Tristan Parrock is a piano man and the only regular entertainment on this little ferry-cum-cruise liner. He does a good job, but it’s not too easy. The passengers are pretty mature crew. Not that that totally writes of a party atmosphere. But they are mostly Brits or Germans. Grog is seriously dear here for Brits with their economy and for German with their cheap prices. So Tristan gets a steady flow of people with coffee cups to listen, and there are one or two bar-hangers, but this is not a raging audience. But he does a good job.
I sat there admiring the all-encompassing nature of the job. This is one guy who sings, runs an accompanying drum machine, plays left hand bass and right hand piano chords. It’s a neat one-man band with a nice feel and some variation; it’s not just sequenced regularity. And I was particularly impressed by the bass lines. They sounded just right. He’s got that left hand loose and rhythmic and independent. But even more than that. It got me thinking that the lines are just as they should be. I guess this is because he’s doing it all. The right and left hands are a package, even if independent, and both fit to, and serve, a vocal line (which is the most important part) that he is also performing. So there are no unnecessary or unfitting fills or improvs. This is neat and eminently suitable interplay, because one person, one mind, is doing it all. It must take some time to develop the skills to do this, even on popular piano-bar numbers that we all have in our heads, but it’s a skill that I’ve recently enjoyed and even marvelled at. Piano bar is not something I hear too often (recently it’s been once per ship) but it’s a particular and attractive skill. I’m enjoying this one. But then, just to confirm how hard it is, I ran off with everyone else when the PA announced an aurora was on view on deck. Being the piano man can be a lonely job, but we all know that from the music.
Tristan Parrock (piano, vocals) is the piano man on the Hurtigruten ship MS Richard With.
Travelling on this ship in Norway isn’t as serious as Ellington’s original: we are here for the Aurora Borealis. Megan had never seen an aurora and it was the genesis of this trip. I’d seen one, or at least the Aurora Australis, our Southern counterpart, outside Bungendore in a break while playing with White Cockatoo, a bush band, in ~1990. That was a beautiful and established memory: rippling blues and reds and greens in a curtain stretching from ~10-60 degrees from the horizon. We had been worrying that we’d miss this one. All the way from Bergen, the sky had been overcast or raining. Then we wondered if it was too early in the year or if there was too much moon. We avidly checked aurora prediction websites and the SOHO observatory and meteorological sites. The background level was 2 on a scale of 7, ie, low auroral activity. This didn’t sound too exciting. But then the sites raised short-term forecasts to high activity on the night of 7/8 October due to an observed Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). (Aurorae are charged particles from an active Sun that glow when caught in the Earth’s magnetic field. They peak every 11 years with the sunspot cycle and have a 28 day sub-cycle related to solar rotation. Unpredictable CMEs can send particles to Earth and cause otherwise unexpected auroral activity). But the weather was predicted to be overcast. In the end, at 10pm, the sky was clear, the Moon was not risen and the aurora was stunning. We saw streams of green over the ship, horizon to horizon: we were right under it. Mostly yellow-green, but with some rare tinges of red or purple at the edges; constant, billowing movement; great clouds or sinuous snakey trails; occasional whisps or dark lines. Stunning beauty. We got out at 1am and 4am too, but nothing like the first. I got some pics, but not as good as those of Thomas Stutz of Switzerland with his Nikon full frame and 14-24 f2.8 lens and tripod and 3sec exposures at ISO1600. His were superb. Here are a few of mine (handheld) and the link to Thomas’ site. Expect Thomas' pics by end October.
