Saturday Morning Music - Tango
Earlier this morning I was playing a superb CD called 'The Soul of Tango' which consists of Yo Yo Ma's collaborations with some of best tango musicians, all playing the music of Astor Piazzolla. Now I am a clumsy dancer (think of a puppet or a corpse dancing in a Roald Dahl short story) but I heart tango: the music, the performance, scenes in movies, and whole movies* themseleves which have been made around tango. It also helps** that the great J.L. Borges had written extensively about tango; his best pronounciation of the tango is as follows:
"The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration"
Since I am not accquantied with the backways and the technical alleys of tango, here is an excellent Economist essay on the history of it from my bookmarks. Here are some more of those aphoristic lines forged by Borges in one of his essays discussing the origins of the tango:
"This brusque and severe man, whom we can picture clearly from the two verses, illustrated very well the people's first reaction to tango – as a "brothel snake" in Leopoldo Lugones' laconic words. After being found less offensive and thus more socially acceptable in Paris, it took many years for tango to penetrate the tenements in the northern part of the city – and for all I know it may not have succeeded even now. Formerly, tango was orgiastic devilry, and now it is a way of walking."
But let's get to the music itself. Here is a sampling from the numerous videos I found on YouTube:
Enjoy! May you walk the tango today!
*"The Tango Lesson" is one of these; extremely enjoyable with fantastic tango music. Also if I ever partake in the making of a movie, you can be sure that tango would show up in it.
**I should also confess to the fact that all the Argentinian women I have encountered so far have been absolute babes. So perhaps my minor obession with the tango is not so innocent afterall, and it just might be the strategy that my subconcious has adopted to worm its way into their "graces".
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Sunday Music - Nick Drake
Nick Drake’s music first came to me many years ago, at the height of Napster era, during what was personally a weepy time. I was pointed in his direction by my friend F, who told me to check the man out – this after I had mentioned a song I had <a href=www.youtube.com>heard in a Volvo ad. What I really like about Drake’s music is the way orchestral arrangements heighten the simple (thus extremely potent) acoustic line of his songs, and how it makes you want to go off on Drake-ish tangents of your own; “San Francisco Blues” I wrote earlier today is one example. Here is what I found of Drake’s music on YouTube:
As the voice-over on that documentary clip says, if I meet a girl who takes me to her room, and I find Nick Drake's records in it, well, I too would marry her.
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Friday Chitrahaar
I wanted to run the Big B version of Chitrahaar this week, when I stumbled upon a really cool French ad for bottled water (Volvic) featuring the hottie Frenchman Zizou, set to AR Rahman's "Bombay Theme". I went on to find two more ads in the same Volvic series along with a Shekhar Kapoor ad with Rahman's music for an Italian icecream company, and an ad in which Rahman pitches for a staellite radio. Then there were two clips from the Spike Lee's bank- robbery thriller "Inside Man" (with Clive Owen; I am going to so watch this movie soon) that features Rahman's ever dance-able "Chaiyya Chaiyya" as the score for the opening and closing credits. I also recalled that Rahman's "Bombay Theme" made a brief apperance in Nicolas Cage *rring "Lord of War". So that go added as well. Finally, we have the vedy vedy lovely theme Rahman composed for Banyan. Is the world becoming flat? I don't know but you go watch:
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