You Tube Gold: Two Brilliant Performances

One of the great things about music is that musicians steal. And we mean that jovially because another way of saying it is that people are influenced by other cultures and ideas. If you listen to Scott Joplin you hear classical influence. If you listen to Django Rheinhardt, you hear Roma and jazz coming together to do something astonishing. In his song Hung It Up, Junior Brown does riffs borrowed from a bunch of his favorite guitarists, including Bill Haley, Dick Dale and Jimmy Hendrix.

There is an ocean of music in the world and the Internet has taken every style to every city and hamlet around the planet.

Even so, we weren't really prepared for what this woman does.

She plays an instrument called a gayageum. In Asian music, there are several versions of the instrument but all use one hand to pick and one hand for vibrato or bending the notes. It’s hauntingly beautiful. There really is no Western equivalent to it.

She is brilliant enough to be able to translate Sultans of Swing, by Dire Straits, to her gayageum.

It’s a tough piece to play on guitar and it can’t easy on a gayageum.

For bonus points, she pulls off -with aplomb - Johnny B. Goode.