:: groupthink ::

:: Tuesday, September 23, 2003 ::

how much money is that in my pocket?
wanna understand currencies better? think you work too much? heard an interesting bit on marketplace this afternoon when they pulled a reporter from their partner the economist- up on-air about something called the big-mac index. the economist has been running an index calculating the purchasing power of currencies by holding the mickey D's big mac as the object of desire. its apparently been quite good at predicting certain macro trends including when the euro was overvalued etc. etc. this afternoon the program began mentioning that UBS (the bank) had taken the big mac index a step further by calculating purchasing power of countries and how long you have to work to be able to afford a big mac. the pdf has all sorts of charts and graphs but the upshot is that someone in kenya has to work about three hours to earn enough for a big mac while someone in a major metro in the US has to work about 10 minutes.

this kinda stuff makes me think a bit more about a concept i first read about in a book by buckminster fuller - called critical path- where he thinks we should just do away with currencies and place value on goods and services by the amount of energy expended in their creation etc. seems complicated- but so does the system we have now i guess.




:: h 12:24 AM [+] ::
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written:1:07am 9/14/03
published: tbd

Music purists need take note (or notes)-

If you're one of those anti-fusion music purists, who believes that classical Indian carnatic tunes should stick to their own aisles in the store, and never mingle with beats from another part of the world, it'd be worth your while to check out some of the work a guitarist named Prasanna is putting out.
At a recent fundraiser for Asha and Room to Read in the bay area I was able to catch this classically trained (both IIT Madras and Berkelee college of music) artist, playing a duo with one of the world's best bassists - Victor Wooten of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.

The crowd for such a hybrid concert was as wide ranging as the material in the two artists' repetoire. Half the crowd had come because Victor Wooten has more skill in his thumb than most bass players have in their entire hand, hes got the grammys under his belt to show for it, not to mention other unparalleled accolades, and no one knows which of his 42 bass guitars he'll bring with him on stage. The other half of the crowd showed either for their IIT loyalties to Prasanna, were fans of Prasanna's music, or were merely present to support the construction of 10 new libraries in India. No matter what the reason, both sides of the crowd gained an understanding not only of the skill of both musicians on stage, but also how well different streams of music flow together.

The duo started off with some more technically challenging and experimental work that Prasanna says he wrote for Victor five years ago, and moved into more accessible tracks showcasing both artists' improvisational and fingering skills.

Victor's solo piece in the first set showed most of the newbies to his music, why his fans in the audience were as loyal to him. You could see knees lifting salvars and sarees, feet flopping rythmically in chappals when Wooten's down home funk, combined with a command of the instrument at just about any angle brought sounds out of a bass that most people don't imagine possible. His hands flew simultaneously up and down the arm of the bass, while his feet kept a steady beat.

Prasanna's bread and butter is finding a way to interject carnatic classic music (which isn't usually played on an electric guitar) into jazz, rock, blues, latin whatever other genre a guitar can lend itself to. The titles of his tracks range from Kalyani connection to Blues for Saraswati and they are that. In the first set, his solo consisted of weaving popular tamil film songs through reverberating layers of his own music created on stage.

Second sets are always worth staying for, because there seems to be an ease and energy in the room. The portion of the audience ancy to leave - have left, and the musicians have a better read on what will work with the crowd. These two artists had solos in the second set which were mind-numbing in complexity, rhythm, cadence, and both pieces reenergized the crowd. Victor led with his track- "Me and my bass guitar" and Prasanna followed up with his "Gaza" a dedication to the victims of the violence in Israel and Palestine off his album "Peaceful".

After the solos was where it got interesting, the duo had an impromptu jam session on a carnatic track that Prasanna laid down, while Wooten did an amazing job keeping up. Prasanna kept throwing microtones out there, and within a matter of a minute or so Wooten was getting the hang of it. Its an aspect of classical carnatic music akin almost to a call-response, where one artist will verbalize a phrase, and the other artist is expected to be able to play it. Its not a skill that comes easily, but to someone who has much command of his instrument as Victor, it was awesome to watch. Prasanna also tried to get the crowd involved by showing them the similarity between a scottish folk song- "Scarborough Fair" and a song from the Tamil movie "Hey Ram" and getting the entire crowd to sing them out loud together while he melted the tracks together to show the similarities of music from two distinct cultures.

When you go to a concert like this, theres nothing more rewarding than watching the expressions of joy on a musician's face. When either artist was in the depths of a complicated section of his solo, the other would be beaming straight at the hands of the other artist or the arm of their instrument, finding joy in the creative process of another. Musicians build this respect for one another quietly, its only through concerts like these that we non-musicians are privy to see how these bridges between cultures get built.




:: h 1:13 AM [+] ::
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