My friend Viv McWaters sends this note from Australia:
“I’m just back from three days at the Port Fairy Folk Festival where I immersed myself in great music and bands and came away with lots of thoughts about how facilitators can learn a lot from musicians.
The stand out performer was Harry Manx – a Canadian Blues/folk performer who combines traditional blues, amazing slide guitar, mohan veena, mandolin and harmonica and vocals with traditional Indian music. He says on the CD notes “Mantras for Madmen”: ‘When the silence between the notes says as much as the notes themselves, like the gap between the breaths, it’s all good. The way I see it, Blues is like the earth and Indian music is like the heavens. What I do is find the balance between the two.”
I’d be happy if I could facilitate half as well as he performs – seamlessly collaborating with his harmonica player and percussionist; connecting with the audience; reading the mood; improvising when a guitar string breaks; changing the pace; being silent; and making everyone feel privileged to be alive and here, now. That’s what I aspire to be able to do when I facilitate.”
Yup, me too. Here’s Harry, a fellow Gulf Islander, hailing from Salt Spring Island to the south of us here.
From Vashti Bunyan:
once I had a child
he was wilder than moonlight
he could do it all
like he’d been here beforeonce I had a child
she was smiling like sunshine
she could see it all
like she’d been here beforethen I had a child
took his while like northern summer
and he knows it all
like he’s been here before
This song reminds me of my kids…
mp3: Vashti Bunyan – Here Before
Jockey Shabalala of Ladysmith Black Mambazo has died at age 62. Even people who are not fans of world music know the legacy of this man’s work. Jockey was the founder of LBM, although he took a backseat to his brother who sings the lead for the group.
According to a report on CBC today, he chose the name because “Ladysmith” was his home township, “Black” was for the colour of the strongest oxen, and “Mambazo” means to cut down with an axe, a reference to the fact that the group started out singing in contests and that it would lead its competition in shreds.
Here is a track to commermerate Jockey’s passing.
From the logs of The Whalesong Project, located in Kihei on Maui:
We witnessed a beautiful and unusual, from a modern western perspective, event this week. Raina Ferris visited us from Aotearoa, New Zealand, and we took her out on the ocean to support her cultural interest and connection to the whales. Raina is a Maori kai-karanga tahuna (spiritual chanter) and professor of Maori studies at Te Wanganga O Raukawa in Otaki. She came to Maui to share Maori tradition, and to further research on ancient ties between Maui and Aotearoa – alluded to in the ancestral chants of her clan. Those of us who saw the movie Whalerider witnessed Maori chanting and belief systems that connect the Maori to Hawai’i, and to the whales. Paikea, the young woman who inherited the name of the Maori ‘prophet’ who came to Aotearoa on the back of a whale, from Hawai’i, chanted – and the whales came. We witnessed this in real life when Raina performed her Haka – prayers in a chanting format. We cut the engines and drifted in the wind and waves as Raina chanted from the bow and we were followed by a mother and calf on the surface. And a male with a powerful voice stayed below the boat and sang a beautiful, powerful, soulful song. Those of us who have been listening closely to the songs of these whales for over five years now were surprised to hear the characteristics of the song change rapidly and dramatically. There was a strong impression that there was an unexplainable interaction between Raina and the whales…
I think this is not a haka, but a powhiri, if I’m not mistaken. Hakas are war chants, and this sounds like a powhiri, the kind of song sung on the marae to welcome vistors. Please correct me if I’m wrong. The song is haunting, and especially the way the humpback seems to respond. While I was in Maui last month, we went whalewatching and saw 20 humpbacks and sat transfixed listening to them sing as well. You can find more about Maori whale songs at folksong.org.nz
By the way, the Parking Lot soundtrack, a list of all the mp3’s I have been collecting here over the past year is hosted at Webjay. You can go visit and stream the whole thing. It’s a pretty good listen, if I do say so myself.
Here’s an mp3 post for a rainy Friday afternoon, another contemplative moment.
This is Allegri’s Miserere, a stunning piece of choral music composed in the 1630s. It is so sublime that for a long time it was only performed once a year and anyone who wrote it down would be excommunicated for doing so. The story goes that Mozart (whose 250th birthday is today) broke the ban by hearing the piece, transcribing it from memory and then giving it away. In this respect Wolfgang may have preceeded Napster by a couple hundred years. Thanks to Wolfgang’s transgressions, this Miserere is now open source and able to be performed by any choir with a soprano that can hit that high C. For me, as one who is not a great fan of Mozart’s music in general, I consider this one act to be his greatest acheivement.
The piece is ten minutes long, so sit back, close your eyes and enfold yourself in the textures of it as it moves between plainsong and polyphony and as that soprano descends from heaven with the most heartstopping phrase in choral music.