Weekend downtime

What do you do in the weekend? I call it the "weekend downtime" where you do some maintenance activities to refresh yourself and ensure smooth running for the rest of the week. The way I do it is by listening to a lot of music. Had splurged on audio CDs recently, and there's quite a lot of collection in my hand right now. So, What I'll do now is to post one-paragraph reviews about each of them.

John McLaughlin Trio - Que Alegria
Had bought this quite a while ago, when I started to get to know John McLaughlin through my favourite band Shakti. The reason I got attracted to this album, apart from John McLaughlin himself, is because it featured Trilok Gurtu, a famous jazz percussionist. The tracks in this album were pure jazz stuff. I know I'll love it very soon, but unfortunately, I'm still not into the whole jazz genre yet. I'm still in the middle of traversing through instrumental fusion and jazz. I don't like this album a lot yet, it'll have to wait.

John McLaughlin - Friday Night in San Francisco
This is one really amazing album featuring John McLaughlin with another great guitarist Paco De Lucia. John McLaughlin is agressive and shows his explosive qualities in here, producing a lot of fireworks, and Paco De Lucia bridges the explosion with a very sweet, soothing and sonorous acoustic guitar notes. Paco De Lucia is so good that I started listening to him on Pandora. And by the way, several guitar enthusiasts rate this as the best acoustic guitar live performance ever.

Shakti & John McLaughlin - All the hits
This is a money-saver definitive collection 3-CD pack from Sony Music. The 3-CDs are the best albums ever to be released by Shakti in their prime period. They are Natural Elements, A handful of Beauty and John McLaughlin and Shakti. I'm proud of this collection and I listen to this very often. Even though I had access to almost all the mp3s featured in here, I went ahead and bought the original CDs. The beauty of mp3s is that they act like teasers. When you listen to an mp3 and you like the tracks, you should buy the original CD to give the artists the appreciation they deserve. This CD collection is really value for money.

Paco De Lucia - Gold
I've got used to listening to Paco De Lucia's smooth acoustic guitar in pandora, and I loved almost every track he made. This motivated me to try some CD of his. I was strolling through the aisles of the local Music World and hit upon this CD. I used up my HSBC's credit-card points to buy this CD. This is a 2-CD collection and has 25 tracks of solo acoustic guitar. This probably falls in flamenco genre. The music is very rhythmic, and light. Amazing album.

Pure Silk
Happened to know that this music band was performing in Hyderabad from my friend and we had to scramble to ITC to get the tickets. We finally got the tickets after a huge adventure. Anyways, the concert wasn't that great because of of several issues, but for me, the band was an instant hit. I just loved the way Shankar played with music, and how Sivamani enjoyed getting his hands dirty with all his signature sound-ware (I keep wondering how he manages his inventory when he flies from city to city... Or does he have a full set of his ware in every city?). There were Louis Banks, Carl Peters too, but they never made an impact as their instruments were hardly audible. This Pure Silk album is a recording of their live performance at a music concert in London in the year 2000 (They performed better in London than in Hyderabad). The music is lively, modern, urban jazz. A very good find and I'm fond of it.

So, what do you think of it?