“… relax and enjoy the journey, wherever it might take you!” – these were the words of the festival manager at the beginning.
Recently we went to a summer festival nearby. I invited my beloved for a romantic evening in my born town. As every year, there was the summer festival taking place. All the concert of well known artists were sold out. But the closing concert, far from sold out, was by an artist with great remarks and a name I’ve never heard before. Briefly, I checked the reviews and listened into two songs. It sounded okay, strangely even familiar. So I bought the tickets.
We sit in the middle of the huge concert hall. Have you ever attended a concert of an artist you never heard of before? There is a particular excitement about it, it’s almost a bit adventurous.
With a similar feeling of a plane about to take off, where you know you can’t get off anymore, we lean back and listen to the first tunes.
It starts slowly, with merely noiselike sounds, like a modern art painting, we get dragged along into a jungle. In an imressively long arch, the tension builds up. A song may easily lasts 10 minutes, starting silent, peaking with that mesmerizing voice, both low and high tunes. It’s a hard to describe mix of jazz, nu jazz, trip hop, funk and soul. Beautiful and fascinating.
In between the artist speaks in a silent, fast and hard to understand way. But then turns to the audience and like switched on, starts interacting and even integrating the audience, we become part of it.
“Send your condolences to fears and insecurities” – it seems like he had to sing that to himself so many times. Like he wrote it first for himself.
Not only this “never heard” turned out to be a great musician, but more than that, also great philosopher. The lyrics deeply touched me. His personal story is definitely worth reading, and for sure you can hear parts of it in the music.
Also not less impressive the female cellist that was coordinating the choirs and keyboard right behind him.
He has a catching stage presence, able to make the whole audience sing together, and standing ovations at the end.
So, out of nothing, completely unexpected, a brilliant evening happened. We met a mind that touched us. And we still humm these melodies and words, weeks later. He’s name: Benjamin Clementine.