मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Thursday, December 06, 2012

नवे सूर अन्‌ नवे तराणे Dave Brubeck 1920-2012, Narayan Rao Koli and Take Five

"या भवनातिल गीत पुराणे
मवाळ, हळवे सूर जाऊ द्या, आज येथुनी दूर

भावभक्‍तिची भावुक गाथा

पराभूत हो नमविल माथा
नवे सूर अन्‌ नवे तराणे
हवा नवा तो नूर
जाऊ द्या दूर जुने ते सूर"
[from Marathi play 'katyar kaljat ghusli' (कट्यार काळजात घुसली) by Purushottam Darwhekar (पुरुषोत्तम दारव्हेकर) ]
Herbie Hancock (listen to his talent: 'Watermelon Man'  here):
"Dave Brubeck was a pioneer, so many of us sprang from his incredibly creative and daring work. He even proved that a song with 5 beats in it and one with 9 beats in it could become popular, with Take 5 and Blue Rondo à la Turk. We were so lucky to have had him for as long as we did and will never forget his musical gifts as a pianist and composer, his kindness, his generosity, and his smile."

ERIC FELTEN:
"Miles Davis's masterpiece, "Kind of Blue," was recorded at 30th Street, and so too, just a couple of months later, was Dave Brubeck's album "Time Out." David Simons, in his book "Studio Stories," suggests that the success of those two records owed something to how they sounded, something that wasn't just a function of the quality of the recording equipment. There was the sympathetic resonance of the studio's unvarnished wood floor and the distant reverberations reflected by its towering ecclesiastic architecture: "To hear 30th Street is to hear drummer Joe Morello's snare and kick-drum shots echoing off the 100-foot ceiling during the percussion break in Dave Brubeck's great 'Take Five.'"
 I have already written about Anthony Prabhu Gonsalves's piano for "Hum aapki aankhon me" ('Pyaasa', 1957). 
 That is the kind of music Dave Brubeck played every time he sat at the piano. Just listen to his:

Blue Rondo A La Turk - Dave Brubeck.


Dave Brubeck's 'Take Five',  first recorded in 1959  has been viewed on YouTube for more than 50 lac times! 

I have heard it on my cassette player so many times that the tape is now damaged. Even my son once was  very fond of it. (He wrote on his FB page: "Farewell Dave !!!! You were the most influential musician of my childhood.")

"It is famous for its distinctive catchy saxophone melody; imaginative, jolting drum solo; and use of the unusual quintuple (5/4) time, from which its name is derived."  (Wikipedia).

Now do you know that our own Mridangacharya Narayan Rao Koli (नारायणराव कोळी) might have played a big role in this?

"That is perhaps why Fernandes chooses to concentrate rather on a forgotten and tragic genius, the jazz pianist Edward “Dizzy Sal” Saldanha, who was feted by a visiting Dave Brubeck, who went to study jazz in Boston, cut a well-received album in the U.S. and then returned to India into self-enforced exile. Brubeck and his drummer Joe Moreno, meanwhile, experimented with the Goan drummer Leslie Godinho and the percussionist Narayan Koli, from whom, some say, Moreno learned the unusual 5/4 time signature that informed Brubeck's classic, “Take Five”...."

(VIJAY PRASHAD, 'The Indian jazz age', review of 'Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay's Jazz Age' by Naresh Fernandes, Frontline, April 6 2012)

p.s I think there is a mistake  in Mr. Prashad's statement- It should be Joe Morello and NOT 'Moreno'.


Dave Brubeck listens to pakhawaj player Narayan Koli
Image Courtesy: Naresh Fernandes