Forget disease, divorce, and the law of accident. The trusty archetypal grinning skull that waits for our flesh to weary of all the bother happily scatters any pretense of continuity. The inevitability of death presents us with a gaping mystery too large to plug with a rational idea or single irrational belief, or the praying would have long since been completed, the life insurance policies proudly displayed in slate frames next to workspace photos of our loved ones. Abhorring an unsightly vacuum, nature kindly sends a clown, a couple of integers, paranoia, meglomania, crop circles, alien abductions, or other sorry exiles from closure. Best bet, then, is to spit gobs of uncertainty back into the void, trusting a few will hit the target.
Small vessels seem to work best, presumably because our lifespans are so short.
Hence the virtue of the song. Producing the most incongruous music I had heard to date, Papasov and His Bulgarian Wedding Band blend Balkan folk melodies and fusion jazz according to opaque alchemical principles which principally burn away the flux, leaving a vitrified surface of burrs, rough edges and clarinet glossalalia. This is carnival music pure and simple, the manic soundtrack for a carousel as it spins free of its moorings to bear down on your bumper at metal-crunching highway cruising speeds. And Papasov's slippery, glissando clarinet style, dense with microtonal shadings, owes as much to ancient festival music of Greece and Asia Minor as it does to the slingshot swing of Benny Goodman. Dazzling as Ivo gets in terms of sheer momentum, even more impressive is his tonal mastery, blowing his clarinet full throated and rounded one moment, then the next phrase pinching it back into an atavistic buzz.