On An Overgrown Path

A recent post praised a new CD of Violin and Sitar Concertos from the Anglo-Indian father and son team of Jonathan and John Mayer. As well as composing for classical forces and playing violin in the London Philharmonic for five years in the 1950s, John Jiddhu Mayer wrote for and played what became known as Indo-Jazz Fusions with Jamaican-born alto-player Joe Harriott . Their Double Quintet included sitar, tabla, tambura and flute, with Mayer on violin or harpsichord.  Joe Harriott and John Mayer's Indo-Jazz Fusions featured at the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival . This was headlined by Bob Dylan who ended a three year hiatus from live performances enforced by his motorbike accident. Saturday at the Isle of Wight Festival was prog rock day, with Indo-Jazz Fusions taking the stage in the afternoon after classical-influenced Third Ear Band . Saturday evening saw The Who playing, with The Moody Blues finishing the first day late at night, a transcendent performance captured on video by...

Bhaskar Menon, a leading figure in EMI Worldwide, has died aged 86. In a typically delusive Slipped Disc post Norman Lebrecht states that "He was responsible, with George Harrison, for organising the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh". So now the click bait has hit social media and Norman's readership numbers  are spinning like a fruit machine , let's look at the facts. In his autobiographical I Me Mine George Harrison recounts how:  "It must have been in 1971 when I was in Los Angeles doing the Raga soundtrack album. Ravi [Shankar] was talking to me and telling me how he wanted to do a concert, but bigger than he normally did, so that he could raise maybe 25,000 dollars for the starving in Bangla Desh. He asked if I could think of some way of helping, say for instance for me to come on and introduce it or maybe bring in Peter Sellers… something to help, anyway. " Ravi Shankar and George Harrison went on to organise The Concert for Bangladesh , with help fr...

Among Indian musical instruments the short-necked fiddle known as a sarangi is the Cinderella. Because it was closely associated with popular folk music the sarangi fell out of favour at the turn of the last century, and the harmonium and violin began to replace it in classical performances. Later, the flowering of Indian music in the West was led by the sitar, which shares with the now-ubiquitous Malian kora a beguiling mellifluousness. By contrast the sarangi closely approximates the Indian classical vocal style , and is therefore more challenging to Western ears. Despite its eclipse and relative inaccessibility to Western ears there are many distinguished sarangi masters, and my recent listening has included Indian recordings of ragas played by Ustad Sultan Khan with his longtime accompanist tabla virtuoso sans frontières Zakir Hussain . Overgrown paths converge here as Zakir Hussain was a member of John McLaughlin's Shakti , a band featured in another post sparke...

I don't believe in magic, I don't believe in I-Ching,I don't believe in Bible, I don't believe in tarot, I don't believe in Hitler, I don't believe in Jesus, I don't believe in Kennedy, I don't believe in Buddha, I don't believe in mantra, I don't believe in Gita, I don't believe in yoga, I don't believe in kings, I don't believe in Elvis, I don't believe in Zimmerman, I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me That litany of rejected influences comes from the track God on the 1969 John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album. John Lennon dismisses two elements of Christianity, the Bible and Jesus, and five of Eastern traditions, I-Ching, Buddha, mantra, Gita and yoga. But intriguingly Lennon does not reject Islam as an influence. There may well be a simple explanation for this: namely that Vedanta and Zen Buddhism but not Islam were the esoteric traditions of choice for the the 1960s counterculture. But there is another possibl...

In a Guardian article Amit Chaudhuri argues that Bob Dylan is not the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for literature and makes the case for the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore who won the Nobel Prize in 1913 . In support of Amit Chaudhuri  I would cite Alexander von Zemlinsky's neo-Mahlerian Lyric Symphony which sets Tagore's The Gardener , and Jonathan Harvey's Song Offerings which sets the sensuous Gitanjali Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

The first regular coach service from Europe to Asia started in 1957. For almost a decade the ‘ Indiaman ’ made the 10,000-kilometre journey from King’s Cross in London to Bombay and Calcutta. It was soon joined by the legendary ‘Magic Bus’ , leaving from Dam Square in Amsterdam, and by other coaches running from the Porte d’Italie in Paris via Frankfurt, Munich and Salzburg and across the Middle East to India. In the 1960s and 70s these transcontinental coaches provided the route to the Orient for a new generation of independent travellers who were variously called the Beats, Intrepids and Hippies. There were two main motivations for these 20th-century Intrepids to undertake the long and sometimes hazardous overland journey to India: the first was a growing disenchantment with Western values; the second was a fascination with the spiritual traditions of the East. One of the legacies that the Intrepids left was musical, with Bob Dylan, the Byrds, the Beatles and the Grateful Dead amon...

Martin Scorsese has a knack of capturing the musical zeitgeist . He has directed biopics of George Harrison and Bob Dylan, and his film Kundun , which portrays the flight of the Dalai Lama from Tibet in 1959, was scored by Philip Glass . But another Scorsese movie, his controversial 1988 adaption of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel The Last Temptation of Christ , features music that is considerably less well known. The Last Temptation of Christ uses the track Ya Sah by the Moroccan group Nass El Ghiwane. While working in a political theatre in the late 1960s the founder members of Nass El Ghiwane started using traditional North African music to communicate their views on political and social issues, and such was the success of their experiments that they went on to form their own group in 1969. The band's name translates as 'disciples of the Ghiwanes' - a reference to the Ghiwane Sufi brotherhood of musicians and story tellers . Nass El Ghiwane's music, which couples ...

Georges Simenon, who walked with Varèse , was born in Liège, Belgium in 1903. César Franck was born in the same city in 1822. Liège is in the predominantly French speaking part of Belgium. Both Simenon and Franck moved to France to further their careers. Pupils of César Franck later founded the Schola Cantorum in Paris where Edgard Varèse studied for three years. Si Tu Dois Partir is a French-language cover of a Bob Dylan number by the English electric folk group Fairport Convention . In 1969 Herbert von Karajan recorded Franck's Symphony in D minor and in the same year Fairport released their influential album Liege & Lief . Unusually, Karajan's recording of the Franck Symphony for EMI was made in France with L'Orchestre de Paris . Fairport Convention's recording producer was Joe Boyd , who also produced Nick Drake and Boyd was at Newport in 1965 when Bob Dylan went electric . Playboy par excellence Karajan had a house in Saint Tropez, France and kept his yacht...

Dylan is cool and Simon and Garfunkel are not. But in the days when file sharing meant copying LPs onto reel to reel tape the folk duo were most definitely cool. I still cannot listen to Old Friends on CD without missing the wow and flutter from the Elizabethan 1/4 inch tape machine that was my student equivalent of an MP3 player. Much wow of a very different kind on the free jazz improvisations on Paul Simon's Old Friends by pianist Marc Copland and his five piece band on the 2003 CD above. Other masters who receive the improvisation treatment include Miles Davis/Bill Evans, Charlie Parker and Herbie Hancock. Next to my CD player is a shelf where I keep music I return to time after time: there are seven Marc Copland discs there. Marc Copland And.. is on the Swiss label Hat Hut Records which also brought us Lou Harrison's Fifth Simfony (yes, that's right) for percussion. Also on Facebook and Twitter . Marc Copland And... was bought at retail. Report broken links, ...

There was no aspect of human existence which did not exercise some fascination for him and around which he did not allow his mind and fertile imagination to play; and where, as a young man, I had been brought up in a world in which the secular and religous were separate, he insisted that in poetry, music, art and life they were one, and that there should be no dividing line. That is Leonard Elmhirst writing about the Bengali poet, composer and educationalist Rabindranath Tagore. With his American wife Dorothy, Leonard Elmhirst founded Dartington School which was modelled on Tagore's educational experiment at Santiniketan in Bengal. The summer school at Dartington has made a major contribution to contemporary music ; the musicians who have participated in it include Peter Maxwell Davies, Igor Stravinsky, Maderna Boulez, Luciano Berio and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Sir William Glock presided over the summer school for some years. In 1913 Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel ...

Randomness is a very precious thing , or is folk music the new classical ? Bob Dylan tops the UK charts . Then, as I was preparing my articles celebrating folk icon Pete Seeger's 90th birthday , Jordi Savall's new CD arrived, and it is pure folk music. The Celtic Viol is a homage to the Irish and Scottish music traditions with Jordi Savall playing treble viol accompanied by Andrew Lawrence-King on the Irish Harp and psalterium. Accompanying the beautifully played and presented CD is a 142 page multi-lingual booklet to which Jordi Savall contributes a superb essay titled In praise of transmission . This highlights the importance to folk music of that forerunner of viral marketing , the oral tradition . All the music on this new CD comes from the oral tradition, as does Pete Seeger's and most folk music. One of the most famous examples of the oral tradition is Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land which was written in 1940, but was not professionally published until 1...

The best possible response, however, to the question 'What are your songs about? ' was vintage 60s Bob Dylan: 'Oh, some are about four minutes, some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve,' he replied. Quote is from Karen O'Brien's biography of Joni Mitchell . Read about the birth of rock here. Dylan photo from Mood Swing . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Art of the book cover from David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street . Upper image shows Joan Baez and Bob Dylan , the lower Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña . The artwork is by Eric von Schmidt based on his classic poster for the 1964 Baez-Dylan tour. Ironically, the original posters were withdrawn and pulped as Dylan did not like them. Despite this, or perhaps because of, they are now valuable collector's items . As well as beautifully capturing the zeitgeist of the early 1960s Positively 4th Street makes a valuable contribution by reassessing the contributions of Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña, who are usually overshadowed by Mimi's sister Joan and Dylan. The first album by the Fariña's, Celebrations for a Grey Day is well worth exploring, particularly for Richard Fariña's use of the dulcimer. On the day that he died in a motorcycle accident in 1966 Richard Fariña had been attending a launch party at the Thunderbird bookstore in Carmel Valley, California f...

Anonymous Soprano has left a new comment on " Music for four accordions" : This brings up the subject of how anything "folk" is perceived by the supposed musical elite -- both music and instruments. See: John Jacob Niles , for instance. The only exception to this seems to be if it comes from somewhere else -- i.e., the performer is always been if they're from a long ways away. "Folk" instruments are respected if, say, they're a Shakuhachi , but not, say, the nearly identical Native American instrument. I guess it's because the assumption is that "folk" music and instruments aren't "educated" properly, and therefore can't possibly contribute anything to the realm of "proper" music? I don't know. All I know is that the best composers pretty much all appropriated folk tunes and sometimes folk instruments...even Mozart. AS, it is a good point you make. We are all guilty of overlooking folk musicians. ...

In the 1960s we were open to experimentation in all things from natural to unnatural to supernatural. I believed that knowledge acquired from instinct and observation was as valid as an academic search for factual verity. Parsing everything was not a path to discovery - it was a deterrent. It wasn't that I was against study and excavating for information, but I believed that overanalyzing was harmful and interfered with the ability to see. I was wary of entering a tunnel of thought that ignored the surrounding terrain and the weather above it. Those words from Suze Rotolo's 'A Freewheelin' Time' remind us of how new approaches to the creative process produced remakable results in the 1960s. Here are four examples of the notable new music that was composed in one year alone - 1968 Roger Sessions - Eighth Symphony Harrison Birtwistle - Nomos Luciano Berio - Sinfonia Luigi Dallapiccola - Odysseus But instinct is not always a good thing. In 1972 the self-styled bla...

One evening we went to Emilio's on Sixth Avenue and Bleeker Street, a restaurant that was a fixture in what was then still an Italian neighborhood. It had a lovely outdoor garden in the back that compensated for the stereotypical food. Bobby [Dylan] was all fired up about the concept of freedom.What defined the essence of freedom? Were birds really free? he asked. They are chained to the sky, he said, where they are compelled to fly. So are they truly free? From Suze Rotolo's essential memoir of Greenwich Village in the sixties 'A Freewheelin' Time'. See Dylan's art here. Suze Rotolo is the lady with Dylan on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

'I am astonished at how rarely the union of music and text succeeds in English-language opera. People invariably point to Benjamin Britten as the gold standard of setting texts in English. But to my (admittedly American) ear, his vocal settings can produce a sensation uncomfortably stilted and oddly archaic. They may satisfy the needs of the English dramatic sensibility, but they are not a comfortable fit for an American ear brought up on everything from George Gershwin and W. C. Handy to Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder' - from John Adams' Hallelujah Junction , which is, quite appropriately, sub-titled Composing an American Life . Photo shows Benjamin Britten in upstate New York, 1939 with Aaron Copland and Peter Pears. Another Britten gem here. Copy of Hallelujah Junction borrowed from Norfolk Library Services . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be ...

The graphic art of famous musicians has provided some fascinating posts on the path and we recently travelled to Scotland to add the paintings of none less than Bob Dylan to the thread. While touring in the early 1990s, Dylan created a collection of drawings that were published in a book titled 'Drawn Blank' in 1994. These expressive works capture Dylan's chance encounters and observations and were created to " relax and refocus a restless mind ". Ingrid Mössinger - the curator of the Kunstsammlungen Museum , in Chemnitz, Germany - came across 'Drawn Blank' during a visit to New York in 2006. Instantly excited about Dylan's work, she contacted the artist and arranged for the first public showings of the works. Dylan had made the drawings intending to create paintings based on them at a later date, and he used watercolour and gouache to elaborate them for the exhibition. We caught up with the exhibition at the Breeze Gallery in Peebles Scotland wher...