Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

Music gets hi-jacked for nefarious purposes all the time. Manson used Helter Skelter as an anthem for a very destructive agenda. I don't think Lennon approved. Music has the power to bring people together so anybody who is trying to round people up is probably going to be using music. I loved it in the Presidential campaign when a couple of artists snatched their songs back from Republican campaigns.

chikuzen wrote:

How about also posing the question, "What do you not listen to"?  Try NOT listening to music you normally would listen to without giving it a thought for a while.  If you want to change your ear, stop listening to everything except shakuhachi for a week, then even longer, just as an experiment to see what might happen to you. I'd love to see a dozen people do this and come back and talk about it. I'm going have my students do this as homework.

Chikuzen, I do go on shakuhachi binges where I listen to nothing but shakuhachi.  Sometimes it's the same few pieces over and over again.   I have a playlist on my iPod called "shakuhachi"...oh, and my ancient original iPod wakes me up with shakuhachi every morning.

Eventually I will have to put on some booty shaking music before I go crazy, though.   

I don't think I could perform this experiment with modern country, although doing it with modern classical and film scores (for study) and with various types of world music (out of curiosity) were quite world-expanding.   

What happened to me was that I have an increase in my 'appreciation zone'; perhaps to a degree in my 'that's groovy' zone...although I do think that one's core music tastes are formed as a teenager and trends follow thusly afterwards.

Dean Del Bene wrote:

How long this will last I don't know.  I listened to mostly Sun Ra for a good ten years.  After shakuhachi, nothing seems the same.

I suffered a musical identity crisis after Sun Ra died, which was cured by starting to play shakuhachi.

"Tell Tale Signs"-Bob Dylan
Prokofiev:
Tocatta (Martha Argerich,pianist)
3rd & 7th Sonatas
1,2,3, Piano Concertos(especially 2nd)
Rachmaninov 3rd w/ Cliburn & Kondrashin live 1958-
Glenn Gould in most Bach
Grateful Dead-especially the studio efforts-
Miles Davis- "Big Fun" & "Bitches Brew"
Abbey Simon,pianist in Ravel "Mirroirs"
Georges Cziffra- Chopin Etudes astonoshing
Tossy Spivakovsky, violinist in Tchaikovsky & Sibelius concerti.


Evgeny Kissin, pianist, in most everything..best pianist dead or alive.

Last edited by YuccaBruce (2009-03-31 09:54:10)

Since Geni has me working on Blue Bossa I broke out a bunch of my Bossa Nova CD's (Elaine Elias "Dreamer", Jobim's "Stone Flower", Asrtud Gilberto's "Finest Hour", and some Sergio Mendes) and bought a new Elaine Elias mp3 album. I love this stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9U6URQSF6U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dpcg5Pg4zHY

I bought a few tracks off this album too recently, I absolutely love that first track: http://music.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuse … id=8170822

Edit --- pulling up those youtube clips got me remembering this guy, nice guitar work! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI4uZ9J402U

P.S. I have a couple of these guys CD's that I really like too... http://www.youtube.com/user/airofficial … 1&ob=4

Last edited by radi0gnome (2009-05-21 22:14:49)

radi0gnome wrote:

Lodro wrote:

HATE (small minded admission) - Country and Western,

I know "different strokes for different folks" and all that, but how can anyone dislike this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtFUCja8iUg

Yes it's got a certain appeal doesn't it. It's weird, like I know it's my small mindedness but even outside of that I still can't grasp (intellectually/musicaly) what it is that people are drawn towards. I'm not dissing the genre at all and I believe that every music has its place - even pop music - I just can't find what it is. Is it the mood or what? I kind of piss myself off with this one because I simply can't find its meaning. Or maybe its 10 years of sitting in studios working with Aboriginal people on their Country & Western songs that finally took its toll.

lowonthetotem wrote:

The best music always skirts "genres" and is difficult to classify.

Always is a big word, even for the Internet.

As usual Phil you are correct.

It's true that there were a bunch of purists who were listening before then that were griping about the newer Country and Western music, but a big part of their reason for griping was that it was skirting genres by incorporating lots of R&B stylistic elements.

Actually, this is kind of my point.  It always seemed to me that folks in the forties, fifties, and sixties were just making music, music that was similar to what they had grown up with and that was influenced by their contemporaries.  I am not sure that anyone was making "Country Western.."  There seemed to be distinct styles, but the tended to be more individual than genre related.  Perhaps I am being sentimental about, though, since I did not experience it first hand.  It just seems to me that people were just making music that they loved and happened to get famous doing it.  Now it seems like folks write songs to become popular with certain audiences in order to become famous.  I don't know.  It just seems to me that the cart seems to be leading the horse anymore in Country music, and has been for a while, dancing aside.  Country music, as it is today, seems to be little more than a cliche to me.  There does not seem to be much diversity in it anymore.  I don't see any figures like Willie Nelson or Merle Haggart coming along to shake things up.  I don't hear alot of people coming out with songs from the heart like Hank Williams and Johnny Cash anymore.  It all seems like sentimental drivel anymore.  Of course I could be wrong.  I am not much for listening to new music.

Just to keep things on the right track, I hope, recently I have been listening to the last Joe Strummer album that came out alot.  My ex-wife gave it to me when we were married, and I guess I am just getting over that situation enough to be able to divorce the gift from the giver.  I am glad I did not chuck this CD along with all the other junk she gave me.  "All transmitters to full, all receivers to boost."

Last edited by lowonthetotem (2009-05-22 11:32:43)

one of my guilty pleasures is listening to jimmy dale gilmore.

indigo wrote:

I wonder what the Australian Aborigines are trying to reach with country music?

As a minority group traditionally living in conditions where access to music was limited to the environment you live in (the country) and having access only to the predominant radio station(s) around (country music and rock'n'roll) it was a matter of simply being the only music available. It's only since the urbanisation process began that Aboriginal people have consciously taken on other musics (starting with reggae and more recently moving on to rock, pop, heavy, and much more recently jazz and metal). The ingrained roots of C & W are still largely intact within the culture, and culturally and emotionally are the closest to the 'colonialisation' stage which Aboriginal people tend to relate to as the last remaining point where their culture was still - to a point - intact. The ethos of the music and the times are still relevant and the people tend to hold onto that as a point to represent their culture in a particular time, along with traditional music.

As an interesting aside - I worked with a band that came from the New Guinea highlands. They developed their style of music in a rather interesting manner. Because of the location the radio reception was not good and the reception for any particular radio station would keep phasing in and out. This meant that the listener would only hear snippets of songs and would often have to frequently change to a completely different radio station in order to hear anything. So in any hour of listening you would hear only certain bits of any song and also certain bits of different styles of music. The band I worked with deliberately took this on as a tool for making their own music. The result was fascinating. Completely plausible songs which incorporated a number of differing styles within the same song, they were also fascinated with jazz-rock and incorporated this 'variety process' into the style of jazz rock. The music was quite bizarre but worked amazingly well. I have not heard any music like this since and I feel that it is totally unique. This is a bit of an odd statement for me because I'm intrigued with the notion of creating 'newness' and generally speaking don't come across it too often. To find a band from the New Guinea highlands that are doing this is quite a find for me.

Kiku Day wrote:

Your account on the band from New Guinea is very interesting.
Is it a recent experience? And is their music available?

The band is called Sanguma, they were around in the 80's. My dealings with them were in 1988 I think. 1 or 2 of them went on to join Yothu Yindi (I know that least the drummer did). As far as I know they released 2 recordings (maybe more) but I haven't been able to find them. Maybe through the NAS (National Arts School) in Port Moresby if the school still exists.

One interesting collaborative recording (not related to Sanguma) is the Album called 'Tabaran'. It's a collaboration between Papuan musicians and the Australian band 'Not Drowning Waving'. Essentially the recording is attributed to 'Not Drowning Waving' however it is actually much more than that, as the main Papuan musician involved, Telek, had a huge input into the material. The album itself is again a coherent 'mixture' of West meets Papua, and to my mind (note: 'to my mind') puts the 'so called' and maybe even destructive (note: 'to my mind') 'World Music' genre to shame.

As an aside to this 'aside' there's a wonderful book by Steven Feld that you might be interested in Kiku. It's called 'Sound and Sentiment - Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression'. To quote from the back cover, "Steven Feld probes the aesthetic ideology of the Kaluli of the Papua rain forest. Why do weeping, poetics, and song produce a sense of deep sorrow in their listeners?....Feld examines sound itself as a system of symbols within a culture. Bird noises, since they reflect the spirit world, colour the entire spectrum of Kaluli expression with evocations of death and mourning. In weeping and funerary wailing, the vocal range mirrors a mythical bird call; in poetics, grammatical conventions create a sad and reflective birdlike language; and in song, the melody of weeping and the bird language of poetry combine to produce the ultimate Kaluli expressive form. How weeping turns into song and how song moves listeners to tears are also examined in terms of social significance. Weeping emerges as the major expressive form of Kaluli women and song the major expressive form of men. The resolution of both weeping and song into the mythic process of 'becoming a bird' indicates how a sound structure is also a reflection of a social structure.....Feld explores...the complex influences of the forest noises upon the creative soundmaking of its human inhabitants."

Well, right now http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MLxgcn4XBY

Simply awesome...

lowonthetotem wrote:

"Just Plug Me In Just Like I Was Eddie Harris
You're Eating Crazy Cheese Like You'd Think I'm From Paris"

Not exactly in the same league: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqekCTonxWg