Christian Chat Network

This version of the message boards has closed.
Please click below to go to the new Christian BBS website.

New Message Boards - Click Here

You can still search for the old message here.

Christian Message Boards


Post New Topic  Post A Reply
| | search | faq | forum home
  next oldest topic   next newest topic
» Christian Message Boards   » Miscellaneous   » Political Discussion   » The Singing Revolution

   
Author Topic: The Singing Revolution
WildB
Moderator
Member # 2917

Icon 1 posted      Profile for WildB   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post   Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by WildB:
Uploaded on Jan 1, 2008
A moving, intensely human testament to the sustaining power of hope and the motivating strength of song, James and Maureen Tusty's The Singing Revolution documents how, between 1987 and 1992, the Estonian people peacefully attained political independence after decades of Soviet occupation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp0h9Z97w1s

youtube has pulled this story. All I can find is this?

"The Singing Revolution": How Estonians sang their way to freedom
CS Monitor
How Estonians sang their way to freedom
A new documentary tells story of how the national tradition of singing helped unite the masses against the Soviet occupation.
By Gloria Goodale | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the October 24, 2008 edition

Walk around the verdant green amphitheater known as the Lauluvaljak, or song ground, here on the outskirts of Tallin, Estonia, and it's easy to imagine the air alive with music, reverberating up the grassy slopes from the half-domed, vaulted stage at the bottom of this natural theatrical setting.

But to grasp what it feels like to be amid an audience 300,000-strong, singing in Von Trapp family-like harmony with sub rosa political purpose, you'll just have to pick up the DVD of "The Singing Revolution," a passion project by documentarians Jim and Maureen Tusty. Released this week, it is the story of how a tiny country (population: 1 million) with a 5,000-year-old culture, perched on the western edge of the Russian giant, used its tradition of song to finally free itself of foreign occupation, in this case the Soviet state, in 1991.

This tale of how peaceful crowds managed to fend off Soviet tanks as they attempted to take over the local television station is operatic in its drama, says the married couple. "This is the story of the power of nonviolent resistance to succeed where guns and rock-throwing would have resulted in death and more political oppression," says Jim Tusty. The nation was trying to throw off the Soviet yoke, which ensnared it in 1939, when Hitler and Stalin secretly signed a pact to divide up the Baltic countries. But, says Jim Tusty, it is also the story of a relationship between art and politics.

"We wanted to tell this remarkable story ... before the generation that lived it is no longer around," he says. He adds that a number of the older Estonians he interviewed say they are grateful to have the narrative preserved. They see that the next generation – a global, externally focused cohort in a nation that is now part of the European Union and NATO – has little awareness of the struggles of an earlier generation, he says.

The story began for the filmmakers when they taught a cinema class in Estonia during the summer of 1999 and began to hear about the song festival and the revolution it had inspired. In the festival, founded in 1869 and held every five years, choirs from all over the nation audition to be part of the 20,000 to 30,000-member chorus that takes the stage and leads the huge crowds that attend.

The music is a mix of modern and traditional folk songs, many of which have what the team calls the kind of oral traditions that are full of hidden, deeply patriotic meaning that sustained Estonians through centuries of oppression. As they investigated the festival itself, they discovered the role that the traditional songs played during the critical years leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union, 1987 through 1991. Rather than engage the Soviets directly, as Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania did, all with disastrous results, the various political groups united in song.

"They never wanted to give the Soviets a reason to arrest or hurt anyone," says Maureen Tusty. Paraphrasing one of the Estonians who survived the brutal years of Soviet gulags, her husband adds, "Art used to be serious when real political participation was not possible," but now, with meaningful political activity allowed, the arts have become trivial and the next generation is not interested in the power of this culture to make a difference.

Beyond that, the filmmakers say the film has a role to play in a world that is getting increasingly violent, particularly a Russia with more aggressive foreign policies. They have assembled a three-disc educational DVD version (available at www.singingrevolution.com), complete with maps and historical data. But, Jim Tusty hastens to add, they are not advocacy filmmakers. "We just believe in this story, which has its own message."

• Los Angeles-based writer Gloria Goodale toured the Tallinn festival grounds in 2007.
Posted by Kevin at 12:38 PM No comments:
Labels: conflict, music, politics, russia, tradition, voice
The changing face of Chicago blues
CS Monitor (see original for photos and video)
The changing face of Chicago blues
Foreign-born players and whites pick up the slack creating a global appeal and expanded songbook.
By Mark Guarino | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

from the November 7, 2008 edition

Chicago - Billy Branch steps off the stage and into the crowd, leaving his band to chug through a 12-bar blues. With a harmonica pressed to his lips, Branch sends light, flirty chirps to a woman, just inches from her face. For a single moment, the hundred or so people at Rosa's Lounge on Chicago's West Side fall silent.

The woman slips into the groove and joins Branch's musical conversation, and everyone around follows her cue.

Branch barks his biography – "I was born in the North, but my heart is in the South!" – and the band guns it. His heels spin to join them.

Here, on a Saturday night in October, it is a familiar conquest: Targeting lips to hips is what makes Chicago blues so enduring. But movement of a different sort, through geography and generation, is what also makes it deceptively complex.

That journey is threatening to jump the track. The music is largely silent in the Chicago neighborhoods where it originated, due to a shuttered club scene that moved audiences to the North Side, near the friendlier confines of Wrigley Field. But more alarming is the increased passing in recent years of aged blues luminaries, an inevitable loss of stories and techniques that connect the music to its fundamental roots.

Today, the Chicago blues scene is in stark transition. Younger blacks are failing to see the music as anything but a relic, leaving an entire tradition largely up for adoption by foreign-born players traveling halfway around the world to learn from the source. Their enthusiasm is helping move the blues from isolated neighborhoods to the global stage, evidenced by Chicago bands that very recently have come to resemble a United Nations portfolio.

This cultural exchange is expanding the music's songbook with stories it never addressed before and is helping create sophisticated players schooled as much in Van Halen and Led Zeppelin as they are in Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. But advocates worry that the flashy guitar tones and studied technique threaten to replace the personal expression that has long made the music profound.

In Chicago, blues music has always lived, not through television documentaries or books, but primarily through people – the Southerners who populated the city's South and West sides and who helped pass the music's foundation on to the next generation. For this reason, the blues has always been a collaborative pact between fathers and sons, uncles and nephews, the grizzled mentors and the eager young followers who sought them out, either from the other side of town or from as far away as Japan.

"There is a crisis," says Tony Mangiullo, owner of Rosa's Lounge, which marks its 25th anniversary next year. Mr. Mangiullo is a record keeper of this turning point in Chicago blues history; he keeps a database of musician deaths, which these days can be every other month. "If we keep losing those important links, it could be catastrophic."

Younger players may neglect in their playing what Eddy Clearwater calls "a spiritual thing." Clearwater arrived in Chicago from Birmingham, Ala., in 1950 when he was 15. (This fall, he released "West Side Strut" [Alligator], his 16th album.) In the '50s, an agent changed his last name from Harrington to Clearwater, a riff on Muddy Waters; Clearwater was honored.

"He's my all-time hero. He took me in. He used to call me son," Clearwater says.

Clearwater embodies the total Chicago sound. His polished performance style is what Waters helped shape on the South Side, but his guitar style – minor chords, gutbucket distortion, raw phrasing – is identified with Magic Sam, Elmore James, and others who developed the West Side sound and whom Clearwater listened to and watched as he grew up.

Back then, music filled those neighbor- hoods when nightclubs and taverns became incubators for experimentation and collaboration, and the dozens of record labels on South Michigan Ave. sent the results to the world.

Today, only a handful of clubs on the South and West sides feature live music – the rest fell victim to the crumbling infrastructure created by the race riots of the 1960s, widespread factory closings, and gentrification. Younger blacks largely turned away from blues and toward music they considered more contemporary: soul and funk.

"All of your blues clubs were in dominant black areas. You didn't hear of a blues club in the white areas. So now it's totally the opposite," Clearwater says. "Now, more white people support the blues. I hope black people realize it's their own heritage."

Branch has held court at the Artist's Lounge on E. 87th St. every Monday for 22 years precisely for this reason: "To keep the music in the community." Also an educator, he has traveled the world since 1978, giving week-long clinics to teach blues harmonica to schoolchildren and show them how the blues can be a relevant mode of expression in their lives.

"The main reason black kids can't grasp onto it is they're not afforded the availability. It's not played on the radio, and you don't see it on television," he says.

How far Chicago blues spread outside its neighborhoods becomes clear upon any visit to a club bandstand. There, the visitor may encounter either Shun Kikuta or Guy King, two guitarists who made a beeline to Chicago from Japan and Israel respectively to learn the music they only knew through recordings. They represent a new generation that sought mentors to learn the music's fundamentals, but would never assume to represent its past.

"We still do play the 12-bar style, but the sound is much heavier. In traditional blues, there's more space between notes. But nowadays, because of the funk and rock influences, that sound is more concentrated," says Kikuta, who came to Chicago in 1990 and now plays guitar for blues luminary Koko Taylor. His recent album connects Chicago blues to his own heritage with the use of a shamisen, a three-string traditional Japanese instrument that dates back to the 16th century.

On "Livin' It" (IBF), his just-released first album, King uses the blues to talk about religion and the battle over land rights in his home country. "Some people will say it's not really blues. But I think the blues has been misinterpreted. They will tell you it's old people's music, but if you think about it, the legends were all young when they made it. Robert Johnson died when he was 28," he says.

As much as Chicago blues is changing to tell new stories or incorporate different sounds, there remain musicians who consider its earliest and simplest incarnation, the pre-electric era of the 1930s and 1940s, as the most relevant.

"I'm burnt out on the electric stuff, it seems what they're doing is headed more towards tourists," says Rick Sherry of Devil in a Woodpile, a trio that for the past 12 years has played every Tuesday night at the Hideout, a cozy bar and music room tucked inside the North Side's industrial corridor.

Long ago the band decided it would play on the floor and not a stage to make the music more intimate. On a recent Tuesday in October, 20-year-olds crowd so close to the band that guitarist Joel Patterson has to lean over while playing so as not to block the line for the bathroom.

Sherry, who plays washboard and clarinet, and kicks a 1916 drum at his feet, gets couples dancing with early 20th-century standards from Charlie Patton, Fats Waller, and others who date back to a time when musicianship was more physical: Players could not rely on amplification to be heard.

"It was like a niche that was untouched," he says. "I'm not stealing anything from anyone. I'm stealing everything from everyone. People like this music."
Posted by Kevin at 12:35 PM No comments:
Labels: blues, music
Country Sensation Taylor Swift: My Music, MySpace, My Life

--------------------
That is all.....

Posts: 8775 | From: USA, MICHIGAN | Registered: Mar 2004  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
WildB
Moderator
Member # 2917

Icon 14 posted      Profile for WildB   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post   Reply With Quote 
Uploaded on Jan 1, 2008
A moving, intensely human testament to the sustaining power of hope and the motivating strength of song, James and Maureen Tusty's The Singing Revolution documents how, between 1987 and 1992, the Estonian people peacefully attained political independence after decades of Soviet occupation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp0h9Z97w1s

--------------------
That is all.....

Posts: 8775 | From: USA, MICHIGAN | Registered: Mar 2004  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator


 
Post New Topic  Post A Reply Close Topic   Feature Topic   Move Topic   Delete Topic next oldest topic   next newest topic
 - Printer-friendly view of this topic
Hop To:

Contact Us | Christian Message Board | Privacy Statement



Powered by Infopop Corporation
UBB.classicTM 6.5.0

Christian Chat Network

New Message Boards - Click Here