So, another jam session today - but this time not with car radio factory workers, but… Well, people who might have all kinds of jobs. But all of them also working musicians.

There’s a Center For Performing Arts in Penang called Areca, and J, a pianist who I’d seen at the club on one of the first nights I was here (his band was playing there before I started) invited me down to a monthly jam session that he and other jazz players hold there every month.

So I went today - together with D2, the jazz pianist from San Francisco. It was a lot of fun, and great to hear D2 play live. You can see some pictures from the afternoon at the top of the set here.

Then this evening, T2 and HH collected me and  D2 (OK, this whole initial thing is getting silly) from the hotel, and we went for dinner at a restaurant in Batu Ferringhi. I had pizza for the first time since I got here, and it wasn’t bad at all. Although, as B would say, pizza’s like sex: even when it’s bad, it’s good.

The reason we went to Batu Ferringhi is that I wanted to reviset the night market V and I went to, and do a burst of present-shopping for friends and family back home. The night market is basically a series of stalls along the side of the road,  stretching for hundreds and hundreds of yards, and selling all manner of things from utter tat (knock-off designer goods, mostly) and pirated DVDs of films still showing in the cinema (mind you, this is probably the only way I’d get to see There Will Be Blood out here) to lovely Malaysian arts and crafts.

So you’re all getting utter tat and pirated DVDs.

It was great to have HH with me as I shopped, as she has haggling (in Chinese) down to a fine art. I learned that the best technique seems to be: tell them how much you’re prepared to pay, listen to them reduce the price to what they’re willing to offer, tell them don’t be silly, that’s not low enough, and then walk off. At which point they shout after you the price you were willing to pay. Works a treat.

I was too busy taking in all the shininess and potential gifts to take any photos of the market, but I did get quite a groovy shot or two earlier in the evening, as night was falling when we arrived:

Batu Ferringhi - it’s the Vegas of Penang! And that’s guarantee!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 12.25am and is filed under Penang, The actual music stuff, The people. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.