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robin's Collection

Tom Waits   09/21/2003

Avery Fisher Hall - Lincoln Center, New York, NY
Source see notes
Media cdr   1 disc
Tech Notes This concert and the San Francisco show were recorded by the same person.
The taper has 2 requests:

#1- since this show was a benefit,
see below and contribute what you can.

http://www.healingthedivide.org/donate.php3

http://www.healingthedivide.org/

#2 when this shows up on ebay, aggressively fuck with the sellers.
report them, place bogus bids, offer bidders free copies, etc.

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at822>m1 orch row gg seat 110
r300>dio2448(coax)>sf6.0/ce2k>cdwav>mkwshn
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01. - -kronos quartet
02. way down in the hole - -tom waits with kronos quartet on tracks 2-9
03. cold, cold ground
04. a little drop of poison
05. what's he building in there?
06. god's away on business
07. the part you throw away
08. lost in the harbor
09. always keep a diamond in your mind
10. coney island baby -encore-waits solo
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Star Starts a Show; Tom Waits Ends It

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By JON PARELES
New York Times
September 23, 2003

The star isn't usually the opening act at a concert, but things work
differently with the Dalai Lama, who begins his daily spiritual practices at
3:30 a.m. Since he had to be in bed early, he spoke at the beginning of the
concert on Sunday night at Avery Fisher Hall to benefit Healing the
Divide, an American organization that tries to use technology to preserve
and provide access to ancient cultures like that of Tibet.

The Dalai Lama warned that technology alone could "give us false hope that
every problem can be solved by technology," and he urged a fusion of
cultures. "Western science and ancient philosophy meet where mind and matter
meet," he said.

Tom Waits, who closed the show in his usual guise as a lowlife sage,
wisecracked: "So his holiness goes to bed at 7:30? That's not the holiness I
used to know."

Mr. Waits was the welcome, indecorous oddball in what had been a concert of
richly meditative music. Playing to a hall with many Buddhists, Mr. Waits
started his miniset singing about Jesus and Satan. "Gotta help me keep the
Devil way down in the hole," he sang in his slurred growl.

Earlier in the day the Dalai Lama spoke to 65,000 people in Central Park as
part of a 20-day national tour. At Lincoln Center he was introduced by
Philip Glass and Richard Gere.

In a concert filled with genre-straddling collaborations, Mr. Waits was
accompanied by the Kronos String Quartet and Greg Cohen on bass. The quartet
arrangements worked ingenious variations on Mr. Waits's waltzes and hymnlike
tunes, skewing the oom-pah-pah to various places around the beat and
applying dissonances that brought out Mr. Waits's Kurt Weill connections.

The quartet was most effective in "What's He Building?," a paranoid
recitation that the quartet accompanied with eerie atonal creaks and
scrapes. Mr. Waits's set moved through songs about death, greed, loss, love
and finally faith and hope. "Always keep a diamond in your mind," he sang.

Kronos also played a piece by and with the Nubian musician Hamza el-Din,
playing tar (hand drum). With sliding, unharmonized melodies over pizzicato
vamps, it transformed the quartet into a miniature Arabic string orchestra.

Two musicians who play wooden flutes - the Tibetan composer Nawang Khechog
and the Navajo-Ute composer R. Carlos Nakai - collaborated on a luminously
introspective duet. Mr. Khechog opened the piece with the deep tones of a
long Tibetan horn below Mr. Nakai's hovering flute phrases, and he recited
the bodhisattva vow to work for the enlightenment of all sentient beings.

Later he used his wooden flute to waft high, ethereal overtones and to trade
serene, overlapping phrases with Mr. Nakai as the two musicians found modes
shared by Asian and American music.

Mr. Glass and the Gambian griot Foday Musa Suso played a preview of their
most recent collaboration. A basic, almost waltzing ostinato (played by
Michael Riesman on keyboard) supported plaintive melodies from Jon Gibson on
soprano saxophone, quick arpeggios from Mr. Glass on piano and, best of all,
the flickering, glittering syncopations from Mr. Suso's kora (21-stringed
harp).

The back of Mr. Suso's kora, the traditional instrument of African griots,
was emblazoned with the address of his Web site, www.fmsuso .com.

Anoushka Shankar performed the premiere of idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="143869">"The Offering," a piece by her
father, Ravi Shankar, based on a raga originally used for prayers.

It was a short performance by Indian classical standards, only about 10
minutes, which gave Ms. Shankar (with Tanmoy Bose on tabla) time to outline
its major mode and melodies and offer some hints about where improvisations
on them might lead.

The night's music began with the Gyuto Tantric Choir, 10 monks who chanted
with the subterranean bass tones and simultaneous ethereal overtones of
Buddhist sacred tradition. Technology had come to them, too; like Madonna or
Britney Spears, they wore wireless headset microphones.


Trades Allowed Yes
Owned by robin · Last Updated May 23, 2023