On January 4th 2005, the Songwriters Avenue 2 broke the tsunami’s no-gig silence. Like its first instalment, it was at Le Bernardin. This round, Shelley Leong, Az Samad and Reza Sallehuddin played. Shelley’s guitar playing had noticeably improved since last year in songs like Crime (yes, I’m still not over the last-year jokes). Az however had a fever and did a lot more ‘haram‘ notes than before, but managed to take jazz-ic license by improvising.

Reza deserves a paragraph to himself. I saw Tracy‘s heart melting, mesmerized by his voice. Plus he had excellent guitar sounds too, ranging from rock to hearty jazz to ballad.

The sound monitor (not TV mind you) made an excellent tripod.

This is what happens when you mistakenly use a yellow cloth as your custom white balance reference. Pictures with flash turn blue!

Photoshop saves the day.

If you want videos I recorded, ask me! I quickly exhausted my 16MB SD card and the 32MB SD card Jenifer lended me, so they aren’t that long, but at least they have sound.

From top-left, clockwise: Sui Lin of Her Reverie, Yyan (with weirder tunings than Az), Alda (on bass, covering Az’s Latah Setinggan, accompanied by Az himself), Izzy (the reason why I wanna dye my hair white), Lisa, and Yee Meng who did a killer tribute to Az and Shelley (with a very Az-influenced song).

After that was Rafique Rashid from former gig-place No Black Tie and a guy from Cameroon.

The most notable star, however, was the guy who wrote and sang the Malay equivalent of acoustic singalong More Than Words (by Extreme). Manbai sang Kau Ilhamku.

Oh, and I’ve updated my Quotes page with:
“There are unisex toilets in every home.”

I felt like a genius when I came up with that.