TRAVEL

ADDY & I: walking the streets of jaffa at dawn…

  It’s dark and still, for just a little while more, nothing moving out there except the cats. Rogue and freeform, they pad along stone pavements ducking under heavily-flowering bougainvillea, spiky trees written bloodshot that yawn over ancient walls and cascade down to the ground below. I roll over behind shuttered window – glassframe beyond …

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Jerusalem… A Brief Portrait

[UNPUBLISHED] Jerusalem throbs with a religious fervour, with a visceral sense of time and place, with tension you can almost cut and with a power that’s hard to put your finger on. It swelters in summer heat, its maze of streets – in both the new and old cities – an indecipherable sprawl of foot-polished …

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Tel Aviv… A Brief Portrait

[UNPUBLISHED] Tel Aviv shimmers rippled gold from the midnight desert. A sprawling jewel against black from the tiny airplane window, disappears as we bank left, reappears on the far side. Closer now. The thud as we touch down and reverse thrust and finally, still. From verdant English countryside to layers of burnt orange and gold, …

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The Broken Spoke

[Published in The Saturday Paper, February 20/2016] Two-Step Program Everything is bigger in Texas, from the hats and trucks, to the stories and steaks. But nothing is bigger than the legend of The Broken Spoke, the last of the true Texas dance halls, writes Samuel J. Fell. She’s only about five foot tall, but Terri White …

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American Deep South Vol. 1 – Austin, Texas

[Published on the Rhythms magazine website, November 2015] By way of explanation – until now, I’d never been to the States. I’ve grown up listening to the music that was born here, I’ve grown up listening to music inspired by same. But I’ve never actually been able to get over here to sample it for myself. Of course, …

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American Deep South Vol. 2 – New Orleans, Louisiana

[Published on the Rhythms magazine website, November 2015] New Orleans is a city of stark juxtaposition. Home to the bawdy and loose French Quarter, where good-time bad behaviour is merely a part of the make up, step outside the European styled buildings aligning narrow streets, and you find neighbourhoods the complete antithesis. Wide, flat roads and tired …

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American Deep South Vol. 3 – Memphis, Tennessee

[Published on the Rhythms magazine website, November 2015] I’ll preface this piece by saying that because of a tight schedule, we only spent two days in Memphis, which I can tell you isn’t nearly enough time to delve into the incredible history this Tennessean city is custodian to. The birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll and soul music, …

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American Deep South Vol. 4 – Nashville, Tennessee

[Published on the Rhythms magazine website, November 2015] Having spent a good deal of my younger adult years living in the hip and cool bustle of Melbourne’s inner north, coupled with the fact that it doesn’t take much to convince me to throw on my old cowboy boots and tap my leather-shod feet to some tonkin’ country/blues, …

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