This CD is going to come in that nice-looking pasteboard packaging, like those world music recordings that used to be all over the place. It (a) seems to last longer (b) looks classier (c) feels better and (d) involves less plastic. We're getting the good kind, with a spine, so you can still find it in a rack.
The downside is, there's a bit less room for written information than in a standard 4-panel booklet insert. To make up for it, we're putting some stuff
on the web. Here's a first draft of what I'm writing about one of the stories.
Something about Storytelling
Four Friends and a Tiger
Some of our favorite stories came from India. So far, we've recorded The King and the Thrush, "Jackel's Pond," and "ToeBone."
Often these stories exist in written form pretty much by accident. For example, maybe a 19th century Englishman was out in the colonies on some imperial or scholarly errand-- cataloging ethnic groups, watersheds and raw materials, for example, or doing an esoteric investigation into the origins of language--
and he jotted some tales down in passing to illustrate some point. Maybe one or two of these stories later showed up in rudimentary form in some specialist newsletter of Oriental studies or popular antiquities. Maybe a headmaster with an interest in folklore saw them there, and retold a few for his students, and then maybe later he wrote them up
and brought them out in (now long out-of-print)
book for children. Just, for example.
Four Friends and a Tiger, on the other hand, is from one of the great texts of the ancient world, the Panchatantra. Written in Sanscrit perhaps as early as the 3d century BCE,
it probably contains material much older than that. It's generally acknowledged as the grandfather of The Arabian Nights, both in its "nested tales" structure and much of its content. Some of the stories show up as Fables of both Aesop and LaFontaine.
We translate "Brahmin" as "Scholar." Obviously, there's more to it than that-- it's a caste of hereditary priests-- but it is one true meaning for the term. Today's rising price of higher education helps the tale's hint of
caste-resentment
survive translation.
We've been delivering several of the lines operatically big -- "let's do it," "rich and famous"-- for years, with mixed results. Some of our audiences get a kick out of the extreme styling, others have looked uncomfortable. (Paul Reiser on opera: "I always feel like I'm being scolded.") A few days before recording, almost absent-mindedly, we tuned the shouting into singing, and all of a sudden everybody was easy with it.
I love pounding my chest like a gorilla, near the end. It's one of my favorite things to do. It kind of sums up the characters and their motivations.
Panchatantra has gone through lots of cultures, taking on the flavor of each.
We turned one of the aphorisms at the end into a song. The original is scornful about the pursuit of knowledge. Leanne created something newer, truer, and well within the spirit of the tale. I think it's a brilliant folk saying:
Science may cure ignorance--
But the more you know
the more you need
common sense.
