After losing and mysteriously recovering my book on the weather, I was at my mother's house the same day going through my father's papers, when my sister, Bette, dropped a pen. I pulled up the couch cushion to look for it, and staring me if the face was the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Weather that I had given her husband for Christmas. So the book imp restored the same book title to me twice within five hours. The imp's ostentatious flair for restoration prompted my wife, Linda, to put a positive spin on his talents. I keep looking at his neatly arranged stacks of big band cds, and I keep hoping for a clue.
Life is a mess.
And so is this column. Spirits is as much a document of natural sounds as it is a collection of songs, containing vivid, near three-dimensional recordings of songbirds, burbling streams, chattering insects, domestic animals and stampeding wild horses, the latter captured on tape with some peril to the recordist. Flowing through these soundscapes are vocal and instrumental responses that evoke or directly mimic natural aspects. The Tuvans and Sakhans are animists, not surprisingly their religion is rooted in their lives as herder-hunters, and their art imitates life with an intimacy rarely found in music. They toss off an example of the xoomei vocal style while bouncing on the back of a trotting horse and pay tribute to their beloved horses with the one-string igil fiddle on another track.