BERLIN - Twenty people in a dim, narrow, smoky room, each focused respectfully ahead as the musician sings and plays his guitar. Charitable applause follows when the refrain ends, people grab their drinks, light up again, a few more enter the room. It's a Monday night in Berlin, the back room - more a cupboard - of a bar where local musos ply their trade, a room below an apartment that won't sustain amplified music, unless the bar is looking to get shut down.
Berlin forces its musicians, and audiences, to compromise - and improvise. Apart from the bigger main venues and purpose-built concert halls, the rabbit warren of small bars-cum-music locales in Berlin are forces of innovation, nocturnal caves, cubbyholes and basements willed improbably out of the chaotic, crowded tenement-scape.
