Still Too Young To Die

One of the good things about globalisation is that, in addition to watching a dance troupe from Senegal performing Turkish folk dances on TV last week, I was able to see Jethro Tull in Ankara last night. It was nice to see that Ian Anderson, at sixty, is still too young to die and by no means too old to rock and roll—he still does his leprechaun dance and indeed looked fitter and more energetic than most of my students. Musically, it was a great performance, with a strong bias to the early stuff, with a lot of tracks from This Was, plus, of course, Thick As A Brick and Aqualung. Anderson's patter was also on form:

[Introducing "Dharma for One" ...]
"Back in the days when your parents listened to this kind of stuff, we had things called drum solos."
[Introducing "Bouree" ...]
"Unfortunately it got turned into light cocktail jazz, the kind of Bach you'd hear on a cruise ship."
[Introducing "Thick as a Brick" ...]
"Remember 1972? That was a funny year. Well, of course you don't remember 1972. I suppose some of you might have been an uneasy stirring in the womb then. Anyway, this is what they called ‘progressive rock’, but I think it's just a nice little tune."