MP3 Sally Block - Halfway to Midnight

Silver and bansuri flute delivers to your heart world rhythms & raga melodies that are meditative and relaxing, but in that garden of drone there is a seduction to it too.

6 MP3 Songs
WORLD: World Beat, WORLD: Asian



Details:
This music is appropriate for calming your hyper active dog, soothing your aching mind and heart, yoga, intimacy, dancing through bustling city streets, ambling down a lonely road... or just lying on your back listening with headphones.

Silver and bamboo flute, Indian slide guitar and violin, and the one hundred stringed Kashmiri santoor improvise on seductive evening raga melodies with muted cornet punctuating the Eastern beats.

The tracks are average over eight minutes, and here the clips are the first two minutes. If you go to the sallyblock.com website you can hear clips more into some of the tracks. Also there is a section called Prose & Poetry with a primer on Indian music for Western musicians, complete with scales.

I quibbled with my college Russian flute teacher over studying the Impressionists. Not because I didnât love Debussy, it was more a yearning to drop the music sheets and learn to improvise. A few years later, in San Francisco, I heard G.S. Sachdev playing Indian classical bansuri. I knew then that it was this sophisticated and meditative music I wanted to study next. To add to the intrigue, Yusef Lateef was studying with Sachdev at the time and I thought that was cool.

In the span of 12 colorful years of living in India, I played my flutes in the company of very good Indian and eclectic international musicians who have become innovators in the world fusion and new age markets.

The project âHalfway to Midnightâ began in India and culminated in Sag Harbor, NY where I presently live. Friends from seven countries and four continents worked on this project with me. It is a culminating point in my life. When there is spirit in the music it becomes one of the greatest connecting threads between human hearts.

Every raga invokes a certain mood and time of day. I was trying to explain the feel of Raga Yaman in track four to musician friends at a recording session way out at the end of Long Island, New York. We had set up in a spacious screened-in porch with a microphone outside picking up the crickets along with the harmonica. The sun had set, the air was cooling, and we had just opened a bottle of wine. âItâs like now ⦠think halfway to midnight.â