Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World) is the title of this strange and beautiful portrait by Leonardo. I suppose it’s a rarity to come across Christ holding a crystal ball, not to mention finding his fingers in such a mudra-like position. What really lends this one the otherworldliness I love so much is the blending of the masculine and feminine- from the face to the hair to the chest- mirrored on the horizontal and on the vertical- the alchemistic marriage of opposites creating something anew. He/she’s been staring at me all day so I had to do something about it.
I’ll jump start this post with a quote by my main man Mr Tesla himself and follow it up with an image of the man himself seated calmly in his workshop whilst a bolt of lightning shoots out.
What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife… Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment… Nikola Tesla
I suppose one of the things I try to do on this blog is squeeze the juice out of my work and offer the essence as best and as concisely as I can (admittedly I have been caught ranting on about spirals and overtones but I to this day can still barely contain my excitement). If I do scream out with joy it is still done quietly and succinctly- after all, here in my little world, we all speak softly- there’s enough noise, excess, and hot air outside.
Were I to put my interior work from the last few years into a tiny nutshell or the inside of a grape it would sound something like this: a simple saxophone chord of spiraling 6ths like the ones I have posted so often before. Behind this however is my main internal work: understanding consciousness as matter and vica versa. This brings with it a whole host of tantalizing side trails which permeate our reality. Bit by bit I am getting closer to this point of understanding. Through sound. Through numbers. I’ve been given some beautiful keys in the form of sound to help me with this work and herein lies for me the chance to raise the bar regarding our perception of the universe around us. That is what drives me now. That is the drop of compressed juice I can offer you from the last few years of fruit picking.
Back to the now. Contrasts abounded in the last 3 days. In Barcelona I was lucky to improvise to the films of Martha Colburn. Goodness me! Her films were so dam amazing it was not easy to play. It was like being inside someone else’s dreams and it was quite a ride.
Not even 24 hours later I’m close to the Netherlands playing Trio jazz- it’s a jazz meets art affair and yes, a dear old gentleman is painting semi realistic portraits of us. Thanks to Martha though all I see is blood, spiders, breasts, wolves, indians and sunsets behind battlefields as Loverman seeps from my horn, or as Ahmet Shabo might say, building slowly and gracefully around the melodic foam that froths over regularly from their horns’ rims.
Let me tie up this baby with the words of a soft speaker. Lester Young himself:
Readers, I would like to share a short film from the first date my sruti box and alto went out on together with myself mediating the proceedings. P4 Studios Berlin, June 16, 2010. The High res version is right here. Low youtube res for New Zealand modems here.
Why not mosey on over to the video section of this blog where I just uploaded a sax trio piece from the last festival with Michael Moore, Frank Gratkowski, and your author wearing the pink neckstrap. Full screen version here.
Barcelona is awash in orange light from the sun peeping piercing through the light diesel fog. My eyes are relieved by the sunlight at least- the bright pinks and reds and violets of the cheap airlines I frequent combine to form one massive homogenous mass of fluorescent sensory bombardment- add in the ceaseless advertisements and light house music that a certain yellow colored company plays on board and you have a delightfully challenging way to travel.
In the flight today I was perusing through some Stockhausen CD texts. On some of them you are really not sure if someone is pulling your leg or not. This gem from the truly bizarre liner notes to “In Freundschaft”
“Any set of sensitive ears hooked up to a sensibly sensible brain and mind will open up the world of IN FREUNDSCHAFT to the splendor of Stephens’ garlands of spiraling basset-horn tones, in waves and vibrations of compressions from the shifting pillar of air inside her instrument.”
I also read that Stahlheinz claimed to be a great bebop pianist and could “make any party dance”. How I would have loved to play some bebop with him in waves with the shifting column of air inside my horn and my sensibly sensible brain.
Finishing on a light note here is my cover version of a Catalan football commentators build up to yet another Messi goal, spoken and screamed into my computer lap top using naught but sensible garlands of spiraling improvisational fervor all brought about by the cascading orange light and scent of greasy tortilla around me. Para disfrutar, Chicos:
There are some ragas that are charged and infused with a quality I can best describe as hope. This is one of them, Dhun, played by Hariprasad.
M.G. Blues by Jimmy McGriff for a lucky day indeed. The reverse glissandi pepper the swing delightfully. May you ease into the Russian new year in style with this compact masterpiece, wherever you are.
Allow me to follow up this year’s first full moon by holding my tiny little metaphoric microscope to a song by Fats Waller which accompanies me of late. There is something beautiful and something tragic about a certain moment 1 minute into the piece when he says to the clarinetist, shortly before his austere and pretty solo, now get on out there and tell your lie, what is it? – something close to the human condition with the full moon’s shadow cast back onto it.
Dear Readers, I am off to hibernate in absurd places and wish you all a peaceful new rotation around our home star. I look forward to supplying you with all the beauty I can find in 2012- as far as music goes, music that really matters to me- it will be a big year and one I have prepared for long in advance. By the time of the first full moon of next year I shall be back with you, laden with goodies and messages from the silver goddess. May she bless you all.
I leave you with one of my last tracks which fairly accurately describes how I tick of late.
Prelude to a Bliss Download
My favorite photo from this year captured with my dear minolta x700 is this one- it happens to be of my favorite bridge on a certain mediterranean island- dear to me because it
-leads to nowhere
-leads to everywhere
-divides the blues perfectly
-squeaks and creeks when you tread on it and sports many a missing plank
-points to the goal.
Here she is:
Carrying on the other day’s topic of undisputed and perhaps lesser known kings of a genre I turn my sonic telescope back to the plains of Armenia. For insiders, he is the man of Duduk- Vatche Hovsepian. Others are in the meantime more famous but he still holds the throne made of apricot wood and stained with the tears of generations. The way things are going I will finally make it to this place in 2012 with my brother in Bach, Koryun Asatryan. This is Odaramayi Jampeki Vra:
The music of a Serbian Gypsy gentleman by the name of Saban Bajramovic has been lessening the pains of modern existence for me of late. He is known as the King of the Gypsies and he fully deserves the title.A beautiful voice wailing over vastly differing songs. I picked one out which I thought to be representative of their musical world. I heard someone call a particular type of improv music in Germany “Berlin reductionism” – I had to laugh and thinking of another ism to use for this genre, I settled on “No fxxking bullshitism”
Saban sings it like it is (and don’t underestimate the dexterity of the accordionists right hand):
Travel isn’t what it used to be and you have to in the mean time have a zen-like demeanor to get through and retain your peace of mind and dignity. More often than not I am given a nice little extra rub down and my Saxophone examined. Recently I made a complete inventory of my case to speed up the process. Little survivor items from left to right:
Thin Japanese incense Sticks
Peruvian Palo Santo Wood
Rose Quartz
Pink and Black neckstrap – hey, my mood could go any way.
Key oil
Sand paper
Reeds, sealed and deflowered.
Sandelwood oil
Cederwood oil
Mouth Harp
Reed cuter
Tooth paste
Business cards (in case a tourist group finds my sax they can each take a business card)
More reeds and watch.
My travel tips are simple- travel light with hand baggage only, keep breathing regular at all times and drink plenty of fine wine water, try to have fun with the pat down team (imagine changing jobs for a day), and make the most of the view from the top side of clouds.
One man who has documented the pains of modern travel better than most is Jochen Rueckert, whose writings are a timeless ode to the bane of our profession. You can’t beat him when it comes to knowledge of different airplanes and flight procedures. Certainly, this man has an eye for detail. His second volume of travel writing is already out.
I had posted this incredible piece once before but I’m doing it again because is with me so often and I believe it to be one of the most important works from last century. No matter whether you are into just intonation or not this work is a wonderful vehicle for leaving the physical playing of the piano and entering the overtone space above- it is a different kind of hearing in which the overtones dance and the playing simply supports it. It’s not so easy to realize in most modern musics because of the speed and tuning. Once you hit it, and I think anyone could by around the 7th minute in this piece by Le Monte Young, you can stay there for the whole journey. It is a relaxed state of hearing, without the usual focus or aural “looking”. “The Well Tuned Piano”
In a bit of a doodling phase again- the state of emptiness after finishing something in which the new begins. Been listening to some different musics and doodling too it. When I do this I usually come up with something like this, in the mean time I have books filled with them:
Let me give up my quote of the day:
“The man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures and acknowledging unity with the universe of things, was infusing into his being the true essence of civilisation” – Luther Standing Bear
Stumbled across a beautiful western raga in just intonation for violin and double bass- Plainsound Glissando Modulation by Wolfgang von Schweinitz. The more I soar with overtones the more I love to hear them sing out from other instruments. If we could return to the overtone core of the keys and still keep our flexibility in transposition…. Here is one movement:
I think it is worth taking the time to dive into these natural sound worlds which are far removed from the equal temperament we are usually bombarded with. -Let me give you a fantastic quote by Gareth Loy to get things going: “The equal-tempered scale inherits nearly all the important components of the Pythagorean scale and can also transpose. Now every key sounds as in tune (or out of tune), as every other key, just as we wanted, but at the expense of the pure integer ratios, which have been virtually banished. It is somewhat reminiscent of the modem practice where an oak grove is ripped out to build a shop- ping center and then the shopping center is named Oak Grove. We are left with the impression of the pure intervals but not with their reality. We get the advantage of the modem conveniences (transposition) but at the expense of the reason we wanted it. Isn’t it interesting that not even music is immune to the inevitable downside of technological advance? The moral: nothing is free.”
This is your humble author kissing an Albanian film/music star I had fallen deeply in love with- it was a mixture of her voice and her perfume, so enigmatic, she seems to be everywhere. And Cossette, nestled in my left arm didn’t even seem to mind.
Here is an excerpt with piece of music I wrote for a Rebecca Horn film- a 12 tone piece in which the row forms the harmonies played by the piano after the clarinet leads. The film “Moon Mirror Journey” is now on camelback and well into the desert of it’s sufi journey skywards.
Simon Nabatov-Piano, Claudio Bohorquez-Cello, Gareth Lubbe-Viola, HC-clarinet.
This wee baby is about spirals, the earth, and Love in Numbers.
I know that of late I have been piping on like a broken record on the theme of spirals, golden this and that, and the idea of self-similarity. Now what the bleep is self- similarity, I was politely asked the other day. And how happy I was to find a beautiful example of it coming from my homeland- a piece of a fern which speaks volumes and needs no explanation. Get it now, honey?
I just finished my “spiral work” Love in Numbers and want to give out the first and last paragraphs from the introduction I wrote:
“LOVE IN NUMBERS (The secret of the Sixths)
“If you want to understand the Universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” Nikola Tesla
This work is about the marriage of two universal creative principles expressed through sound: the harmonic series, and the growth series more commonly known as the Fibonacci series. Their point of intersection is a fascinating one, both mathematically and musically. The harmonic series is perhaps more familiar to lovers of music but the way in which the Fibonacci series interacts with the overtones reveals much more to the listener regarding the nature of self-similarity, organic growth, inter-dimensional relationship and micro-macrocosm similarity….
…finally, the third creative principle, and the one that in certainty rivals the force of the other two, is contained in the title of this work. Overused as a word, perhaps underused as a principal, it is the one of the three creative forces unique in its form to the resonant blue/green sphere this work springs from. Bless her soul.”
Now, some years ago I would have been a little too coy to write something like that but through all my travels and seeing first hand how we have treated our planet and I am more than ready to stand up and speak out for her now. I feel her more and more as a living organism and I am even ready to put her in front of us and to say that the last few thousand years of human history, marked and stained by the religions I need not name who place man in smug dominion over her- have been, as the great Sarah Palin would put it, a “travesty” of justice for our dear Gaia.
Looking out the plane window the other night en route from Tirana to Vienna, I could see the beautiful open sky, the crescent moon, the soft clouds, the sphere below, the stars above- all in such a perfect equilibrium. How much we take for granted on this place.
I give you the first few chords from the final version of Love in Numbers. When I hear these I think of her and how much I love her:
Tirana is awash with Autumn reds
small oceans of flags decorate the boulevards
Independence day today and the loud speakers relish their big day out
The language sounds pleasing and umlauts abound, framed with soft consonants
The espresso is brown, strong, and pleasing
Cheese pastries and liquid yogurt- balkan snack par excellence
The spectacle of Nationalism is hazy and impressionist without my contact lenses
Stark red and black against the trees’ orange
And there are so many songs being played at the same time
It’s as if Stockhausen had been commissioned for National day in Tirana, 2011.
An Albanian song with the singer Eda Zari I played on recently….
This post is about bigbands, surfing, uniforms, tattoos, Tai Chi, the galactic alignment, lining other things up,and the perfect song tempo,
Firstly let me say upfront that where I come from we wear our tattoos on the inside. Now with that out of the way let’s move on to big bands.
It was early 1997. I had just finished a week’s work as a soloist with a certain European Radio Big Band. The realization of this pit of abject musicianship had plunged me into a fit of despair. I had glimpsed the empty void of jazz professionalism for the first time- I had tasted and had to swallow it in one of it’s classic and ugliest forms. I took the copious fee, flew to the gold coast of Australia, put a mattress in the back of my station wagon, and started surfing. The shitty trumpet punches and sleazy sax lines with their soft reeds, shiny metal mouthpieces, and unsurmountable tax/copyright knowledge disappeared behind the wave’s wake. And then something more important happened.
Let me back up some. For the 3 years before that I had started “Tai Chi” in Germany. They took it very seriously and everyone had nice black silk shirts on right from the word go. Chinese “masters” (also in silk shirts, but somehow even more elaborate” would visit regularly and display their “chi” by pushing back 10 students at a time, drawing gasps of awe from the students. The floors were polished wood. The membership wasn’t cheap. The expressions were serious. People were trying hard. Even my loud motorbike parked outside was frowned upon.
Boy was I in for surprise when my cousin took me to a different Tai Chi school on the gold coast. The dudes all casually met in a parking house wearing their jeans and t shirts. No one pretended to be a “master” though their were clearly some of them around. Everyone helped each other. Training went on as long as everybody wanted. There was massively understated strength in this garage.
I returned some more times. Sometimes they met in the park- sometimes on the beach. It turned out that the guys who were helping me were the dudes, so to speak. Wally was an expert on Chinese medicine and the classes went deep into meridians and healing. These few classes changed my life and theirs is the school I want to endorse with all my heart today. In the meantime it is a worldwide network of like minded souls which has been set up by the man who led that first parking house session, Erle Montaigue.
The deeper these guys had gone, the more deadly the strikes and power they had developed, the more interested they were in the healing sides of the art. And the way the school was set up in which all levels were always present influenced me greatly. In short it’s a great example of antipodean get-down-and-do-it cutting to the point. In short Erle was one of the very few to graft the ancient roots into our times, without pomp and ceremony- take your polished floors and put them where the sun don’t shine.
In short, my old class:
And my new teacher:
The difference between these schools is that one deals with the essence and makes no fuss about it and the other does the opposite. It’s about the essence.
Sadly Erle passed away this year, but he leaves behind him a massive legacy and his teaching survives. Here’s a classic example of one of his home made instruction tapes- one of many from oz where you can hear some great birds in the background. The system lines up body/mind/spirit which allows greater forces to flow through us- now doesn’t that ring a musical bell somewhere.
In ideal world and in my ideal school, we don’t simply play, we channel. I have written very little on this and there is no need now as we simply work on the tools to line everything up- refining intonation, deepening the breath. The rest falls into place. The whole idea of lining things up does set my mind going though.
I read the other day that 49 octaves of transposition of our piano range are enough to reach light. Must check that. Apparently, around the time I write, our rising sun is or is becoming extremely close to the central point in our milky way, forming a straight line between us on our outer spiral (ops, sorry, I wanted to write one post without using that word), the sun, and this point in the middle of our galaxy, thought of by the Mayans as being the cosmic womb, our place of origin. A chance to line things up well good, mate? Now for some reason that got me thinking about things lining up in a song- a song was playing as I wrote this in which the perfect tempo, perfect timbre, perfect arrangement came together to let the piece really sing out. If the universe can have its breath in and breath out, its night and its day, then so can we:
Let me introduce you to my overtone cockpit. This kind of protective clothing is advisable as cosmic winds can get quite blustery. I find it is also an excellent replacement for espresso- it gives one quite a kick.
I have been recording with Pedja my monochords to go with some of the (you guessed it) Fibonacci spiral chords. It sounds not too shabby at all:
The beautiful golden carpet you see here is what the Germans call Laub- a word I have written about before on this blog- one of those which find no equivalent in English and successfully capture so much of what it describes in the sound itself. Now is the season for dear Laub, and the change in energy that comes with it is like a larger version of what happens at dusk. I love this time of year and it fills me with hope and energy- if you’ve been reading some of these number orientated posts below you could perhaps imagine that no matter where I look, whether skywards or laub-wards, I see spirals everywhere. I have glimpsed the edge of the number abyss plunging into infinity and felt the madness creeping up from within but walking through a lush scene of Laub brings be back to this place profoundly. Searching for a track to go with this feeling of liberation and peace I offer Warne Marsh’sI can’t give you anything but love
Since diving into the sea of numbers some months ago one of my main obsessions has been the spiral form. Over and over one comes across the DNA double helix form and I have in my dreams been moving in and out of it deep in the night. Suddenly, after my perception shrunk to around the size of a carbon atom, I could see the form of the fibonacci spiral in the double helix itself- a matter of perspective and nothing more. May sound simple but it was a revealtion for me. This image roughly gives off what I mean. It was a thrilling experience that still elates me.
This little baby I named the Fibonacci Raga. It is created with my alto, a sruti box, and my voice. The raga itself returns back to the 5th, 8th, 13th, and 21st overtone of C, the fundamental. It is another way in which I am exploring this glorious sequence with my copper and reed, reaching up into the majestic firmament fretted with golden fire as best I can. Recorded by Pedja Avramovic in Studio P4 Berlin but one moon ago:
And just a little cosmic tag: a long exposure shot of our milky way spiral seen from Argentina through the night I recently came across. Goodness me!
How lucky I was yesterday to stand in the flesh for long minutes on end in front of this object of beauty:
L’empire des lumiéres (The Dominion of Light).
Painted in 1954 by Mr Magritte and gifted with a magical translation, dominion evoking so much more for me than empire with regard to light. The work is one of many he painted in which natural light from the sky meets with man’s interjection into darkness below, this time in the form of a solitary street lamp, light through a window, and their reflection of the water in the foreground. As if someone had expanded the the dusk in reverse directions and frozen the result, stretching magic and imagination to breaking point and yet framing it in the most normal scene of all. There are no humans to be seen, only their traces, and the dominions of heaven and man are evenly split, with only the trees piercing through to the sky. Something about this work really got me.
A few weeks ago in the P4 Studio in Berlin- just for the purgatory of it- I recorded some of the Stockhausen Zodiac melodies. The room is a beautiful one and I have written about it already- I suppose that aside from the proportions of the room, it is the nature of the wood that gives it such warmth. The way the wood resonates with the waves from the saxophone is fascinating indeed. There are two other rooms I remember having these magical qualities- the tiny courthouse in the Irish village of Tillaheney and the old literature club of poets in Moscow- both wooden constructs which seemed to sing together with my horn. Of course we’ve all played in wooden concert halls with beautiful sounds but these are smaller spaces with differing types of woods that really seemed to lift the saxophone sound in such a powerful way and I’m not talking about reverb here- simply timbre.
Back to the works. There’s something magical in these melodies. I have, in the spirit of where I come from, interpreted them rather freely. Having said that, I have listened a lot to the original versions for music boxes (wonderful tiny creations if you ever get your hands on one) and so over the years they have seeped into my psyche. Here are Aquarius, Gemini, and Pisces. Aquarius and Gemini as that is my own cosmic hood, and Pisces going out to my numerous buddies born on March 11.
Recording engineer Pedja Avramovic. 2 room Schoeps microphones ,the P4 room, and a wet reed:
A track I’ve had on and off for the last few days is one weilding once again enormous cajones in the most laid back of ways- Shine on Harvest Moon with Coleman and Ben- and not forgettting Mr Hihat himself. Shine on:
Readers, I must share an amusing revelation I had today. From December I will be changing somewhat my life and organization to a 13 month moon based calendar. This has to do with a host of factors which I will write about towards the end of the year in detail relating to my harmonic/number work and the situation on this planet right now in general. In short for now: I have been writing in my new 13 month calendar over the old 12 month one I had always used and I had to laugh to myself as it felt exactly the same as what I have been doing for the last few months in sound, calculating overtones and fibonacci spirals over our tempered musical system and using cent deviations to make them playable. The two tasks are o so closely related but I would never have thought of this a year ago. I look forward to the day when we can throw away these antiquated relics for good, our two dimensional artificial grids over nature’s fractal beauty, or at least frame them for future museums and have a good chuckle about the old barbarian days when we used to rape the earth to power our cars and waterboard our brothers.
On another lighter note, I once collected absurdities from my travels until I realized it would easily become a full time job and stopped. Once in a while though I see something which cries out for documentation. Here is one from Naples yesterday.
There’s one album cover made by a couple of old mates of mine I’ve always liked and often when I’m in cities I often remember it. On it, an old man smokes his long pipe as some business penguins hustle on by behind a surreal statue. A small isle of peace amongst the sound and fury. Funny how some images stick with you over the years.
After many a year I am back in Napoli for another project. As I write I look out on the bay with the sleeping Vesuvius waiting patiently. The sky is a deep blue but the one thing I have in my mind is blacker than the very depths of hell. It is also hot, bitter, and magic- in this place at least. What I loved about being here is that there is no doubt as to the quality of the coffee- you can rest assured that every dive will have first class espresso with a tiny cup hotter than hell itself, a fine nose, and a scintillating caffeine curve which will land you nicely a couple of hours later just in time for the next one. It’s been one of the last unsolved mysteries of my life, why others simply cannot get it together like they do here – at the same time a lesson in compromise- no matter where you are there will always be short ends of the stick in abundance- thank goddess espresso is not one of those sticks as it gives one the foundation to build a decent day upon. Things going wrong? Simply slap down your euro coin in the next bar and get the magic darkness inside yourself. One must chose one’s vices carefully and long ago I settled on this one. And a funny little coda for this post- I would never have expected it all those years ago when I left my home island that it would become the one place I know of that rivals this place in terms of coffee quality across the board. Amazing the joy that can come from a tiny bean, wiring bipeds the world over. Still remains a bit of a capitalist drug mind you- in the long term the white-tea sipping Chinese will surely overcome the wired, nervous gringos with their plummeting stocks and ailing hearts.
‘Twas a beautiful few days of music in Cologne. Mr Zoubek was on fire and his performances will remain in our memories for some time to come.
Back on the road now and so perhaps a good time to link to the new book of Mr Rückert which includes photography and stories from the the world over. As I’ve written before, the drummer spares no punches when it comes to describing the full spectrum of absurdity, insult, horror, and tedium inflicted on the modern touring musician. And no folks, believe me it is not getting any better. This time round there is a particularly appealing chapter. As I may have mentioned, a certain Jazz group I play in won the “BMW Jazz award” earlier this year. Now, in the general spirit of this blog I restrained myself from ripping the guts out of the spectacle and instead spent the modest prize money on some monochords in Munich, sealed my lips, and locked away my pen. Not so our drummer and so I quote in length. Enjoy the BMW Jazz competition in all it’s wondrous glory through the eyes of Mr Rückert. (The book one long delight- support the artist by getting a copy from his site here)
“Feeling lucky and hoping that your luck won’t run out during your flight back to Munich, you board the Continental 757-200 modified for transatlantic service as an american citizen, which feels pretty much the same as it did when you were just plain German. Stopping over in Berlin’s antiquated Tegel airport, you get to Munich in time for the 1 pm sound check, immediately getting into a fight with the sound engineer and stagehands, who insist that the drum set remain on a riser so they can swap it out with the other band’s drum set, which is identical to your’s, guaranteeing a boomy sound and wobbly cymbal stands. Not seeing the mindlessness of the exercise, the head sound engineer quotes imaginary provisions of an imaginary contract giving him the last word on all stage arrangements. Eating dinner with the same 25 Euro voucher at the same restaurant as last time, your bill for an appetizer, a main course and a glass of house red wine comes to 38 Euros. Some lady with a headset hands you a printed pdf with the schedule for tonight’s proceedings, in minute detail, though even the opening speech is 12 minutes late and exceeds its alloted 8 minutes by 5, kicking off an evening of hurry-up-and-wait exacerbated by the unexperienced staff’s anxiety to keep to the obsolete schedule. Your band is reminded constantly and in a increasingly incessant way to please be here or there for this photo opportunity at that speech or presentation at this or that time, which is always delayed once you get there, by aforementioned headset lady, probably a secretary that is already justifiably miserable with her shitty life, overwhelmed by her one night stand with stage management. Being denied a drink during your hour long wait to perform, you finally resort to shouting at the poor woman, who then takes ages to return with four single dutch beer bottles for your band, after which you have to shout at her again to either bring 4 times more and more varied drinks or repeat what she just did every thirty minutes. Probably not as used to being surrounded by assholes and people that don’t know what they’re doing like you are, the other band playing the first set doesn’t quite fulfill its potential and after short deliberation, the jury, whose fee for engaging in these shenanigans most certainly outweighs the money paid to the musicians, decides to award your band the first price. You are being shoved onto the stage to receive the trophy, a large faux-modern chrome sculpture made from spare bolts, springs and whatnots, which is later given to your manager since he is the only one interested in having it and also the only one not traveling home by plane. The band surpasses the obligatory level of intoxication after winning such an event and you are finally glad you couldn’t get a flight home the next day and have to spend an additional unproductive day in your hotel room…
Suspiciously, both bands making it to the final this year and last year can be passed on as german; also it is revealed that tickets for last night’s concert in the 500 seat venue were sold for about 35 Euros, much incriminating the car company’s assumed role of patron of the arts. Realizing that the fee to play the first round of concerts roughly equals the price money for second place – 5000 Euros including travel costs, you issue statements along the lines of “that’s fucked up” to the “losing” band. Submerged in deja-vu, you relive the challenge of another night of solitude in the exact same hotel room with another bottle of exactly the same wine. Having learned nothing, again snoozing off at 10 pm, you awake at 4 am, two hours before breakfast starts, which is still rushed since you have to catch a 6.20 am bus to the airport. Solipsistically, the car company arranged for private drivers in suits and sunglasses chauffeuring you in one of their high end models, for the day and morning after the show only, not able to imagine you would need one to get back to the airport another day later, so you are stuck with public transportation. Making up for being rather overbooked and turbulent, Continental flight 107 reaches Newark 30 minutes faster than last time. It takes over 4 weeks for your share of the price money, about 1800 Euros, or a month’s rent for an apartment similar to your’s, to be wired to your account. A few weeks later, the car company inquires about the possibility of the band playing at their executive board’s yacht party in Monaco in 2 months time. Your manager requests a fee greatly exceeding the first price money and actually manages to confirm the anomalous engagement by telephone. Since the last concert of a tour of Europe with another band and this concert paying more than that whole tour coincide, you ask to be relieved of the last gig and offer to pay the transatlantic flight in full as an incentive for the other band’s band leader to let you go. Arrangements are made and a mere 10 days after confirming, the car company cancels the event without naming a reason or offering reimbursement, leaving you with the $800 flight, a missed gig and nowhere to stay that night.”
Deep red sunset in Cologne after a rainy day- I always look to the sky for signs.
Hans Martin brings the big bowl of Chile con Carne.
A cloud of friendly smoke surrounds the musicians.
Live stream will be up here from 0830 tonight if you happen to be in Samarkand.
Today’s short post is re cajones and in their spirit I throw out this track by Duvacki Orkestar Bakije Bakica. I think by listening you will know what I mean:
In that spirit, that of cajones in the deeper feminine sense of the word where yin multiplies yang thousandfold, here is the program of this week’s Plushmusic3 Festival at the Loft in Cologne. Enyoy, Chicos…
At this year’s Music Village in Greece I played a duo with Kostas Anastasiadis in the schoolyard. Here are the results:
This post is about mountain running, looseness, and cross-discipline training.
I’ll start off by introducing my training run in Penedes, Spain, which is a 10km mountain run with a 700 meter ascent. It is the time I use now not only to free my mind but to deepen my experience of looseness in the body even whilst excercising. I have turned the run into my own kind of Biathlon, and at several points I stop for a few minutes and practice Samatha- peaceful abiding, simply being with the breath. It is here you can also experience movement in stillness, and stillness and movement- the physical side of this run helps deepen this It starts in the village of Gelida and climbs up through the lush pine forests of Montcau.
The village I depart from with the massive Montserrat in the background:
The run up through the forest:
One of the higher trails with Montserrat in the distance:
Some beautiful olive trees on the way down, my dear ancient friends:
Whilst running, if my mind wanders I usually bring it back to physical sensations and the feeling of looseness. The shoulders are low, the arms are not held up too high, the breath is steady and low, the hips are relaxed, the back is straight. All of these aspects are related to my other passions- saxophone playing and tai chi and indeed the general feeling of looseness in the body is probably important across the board. I use this mountion run in this way to reinforce my training on the instrument and I feel and I can deepen the “relaxed state” of saxophone playing by using experiences from another field.
I learn by observing. I taught myself overtone singing by listening and copying. And I taught myself mountin running also by observing and then testing things out myself. My “teacher” of the trails is Anton Krupicka and simply by watching him run I was able to incorparate these technicques into my style. In short, energy is conserved for the task at hand. Nothing is superfluous.
Through deepening the feeling of looseness we can develop real power. This relates directly to the Saxophone. Recently I have helped some classical players begin to loosen their otherwise tighter embouchures to develop a more open sound. Tight lips means tight sound. And a tight sound carries with it a whole lebenseinstellung of tightness- no thanks. Nothing good will come of tightness, possums. Think tight-lipped, tight-arsed… From the suppleness of the lips we can develop more control, and we loose the inflexibilty and rigidness of the tight-arsed styles. This can be applied across the board- even to the mind itself.
In the end, the soft will overcome the hard. Yin will embrace and take in yang before creating again or returning to the nothing state- wuji.
Some pictures from my last visit to Kansas.
An inter-dimensional house
A road and cornfield
Two Chisholms two wheels
To all my Greek friends: my workshop “The G string of Pythagoras” will happen today at 1900 in the Thessaloniki Concert Hall. Tomorrow the concert with Lula Pena is also there. Infos are here
A short jazz interlude before another dive into the deepest of number pools. On Sunday we shared a beautiful concert in Cologne with Simon Nabatov on Piano and Jonas Burgwinkel on drums. I plan for this trio to be one of my first releases on the soon-to-be-revealed Moontower edition. As a small preview I would like to share one of my compositions.
Inebriate Waltz:
Discovering a new row of sixths within the harmonic series with the Fibonacci recursive series has opened up a new world of possible musics for me. I have even had to restrain my research so as to get one piece at least partly recorded within couple of week’s work. I am uploading now one of my first sketches- a piece for 5 saxes in which I also sometimes use soprano to extend the range. What I have done with this piece is to calculate overtones from a fundamental of 19.445 hertz (making my low C on the alto the 8th overtone) all the way up to the 32nd fibonacci numbered overtone and transpose them down into the saxophone range. This meant going up to the 322 178 398th overtone and transposing it down. I say 6ths but the feeling and hearing is more like stacks of thirds and the way they resolve and at the same time open up to the next is loaded with creation information. With 16 octaves or so at their sensory disposal, I believe our ears are far better prepared to take in higher knowledge than the one octave our eyes can receive. The results have, as I wrote in the post below, profoundly blown my mind. The nature of this circle of 6ths is staggeringly beautiful and in this, my first sketch, I have made chords with different segments from the row as well as juxtaposing row sections together ( eg overtones 21,34,55,89 against 377,610,987,1597). I simply let the chords sound out as it is so that we can best pick up on the self-similarity and fractal nature of the row without too much human interference. This is what I mean by laying out the golden section in a vertical fashion rather than trying to carve up time according to proportion. As theoretically all of the overtones sound out immediately with the first chord I am hearing up the harmonic series and beyond it through the fibonacci recursive series which brings forth the 6ths and basically sounds like something is going on here, buddy. I have tried to find a pattern in the tuning of the 6ths themselves and am yet too; it doesn’t seem to mirror the wave like fluctuations around the golden section of the ratios. Herein lies the mystery for me- if the Fibonaccl series approaches phi, the most irrational number there is, the higher you go in the series- what on earth ,pray, do these beautiful 6ths approach? From all our knowledge and hearing, we would believe the first 6th in this spiral series- overtone 5 to 8 with the third 14 cents low and the octave (8) perfect as it is to be already the most perfect cadence- and yet this is only the beginning of the series, the point of departure. This is the safe port to which I slash the ropes to my wooden Cutter and let the outgoing tide pull me out under the blood red moon and the golden sky.
It will be a long voyage. Mapping out the first 300 Fibonacci numbers up to overtone number
222232244629420445529739893461909967206666939096499764990979600 I can already see that the E I play as the 5th overtone does not return. None of the numbers are factored by 5,10,20,40,80,160 etc. I intuit the spiral never returns to my humble low E.
Now why did I go up to the 32nd Fibonacci number in my piece? Well, this is why: Last week I walked into a Berlin cafe and saw a little flyer on the table. I picked it up and read with utter astonishment that “100 children from Rotterdam and Neukoelln will be dancing and singing the Fibonacci series in Berlin.” I knew at this point I was onto something. when I write the full program notes for this piece I will surely include this flyer, onto which the first 32 numbers of the sequence were printed.
I’m writing all this from a hotel overlooking the Red Square in Moscow. The sun is shining through the exhaust haze. Everywhere I look I see spirals. The traffic jam sounds like a low quint. Thank goddess for that for the rest is not my cup of borsch. Now I don’t intent to let this stuff take a complete hold of me but for the moment it has left me almost speechless.
Love in Numbers (First test version recorded at Nuca Studios by R. Nacken) :
This post is but a tiny filler, possums. My room is filled with calculations and I will be putting up some of my Fibonacci/Overtone research soon. It has mildly blown my musical world to pieces in the most delightful way. I knew I was on the right track when the other day I walked in to a cafe in Berlin and picked up a tiny flyer advertising several hundred school children from the Netherlands “dancing and singing” the Fibonacci numbers. I’m up to the 32nd Fibonacci number, overtone 322,178,309 transposed down 21 octaves into the alto sax range so if anyone out there is on my trail you had better get your act together fast…Why 32nd? Because on the tiny flyer I picked up that’s where the children stop their dance. Connectivity? All I know is I’ve left the horizontal time plane and am going straight the fxxk up. Let me leave you with some wise words from Jiddu Krishnamurti- “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”
Once in a while I use the immediacy of this medium to give away a little secret I’m working on and today is one of those days- the feeling for me is akin to creeping up to the edge of the Grand Canyon in the deep of the night and whispering something into the gaping depth below with only the faintest of echos in return and nothing else; like this I never know if anyone has heard it or not.
Beauty is often by nature an ephemeral muse and so it is for me all the more powerful to discover a thing of beauty that transcends the decaying effect of time on the physical plane. We should never forget that the word music comes from the old Greek for “House of the Muses” and with it we have the tools to understand some of the driving creative forces of the universe whilst bypassing our intellectual faculties- going straight to the muses’ bed, so to speak.
I choose to give out something like this for many reasons but most importantly there are no copyrights on the architecture of sound which has in so many ways healing properties if used correctly. And by Thor does this planet now need healing- even the music itself needs it- and so it comes that ex-jazz musicians like myself are drawn by greater forces into sound worlds like this. Anyway, here it is in brief: my current passion- the one thing that drives me like no other.
In Greece in the workshop we were slowly climbing up the eternal overtone ladder. I had written one piece which ascends to the 46th overtone and whilst working on this we tried out different combinations of overtones. One of them I decided to test, was using the Fibonacci numbers on the overtone row- boy was I in for a surprise. Without losing the brevity of this post, Fibonacci numbers are the dogs bollocks when it comes to the physical signature of a godhead on the material world, from ear forms to waves in the sea, and when I grafted this the drafting pencil of heaven onto the overtone row, a pattern emerged from the 3rd overtone upwards which seems as if a dimensional shift was on the lips of the goddess- and what a sound to boot!
Taking the Fibonacci numbers 2,3,5,8,21,34 and using the respective overtones, an endless chain of the most beautiful 6ths was revealed to my humble ears. In the last few weeks I have followed the chain upwards and glimpsed the eternal spiraling ladder, it looks like a rainbow colored DNA chain and I feel small and privileged all the while- all the more so considering 6ths were always the schmidt for me right since I first heard “My Bonny lies over the ocean” (making sure that bon is 59 cents flat of course). That such a musical spiral of beauty could emerge from what I already considered the musical foundation par excellence had left me dumbfounded- and inspired…..
The dimensional aspect is important here as the two structures extend outward into space in very different manners. The 2 dimensional spiral of the fibonacci as we depict it seems clearly to be of a higher dimension, one that carries with it obvious creative force if we look out at the countless spiral galaxies. How we receive information from a higher dimension is vital and I believe the understanding through the ear will be key in this.
A short interlude: in Greece at the workshop was a group of handicapped and autistic children. At the end of the week we played a saxophone ensemble concert. Guess which structure we played which touched them deeply, leaving their teacher to ask me about it’s form and meaning?
Another short interlude: there is of course a mere man factor in this playing of this piece and that is where the true humanness comes into play-bridging the infinite with the temporal- apieron with peras as Pythagoras may have said. I may only be able to execute theirs tones to within 2 cents but it is in this bridging, this attempt, this bringing down to the earth the information from above, that I feel like I am fully in my role- half animal half god- protector and lover of Gaia. I used to wish I was a dolphin- now with all the mess in the seas I’m better off trying to span the gaping chasm with sound as best I can.
And so off I went and began to work with it. I constructed sound fields based on this pattern. I am including one of my first sketches which I recorded yesterday with Robert Nacken using overdubs. The bottom line is a 12 tone row. Each note changes in its function- always being an overtone with a fibonacci number up to and including 55. Perhaps it is nice for you, dear reader/listener, to take it in without too much theory.
This is my first sketch- I am now fleshing it out for 8 saxes in a longer version. O, and by the by- the nice thing about this work is that it transcends e’s, g’s, and o’s. I raise my glass to you as you step over my little bridge.
I’m back, dear readers and this is the mood I am in, early September, having spent several hours at the Russian consulat waiting for a visa and having fun in their grafitte ridden passport machine. The last few weeks have been intense to say the least and bit by bit I will upload and report on some of the overtone based work we have been diving into deeper and deeper.
Dear Readers- I shall be offline and out in the sticks for the next month. I wish you all a great Summer and hope to be back at you with more sounds and bites come mid September. HC
One of my heroes in the ultra running world is Anton Krupicka who is a bit of a cross between Jesus and a supple alpine cat who regularly cleans up on the 50 and 100 mile trail courses. It is the beginning of Ramadan and my personal pilgrimage meant running his main training summit close to Boulder: Green mountain summit. I can now safely say that this was a bitch of a run with a wicked elevation and some really rocky paths. Wild as hell and beautiful though. Colorful mountain flowers everywhere and stunning views of the surrounding rockies. Coming down was fine but getting up those 2300 steepest of feet was a real feat for my feet. Especially the first few miles were really challenging, i suppose that’s where the boys are separated from the catholic priests men. Anton apparently uses this as his main training run and so naturally it was an honor to step on some of the same rocks and boulders. I feel exhausted yet elated.
From Kansas I come to Colorado and find myself on Highway 70 west which is a smooth winding ride cutting through the moutains. I flick through the radio stations and settle for the Spanish options and now I write this tiny post from one of the countless Satrbucks which pepper the route and keep the tired drivers sufficiently wired to update their travel blogs. The heat from Kansas is now gone and the cool mountain air is big relief. I am Aspen-bound, highly caffenated, hawk- eyed, and eternally curious about this massive country which you can never really put your finger on and say it’s this or this. It’s always something else. 6 mintues of the Starbucks jazz program and I am close to the edge. Time to roll.
Took a motorbike on highway 7 from Lawrence, Kansas, to Topeka. It’s been a dry hot week with temperatures soaring up to 44, the hottest of my life, and the sky was pregnant and ready to explode. She’s dark and brooding. As I rode, lightning broke out over Topeka and the fist drops came down. In Kansas no one has to wear a helmet and so it’s just you feel them on your face. Stopped off for some shelter on the outskirts of the Kansan capital in a roadside dive. Bluegrass was playing. Nothing much else is around in another urban wasteland. Took some shots on my minolta and will develop them later.Everyone drives massive pick up trucks around here. It’s rough inside, I can feel some fights coming on. The music reminds me a little of Roscoe, I think I posted him before- one of my favs from this mothership- An untamed sense of control- just what I need to get me through this thunderstorm on a Buell:
I blogged the Stelzenfestspiele in brief last week because it is difficult to describe this place in words. MDR television made a portrait this time round and it’s online here. It’s a snapshot of a village with a underlying current of delicate madness.
We smoked a biddy together in the hinterland of Kenya. The moon was high, animals were roaming around. He gave me a finely wound wooden necklace, looked into my eyes and told me “Don’t forget”. We’d spent a week or so together- not much in the great river of time- and yet he’s one of the dudes whose influence has remained strongly in my musical world. Narayan Chandra Adhikary. He’s a great spirit and one of the true remaining Bauls. My friend Pietro, half Baul and half Roman, somewhere in between an espresso and a milky chai, shot this film from a gig in Italy.
Dear Hermes,
I’m on the move again in your hallowed name- this time in Kansas and it’s hot, real hot. T’was quite an ordeal coming here as it often is. They have these strange body scanners at the airports in this age and I was given several disconcertingly thorough full body searches which surely must seem strange to you. Well here I am now in the middle of a heatwave well into the hundreds (whatever that translates to) and the humidity felt like walking into a wet curtain when I got off the plain and into the planes of Kansas. I’m off now to visit my favorite crop artist , Stan, and talk about some of the latest crop circles from this year.
Had a funny performance last week- I was wondering for quite a while how I could raise the pitch of my didjereedo and then it suddenly dawned on me- a chainsaw! A friend shot the film with his phone and you can’t hear the didj so much but you can maybe put the pieces together, so to speak.
H
ps: I like the part when a bit of the didj is hanging off….
Losing it or gaining it?
One of the strongest feelings of internal movement in Taiji for me comes with the movement wave hands like clouds.
In ex-Yugoslavia I once found a practice spot on the Adriatic ideal for one of the strongest internal Saxophone training move clouds with single note.
I believe the only impossible thing is sneezing with your eyes open and even that I think I can make one day.
In aspiring to move these clouds, and in moving them with my f sharp, I assert my humanness by actively bridging the temporal with the eternal, if only for a moment- but then how much can be contained in a moment?
Goddess dam this be beautiful music! I listen to tracks like this Sabilulungan a lot of late. It oozes lightness, air, ease, honesty, and the happy marriage of intention and execution. There is a healthy dose of reverb on the flute but it works out just fine. I imagine the pundits to be seated comfortably on think carpets or flax weaving. It probably smells very good under the thatched roof and apart from the odd mosquito things are close to perfection. No one is trying too hard, the balance is good, the ritardandos sweet and subtle, not to mention those succulent mangos dangling nearby.
I need all of these qualities in abundance as I fly in the Americas economy class to the country whose debt on various levels are even larger than my love for this music which must thus be fucking huge, mate.
Degung Sabilulungan- Suara Parahiangan group: