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An Intimate Arrangement

May 5, 2013 | by | Category: Music | Leave a Comment
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Le Salon de Musiques: Recital, Camillo Schumann, Fredrick Delius, Frederic Chopin, April 14  Andrew Shulman - Cello, Steven Vanhauwaert - Piano — A great cultural treasure in Los Angeles is hidden in plain sight, high up on the Fifth Floor of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Attendees at a recent performance entered through large doors into an intimate partitioned area of the grand ballroom. A discreet sign read: Le Salon de Musiques. Inside, about 150 people greeted old friends and made new acquaintances. A grand piano, bench and a single chair were situated near the windows. Surrounding this corner was a half-circle of chairs for audience members, some of whom read glossy program notes describing the unique nature the ensuing ... [Read more]

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Internal Scripts

April 14, 2013 | by | Category: Music | Leave a Comment
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Thomas Mera Gartz’s Luftsånger / Cloudsongs — 'Ett moraliskt innehåll kan finnas i en form' — Åke Hodell On April 30th of last year, Swedish drummer Thomas Mera Gartz died at the age of 67. His work with the legendary shamanistic-psychedelic bands International Harvester, Mecki Mark Men, Pärson Sound, and Träd, Gräs och Stenar was mostly live in concert, seldom recorded, so his reputation lives on mostly among those who toured rock festivals in Scandinavia in the late 1960s. In the aftermath of those years of underground artistic insurgency, during which all manner of new artistic freedoms were defined in Sweden, he recorded an acid-folk album of his own songs, and then a decade later released an understated and ... [Read more]

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“Rites” of Passage

March 31, 2013 | by | Category: Dance, Music | 3 Comments
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Celebrating A 100 Years of Le Sacre du Printemps The Joffrey Ballet "Rite of Spring", Dance at the Music Center, February 2013 4handsLA, Le Sacre du Printemps, Jacaranda: Thresholds, February 2013 — While other sixteen year olds sought summer employment behind the counter of MickeyD's or bagging at the local Safeway, I got lucky and was hired as a backstage "runner" at the Hollywood Bowl, the world famous outdoor amphitheater in the foothills of Los Angeles, where music concerts—classical, pop, jazz and rock—have brightened the night sky above since 1922.  As a “runner” and on stand-by for every show, I was assigned to the backstage area.  My close access to the dressing rooms allowed me the chance to meet some of the ... [Read more]

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Remembering Pandit Ravi Shankar 1920-2012

December 30, 2012 | by | Category: Music | Leave a Comment
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“When a pigeon flies, his wings beat in taal (Rhythmic cycle). You can count the matras if you don’t believe me. And such a sweet voice! God has invested such a treasure of music in each of his creations that man can take armfuls away but never exhaust it. Goddess Saraswati has given me a little too. But not as much as I would have liked. Just when I began to draw something from the ocean of music, my time was up. This is the trouble, when the fruit of a man’s lifelong labor ripens. Who can understand God’s ways? But one thing I have understood a little. There is a fruit, the custard apple. I like it very much. I eat it and throw the seeds outside the window. And one day I look and there’s another tree of the same fruit. With ... [Read more]

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The Seer

December 8, 2012 | by | Category: Music | Leave a Comment
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Swans, The Seer,  3xLP or 2xCD, Young God Records, 2012 — Swans, throughout their thirty year history, have always been good enough not to make me wish I was listening to something else, nor remind even me that something else exists.  If when playing The Seer, with its long boiling rises and reductions, a sniff of Aidan Baker or Burning Star Core comes into the room, it is not because Swans are catching up with the times, it is because the times are finally catching up with Swans. Michael Gira describes his latest work as “the culmination of every previous Swans album as well as any other music I've ever made, been involved in or imagined.” And while it is easy to agree with this statement in terms of aesthetic and philosophic ... [Read more]

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Seven Sets, Eight Sides

November 11, 2012 | by | Category: Music | Leave a Comment
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John Tchicai, Hartmut Geerken & Famoudou Don Moyé West Africa Tour (Sierra Leone, Liberia & Guinea), April 1985,  4xLP (Sagittarius A-Star – SAS #21), 2012 — John Tchicai The history of jazz is too often Americentric, focusing on the epicenters and forgetting the aftershocks, no matter how devastating, and leaving the impression that no one south of the Rio Grande or east of the Atlantic ever blew through a saxophone reed. Indeed, both Gioia’s History of Jazz and Shipton’s otherwise excellent A New History of Jazz devote fewer than thirty pages between them to the practice outside North America. Europe, South America, Africa, Japan, and everyone else barely happened you might think. In fact, European jazz ... [Read more]

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Lyricist Gandhiji – Revisited

October 28, 2012 | by | Category: Music | 2 Comments
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September 20, 2012. ‘Ganesh’ festival holiday. – My wife and I set out for a short visit to Ahmadabad. As this was our first time, visits to Akshardham temple and Sabarmati ashram were the top priorities. We thought Akshardham temple a very nice place but it was quite hot outside as we set out towards Sabarmati. Our driver too was quite restless due to this unusual heat. As we approached the town, suddenly the atmosphere changed with clouds and a real transfer scene. The sky above was full with storming black clouds getting ready to pour anytime. Just before this visit, I had read a nice book ‘Meera and Mahatma’ by Sudheer Kakkar. It had many pages describing this sacred place. It had been an ideal laboratory for ... [Read more]

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Transfiguration by Steel String

October 7, 2012 | by | Category: Music | Leave a Comment
Photo: Jeff Dooley

Robbie Basho's 'The Seal of The Blue Lotus' — On 26 February 1986, guitarist Robbie Basho lay back on a chiropractor's table in Albany, California, for an adjustment to treat back pain. An instant later, one of his vertebral arteries hemorrhaged and the chiropractor watched helplessly as his patient's cranium filled with blood. Robbie died a few days later in a local hospital at age 45—a rude end to a life of earnest artistic self-discovery. Though it would surely have pained him to receive so little notice in the event of his death, this would not have surprised Robbie since, even as he entered his 40s, he was still sometimes playing his heart inside out to audiences of three, or even one. Henry Kaiser related an incident in ... [Read more]

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Poems From A Not Too Distant Shore

June 17, 2012 | by | Category: Music | 1 Comment
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Mustapha Skandrani’s Istikhbars and Improvisations LP or CD. EM Records (EM1096), Japan. 2012. also released as Musique Classique Algérienne – Stikhbar. Pathé Marconi (STX 202), France. 1965. – Far from the cultural barrier we often imagine it to be, the Mediterranean is and remains a conductant to the life and practices teeming at its edges. Countless fishermen, sailors, merchants, criminals, pirates, soldiers, and refugees have charted the waters, bringing with them the trappings of their homeworlds. Movement, it seems, is more the rule than the exception in human history. Could water hold and replay sounds that verberate across it, so many mysteries of its deep past would be revealed. Whence came the Minoans, the ... [Read more]

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Go Ask Alice, I Think She’ll Know.

June 7, 2012 | by | Category: Music | 1 Comment
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Notes on The Gospel According to The Other Mary by John Adams, libretto by Peter Sellars – Having been offered tickets to the World Premiere by a westsider who couldn't make it downtown through rush hour traffic, it was by surprise I found myself last Thursday night in the auditorium of Disney Hall listening to Deborah Borda discuss the future of a Major Work of Art, the new oratorio by John Adams and Peter Sellars, …a radically feminist political take(!) on the traditionally religious theme of the Passion of Christ: here, the Christ of Orozco, who chops down his own cross and crushes his mother with the stone he rolls away from his own tomb, rips her stained scarf from beneath it, ties it round his hip and goes sachaying off toward ... [Read more]

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