Silk Road

Knitting happened this weekend. Really. It did. Here's proof.

Admittedly, mostly geeky things. I promise I'll dissect them later.

What really happened this weekend was the CSO Family Concert by the The Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma at Symphony Center. I've been stumbling around for words to describe the experience. It has to be words, because Symphony Center doesn't allow cameras. Breathless comes to mind. Mesmerized. Amazed. Instructed. Transported.

This (I think) was the program:

Sandeep Das, Shristi - A percussion piece (it was incredible), performed by 4 or 5 artists on dozens of drums and their variations ;

Story #1 (Creation), Ben Haggarty (Storyteller Extraordinaire!) - The tale of how Brahma fell asleep and his father/brother/son turned into a wild boar and saved creation;

Kayhan Kalhor, Mountains Are Far Away;

Chinese traditional, Galloping Horses;

Story #2, Ben Haggarty - Tibetan story of the Horse-headed King, who was also (really?) a Bodhisattva;

Improv, Ko Umezaki, Wu Tong, Dong-Won Kim;

Story #3 (Saryashki), Ben Haggarty - How the Tibetan Merchants in the previous story were washed onto an island of demons and saved by the Horse-headed King;

Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, Paths of Parables: The Father, the Son and the Donkey;

Story #4 Ben Haggarty - The Story of Hodja and the Donkey;

Night at the Caravanserei .

Here are pictures that convey a little of the experience. These are from performances at the Peabody Essex Museum. I couldn't find any good ones of Silk Road Chicago.

I found this on YouTube. It conveys (a little) of where we went for an hour or so on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of Chicago.

I know some of the excitement was because Yo-Yo Ma is one of the members. Some of it was due to Clare taking a flying escape from her end of semester responsibilities. Marco and John, as long-time fans-in-the-sense-of-fanatics of CSO Family Concerts, added their contribution.

I'm not sure why, two days later, I'm wandering around, thinking I smell spices on a dry desert wind.