Sandy Bull: Triple Ballade: Sans Cuer/Amis Dolens/Dame Par Vous, composed by Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377)
Sandy gets mediæval on your ass with this intense jam from his Inventions LP. Everything you need to know about life in the 1300s is encrypted in these tones.
From the sleeve notes:
"The Triple Ballade by the 14th century Guillaume de Machaut is transmuted by Bull into an absorbing play of sonorities as well as of lines. By multi-tracking, he plays the parts on oud, banjo and guitar. The piece is a canon on the unison in that each part comes in on the same note. 'Written long before rules of modern counterpoint had been set down,' Bull points out, 'the harmonies have that haunting sound of the Gothic age, plus what actually amounts to tone clusters in certain places.'"
For persons wishing to hear the piece in choral form, voilà.
4 comments:
Hey Emmett.
Outstanding. Philistine that i am, i'm bowled over way more by Sandy's oud dominated take than the choral arrangement. Fantastic! I know the oud has much in common with the european medieval lute, but this sounds so much as if it's played on a Japanese koto at times, it's staggering...
Love the cheesy cover shot too.
Hey dude, what's upper? I bet that Sandy would have happily picked up a koto if there were any lying around the studio...
Great stuff. I just checked out some bio details on the guy, and yet another piece of the cosmic aural jigsaw falls into place. I'd never heard of Sandy Bull before today. Wicked!
I see that Sandy was paired up with Billy Higgins on drums on this LP. Any more of this stuff lying around ?
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