Aaron Nazrul – Butterfly Man CD Release (and CD Party at The Media Club Dec 9th)

Attend Aaron’s CD Release Party on December 9th at 10:00 p.m. at the Media Club in Vancouver, B.C.

Lit Fuse Records presents Butterfly Man , the debut folk album from Vancouver singer/songwriter Aaron Nazrul , produced by former “Doug and the Slugs” keyboardist and Genie Award-Winner Simon Kendall , with additional tracks produced by Lin Gardiner of Super G Music and Vancouver’s DJ Darren Woodhead .

Aaron Nazrul (real name Aaron Ross) was a hit at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, winning popular and critical acclaim: “The Golden Voice of the Festival…definitely a talent to watch for in the future.” Festival FM Radio

Aaron’s music combines the raw emotional intensity of Ben Harper and the cultural diversity of Manu Chao, an emerging talent with the voice of a future classic.  Tracks of note are As the Sun Goes Down, Take These Chains, Butterfly Man, and Delivered featuring guest vocals from Frazey Ford of The Be Good Tanyas.
 
The album was inspired by Aaron’s recent travels in South East Asia, and includes songs written during a motorcycle trip through Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and China.  Butterfly Man is a slang term in Asia for a restless traveler who never settles in one place, or with one person.
 
The album was Executive Produced by Lit Fuse Records founder Baba Brinkman, who has gained international recognition for his Rap Canterbury Tales performances. Butterfly Man is now available from the iTunes Music Store, with general release in retail stores December 4th.

Web: http://www.myspace.com/aaronnazrul

Freestyling the Fringe By: Baba Brinkman

Visit Swanktrendz’s home Site

Well-Adjusted Citizens,

Today is the last day of the Edinburgh Fringe (nicely planned, I know), and tonight I will play my last of 24 consecutive shows, followed by a post-partum rest. A few hours ago I was on a different kind of stage, being presented with an impressively titled Three Weeks Editor's Choice Award including a photo and framed plaque. The biggest festival reviewing newspaper Three Weeks chooses the ten events, shows, or performers that made the fringe special each year, and this year I was one. Being selected as one special thing out of ten may not seem like a great honour, but there are over two thousand shows competing for attention at the Fringe this year.

Here is the Three Weeks review that led to the Award.

I have been rubbish (UK-ism) at keeping up with email during this festival, due to the constant welcome distractions provided. Our daily routine for the past month has been to wake up each day at around noon (or sometimes 3 pm, depending on the night before), and proceed to the local coffee shop for beverages, internet, and breakfast (I'm here right now, 4:30 pm, right on schedule). Then we prepare and hand out flyers for a few hours each afternoon, and get ready for our shows. Aaron has had about a dozen gigs at various times over the past three weeks, some at theatres and some at bars and cafés, and I have been performing The Rap Canterbury Tales every night at 8:45. When the shows are all finished around 10 pm we head out on the town for the smorgasbord of cabaret, dancing, theatre, live music, comedy, and nightclubs that are available around the city until 5 am every night, often ushering in the dawn as we walk home, and the next day we do it all again. In the (purloined) words of Jay-Z, it's a hard knock life for us.

How can I still be having fun doing the same thing I was doing three years ago? Well, this year I changed up my strategy and starting working more and more improvisation into my act, turning it into a spontaneous comedy play. For me, this has been the Freestyle Fringe. In the first week of the festival, Erik challenged me to experiment with the script every day (he said he'd die of boredom tech-ing the same exact show twenty four more times), so I have been doing my best to surprise him with new twists and improv dialogue in each show. We have also included a segment where the audience fills out short surveys in the lobby before the show, writing down phrases and words that they associate with rap and Chaucer. Then, at the end of the show, Erik projects the responses onto a screen on stage, and I extemporize everyone's ideas into a live freestyle rap as an epilogue.

The reputation I got for doing this freestyle outro in the show quickly spread to the official Fringe radio station, Festival FM, and on the fourth day of the festival they brought me in for an interview and got me to freestyle live on air. It went so well that they offered me a regular slot reading the nightly 8 o'clock news as a freestyle rap. So for the past three weeks I have stopped in at the radio station on my way to perform every evening, and they have prepared a list of the day's headlines, finding the quirkiest and most bizarre items of news to try to challenge me. Then they hand me the list of headlines and with no rehearsal or preparation I put them into rhyme live on air. This regular stunt has earned me a cult following with the festival media people, and we even brought the camera in to film one of the news sessions. You can watch the YouTube video here:

The result of all this experimentation and creative development, I'm happy to announce, has been a critical smash at this year's fringe. I was reviewed five times by various papers and websites and never got less than four stars out of five, with one five star review and two Critic's Choice picks. For those of you who are currently feeling nauseated by all this saccharine positivism, you will surely appreciate the final words of the Three Weeks review: if he wasn't so likeable, he'd be almost sickening. Erik takes issue almost every day with this affront, especially when I get on his case... "’likeable? ha!’

Here's some more of what the critics are saying:

Fest Review:

Review

FringeReview.com Review:

In a few days I'm on my way back down to Brighton and London to do some more recording with my UK hip-hop affiliates, then to Brisbane, Australia on September 6th. The Brisbane Writer's Festival has organized a writer's retreat for the week preceding their events. This entails flying all of the featured writer's to an island off the coast, where we will be put up in cabins and left to our own devices for four days in the middle of a national park. Fringe benefits.

Hope you have all had a similarly spectacular summer, and wish me luck on the hard road ahead.

baba

Image from babsword.com

Back in the Saddle by Baba Brinkman

image from baba’s myspace.com site

Visit Swanktrendz’s home Site

Creative Capacities,

The prodigal son of the Fringe has returned home, to Edinburgh that is. I'm writing from a packed café on the rainy official first day of the largest and greatest arts festival in the world. I turned my back on the Fringe last year, opting instead to record my "Lit-Hop" album and stay in B.C. for the summer. But the Fringe is a forgiving family, and it looks like they're taking me back, and it's a great place to be.

I had my first preview show on Friday, and it was pretty nearly a disaster, with the redeeming factor that no one in the audience seemed to be aware of everything that was going precipitously wrong, or if they were aware they laughed it off due to my ad-libbing through it. The reason for the cock-up was the recent addition of animated visuals to my performance. We are now projecting Erik's illustrations from the book onto a screen on stage while I perform the show, and the technical logistics of mixing the lighting with the visuals and sound has been challenging, but yesterday's show was much improved for fluidity (and I had about fifty people in), and tonight the show ran like a well oiled Olympian.

If you want to see an example of the new animated tales, you can watch one of them on YouTube here.

The other action at the Fringe this year is the rise of Aaron Ross, Vancouver's next folk music hero (mark my words). Today he performed his world debut show to a healthy crowd of forty-five or so, and one hour later he had forty-five appreciative fans. We sold a pile of Aaron's CDs afterwards, and he had a reviewer in as well, so we'll see what the critics think of him next. But really it hardly matters, because the crowds are loving him, and he will be performing nearly every day for the rest of the month, seven days in a massive cathedral on George IV Bridge, four days in my venue next to Edinburgh Castle, and multiple performances at live music venues around town. On Friday Aaron opened for a rock band at The Ark (a popular bar in the centre of town), and he was so well received that they invited him back to play every week for the rest of the month. He also has spots coming up on Festival FM radio and is getting a great response from everyone who has heard his album tracks online.

Click here to see why. I have also posted additional tracks on my Lit Fuse Records site, and advance copies of Butterfly Man are now available for mail order through PayPal. Soon he will be availably digitally as well as globally, but first we have this ancient city to infiltrate.

Here's the Lit Fuse link: As for me, I'm just getting ramped up, as I perform at the Fringe every night at 8:45 pm from now until August 26th, and then fly to Australia shortly after. It's surreal to be back here exactly three years after my first foray into the Fringe, but that first time I was wide-eyed and untutored in the guerilla arts. This time I have an arsenal of reviews, albums, books, and a team of new talent to showcase (four of us from Vancouver are sharing a flat here, including my brother and Geordie, who plays bass with Aaron). Many charges have been set to blow, but a lit fuse does not make an explosion on its own, so there are no guarantees. I'll keep you updated as events unfold here at the festival, and try to stay abreast of correspondence.

All the best from the powder keg,

Baba

PS - Here's a link to Aaron's press release if you want to see how we're pitching him. And a link to my press release if you want to know how we're pitching me. And here's a link to a recent story about my flat-mate Ryan, who is the Neo-Shakespeare to my Neo-Chaucer.