Writings about Music

Sea Beatles

George Harrison and Paul McCartney at the Casbah Club in Liverpool

Playing Beatles songs as a blueprint for piano improvisation, there is so much the feeling of the sea, the ocean, in their melodies, harmonies and rhythms; the adventure of seafaring imparted by Liverpool. You feel the lure of the moist salt air, the fresh invigorating breezes soft, sometimes becoming wild tempests, love of nature-women-God.

You might even call them the Sea Beatles in the manner of the Beach Boys...but not the Sea Turtles.

The Beatles making my point overly emphatically and overly literally, hasya rasa being one of many things they executed to perfection and beyond.

Come to think of it, the night I conversed with George Harrison and he sang a raga for me, I now seem to recall him briefly mentioning having gone surfing that day, or at least attempting to surf.

My sense is the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious vocal harmonies of both bands were primarily touched by the Four Freshman who George Martin was exposed to in America. The Beach Boys were already here, of course. Just about every time I hear the Four Freshman, only learning about them in recent years, I register Beatles and Beach Boys before the conscious thought.

I once received a hand signed letter from George Martin and may write about that, too.

- Michael Robinson, December 2022, Los Angeles

 

© 2022 Michael Robinson All rights reserved

 

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Michael Robinson is a Los Angeles-based composer, programmer, pianist and musicologist. His 199 albums include 152 albums for meruvina and 47 albums of piano improvisations. Robinson has been a lecturer at UCLA, Bard College and California State University Long Beach and Dominguez Hills.