Long plane rides and walks are perfect for catching up with stored podcasts. In this case, it was a podcast of "Morning Becomes Eclectic" with an enchanting live performance by "Niyaz" (w. Azam Ali, she of "Portals of Grace") on - The bewitching live performances of Iranian folk song "the Hunt" (~27 min into podcast) and Turkish standard "Beni Beni" (~4 min into podcast) have been spinning in my head for a couple of days. The group sets a fair bit of poetry (Amir Khusrau) from Urdu and Farsi to a real groove - sure livened up the evening walk. Both the instrumentation and Azam's hypnotic voice set this as one of my musical highlights of the year.
This last festival season, my ears were opened to some folk tunes from Macedonia (Makedonsko Devojce) and Bulgaria (Sto Mi E Milo) when some of the musicians at the post-festival party spontaneously switched from the Celtic tunes they were playing (the melange of musicians, instruments and improvisation itself was something unique, but that is a story for another time) to these tunes - the YouTube versions don't do justice to the uptempo jam but you can pick out some beautiful melodies from the samples.
Since then my ears have been pulling me back to Asia-Minor and Eastern Europe to find what I've been missing. There's a real bit of serendipity here since I had heard Azam's previous CD "Portals of Grace" where she covers some tunes from Eastern Europe and then promptly lost track of the CD - delighted to have re-discovered her.
Running across from Iran to Egypt, an equally stunning moment last year was listening to the music from a delightful little Israeli film (one of my all-time favorites) called "The Band's Visit" - Ayam Fi Hodnik in this clip from YouTube is an enchanting example of an awesome collection of songs and tunes that litter the movie, some of which are barely a minute in length. I'm still hunting the name of the song that one of old men in the band sings in solo voice at night...who knows what I'll find chasing that one...and so it goes.
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