Month: September 2011

Back to bread

I learned how to bake soda bread from my mother when I was still in school, but never really got into making bread until I was in university and had a kitchen I could use myself. One of my friends in my final year of university was a baker, and taught me how to make a yeast dough. It was our form of socialising – we’d bake bread, drink tea, and listen to great music. We have a wonderful little rivalry over who makes the best bread, eventually agreeing that we would settle on the fact that she makes better yeast breads and I make better soda breads.

The last few years I’ve not made much bread at all, after hitting a peak in my breadmaking when I lived in the UK, but I’ve been getting back into it lately in a big way. I think I’ve made a loaf every two or three days for the past few weeks. It started out with my quest to get better at pizza doughs, as I’m a big fan of making pizza from scratch. Every week I had a Pizza & Dr Who evening, which is pretty self explanatory I think.

But, finding good strong white flour has been the lifesaver of my breadmaking, and the recent loaves have been really delicious. My mother even commented on my most recent loaf saying that it was as good as one bought in a shop.

I think I enjoy it in the same way I enjoy swimming. You have to set aside some part of your day to do it, and there’s a mindlessness to the repetitive physical action that you stop consciously thinking about – your mind is free to wander elsewhere and not have to give it its full attention. Kneading a dough is also a wonderful way to work out frustrations ;) There’s also the fact that you get a really tasty loaf out of it and the house fills with the smell of baking bread. Delicious stuff.

I usually use it to break up piano practice – I go and play for an hour or so while the dough is rising, or use that time to make myself a meal. Now that I’m happy with my basic brown and white breads (I’ve made a successful wholemeal loaf most recently) I’m trying to decide what to try and add next to my arsenal of bread making.

Jazz Festival, more mixing, and a Swede

I’ll be playing a set in the Festival Club at the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival this October 30th. The time isn’t confirmed as yet, but I’ll update some more about that when I know later on. I don’t believe I’ve ever actually played a gig in Cork before, now that I think about it. I’m looking forward to showcasing some of the tracks from the record along with some of the other songs that didn’t make it on to this record, but are being held over for a later date.

I’ve also been writing again recently, reworking older unfinished songs, polishing off mostly finished song, and writing some brand new ones too. I’m really happy with some of the newer material and a little part of me wishes I could just jump right back into the studio and knock out a second record this winter, as I have enough songs that I’m happy with to go and do that. But I still have work to do to finish off this one first. And who knows what other songs I’ll write in the meantime.

I was back in the studio for a day a week or two ago to do some tweaks to the album mixes, but I think I now have mixes that I’m happy with of the record. Some little things niggling at me about the track sequencing at the moment, but I took a break from listening to the record to go back at it with fresh ears and sort out the part of the sequencing that I’m not happy with. The next stage will be to get the record mastered.

I’ve been spending a lot of time playing piano again – the digital piano is set up in my room, and I’ve been able to play away on headphones. However, I’ve been snatching time at the acoustic piano too – though it is in dire need of tuning and some minor repairs. Hopefully that’ll all be sorted out next week when the piano tuner comes to call!

One of my best friends is visiting from Sweden for a few days next week too. Last time she was here I had just bought my first little protools recording setup, and we had a ball recording some covers and little things on that same piano that I’m getting tuned next week. Nika plays in two wonderful Swedish traditional folk groups, Sheik and JONI, and as well as having her own solo output, and studied classical piano with me in Maynooth a number of years ago. If you’ve never listened to any Swedish traditional folk, any of those three links wouldn’t be a bad introduction, in my opinion. One of the songs I learned from her, Vargsången, I ended up arranging for SATB choir and performing with the NUIG Choralsoc last year, and is one of my favourites of my own arrangements.

Here’s Annika singing a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Conversation” on my piano a long time ago now. It’s quite quiet, but I had just one microphone that was on loan from a friend, and the actual recording session itself is lost, and we just have mp3 copies of those tracks left. But she did a really lovely version of this song:

annika hammer – conversation by misterebby