I've never identified as Christian in my life but I suppose, having grown up in America over the second half of the twentieth century, that I still qualify as "culturally christian" to some extent. I always hated -- hated! -- the starched sermons of church and the syrupy, saccharine sound of hymns. It all sounded emotionally false to me, dripping with false piety. Of course, I used to feel the same way about classical music as a child. It made my skin crawl. I eventually discovered the appeal of Baroque! Fortunately, my family was not religious (or "cultured") so that spared me the baggage so many of my contemporaries were saddled with.
But I was always moved by Christmas carols, oddly enough. And have always loved everything everyone else descries about that season -- the lights, laughter, food, noise and presents. I love shopping for and buying presents for others.
So on Palm Sunday, Jesus entered Jerusalem and began his show-down with the powers-that-be of Ignorance -- political, religious, and human. It appears that ignorance wins all the battles; faith says that truth finally wins the war.
John Fahey took an old spiritual, "In Christ There Is No East or West," and played to his strengths with it. Steeped as he was in the roots of musical Americana, John took this song and spruced it up in just that fashion. Makes it a lively piece of music. He recorded multiple versions of it, but the one from the 1974 album is still my favorite. His style is "out of style" but have a listen and see what you think.
The other cut from her album, Harponium, which influenced me. But I tend to like rhythmic, percussive sounds, especially when they're on an unexpected instrument like the harp. Here you go:
The Scottish harpist, who was the composer of the song done by the Aquarelle Guitar Quartet, in a song from her own album, Harponium. This song is entitled "Roof of the World." Watching this video, and one other from the same album, inspired my earlier story of the water dragon and the swan.
The vernal equinox occurred at 2:37 a.m., Pacific Daylight Time, this morning. And so the inexorable turning of the seasons continues as it always has, despite the tumult of the world and the changes wrought by covid, climate change and all the myriad human shenanigans, big and small, that affect our lives.
May the light and lovely energies of spring spread their burgeoning green glow across the northern hemisphere of this beautiful blue orb hung in the dark velvet backdrop of our mysterious cosmos.
And just a little ditty to usher in the season. A few days ago I mentioned Max Ochs. He, along with John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Leo Kottke, were a crew of steel string guitarists who suddenly made their joint appearance in the Baltimore area in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Each had their own effect. Fahey was a musicologist and was well steeped in musical Americana. He started his own record label, Takoma Records, when he was only 19. Basho moved to San Francisco and explored Oriental, Indian, and Middle Eastern themes. Kottke, of course, followed his own whimsical star and became the most popular of the three.
For today, I'm going to feature a piece by John Fahey from the 1974 album he produced with Peter Lang and Leo Kottke. I used to own a vinyl version of this and played it constantly. This was my favorite cut on the album. It's entitled "On the Sunny Side of the Ocean." With this I welcome Spring!
This is a guitar quartet from the UK. I originally became aware of them through an album called "The Spirit of Brazil."
What I find most interesting about this performance, though, is that the piece was originally composed by the Scottish harpist, Catriona McKay. This quartet took a song, "The Swan Lk 243," and transposed it from the harp to a score for four guitars and slowed the tempo slightly. Having listened to both versions, I actually prefer this version to the original.
Having said that, sometime this weekend we'll see something from Catriona McKay so that you can get some sense of her. But for now, "The Swan Lk 243" by the Aquarelle Guitar Quartet.
Something a little more light-hearted. Two individual guitarists playing together in Chile. The playful back and forth of this I find innately charming. The song is entitled "Danza de pies pintados."
This is my last post of Elizabeth Morris, the Chilean singer and composer. The performance of this song is, in a word, intense. Elizabeth sings the entire song with her eyes closed, intently focused, and in this performance in particular she is able to display her own musicianship fully within her trio, playing what looks to be a four-stringed Andean guitar. She is accompanied once more by Cesar Gomez on violin and Nicolas Ortiz on flute.
I felt that yesterday I made light of Jack Kerouac's suffering and unfairly glossed over what he really felt and what truly undid him: spiritual and emotional despair. That despair I see as the keynote of this age.
We're a people -- and by "we" I mean everyone on earth -- who have truly lost our way. I've alluded to it in a number of previous posts. It's easy to criticize a loose grouping of people, or even an entire culture, but the fact of the matter is, we've lost ourselves. All of us. Everyone. And speaking for myself, yes, I'm lost too. Lost and searching.
Although I got unwittingly launched upon the spiritual quest at the age of 17, my experience has largely been one of disappointment, failure, of imbalance rather than balance, tumult rather than equanimity. And despair and disillusionment as the flip side of every hope I ever harbored.
What rarely gets said in spiritual literature is that most often the spiritual quest/life is full of failure. You virtually fail at everything. Well, I guess I should qualify that statement: I have virtually failed at everything. Because the spiritual quest, whether we know it or not, assumes a desire to be perfect. Which is a virtual impossibility and literally inhuman. Yet that unconscious assumption often accompanies our spiritual hopes and aspirations.
The idea of aspiration itself begs the question: who or what aspires? The ego? Is that who we really are, our egos? Aren't we more than that? And to what are we aspiring? Freedom? What does real freedom even look like? Is it freedom from inner compulsion, so that we finally, truly have a sense of unfettered choice? Is it the classical spiritual ideal, to be utterly desireless (talk about impossible)? Or is it the naive New Age fantasy of "manifesting" everything you want in life, the fulfillment of every desire you could ever possibly have, endlessly repeated ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Is it escape from the vicissitudes of life? As the near-contemporary spiritual teacher Meher Baba pointed out, such a desire is really a neurotic reaction and a recoiling from the demands of life, rather than an attempt to solve the gritty problems by which we're all beset.
It's pretty damned cheeky for anyone to write about the spiritual life at all. It's presumptuous and pretentious. Many look at the world today, with its endemic unfairness and inequality, a world in which the selfish and vicious seem to be endowed with power and control, a world in which ignorance, bigotry, hatred, sectarian violence, reactionary fundamentalism and nationalism all congeal into a poisonous concoction -- and people come to the logical conclusion that there is no over-arching "higher power" at work, no truth, only the brutality and banality of the human ego run riot. And people despair.
For me, if not for you, that's an unacceptable conclusion. That what is, this flood of debris in a monumental logjam, is all there is to life. But before I lose myself in the morass of hopelessness, let's bring this back down to earth.
Besides alcoholism, which was just the bad luck of the draw for Jack Kerouac -- his inherited biochemistry, over which he had no control -- there were two underlying problems in Jack's life which did him in: his inability to find love (which was rooted in the instability of his own nature) and his failed quest to attain to his own spiritual ideals.
It's those two characteristics of Kerouac's life with which I most identify: his failed quest for love and his failed quest for a higher spiritual life. I identify with his failures, because those are my failures. It's my story as well, and probably the same story for many others.
I could go on for pages about this but what I really wanted to acknowledge today was the reality of spiritual despair in today's world, and in the life of anyone who aspires for more. It's no use to be a Pollyanna. Life is tough, it's hard, and we often fail. Let's look that in the face and make no excuses about it.
On that note, my musical post for today is an instrumental which captures spiritual despair to a tee, at least for me. It's a piece by the guitarist Max Ochs. Max was another one of those guys in Baltimore and College Park, Maryland, some sixty-odd years ago, along with Robbie Basho, John Fahey, and Leo Kottke. The song is entitled "Hooray For Another Day." Because my maxim is: the way Up is Down; the way Out is In; and the way In is Through, let's go down, in, and through this despair and quit pretending it doesn't exist. Vedanta doesn't honor Kali for nothing. I'm going to give the dark its due for a day.
Today is/would have been Jack Kerouac's 99th birthday. Next year on his centennial I'll do a long post or article with respect to my thoughts about him and his legacy for me personally. For now, suffice to say I probably wouldn't have been interested in Kerouac at all, his writing and effect upon my generation notwithstanding, were it not for his own failed spiritual quest.
Kerouac was a Pisces. He was both somewhat of a mystic and certainly was prone to mind-altering substances. Alcohol got him in the end. He also suffered from the fallout of his failed attempt as a Buddhist auto-didact. The ensuing existential ennui did a number on his head.
But his impact upon the world is indisputable. Thus, I'm going to acknowledge Jack today with this song of Leo Kottke's, which is about just such blase ennui, and which also evidences the associative and spontaneous wordplay that Jack loved so much. Fittingly, the song is entitled, "Jack Gets Up."
This is perhaps a more representative sampling of Elizabeth Morris's music. The draw for me, though, is the contribution made by Cesar Gomez on violin and Nicolas Ortiz on flute. The dynamic between them is lively, evident, and wonderfully supports Elizabeth's guitar and voice. The presentation is relaxed, unpretentious, and all the more impressive for that.
This is the second of four Elizabeth Morris videos that I intend to post, and it may be my favorite. Firstly, I'm tremendously impressed by the power of performance when only two instruments are at play -- Elizabeth's guitar and Cesar Gomez's violin. Secondly, the melody somehow seems to me to be intrinsically Hispanic, a kind of musical incarnation of the Hispanic soul as it is found in this small, intimate setting in Chile. The interplay, the visceral vibe, the setting -- I find it all utterly magical and charming. I hope you do as well.
Known as "Eli" in Chile, Elizabeth Morris was born in Valparaiso in 1972 but her family emigrated to Germany due to Pinochet's 1973 military coup of Salvador Allende's democratically elected socialist government. The family returned to Chile in 1982.
This video was the entry point for me into the folk music scene of South America, which has proven to be a rich and nourishing sojourn, with much sustenance for the soul. This particular video captured my imagination, what with its sense of lost love, of losing something only to have it miraculously returned. It is a harsh truth that our losses strengthen us despite ourselves. If only we could learn these lessons more easily, but being thrown back upon ourselves, and the act of relinquishing control, seem to necessary steps for all processes of healing.
Enough said, except that I love this artist's work and her musical sensibility.The song is entitled "Decimas."
Something from Spain before I move on to South America next weekend.
This little video is apparently based around a children's story -- I haven't attempted to find a translation for the text of the story. What captured my attention about this was the poignant whimsy of the music, which evokes the nostalgia and ephemeral magic and sadness of childhood, growing up, and the inexorable movement into our adult lives. I'm touched by the use of personal images and real memories in this video, and the symbology of the ship that keeps repeating. I sense the wistfulness of love lost and unrequited longing in the choice of the book, whose author seems to be someone of consequence to the person making this video.
In all, an emotional journey through the many landscapes of the human heart, and the fleeting moments of our lives.
Time for something a little more lighthearted. So here's the group, the Barcelona Gipsy Klezmer Orchestra. Actually, they have recently renamed themselves the Balkan rather than Klezmer orchestra due to band member changes. But as originally constituted, members came from Italy, Spain, Serbia, France, and Greece. Members seem to come and go with a few stalwarts who stay, like vocalist Margherita Abita, who is just a born performer. Anyway, give them a listen with this Albanian tune, "Lulle, Lulle."
