It may be my age, but those moments when a piece of music really hits me in the solar plexus seem to get rarer and rarer. But during my recent extended travels in India I was metaphorically punched time and time again when listening to ECM's Codona recordings on headphones. Recent posts have touched on the potential of virtual concert halls and the fact that no one mixes for speakers these days , and the Manfred Eicher produced Codona sessions from between 1978 and 1982 really demonstrate the impact of the up close and personal sound of headphones . The line up for Codona was African-American trumpeter Don Cherry, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and Colin Walcott on sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza, timpani, and voice. The band took its name from a circus trapeze act of the early 20th century called the Flying Codonas , and the three albums packaged by ECM for CD as The Codona Trilogy capture the peerless musicians-beyond-frontiers performing their creative hig...
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Can't resist, though, mentioning Churchill's comment on learning Gandhi was back in town (London)..."oh no, not that bloody fakir again!"
:-))
Salams,
b.
http://www.overgrownpath.com/2014/09/this-digital-fixation-is-damaging-live.html
I must say that the words attributed to Churchill by billoo sound a lot more characteristic of Eric Idle. But that apart, the words of WSC that gave rise to the "half-naked fakir" image, surely one of the best-known of the plethora of things Churchill never said, were:
"...a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace..."
When historians of my age and (even older) Peter Brown's speak of the 'historical imagination', we don't mean just making stuff up. (See Collingwood, Oakeshott, Barfield, White, et al.) That we really do leave to Monty Python, Hollywood filmmakers, and the historical novelists averse from research. Oh, and also to the younger generations of historians who adhere to post-modernist thought, giving primacy to subjective opinion and bringing the historical discipline to an undignified end.
So, yes, your point is well taken...it was a flippant comment and I can see how it must be quite infuriating as a scholar to read that. I would be interested to know in what sense Churchill used the word 'fakir' but am extremely weary of using Pli's space here for this digression)
Perhaps we can at least agree that it was quite funny?