Jazz

I love music with complex interactions between instruments, melodies, rhythms, timbres and lyrics. The only genre I love for these qualities more than Jazz is Progressive Rock. But in a pinch, Jazz will do just fine. Particularly Jazz Fusion.

Beginning again with Sacred ~ Lotus Feet & Shakti

Remember ~ Shakti

I haven’t been living the sacred enough lately. Sometimes I forget how sacred life is, become caught up in the mundane, the day-to-day of existing in a corporeal world, in the meanness that can be everyday life. I stop, for a while, living a life that is sacred. I’m often […]

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Fusion for the jazzily inclined :: Shakti, Brand-X, Return to Forever & Pat Metheny

Brand X ~ Moroccan Roll

OK. With not one but two false starts at identifying some jazz fusion music most folks can enjoy, here are a few examples from the genre I really hope you will like … maybe even love. Remember Shakti :: Lotus Feet One of my favourite pieces of music in any […]

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Bringing Latin passion to fusion and the future ~ Al Di Meola’s Elegant Gypsy

Al Di Meola ~ Elegant Gypsy

A couple weeks ago I offered up three old fave songs from the German jazz fusion group, Passport, then asked for comments. The silence was deafening. <grin> But, after a while, there was one comment. Essentially: “boring.”  OK. Fair enough. A followup comment illuminated some issues with the music which […]

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Cycling Mantras ~ Establishing Desert Rhythms

Everything But The Girl - Missing - like the deserts miss the rain

Bicycling is among my passions, one of the ways I connect to the world, my body, my being. The rhythm of riding, the cyclical nature of cycling, of spinning the crank arms, to spin a cogset, to spin the chain, so that the wheels spin. Round and round and round […]

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Passport to Paradise ~ Three songs you’ve almost certainly never heard before…

Passport ~ Sky Blue

…unless you’re Stephen Guy. (Who, by the way, almost certainly introduced me to this band. Have you started on that guest post yet, Steve?) This is a literary blog. While the theme is movies, music and books, it’s really about words and how these themes inspire them. Every now and […]

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Remembering with Shakti: Lotus Feet and Vancouver’s Sea Wall

Remember ~ Shakti

It was a couple years ago that this piece of music resoundingly re-entered my life. The spring in Vancouver seemed to be a never-ending stream of sunny, tranquil days, riding my bicycle along the miles and miles of sea wall ringing the city. This is a spectacularly beautiful city once […]

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The Philosopher Kings all dressed up for San Francisco, bringing their charms

The Philosopher Kings

It was the summer of 1995. I was back from extended travels through Australia and SE Asia, living in a Deep Cove cabin with the gentle high-tide waves lapping on the rocks just 20 feet below me while I busily built a website (a blog long before the name became […]

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