Falstaff has written the best homage to Ustad Bismillah Khan I have read so far in the "blogsphere". I have been listening to Ustad Saab's music (his own & his jugalbandis) over at MusicIndiaOnline all day today. As Falstaff put it:

"Each time Ustaad Bismillah Khan put that shehnai to his lips what came out was music as revelation, as a life force, music that transcended itself to become something even more elemental, music (to use the exact urdu word) as ibaadat. To hear Bismillah Khan play was to lose sight of the boundaries between man and music, so that it was no longer clear whether the shehnai was the instrument of the player or the player was the instrument of the shehnai. Music erupted from this man as a metamorphic force, a sort of beautiful magma. It wasn't just the silence that was torn apart, it was the music itself."

Go listen, and be moved.

Glenn Gould, the piano god, playing Bach's (the god of western classical music) Goldberg Variations. And yes, Gould is MAD in these recordings, a madness that every thunking person should ask for. Also, this is an earlier post on pianos.

(h/t to YouTube user opus3863 for uploading an extensive collection of piano music)

Will you let me know if you know of an approximate version of Nathalie Cardone, who might be interested in yours truely? I was looking for that melodious song "El Otro Lado del Rio" from "The Motorcycle Diaries" over at YouTube when I ran into this music video by Ms. Cardone. It has something to do with Che Guevara, "revolutcion" and all that jazz but I was more entranced by Ms. Cardone's "hotness" as she shoots and totes an AK-47; that is how shallow I am.