SOUNDTRACK: EMEL-GlobalFEST Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #134/145 (January 12, 2021).
GlobalFEST is an annual event, held in New York City, in which bands from all over the world have an opportunity to showcase their music to an American audience. I’ve never been, and it sounds a little exhausting, but it also sounds really fun.
The Tiny Desk is teaming up with globalFEST this year for a thrilling virtual music festival: Tiny Desk Meets globalFEST. The online fest includes four nights of concerts featuring 16 bands from all over the world.
Given the pandemic’s challenges and the hardening of international borders, NPR Music and globalFEST is moving from the nightclub to your screen of choice and sharing this festival with the world. Each night, we’ll present four artists in intimate settings (often behind desks donning globes), and it’s all hosted by African superstar Angélique Kidjo, who performed at the inaugural edition of globalFEST in 2004.
The fourth band on the second night is Emel from Tunisia.
Tunisia-born singer Emel first performed at globalFEST in 2015, the same year she performed her song of Tunisian Revolution, “Kelmti Horra,” at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert. Emel was hailed by NPR as a “21st century catalyst for change.” She created her latest album, The Tunis Diaries, equipped with only a laptop, tape recorder and a crowdsourced guitar after she was unexpectedly quarantined in her childhood home in Tunis last spring.
Emel plays only two songs. It’s just her and her co-guitarist Kareem. The songs are spare but very full and quite powerful.
“Holm” (A Dream) is a pretty, quiet song with soaring vocal melodies over the restrained lead guitar from Kareem.
“Everywhere We Looked Was Burning” is sung in English. The spare and lushly echoed guitars make her voice sound especially raw and passionate.
[READ: January 14, 2021] “Drawing from Life”
I found this story to be a little confusing as it started.
Without really referring to the narrator specifically, the story starts with talk of being called out of retirement and away from Netflix, etc.
It wasn’t until the third paragraph when things started to get explained that it made sense.
Harold is a 70-plus year-old-man. He was one of the first people in his neighborhood to get the Coronavirus. His son had thought to get him an oxygen tank and so he didn’t need the hospital. Two weeks later he had survived the virus and was more or less immune.
It was sometime a month or so later that the local rabbi called up. He explained that people could no longer sit with the dying, with the deceased, as their faith prescribed. Perhaps, since he was now immune, he would be willing to do so. And, more to the point, perhaps he would be willing to paint the deceased for their family–as a last gesture.
Harold was an excellent painter–former teacher, exemplary artist who sold paintings to raise money–and often made a lot.
And so, Harold found himself in the hospital, often overnight, by himself, painting.
While he is painting he thinks back to his younger days “learning to see.” He lay and stared a the sky until he could “see it” and then paint it. He thought about the young woman in Amsterdam he painted who brought him home for a few months.
The paintings were lovely. Harold tried to imagine different ways he could present the subjects, but he stayed faithful to portraiture. The rabbi never asked for the paintings. Harold wondered if they would ever be claimed. But he didn’t mind, because he enjoyed doing them.
He called his daughter and told her about the work and she seemed offended by the whole thing, “Isn’t that a little creepy? Who’s goin to want a painting like that?”
But it was his daughter’s boyfriend, a man who spent his free time driving on the now empty roads for fun, a man whose name Harold couldn’t even keep straight (it was Eiatn and he called him Itai) who stood up for him and the work
95 million images are shared on Instagram every day, and not one of them is of the thing that every network, news source, government official every everybody is talking about nonstop. We’re obsessively counting the dead, minute by minute, updating the number of corpses without ever looking at them.The only witnesses for pictures of the dead are computers that wipe them out before they can ever get posted. But here’s your dad, doing it.
As Harold walked into the funeral home that next day, he asked one of the workers why people were silent in front of the dead.
One shouldn’t mock the dead by doing in their presence what they can no longer do.
Of course, though Harold, that would be everything.
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