Category: Jazz
Beginning again with Sacred ~ Lotus Feet & 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 aware that I’m doing it.…
Fusion for the jazzily inclined :: Shakti, Brand-X, Return to Forever & Pat Metheny
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 genre: Lotus Feet. Remember Shakti…
Bringing Latin passion to fusion and the future ~ Al Di Meola’s 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 I happen to share, but…
Cycling Mantras ~ Establishing Desert Rhythms
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 in a circle game…the movement…
Passport to Paradise ~ Three songs you’ve almost certainly never heard before…
…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 again, though, we’re going to…
Remembering with Shakti: Lotus Feet and Vancouver’s Sea Wall
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 it wakens from its winter…
The Philosopher Kings all dressed up for San Francisco, bringing their charms
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 popularised) from the travelogue and…
Gatekeeper: My introduction to Feist
A while back I ran across the image below, The Gate Keeper, which made me think of a song of the same name, by Feist. It’s the first song of hers that I was able to put her name to, though I’m sure I’d heard her music before, and I already knew she often appeared…
