05-31-2006, 11:36 AM
One of my favorite misheard lyrics by Tara was "lizardy lights" for "the israelite"
Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,
so that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,
So that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
My wife and my kids, they are packed up and leave me.
Darling, she said, I was yours to be seen.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
Shirt them a-tear up, trousers are gone.
I don't want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
After a storm there must be a calm.
They catch me in the farm. You sound the alarm.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
Poor me, the Israelite.
I wonder who I'm working for.
Poor me, Israelite,
I look a-down and out, sir.
Hamza passed on too. I have a very clear memory of him sitting in with the Rhythm Devils @ HJK. Everyone thought it was Olatunji, which both amused and offended me. That was an event show, like NYE, and he wove a spell of the desert that will always be part of me.
Hamza El Din, 76; Musician Popularized North Africa's Ancient Traditional Songs
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
May 30, 2006
Hamza El Din, considered the father of Nubian music who helped expose the sounds of his North African homeland to a worldwide audience, has died. He was 76.
El Din died May 22 at a hospital in Berkeley of complications from a gallbladder infection.
A composer and master of the oud, El Din became known to American audiences in the mid-1960s when he performed at the Newport Folk Festival and recorded two albums for the Vanguard label.
His music drew the attention of such musicians as folk singer Joan Baez, the classical Kronos Quartet and the rock band the Grateful Dead. He collaborated with the Kronos Quartet on the album "Pieces of Africa," and played with the Grateful Dead during its show at the Great Pyramids at Giza in 1978.
Other collaborations followed, including one with director Peter Sellars for a version of the Aeschylus play "The Persians" at the Salzburg Festival. Hamza's compositions also were performed by several ballet companies, including the Paris Opera Ballet and San Francisco Ballet.
Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart called El Din's music "mesmerizing, hypnotic and trance-like."
"Hamza taught me about the romancing of the drum," Hart told the San Francisco Chronicle. "His music was very subtle and multilayered."
El Din, who taught ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, Ohio University and University of Texas, lived for a time in Japan to study the biwa, a Japanese lute.
Born in 1929 in the former Nubian town of Wadi Halfa in northern Sudan, El Din was an electrical engineering student at what is now the University of Cairo when he took up the oud, an instrument similar to the lute, and the tar, a single-skinned frame drum from the Upper Nile.
At the news that his homeland would be part of the area to be flooded by Lake Nasser on the completion of the Aswan High Dam, El Din quit his engineering studies and traveled the region by donkey to warn his people of the dislocation that would come about from the dam project.
He also acquired material for many of his songs. He wrote about love, childhood memories, a wedding and the water wheel in his home village.
By playing the oud, not a traditional Nubian instrument, he found ways to expand the boundaries of his native music.
He returned to Cairo to study Arabic music and later studied classical guitar and Western music in Rome at the Academy of Santa Cecilia.
Since the late 1960s, he has lived much of the time in the Bay Area and toured extensively. He offered quietly intense solo concerts and appeared at major festivals throughout the world. He performed dressed in white robes and wore a white turban.
Critics say his most significant recordings were "Escalay: The Water Wheel," released in 1971, and "Eclipse," a 1982 release. His most recent album, "A Wish," was released in 1999.
El Din's survivors include his wife, Nadra.
http://www.hamzaeldin.com/
Also we lost Ramrod of the Grateful Dead. I didn't know him well, but I partied with him at a few aftershows when I worked for the Dead. He was an interesting character, that's for sure. Anyone who earns a Hunter Elegy was.
Elegy for Ramrod
Most never knew his given name.
They called him Ramrod.
Lawrence didn't fit him.
He came down from Oregon,
Prankster sidekick of Cassady,
Kesey and the merry crew,
a silent stoic in a vocable milieu
his heart was stolen by the Grateful Dead.
A country boy, not given to complexity,
his crowning gift was loyalty
for which he was loved more than
the common run of men by friends.
This is not to say more than was so,
the common fault of eulogies
which shine the silver of modest virtue
into the gold of rareness.
Every soul owes life a death.
Between each heartbeat is a moment
within which the pulse is still.
In the longer beat between life and death
a man was here we called a friend,
a father, a husband and a son.
He is us and we are him,
his death is ours, our lives are his.
Some see Heaven as dying's recompense,
some acknowledge only nothingness
in a space we know not of,
in a place we know not where.
But this we know, as a poet said:
"To have been here but the once
Never can be undone."
Some will pray, some just remember.
Those who pray, having prayed,
will go on to pray for others.
Those who remember,
having remembered for awhile,
will in the course of time forget,
more so as the years dissolve.
This is as it should be
lest death overstep its bounds
and impinge too much on life.
Life, being what is, cannot
impinge too much on death.
The circumstance we most desire
in grief which shakes our branches
like some holy hurricane raging
through this barren world of little light,
is that our brother be gathered in glory.
If so, rejoice! If wishful thinking,
give thanks instead
that he was here among us.
Delivered from the testing fire of pain,
a truer heart was never broken.
- Robert Hunter, May 17, 2006
Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,
so that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,
So that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
My wife and my kids, they are packed up and leave me.
Darling, she said, I was yours to be seen.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
Shirt them a-tear up, trousers are gone.
I don't want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
After a storm there must be a calm.
They catch me in the farm. You sound the alarm.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
Poor me, the Israelite.
I wonder who I'm working for.
Poor me, Israelite,
I look a-down and out, sir.
Hamza passed on too. I have a very clear memory of him sitting in with the Rhythm Devils @ HJK. Everyone thought it was Olatunji, which both amused and offended me. That was an event show, like NYE, and he wove a spell of the desert that will always be part of me.
Hamza El Din, 76; Musician Popularized North Africa's Ancient Traditional Songs
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
May 30, 2006
Hamza El Din, considered the father of Nubian music who helped expose the sounds of his North African homeland to a worldwide audience, has died. He was 76.
El Din died May 22 at a hospital in Berkeley of complications from a gallbladder infection.
A composer and master of the oud, El Din became known to American audiences in the mid-1960s when he performed at the Newport Folk Festival and recorded two albums for the Vanguard label.
His music drew the attention of such musicians as folk singer Joan Baez, the classical Kronos Quartet and the rock band the Grateful Dead. He collaborated with the Kronos Quartet on the album "Pieces of Africa," and played with the Grateful Dead during its show at the Great Pyramids at Giza in 1978.
Other collaborations followed, including one with director Peter Sellars for a version of the Aeschylus play "The Persians" at the Salzburg Festival. Hamza's compositions also were performed by several ballet companies, including the Paris Opera Ballet and San Francisco Ballet.
Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart called El Din's music "mesmerizing, hypnotic and trance-like."
"Hamza taught me about the romancing of the drum," Hart told the San Francisco Chronicle. "His music was very subtle and multilayered."
El Din, who taught ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, Ohio University and University of Texas, lived for a time in Japan to study the biwa, a Japanese lute.
Born in 1929 in the former Nubian town of Wadi Halfa in northern Sudan, El Din was an electrical engineering student at what is now the University of Cairo when he took up the oud, an instrument similar to the lute, and the tar, a single-skinned frame drum from the Upper Nile.
At the news that his homeland would be part of the area to be flooded by Lake Nasser on the completion of the Aswan High Dam, El Din quit his engineering studies and traveled the region by donkey to warn his people of the dislocation that would come about from the dam project.
He also acquired material for many of his songs. He wrote about love, childhood memories, a wedding and the water wheel in his home village.
By playing the oud, not a traditional Nubian instrument, he found ways to expand the boundaries of his native music.
He returned to Cairo to study Arabic music and later studied classical guitar and Western music in Rome at the Academy of Santa Cecilia.
Since the late 1960s, he has lived much of the time in the Bay Area and toured extensively. He offered quietly intense solo concerts and appeared at major festivals throughout the world. He performed dressed in white robes and wore a white turban.
Critics say his most significant recordings were "Escalay: The Water Wheel," released in 1971, and "Eclipse," a 1982 release. His most recent album, "A Wish," was released in 1999.
El Din's survivors include his wife, Nadra.
http://www.hamzaeldin.com/
Also we lost Ramrod of the Grateful Dead. I didn't know him well, but I partied with him at a few aftershows when I worked for the Dead. He was an interesting character, that's for sure. Anyone who earns a Hunter Elegy was.
Elegy for Ramrod
Most never knew his given name.
They called him Ramrod.
Lawrence didn't fit him.
He came down from Oregon,
Prankster sidekick of Cassady,
Kesey and the merry crew,
a silent stoic in a vocable milieu
his heart was stolen by the Grateful Dead.
A country boy, not given to complexity,
his crowning gift was loyalty
for which he was loved more than
the common run of men by friends.
This is not to say more than was so,
the common fault of eulogies
which shine the silver of modest virtue
into the gold of rareness.
Every soul owes life a death.
Between each heartbeat is a moment
within which the pulse is still.
In the longer beat between life and death
a man was here we called a friend,
a father, a husband and a son.
He is us and we are him,
his death is ours, our lives are his.
Some see Heaven as dying's recompense,
some acknowledge only nothingness
in a space we know not of,
in a place we know not where.
But this we know, as a poet said:
"To have been here but the once
Never can be undone."
Some will pray, some just remember.
Those who pray, having prayed,
will go on to pray for others.
Those who remember,
having remembered for awhile,
will in the course of time forget,
more so as the years dissolve.
This is as it should be
lest death overstep its bounds
and impinge too much on life.
Life, being what is, cannot
impinge too much on death.
The circumstance we most desire
in grief which shakes our branches
like some holy hurricane raging
through this barren world of little light,
is that our brother be gathered in glory.
If so, rejoice! If wishful thinking,
give thanks instead
that he was here among us.
Delivered from the testing fire of pain,
a truer heart was never broken.
- Robert Hunter, May 17, 2006
Shadow boxing the apocalypse