In 2006, I spent a bit more than a week in Barcelona. It was my first visit to that wonderful city. I really enjoyed the atmosphere there a lot. I also loved Antoni Gaudi’s masterpieces such as Park Guell, Casa Batlló and La Pedrera. I felt instantly at home. The same thing happened to me when I went to San Francisco.

I was hoping to go back to Barcelona soon after my 2006 trip. It didn’t happen as quickly as I wished for... not until last week. And I truly loved the 4 days I spent there. Wonderful city. Very nice people. Awesome architecture. Very laid-back atmosphere.



I visited La Pedrera and got a close look at the greatness of Gaudi. Some of the chairs he designed left me totally flabbergasted. They looked so well-thought and perfect! The same thing goes for the door knobs, the heat control system and many other aspects of this gorgeous building. I also visited the Pablo Picasso museum. I don’t think I have the right mindset to appreciate his art and I was in a hurry to get done with the visit.

I also walked a lot around La Rambla and the Raval district and went to Park Guell on foot. When I needed to relax, I hanged around Plaça de Catalunya or went for some Music listening near the Barcelona Cathedral. I had great food, particularly at two organic food restaurants I highly recommended (the link behind the restaurant name launches a Google Map): Origens in Passeig Born, near the Picasso museum (http://www.lallavordelsorigens.com/) and Organic in Carrer Junta De Comerç, which is a parallel to La Rambla (http://www.antoniaorganickitchen.com/home.html).

I had only my mobile phone’s rather lame embedded camera to take pictures when every tourist and his mom had some DSLR hanging around the neck. If your are not afraid that your eyeballs pop out of their socket due to bad pictures, you may want to look at the few barely honorable shots I could beautify with iPhoto.

Viva Barcelona! (but Paris still rocks, ask betabug)

Welcome to http://upbeat.fr/ my new digital home on the Web! It is as cozy as http://saad.docisland.org/, the previous one that hosted my Web self() for about 3 years.

The DocIsland community I belong to (yes, in the present tense) has decided to stop renting the dedicated servers that have been hosting our DNS, web, mail and other network services. Discussion is ongoing of what will happen to our DocIsland emails and if we are going to get some kind of redirection service or something along these lines that requires little to no maintenance.

This is why I moved my website to this new domain. Please update your bookmarks, RSS feed and Comments feed as soon as you can.

Moving one’s digital home is not an easy feat. Not because of any particular technical difficulty but because you need to think hard about a decent domain name. I seeked the help of a few close friends for some brainstorming and I decided to buy upbeat.fr since it reflects one of my main personality traits. Ask a dictionary such as the one bundled with Mac OS X Leopard:

upbeat |ˈəpˌbēt|
noun
(in music) an unaccented beat preceding an accented beat.
adjective informal
cheerful; optimistic.


Got it? ;-)

You may also note my new email address that you will find under the contact link at the bottom of this page.

In October 2006, I posted a blog entry about Christian Scott’s Rewind That album. Back then, I wrote:

No words come into mind to describe this masterpiece. Rewind That is the debut album from an amazing trumpeter with a great sense of Funk. Christian Scott has earned my admiration and my utter respect with this record which I keep listening to, over and over. As good as (and sometimes better than) records from Erik Truffaz, Roy Hargrove (through the RH Factor) and Christian McBride. I really would like to see more and more albums like this because it reunites three wonderful elements: Funk, Jazz and trumpet.


Then in 2007, Christian released Anthem, another masterpiece which caught me completely off guard. While Rewind That can be barely classified as Jazz since it incorporates a lot of Funk and Soul elements and, in this regard, can be compared to releases from Roy Hargrove’s The RH Factor sublime band, Anthem is more of a true Jazz. In a very laidback style, Christian expresses much anger and haunting images after his hometown has been devastated by Hurricane Katrina. All About Jazz has a nice review of the album that I recommend reading.

A few weeks ago, I was scouting around on the Internet looking for worthy concerts to attend in February/March. This is how I found out that Christian was to play at the New Morning, a mythical Jazz Music venue in Paris. So I went there on Tue Feb 24th with a couple of friends and I enjoyed my time there. I was expecting though a bit more punch from Christian Scott but he decided to leave quite a room for his acolytes. At one point, he said that he really likes playing with his band and listening to it during the sets. No doubt about that since he gave me the impression of attending the concert like I did and spending most the time listening to his buddies.



The line-up for the concert is different from the one that delivered the album. Kristopher Funn replaced Esperanza Spalding at the bass, the uncanny Jamire Williams took the drumming control tower, Milton Fletcher was at the piano. The only original band member was Matt Stevens, guitar.

While my photography skills are very average, I was able to take honorable pictures of the concert thanks to my friend betabug’s sound advice. The pictures were taken with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX150 with an ISO 400 to 800 sensitivity and no flash in program mode.