The Master and Margarita - 2001
The Tea Party
The Tea Party was a Canadian rock band with blues, progressive rock, Indian and Middle Eastern influences. Active throughout the 1990's up until 2005 when the band broke up, The Tea Party released eight albums on EMI Music Canada, selling 1.6 million records worldwide.
The Interzone Mantras (2001) was the sixth album of the band. Lyrically the album draws from the works of modern writers Aleister Crowley, Mikhail Bulgakov and Wim Wenders. One of the songs was called The Master and Margarita.
Here's the text of a TV-interview with Jeff Martin, frontman of The Tea Party, about why he wrote the song The Master and Margarita:
«Communism didn't work. What it did was take away the rights of the individual and artistic expression and freedom of choice, and freedom of religion, and all these things that should be the right of any soul. So the only way that these artists -- whether they were authors, painters, sculptors or musicians - could criticize the regime that was in place was to use parables, hide their meanings and hopefully someone would get it in an underground sense. So Bulgakov wrote a book called 'The Master and Margarita'. It's a very funny book. Some Russian friends of mine in Montreal did one of the first theatrical productions of the book. It's about Satan himself, who manifests in Moscow in 1926 as the angel of light and he basically teaches all the Muscovites (the joie de vivre), how to enjoy life to the fullest, and in doing so brings down the suppressive government and everything goes back to normal in a very unusal sort of way. That's the philosophical tenet of what I'm trying to say in this song. And in this song, I get to play the devil which is something I do quite well.»
The Tea Party - The Master and Margarita
Jeff Martin (The Tea Party)
Technical details
Album
The Interzone Mantras
Musicians
Jeff Martin - guitar, sitar
Stuart Chatwood - bass, keyboards, mandoline, harmonium
Jeff Burrows - drums, percussion
Label
EMI, 2001