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Category: music

Fuller version of “Big Spit: full Monty”

If the featured image’s swan had nested at this location a couple of decades earlier,  he/she (black swans share nesting/parenting duties) would have almost been “living next door to Alan”.

Alan Bond – criminal/America’s Cup “hero” – is no more, but “his” Victoria Avenue mansion recently sold for multiple millions, and is part of the featured image’s “millionaire’s row”.

This post is best read after first seeing the immediately preceding one.

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Revelatory covers (15th in series): “Oblivion”, twice

 

Oblivion is a 1982 composition by Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992), Nuevo tango’s pre-eminent composer and bandoneon virtuoso.

Perhaps his most uncanny piece, it has survived/endured countless covers.

Some of its finest interpreters are not Argentinian, and although one of this post’s two very different versions does feature a “squeezebox”, it is not a bandoneon.

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Revelatory Covers (14th in series): Brian, Fred, Thelonious,Ruby

Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) is one of my favourite composers.

Ruby, My Dear has always been one of my favourite Monk ballads.

Among living pianists, Fred Hersch has, I think, proved the most consistently rewarding interpreter of Monk.

Until a few weeks ago, I had never heard Brian Landrus; I have heard literally thousands of Monk “covers”, but none lovelier than the one which concludes Brian’s new album.

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Happiness, joy, contentment…(#73 In “a shining moment series”)

 

It is a great pleasure to encounter a non-gloating, happy person – one who appears comfortable in their own skin, who requires “no particular reason” to be happy, who radiates contentment, is fully alive, and not “on guard”.

Such encounters do not require a common language, nor any words to be spoken.

Typically, no commercial transaction is involved, no contest, no “big event”…

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