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It's just like a "return to the future", where technology serves
ancestral wisdom, which often but not always lies in the eastern
part of the planet, in places like India, Tibet, China and Japan.
This tendency grew a
couple of years ago, and its highest peak was the recording of the two albums "The
Llama Chants" and "Oho". They're both albums in which the ancient
"mantra" of Buddhist tradition (sang by Llama Gyourme and by the monk Choying
Drolma) were supported and integrated by modern technology.The electronic part was
cured by the French Jean-Philippe Rykiel and the American Steve Tibbetts.Emi Classic recorded a
project called "Rumi" in 1997, and it represents another step on this direction.
Actually, it takes inspiration from the oriental genre we talked about, maybe more
oriented to the Sufi theories, as to say Islam. But the innovation in
this field consists in the variety of voices put together of their wonderful singers: for
example the Pakistan Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Israelis Noa, the American Lori Carson,
the French (but born in Cameroon) Esther Dobong'na Essiene, the Turkish Omar Faruk
Tekbilek, the Armenian Djivan Gasparian.And most of all, this
project forces those singers to face new kinds of music, which were composed exceptionally
by the New Zealander Graeme Revell and the Australian Roger Mason, after they read Rumi's
love poems. In this case love is to
be conceived in its largest meaning. We must not relate to mundane love, that easy,
frivolous and inconsistent love we're dealing with nowadays, which inspires artists like
Bob Dylan and so on. Rumi's kind of love has a spiritual and noble dignity; we can call it
sublime. It's the love we feel for the Inviolate, for the Ineffable, for the Divine and
which lies in any of us. This love is fully described in the inside booklet that reports
also Rumi's words " We love: that's why life is full of so many wonderful gifts.
For anyone who doesn't
know him, Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi has always been an incredible love singer, perhaps
"the greatest mystic poet of human history" according to Richard Arberry's
opinion who is a dedicated studious of Sufis.Born in Bhalk, Persia, in
1207 from an aristocratic family, Rumi died and in 1273. People say that he played about
70.000 verses. Many of them, are included in his masterpiece "Masnavi-yi Manari"
(Spiritual Couplets). They were meant to reveal the secrets of the Way to Unity to the
pilgrims and the Mysteries of the Way to the Eternal Truth.Just like Samuel Johnson,
the English poet from 18th century used to say.That's particularly
amazing because Rumi himself used to consider poetry as a "secondary product".
As to say, "a mere reflex of that huge interior reality we call love. Love it's an
emotion "he always used to repeat "totally silent and inexpressible with
words".
But maybe it's possible
to gain dignity and power of expression with music, or better then that with dance. As a fact, Rumi is
universally known thank to the establishment of the Rotating Dervish Dance Ensemble. This
indicates those mystic people, always dressed in a white large tunic, who dance often in
trance spinning on themselves, to reach ecstasy.They were helped in their
dancing by an hypnotic and untouchable music, continuously repeating itself and which may
appear like a sort of pray.Rumi, who was an
extraordinary man of action or inaction, rigorous and expansive at the same time never
forgot to underline that this music has a form, a sound, a physical reality.
"Everything that can be expressed by words has a physical equivalent, every thought
has its own action."
From this point of view,
the album "Rumi" matches perfectly with his inspirer's intuitions.It hides itself in
different kinds of music like a "qawwali", or a modern ballad, or a muezzin-like
lament or a rap.Its internal dynamics
remind a pray and this represents its strength: ancient and modern at the same time. |
