Wondered into being by: Edgar Meyer (bass) and Bela Fleck (banjo)
Wonderspan: 6 min
To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full-screen icon and turn the sound r i i i i i g h t UP!
Today's way of loving is virtuosity - an individual's outstanding skill or facility, usually for playing a musical instrument. And you get there, it seems, by loving music to a degree beyond anything anyone would recognise as reasonable. Thanks to Jonathan B for sending this clip our way - Bela Fleck and Edgar Meyer make the air glad:
Extra...
There's an abundant harvest of extra musical wonder for you to enjoy this Monday morning...
Here's one of Keith Jarrett's many scintillating, soulful improvisations (and if he looks like he's making love, maybe he is - let's not interrupt him):
Next, a beautifully-made 15-minute documentary by Wandering Eye showing how an engineer works with a musician to make the sound really shine. The guitarist Ricardo Gallen plays the Prelude from Bach's Partita No. 3 in E Major for solo violin; the engineer is fellow guitarist Norbert Kraft.
If you're not yet emotionally exhausted, or if you are, here's Anoushka Shankar's sitar following her father's vocal improvisations with the ease of a smile - amazing:
And if you liked that there's more from Anoushka here, with even more joy and smiling - it really gets cooking, this one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CnhcGpmH9Y
And here's Bela Fleck back with his own playful reworking of the same Bach E Major prelude we heard earlier. Bach was a pretty unhappy individual for a lot of his life, his music often aches with sadness, but there's a deeper, half-hidden gladness there, too. This is, I wonder, a kind of half-secret joy that many introverted people know. It is as if they see and feel wonder all around them but struggle to make it known in the social world, where all the rules are different. Every now and again Bach produced a piece that feels just like a blast of sun in winter, the sort of rare phenonenon the weather forecasters had no idea was coming. He couldn't have known that someone would invent the banjo but I think he would have loved it:
And finally, here's something more oddball. Ethel Smith was a virtuoso organist who made her name in films. Here she is playing 'Tico Tico' in 1944's Bathing Beauty.
What virtuoso musicians would you include here? Leave a comment or send an email to justplaindavid@waysofloving.com
Next week - more joy, and we get political with it... see you then, wonderlovers.
Really enjoyed that. Esp banjo and bass combination. It's taking me the whole week to digest Monday morning wonders...(Normally only have time for a "couple of clicks" on the actual morning, so please excuse the late comment)...true about Keith, but to his piano or to the universe?
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