Four great artists, four wonderful songs, and three of them instrumentals...
And none of them nominated by me (sorry Stephan but it was Miguel who nominated "Vesoul").
Bracket 7.1
Mulatu Astatke - Yèkèrmo Sèw (Ethiopia, 1974)
Ástor Piazzolla - Oblivion (Argentina, 1984)
So we have on semi-finals two of the musicians that I included on that special edition about '"impressive musicianship." But these were not the most virtuoso musicians, their abilities don't rely on velocity but on inventiveness. Both musicians created new styles mixing previous genres, Mulatu created Ethio-Jazz combining jazz, Ethiopian traditional music and funk grooves and Ástor created Nuevo Tango combining classic tango and classical contemporary music. Piazzolla developed a long and acclaimed career (but oddly more appreciated outside his home country) but Astatke, despite beginning his career during the sixties, remained in relative obscurity until Jim Jarmusch used his music for a soundtrack and doing this discovered the artist for the new generations (for instance next month he will play in Barcelona on Primavera Sound Festival along with musicians like Animal Collective, My Bloody Valentine or Nick Cave).
Why choosing Astatke and not Piazzolla? I really don't know. I love both. Maybe my favourite song by Astatke faces not my favourite song by Piazzolla (albeit a very good one).
Bracket 7.2
Shigeru Umebayashi - Yumeji's Theme (Japan, 2000)
Jacques Brel - Vesoul (Belgium, 1968)
Well, this (wonderful) game is coming to an end. Looking back I can see that I (we) enjoyed a lot of great (and previously unknown) songs from every part of the world. But if I have to choose a continent that I enjoyed less than the others it would be without any doubt Asia. Surely, we had great artists (Ravi Shankar or Ryuichi Sakamoto for instance) or mesmerizing sounds (see that Gamelan song that came to quarter finals) but as a whole these sounds seemed less exciting to me that the ones coming from Africa, America or Europe. Maybe our choices were not the best ones. Or maybe it was just me...
But this got nothing to do with this choice, this is not Asia against Europe, this is Umebayashi against Brel, or more exactly "Yumeji's Theme" against "Vesoul." Or even more exactly restraint against exuberance. My choice? Exuberance, passion, heat. Hot! Hot! Chaud! Chaud!