I was always taken by the story in which Schoenberg went for a Sunday stroll and composed an entire movement of a String Quartet in his head, fully scored. For my own part I have only ever managed a few bars, but today I managed my record which was a whole 6 bars for saxophone octet. I did this whilst riding a speedboat off the coast of Cyprus and picking up a sunburn on my neck- it now being the colour of an australian or texan crayfish; strange how that is the only part of my body that seemed to attract the UV rays. Back onshore it is a strange conglomerate of Russians and Cypriots that populate the shore, many of them bearing the same colour coding I now sport.
I´ve been trying out lots of new Vandoren reeds here in their cute little humidity-proof condoms (I´m not yet convinced that they make a difference…). Anyway, being here on this island reminds me of the Greek clarinet players I admire and their ability to make extremely soft reeds sound full and resonant. Here is one such sound I enjoy:
On a lonely rooftop next to central park in New York I sit and meditate on the music for the film Naked Mind I am now working on- this trailer has some of our Doha music. One of the characters is an amazing man, Fleet Maull, who used his many years in prison for drug trafficking to practice the Dharma and has since founded the Prison Dhama network.
Kansas is behind me and I miss it already. I miss not having to wear a helmet on a motorbike, the huge open skies, the 4-way stop intersections that bring out the courtesy in everyone, and Stan the crop artist who vindicating my belief in these temporary temples. “There´s no dam way in hell someone made that overnight, I would need 20 people and 3 weeks to make one of those”
I watch the bald eagle above the huge lake
The circling eagle watches the boy in the waves
The boy watches the dog under the 40 degree sun
The dog watches me watch the eagle
Eyes love you
It´s a searing hot solstice in Kansas
I heard something last night that blew me away softly. I was sitting in front of a red Kansan farmhouse watching the hot wind blow through the huge tree canopy when one of the many local maniacs strolled past with a speaker on his tricycle laden with bongos and glass bongs. He was moving much slower than the wind so I could hear the whole track. On the surface it´s nothing special, someone took a Bruce Springsteen song and put it into a minor key, stripped down the instrumentation and slowed it down. Nothing too far out. But there is something about this transformation that really struck me.. A simple step takes this rock song and it´s effect to another level completely. She is vigilant in keeping the original melody and just changing the chords underneath. Bat For Lashes, I´m on Fire:
Piece by piece the concerts I put together for the Plushmusic festival are finally going up. Here you can enjoy Simon´s beautiful solo concert and here is a bootleg recording of The Embassadors live in Cologne in April. Oh, and in case you´re wondering where people over here get their news from in the middle of the wasteland, this site is a popular alternative source and one I also enjoy.
It is wickedly hot and humid in Kansas and taking my son to the famous American summer camp feels like walking through a thick warm soup. Ample sun screen is needed to armour his Scottish complexion against the ruthless Indian sun. It´s the season for sudden winds and in the north tornados are brewing. The sky is wide open and the heavens play out beautiful colourful spectacles daily- it´s as if everything I see in the skye is through a wide angle lens. Huge 4×4s thunder by, people are big-boned (as my dear mother would say), incredibly friendly, and obsessed with sports (reminds me all of a little island in the south pacific). I played a benefit concert last night for a friend´s hip replacement (something this country´s health system struggles to cope with) and it seemed like the whole town came together to chip in for him.
Some of the film music I am putting together at the moment isn´t far away from the vibe right here in the mid west. It´s a strange kind of openness, in between the endless plains and bloody meridians :
On my hard drive I have some exciting concerts I am readying for Plushmusic including the latest from Huun Huur Tu who I flew high with in Kenya two years ago, and the Bauls of Bengal- wandering sufis incarnate from India. Narayan, the main singer on this track and the leader of this group is an important teacher for me :
It was quite a week indeed. I was on my way to the Pfandhaus in Cologne to record a concert when I saw a poster advertising a Shakuhachi concert in the tiny Japanese/German Culture institute. I asked if I could film and they graciously accepted. Mr Tajima played a beautiful concert and I was able to capture most of it on tape. As a taster I offer the first few seconds of the concert in which he takes his seat, prepares himself, and then takes flight- I think this short clip sets the tone well for what was to come.
Balancing that off I uploaded this clip from Subway a few months ago when I took out my 140 dollar tenor Chinese Sax for it´s first ride. This was the first time I ever played tenor and could test out some of my hip rotations at the same time, the sweet-sour taste of irony was soaked deeply into my rico reed that night but I was trying hard nonetheless to keep up with Nacken´s groove.
This groove segues seamlessly into our first HD opera release on Plushmusic- Tristan and Isolde from the Glyndebourne Festival. And now I sit on the roof of Mr Rueckert´s Brooklyn apartment planning my portrait of the drummer as a young man.
Last night I was blessed with the type of dream I love the most- pure music. No foreign landscapes or flights through sand-swept deserts; no enochian magic or levitation tribulations; no ethereal girls or earthly desires; none of this, but rather a newly repaired bass clarinet and an effortless middle b to c trill which lasted for what seemed like the entire night. Having come off some hot days in the Sciarrino Opera in Madrid this trill was a welcome respite and one that is still resonating through this mild Cologne day.
Before Madrid we had the premiere of Fata Morgana in Venice. I have here one of the final versions of the music I created for this short film. On it you can hear Simon Nabatov, Gareth Lubbe, Claudio Borhorquez, myself, and Mohammed Attar- an incredible Ney flute player who Robert recorded in Egypt:
The headline on yesterday´s New Zealand Herald was “Most Wild Horses destined for Paddocks” . It´s moments like this when I really miss the paddocks of home.
No matter which town I go to I usually end up in traffic once I leave the airport. Growing up in the age of the automobile has always made me think about issues of space and sound. Being a photographer in cities one can quickly develop a loathing for cars as they invade almost every shot, not to speak of the noise pollution experienced by lovers of silence. One thing that has always amused me is the way personal “freedom” is often coupled with the movement of cars- if the movement of cars is restricted then people themselves feel hedged in. It´s not that I am an anti-car freak, I love driving fast and Germany provides me with plenty of opportunities for this; but taking a closer look at the strange relationship between humans and their steel and rubber pets can be enlightening. This relationship is for me one of the most telling of our times; it is for this reason that I collect photos like this (which I call the future, the Porsche presentation at the Beijing Car fair), or essays like this, which for me go a long way to explaining the interaction between our cars, our cities, and our souls.
I´m returning to action with an amusing text I discovered recently. It is one I wrote when I was 19 or so, and heavily washed in esoterica and theosophy, I spare no punches when it comes to assessing the current state of humanity even though I was supposed to be writing about the Saxophone. It was one of my compulsory papers at the Music Academy and I still like the bit about playing the Sax with one´s feet, something I still try to do on occasion. It´s good to be back. Sources of Power.
E’l naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare.
The Dance continues in spirals.
The streets of Geneva are paved with gold and we crawl into the station hotel for an afternoon rest. On the long path to the completion of the Fata Morgana film I had to leave behind many of my sketches. This is one that was written to accompany this image of a turtle being hoisted slowly above a window. It wasn´t so much the turtle itself that inspired me but the colour of the lake and sky. It is based on the 12 tone row used throughout the film and has Simon on piano. I called it The Turtle is Rising my Dear:
Although it´s taken much longer than planned, the concert from the Cologne festival in February are now ready and will be put up on Plushmusic one by one. I cut together a sampler of the music which you can see here. Storm clouds gather in Zurich and the thunder bounces of the lake and down Alder Strasse. The concert tonight at eight is a low key affair at Atelier Blau, Baendlistr. 86. Password at the door for free tickets: Patienca
The inner courtyard of the Rome hotel is covered with enormous palm trees. The coffee is strong and Mandarin is spoken to accompany it. The Chinese women in colourful Gucci dresses complement the dark green of the canopy and the fierce skye blue spilling through. The flight to Palermo is two hours late but the bass player´s gold card weaves its magic on the overweight. The Grand Hotel of Palermo stands before the sax player. Finally. He in turn gazes up and thinks of Mr Roussel´s soul vanishing upwards through one of the windows, a thin wisp of purple steam filled with dream scenes and desires. The red grapes fall off the back of a wagon and roll in front of him. One of them lodges itself in between his toes and explodes pianissimo producing a high g sharp blending nicely with the low C from the hotel´s fire conditioner. The clouds are moving quickly behind the hotel´s facade to form Hebrew letters before the 45 minutes allocated to the band for sight-hearing elapse. Then Cantarel, declaring all the secrets of the Hotel were now known, took the path back to the Goethe institute where all of us were soon united at a cheerful dinner at which the morals and ethics of Jazz were discussed in detail. The endless expanse above and within us is filled with Coraçãos which are exploding eternally and yin and yan are fused together in this song by Djavan and Cassia playing in the adjacent smoking room:
Back at Frankfurt Airport for the sixth time in six days she asks me where I am flying to. I can´t quite remember. I watch the yellow lines which mark the designated smoking areas. The smoke spills out and drifts intentionally to the non-smokers, seeking them out with long sleek fingers, lung to lung. The security team ask for a demo to prove I can play the sax- they get a de-tuned careless whisper and aren´t sure whether to laugh or cry. I count the hours of sleep in the last 3 days and don´t get past my right pinky. I make it to gate 32 and collapse onto the leather seats under the grey sky speckled with silver jets. The soundtrack I choose for this is David Sylvian´s Trauma, for me a kind of digital raga which fits the mood.
I realise suddenly I am exactly in the middle of the tour, six down, six to go. I estimate the average lobby time to be 0545, the average age of the audience to be 43, and the average travel time per day to be 9 hours. 1151am: The trombonist reclines at the gate reading Siddartha, the bassist reads the Tribune in the business class lounge, and the drummer carefully downs some tablets in the senator lounge in preparation for another daymare flight. Siddartha is slowly rowing across the river in the dawn; panic is breaking out once again over panicdemics ; advil, xanax, and melatonin meet up for a party in the drummers stomach, and the sax player´s mind is as empty as the dawn sky over Siddartha. Minutes later we are in another bus to the distant aircraft. The drummer is cursing loudly and offensively at this procedure but at the same time astounding the passengers with his in-depth knowledge of airport protocol and aeronautical engineering. Maybe he´s right. The tourism logo for Hessen is “Hessen- there´s no way around us”, an unlucky slogan pounced on by the drummer and used as a springboard into a theme and variation oration featuring virtually every obscenity known in German and English. Upon exiting the bus many of the passengers are visibly shaken. Minutes later the flight takes off to god knows where and we all collapse inwardly once again, only the dear drummer gazes out at the engine praying to an unknown god and playing host to the chemical wedding party inside his bowels.
In between scenes like this we managed to shoot this short portrait last week.
Some of the contrasts on a tour like this are worth savouring. Yesterday we played in the North East of Germany in a town called Neu Brandenburg. The East German town is nestled on the side of a beautiful lake and I could feel the very particular vibe of the East mixing in with the order and stringency of the North. It was an incredible summer day and the northern light was sharp and crisp, just the way I like it. At Berlin our Bass player missed the train after miscalculating the time needed to purchase a Cappucino and Herald Tribune. Only half a day later we are playing our sound check in the middle of the black forest in a small village that immediately reminds me of a Kafka story. Once we get in I take a slow walk to try and ground after 9 hours of film editing on the train. Eyes follow my passage through slightly opened shutters. Behind the old town walls and in between the sausage stalls I find a wifi spot and sit down to upload, observed carefully all the while. This is another one of those towns I think I played in before but never really know for sure. The string of 5 o´clock wake ups has given us all an enduring calm and mindlessness; we float to the soundchecks, sip at Matt´s selected Bordeaux, make the set list, blow, and fall into a slumber, all in one sweeping motion. These warm spring days only amplify the feeling. We´ve been opening with this song, Treatment:
All of the members of root70 are fast asleep on the ICE train to Kassel. The sleek white missile-like train is propelling the sleeping jazz musicians at over 200 km/h to their next concert. None of the members is woken by the incessant announcements. Only the saxophone player is diligently updating his blog- why, even he doesn´t know. The meditation on the possibility of the utter futility of existence is no cake walk. At any time he half expects the whole thing to vanish into the digital void. What about the memory of a note, is it worth more than the recording of it? Someone in the distance starts talking about carbon offset, in front of me is a tour plan with a two week string of 5am wake ups. My bag is bursting with Omega3 capsules. My eyes can hardly stay open as the German landscape whips by. You cannot get into the same train twice. You cannot even get in once. Returning to my breath and pressing the upload button i can smell the plates of sausages being delivered to the passengers. What to do with the unutterable on my lips? The train hits 240, atomic plants shoot by next to giant wind farms. Kassel itself is a wasteland of modernist architecture, it was obviously flattened and rebuilt quickly. How I wish to have been in Germany when it was nothing more than a large forest. I can hear this track spilling out of someone´s headphones. It´s Frosted from Matt´s solo album, dedicated to his Grandfather:
After a day of meetings in the drizzle of Oxford circus I board the rush hour Victoria line to Brixton. Everyone is crammed together nursing their free papers and pods. I hear some New Zealand accents cutting through the cabin like a knife through marmite and I migrate towards them, picking up their conversation which achieves naught else but reminding me of home and the oceans between. In Brixton I stroll past the Jamaican bottle shops and evangelist dens, the ear training course of Doris is in my head and I am humming de-tuned fifths under my breath to the ska coming from the here-dressers.
A few hours later I move up to singing 6ths and board the train. On the Stansted Express the great orb of Ra heaves up through the smoke of distant factories. Staring into the red ball and performing a silent adoration through the train window I manage to join some of the dots on the page, turning crotchets to quavers under the pint-coloured English sky.
The movement of swarms and flocks has always been of interest to me in a musical way (and not only that of sheep). Some of the pieces in the Kaum Quartet concert were inspired by mapping the movement of flocks and rewriting them for our instruments. Recently I conducted this interview with Tim Blackwell at the Wellcome Trust in London. Tim is someone who has gone deeply into mapping the musical parameters of swarm movement and this clip on Plushmusic gives a nice introduction to his work.
After a long day of filming in central London it was a breath of fresh air to return to Brixton via the packed rush hour tube. After leaving the tube I went straight into a Fish´n´Chip shop to breath in the almost perfect incense of a Friday night in a small New Zealand town. No other sense transports us quicker than this one. After making my way up past the Jerk Chicken eateries and african hair salons I was greeted by an amazing sight on the corner of Hayter Street. A Jamaican shepherd was carefully positioning around a dozen sheep onto a tiny piece of grass in front of the house I am staying in. I asked him what was up and he replied by singing a line about “you can´t always know what you see”. Naturally I was exhilarated to see so many sheep in the city and had no desire to know where they came from. I responded to his song by making eye contact with his fine urban herd and finally ceased to worry about camera angles and white balance from today´s filming - the white fluffy souls were now happily balanced in the middle of Brixton and that was enough for me. To go with this scene I offer a little preview from the next Embassadors. Perhaps Each Time is Always:
Wind over the Earth is the elegant name of my friend Mickey´s studio in Boulder, Coal- a Ra dough. Here are two improvisations I recorded there with Gareth while we were waiting for the hurricane over the suburban paradise to pass. The Pro tools students sat outside the glass alongside the Logic Pro students and wondered who was paying us to sit and sing like that. ´Twas the Buddhists who bankrolled it.
Wind:
Earth:
It´s been a mad few days in Berlin. Together with Burnt Friedman I have been putting some of the final touches on the new Flanger soundtrack for the film “Bibliotheque Pascal” - an intriguing work shot in Romania and England by Szabolcs Hajdu. When the film is ready I can write more about it; the subject of human trafficking and modern decadence in western Europe is a tantalising one. In between accompanying the deliciously captured latex scenes with my soft tenor sax, I put down the lead lines on the new Embassadors album- this one will be called Coptic Dub and will be out later this year. To get in the mood I hijacked this wonderful Dub Mix made by Mr Friedman, it´s well worth the ride:
Two hours later and I´m biking up the right side of the Rhein past the gothic cathedral of Cologne. The hot wind whips up the dust from the building sites straight into my tired eyes. The other film I am racing to finish today is called Fata Morgana. Now, through the tears forming everything becomes blurred and the mirage comes naturally between my own salt water and the dub.
The sky was perfectly clear yesterday and I took a walk to the Puig Monastery in northern Mallorca. When I was on the mountain and looked up and out of my shell, the words of my teacher Bill McKeever came to me, he was speaking about the moment of death and said something like space dissolves with luminosity. When our inner breathing has already stopped, mind and body have been separated and our inner awareness has exited the body and shot up into space like a dancing flickering spark, at this moment we experience the luminosity of the base, or the luminosity of the dharmakaya. It is a bit like a pure cloudless sky. All our perceptions of the external world will fade, only this luminosity will remain. From here on we need all our experience of meditation to see this as it is.
In our lives there a many flashes of realisation, some of them precede and prepare us for the dying moment, many of them happen in our sleep. Thinking about this (or actually anything for that matter) will not help us prepare for the final separation of mind and body. As I tell my students, thinking about problems will solve nothing on a deeper level, the only way is to breathe through them. True thought is deeply connected to the breath. In the moments of greatest liberation, the open sky moments of my life like today, dissolving into the open light void (some would call it death) seems so close and trusted. The breath contains for me all the secrets of physical life and creation, beyond that and without the body, our little soul sparks shot out through the head and without the body may easily panic but there is nothing to be afraid of other than fear itself. Why be afraid of falling when there is no landing? By the way, there is a wishing chair cut out of the rock on the steep path to the monastery. If you can articulate your wish correctly, it will certainly be granted. I want to experience a perfect Vandoren reed, gold and sleek, moist and inviting, even and honest, for the entire month of May. Wishing stone, do your job!
My favourite little bar in Cologne is an odd place. It´s an Italian sports cafe filled with slot machines and televisions and the coffee is almost like in Italy. In the morning local prostitutes take their coffee and give the old Italian gentlemen advice. They speak loudly and with authority in their thick cologne accents and their words are sprinkled with proverbs. They are large and imposing ladies. They are extremely careful with money and seem to be saving for something, but that doesn´t stop them some days from buying the whole bar a round of white wine at 8 in the morning. The noblest and most honest profession in the world, I can´t help but admire them. They often speak of reality and dream, of what we can really believe. This beautiful song by Kreisler is the closest I have to their way of describing their world,
In reality there are dreams, and in reality they are real:
The language borders on a dream itself, all against the backdrop of the Italian morning news. By the time I have drunk a coffee I have heard all kinds of bizarre things and I usually leave with a broad smile inside.
I visited the opening of the MaerzMusik festival in Berlin last night which featured a “new” music piece for 6 percussionists and one hundred and something instruments. Afterwards the director of the festival asked me if I had suffered particularly during the performance. It could be that he had noticed the grimaces on my faces (which were actually due to the pelvic training I was deeply immersed in). I lied through my teeth and said “No, why?” A Romanian poet at his side piped in and asked me out of the blue about my philosophy on life- maybe he too had noticed the pain I was in listening to this extremely expensive and utterly futile percussion orgy and wondered why. Knowing that any response to this stuff, positive or not, is utterly relative and thus really meaningless doesn´t make me feel any better. I said “O, I´d rather just have a wine” and thought something like this: ” If there was any doubt that the human predicament has remained fundamentally unchanged, then surely the last 100 years have wiped it away. If after all of the blood that was shed in the last century, after all of the hate and destruction, humans have really learned nothing and continue to kill their brothers as we can see today, then what else can we expect but even more of the same? If after all of that half-hearted cock-stroking on expensive Asian gongs to notated music for over an hour, they can still be received with delight then I am out of the game, my friend. Although that may sound like darker pessimism I remain until my last day an optimist. I find solace in the unchanging laws of sound but I cannot sit and listen when there is nothing but intellectual intention behind the playing, especially not on fine asian gongs. It´s all about gesture and intention. Perhaps the key is to accept the unchanging nature of humans, including all the blood, fury, and futility.” At that, I sipped my wine and stared out into the night and thought about how different it is to miss a son. I have missed people before, of course, but to miss a very distant little son is a physical pain, a true heart-wrencher. Human, o so human.
Ten years ago I was in a Flamenco club in the suburbs of Tokyo when I had a realisation I managed to write down (unlike most of them)on a Sake napkin I still have. It could have been the sake or perhaps all the Japanese girls dressed immaculately in Spanish dresses and clapping to the guitars: Studying and listening to the overtones with care and patience will lead to a general understanding of things. The more intense the study of overtones, the more complete the understanding of the guiding laws of nature. Changes in this world are often too subtle to be seen so we must use our ears. Follow and revel in the dance of overtones in all you hear. Moreover, love is the only way to make a complete nothing out of two things. When the Two has become Zero, only love can be held responsible. The first part I have fully assimilated, the second remains an enigma to this day. I´m writing this post in a mall on Alexander Platz in Berlin. It´s too early for the huge Media Markt to open and sell me a hard drive to send to LA to fill with Tuvan Overtones so I sit next to the mall waterfall inside my own firerise, breath in the CK one fumes, and wonder at the wonder of it all with a beautiful solo by Jon Hassell:
The morning fog in Venice is thick but our hazy red giant still manages to shine through and reflect off the water. Another dead end street leads me to the canal, I wonder how many have fallen in for good. Death seems very close here, even the gondolas look like floating coffins. The striped boatmen rowing Japanese tourists to a mind numbing capitalist purgatory. I find a small bench facing the dawn. Staring at the point 10 degrees below our hallowed Ra and blinking, letting the light recharge my atoms and cells- this is a little exercise I try to do each each day. I open my palms and smile inside, tanking up on the good stuff- a ten minute respite. The soundscape is a soothing one,there is something calming in the frequency of lapping waves and no engines within earshot. I meditate this morning on the Schuman wave theory, something that has been with me a lot of late. This theory defines the wave lengths and types that are produced naturally between the earth and the Ionosphere. I remember that around 100 lightning strikes each second around the world are enough to perpetually stimulate these huge waves. I estimate that around 240 Billion lightning strikes of a different kind occur each day when the eyes of people meet.
I choose the fire taxi instead of the water taxi, it skims over a strip of oil and protects me from accidently going to purgatory instead of to the Venice Airport Difficult Jet check in. Through the crackling flames I hear nokia mobiles ringing and people speaking in numbers. I hear the odd “seven” but mostly only zeros and ones. Someone asks “are you on facebook?” with a sleek Russian accent and then is immediately eaten by a three headed dog wearing a stripped shirt with the logo “just do me” on it. I look back to the sun, my fire in the sky, a possible home, my oldest friend. A scarlet woman is riding it and riding it well. A Japanese man with permanent sunglasses and Vitamin D deficiency called Keiji Haino who I once accompanied in New Zealand screams out a challenge to fate, the dog spits out the nokia and burps, my fire taxi speeds home:
In the musical spheres I have been involved with, mystics of all sorts are never far away. I was first attracted to the writings of Alice Bailey and the Theosophists as a teenager after Braxton dropped their names in an interview. It is interesting to track some long voyages back to their source. In a sense, if we musicians are inspired by the mystical writings of Swami X or Master Y, it doesn´t really matter if their message is perfectly true or not, what matters is how we interpret it. That having been said, it is perhaps more important that ever to discern between facts and fantasy in a world of overwhelming digital opinion masked as information. I recently traced some of the figures behind the music/mysticism of Steve Coleman and came again across Schwaller de Lubicz, an interesting case study and a good example of a mystic who is easy to believe until you read closer between the lines. Here is an essay by someone I admire a lot, a woman who has been unjustly cut down viscously for her unorthodox views on what is not quite kosher with this mystic and others like him. To go with the fare, two of my early mystic-inspired works:
The Stanzas of Dzyan:
Early Morning Invocation:
After a long night of recording 12 tone music for String Trio it´s now early morning and I am pacing down the underpass in the grey of Berlin Schoenefeld Airport to make the flight to Venice. Boarding in 10 minutes. On the way a lone accordion player is serenading the rushers-by. In a single sweeping gesture I reach into my pocket and prepare a large frozen coin for tossing. Don´t think about it, just throw away your money. As I cast it into his humble sack I sense it slicing through the cold mist like a ninja shuriken and his gaze picks up on the silver around the edge of the 2 euro coin, giving away its worth in mid-flight. For a split second time is slowed right down to the minimum and a portal is opened within the e minor chord he plays followed by f sharp diminished. His eyes light up during the coin´s curved trajectory and for a moment he forgets his frozen fingers, he is the unknowing gate-keeper. The two euros causes his modulations to be more daring and the chords are more richly voiced. He now plays the Tristan chord without knowing and through the chord I enter the portal but let my body keep walking down the underpass to check in, go through security, take the flight to Venice, test the sound in the opera house, drink espresso, stare out into the canals, and continue appearing to live normally. Looks like a puff of animated steam, blue, shooting skywards through your head, a once-part of you. Life like this is an ever-peeling cocoon and when all the layers have been stripped away and liberated into the ether like this one through the Tristan chord, our physical husk can release its last outward breath in peace leaving a gentle overtone to cause a beautiful ripple in the liquid fabric spreading outwards in concentric circles for infinity.
Now in Venice on the water-taxi my ear is stinging from the hot wind and my eyes ache from the light reflecting off the ripples of countless outwards-breaths of others. This light-pain I love. My deformed irises reflect the light again in pyramid forms. The endless overture spins out, barely holding centre- the turning windmills are giants again- sometimes when I wake in the night I reach for the life or death vest under my bed:
Since over a decade now I have been in competition with Adrian Brendel to visit as many absurd places as possible and to play in them in some form. Last week I scored a 40 yard screamer in the top corner to put New Zealand ahead with a microtonal alto solo in front of the Sheikh and the crown princes of Dubai. The Cuban photographer was tilted slightly to the right, about to faint.
I got up at 4 this morning and took a ride into the desert close to the Oman border. I made sure I packed in my marmite, a slice of toast, and some black tea. Close to the border I was allowed to milk a camel, using all of my New Zealand farm experience to fill my bowl with fresh camel milk. I then added Weetabix for a truly Arabian-New Zealand breakfast before the rising sun. After being roped into some reading and translating these last few days ( last night I was reading of rape and pillage in Grozny and Afghanistan to an audience of veiled listeners), my tired senses bathed in the milky morning desert sun and again for a fleeting moment my thinking drowned in an open sea.
From a distance, over the heads of hundreds of hooded Arabian poets, I catch some fragments from the translators voice, like fragments of an unknown teaching: “The beauty of desiring a woman is greater than the woman´s beauty alone- my gaze yearns to be your view- the lake rose to tongue-level.” Breyton relates to me the wise African proverb a man with diarrhia is not afraid of the night! Yang Lian, the Chinese poet bursts into Mongolian song and I tune my sax to meet him in the middle. An old wheelchair-bound Egyptian poet bursts into tears before the sunset, the East Germans lyricists are noticeably oppressed by the unbridled opulence, overweight Australians and Russians stuck in the sand resemble beached giant lobsters soaked with grease and gucci grime, robed servants rush to keep the singing poets topped up with champagne and the obese Australians from hyperventilating, the beach is teeming with Masseurs form Bali, the cocktail I am balancing is called a lonely bastard (1st prize in the appropriately named vodka specialties)- I could lose my head from all the spinning so I wind up the magical Bali sounds to reel me back behind the Afrikaan epics being spun out in front of me on the arabian sand und alles was ich tun kann ist nur schweigen, und an die ewige Umarmung nachdenken währen ich von mücken leidenschaftlich aufgegessen wird beim sanften Oud klängen:
One of the first things I achieved in Dubai was getting profoundly tipsy with Breyten Breytenbach, one name I am not afraid to drop as I had no idea who he was when we met here at he poetry festival. We started with Amstel lights, migrated to red wine and then to cognac and whiskey, in other words I did everything by the books. I tested out my not-so-shabby Afrikaans, and I sat back in the absurd setting of the Sheik´s hotel and listened to one of South Africa´s great minds fly- it was better that any concert I can remember. His life story encapsulates everything I value and something he said stuck with me tonight: “the tongue has no teeth but it bites deeper”. On that note and because of all the poetry around me I offer Sylvia Plath in her own words before I fade- it´s a good thing when as a musician you can get your arse kicked by “mere” words- when they are strung together in the right way no music can get there, unless you take the words and transform them again through song- but be quick! The words are here now, gone tomorrow:
Before I undertake any trip I usually spend a good hour staring at my bookshelf deciding which weapons to take and how much they will weigh- as this trip will take me to Dubai to a gathering of 1000 poets I decide on Japanese Death Poems- a small, unassuming volume which I think will save me from falling into manic depression when I look out at a landscape of shopping malls and spectacular architecture with nothing to fill it. The Japanese monks, whose last breaths were frozen into these verses (some by their own frail hands and some by their students) would have also been surely puzzled by such a glistening mirage in the middle of the Arabian desert- perhaps they would have smiled even- perhaps I will too when I hang up the do not disturb sign, lock the door for a day, gaze out at the man-made islands, and am finally and blissfully alone to die with the monks, at least in my way.
O Frankfurt Airport
I know your every corner
Fly me home again
The album of the group Coloma just came out recently- “Love´s reccuring Dream” is a beautiful singer songwriter outing and I played some woodwinds for this release. Here are two of the tracks from the album:
I dreamt last night I was stuck in the middle of a Christian Rock Festival. Columbian Heavy Metallers were exchanging watered down medium tempo licks on their white guitars and I was about to lose it completely, there was no way out. I think it could have been the backlash from watching this film on the Norwegian Black metal scene of the 90´s, about the boys who took the initiative into their hands and started to burn down churches across the country. To balance that out and return to the real essence, beyond speculation on whether or not crosses should be inverted and burnt, I recommend the documentaries of the production house zed, some of which are here.
A true children´s lullaby : A friend of mine in Barcelona, Zoran Dukic (who happens to be an incredible classical guitarist with fingers of steel) is also the proud father of 6 year old daughter with the sweetest of voices. She recently sang this little song which I think is quite something:
I discovered another cultural difference between New Zealand and Europe the other day- or rather it dawned on me even though I have sensed it for a long time. Each time I take my 2yr old out I often let him run around bare feet- even on the beach or on the grass I still get funny looks from other featherless bipeds. They sometimes tell me to put something on, lest he catch a cold. I remember most of my childhood in New Zealand was spent barefoot- whether it was the classroom or the playground or home, our fleshy hobbit feet were mostly out on show. There is that pivotal moment in a Kiwi upbringing, that tribal initiation of passage when we start to play rugby with boots around the age of 15. Now I remember the first time I was in London, happily going for a barefoot jog in the park and innocently slashing my foot on a broken gin bottle (was that the end of my childhood?). It would be easy to get esoteric and talk about the grounding and earthing we miss by wearing shoes all the time but I will save it for now- my saxophone exam paper in Cologne was failed partly because I included my chapter on playing the saxophone with the feet ( which was meant in a more energetic way rather than physically!). For a euro-based saxophone class I would tone down my esoterica a little and say that if you do have floor heating, I recommend practising bare-feet as well as removing all the broken gin bottles from your lawn.
This is a piece I wrote for the Whanamomona Hotel in Taranaki- in a blistering burst of inspiration I named it “Whangamomona Hotel”. In times of evil, when below the dull roar of digital progress, nuclear energy is one of many spectres raising its ugly head again, it is consoling to return to places like Whangomomona, if only through sound. (btw, this is the map designating nuclear plants world-wide I often consult before planning any trips around) Jochen is on drums, Phil Donkin on Bass:
Last December we played a concert in the St Audeons church in Dublin with a new quartet consisting of four altos which we called christened the “Kaum Quartet”. The group evolved out of my workshop series in Greece and continued the microtonal explorations we started there. It was crisp and cold in Dublin during the rehearsals and I shot and cut my first portrait film for Plushmusic which you can see here. One of the pieces, Flock, deals with the movement of animals translated in into musical parameters- hence the swans and ducks in my film ( I couldn´t find any sheep so I went a la Chinois for the next tastiest animals).
I believe it was 30yr old Lagavulin which inspired Gareth Lubbe and I to launch into this spontaneous song of thanks at 0300 AM in the top tower of the great Stupa of Dharmakaya in Colorado. The spirit of a small Namibian village called Arandis where we had just been was singing through us. A certain little Maxim Chisholm had fallen asleep in the arms of one of the musical buddhas, surrounded by angels and demigods all entwined in making passionate love, merging their essences and hinting at the goal which can only be the end of division and realisation of infinite connectivity. When the eyelid bats, the bushy tail shudders, but when the butterfly in China flaps its wings, nothing at all happens- nothing at all- nothing is that simple:
Last year I played with some Moroccan musicians who travelled to Germany for the first time. After a few days of observing their ongoing expressions of shock mixed with great amusement I asked them what was up. Their reply was something along the lines of ” this is supposed to be the civilised world and yet they are all walking around with dirty arses, trying to clean them in vein with dead trees!” . The fact that there was no water in our bathrooms for hydration after excavation was of extreme amusement to them- especially the mix of apparent cleanliness on the outside (not to mention a vast array of extremely powerful and offensive after shaves and perfumes) with an inexcusably unhygienic situation in the more sensitive areas (not to mention the forests that must fall to fight the lost battle of rear-flossing). It seems that not only has our dear occident untold blood on our hands after centuries of unbridled war mongering, we also have dirty rears to boot. I think their amusement was justified, it is something that still puts a smile on my face when I strut through cities, and it certainly put some vigour into their Gnawa rhythms:
Whenever I embark on a longer composition like I am doing now for the opera in Venice I usually take a few books with me for inspiration and sanity. The ones I pulled out now happened to be the Drowned Book by the Father of Rumi, Artaud by Anne Thology, and The Little Prince in Armenian. These books have nothing to do with what I am writing but they keep me sane when my attempts to freeze my ideas into music are close to pushing me over the edge. Writing for such a space is often burdened with the thought that it has to be such and such; an opera house has to be filled with a particular sound, a particular instrumentation- what rubbish! I can picture the whole scenario already, with or without my music- not that that helps me much whilst writing. Composing for me requires a kind of mute cutting off of impressions, a retreat into an inner world and an exclusion of the total perception I usually like to walk around with. It is like a dumming down, a return to a small metaphysical mud hut of seclusion, and a welcome one in times like these when each time I can´t avoid looking at a newspaper stand I am cast into a fit of depression at the sight of another stained century. Beneath the din of digital progress, countries like Sweden and Poland are returning to nuclear power and dolphins are shedding salty tears causing the oceans to rise. Alas! Alaaf! A small jazz lament, my live version of the Flanger piece Peninsula, another sample from last week´s Plushmusic festival:
When I came to Germany shortly after the 30 year peace, I was immediately taken by the writings of Kafka. The utter futility of the worlds he created gave me a lot of strength to plow through day to day life in Germany. Later I also learned to appreciate more the futility contained in the language itself, sentences from which there is no escape, paragraphs twisted into endless circles, no logical or satisfying way out. I once thought this futility, or rather, this perfectly enclosed description of the futile nature of our existence, was a German thing but now I know it to be universal, it only finds some of the heights of its expression in that part of the world. Beyond the smiling carnival faces, bubbly samba and swinging arses of the Brazilian carnival there are some souls staring into the bottom of a Caiperinha and feeling deeply that Teutonic twang of realisation, that wiff of inevitability, that recognition that the game is being played for us. I have seen these souls in Samarakand, in Sydney, and in Saragossa. It is to you I dedicate this bubbly melody with the flute of futility hidden beneath:
One of the pieces I played with Jochen and Phil on Sunday night was the jazz standard “There will never be another you” backwards. Now I have reversed the audio so that after hearing the end announcement and applause, you can hear the original theme, reversed twice, and thus back in our normal hearing dimension :
In the plane on the way to Spain I randomly extracted a few seconds from each of the concerts in Cologne and strung them together. It gives a good impression of the range of eclectica we shared over the weekend. Thanks to everyone for a magical time. Check back on Plushmusic soon to hear all the results. Airbourne Eclectica:
Our festival at Loft Cologne is underway. Simon Ings is here writing about the concerts and updating the Plushmusic blog- you can catch all the action here.
Three gems for a snow-filled day in Berlin: A fantastic article musing on the curse of America and some jazz from the same condradiction-laden territory, the Herbie Nichols Trio:
and The Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell,a song I treasure:
I played last night in Barcelona in a tiny bar in Gracia with Frank Gratkowski and Mr C. Williams. Although I havn´t played a fully imrov. gig in a while and had written this long essay about it I did have a lot of insights.-Tocks became ticks and ticks became tocks. Warming up for the gig we had some of our usual marathon listening sessions deep into the Catalan nights. One album that I havn’t heard in a while is this gem by Konitz and Guiffre: