Customer Reviews

Fool... Bazantar/Sitar

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
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By the 4th movement I found myself far removed from my sense of self in the room. The space around me grew very large and intense. This music is very interesting and penetrating. The fact that this music is of solo performance it astounding to me!

I am fresh from a concert presentation of gryphon-like beast the bazantar. The versatility of this instrument, in Mr. Deutch's most able hands, is quite remarkable. This recording is superb in its ability to place one inside the music. From this recording, from the concert, one gets a sense of vast possibilities and expectations for this instrument.

Fool is a musical exploration of a life as a spiritual path, one version at any rate, a rather saturnine version. I look forward to Mr. Deutsch putting out further recordings so he can expand the mystical vision with some of the irreverence of which he is also capable. Mysticism demands deconstruction to transcend itself. Fool is also a lesson in musicality. Part of the joy of this music is that it feels both unique and connected. We love to place things in categories (we cannot not do this in fact) and while I sit with this I have both the Baudelairean sense of plunging into the abyss of the new yet resonance with and anchoring to many traditions and expressions. As I am writing this I notice the second movement is playing, titled Persival. It includes a golden-ratioed figure-eight-like symbol. Interesting conjunction. Pesrival means "through the middle" or living in the points of conjunction, Whitman's "both in and out of the game. The bazantar is itself a point of intersection.

Mr. Deutsch has proven himself to be, by even the most elementary standards, and absolute master of music. Consider his accomplishments. He achieved proficiency on the sitar; a notoriously difficult instrument to play both physically, and within the conceptual framework of Indian Raga. He developed a system of temperament that unlocks a harmonic potential that allows expressive capacities rare in most music. He designed, using the mathematical framework of his tuning system, a modification and extension of the contrabass that permits unheard of musical potential.

And to top it off, all of the aforementioned exist in service to an artistic vision greater than the sum of its parts. Deutsch creates a sonic landscape with banzatar and sitar that propels the listener into a world unlike any previously experienced. Each piece can be listened to again and again, examined from a purely intellectual perspective, or release oneself into the oceanic visceral experience of the music, and keep finding endless facets. It is a new experience every time you listen.

"Fool" is a masterpiece. My copy is among the greatest treasures of my CD collection.

This music is unique and certainly difficult to describe with words. But I'll give it a go: With his Bazantar, Mark masterfully creates sound and timbre that entwine the exquisite aural resonance with cryptic mystical conjurings, beckoning the mind to relax and open and explore a transcendant tapestry of emotive texture and visionary trance.