March 2012

 

March. That was a good March, if you ask me. Let's see: 

15 appearances total - every other day. Not bad I'd say. 
A gig away from Irvine, CA, in famous Santa Barabara with my sister Tamara and our friend Nadia, under the evening sky, with a balckbird actually whistling along as we were singing the Beatles' "Blackbird". That was absolutely surreal, lasted only that one song, and was definitely one of the key indicators of universe's mechanics in my life. The feeling when we realized who's sitting in with us on that song is not really adequately describable :) 
Steering away for a moment from my beloved bluessanova, Tamara and I gave the crowd at The Gypsy Den a taste of Gypsy music, complete with costumes, 

          and followed by Tamara's belly dance performance. 

http://omibellydance.com/ 

Steering away from my beloved bluessanova for another moment , I went on stage as a percussionist with Tabla improvisation to my composition "Water". 
Here's the studio recording http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBFGURpX_0c. 
And here's what it looked like live :) 

(Photo courtesy Bob Lanphar) 
Had a pleasure of being interviewed live on the radio by Linda Lee Grau, host of "Talent In The Southland" show on Orange County's OC-TalkRadio. http://www.oc-talkradio.com/talent-in-the-southland.html 
and tried my hand at pottery at http://www.theceramicsstudio.com/ - read how that went here http://www.sandroeristavi.com/blog/humility_at_the_wheel/ 
And I am working diligently on that EP. 
Almost forgot - I now have joined the thinning ;) ranks of musicians for hire (as a percussionist for right now) and launched the "Services" page on my web site: http://www.sandroeristavi.com/services/ 

..."And now for something completely different" - now for April :)

Charles Baudelaire - "Evening Harmony"

My fascination with this exquisitely beautiful poem eventually lead to a song I wrote to it. 
For me the process of writing this song was somewhat unique and indicative of the real mechanisms of inspired creation. 
After several months of thinking about the poem and how to possibly do it justice musically, I finally sat down with my guitar and my intention. And that's when an excruciating headache set in, the kind that won't let you even slightly turn your head. For some reason I didn't put the guitar down and the song in its entirety was written within 20 minute. And, once it was done, the headache went away completely. That was long time ago, I've written so much music since then, but to this day "Harmonie du soir" remains one of my absolute favorites. 
What do you make of that? :) 

Here's the original followed by several English translations. 

Harmonie du soir 

Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige 
Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir; 
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir; 
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige! 

Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir; 
Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu'on afflige; 
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige! 
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir. 

Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu'on afflige, 
Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir! 
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir; 
Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige. 

Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir, 
Du passé lumineux recueille tout vestige! 
Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige... 
Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir! 

— Charles Baudelaire 

Evening Harmony 

The season is at hand when swaying on its stem 
Every flower exhales perfume like a censer; 
Sounds and perfumes turn in the evening air; 
Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo! 

Every flower exhales perfume like a censer; 
The violin quivers like a tormented heart; 
Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo! 
The sky is sad and beautiful like an immense altar. 

The violin quivers like a tormented heart, 
A tender heart, that hates the vast, black void! 
The sky is sad and beautiful like an immense altar; 
The sun has drowned in his blood which congeals... 

A tender heart that hates the vast, black void 
Gathers up every shred of the luminous past! 
The sun has drowned in his blood which congeals... 
Your memory in me glitters like a monstrance! 

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954) 

Evening Harmony 

Now comes the eve, when on its stem vibrates 
Each flower, evaporating like a censer; 
When sounds and scents in the dark air grow denser; 
Drowsed swoon through which a mournful waltz pulsates! 

Each flower evaporates as from a censer; 
The fiddle like a hurt heart palpitates; 
Drowsed swoon through which a mournful waltz pulsates; 
The sad, grand sky grows, altar-like, immenser. 

The fiddle, like a hurt heart, palpitates, 
A heart that hates oblivion, ruthless censor. 
The sad, grand sky grows, altar-like, immenser. 
The sun in its own blood coagulates... 

A heart that hates oblivion, ruthless censor, 
The whole of the bright past resuscitates. 
The sun in its own blood coagulates... 
And, monstrance-like, your memory flames intenser! 

— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952) 

Harmonie du soir 

the hours approach when vibrant in the breeze, 
a censer swoons to every swaying flower; 
blown tunes and scents in turn enchant the bower; 
languorous waltz of swirling fancies these! 

a censer swoons in every swaying flower; 
the quivering violins cry out, decrease; 
languorous waltz of swirling fancies these! 
mournful and fair the heavenly altars tower. 

the quivering violins cry out, decrease; 
like hearts of love the Void must overpower! 
mournful and fair the heavenly altars tower. 
the drowned sun bleeds in fast congealing seas. 

a heart of love the Void must overpower 
peers for a vanished day's last vestiges! 
the drowned sun bleeds in fast congealing seas... 
and like a Host thy flaming memories flower! 

— Lewis Piaget Shanks, Flowers of Evil (New York: Ives Washburn, 1931) 

Evening Harmony 

Now is the time when trembling on its stem 
Each flower fades away like incense; 
Sounds and scents turn in the evening air; 
A melancholy waltz, a soft and giddy dizziness! 

Each flower fades away like incense; 
The violin thrills like a tortured heart; 
A melancholy waltz, a soft and giddy dizziness! 
The sky is sad and beautiful like some great resting-place. 

The violin thrills like a tortured heart, 
A tender heart, hating the wide black void. 
The sky is sad and beautiful like some great resting-place; 
The sun drowns itself in its own clotting blood. 

A tender heart, boring the wide black void, 
Gathers all trace from the pellucid past. 
The sun drowns itself in clotting blood. 
Like the Host shines O your memory in me! 

— Geoffrey Wagner, Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (NY: Grove Press, 1974) 

Link reference: 
http://fleursdumal.org/poem/142

Tai Chi > balance > connection > peace

I am grateful for so many things in my life. 
Today I want to single out this one - Tai Chi. 

I've been addicted to Tai Chi for the last 6 years and it transformed my life in a most positive way. So I feel I have to share this, I feel it would be kind of selfish not to. 

Tai Chi is an art, and a philosophy, and a healing system, and a fitness exercise, and a martial art. 
And it's a game. I heard many times advanced Tai Chi practitioners use the word "play". "I play Tai Chi", not "I practice". 
The art of Tai Chi is accessible to anyone, at any age and any level of physical fitness, and its benefits are absolutely amazing. We are all different in our preferences and goals in life, so I can only speak for myself. 

Here is what Tai Chi gives ME access to: 

Flexibility (physical and mental) 
Awareness (of motion and stillness, of breath, of unity of the universe and connectedness of its rhythms) 
Balance (again - both physical and mental) 
and ultimately most important of all - Peace. 

There are days when peace is in our hearts undisturbed, as it is supposed to be. And then there are other days, with turbulences and distractions. And when those happen - that's when I realize what a wonderful gift is this "game" that is always with me. One slow run through "24 forms" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hG9iqKPM14), less then 10 minutes - and connection with universal rhythms is re-established, and the peace within is restored. That's how it works for me anyway. 

So grateful for that! 
Grateful for good teachers, especially for Master Ryan Lee, founder of Balance 24/7 http://www.balance247.com/, teaching in Orange County, California. 
As you can imagine, it's very important who teaches you, particularly at your first steps. I was lucky to be learning from Ryan. He has a real passion for the art of Tai Chi and Qigong, and a genuine talent. He's one of the few teachers, who take you beyond teaching the correct motions and breathing. He knows the way to direct you towards the feeling that the "game" should generate within you. 

And it works! 
And it works miracles! 

Let your peace replace your stress. 

Please be well, it's your birthright! 

Sandro

Happy Thanksgiving! ...and baked pumpkin :)

 

Hi everybody, my name is Sandro, and I cook. Not obsessively, but with pleasure :) 

And since, among other things, it's clearly the eating day - here's my contribution to our common gastronomical good. 

Very simple, slight modification to what I saw on the internet. 

Sliced pumpkin (with skin) on the cookie tray, sprinkled with orange juice and peels, brown sugar and allspice (cinnamon will work too). 

Slices of orange on top (skin removed - or it'll give bitterness). 

1 hour at 360F (first 1/2 hour - covered with foil, then - opened). Check it around 45-50 minutes. It's ready when the skin becomes easily "pokable". 
Voila! 
To splurge serve with cranberry sauce and whipped cream. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

Merry Christmas  ...and Cranberry-Orange Relish :)

I'm a big fan of cranberry sauce. I think it's my favorite item from traditional Holiday menu. But preparation of cranberry sauce includes cooking cranberries and apples and killing vitamins and flavors in the process. This recipe however does not require any kind of heating. I found it somewhere on the net, and gave it a try, and everybody loved it. So here it is, with slight modifications ..because I usually stick with the recipe only the first time I cook something, but the next time I have to add improvisation. What you gonna do - I love jazz ;) Feel free to improvise yourself - these are just the guidelines. 

Fresh cranberries - 12 ounce bag of 
Orange (you'll need the peel too) 
Sugar (I prefer brown) - 1 cup 
Apple 
Fresh mint - 8-10 leaves 
Food processor 

Cranberries, peeled orange, apple (remove seeds from these two), sugar, mint - all go into the processor and get chopped. Then separately process orange peel (just the outer orange layer of course) at higher speed - it needs to be finer than the rest of ingredients. Mix it all together. Done. Now immediately go get more ingredients, because what you just made won't last long :) 

Merry Christmas! 
Happy New Year!

End of the world thoughts

 

Well, I'm up all night - I chose to take the 12/21/12 warning semi-seriously. Obviously nothing happened at "scheduled" 3:11 AM. 

Weather its timing's a little off, or it's postponed considerably or cancelled - i don't know. But expecting and (presumably) surviving an event like this brings some thoughts. Here's what's going on through my mind. 

"I have a dream". 

The world not ending today in a physical sense, but in a sense that tomorrow starts the new one. Where we gain the realization of oneness of all life on this planet, and we lose our ego. We are one organism with this planet (and with each other), a very complex body with each one of us representing a cell. And what we're doing currently reminds an autoimmune disease, when the body starts attacking itself. It's fatal. 

This thing called karma makes so much sense in this context. 

It's December 21, 2012, 5AM. I'm up all night - I chose to take the 12/21/12 warning semi-seriously. 
Obviously nothing happened at "scheduled" 3:11 AM. 
Weather its timing's a little off, or it's postponed considerably, or cancelled - I don't know. But expecting and (presumably) surviving an event like this brings some thoughts. Here's what's going on through my mind. 

"I have a dream". The world not ending today in a physical sense, but in a sense that tomorrow starts the new one. Where we gain the realization of oneness of all life on this planet, and we lose our ego. We are one organism with this planet (and with each other), a very complex body with each one of us representing a cell. And what we're doing currently reminds an autoimmune disease, when the body starts attacking and destroying itself, one group of cells against another. It's fatal. 

This thing called karma makes so much sense in this context. You do something bad to another being and there'll be a payback, maybe delayed, some think maybe even generations delayed, but there'll be payback - as sure as death and taxes. But in fact it's the same as hurting yourself, only the delay between the injury and the consequences (pain being the first and most obvious) is longer. You cut yourself - you feel pain in 1 second; you cut somebody else - you'll feel it, just much later. 

I so wish we started waking up to this.

Pumpkin soup a la Eristavi

Disclaimer - I don't claim to be the owner of this recipe. With its ingredients being fairly common, I'm sure I'm not the first to put these together. 

Furthermore - Being a jazz musician I tend to improvise, so this recipe is not set in stone, but more like a general guidance. Consult your taste buds and have fun as you go :) 

Ingredients: 

Pumpkin (baked, or canned) 

Sweet potatoes (boiled until soft) 

Coconut milk or rice milk. Unsweetened preferably - sweet potatoes are called this for a reason. 

Onion, chopped 

A slice of fresh ginger (sliced across the fibers) 

Curry powder 

Flax seed 

Walnuts (shelled and diced, not too fine) 

Rosemary 

Coconut oil 

Salt 

Cayenne pepper 

Garnish - hardboiled egg, sliced carrots, broccoli, rosemary 

50/50 pumpkin and sweet potatoes are processed in the blender with coconut milk, chopped onion, ginger and rosemary. 

The amount of coconut milk is up to you - how thick you'd like your soup. I prefer a puree-like consistency. 

Per cup of this puree I add about a teaspoon of chopped onions, about a dime size slice of ginger and 4-5 "needles" of rosemary. Blending until really homogenous and rosemary needles are all chopped up into tiny specks. 

Empty the contents of blender into a pot, add some salt, curry powder, flax seed, coconut oil (approximately 1/3 teaspoon per cup of soup). Heat on medium-low for 10-15 min; let it bubble, while stirring. Careful - if your soup is thick enough the bubbles may "spit" at you. Hot! 

Add a little cayenne pepper if you're so inclined - makes it more interesting. 

Walnut thing is up to you, but if you like a little crunch - throw some in the pot. The earlier you add them - the softer your crunch will be. 

Voila! People I fed this to loved it. Happy Holidays!

Blue Up and Virgil Donati

My upcoming new blues album, titled "Blue Up", has been in the works for over a year now. Initially I was hoping to finish it by last winter, but this one turned out to be slower than the previous CD ("Blue Sharp Minor, released in May 2013, took about 6 months to record and release). 
So here I am, seemingly very near the finish line, when suddenly I find myself at the concert of an incredible trio. Allan Holdsworth on guitar, Jimmy Haslip on bass, and Virgil Donati on drums. All three are musicians of the highest class. But I somehow was most affected by Virgil Donati's very expressive and inventive playing. To the extent that now I'm going back and re-doing all the drum tracks on "Blue Up". 
Of course You Tube can only convey a small fraction of the effect, but still, just as a sample to give an idea of what I've been exposed to and infected with at that unforgettable gig :) 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rzjFtI8I8w 

Is there an end to a quest for perfection? Rhetoric question, I know :)

 Vegetable lemon curry with buckwheat.

It’s been awhile ..let me see ..about year and a half since the last recipe. Let’s fix that. 

As always – I’m not claiming that I’m the first to invent this dish. It’s more like jazz – as is always the case with me in the kitchen – improvisation based on popular melodies, kind of fusion-folk-jazz expressed culinarily (is that the real word?) So – fusing Indian and Russian motives with my imagination. 

Also - the amounts of ingredients are flexible. Photos provide some indication. 

Improvise, have fun! Long live the healthy dose of unpredictability! 

Ingredients to make about 2 servings: 

Olive oil 
Coconut oil 
Curry powder 
Cayenne pepper 
Salt 
1/3 of an onion (yellow or white) 
1 large garlic clove 
2 lemon slices 
1 zucchini (don’t be discouraged by the photo – zucchinis without my logo work just as well) 
1 broccoli stem 
4-5 Brussels sprouts 
Buckwheat 

Buckwheat – the Russian part of the recipe. It’ll take longer than the rest, start with it. Depending on the brand you got you can cook it right away or you might need to rinse it before. Cooking is easy – 1 cup of buckwheat + 2 cups of water, salt (don’t overdo, you can always add more later), combine in a pot, bring to boil. Now reduce heat to low and pour some olive oil in. Alternatively – a blob of coconut oil will work great. (Coconuts don’t grow in Russia, so this part is improvisational :) The oil will spread on the surface of hot water and, as the water evaporates, it will coat the grains evenly, which makes for a nice, non mushy texture. Cover the simmering pot, leaving a small outlet for steam. Check periodically if there’s still water (part the grains in the pot with a fork to see the bottom.) When all the water evaporated – turn off the heat and let it sit covered for 15-20 min. 

On to Indian inspired part of the recipe! 
Cut each Brussels sprout (…Brussels is in India, right?) in two, lengthwise, not across (see photo). 
Dice onions and garlic. 
Chop a zucchini as shown. 

The two lemon slices: if the lighting allows – for a sec pick them up and look at the afternoon sun through them ;) It’s beautiful. To add functionality to that step let’s pretend we did that to better see the seeds – get rid of those. And now cut the slices into quarters, as shown. 

Broccoli stem requires some special attention. We want the inside crunchy part, not the outside stringy, filamentous skin (marked as “Discard these” on the photo above). So carefully cut the outside off, free the heart of that broccoli stem. Once the skin is off – slice it up. 

OK. Now - skillet, heat at about 75%, olive oil. Once it’s hot - dump chopped onions and garlic on the skillet, swish around, and almost right away add Brussels sprouts, zucchini, broccoli, lemon, salt. 

Toss around, cover. 

In 5 min reduce heat to about 40%, add curry and pepper, toss around, cover for 5 min, toss around some more. Poke the Brussels sprout halves with a fork. When they feel soft enough to be chewable – it’s ready. 

Serve with a side of buckwheat. And let me know how it worked for you :)