Saturday, March 8, 2008

When I was a kid, I used to stand beside our upright black Yamaha piano and watch my mother practice. My nose nearly touching the edge of the piano lid, I had a habit of unfocusing my eyes and watching her fingers flittering across the ivory. It always reminded me of ripples in water; scales were canoes gliding smoothly down a river.
Every Sunday morning, I'd wake up to the sound of her warming up, or practising a song for church and I'd lay awake, listening to scales and chords mixed with the percussion of the creaking of our old hardwood floors as my dad paced around the kitchen making coffee. I was lucky to have been raised in a house where when music was played, it echoed defiantly through the halls and filled all of the rooms with raw melody. From my brother's trumpet at his end of the hall to the piano in the living room, there was rarely a moment of silence.

I was watching my friend Andrew play a Fugue by Bach in one of the practice chambers under the caf, and as I kneeled with my nose almost touching the lid and watched his fingers fly across the keys, I was sent back to the old house with the creaky floors and the echo-y walls. After he finished, he sort of leaned back, looked at me with a grin and in his Lebanese accent, went, "This is nice piece?" I couldn't do much other than smile back and nod.

I'm getting into jazz and classical now, more than before; obsessed with what my friend Kyle calls "pure sound". I've always been fascinated with the idea of being surrounded by this organic, natural music, and what Jazz has been giving me is a sense of beauty in confusion, which sort of reflects a balance I've been trying to find in life in general.
So here it is - a mix for the bubble of sound.

1) The Gardens - Chick Corea
2) Blue Skies - Oscar Peterson Ft. Itzhack Perlman
3) Body And Soul - Thelonious Monk
4) The Boy In The Bubble - John Coltrane
5) La Fille Aux Cheveux De Lin - Claude Debussy
6) The Voyevoda, op. 78 - Tchaikovsky
7) Miniskirt - Kronos Quartet