Study Break Music

I've been listening to a lot of different music the past week. 

It started with the song they play during the champagne celebration at the end of each F1 race.  I googled it a couple years back and discovered it was composed by a French dude called Georges Bizet... It was the prelude to a quite famous work of his called Carmen.  I spent some time trying to download the mp3, which i eventually succeded in getting.  But in the the process I was led to discover Montserrat Caballet, a very talented Spanish vocalist who was responsible for the beautiful delivery of Habanera in that exact same opera.  Her prolific career as an operatic singer led her to work in later years with Freddie Mercury (who I really like) of Queen, particularly on the song 'Barcelona' (which was actually used as the theme song for the '92 Barcelona Olympics after Mercury's demise of AIDS).  Interestingly I've known of Freddie Mercury for forever, and I remember the Barcelona song from childhood, but I had never heard of Caballe.  Turns out she had quite an illustrious career.  If I'm not mistaken she's still alive somewhere.

What really woke me up was all the Queen material I found on YouTube. I watched some of the band's best performances including the famous Live Aid Concert at Wembley in London 1985.  They were truly great performers, and I think a lot of guys in entertainment can take a leaf from those incredible bunch of guys.  Take some time to click the link above and watch the video.  There's a reason the call it the world wide web.  Everything is connected, and you can go from here to anywhere with a click of the mouse.  You know how YouTube is, with the suggestions on the side of the page you click another video of interest and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

Eventually I found myself in 1969 at the famous Woodstock concert. And for the second time in my life I listened to Jimi Hendrix rendition of "the Star-Spangled Banner".  My first impression of the piece when I watched it a couple years ago, were simply that it was the over-artistic attempts by a long-haired junkie to create an edgy and non-conventional travesty of the national anthem of his country on the least likely of instruments.  I really was not impressed.

But strangely (and for a reason that was until not so long incomprehensible to myself), that one performance of that one song has been hailed as one of the greatest musical performances of history.  So, this time I sat down and actually bothered to do a little background research as to what exactly the funny looking black man with the upside-down guitar was trying to achieve with his whining guitar.  My research, as it turns out, revealed that Mr. Hendrix actually enlisted in the US Army in 1961 and served a year in the 101st Airborne Division, before being discharged for being, effectively, a lazy bum.  Simultaneous to that historic concert in upstate New York, the American nation was at war in a far-far away place in Asia known as Vietnam.  Fighting age American soldiers were being conscripted into service of their country against the ugly communist threat.  Many were dying.  The government was fighting an unpopular war; the American people were quite understandably and for lack of a more concise phrase, pissed-off. And needed an escape.  And that they found with things like the hippie movement, drugs and of course, music.  In fact the concert was billed as "An Aquarian Exposition in White Lake, NY ... 3 days of peace & music".  Indeed turbulent times in the United States, and it was against this backdrop that James Marshall Allen Hendrix stepped onto stage  on the 18th day of August.

Hendrix begins the piece with the usual familiar first strains "oh say can you see"  ... and proceeds to play the familiar tune, with-out much deviation from the original.  Upon reaching the line where the lyrics would ordinarily read "and the rockets red glare... the bombs bursting in air" Hendrix proceeds to turn his guitar into an unearthly synthesizer, replicating the chaos of the war in Vietnam replete with dropping bombs, airplane sounds and explosions.  The emotion on his face really is amazing.  The most definitive moment of the whole piece for me is where he plays a few bars from "Taps" which is the slow haunting bugle melody played for departed soldiers being laid to rest in the US military.

Genius.


I wish I was there, really.  Not to party, no.  I'm told that the four day Woodstock concert was at some points nothing more than a big drug convention.  But I wish I was there to see that one magic moment of music history.  Alas, I was born many years too late in an African country far away.

But some people don't get rock.  And its perfectly understandable, I guess.  To each his own.  So there's some of the stuff that kept me busy the past five days.  Take some time to click on the links.  Open your minds! Cheers guys!