August 20, 2012
The sense of openness continues long after Irene has gone to bed and been piped out of the park. It’s as though the parade brought them home here through our house – Sarah Slean, Royal Wood, Oscar Lopez, the Lemon Bucket Orchestra, The Rwandan guys, The Powerful Women from New Zealand, The MacKenzie Blues Band (our dear friends), Matt Anderson, Nathan Rogers, Karen Savoca, and so many others glimpsed, heard from afar or almost missed – along with all of the dear friends we were able to connect with.
The air is pregnant with resonance. Into the air and the house I play Sarah Slean’s Land & Sea, which has me in tears from the first track. Good tears – she is so playful, so powerful, honest and so Good at what she’s doing that laughter and tears just flow. This cd has such great depth and complexity and beauty that I choose it as one of my filters – one lens from which to view the world, in order to make the world better. That doesn’t happen often at all.
A couple of tracks on YouTube are here, and here. Enjoy. Better yet, buy the cd – you’ll love it, I promise.
From Sarah I let my computer play on – five cello concertos (Barber, Schuman, Dvorak, Saint Saens, Shostakovitch) and the Casals Bach Suites took me upstairs and into a book on a couch in the sunlight, into the garden for fresh tomatoes, basil & chard, the kitchen for a sandwich, the clothesline for laundry, and the back deck to feed the cats. Conversations, about Nathan’s incredible voice; about Oscar’s generosity of spirit; about the marvelous revolution the Lemon Bucket Orchestra is building just by playing their impossible BIG whenever and wherever they can (they might possibly save us all, along with Sara and Oscar & the other incredibles we witnessed); about Matt Anderson’s huge HUGE skill as a performer being equal to his quiet humility, about getting deep into the dancers whenever possible…
Now the sun has set, the bugs are shut out, we’re inside in the peaceful resonant air, feeling very rich indeed.
Happy Monday everyone.