I had a gift voucher for a music download site and after buying a main album I had a couple of dollars left so I picked two instrumentals I love from the Santana body of work: Incident at Neshabur and Europa.
Incident at Neshabur comes from Abraxas, what I regard the best of classic Santana albums. The cover painting is very psychedelic. The nomenclature of the album is steeped in intrigue. The album title is taken a line from Hermann Hesse's novel Demian. Toussaint L'Ouverture, one of the tracks, was also the leader of the first successful slave revolt in Haiti. And I was sorely puzzled over what incident happened at Neshabur. This was pre-Internet, so it took me many years to discover that Neshabur, or Nishapur, was a great city in Persia, now Iran. Still that didn't explain what incident happened there. Recently I came across this article in KeyboardMag that had a bit more detail about Alberto Gianquinto, the co-composer with Carlos Santana of and the blues pianist in that piece. The album was released at the tail end of the heady days of flower power and Gianquinto was making some kind of political statement, but nobody was sure what, they just thought it was a cool name.
As for the piece itself, it is extraordinary the changes of pace and metre it goes through. It starts off as a hard-driving jam by guitar, bongo, electric organ and piano. It's a showpiece for the guitarist where he gets to employ distortion and sustain but also delicately pluck notes. But the pianist also gets to carry a lovely melody towards the end. For some reason, when listening to the second half, I have always had a mental image of a cavernous room in dim crimson light while the sustained notes resonate through the room, and as the piece progresses towards its gentle finish, you could hear a pin drop as the audience is rapt in silent appreciation. I have lost track of the number of times I've listened to it on headphones in the dark.
As for Europa from the Amigos album, the name comes from the Greek myth of course, because of the secondary title Earth's Cry Heaven's Smile, but I don't think any overt statement was intended, it is just a very lyrical showpiece for electric guitar. It has an amazing prolonged sustain towards the end.
Tuesday 22 June 2010
Sunday 13 June 2010
The Feng Shui Detective
I'm reading this series of detective novels by Nury Vittachi. It's not high literature but I find it entertaining.
The stories are actually more comedy than mystery. C.F.Wong, the Feng Shui master, is a veritable scrooge and always looking for ways to earn more consulting fees, all the time penning fables of Eastern wisdom, which provide interludes to the tale, for his magnum opus. He is neatly set off against a teenage intern, Joyce McQuinnie, foisted upon him by a regular client. She is British-Australian but speaks a language called Teenager where Whatever means yes, and As if means no. So the stage is set for the hilarious clash of opposites: East versus West, age versus youth, tradition versus modernity.
The stories are set in Asia, locations such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, with excursions to cities like Sydney. Nury Vittachi lives in Hong Kong, and was a magazine contributor for many years so the behaviour of his colourful characters (we meet some members of The Union of Industrial Mystics), his depiction of the locations, the descriptions of the street food, and the rendering of the patois—snippets of Cantonese, Malay, etc., are spot on. I can't vouch for the Feng Shui bits, but the terminology sounds realistic.
C.F. Wong's observation that there should be more destruction, in the sense of discarding of acquisitions, in the later half of life so that one would move from the material to the spiritual, and end life gloriously unencumbered, appeals to me. I suspect that he was giving voice to a piece of the author's philosophy there.
The stories are actually more comedy than mystery. C.F.Wong, the Feng Shui master, is a veritable scrooge and always looking for ways to earn more consulting fees, all the time penning fables of Eastern wisdom, which provide interludes to the tale, for his magnum opus. He is neatly set off against a teenage intern, Joyce McQuinnie, foisted upon him by a regular client. She is British-Australian but speaks a language called Teenager where Whatever means yes, and As if means no. So the stage is set for the hilarious clash of opposites: East versus West, age versus youth, tradition versus modernity.
The stories are set in Asia, locations such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, with excursions to cities like Sydney. Nury Vittachi lives in Hong Kong, and was a magazine contributor for many years so the behaviour of his colourful characters (we meet some members of The Union of Industrial Mystics), his depiction of the locations, the descriptions of the street food, and the rendering of the patois—snippets of Cantonese, Malay, etc., are spot on. I can't vouch for the Feng Shui bits, but the terminology sounds realistic.
C.F. Wong's observation that there should be more destruction, in the sense of discarding of acquisitions, in the later half of life so that one would move from the material to the spiritual, and end life gloriously unencumbered, appeals to me. I suspect that he was giving voice to a piece of the author's philosophy there.
Saturday 12 June 2010
Removing sticker residue
I bought a CD yesterday and found that the security sticker on the opening was old and left behind gum residue when peeled off the box. I applied a trick that I have used before to remove the residue.
Cut off a length of sticky tape, hold it sticky side out with a finger and press it down on the residue. Lift the tape sharply off the surface. The action is small, not sweeping. Hopefully some of the residue should have come off onto the tape. You may need to hold it to the light at a particular angle to see what remains. By repeating this action many times the gum should gradually transfer from the surface to the sticky tape.
This also works for removing price sticker residue from the backs of glossy books.
Sometimes you can even use the just removed sticker to remove its own residue with the same procedure.
Cut off a length of sticky tape, hold it sticky side out with a finger and press it down on the residue. Lift the tape sharply off the surface. The action is small, not sweeping. Hopefully some of the residue should have come off onto the tape. You may need to hold it to the light at a particular angle to see what remains. By repeating this action many times the gum should gradually transfer from the surface to the sticky tape.
This also works for removing price sticker residue from the backs of glossy books.
Sometimes you can even use the just removed sticker to remove its own residue with the same procedure.
Friday 11 June 2010
The Life of Pi
Yes, that Man Booker Prize winning novel by Yann Martel. Yes, from 2002, and yes I'm somewhat slow in getting to read it.
No, I'm sorry, it didn't do it for me. The first part about Pi's childhood is amusing enough, as is the last part where he's recovering in a Mexican hospital and talking very nonchalantly with the Japanese insurance investigators while depleting them of cookies (baked ones, that is). The problem is that the novel sagged in the middle part. An account of a boy shipwrecked for 227 days in the Pacific in a lifeboat with only a wild Bengal tiger for a companion is hardly an exciting premise, no matter how much magic realism you sprinkle into the tale, and how many allusions to spiritual themes there are. Pi was observant of ritual in the lifeboat but that only added to the tedium. I'm sorry, I sped read through this part.
Martel seems to be the kind of novelist that likes to dazzle you with a recitation of 25 different flowers and that sort of thing. Ok, so I'm envious of writers who can do that, but it's also that I prefer concision. My favourite writer in that department is Bruce Chatwin who said that he learnt the art of maximising the effect of words from writing descriptions of auction lots while at Sotheby's.
Apparently it's going to be a 3D film directed by Ang Lee. We'll see if the story improves in translation to the screen. There's no truth to the rumour that the film will be entitled Eat Drink Boy Tiger.
No, I'm sorry, it didn't do it for me. The first part about Pi's childhood is amusing enough, as is the last part where he's recovering in a Mexican hospital and talking very nonchalantly with the Japanese insurance investigators while depleting them of cookies (baked ones, that is). The problem is that the novel sagged in the middle part. An account of a boy shipwrecked for 227 days in the Pacific in a lifeboat with only a wild Bengal tiger for a companion is hardly an exciting premise, no matter how much magic realism you sprinkle into the tale, and how many allusions to spiritual themes there are. Pi was observant of ritual in the lifeboat but that only added to the tedium. I'm sorry, I sped read through this part.
Martel seems to be the kind of novelist that likes to dazzle you with a recitation of 25 different flowers and that sort of thing. Ok, so I'm envious of writers who can do that, but it's also that I prefer concision. My favourite writer in that department is Bruce Chatwin who said that he learnt the art of maximising the effect of words from writing descriptions of auction lots while at Sotheby's.
Apparently it's going to be a 3D film directed by Ang Lee. We'll see if the story improves in translation to the screen. There's no truth to the rumour that the film will be entitled Eat Drink Boy Tiger.
Thursday 3 June 2010
Help, how do I get out of this song?
I got another book of sheet music the other day and was learning to play How Deep Is Your Love. Only oldies will remember this was sung by the Bee Gees in that Ur-Disco Film, Saturday Night Fever. It's quite a catchy tune actually. But when I started playing it, I couldn't find an appropriate final bar. I decided to investigate why it was taking me around in circles.
The structure of the song looks like a normal A-B-C-B-D, where A is the opening, B is the main section, C is the bridge, and D is the coda. Uh wrong, there is no D, after B, here's what happens: while a Gibb brother is singing how deep is your love, his brother starts singing how deep is your love a 13th down, always taking you into C. So that's why I got stuck in a loop of B-C ad infinitum.
How to solve this? Well in the soundtrack album, they simply fade out the second time on the bridge. In fact the sheet suggests an alternative start to the second bridge consisting of few tacit bars while progressing through the chords Ab Eb Gm7 Ab followed dal segno and fade. I can't do that so I devised my own ending. I play Ab on the arpeggiator and then tack on Eb6 to give it a chord of finality and halt.
I suspect this looping is what allows some dance songs to keep going until the band or the dancers tire of it. It sounded like the same trick I heard in Northeastern Brazil dance music.
Now I have to master that song and stop it running around in my head!
How to solve this? Well in the soundtrack album, they simply fade out the second time on the bridge. In fact the sheet suggests an alternative start to the second bridge consisting of few tacit bars while progressing through the chords Ab Eb Gm7 Ab followed dal segno and fade. I can't do that so I devised my own ending. I play Ab on the arpeggiator and then tack on Eb6 to give it a chord of finality and halt.
I suspect this looping is what allows some dance songs to keep going until the band or the dancers tire of it. It sounded like the same trick I heard in Northeastern Brazil dance music.
Now I have to master that song and stop it running around in my head!
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