According to the experimental folk artist Mike Cooper, there is a tree in Almuñécar, in Southern Spain, that used to attract hundreds of birds. It inspired him to write the “avante folk” song “The Singing Tree,” off his recently reissued double album Places I Know/The Machine Gun Co. The funky organ that permeates the song alludes to a melange of influences—including the free jazz of Ornette Coleman and Pharaoh Sanders—that drove Cooper’s music in a new direction in the early ’70s, when the track first came out. “The Singing Tree” is memorable and complicated, much like the legendary author Jorge Luis Borges, whose words adorn a plaque at the base of a tree near the beach in Almuñécar today.
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