Fête de la Musique.

So because I am always up to date about writing what I've been doing and the wonderful (and not so wonderful) aspects of the crazy Parisian life, here is a snippet of what happens on June 21st every year in Paris (hence the up-to-date reliability).

It is a day long activity which really kicks off in the evening and through the night and is known as Fête de la Musique, actually a play on words because it sounds like 'faites de la musique' which means 'make music'. The whole idea was started in Paris over 20 years ago by a pretty cool dude whose name was obviously not as cool as his ideas because I've completely forgotten it.

But anyway, the idea is that anyone and everyone can take their music to the streets, cafes, rooftops, and anywhere that you can reach and persuade the cops is safe (which judging by some of the set ups indicates cops can be bribed by donuts.)

The result is pretty amazing. Riding through the streets in the day you see the odd music group or solo performer doing their thing, the music mostly failing to carry itself over the honks, toots, talking and laughing of general every day loudness that Paris seems to accumulate. But as the sun begins to set (which now that it's summer is stunningly late), the streets are absolutely packed with music everywhere. Sometimes coming from a one man band whose frontman/drummer/guitar man/water boy was so passionate his dreads were flying in every direction with each toss of his head and he was oblivious to the 2 metro radius he was forcing people to walk around. There were groups of 80+ year olds belting out Christmas carols (either super early rehearsals or a bad example of dementia/amnesia) as well as rock bands in cafes, techno music screeching from grunge apartments bordering the canal and the haunting melodies of talented saxophonists and harpists who had clearly been smoking good ol' Mary Jane longer than they had been learning the instruments.

It was pretty amazing to just walk around the streets and constantly be confronted by all sorts of music coming from everywhere. In a beautiful coincidence, it was also the night of 24 hour Velib, a promotional idea to make more people use bikes as their form of transport, making a noticeable absence of 4 wheel vehicles from the rues and allowing the music to carry across the whole city.

I think it's a brilliant idea to advertise music and its obviously working as it's spread to all corners of the world. Except Christchurch apparently, which could really do with a bit of sporadic ear candy. Though I'm also unsure as to whether wee Christchurch has the talent/misplaced ambition of some of the Parisian folk.

Although I fear Parisians might have to stick to recorders and harmonicas, I'd love to see a piano get into some of these shoebox Parisian apartments...