Day: November 23, 2011

Tibetan Buddhism in a Business Suit: LFM Reviews Crazy Wisdom

By Joe Bendel. Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche was a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who embraced the 1960’s counterculture, but could not abide rock & roll. He drank significantly more than he should have, openly and often, but he had no use for drugs. A former monk, Trungpa renounced his robes, developing ways to teach Tibetan Buddhism in the western vernacular. A study in paradoxes, Trungpa’s all too brief life avoided cliché, making him a rich documentary subject in Johanna Demetrakas’ Crazy Wisdom: the Life and Times of Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, which opens this Friday in New York at the Rubin Museum of Art.

A recognized reincarnation, Trungpa was the last of his generation to be entirely educated in Tibet. After the Chinese Communists invaded in 1959, he took a leading role securing the teachings and documents of his faith, personally guiding a group of his fellow monks to safety in India. Living in exile, Trungpa chose to embrace the west, trading his robes for a business suit. It was the start of a transformation that was decidedly controversial with his elders.

Living in Scotland, Trungpa married a young British woman and began teaching Tibetan Buddhism to hippies. For obvious reasons, they were attracted to his “crazy wisdom,” a recognized approach to enlightenment celebrating the eccentric and unconventional, sort of the rough Tibetan Buddhist analog to drunken master martial arts. However, Trungpa liked to keep people guessing.

As one of his students recalls, at the height of the anti-war movement, Trungpa was once asked to comment about aggression in America, to which he replied: “I want to talk about the aggression in this room.” Ouch. He was also evidently a stickler for the Queen’s English, perhaps giving scores of hippies their first elocution lessons. However, the greatest irony must have been the Dorje Kasung, the military drill team he established at Naropa University, the American Buddhist school Trungpa founded in Boulder, Colorado. Continue reading Tibetan Buddhism in a Business Suit: LFM Reviews Crazy Wisdom

YouTube Jukebox: The Legacy of Bert Jansch

By David Ross. Bert Jansch, storied fingerpicker and warble-voiced bard of the British folk movement, died last month at age 67. He achieved quiet glory as a guitar stylist and as guiding light of the folk group Pentangle, in which he was paired with equally legendary guitarist John Renbourn.

Above, Jansch performs “Moonshine,” a lovely tune of his own composition, circa 1975. Here Pentangle performs in the lush first flush of its jazzy, bluesy thirteenth-century folk rock. Jansch is seated to the right, the bearded Renbourn to the left. Jacqui McShee could not sound or look more the part of the British folk chanteuse. Her pale, somber, chinless face is a lovely study in the art of the church altarpiece, lacking only a halo and a swaddled Christ.

Jansch’s influence on Jimmy Page’s acoustic style is unquestionable. Page’s “Black Mountain Side” from Led Zeppelin I is a note-for-note nicking of Jansch’s “Blackwaterside” (here), which appeared on his 1966 album Jack Orion. Jansch was miffed enough to consider suing Page, but he could not afford a legal crusade on a folk guitarist’s salary and let the matter drop. One can easily construe Tolkienian epics like “Stairway to Heaven” and “The Battle of Evermore” (featuring Jansch’s old protégé Sandy Denny) as grand bastardizations of Jansch’s antiquarian interests. Admittedly, Page is the more gifted musician. In this clip, he transforms “Black Mountain Side” into a frenzied druidic raga, achieving an intensity that was well beyond Jansch and Renbourn.

Jansch’s complex, open-tuned stylings equally influenced Nick Drake, the Keats of British folk, in whom the movement’s decade of research and experiment became something new and consummate. As far as I know, there is no extant footage of Drake performing live, but a tune like “Cello Song” (here) gives the feel of his exquisite little nocturnes.

To have schooled both Jimmy Page and Nick Drake is to have helped midwife the music of the twentieth century. I hope that Jansch, his work done, rests where he belongs, in some old churchyard, amid the moss and weathered stone.

Posted on November 23rd, 2011 at 11:31am.