what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Monday, March 23, 2020

Music from my travels

Romania has a superb classical radio station – Radio Muzical – with a hall for live performances which are/were broadcast simultaneously. The station has been keeping my spirits up these past 5 weeks - but yesterday I felt it was time to take a trip along memory lane by dipping into the hundreds of CDs I have amassed during my travels around central Europe and Central Asia over the past 30 years. 
I have vivid memories of the variety of musical bazaars I would come across and of exciting new finds – particularly of the more popular sort which (apart from Queen) had never appealed.
Bonnie Tyler made a lot of guest appearances in central Europe in those days and Willie Nelson, Rod Stewart and Michael Bolton’s voices would accompany me on the car radio as I drove to and from the 2 bases I had in the early 90s for a couple of years in Eastern Hungary and indeed into Satu Mare, Romania.   
Later, in Uzbekistan, Santana and Russian pop (such as Alla Pukacheva – and a Yulia with a guitar) became favourites
So my faithful Philips CD radio which I had in Sofia for a decade has been pressed back into service for this purpose. There it was classical music I bought - at amazing prices, a fifth of what I would pay in the UK, allowing me the luxury of buying simply to taste...... 

And thus I came across the amazing voice of Lisa Gerrard on a CD called Immortal Memory with Pat Cassidy. Her full repertoire can be sensed here
It turns out that she was part of the Dead can Dance group which I remember coming across in the late 90s on my travels….probably in Central Asia. What I hadn’t appreciated was her link to the famous Bulgarian voices – which you can see and hear also here
If that arouses your interest then watch this recent performance from Lisbon and this youtube version of the CD I first heard in the early 2000s - The Serpent’s Egg

Jan Garbarek, Pat Metheny and Ben Webster were other discoveries from those days – until then I knew only Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond.  
But it was the ouds which fascinated me – Anouar Brahem is a great favourite, particularly Le Pas du Chat Noir. But all his CDs are in the mountain house – here is a longer presentation and an excerpt from a performance he did in Bucharest in 2012

In Azerbaijan I picked up some Rabih Abou-Khalil - here he is doing a fado in Lisbon

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