Ballpark

I won a couple of tickets to attend a showing of the Universoul Circus, held adjacent to Turner Field, home of the Atlanta Braves. The traveling act takes the traditions of one-ringed schtick and adds multicultural twists and turns, resulting in an energized, beat-driven spectacle. Hip Hop music served as the ritornello of the pulsing evening out, and the people working the sound booth cranked the dials to 11. My ears still ring with aural residue.

My wife and I were two of the three folks under the big top hailing from caucasian backgrounds. Writers interested in culture and ethnicity would have a field day covering this event. This blog, however, is about music - specifically a project of putting music together in the course of a year. I shall focus my comments accordingly.

As we drove the ten miles to the stadium, I had no concept how far out of our everyday ballpark we would be. The experience of being an outsider looking in is entirely positive. I try to find myself in the minority with some regularity; without fail, important life lessons emerge from such situations. With eyes agape and ears perked, I tried my best to push through sensory overload and absorb some of the visual and aural wonder unfolding in front of me. If the arts are like cups of cool water, this event smacked of drinking from a fire hose.

Any notion I have of understanding music is shot to the ground after listening to tonight's songs and sounds. Music is endless, vast, and mysterious. It is folksy and sweet to speak of music as the universal language, but its dialects are numerous and thick with accent. I delight in these possibilities of sound channeling through my ears into my soul. I hope that my music (and I) will never be the same.