[Dixielandjazz] Sideman to Musical Ghosts With The Thighbone Trumpet

[Steve barbone]

Hey Bob Romans, found this article just for you in today's NY Times. Right
next to an article about how previously convicted NYC Madam Heidi Fleiss,
was going to open up a brothel FOR WOMEN CUSTOMERS in Nevada.

Take your vitamins. Maybe you and I can get a double gig there. Must be some
old ladies around who appreciate us artists. (or young ones with a
grandfather complex) :-) VBG.

Have you ever played a thighbone trumpet? It is a gruesome looking thing.
Jazz perhaps in both meanings?

Cheers,
Steve

Possessed - Sideman to Musical Ghosts

NY TIMES By DAVID COLMAN - January 8, 2006 - (Excerpted for brevity)

HERE'S a question for you: When did the happy couple art and music split? .
. . .Christian Marclay . . . plays not just with sounds but also with their
sources, a concept nimbly embodied by a 25-foot accordion he constructed in
2000.

But surreal as his works are - suitcases fashioned into speakers, a 10-foot
stack of vinyl LP's, a floor tiled with chrome-shiny CD's (all detailed in a
2005 monograph from Phaidon Press) - he has never been able to outdo a
bizarre antique given him in the late 1970's by his first employer in New
York, an Asian antiques dealer.

"It came from Tibet or India with some things she had bought, and she didn't
want it," he said.

One can imagine why. It is a trumpet made from a human thighbone and
decorated with what might be human hide, which is about as grisly as a wind
instrument gets. And the music it makes: well, the magic flute it's not.

"It sounds like a dying animal," Mr. Marclay offered, demonstrating. He is
correct.

"I'm not a trumpet player," he added.

A ritual instrument of tantric Buddhist monks for more than 1,200 years, the
trumpet, called a kangling, was historically played in tandem with a kind of
hourglass drum called a damaru, made from the tops of two human craniums
stretched with hide. The two instruments were used in a variety of
ceremonies: to make rain come, to drive off fierce spirits.

Scott Farrell, a dealer in tribal artifacts in Sacramento, said the pieces
are becoming hard to find. Mr. Farrell sells kanglings, for about $500, only
to people who use them in the Chod ceremonies of tantric Buddhism. Mr.
Marclay is no Chod practitioner, but the thighbone has been with him for
almost 30 years. 

"I rarely touch it," he said. "It has a weird resonance. It's so plain, so
raw."

And, he added, "when someone gives you a piece of someone else's body, you
just can't throw it away."

As someone who views an LP as a kind of modern fossil, a once-live piece of
music embalmed on a petroleum product, he appreciates the trumpet's link
between music and death. And a recent gift from a friend makes a nice
bookend: a "bone record," a 1960's bootleg from the Soviet Union. Bone
records were made by pressing a record's grooves onto a square of used X-ray
film. On Mr. Marclay's specimen the rib cage of the patient is still
visible. 

As such fossils dwindle - from LP to CD to MP3, each succeeding one simpler
to replay and pass on than the last - it is easy to forget how precious
music once was, an art that, once produced, was gone forever.

"Music is so ephemeral," Mr. Marclay said. "It's usually gone the minute
it's over, so recordings screw up that whole equation." Now, thanks to
technology, the music of pop stars like Ms. Spears will live forever. One
wonders if anything can drive their fierce spirits away.

One more reason to think about turning to Buddhism this year.