Bela Fleck, Edgar Meyer, Nuzrat Fateh Ali Khan, Luciano Sgrizzi, Leonard Cohen: Playlist for The Open Window for October 5 and 8, 2009

The Open Window airs at www.cjly.net, Kootenay Coop Radio, at 6:30 am Mondays and 10 am Thursdays

Listen to a podcast of this show

Bela Fleck and Edgar Meyer: six tracks from Music for Two (Sony Classical)

The re-imaginer of the banjo and a genre-crossing classical bass player give us the unique sound of bass-banjo duets, sometimes in classical music (Bach) and otherwise with acoustic improvs of various kinds.


Nuzrat Fateh Ali Khan and Michael Brook: My Heart, My Life; Lament; and My Comfort Remains from Night Song (Real World)

This 1995 CD is a classic of world music, with the Canadian guitarist Michael Brook taking Nuzrat's music some distance into the west. Nuzrat (1948-1997) has been called both the Bob Marley of Pakistan and the Pavarotti of Pakistan, not surprising considering his revered status there. He has also been called the most popular singer in the world, some of his concert crowds rivaling most western cities in population. He sings a kind of Sufi devotional trance music, altered here somewhat for this experiment with Brook. The grooves and the improvizations and the quiet moments on this CD have grown on me very much over the years and it's one of my all-time favourites.

Luciano Sgrizzi: Suite in C by Domenico Zipoli, from 18th-Century Italian Harpsichord Music (Nonesuch )

This was requested by a beautiful Italian woman at a party-- the first actual request I've ever had. I've since discovered that Sgrizzi (1910-1994) was quite an eminent musician with dozens of recordings.

Leonard Cohen: Villanelle for Our Time from Dear Heather (Columbia)

These memorable lyrics are by Frank Scott (left) (1889-1985), the Canadian poet who was a professor of Cohen's in university in Montreal, and also a mentor. The words would have to be exquisite to stand up alongside any of Cohen's songs and they do, in fact they are quite Cohenesque. Or maybe all Cohen's songs were influenced by Frank Scott. Here's the poem, but you have to imagine it read by Cohen at his deepest and most resonant.

From bitter searching of the heart,
Quickened with passion and with pain
We rise to play a greater part.
This is the faith from which we start:
Men shall know commonwealth again
From bitter searching of the heart.
We loved the easy and the smart,
But now, with keener hand and brain,
We rise to play a greater part.
The lesser loyalties depart,
And neither race nor creed remain
From bitter searching of the heart.
Not steering by the venal chart
That tricked the mass for private gain,
We rise to play a greater part.
Reshaping narrow law and art
Whose symbols are the millions slain,
From bitter searching of the heart,
We rise to play a greater part.

Kala Ramnath, Eric Dolphy, Yo Yo Ma: playlist for The Open Window for September 28, 2009

The Open Window airs Mondays at 6:30 am and Thursdays at 10 am at www.cjly.net, Kootenay Co-op Radio.

Download a podcast of this show here

Kala Ramnath: Raga Bhatiyar from Kala (Sense Music)

A girl is born in India in 1967. She doesn't get to play or hang out much because her grandfather violinist Vidwan Shri Narayan Iyer took her as his student when she was very young and he was a real taskmaster. She was also taught by her aunt Dr. N. Rajam, who was
kinder. Her aunt introduced her to Pandit Jasraj who became her guru and main violin teacher. Now she is a renowned classical violinist in the south Indian tradition, sometimes collaborating with western musicians, and sometimes, as on this CD, playing classic ragas purely, with just tabla accompaniment. Check out her website. And you can watch her perform here.


Eric Dolphy: You Don't Know What Love Is from Last Date (Limelight)

I bought this piece of vinyl when it came out in 1965 and I have always loved Eric Dolphy's playing and loved who he was as a man: in an era of jazz musicians who were often drug-addicted or wildly eccentric or justifiably bitter, the friends Dolphy and Coltrane walked a path of integrity while remaining creatively innovative, and Dolphy was known as a kind and actively generous person. He was an extremely brilliant musician who died at age 36 from complications of diabetes. Dolphy was primarily an alto saxophonist and pioneered the use of the bass clarinet as a solo jazz instrument, but he was also a wonderful flute player and this piece is his real legacy on that instrument. This was his last recording before he died, hence the album title.

Kimi Djabate: Djalia and Fololon, from Karam (Kumbancha)

This young man is a griot from Guinnea-Bissau, who learned to play the Balafon (West African marimba when he was three. He's also a guitarist and singer and one of the charming things about this music is the occasional chorus of female voices.

Yo Yo Ma: Antonin Dvorak: Silent Woods, Humoresque in g-flat major ( both with Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa) and Songs My Mother Taught Me (with Patricia Zander, piano) from The Dvorak Album (Sony)

Most of this album is taken up with Dvorak's Cello concerto which I did not play but might one day. The rest has several short pieces or segments of larger pieces by Dvorak, all lovely, and they finished off this hour perfectly.

Maryem Tollar, Allen Toussaint, Vivaldi: Playlist for The Open Window for September 21, 2009

The open window airs at 6:30 am Mondays and 10:00 Thursdays at www.cjly.net.

Download a podcast of this show here

Maryem and Ernie Tollar: Il Matar, Taksim Kamanga, Gigue, Longa Baladi, and Heartsoul, from CAIRO TO TORONTO (Independent)

A girl is born in Cairo in 1968 and her family moves to Halifax. When she is 12 they move back to Egypt for five years. Maryem rebels at the uprooting, rejecting Arabic music, language and culture. She begins to sing pop music. In 1994 she goes to work for her musician brother in a project that requires Arabic singing, and that changes everything. She embraces her roots, takes lessons with the Toronto-based Egyptian musician George Sawa, and goes to study in Syria and Egypt. She sings in a group called Ritual Party, where she meets the saxophonist and flute player Ernie Tollar. They get married and this CD has several pictures of them and their three young children.

This CD is a great example of the melding of Arabic, jazz, and western folk. I started this set with Il Matar, which of all the tracks I think best bridges east and west because of the assertive jazz harmonies. Maryem Tollar is a great singer and these musicians, mostly Arab-Canadians, are a band that sounds like it knows where it's going. The Cairo violinist who joins them for a few tracks, Alfred Gamil, is beautiful.

I just discovered that Maryem Tollar played at the Our Way Home Reunion in Castlegar in 2007. There's a YouTube video of one song from the Brilliant Cultural Centre.

Allen Toussaint: St. James Infirmary, Blue Drag, Solitude, and Winin' Boy Blues from THE BRIGHT MISSISSIPPI (Nonesuch)

Remember that song Workin in a Coal Mine by Lee Dorsey? Or another one by Dorsey: Everything I Do Gon be Funky From Now On……or Pain in my Heart recorded by Otis Redding, or Fortune Teller recorded by a bunch of people including the early Stones. The list all the people Allen Toussant has written for, produced, arranged, played piano for, is long.

Well Allen Toussaint may have made his living writing and producing music like that: rock, rhythm and blues, and soul, but something of old New Orleans is in his blood, and late in his career he has made an album celebrating that, and this is it, The Bright Mississippi, with a relaxed and sociable visit to tunes written by jazz greats like Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Django Reinhardt, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and Billy Strayhorn, backed by a great band including clarinetist Don Byron, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, guitarist Marc Ribot, and bassist David Pilch. It's friendly and authentic music.

Vivaldi: Autumn from The Four Seasons performed by Virtuosi di Roma conducted by Renato Fasano (EMI)

A tribute to the new season that's upon us-- I know because riding my bike down to the station to do the show in the early morning I regretted not wearing gloves.

Arve Hendriksen, Mitsuko Uchida, Ravi Shankar & Philip Glass, Leonard Cohen, Herbie Hancock: playlist for The Open Window September 14, 2009

The Open Window airs at 6:30 am Mondays and 10:00 am Thursdays at www.cjly.net.

You can download a podcast of this show here: http://cjlypodcast.net/openwindow/openwindow_sept14_2009.mp3

Arve Henriksen: From Birth and Before and Afterlife from Cartography (ECM)

This group consists of Arve Hendriksen's trumpet and a bunch of programmers and samplers plus the odd guitar or bass or drum kit. The trumpet often does not sound like a trumpet-- mostly it moves imperceptibly back and forth between the sounds of trumpet and Japanese flute. These pieces are moody shape-shifting tableaux led by a trumpet, reminiscent of but neither as funky as nor as transcendent (sorry) as Jon Hassell's music which I have played recently here.

Mozart, Sonata in A, Mitsuko Uchida, piano, from Mozart Sonatas (Philips)

A girl is born in Japan in 1948. She is fascinated by European classical music and especially Mozart, and she starts piano lessons. Her father is appointed Japanese ambassador to Austria, so the family moves to Vienna which just happens to be the place Mozart composed many of his masterworks. She studies, and performs her first concert at age 14. The family moves back to Japan after five years but she stays. Since then Mitsuko Uchida has become known as the "high priestess of Mozart." I felt honoured to bring this music to you.

Philip Glass and Ravi Shankar: Offering from Passages (Private Music)
This is a piece of orchestral music based on a Ravi Shankar raga, with no sitar in sight, from one of the most successful collaborations between unlikely musicians that I have ever heard.

Herbie Hancock and Leonard Cohen: The Jungle Line from River: The Joni Letters (Verve)

This Joni Mitchell song was on her album The Hissing of Summer Lawns from the 1970s.

So: Joni Mitchell, lyrics; Leonard Cohen, vocals; Herbie Hancock, piano. What a team!

Evelyn Glennie, Allen Toussaint, Mascato: Playlist for The Open Window for September 7 and 11, 2009

The Open Window airs Mondays at 6:30 am and Thursdays at 10 am on Kootenay Cooperative Radio www.cjly.net.
Listen to a podcast of this show here:
http://cjlypodcast.net/openwindow/openwindow_Sept10_2009.mp3


Evelyn Glennie with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra directed by Paul Daniel: Concerto for Marimba and String Orchestra by Ney Rosauro from Rebounds- Concertos for Percussion (RCA)

Evelyn Glennie is a world-renowned Scottish concert percussionist who has been deaf since she was a teenager. Yet she manages to play stage-fulls of marimbas, tympani, drums, chimes, gongs, etc., and she does it in her bare feet because that is apparently how she hears it. On a TED talk, Glennie talks and plays, telling us how her main mission in life is to help people learn to listen.

The piece I played on the show is a lovely thing by the Brazilian composer and percussionist Ney Rosauro. Evelyn Glennie will be appearing at the Charles Bailey Theatre in Trail, B.C. with the Winnipeg Chamber Orchestra on Sept 15 and I'm going to it with the awesome Rosie.

Allen Toussaint: Egyptian Fantasy, Dear Old Southland, Winin Boy Blues from The Bright Mississippi (Nonesuch)

This is one of those CDs with no weak tracks. It's the legendary producer, arranger, composer, pianist who influenced R&B so much especially in the 60s and 70s, this time delving into traditional New Orleans jazz sounds, accompanied by a bunch of much younger jazz musicians who are not normally associated with that music at all except trumpeter Nicholas Payton who is joined by Don Byron, clarinet, Marc Ribot, guitar, David Pilch, bass, and Jay Belarose, drums.
The formidable pianist Brad Mehldau comes in for one track and plays a two-piano duet with Toussaint. Joshus Redman guests one track. Marc Ribot plays old-timey, which I have never heard before-- fascinating. The real glory here is Allen Toussaint's piano playing and the happy blues sound this CD has.

Mascato Youth Choir: Likonelam, Dubula, and Ntyilo, from Namibian Rhythms in Spain (Independent)

I bought this CD a few years ago in Nelson when this wonderful group sang here. They came with Edmonton's Kokopelli with whom they have a sibling choir relationship, and Kokopelli in turn is a big city version, and a dear friend, of Nelson's Corazon.


Steve Dawson: 1000 Year Old Egg from Telescope (Black Hen)

Vancouver's Steve Dawson has been studying pedal steel with Greg Leisz, and he's good at slide guitar too, and I love both instruments.

Kronos, MJQ, Black Mambazo: playlist for The Open Window for August 17, 2009

The Open Window airs at www.cjly.net (Kootenay Co-op Radio) Mondays at 6:30 am and Thursdays at 10 am

The Modern Jazz Quartet: A Cold Wind is Blowing, Skating in Central Park, Cue #9, and No Happiness for Slater, from Patterns (United Artists)

There is no photo anywhere on the internet of the original cover for this wonderful album which first appeared in 1960 and opened up a whole new window on music for me. It was one of those musical revelations you only have when you are young. The music was much later re-released with the album cover pictured here and a different title-- the music was from the film Odds Against Tomorrow.

In the 1960's I knew this album by heart. Then after a few years I lost it and I believe it went out of print for a while and I spend decades haunted by the simple, elegant melodies until sometime in the 1990s I found a pristine-quality vinyl edition of it in a used bin in Vancouver, with the original simple black and white cover art. I paid a lot of money for it and have cherished it since.

The Modern Jazz Quartet were John Lewis, Piano; Milt Jackson, vibes; Connie Kay, drums and Perch Heath, bass. They recorded mostly from the 50s to the 70s. They wanted to bring jazz out of the smoky clubs and into the concert hall ( I prefer it in the clubs). They wore tuxedos and took on a sophisticated demeanor. But it was not phony, it was honest. They played elegant, stately music that still had the blues in it, but subtly.

Kronos Quartet: Hold Me Neighbor In This Storm from Floodplain (Nonesuch)

Alexandra Vrebalov, the composer of this piece, was born in the former Yugoslavia in 1970 and left Serbia to live in the U.S. in 2007.

From the program notes to a live performance of this piece at Carnegie Hall in 2008:

About hold me, neighbor, in this storm, Vrebalov writes:
“The Balkans, with its multitude of cultural and religious identities, has had a troubled history of ethnic intolerance. For my generation of Tito’s pioneers and children of communists, growing up in the former Yugoslavia meant learning about and carrying in our minds the battles and numberless ethnic and religious conflicts dating back half a millennium, and honoring ancestors who died in them. By then, that distant history had merged with the nearer past, so those we remember from World War II are our grandparents. Their stories we heard firsthand. After several devastating ethnic wars in the 1990s, we entered a new century, this time each of us knowing in person someone who perished. As I write this in November 2007, a new generation of Albanians and Serbs post their war-songs on YouTube, bracing for another conflict, claiming their separate entitlements to the land and history, rather than a different kind of future, together.

“Strangely, the cultural and religious differences that led to enmity in everyday life produced—after centuries of turbulently living together—most incredible fusions in music. It is almost as if what we weren’t able to achieve through words and deeds—to fuse, and mix, and become something better and richer together—was instead so famously accomplished in our music.

“ …hold me, neighbor, in this storm… is inspired by folk and religious music from the region, whose insistent rhythms and harmonies create a sense of inevitability, a ritual trance with an obsessive, dark energy. Peaceful passages of the work grew out of the delicately curved, elusive, often microtonal melodies of prayers, as well as escapist tavern songs from the region, as my grandmother remembers them.

“For me, …hold me, neighbor… is a way to bring together the sounds of the church bells of Serbian orthodox monasteries and the Islamic calls for prayer. It is a way to connect histories and places by unifying one of the most civilized sounds of Western classical music—that of the string quartet—with ethnic Balkan instruments, the gusle [a bowed string instrument] and tapan [large double-headed drum]. It is a way to piece together our identities fractured by centuries of intolerance, and to reach out and celebrate the land so rich in its diversity, the land that would be ashen, empty, sallow, if any one of us, all so different, weren’t there.”


Ladysmith Black Mambazo: Mercy of God and Get Ready from Journey of Dreams (Warner Bros)

This 1990 album took us further into the music of the group most of us discovered on Graceland in 1986.

Kronos, Isabel Bayrakdarian, Allison Girvan, Luciana Souza, Bach, Glenn Gould: Playlist for The Open Window for August 3 and 9, 2009

The Open Window airs at www.cjly.net (Kootenay Co-op Radio) Mondays at 6:30 am and Thursdays at 10 am

Kronos Quartet: Wa Habibi, Raga Mishra Bhairavi Alap, Mugyam Beyati Shiraz, and Tew Semagn Hagere from Floodplain (Nonesuch)

This is music from cultures that reside on floodplains
in the Middle East, Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe. People living on floodplains are used to violent upheaval, and they are often melting pots, formed from many societies from all over. But we in the west tend to see them as homogeneous.

This music is centuries old and refreshingly new, much of it commissioned from contemporary composers.

There is music from Egypt, Lebanon, Azerbaijan and Iraq, among other places. Some was written for the Kronos Quartet by such contemporary artists as the Palestinian electronic / hip hop collective Ramallah Underground and the Serbian composer Aleksandra Vrebalov whose Hold me Neighbour In This Storm is worth the price of this CD which is full of beauty, integrity, and wonderful surprises.

It's fascinating to hear Kronos playing in so many styles; even more so to hear individual members playing as if from another culture: violist Hank Dutt becomes an Indian musician on Raga Mishra, and David Harrington an Azerbaijani on Tew Semagn Hagere.


Isabel Bayrakdarian: Lullaby, from Gomidas Songs (Nonesuch)

The Armenian composer Gomidas Vertabed (1869-1935) is known as the father of Armenian classical music. He took songs and dances of the Armenian peasantry and recreated them in European classical format. He did this because, as a survivor of the Armenian genocide, he thought this the best way to preserve Armenian musical heritage.

Isabel Bayrakdarian is an Armenian-Canadian opera singer. There is a wonderful video on You Tube of her singing this song accompanied by a quartet of Armenian players of the duduk (a Turkish-Armenian wind instrument) in an ancient Armenian ruin, here: http://tinyurl.com/9q7s2w.



Lusiana Souza: Sonnet 49, from Neruda (Sunnyside)

This Brazilian singer has elegantly put some of Neruda's poems to music. I urge you to watch her perform this song, self-accompanied on the kalimba.

Allison Girvan: Bright Morning Star from Resonance (Independent)

Allison Girvan is the cheerfully creative leader of the Corazon Vocal Ensemble in Nelson, B.C. and the bar-raising musical director for the Capitol Theatre summer youth productions as well as being a solo performer and one of Nelson's musical movers, shakers, mentors, and elders even though she's not that old. This song is purity itself.

Bach: Invention # 5, 14, 11, and 10, Glenn Gould, piano, from Bach: The Two and Three Part Inventions (Columbia)