Another favourite tune. What an energetic recording!
I’ve been meaning to learn this for years. Must drag out the guitar and get to it!
I v. much like the Colin Reid version too, btw, but can’t find that one on YouTube. Here it is to listen to with Media Player or whatever.
However, here’s Colin playing Music For a Found Harmonium; yet another of my favourite tunez. Such a great arrangement! (Looks like he’s changed a bit since I drove to Birmingham years ago to ask him to show me how to play a tricky bit of one of his own compositions!)
And here’s the truly wonderful Penguin Cafe Orchestra playing the original. Sigh…
…if anybody feeling overwhelmed by life’s challenges didn’t watch Alex: A Passion for Life then you should go and watch it now.
I can’t think how I came to miss it. I found it this evening when checking up on Cutting Edge, one of my favourite documentary series, and discovered that it had been on before I went to the Lakes. It’s the follow-up to the documentary made a couple of years ago about Alex Stobbs, a schoolboy music scholar (at the time) suffering from cystic fibrosis, but with an ambition to conduct Bach’s Magnificat. Now he’s at Cambridge, and this second documentary is about his attempt to conduct the St. Matthew Passion.
I knew it was coming up, but somehow I didn’t see any adverts for it before I went away. Fortunately it’s still available on Channel 4 on Demand, and if anything was going to put a few drizzly days on some slippery hills into context for me then this was definitely it.
It’s utterly inspiring stuff, whether you love the St. Matthew Passion or not, but if you *do* love the music (as I do) then it’s simply transporting.
I think I’ll put the chicken in the oven and go and watch it again.
Edited to add:
Listening to this wee bit of the St. Matthew Passion on the way to and from court each day helped me to win the biggest case I ever did as a lawyer, quite a long time ago now. The whole drama of the thing–all the ups and downs and nuances of cross-examination–was there in the music. Nothing beats music.
Rifling through my iTunes ‘Recently Purchased’ folder just now, I came across this. Unsurprisingly, it sounds a little different live. Still, it’s so exquisitely beautiful that it makes me yearn to pick up the guitar I packed away into its case when Piglet arrived, and began to chew everything that wasn’t battened down.
I never did get that sound problem on my computer sorted out, and so I’ve not listened to enough music recently as I have to do it through headphones, which are a pain and a faff. When I listen to stuff like this, though, I wonder why I ever do anything else.
One of my favourite James Taylor songs, which means this is one of my favourite *ever* songs.
*melts*
JT = Acoustic God.
Plus… (I always do this editing thing…) another from the same album: Shed a Little Light. I LOVE this! I remember driving back from the Employment Tribunal in Birmingham about 10 years ago, after a week of trauma in front of a nightmare Employment Judge (or Chairman, as they were called then) to the wedding of two good friends, and listening to this in the sunshine, in my open-topped car. What a blast! A month later I learned that we’d won the case. Quite right too! F*ck the race discriminators
And another… Ducks in a Row
I wanted to show you Native Son too, but it’s not on YouTube. Sob… Here it is, though, in streaming audio.
This is a tune I used to spend afternoons in the car playing along to (in a very rudimentary fashion!) as a 12 year old, with my little guitar. Posted here pour Le Slowman, since I mentioned it to him yesterday *g*
I heard a pop tune from (I think) the 80s when I was in the farm shop yesterday, and I can’t get it out of my mind. I can’t remember what it is, though. A young woman was singing it, and the tune to the chorus goes as follows. Sorry for the naff rendition, but I couldn’t think of another way to get it across. It’s a very upbeat sort of thing: fast, catchy, infuriating… *g*
Piglet and I walked the Dales Way last week, and got back late on Friday night.
I’ve been before, but this was Piglet’s first long walk and she was an absolute star, camping happily in a tent and walking mile after mile on her tiny wee paws. She slept like a log at night, and developed a love of rivers during the day. She learned to climb the stone stiles all on her own, though she needs a lift over the wooden ladder ones. She met, and was terrified by, her first hedgehog, and was roundly told off for attempting to chase a sheep (despite her lead). Unfortunately, she also developed a habit of barking at distant dogs and walkers! She was mugged by adoring children in Kettlewell, and bore their cuddles and stroking with a patience that amazed me. She was a little reluctant to leave the tent in the morning, and tried to run into every open doorway we passed along the way, but the sight of her sprinting up and down the river banks and rolling in grassy fields on the odd occasions when I was able to let her off her lead brought joy to my heart and a wee tear to my eye ♥
Wee dog meets hedgehog!
Oooh!
Arriving in Sedbergh
Sleepy doglet in little coat
Piglet with piglet
In Appletreewick
Wet but triumphant!
I have no idea why the walk doesn’t finish in Sedbergh. I realise that even Sedbergh is actually Cumbria, rather than Yorkshire, but at least it forms a natural finishing point and has transport home. The stretch from Sedbergh to Bowness is pretty, of course, but it’s no part of the Yorkshire Dales. Besides… it’s full of malignant bullocks, and the bit just after the M6 is a bit of nightmare because sombody’s taken down a lot of the signs, which makes it very easy to get lost. What with being lost due to missing signs, and having to take detours to avoid savage cows, and being terrorised by 2 Alsations and a collie, the last couple of days were almost no fun at all. If I do the walk again–and I probably will, at some stage–I’ll finish at Sedbergh.
Having mummy love
This tune has nothing to do with the Dales Way, but it’s here because it’s beautiful and I haven’t heard it since I was at Uni, a thousand years ago…
Posted by peewiglet 
Posted by peewiglet 
Posted by peewiglet 
