Manafonistas

Unbedingt hören: Krzysztof Penderecki And Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead) Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima / Popcorn Superhet Receiver / Polymorphia / 48 Responses to Polymorphia.
 
 

 
Was für eine Musik!

How do you lose music? Then having lost it, what do you do next? Nick Coleman found out the morning he woke up to a world changed forever by Sudden Neursosensory Hearing Loss.

The Train in the Night is an account of one man’s struggle to recover from the loss of his greatest passion in life – and to go one step further than that: to restore his ability not only to hear but to think about and feel music.

Of all our relationships with art, the one we enjoy with music is the most complex, the most mysterious and, for reasons that cannot be explained by science alone, the most emotionally charged. Nothing about that relationship is simple. And yet it is perhaps through music that we make the most intimate contact with our sense of who we really are, at our most naked, unsophisticated, honest, and simplified. Through psalms, symphonies, love songs, ballads, boogie…

Where to start, though, for the newly deaf? Well, you can start, suggested a famous neurologist, by trying to remember every beautiful piece of music you’ve ever heard and then by thinking about that music over and over again until it begins to assume a new kind of form in your brain. You never know what might happen after that. And so that’s what the author did. He went back to the origins of his passion – the series of big bangs which kicked off his musical universe – and then worked his way forwards through the back catalogue.

The Train in the Night is a memoir not quite like any other. It is about growing up, obviously. But it is also about becoming young again and trying to see the world for what it is, whether through the eyes of a teenage punk or those of a middle-aged music critic and father of two. It is about taste and love and suffering and delusion. It is about longing to be Keith Richards. It is funny, heartbreaking and, above all, true.

It is a hymn to music.

(by Lame Mango Washington – attributed to Memphis Earlene Gray with help from Uncle Plunky, revisions by Little Blind Patti D. and Dr. Stevie Franklin)

1. Most Blues begin: „Woke up this morning.“

2. „I got a good woman“ is a bad way to begin the Blues, less you stick something nasty in the next line, like „I got a good woman, with the meanest face in town.“

5. Blues cars: Chevys, Cadillacs, and broken-down trucks. Blues don´t travel in Volvos, BMWs or Sport Utility Vehicles.

7. Blues can take place in New York City but not in Hawaii or any place in Canada. Hard times in St.Paul or Tuscon is just depression. Chicago, St. Louis and Cansas City are still the best places to have the blues. You cannot have the blues in any place, that don´t get rain.

10. Good places for the Blues:

a) highway
b) jailhouse
c) empty bed
d) bottom of a whiskey glass

Bad places:

a) Ashrams
b) gallery openings
c) Ivy League institutions
d) golf courses

17. Some Blues names for men:

a) Joe
b) Willie
c) Little Willie
d) Big Willie

18. Persons with names like Sierra, Sequoia, Auburn and Rainbow can´t sing the Blues,
no matter how many men they shot in Memphis.

19. Make your own Blues name (starter kit):

a) name of physical infirmaty (Blind, Cripple, Lame etc)
b) first name (see above) plus name of fruit (Lemon, Lime, Kiwi etc)
c) last name of president (Jefferson, Johnson, Fillmore etc)

For example: Blind Lime Jefferson or Cripple Kiwi Fillmore etc  (well – maybe not Kiwi).

(Gekürzter Auszug aus: Frank Sikora, Neue Jazz-Harmonielehre, S.221-222)