I founded now this note ...

Lamento di Tristano… De Trilport… Taqsim di Tristano… The Arrival of the Khevsoor in Tiblisi…

Lamento di Tristano comes from a late 14th Century Italian manuscript now in the British Museum. Roger learned it from a recording by the great French musician Henri Agnel. De Trilport is a Breton tune from Alan Stivell by way of French-Algerian guitarist Pierre Bensusan’s recording Pres de Paris. A quasi-Arabic taqsim, or improvisation, follows, leading into a composition of Chipper’s, inspired by this quote from The SecretHistory of the Sword, by J. Christoph Amberger (Burbank, CA: Multi-Media Books, 1998):

“In 1915, a year after the outbreak of World War I, the citizens of Tblisi woke up to watch a troop of mounted warriors ride down the cobble-stoned streets. They were armed with rusty chain armor, sword and buckler (small shield), and carried rifles of amazing antiquity. They called themselves the Khevsoor. Their mission: upon learning that their czar was at war, they wanted to put their swords at his disposal.

These men hailed from a remote region of the Caucasus – an area cut off from the outside world by ice and snow for a full nine months out of each year. The Khevsoor considered themselves the direct descendants of a party of crusaders who got separated from a larger army and got stranded in this remote area.”

American adventurer Richard Halliburton (1900-39) reported meeting the Khevsoor in 1935 in what is now the Republic of Georgia. He claimed to have detected fragments of French and German in their dialect, which was otherwise unintelligible to him, and to have witnessed a crouching sword and buckler duel between two mail-clad semi-belligerents “…well oiled on home made barley brandy…”, which ended with no injury more serious than a bruise! Seven League Boots, by Richard Halliburton (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill Co. 1935)

Chipper’s tune is the result of his imagining the Khevsoor’s crossing on horseback into the 20th century that morning in Tblisi….

Source: http://www.janissarystomp.com/notas.html