Musical Carnival - Let's go to Brazil
All the folks, hailing from Brazil, with whom I have had the grace to be friends with are invariably musical even if they are not. I suppose to be Brazilian is to be able to play the guitar, or at the very minimum to walk around singing, not humming like the rest of us, some song or the other.
Pico Iyer, that inveterate traveler, in one of books invokes paradise, and refers to the essential Brazilian nature to be the closest man can get to subsequent to The Great Fall apres Eating of the Big Red Apple. While such off hand sociological observations necessarily ignore the harsh realities of Brazilian society, they neverthless capture an essential aspect of the Brazilian nature.
So in celebration, this post on a musician I discovered quite recently; if you are a movie watcher, a musican whom you might have encountered in Bill Murray's latest nuthouse movie, "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou", with an acoustic guitar in hand, singing David Bowie covers in Portuguese. Yes, kind reader, I am talking about Seu Jorge. You can download three of these songs, including Ziggy Stardust over here.
Bro. Seu is a child of Rio de Janeiro's favelas, and his music reflects the same exuberance, and perhaps pain, of those crucibles of hard living and quick death. In this concert Bro. Seu seems to address these issues head on. Check out the terrific drum section. Finally here is the customary YouTube video:
This post is for all my Brazilian friends, especially Sgt. Joao and Daniel
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More Music - Bach's Cello Suites
I personally consider Bach's Six Solo Cello Suites to be one of the high points in the musik making history of all beasts. The following clip shows Pablo Casals, who supposedly released, and popularized, these long buried or hidden Bach's djinns over the modern ear, playing the First Cello Suite:
Then we have Andres Segovia, the foremost master of classical guitar, playing the prelude of the same Cello Suite here:
Also here are peices by two other excellent cellists: Prelude to the First & Prelude to the Sixth. Life with the possibility of encounters with such music can't be bad, no it needs to be celebrated! Go, listen, and be amazed.
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Music Note - Grupa Mocarta
aka Four Crzy Poles Drunk On Mozart, whose first violinist is a Tom Hanks twin, and who came to my attention last night as I rounded up music for Laughter and Forgetting.
Grupa Mocarta justify themselves thusly:
"We exist despite the solemness of the great concert halls, despite the boredom of the everyday life of the classical musicians, despite the fanatic lovers of classical music, despite the fans of rock, rap or pop who are afraid of classical music. We treat our Mother Music with a humorous irony and we are sure she will have nothing against it"
Also go here and here to laugh even more.
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