My father's just bought a turntable which converts LPs into MP3s, so some of the records I loved as a child are finding their way back into my life. Joyful discovery! The most joyful - deliriously - is Gheorghe Zamfir, whose flights of panflute fancy to a background of hysterical fiddlers, zitherists (is that a word?) and accordionists are hard to beat.I haven't listened to these records in many years, and ironically Zamfir's folk music now calls to mind not the Romanian countryside but that of Japan's Tohoku: the city-raised protagonist of Takahata Isao's "Omohide Poroporo," who decides to spend a summer working on a farm in Yamagata, is met at the train station by a man (her future love) who rhapsodizes about organic farming as he drives her into valleys of perfectly terraced rice paddies - to music by Gheorghe Zamfir! (My sense of Romanian folk culture, in the meanwhile, has been colored by the reactionary fantasies of Mircea Eliade.)
MP3 conversion means that, if you've never heard Zamfir, I might be able to send you a track. (Or Paco de Lucia, or the Trientiner Bergsteigerchor, or Errol Garner's Concert by the Sea, or the Orff Weihnachtsgeschichte.)
