A Love Supreme

'A man who has never seen the world, never lived as a stranger among foreigners, who has never known a life and culture other than his own is in some way limited. He cannot help but feel his own way of life to be superior, to be the only way. This was one of the poisons I saw seeping into my company in Iraq from the beginning: parochialism, ignorance, knowing nothing about Islam or the Middle East, or any other society outside American cities like Tampa or St. Petersburg...


Many people believe in good and evil. Just that, that simple: good on one side, evil on the other. By default, we are always on the good side. This means that any who oppose us must logically be evil. Buddhism tends to take a circumspect view of good and evil, avoiding that distinction entirely and instead speaking of "positive" and "negative" actions as measured by their effect in the world. It is never as final and absolute as good and evil. Yet duality invades every level of society, from religous sermons to the political rhetoric that drove us into the Iraq war.


The absoluteness of good and evil is an incredibly dangerous doctrine, dangerous in the wrong hands and without proper restraint. I believe that experience demonstrates that never in life is anything wholly good or evil. Good and evil are metaphors, signposts to guide us in the right direction. To render good and evil as actual physical truth is to render an infinitely complex moral world into absurd black and white. Further still, to hold that truth out to the mass of humanity and invite them to act upon it is to invite disaster and fanaticism' - from The Sutras of Abu Ghraib by Aidan Delgado. The author spent a year with the U.S. Army Reserve in Iraq where he worked in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, and the book charts his progress from soldier to Buddhist and conscientous objector and it is essential reading. My quote is verbatim. I am only too well aware that Telford and St. Albans in England can be substituted for Tampa and St. Petersburg without in any way altering the message.


I will be celebrating the Western Easter this Sunday (March 23) on Future Radio with A Love Supreme, and the main work in the programme is John Coltran's legendary 1964 four movement jazz suite of that name. Before Coltrane's 'gift to God' I am playing music by the Yuval Ron Ensemble. This group has been working since 1999 to break down national, racial, religious and cultural divides using the sacred and folk music of the Middle East. The Ensemble includes Jewish, Arabic and Christian Armenian musicians, and they are all actively involved in building musical bridges between people of different faiths and cultures. In the programme they will be playing music and song, appropriately, from Iraq, and also from Muslim and Jewish Andalucia. Listen online at 5.00pm UK time Sunday March 23 with a repeat at 12.50am on Monday morning for transatlantic listeners.


Now visit the green hill far away seen in the photo above here.
Photos are of five great manifestations of A Love Supreme, the Anglican Shrine at Walsingham, Norfolk and the Neue Synagogue, Berlin (both copyright On An Overgrown Path 2008), the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, Istanbul, the Potala Palace, Lhasa and the Taizé Community, France. 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

Great Britten

Interesting to read today's Guardian leader invoking Benjamin Britten (and George Crabbe) in its assesment of the departing Tony Blair ~ 'Christianity underpinned so much about his prime ministership, from his 1997 identification of the act of voting Labour with spiritual redemption - "one cross on the ballot paper, one nation was reborn" - to his attempts to persuade the public of absolute truths. The effect could be brilliant. But it produced a strange sort of defiance, especially after Iraq and in the response to terrorism, a leader who came to believe, like Peter Grimes, that he could see the shoals to which the rest of Britain was blind.'

I wonder which operatic character the Guardian will use in their assesment of George W. Bush? And talking of political failings, now read the story of Peter Grimes' first conductor.
Photo is the 1995 Royal Opera House production of Peter Grimes. 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 other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

When will they ever learn?

So building a 12ft high concrete wall is the new US strategy in Baghdad. When will they ever learn. When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?

I am weary of the constant US bashing

Hi Pliable, I just need to confess: I've enjoyed so much of your writing and reporting on music and humanity, and your postings have added much to my enlightenment and delight in life. But I may be coming to a point where I won't go there much anymore.

I happen to live in the US, and I am getting very weary of the constant bashing of mostly anything US - politics, composers, music, morals, etc. I am a decent person, a pacifist (Quaker), to a degree a political activist (I attended my first anti-war protest *since* the Viet Nam war when Bush II invaded Iraq, and have continued)... you get the picture. But I just don't need to be constantly told how bad I am, how little I do, etc.

I hope you understand my perspective. For those of us who fight regularly, and have for a good long time, to retain the best qualities of our country while attempting to contain or diminish the bad, it is hard to see ourselves - because we are here, not there - perpetually painted in very bad light.

Yours in music and light, Jon

Now read some of my US bashing articles here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and ...
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 other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Simple gifts – Baghdad’s Spring

Travel Notes – new music for the viola da gamba was one of the most thought provoking CDs of contemporary music that I heard in 2006. One of the tracks is Baghdad’s Spring, and here are composer and viol player Paolo Pandolfo’s own words:

Baghdad’s Spring was born while I was on tour in Japan, in March 2003. The TV was like a window opening onto what was happening in Iraq. CNN accompanied me every moment I spent in the hotel room: satellite transmissions of an Iraq reduced to a videogame session, the camera gradually zooming in on the images of bombed targets, strategic sites, bridges, streets, cities … Reality was quite different from those images, the violence of the explosions, the terror of the people … The was seemed to boil down to a question of skill and precision, a game in which someone surgically dosed out horror and death with the click of a mouse button, undoubtedly in the interest of all the world’s TV viewers.

I remember the moment in which I decided to keep watching CNN, but with sound turned off. The images were quite sufficient and the booming quality of the news commentators seemed superfluous, impeding a better understanding of what was really going on. Those images began soaking in silence, like a fine rain, in the small hotel in Hiroshima where I found myself. I’d already visited the museum of horror, the loose strands of memory, the deafening silence of the shoes carbonised by radiation.

My viola was there, resting against the table, mute. I started playing: the instrument produced anguished, subterranean sounds. Now it was there, on the streets of Baghdad, it was next to the fearful families transfixed by a TV screen, like I was, listening in amazement to the same news commentators who explained the characteristics of the tempest of fire which was descending on their city as if they were describing a real atmospheric disturbance, directly connected with the eye of the hurricane ….

Travel Notes comes from the innovative Spanish label Glossa. Violist Paolo Pandolfo (photo above) is better known for his interpretations of baroque and early music. All the compositions on this CD, with one exception, are by him, and this unashamedly contemporary album for viola da gamba, trumpet, percussion and human voice is remarkable proof that today’s new music knows no boundaries.

Paolo Pandolfo wrote the notes for Baghdad’s Spring in the summer of 2003. How tragic that his words, and music, are more relevant today than they were three years ago. There is no simple gift that will bring peace to Baghdad this Christmas, even as I write BBC News reports that a suicide bomber has killed at least 10 in the Iraqi capital - horror and death are still being surgically dosed out.

* Less 'left-field' is Paolo Pandolfo's new CD of improvisations on 16th and 17th century musical forms. Improvisando is another superb Glossa release, and is certainly on my shortlist of best CDs of 2006.

For more seasonal reflections take An Overgrown Path to For unto us a child is born
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "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 other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk