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Category: instrumental music

The Wind (#60 in “a shining moment” series)

 

Tomorrow, Western Australia’s west coast is expected to experience a “once in ten years” storm event, with winds that could gust to 130 kilometres per hour.

Today’s photo shows a much gentler day in a beautiful south coastal WA place, but it still shows how wind – especially salt-bearing wind – shapes, sculpts and prunes.

Musically, today’s venues are in Tokyo and Bahia.

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Freshwater driftwood, riverbed rocks (#59 in “a shining moment” series)

 

On 9 June 2015 the relevant part of the glacier and snowmelt-fed riverbed was bone dry.

But when the river rages, it uproots mighty trees, carries them for a while, then dumps them

Then, over many years, the consistently shifting, ever-swelling/shrinking river transforms their “skeletons”.

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Perspective (#56 in “a shining moment series)

 

Two of many definitions:

the appearance to the eye of objects in respect to their relative distance and positions

a way of thinking about something

Geographically, today’s and tomorrow’s posts involve the same location, on the same autumn 2019 day – just minutes apart, with camera pointing in much the same direction

Musically, they address the same song, as recorded in 1958 and 1956, respectively, for the same label.

Each, however, is remarkably unlike.

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“Ugly Beauty” (#55 in “a shining moment” series)

 

Ugly Beauty is a composition by Thelonious Monk.

Received notions, prejudices and phobias can prevent people from seeing or hearing clearly.

Less so posthumously, but very much so during his lifetime, many just did not “get” Monk’s music – for reasons not hugely dissimilar to those which can blind people to an arachnid’s or a reptile’s beauty.

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Daylight’s opening hour: upland (#54 in “a shining moment series)

 

Today’s song with words is a lovely celebration of daybreak on “the spine of England”.

Its image comes from “the roof of the world”, where even flat, “low” places are several thousand metres higher than England’s Pennine Hills.

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Daylight’s opening hour: lowland (#53 in “a shining moment” series)

 

Today’s photo (copyright Doug Spencer) was taken at 7.41 am on 05 February 2020 in the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary, Keoladeo National Park, Rajasthan.

Its musical companion is a sublime morning raga, performed by one of the Indian subcontinent’s most eloquent instrumentalists.

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Fresh produce (#52 in “a shining moment” series)

 

The featured image (copyright Doug Spencer) shows produce being sold on the footpath in the “old city” quarter of Jaipur, Rajasthan, on 07 February 2020.

This post has two very different songs.

Neither is new, but each is fresh.

Both vividly remember the calls of actual produce sellers, but the second song is really about something that money cannot buy.

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Weeping, in the middle of the road (#50 in “a shining moment” series)

 

Literally speaking, the middle of the road is usually dangerous, and soulless.

Metaphorically speaking, “M.O.R” signifies music, visual art or literature that is bland, dull, pedestrian.

This post’s actual middle of a road is, however, “safe” only in the desirable sense, and its musical content is highly creative, very playful.

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