Time Out Ten
Clouds
For this item you need to be able to stop for ten minutes.
We are often moving on to the next job, the next meeting, scrolling down social media, taking the next call ......'Time Out Ten' asks you to stop for ten minutes and listen to a particular piece of music; to find a time when you won't be interrupted, when you can put in/on your headphones and chill out. Ten minutes isn't long.
Rows and floes of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I've looked at clouds that way
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(Joni Mitchell Both Sides Now)
When was the last time you stopped and looked at clouds? Tried to see images in them?
For this month's Time Out Ten, here is a reminder that just as you need to 'stop and smell the roses', from time to time, you might stop and look at clouds too.
Guitarist Django Reinhardt recorded his composition Nuages (Clouds) in 1940. 'He made two recordings of Nuages in F major, and with a clarinet melody. (Some later recordings are in G major, perhaps to suit the violin.) Unhappy with the first recording, Reinhardt added a second clarinet, creating a renowned arrangement for the December 1940 recording.'
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Django recorded at least thirteen versions of Nuages, and his Hot Club of France partner violinist Stéphane Grappelli has recorded the tune many times too. The version I have chosen for our ten minutes time out comes from an album Skol recorded live in Copenhagen in 1979 with Stéphane Grappelli, Oscar Peterson (piano); Joe Pass (guitar); Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen (bass) and Mickey Roker (drums).
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Listen to it here.
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I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all
