The Works：Interview with photographer Gijsbert Hanekroot, amibent group Cigarette After Sex & conduc

We’re devoting part one to rock and pop music, and we’re beginning with the work of a photographer from the Netherlands known for his images of rock, pop, and jazz musicians. Gijsbert Hanekroot says the first shot of a musician he remembers taking was in 1963. It showed jazz great John Coltrane holding his tenor saxophone and waiting to go on stage. In the years since, Gijsbert has photographed many of the great popular musicians of our time.

Singer-songwriter Greg Gonzalez recorded the songs for Cigarettes After Sex’s widely popular EP, “I” in a four-storey stairway at his alma mater, the University of Texas at El Paso. Gonzalez described the experience as “basically an accident; kind of an experiment”. Since he began with Cigarettes After Sex in 2008, collaborators have come and gone, coalescing into the band’s present line-up. Gonzales refers to their laid-back music as “ambient pop”, and they brought their relaxed and nostalgic sound to Hong Kong for Clockenflap last November. We caught up with them while they are here.

This year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival features over 1,700 artists in 166 performances. The festival’s concert series opened last Thursday with Marin Alsop conducting the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra. Alsop is a trailblazer in the orchestral and classical scene. She is the first woman to have conducted the Last Night of the BBC Proms, and the first female artistic director of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Born in New York, Alsop decided she wanted to be a conductor at the age of nine. Somewhat later, she went on to study under Leonard Bernstein. She’s a strong believer in outreach programmes for young people, so apart from conducting the two concerts with the full orchestra in Hong Kong, she took some time out to mentor young music students. Just before those events, we went to talk to her.