracle rhythm section, including paired/unpaired keyboardists, guitarists, bassists and drummers.
I have been attending rehearsals all week; I like seeing how the clock works, and watching smart people come to an understanding. The rehearsals of Mengelberg material I skipped. At showtime, I will sit there and marvel at the tunes and laugh at the surprises, and maybe at some happy train wrecks too. It’s Misha Mengelberg music.
xxx
Blog #5: Sunday 7 June
Sounds checked
by Kevin Whitehead
The Doek/Tri-Centric orchestra was playing the slow parts of Ingrid Laubrock’s “Offering,” soundchecking on Saturday afternoon. Glowing chords wafted up from the ensemble, and the beautiful blend of distinctive voices sounded eerily like some lost Gil Evans classic of the early 1960s: you could listen to those harmonies all day. This band/ensemble/musicians pool of 19 achieved that delicate balance of individual voices and collective strengths that makes jazz such a popular metaphor for societal relationships (and vice versa).
The ideal large jazz ensemble remains Duke Ellington’s: a band of distinctive accents and musical tics and speech patterns, of myriad timbres and idiosyncratic viewpoints. It’s an ideal more aspired-to than achieved, but this band had it. Not enough Duke had extra-strong stylists Johnny Hodges, Jimmy Hamilton, Paul Gonsalves and Harry Carney among his saxes; they also had to meld in section—voicing the harmonies even as you hear them as individuals. It’s as rare as it is beautiful. We have been lucky to hear that luminous sound all week.
Those voices bubbled out all over on Saturday, the last night they all played together this week. For the second set, arranger Michael Moore (whose rhythmically fiendish “Toujours Maintenant” premiered in the first set) roadmapped various highways and byways through a mess of familiar and less common compositions from Misha’s ICP book—an honest simulacrum of that orchestra’s fluid method. (The stukjes, for the record: Kneushoorn; Tetteretet 5; Waar bleef je 1 & 2; Kwijt for strings; Kafel; 3 haiku-like miniatures Misha wrote on one sheet of paper: Meelwurm/Tuinhek/Reukzoot; his ballad theme De sprong, O romantiek der hazen; Kachel; Brozziman; Weer is een dag voorbij; and the encore Kraloog).
That most raucous set was at times a Charles Ivesian/Braxtonian/Mengelbergian hubbub of conflicting musical statements converging on the same point. On “Waar bleef je,” when the main band played part one, trombonist Wolter Wierbos, bassist Wilbert de Joode and drummer Michael Vatcher huddled together, doing their best to play the other part in a different tempo. Players came and went as the action flowed from one tune to another, or the seas parted to make way for a solo. A stupendous “Brozziman” was all full-bore ass-braying for riffing horns; John Dikeman played the machine-gun Peter Brotzmann role; his flamethrower approach is well deployed in a band that generally administers solo space in small, concentrated doses. (Didn’t Misha say a little free-jazz squalling goes a long way?) The Nate Wooley solo that followed was one of the week’s most audacious: muted, quiet, reflective, the last thing you’d expect. Everybody had their say: the whole Ellingtonian panoply.
Misha Mengelberg came with his whole family, hung out with his old trombonist George Lewis (who’d spoken at the daytime Misha symposium, and who was practically a member of the family when he lived in Amsterdam in the ’80s), Misha also checked out the band soundchecking his tunes. He was in a visibly good mood.
As I write, the ensemble is already dispersing. Some players are winging toward the States, some getting ready to play today’s A’dam bike tour. At the Pianola Museum, where the two-wheeler pilgrimage starts at 2pm, Oscar Jan Hoogland will be the Phonograph Orchestra. French hornist Vincent Chancey and Tomeka Reid join her fellow cellist Harald Austbø at the Torpedo Theater, with Kaja Draksler as intermission pianist; at Het Perron the trio is Wolter Wierbos, violinist Mary Oliver and reedist Moore (the three ICPers in the Doek Tri-C band, improvising, probably). Hoogland’s Bakfietsband may even play on the ferry to NDSM, authorities permitting, as the fietsers head across the harbor (nice long ride) toward Wilbert de Joode’s gig with English-language storyeller Julian Hamilton.
Closing party, Zaal 100 where it all started, at 9 tonight: Yedo Gibson’s trio with ICP’s Ab Baars sitting in play still more Misha. No time to mourn the orchestra. We have more gigs to get to.
xxx
Blog #6: Monday 8 June
Withdrawal
by Kevin Whitehead
Sunday, the final day of the Doek/Tri-Centric festival, let us listeners quietly come down from all the excitement the orchestra built up last week. A few American guests lingered to play yesterday’s four-stop bicycle tour. Still high from Saturday’s Misha Mengelberg retrospective, wherever we went musicians were playing his tunes. We only made it to half the biking gigs—partly because everyone has to sleep sometime, partly because when a house manager tells us we’ll need to don blindfolds in order to be seated, as at the Pianola Museum, we are tiptoeing backwards out the door.
Oscar Jan Hoogland, who curated the day (and seemed to be everywhere), found a couple of gorgeous little theaters to visit. At the art deco gem Het Perron in the Jordaan, where he played intermission piano from the Mengelberg songbook, the main act was the trio of festival bandmembers who play in Misha’s ICP Orchestra, violinist/violist Mary Oliver, altoist/clarinetist Michael Moore and trombonist Wolter Wierbos. The three had had a ridiculous week. Besides rehearsing various festival premieres, they’ve been in endless technical/actors/dancers run-throughs for Misha’s opera Koeien premiering tomorrow.
At the Perron they started off free-improvising, as natural as breathing for these three, but before long bits of Mengelberg compositions slipped in: instant ICP trio. One tune they touched on is in Koeien, the ballad “Zo zacht als boter,” As Soft as Butter (which I’ll always associate with Jodi Gilbert who’s covered it). So even as they echoed last night’s blowout, they were turning toward their next job. The working musician marches on.
Kaja Draksler was playing from that same Misha songbook when we found the Torpedo Theater, nestled in a little alley off little Broadway—the Nes—in the city’s little little-theater district. To describe the Torpedo as little is to understate a pinch. It’s an opera house in miniature, about as wide as a thimble but surprisingly high and airy (there’s a tiny U-shaped balcony—proportions vary everywhere as sense dictates), and pleasant with more than ten people in it. And as James Fei pointed out, no Dutch theater is too tiny to have a bar.
The unostentatious decor is painted in good respectable Dutch primary colors. The stage area is so narrow and shallow the band spilled into the wings, looking gigantic: cellists Tomeka Reid and Harald Austbø flanking french horn player Vincent Chancey who sported a snug quilt-checked jacket and snappy narrow-brimmed hat. It wasn’t like something out of a Wes Anderson movie—they were in a Wes Anderson movie. The music was suitably quirky; Harald put some Misha scores on the music stand they all shared, sitting six inches from each other, and would drop sheets to the floor when it was time to move on. Their free play could be as tight as their circumstances, but Harald took the Americans into Dutch weirdo wereld. He still trots out eccentric stuff he learned at 14 from Ernst Reijseger (that’s him on the last page of New Dutch Swing), and now he sings a lot, in that loud, wild, dangerous voice of the drunk who won’t move on from under your Amsterdam window at 3 am. The highpoint was a sort of garbled mix of one of his besotted bar songs and Misha’s plaintive processional “Mother of All Wars.”
The week’s (and Misha weekend’s) final gig was anything but a valedictory. The Brazilian-turned-Dutch tenor and soprano saxophonist Yedo Gibson led a version of his trio with his longtime sidekick, the excellent, very melodic, creative, always listening, noisy when he needs to be and never louder than he should be Finnish guitarist Mikael Szafirowski. The ringers were subbing drummer Onno Govaert, who grabbed everybody’s ears this festival week, conveying raunchy feeling with immaculate technique, and ICP tenor and clarinetist Ab Baars. It was less Tenor Madness than Never Mind the Bollocks: Mengelberg punk style, starting with “A Bit Nervous” as/with honking H-Bomb Ferguson attack. Yedo is a charismatic guy and whale of a saxophone player, with a big sound and conceptual savvy, holding his own with Baars in a braying competition. Their merged low-register sounds were room-shaking cavernous on “We’re Going Out for Italian” taken as a Beefhearty dirge; the tune is Misha’s version of his then-young daughter Andrea’s happy chant whenever the family was headed to her favorite restaurant. The band sang the brief “Acappella” in three-part harmony, played another earwormy “Mother of All Wars” and the equally lovely “Poor Wheel,” and generally put their own spin on everything, rather like Ideal Bread playing Steve Lacy. A record might be nice.
It was a great way to end it all—a reminder there’s always more ahead. At the ensuing after party for anyone still around and vertical, Yedo good-naturedly but correctly chastised me for the way I’d been plugging this set, in the blog and on stage, making it sound like party entertainment rather than the final concert. The way everyone crowded into the room and hung on every note shows the audience knew what was what.
Pretty clear at this point Misha Mengelberg’s music like Anthony Braxton’s will keep ringing out, that these two composers/leaders who’d sometimes been accused of being rootless or betraying traditions have founded enduring traditions of their own. The Doek/Tri-Centric orchestra in its sheer dazzlement last week confirmed that traditions too march on.
It was a great week, and aside from all the talent and dedication everybody showed, part of its success was sheer dumb luck: sometimes big gatherings click and sometimes they don’t. This time every damn thing went right. But as Doek coordinator Carolyn Muntz reminded me as I was heading out the door, it’s also about all the little support stuff getting done, time after time after time: transportation and meals ready when you need them, awesomely competent volunteers to do advance work and run emergency errands, good personal relationships to grease the wheels. They got all that stuff right too.
Consensus is, in the future, this will be the Doek festival to beat. I don’t envy them that, but would be more than happy to watch them try. Next year: Amsterdam meets Chicago. Watch this space.
xxx