Stage Weather Cairokee · Masar Egbari · a Requiem · two jazz nights, 2016–2018
Between 2016 and 2018 a photo pit pass kept turning up: Cairokee and Tahra at their peak as the sound of a generation, Masar Egbary, Sharmoofers, two nights of jazz in a white-walled rehearsal room, a full performance of Mozart's Requiem K.626, and a TEDx stage that happened to have a guitar on it. Different rooms, completely different lighting worlds, outdoor rigs throwing saturated single-colour washes through haze, and rooms with no stage light at all.
This is not a project about the bands. Almost none of these frames would work as press: the headliners are turned away, cropped at the knee, or reduced to a shape inside a beam. What survived is the thing the light was doing to the body, a conductor's bare hand floating out of black, a keyboardist folded into a shaft of gold, five musicians who exist only as shadows on a wall. The concert is the weather. The photograph is what stood in it.
The Weather
The haze goes up before anyone plays. For twenty minutes the stage is just a machine for making colour, then the bodies walk into it and start working: folded over the keys, arms flung, mouth open on a note a photograph can't hear.
The Bare Room
No lasers to hide behind, no smoke to do the composing. A conductor's hand out of blackness, a soprano mid-note, and the instruments, more honest than the musicians, left alone being wood and brass and felt.
Offstage
The building is full of people waiting to be the one on stage, and the other half of every concert paid to be there. Turn around.
