***for full gig listings jump to the bottom***

Greetings:

On Thursday in Phnom Penh there’s Stu Cottom at Villa Grange, Malina & Ysabel at Botanico and Big D Walker & George Hess at The Confidential, while The Extraordinary Chambers go late at Oscar’s on the Corner.  In Siem Reap find Angkor Classique at Villa D and Rod & Chema at AMBAR.

Friday night in Phnom Penh find The Broken Cymbal at Craft, Cardboard Lo-Fi at Botanico and Miss Sarawan Acoustic Trio at Le Bar at Sofitel.  Gallery Sra’Art  are putting on an open mic hosted by Initial G, Austin is at Cloud and Big D Walker is at Hideout.  Later on, Joe & the Jumping Jacks rock’n’roll out at Oscar’s on the Corner .  In Siem Reap, Jam-Cha are at Supernova Bar.

Saturday night in Phnom Penh, Green Pepper presents Music Dialog with Mikhail Ryu, Issei Sakano & Ahn Shi Nae, while Kampot Playboys take part in an extravaganza at Seekers Spirits and Intan & Yusbel are at Eden Garden.  You can also find The Broken Cymbal at Botanico, Le Clarinettiste Frauduleux at Au Marche, Penh Pals at Cloud and Faceslap at Back Street Bar.  Going later are Nestor & Lily at Mayazon while Indian fusion act PRERNA opens for Temple at Oscar’s on the Corner.  In Kampot, Low Season Riders are at The Bay, and in Siem Reap Rod & Chema are at Harry’s & The Welsh Consulate, Electric Soup are at Supernova Bar and Japan Guitar Shop are at Laundry.

Well-known harmonica player around town Colin Grafton and his wife Keiko Kitamura recently visited the west coast of the US with an exhibition of photographs of dancers taken in Phnom Penh in 1974, also promoting the accompanying book Dancers.  Colin wrote this piece for our sister publication Kumnooh – a weekly gig guide for Cambodian arts.

Also note the Musica Felice choir is holding auditions next Wednesday 31 May and Saturday 3 June.

The LengPleng Feature  

Specialties and Special Ties – Phnom Penh & Hong Kong

This week guest writer Troy Campbell offers memories of connections between two music cities and communities.

“I reach into my stickbag and pull out a pair of Vic Firth 5B’s, drumsticks given to me by Salvatore DiGaetano, generous devil dog drummer that he is.  I’m playing a gig tonight at The Aftermath with another Phnom Penh musical luminary, Mr. Ziad Samman. The Aftermath is a cool rock and roll venue in Hong Kong’s Central district, and I smile at the Cambodian dots connected by Ziad, Sal and myself. I smile thinking about the numerous Wat Sarawan open mics collected along the way.  I smile recalling the Professor Kinski remix of a CSP siren song that prompted me to visit Cambodia years ago, a song I first heard on a CD purchased in Singapore while I was stationed in Korea. I smile at my sheer dumb, stupid luck.”

Read the whole article here

Passing Chords – a few things you may not know about …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Andy Potter.  A veteran of the scene, Andy has played with two of the longest-running Phnom Penh expat bands, Joe & the Jumping Jacks (drums) and Stiff Little Punks (keyboards) and he has also toured with Curtis King Band and Nikki Buzz.  Currently you can find him regularly playing drums “which I’m thoroughly enjoying like you can’t believe” on Sunday afternoons at Villa Grange with the recently named jazz trio Jive Buddies with Phil Javelle and George Hess.  He notes: “The funny thing is I played a lot through the 80s with a band Jivin, a great social club band that played two or three nights a week.  Rock’n’roll – Cliff Richard, Elvis, all that stuff.”

Do you have a pet musical hate?
Repetitive jam nights where it’s just a circle of a few chords.  Too many jam nights you end up playing either something you can’t play to or is too repetitive, and how do you stop it?

A private musical indulgence:
Learning the keyboard.  I know I’m not very good but I love it.  I wish I’d started when I was a teenager.  My brother was a pro keyboard player, and he had lessons from a young age, while I was playing drums, so we played together as kids.  So now I spend time every day trying to learn – it doesn’t stick like it used to.

The year you first came to Cambodia:
2009, touring with the Curtis King Band.  I was quite scared.  The guys in the band had been winding me up – oh, it’s wild in Phnom Penh, the last time we were here we got attacked by the tuk tuk drivers, it’s awful.  We stayed at the Pickled Parrot, and when I went to my room late at night I wedged the chair under the door.  We played Talking to a Stranger and Sharky.

An early music memory:
Traffic at the Colston Hall in Bristol.  I was 12.  They had a single out at the time, Hole In My Shoe.  I also saw Segovia live with my dad, who played guitar.  My older sister was listening to The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Cliff Richard, so I got all that influence.

The last thing you had to eat:
Warm chicken salad at Golden Home, which is supposed to be good for your waistline.

A country you want to visit:
It’s not a country, but Tasmania.  The three Tasmanians I know are all very nice gentlemanly people.  So if they are an example of people who come from there then it must be a very interesting place to visit.

A book or movie you keep going back to:
I like murder mysteries, detective stories, particularly Swedish detective stories, like the Wallander series, which are actually translated to English now but I like to keep up my Swedish.

What languages do you have?
I spent 16 years running a business in Sweden, so Swedish – Big D Walker (who has also spent many years in Sweden) and I talk in Swedish a lot.  So I can also understand some Danish and Norwegian, and I can pick up some words in German.  I studied French at school – I understand but don’t like speaking it.  And I lived in Spain for a few years so I can get by with Spanish.  And a bit of English, and not very much Khmer.

Your primary instrument, and when you started playing it:
Drums, at around five or six.  I always wanted to play the drums.  I was bought a kit when I was about ten – it was an antique, old swing jazz kit, with a massive bass drum, and a tray on the top with four red Chinese wood blocks.  Everyone wanted to buy them from me.  I never gigged with it.  I had a really good drum teacher, Max Abrams, he was in a band called Ambrose I think it was, and was Stuart Copeland’s drum teacher – in the 50s he was the go-to drum teacher in London, but he’d retired and moved by the time he took me on.  He was a real drill sergeant, he was really strict and rudiments were his thing.

Something people might be surprised to know about you:
I’m a doubly qualified nurse.  When I was young I couldn’t get a job so I went and did the training – it was paid education.  And it set me up for life in many ways, and I enjoyed it, but it was quite hard work and it didn’t pay enough.  They’re asking me to come back and work in the UK, but I’m not going.

You have a time machine and a magic ticket to one gig or festival in the past. What do you choose?
One person I never saw live was Bob Marley.  I saw Stevie Wonder, Black Sabbath with Ozzy Osbourne in ’74, Elton John just as he made it, Buddy Rich.  But never Bob Marley, I think he would have been amazing.

A question from the last participant – what was your most embarrassing moment on stage?
That’s easy.  I had an audition for Mud, the 70s glam rock band, and I fell off the drum stool.  And one time when I was playing with Curtis King Band I fell off the drum stool.  I played all night and the only thing people remembered was when I fell off the stool.

Department of Mutual Support:  Friends of LengPleng

We are pleased to announce the first artist page for Friends of LengPleng: The Extraordinary Chambers.  Becoming a Friend of LengPleng will get your logo into the weekly email and onto the weekly wrap page, – see below – and all your gig listings will automatically click through to a page on our website (i.e. a non-Facebook presence for those punters who don’t Facebook) for further information, photos, videos and so on.  Oscar’s on the Corner, Little Susie and The Deck are now onboard – Individuals may also wish to nominate a venue or band to support either anonymously or for the personal glory.

Your contributions will help us keep the lights on and upgrade the infrastructure to more reliable levels at LengPleng Towers – $25 for three months, $40 for six months and $75 for 12 months.  Everything else stays free.  Email gigs@lengpleng.com for further details.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steve Porte Photo(s) of the Week

 

Stiff Little Punks in action at Oscar’s on the Corner, Saturday 13 May 2023

If you wish to receive LengPleng in your inbox every Thursday please send a subscribe email to gigs@lengpleng.com.

Musicians, venues, punters:  if there are things you know that LengPleng should know, please tell us and we’ll do our best to tell the world.

See you around the traps.
your correspondent,

 

Guillermo Wheremount
LengPleng.com
gigs@lengpleng.com (mailto:gigs@lengpleng.com)

Weekly Gig Guide – week commencing Thursday 25 May 2023

** residency/weekly

For DJs and clubs, we recommend Phnom Penh Underground

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

*Note that Wednesday events are often not announced until early in the week – check back here for updates*

Coming soon:

By Weekly Wrap