…are all integral to this post, which is a sequel to both the immediately-preceding one and to the 28 January 2022 post on “Hope”.
If you do not already know Emily Dickinson’s poem Hope is The Thing With Feathers you should click here before you read/see/listen to the rest of this post.
The featured image shows a so-called “plain” bird.
Like many other “plain” birds, Prinia inornata – the Plain Prinia (“common everywhere”, says my copy of Surya Ramachandran’s and David Raju’s excellent Photographic Field Guide, Wildlife of South India) is in fact beautiful, if you care to look properly.
(photo is copyright Doug Spencer, taken in Gujarat, India on 15 February 2020)
When I took the photo, my beloved and I had no idea that within a few weeks we would be confined within the borders of Western Australia for more than two years.
Various planned travels “evaporated”, but our unearned luck had “marooned” us within not only one of the safest places on earth during “the pandemic”, but also within a very large jurisdiction, containing so many unique, wonderful places to “discover” or to get to know better.
And now, we can “realistically” hope to use our passports again, within their/our current lifetimes!
With luck, within the next twelve months we will again be “under African skies”…and Indian too.
Musically, this post returns to the Australian new release which was the heart of the immediately-preceding post.
The album’s final cut is jaw-droppingly beautiful, I think.
Andrea Keller’s composition was inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem of the same name.
You can preview it here (full attention, headphones and/or decent speakers recommended)
As a further extension to immediately-preceding post, this one concludes with another side of Von Freeman’s genius.
Reportedly, at or about the time of this 1996 performance Von – who was born in 1923 – remarked that one needed to reach at least seventy years of age to understand Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints”.
This is the most arresting of umptidleen interpretations I have heard of Shorter’s great composition:
Von’s “entry” has to be heard to be believed… and it’s not a false dawn!
With Von, “live” in sweet home Chicago, were three fellow residents of the “Windy City” – pianist Bobby Peterson, drummer Phil Hey and bassist Terry Burns.