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