matters of the soul and spirit.
Harry Bertoia‘s collected audio works have done much to create calm and spiritual peace and rest of late.
Donovan is delightfully different from cerebral Dylan and always has been. He focuses on feelings, spirit, and soul via his learnings from The Beats and Buddhism. I find his voice, music, and songs to be, naturally, very innerly relaxing.
Early this morning I returned to Ravi Shankar and his deep spiritual oeuvre. Ravi initially plays feelings and moods and then moves into musical action and transcendence. His tabla player’s parts either complement or counter-point the sitar melodies. The tamboura player, likewise, with harmonies or second melody lines as appropriate/fit. Shankar’s ragas are like jazz or classical pieces–pure music, and pure music= feelings, mind, spirit, and soul. I saw him here with his daughter Anoushka when they played the Winspear: a totally sublime, transcendent evening. I remember when I bought my first Shankar album (Ravi Shankar in New York) back around 1967 and had whole new spiritual worlds and Eastern music opened up to me.
(The only other players who have done this for/to me have been jazzers Kenny Barron, Stan Getz, and Miles Davis.)
And so it is, I find, these days, the inner nourishment I most need from music and some of these great past sources still so powerfully connective, relevant, and resonant today.