5 posts tagged “surprise”
This one came out in the early 80s, and sad to say it's the only start-to-finish good album Youssou N'dour's ever made.
But it's not just a good album, it's a great one. This is a riveting 12 minute track; listen to that sax solo, listen to the bass. Listen to everything.
When I first heard it I hadn't a clue what to make of it: it sounded muddy, the rhythms were incomprehensible. It was the first time I'd heard mbalax. But twentysomething years later, mbalax sounds like a kind of perfection, a full-to-the-brim and stretched-to-the-edges thing; it sounds like life itself.
Ackshly I can't remember where I was when I first heard this, but I can remember how it felt. Unlike roots music which feels like it comes out of the ground, this feels like it comes out of nothing, like particle/antiparticle pairs in a bubble chamber.
It's completely universal: if you heard it as an mbira field recording from the Namib, or on Okinawa radio, there'd be no difference. It should've been on Voyager II, with a message saying We are humans. We have absolutely no idea what to do.
Except that might scare 'em off.
Doesn't this kick off just like late Beethoven? The surprise is, it was written in 1787. I don't normally devote much time to Haydn, but this is a stormer - written in 7 adagios (rather like the way Hitchcock shot Rope, in 9 ten-minute takes). Originally for orchestra and arranged by Haydn for string quartet, it finishes with the earthquake from Matthew 28:2 (the marking fortississimo). The Lindsays handle it alright.
The massive opening of Kodaly's solo cello sonata caught me completely off-guard sometime in my teens. Presumably it had the same effect in 1918, and in some ways was doing the same things as Rouault's paintings at around the same time; the almost violent expression of a simple, single line.
I don't know who's playing this one, I found it on the web somewhere . . . I've got the classic Janos Starker recording, but alas it's on minidisc.
Sometimes, the first time you hear something, you'll get such a hit off it that you'll stop in your tracks.
So it was with me and this from Khaled, from the other side of the Mediterranean (or more probably, Paris) to yesterday's offering; the opening groove is so strong that I put down whatever I was doing in the kitchen and stared at the speakers. If you like to sing along to things and your Arabic isn't too hot, the end of this one provides ample scope for the amateur hollerer.
What's surprised you?
