I just got back from Lisbon, where I spent four days with my language teacher Ana Paula who submitted me to a “linguistic immersion” – Portuguese only ..! She can be a pretty cruel person.
(But it seems that this is the way to go if one wants to learn a foreign language. And I have been cruel to her too, in the not so distant past ..truth be told.)

Lisbon is fabulous on a hot and bright summer day…

looks like advertising for something, but not clear for what

…especially when the city is full of smart-looking sailors from India, who were visiting.  The seafood is amazing and very cheap, the beer is always really cold and the churches are large and impressive. The coast is only 20 minutes away and the Atlantic Ocean is wild and very stormy – swimming is not really recommended.

The service industry is a disaster.
The most famous coffee house in town served orange juice with live larvae swimming in it, and no one saw the need to be embarrassed or offer apologies. They did, however, smile and offer to make another one. We declined.

After exploring Lisbon, we drove out to Sintra which was an Arab stronghold in the 8th century. The “Castelo” is built on the top of a mountain and it integrates Stonehenge-like boulders into its structure:  Allah alone knows how these monster stones were cut to precision, moved into the most unlikely positions and how they refused to fall down in 1200 years.

The national portuguese music style, Fado, is deep and romantic and among the most melancholic music styles I have ever heard.
The background is Portugal as a major nation of navigators – and a shared experience of generations of women longing for their men and husbands out at sea.
Including all those men lost to the sea, who would never came back.

To get an impression, listen in here

- stay tuned -
the skipper

WE DID IT !!
Abhi Ken and myself finalised yesterday our first ever collaboration – the new song “A Distant Land” .
Abhi was working out of his studio in Mumbai, India while I was doing the same over here in Geneva, Switzerland.
Working with Abhi was like a charm: agreeing on musical ideas, on what-to-do and what-to-avoid was completely intuitive. It feels like we had been working together for years.. when in reality we only started a month ago and we have never met in the physical world.
Moreover, Abhi was able to win Indian traditional / crossover singer, Deepika, for the production – and she really did a marvellous job.
The result is more beautiful than I could have imagined .. I have only praise for Abhi and for Deepika, who made this song into something absolutely special and unique.

You can listen to “A Distant Land” here
or ( if you are having trouble with the Myspace player… ) click HERE
 - Stay tuned –  
Erik

I will skip all  the cliches that you can read at your local travel office, such as  “Amazing country / Beautiful beaches / Incredibly Friendly People  / Awesome Great Food “  and so on and on.  Not because they aren’t true, but because they are all true.

I would rather share some impressions to do with music and the general way of life as I perceived it in Brazil.

In Sao Paulo, we were invited to a party by some journalist friends of my dear tourist guide, Ana Paula. After some cold beers  – Brahma beer is easily in the top three worldwide so far as I can tell – we ventured onto the dance floor, a place that I normally avoid. This is because the last music style I really had fun dancing to was the funky stuff from “Earth Wind and Fire” in the last century.. unnecessary to say that I hate Rap music and I even more detest Techno. To my amazement, dancing to Samba music (the samba rock variation, not the carnival samba one) turned out to be very great fun!

The next day, we went to see some buildings by master architect Oscar Niemeyer, notably the “Oca” in the Ibirapuera Park. The Oca currently hosts an exhibition celebrating “50 Years of Bossa Nova” with an amazing multimedia show, featuring Tom Jobim and his colleagues on black and white film footage from the 60s, displayed on state-of-the-art holographic  screens that I haven’t seen before – you can walk around those large plastic sheets and the film is showing on the back side as well, without being mirrored the wrong way round!

I am always touched when I see children becoming aware and proud of something meaningful and beautiful.. I was especially touched when hundreds  of schoolchildren came in with their teachers to appreciate Brazil’s Bossa Nova revolution. A real brazilian moment .. sitting inside Niemeyer’s futuristic building with my brazilian guide, and the school children flocking around everywhere and Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Morais composing their hit songs on the hologram screen before us.

I also learned an important figure that day: “The Girl from Ipanema” is,  (after “Yesterday” by The Beatles) the second-most-played song in the world..!

- to be continued -

Erik,  (jet-lagged)

I would like to introduce the man whom they call “The Mozart of Madras” … his name is AR Rahman.

He is an incredibly talented musician, composer, arranger, producer, performer .. you name it , AR does it. And he does it very, very well. So far I have “only” listened to a double-CD collection entitled “Introducing AR Rahman” but when I listen to something intriguingly new, it means that the particular CD is in permanent rotation in my car’s cd player, for weeks on end.

AR manages to blend the Indian concept of melody-over-rhythm with our Western concept of Melody-over-Harmonies, and the result is almost always sensationally beautiful.

It is quite remarkable that although I do not speak a word of Hindi ( do you? ) AR’s music flows so naturally that it needs no explanations at all. Same was true for Mozart, the master of masters.

A great example of AR’s craft is “Thirakkaatha Kaattukulle”.

Peace and Love,

Erik