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Showing posts from May, 2010

Reconnecting after 20+ years!

I was flying…well, almost! I rediscovered Anirvan Chakravarty on FB a few days ago and managed a brief chat today. The lucky chap flies for Kingfisher and has even gone international. We have a lot of catching up to do.

2 days & 12 photo albums!

Each containing 14 snaps , that’s what arrived at our doorstep. And it was all for free! It’s a tragedy that the freebie was too good to last any longer. Only US residents continue being lucky for now.

Happy Birthday, Tchaikovsky!

The name most often uttered in our home from the world of western classical music after Beethoven and Mozart was Tchaikovsky. His compositions were supposed to be ‘very beautiful’ but I really had no inkling how that translated musically. Our AM radio wasn’t much help, atmospheric interference wreaked havoc on the short waves wafting through great distances. I got a feel of the maestro from music cassettes, and I must confess I wasn’t impressed initially. Russian orchestras sounded remarkably different from their European counterparts. They were huge, noisy and pompous. Although Tchaikovsky was influenced heavily by European music, a fact that helped to pull him away from local tradition, he still sounded not much to my liking. All that changed gradually. Swan Lake and Nutcracker sounded fantastically melodic, his piano concerto was one of the best ever composed by anyone and his violin concerto has also been considered outstanding in many circles. Yet musicologists dismissed his m

I understand now

Dad revered Armstrong. Though my taste strongly parallels his, I never really took a liking for Armstrong. To me Louis represented all that was too rustic and archaic in Jazz…barring a few outstanding exceptions. Today I can finally see why Armstrong was Armstrong. The Great Summit | The Master Takes is the coming together of two of the greatest stalwarts of Jazz…and do they jell! This is one album that changed my long-held but flawed opinion of Armstrong.