two very different uses for "Ambee Dagez"

Sue Cross over in Normandy was just in touch again about another of her "animated recipes" involving music from the Dongas' Rainy Night in the Bell Tent collection. This time it's a marmalade recipe, using the Armenian tune "Ambee Dagez" (featuring my saz a bit more prominently than most of the tracks on that tape). She says:

"...it is perfect because it conveys what I am trying to do with the recipe to show that organic food, cooking and traditional recipes know no boundaries, they all 'feed' into each other. As the Moors brought the bitter orange to Andalucia for perfume and medicinal use and then, as legend has it, a ship laden with fruit was forced into Dundee...marmalade is a true mixture of cultures. I think the music fits really well although I hope you don't mind I snipped off a little at the start to get it to time in with my dancing, whirling fruit. I also put a short piece of Chinese music in the middle when I make the ginger root part of the recipe — I used Chinese organic ginger."


If you've not seen them, her animations for courgette cake and Christmas pudding are here and here, respectively.

Weirdly though, in between her contacting me the first time, and then sending me the Youtube link, I did a quick "Ambee Dagez" search to see if I could find it myself, and I found this, using a different version of the tune, this time played by me with Ryan Biesack (amazing percussionist) and possibly Vincent Miresse at an open mic somewhere in Wisconsin years ago:


It's a bit weird hearing your music and seeing swastikas, to say the least (especially when there are fez's involved) but this seems to have been uploaded by someone genuinely interested in historical film documents rather than some kind of Nazi enthusiast.

In fact I just found another clip whose soundtrack is 32 seconds of me playing saz, and this is the allies rather than the Nazis, so I feel better now...



...damn, there's more of this stuff: