Tuesday, November 22, 2005

The world's longest song title ever?

A decade ago I thought that one of Paul Simon's song would be the longest song title ever. This title has 77 characters (including whitespace and punctuation) and is

A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission)

A few years ago that changed and I think the longest one belongs to a musical piece of a group called Shakti featuring John McLaughlin, Vikku, Zakir and L. Shankar. The title of this is 117 characters long (including whitespace and punctuation) and is

What Need Have I for this? What Need Have I for that? I am dancing at the feet of my lord, all is bliss, all is bliss

The discography for Shakti (and its recent avtaar "Remember Shakti") is to be found here.

And while we are at Shakti, I'd been to one of the "Remember Shakti" shows in December 2000. The show was at Shanmukhananda Hall, King's Circle. Quite an amazing experience. The show was recorded live and is marketed as an album "Saturday Night In Bombay" (one of the claps you hear in the album could be mine :-)).

My only contention is that L. Shankar (double violin = ten-string violin) got replaced by U. Srinivas(mandolin) as part of the change in "Remember Shakti". Srinivas is mesmerizing on the mandolin (a "foreign" instrument adapted by Srinivas himself to be suitable to play the subtle microtones required in the Carnatic ragas. But, Shankar would have added to the authenticity of the original Shakti. In addition, Vikku is replaced by his son (Selva Ganesh playing Kanjira) in "Remember Shakti".Guess Vikku is busy with his percussion school in Chennai.

A host of others like Shankar Mahadevan and Pt. Bhawani Shankar chip in at appropriate points in the "Remember Shakti" concert.



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