, B.C.
sen, fiddle; Ben Sollee, cello. This music is a mix of Appalachian and Chinese influences because Abigail Washburn had lived in China and could speak some Chinese before she started her career as a bluegrass musician. She's a beautiful singer, and, if you care to go to her website you will find her to be a charming and intelligent talker about music. Also on the net you will find a couple of fascinating videos of the group travelling in China and jamming with Chinese musicians. This band's music is lovely and original. 
to for Two Violins; Igor and David Oistrach with the London Philharmonic directed by Eugene Goosens, from Bach Violin Concertos (Deutsche Grammophon)
"For me, the flute is really the sound of humanity, the sound of man flowing, completely free from his body almost without an intermediary. . . . Playing the flute is not as direct as singing, but it's nearly the same."-- Jean-Pierre Rampal
Park in Nelson this summer, much to the delight of my daughters Rosie and Laura who are among the organizers of the event and also his nieces (he's their Mom's brother).
has studied under Hariprasad Chaurasia, who is perhaps the most celebrated Indian player of that instrument. This music is somewhere between jazz and Indian classical bansuri music, and is true enough to both to probably please non-purist fans of either (like me). Subir Debv, tabla; Lubo Alexandrov, guitars; Nicolas Caloia, bass; Thom Gossage, drums; Anjana Srinivasan, violin.
arly music, combine them with an improvising jazz saxophonist, record them in Austria's Monastery of St. Gerold known for its otherwordly acoustics, ask them to perform music from the 12th to the 16th century much of it so old the author is listed as anonymous, and you get this stunning work of art.
A celebrated performer of Mozart with a short piece as lovely as the sunny summer early morning on which I played it....
Diabate: El Nabiyouna and Canatelowes from The Mande Variations (Nonesuch)
Vivaldi, Summer, from the Four Seasons; the English Chamber Orchestra, Nigel Kennedy conductor and solo violinist (EMI)
p.10-6; Arkady Volodos, piano, from Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto #3 and Solo Piano Works (Sony)
ays elicits someone calling and saying "Who was that?" Cellist Erik Friedlander has played with John Zorn, Laurie Anderson and Courtney Love and he has also recorded 9 CDs as a leader. He's best known as an avant-garde jazz etc. player, but this one is a stunning solo synthesis of various kinds of American roots music, whatever that means, played with friendly virtuosity on bowed and plucked cello plus a bit of electronics occasionally. Just a few notes in to the CD you'll know that this is the real thing and you will have to buy it.
knows a lot more about classical music than I, hosts Classical Corner on Kootenay Co-op Radio and he loaned me this CD after I heard it on his show. Marjan Mozetich is a Canadian composer who started out as a committed creator and teacher of very avant-garde music. He then underwent a serious about-face in the 1970s, when he started writing music that is part post-modernism (Glass, Reich, Reilly) and part 19th-century Romanticism. It's a fascinating combination. He made this change, he is quoted in the CD notes as saying, because "that world had become sterile: composers were supposed to create a hypothesis and then realize it musically, like a research paper. I thought it was ridiculous."
a great series of music videos performed by dozens of people from around the world, playing their own parts in their own country, mostly outdoors, then edited and united by technology and the impulse to unite us all. Stand by Me is opened by two amazing street singers, Roger Ridley and Grandpa Elliott, but we also see/hear musicians and singers from Holland, South Africa, Congo, Spain, Russia, France, Venezuela, and Italy.
