"Nonkertompf Live" In Europe & The "Quartet" Tour, October-November 2001

In late October of 2001, the seven-piece BFD flew to Groningen, The Netherlands for a Dutch National Radio-contracted performance of Keneally's solo album Nonkertompf, an extremely esoteric collage of soundscapes, motifs, and occasional songs that, for the most part, had never been performed live anywhere. In this case, BFD was joined by four additional crack Dutch jazz musicians, making the band an eleven-piece ensemble that sat and read charts for ninety minutes in the true Zappa "rock chamber orchestra" tradition. A regular seven-piece BFD performance followed the next night, an unusually mellow and ethereal show that may well have been the last ever by that particular lineup.

That's because the band devolved into a quartet a week later for a ten-cites-in-ten-days breakneck American tour, which yielded (IMHO) the best Keneally band performances since 1996. The two back-to-back tours were high musical watermarks for entirely different reasons, and I regret not having the opportunity to write about either in detail due to insane scheduling and workload issues (namely the initial construction of this very website). All I have are the pictures from both as reminders of what incredible times they were for both the band and myself.so I've gone crazy-go-nuts and scanned over twenty shots to bring you a taste of what it was like behind the scenes.

 

"Nonkertompf Live": Groningen, The Netherlands, October 2001

More excuses: I brought along a shitty old digital camera instead of my trusty analog, and it sucked the mighty tailpipe. The following five shots are the only ones I deemed worth posting. I have no shots of the performance at all (#^%@*&&!@^%%!!!).

In the lobby bar of our fine Groningen hotel, where we stayed for a full week during rehearsals, our old friend 'J' (right, striped shirt) holds court with three of the most frighteningly competent musicians in all of Holland (left to right): saxophonist Jan Willem van der Ham, trombonist Bart van Lier, and keyboardist/sampler Ruben van Roon-who, by his own admission, instructs his students to "go crazy" when he teaches a sampling class at a well-known Dutch musical conservatory.

Same hotel lobby, same bar, different crew. Left to right: Marc Ziegenhagen, show producer Pieter van Hoogdalem, and the newly-minted Tricia STEEL (sorry boys). Unlike most tours we actually had time to relax, which explains the preponderance of time spent at this location.

Directly across from the bar was an incredibly efficient (and FREE) internet café, where you could find any number of BFD'ers pounding out e-mails to loved ones and creditors back home after a long night of revelry. Here, Nick D'Virgilio models the exquisite flat-screen monitors exclusively for bryanbellerdotcom.

 

Um, how to explain this.a chocolate gift from Über-Dutchman and show executive producer Co De Kloet becomes folklore when Tricia and I head back to Scott Chatfield's hotel room to view some digital pictures he took that day. Tricia, upon spying the removal of the sweet treat from its packaging, asked me, "Can I have a bite of your big chocolate B?" Scott took this picture seconds later, while we were still hysterical.

 

This motley group of five (left to right: Marc Ziegenhagen, Tricia Steel, myself, Rick Musallam and Evan Francis) were assigned to fly home together, and we arrived at Amsterdam's Schipol Airport three hours before the flight. Thanks to the most rigorous security I've ever seen-we were searched and questioned seven different times-we still ended up running through the terminal to catch our flight. For some reason, I was searched the most. Go figure.

That's it for the European pictures. Continue on for a staggering number of shots from the American "Quartet" tour.