Anouar Brahem, The Gryphon Trio, and Lou Harrison: Playlist for The Open Window for December 14 and 17, 2009

The Open Window airs at 6:30 am Mondays and 10 am Thursdays at www.cjly.net (Kootenay Cooperative Radio in Nelson, B.C.), sponsored by Sidewinders Coffee.

Listen to a podcast of this show

Lou Harrison: Bell Bowls from La Koro Sutro (New Albion)

Lou Harrison was a 20th century American composer with a passion for the gamelan music of Java and Bali, and he incorporated many of those sounds and textures into his music. I opened the show with this percussion piece played by William Wynant.




Anouar Brahem: The Lover of Beirut, Dance with Waves, Stopover at Djibouti, and The Astounding Eyes of Rita, from The Astounding Eyes of Rita (ECM )

Anouar Brahem is a celebrated player of Arabic classical music in his home country of Tunisia, and a tireless experimenter and collaborator to the point where it is often hard to say where North Africa leaves off and Europe begins in this spare, dignified, detailed music. For the past few decades he has divided his time between Tunisia and France and played, composed, taught... and worked with all manner of musicians as well as poets and dancers.

Think about the instruments in this quartet: oud, bass clarinet, bass, bendir and darbouka (those are North African hand drums). The result is elegant, exotic, low-toned, and full of feeling for deserts and cities.

The album is titled after a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, a revered poet of Palestine who died last year (photo to the right, just below). Here is the poem:

Between Rita and my eyes
There is a rifle
And whoever knows Rita
Kneels and plays
To the divinity in those honey-colored eyes

And I kissed Rita
When she was young
And I remember how she approached
And how my arm covered the loveliest of braids
And I remember Rita
The way a sparrow remembers its stream
Ah, Rita
Between us there are a million sparrows and images
And many rendevous
Fired at by a rifle

Rita's name was a feast in my mouth
Rita's body was a wedding in my blood
And I was lost in Rita for two years
And for two years she slept on my arm
And we made promises
Over the most beautiful of cups
And we burned in the wine of our lips
And we were born again

Ah, Rita!
What before this rifle could have turned my eyes from yours
Except a nap or two or honey-colored clouds?
Once upon a time
Oh, the silence of dusk
In the morning my moon migrated to a far place
Towards those honey-colored eyes
And the city swept away all the singers
And Rita

Between Rita and my eyes
A rifle

Mozart: Trio in G movements 1 and 2 (performed by the Gryphon 
Trio) from Mozart Trios (Analekta)

Toronto's Gryphon Trio is Annalee Patipatanakoon (violin), Roman Borys (cello), and Jamie Parker (piano).

Tin Hat, Blind Paper Dragon, Sad Machinery of Spring: Playlist for Beethoven's Breakfast, March 30, 2009

Broadcast at www.cjly.net Monday mornings at 6:30

Tin Hat: Old World, Blind Paper Dragon, Dionysus, The Book, and The Comet from The Sad Machinery of Spring (Hannibal)

Here's the astounding list of personnal and instruments on this CD: Ara Anderson: trumpet, baritone horn, piano, pump organ, toy piano, celeste; Mark Orton: guitar, dobro, piano, banjo, pump organ, autoharp, bass drum, bass harmonica, marxophone; Ben Goldberg: b-flat clarinet, alto clarinet, contra-alto clarinet; Carla Kihlstedt, violin, viola, trumpet violin, voice, piano, celeste, bowed vibes, bass harmonica,ukelin, bul-bul tarang; Zeena Parkins, harp.

Marxophone? Ukelin? Google them for some interesting reading. And what do they do with all that paraphernalia? They play lovely and uncategorizable "chamber music for the 21st century" much of which sounds mysterioiusly and pleasantly familiar, although at the same time I know I have never heard anything quite like it. I think music writers' lengthy descriptors for cross-genre music are getting a bit dull because everybody knows you can meld any two or more kinds of music these days, but I will accept this one describing Tin Hat: "...interweaving Old World Europe with post-modern America, south-of-the-border sensuality with concert-hall propriety, and odd-metered syncopation with deeply soulful grooves" (The New York Press, from the Tin Hat website).


Gryphon Trio: Trio in C Major, from Mozart Piano Trios (Analekta)

The Gryphon Trio is based in Toronto and they do a lot more than play the standard classical repertoire: they won a Juno in 2004 for a recording of music by contemporary Canadian composers, they tend to seen playing jazz clubs, they have made a recording of tango music, they are artists in residence at the University of Toronto's music faculty, and they have tried their hands at multimedia production. They are Annalee Patipatanakoon, violin; Jamie Parker, piano; Roman Borys, cello.
http://www.gryphontrio.com/

Gryphon, Shakti, Bayrakdarian: playlist for Beethoven's Breakfast January 19, 2008

www.kootenaycoopradio.com, Mondays at 6:30 am PST

1. Gryphon Trio: Trio in C Minor K. 548 from Mozart, the Complete Piano Trios (Analekta)

"The gryphon, a Greek mythological creature that was the guardian of treasure and symbolized the joining of cosmic energy and psychic force, reflects the group's interest in many genres of music" (from the liner notes). The Toronto-based Gryphon Trio plays contemporary and classical works. http://www.gryphontrio.com/

2. Remember Shakti: Bell' Aria from Saturday Night in Bombay (Verve)

Remember Shakti is a group of Indian musicians led by tabla player Zakir Hussain and British guitarist John McLaughlin. In the early 1970's they formed the acoustic group Shakti and pioneered a fusion of jazz and Indian classical music. John McLaughlin, in the years before that, was a member of the Miles Davis bands that made the shocking Bitches Brew and the sublime In a Silent Way. Shakti broke up in the 1980's. McLaughlin and Hussain have worked creatively together and apart ever since to acquaint western and Indian music with each other. In fact they are among the founders of what we call "world music."

The group Remember Shakti was formed in 1997 with some of the original players and some new ones including the respected elder Hariprasad Chaurasia on flute. Here is a video of a small version of the group: .http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=qyCH70FODJA

3. Isabel Bayrakdarian : Spring, Mount Alakyaz, Striding Beaming, and Lullaby, from Gomidas Songs (Nonesuch)

Gomidas Vartabed (1869-1935) is known as the father of Armenian classical music. He was a survivor of the Armenian genocide of 1915, and in an attempt to save Armenian musical culture he took songs and dances of the Armenian peasantry and recreated them in a European classical format. The singer Isabel Bayrakdarian is an Armenian-Canadian who, in addition to being an up-and-coming opera star, holds a degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Toronto and was featured on the movie soundtrack for “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” and Atom Egoyan's "Ararat." For a stunning cultural experience watch her perform one of the songs from this CD, accompanied by four players of the duduk (an Armenian woodwind instrument of ancient origins), outdoors in an ancient ruin in Armenia, at http://tinyurl.com/9q7s2w.