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Month: May 2021

Tropical, transplanted, fooled, thriving…(sequel to immediately previous post)

The featured image is surprising enough – young boabs thriving, on the rim of Kings Park’s Mt Eliza, overlooking South Perth – a place with an utterly “wrong” climate.

Just a few metres away – and altogether more amazing – is Kings Park’s more recently-arrived but very much older boab.

If Guinness had a “longest road trip ever undertaken by a large, living tree” category (to qualify, the tree must be alive, still, a decade after its relocation) the tree pictured below would surely hold that record.

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Autumn leaves…but not as you usually know them

Not all deciduous trees have home addresses in cool temperate parts of the Northern Hemisphere.

This one’s home is in a very particular part of tropical Australia.

This individual is circa 750 years old, weighs 36 tonnes, and is thriving in a place with quite the “wrong” climate, 3200 kilometres from home.

Even more amazingly, to get “here” it survived uprooting, followed by almost certainly the longest road trip ever undertaken by a large, living tree.

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Revelatory Covers (#17 in series): “When You Come Back Down”

(the “metaphorical” featured image shows climbers on what many believe to be the world’s tallest sheer rock-face…it isn’t)

This very poignant song was written a quarter of a century ago.

Its co-authors, separately, have recorded it, but the most celebrated version is a “cover”, issued 20 years ago.

None of those recordings quite “nailed” it, I think.

As of February 21, 2021, there is a “definitive” version, performed “live”…

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Life Goes On/ Happy 85th birthday, Carla Bley

 

In the USA, it is currently “yesterday”,  Tuesday, 11 May, 2021.

I hope that Carla Bley is enjoying a very happy birthday with her beloved, Steve Swallow.

For rather more than my entire adult life, Carla Bley has composed, arranged and played singular music, variously – sometimes, simultaneously – provocative, surprising, very amusing, satirical, sublimely lyrical, complex, seemingly-simple…

Her three most recent releases – all, new trio recordings of new music, made between 2013 and 2019 – are some of her finest, ever.

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Revelatory covers (#16 in series): Rhiannon Giddens sings “Calling Me Home”

If the almost-titlepiece of Rhiannon Giddens’ new album were new to your ears, you would probably assume it was a venerable “traditional” song, probably from Appalachia.

Listeners who already knew many traditional Appalachian songs would likely be mightily surprised that they could have hitherto missed such a superb, particularly haunting one.

In fact, Calling Me Home was authored by Alice Gerard; it was titlepiece of her 2002 album, issued in the year of her 68th birthday. (An even better album is Follow the Music, which Alice Gerrard recorded – mostly “live” – in her 80th year)

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