SOUNDTRACK: SEVANA-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #159 (January 26, 2021).
I had not heard of Sevana, although she is a member of Protoje’s In.Digg.Nation collective
“If You Only Knew” is a pretty pop song. I enjoyed the way the music dropped out and there wa s quiet drum fill Mark Reid.
This concert was filmed at the Kingston Creative Hub back in September 2020 (the interludes you’ll hear about the pandemic are reflective of that time).
The second song “Blessed” opens with gently picked guitars from and Nicolas Groskoef and Almando ‘Mundo Don’ Douglas who also both play solos throughout Almando first, Nicolas later in the song. It sounds like a Santana song and is an example of her
jumping delicately between traditional R&B, Caribbean gospel and soul, with touches of reggae interspersed. On “Blessed,” an infectious ode about the miracle of life and faith, she welcomes us with open arms into her church and demonstrates the wide range of her multi-octave voice.
“Be Somebody” has some interesting sound effects and vocal samples from Jean-Andre Lawrence and washes of keys from Rhoan Johnson.
She closes out the four-song set with her most recognizable tune, “Mango,” a dancehall-influenced love song.
I would have thought this dancehall song would be more of a banger, but aside for some quietly pulsing bass from Kawain Williamson, the song is pretty mellow.
[READ: June 3, 2019] “A Dream of Glorious Return”
This is an excerpt from Rushdie’s novel Fury which I have not read. The thesis sentence comes fairly early though.
Life is fury, he’d thought. Fury–sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal–drives us to out finest heights and coarsest depths
It concerns professor Malik Solanka, a fifty-five year old retired historian of ideas. He is presently living in Manhattan, although that is a recent change in his life.
He seemed to mostly want to be a solitary man–celibate by choice–ignoring those around him. Like his neighbor, that damn Mark Skywalker who asked if the slogan “The sun never Sets on American Express International” would seem offensive to Britons.
The novel really sets the time and place quite well–current movies, the election (“unlovable presidential candidates (Gush, Bore))” and the talk of Cuban refugee Elian Gonzales.
The phone rings and it is his wife Eleanor in England. She complains that their son is ill and he doesn’t seem to care. But more importantly
without a scrap of credible explanation you walked out on us, you went off across the ocean and betrayed all those who need and love you most.
He thinks back to how they met and how he had fallen in love with her voice. Fifteen years ago when he phoned a publishing friend, Eleanor had answered and he was smitten with her voice–asking her out for dinner that evening.
So how could he leave her and his child? One night
he sat in the kitchen, in the middle of the night, with murder on the brain: actual murder, not the metaphorical kind. He’d even brought a carving knife upstairs and stood for a terrible, dumb minute over the body of his sleeping wife. Then he turned away, slept in the spare bedroom, and in the morning had packed his bags and caught the first flight to New York
He had left his first wife Sara earlier in a less dramatic fashion. They married too quickly and felt trapped almost immediately.
He reflected back to his childhood in Bombay when Mr Venkat, the big-deal banker whose son Chandra was the ten year old Malik’s best friend
became a sannyasi on his sixtieth birthday, and abandoned his family forever, wearing no more than a hand-hewn loincloth, with a long wooden staff in one hand and begging bowl in the other.
He would never return.
This story could go in many directions from here.
I Just Read About That... 