Music

Singing the Long Now - Warren Senders and the String Theory Trio - Sat Feb 5 2017

Having known Warren Senders chiefly as a Hindustani vocalist - and having missed all his previous collaborationist ventures - I was not sure of what was in store for this event...I thought it would be mostly Warrens singing set to string music...while the evening did start out with a hymn set to Raga Puriya Dhanashri,  it proceeded in novel and unexpected ways. Warren essayed a wide variety of songs, and almost all of them - whether a Dylan composition or a Pete Seeger melody - seemed to be inflected withulHindustani singling styles. Senders' rich and deep, full-bodied voice carried the tunes and the English words along distinctly shifting Indian vocal registers.

In some ways, however, behind the voice, and the very able instrumentation, was the voice of deep concern and conviction, that of the environmentalist Senders. Many of us have known about his abiding endeavors to establish in all our minds the seriousness of climate change. This time, the Man with the Sign was not at Roosevelt Circle in Medford MA - he was on stage

The reading from Warren's "intersectional activism/performance project" was serious in tone but contained the music of rancorless, frank, truthful expression of concern for the environment, and a reminder of the recent arrival of the human species when compared to the natural world that exists around us.








And all through, as said earlier, the evening was like a river, the main flow that of Warren's pucca/pakka voice...