The original idea of this ensemble piece by Johannes Kaefig was to imitate the smooth curves of a Zen garden by using instrumental glissandi. This inspired me to dedicate this zen training exercise to Johnny boy himself. We transformed the piece slightly for saxophone ensemble by inviting a Greek opera singer, Panos Athanasopoulos, to polish of 16 and a half ouzos and then sing over our alto ensemble (another alchemistic way of inducing natural glissandi in singers). The results, recorded under the foyer of the local church in the Music Village, can be heard here:
On tours like this we are all surviving on all but a few hours sleep each night. As the train rides are long and the concerts spread all over, the only chance for rest is in the trains and each of the players have a different strategy for that. Our drummer likes to put on eye masks and knock himself out with melatonin, the trombonist falls asleep into the pages of his swiss novels, and the bassist struggles to cope with the angle of the German train´s seats, hardly encouraging for sleep. My working formula is this recording of orchestral works arranged by Berio, which for some strange reason, is the only one that lulls me into phase 2 train-sleep:
Here is a film with some excerpts of the final concert of the saxophone workshop on Mount Pilion from late August. After a week´s ensemble work we put together a spacial piece for 14 altos which incorporated much of what we had developed together.
The concert took place on Hazini square by night, overlooking the bay of Volos and sonically flanked by armies of cicadas. The piece began with a static chord as we slowly emerged from the forest and then moved into a dense multiphonic carpet which we first developed in Ireland last year with the Kaum Quartet. This structure was optimised and notated for a larger saxophone ensemble by Frank Gratkowski.
As you can see on this clip, the best position for taking in all of this was lying on the ground in front of us and we were blessed here with a concentrated group of listeners, relaxed and open in every way. I thought it was wonderful to have the Baroque and Ottoman music students in the middle of our sound world. After a breath-filled silence ( and some light wind in the camera microphone for good measure) the players disperse back into the forest with “falling” overtones that spin the frail and windswept web of a D major chord.
The whole ritual took around 40 minutes and was captured in part on a small hand camera. I still don´t have a title for the piece but seeing as there were more than a few New Zealanders in the group I made a silent dedication to our dear native birds the kiwis, who, like many humans we know, once lost their ability to fly.
O nein, nein, nein…..it was a nice start to the tour to play in Berlin and Cologne, where it almost feels like playing in your living room to friends. From now on and for the next ten days it is mainly towns none of us have ever heard of before (tomorrow it’s Oberengstringen). It will be a good chance to play in our new blues program and see how the silk glove fits. The Jochen Rueckert profanity meter is thus far recording a very calm drummer with no verbal outbreaks and no civilian casualties to report. It´s early days though…
Tomorrow we are delighted to present our first live streaming event on Plush music. At 1755 BST we will be broadcasting the finals of the Song competition at the Wigmore Hall in London, a far cry from the small Swiss Jazz club (with wifi of course) I will be watching the action from and carefully examining the quality of our broadcast. You can find it all here on our live blog.
German wings carry us safely back to Cologne where my bag is weighed down with over 40 hours of HD footage of the last week in the village. I made some screen shots of some of our shoots just to give an impression which you can see here. It was a another week of solid music making (I didn´t hear once a break) and the variety was magical as ever. During the week we shot all the concerts as well as portraits of the musical characters I managed to convince to play in front of the camera (not a difficult job in this place). It was also nice to see the all-night sessions winding down in a haze at 9 in the morning and segueing seamlessly into the workshops during the day, red eyes and tzipiro breath included. On the Saturday night I had the joy of playing 80´s songs all night with Kostas. My ears are still ringing with the cries of ney flutes and centaurs, but oh so soon they will be usurped with swing in the seedy harbor of Rotterdam, now only hours away.
We shared an intense week of saxophone research in Agios Lavrentios this year and it was pure joy to have 14 altos at our disposal! Our final concert on the mountain square was accompanied by cicadas and gentle wind and was a perfect ending. I am now sifting through the material we recorded and plan to publish some of it here soon. Here is a small excerpt of a 12 part multiphonic work by Mr Gratkowski which we worked on during the week. In the distance you will hear the village children playing as their little souls were being washed gently in a new sound world:
Following on from that is little piece, a homage to all the souls we woke up at 9 in the morning with sounds like these (though by the end of the week they were even saying they were starting to like our clusters):
The Balkan Express overnight is a trip deep through the heart of the wild east by night. The journey begins in Belgrade at 10pm, where the station is heavily flanked by armies of broken zastavas and yugos spluttering black fumes into the air, girls and women all dressed to sex and soaked for life asterix-like in heavy perfumes, buildings still sporting nato shell husks and slot machine dives. The train itself is notoriously late, with delays up to 10 hours commonplace. It is a requirement on this train to smoke like a chimney, especially if you are in a sleeper wagon and enforcement of this rule is severe. Not far out of Belgrade, the electric over wires end and an old locomotive is brought into play and the first delays ensue. I calculate the average speed on this journey to be around 26 km/h. Throughout the night, various customs and passport controls take place from any number of small republics in between Greece and Serbia that have recently claimed independence. They all like to insist on you filling out their passport forms beneath the thick cloud of smoke and under their brandy breath and in a horizontal position. Come sunrise, the train has only made it over the border to “Macedonia”, a country cursed by it´s own self-naming, never to be accepted by the Greeks who of course own the patent on Alexander the Thrice Great (who, by the way, wasn´t gay). Outside the train sausages are being grilled and goods traded. We are now 7 hours late.
As I am heading into the music village where there will be no net for the next two weeks I wanted to leave something behind that could sound on for a while. I chose the Tonga Simonga from Zimbabwe and our Subultra BBC sessions recorded with the legendary Jochen Bohnes in Studio One. Happy listening and I will see you early September with a blow by blow account of Jochen Rueckert´s latest travel escapades on the root70 tour…
Tonga Simonga:
Subultra BBC sessions (Jochen Bohnes, Gareth Lubbe, HC- texts from Guy Debord´s Society of the Spectacle):
Some forty years after the publishing of the Society of the Spectacle, has spectacular growth of the spectacle taken over every single element of modern society, causing separation to be perfected? You betcha. Has everything that was once directly lived moved away into a representation? You betcha. And is the sign finally more important than the thing signified? You betcha- Is that all there is?
Excerpt from an abstract I wrote yesterday whilst staring out into a beautiful valley with a tiny wooden chapel in southern Serbia, fresh cow milk and plum brandy at my side, a distant radio playing balkan accordion, and little blond serbs chasing chickens and pigs…
“Beginning with machines that emit tones and later through to using instruments that play themselves and thus free themselves of the need for a human player , Rebecca Horn´s oeuvre has long had a powerful and deeply metaphoric sound component. In 2002 I began to compose music to accompany her site-specific installations…Horn´s work is closely aligned and carefully planned to relate to the space it is presented in; the musical scores and installation are designed to add sonic definition to these often large spaces through spacial composition. Challenges and questions raised by this collaboration include how to use sound with works already heavily charged with kinetic movement and emotion, in what ways has the level of dialogue evolved between the artists throughout the collaboration from the works´ inception to completion, and what are the meaningful points of reference between the visual and acoustic spaces that warrant further research on our part?”
Berlin Ostbahnhof 530 AM
The frozen doeners are being erected for another meat day
Commuters begin to hasten as the homeless watch on
The Elderly scuttle slowly through
Berio´s orchestral transcriptions are played over the loudspeakers
Slowing down the whole spectacle infinitely:
(Contrapunctus XIX, Ritirata Notturna Di Madrid from Luigi Boccherini, Divertimento per Mozart Variations on the Papageno’s Aria _Ein Mädchen Oder Weibchen, Rendering For Orchestra from Franz Schubert)
In 1998 I went to Tokyo to study Japanese music and spend far too much money on sashimi. One of the figures back then I was interested to play with was Keiji Haino but for various reasons this didn´t work out. Back then I was very much interested in works like A Challenge to Fate which I found to be powerful statements- his voice could be the post-Hiroshima, post-Vietnam cry of humanity, the sonic version of Munch´s The Scream, a voice which not only laments the the bloodiest of centuries but also the endless cycle of destruction itself, from Genghis Khan to Iraq and far beyond our wildest nightmares:
Several years later I did get a chance to perform with him. This track is from the Berlin Volksbuehne in 2005, I am playing bass clarinet with zeitkratzer who act as a kind of lush carpet beneath him in this 14 minute work:
Excerpts from my workshop writings:
I have noticed that despite all our best efforts, the Saxophone remains a wild beast when it comes to tuning. The classical method is to flatten out the broad intonation discrepancies by narrowing the sound. This is a dead end street for me. I believe we should work with the natural harmonic inconsistencies of the instrument and turn them into an advantage, ones that broaden our tone and tonal variants. We should work first and foremost to open our sounds, even if this does not serve to even out our intonation- if it has to be a trade off, I would take the open sound any day. Having said that, if the mouthpiece/reed/instrument set-up provides no unnatural obstacles to the air flow, there should not be any major intonational discrepancies. The types of music that require a stringent intonation are small indeed compared to the worlds of music which do not. Even when are playing with the mother of all detuned instruments, our dear pianos, I would rather listen to a full bodied sax sound with some intonation “problems” than it´s diametric opposite, the constipated pseudo-classical sound that comes painfully close to the tempered ivories but leaves us desperate for whiskey or murder after the gig just to rebalance.
…I think it´s important to finally leave behind us the idea that we are creating anything “new”. This is one of the major problems that hinders our creativity, the feeling that we should somehow be creating something “new” . It is especially prevalent in types of music where improvisation is in the foreground. The whole idea of creating something “new” with sounds is loaded with paradoxes. For starters, every single tone we play on our instruments is “new” and has never been played in such a way ever before, nor will it ever sound the same again. You get my drift. Freeing ourselves from the need to be “new” in our music will already in itself open up a small world of possibilities. “New?” No thanks.
The town I am now writing from in Mallorca happens to be filled with squeaky clean villas and english unreal estate offices but I much prefer to hunt down a sleazy little spanish dive in the industrial zone stinking of grease, sweat, sardines, petrol, beer, and tortilla; a place where the cognac flows from 8AM and outside the dust and stacks of tires perfectly underscore for me what seems like an empire crumbling slowly from within, or is transforming the correct word? The coffee is bitter here and shiny macbooks are viewed with understandable suspicion so I make sure to treat mine with visible contempt and let the flakes of my croissant spill all over the chinese made trackpad with it´s triple click function. Paved over a dried up river an old roman bridge still stands next to the towers of discarded tyres. Some minutes ago I am fined 105 Euros by the Spectacle for not wearing a seatbelt driving over the bridge. Stray mangy dogs roam. Here is no water, only rock. The wifi signal has dried up too. Cameron is blaring from the speakers and I poach the CD for today´s upload. This is Vivire and Dios de la Nada:
This week I am thankfully close to a dear master. Yesterday, Jannis Kounellis arrived at the gallery with crates of guitars and violins and huge sacks of coal. The gallerist´s face turned a lighter shade of ale when he realised that much of this material may not even be used in the end, it is simply needed by him to create something completely different. Kounellis and Horn have, among many other things, transformed the role of musical instruments and given them a life of metaphor completely detached from us, the machines behind them.
Whilst watching this unfolding play I had in my ears Raga Mohan Gauns which was composed by Ravi Shankar in honor of Mahatma Gandhi few days after his death. He uses the notes Ga, Ni, and Dha has the central part of this work:
I also dug up this track mixed by Mr Nacken which we made in Kenya to play on the infamous city buses that charge through Nairobi. It may not have changed the political situation profoundly but it did provide us with one week´s avocado salad and african ambrosia:
Andorra Budapest Vienna
In Budapest I find myself in a taxi with a group of German mothers discussing how many times their husbands have ran off on them. I have no headphones and am forced to listen to the tribulations of monogamy. After a 20 minute ride it is decided (in a rather surprising turn) by the youngest of the three brunettes that if monogamy is not possible, and neither is polygomy, then we are now forced to find radically new models of family if we are to survive. So much for my taxi ride in Budapest.
In the train to Austria the conductor slips me half of my fare back to me with a wink, leaving me without a ticket, but still inwardly rejoicing at this good old fashioned eastern corruption when around me it seems that Guy Debord´s worst nightmare is close to irreversible fulfillment.
In Vienna I scowl the streets around the Westbahnhof for the perfect little room. Nestled in between the sports betting halls, brothels, and call shops, Pension Seelenanblick welcomes me with a tiny single cell for my 6 hour stay. In the space of a modest blog update a violent storm rolls in and it pleases me as much as the winking hungarian conductor. Nature will always overcome the Spectacle. I lie down in silence, denn heim, und ohne klang und wort, bin ich beiseit.
Shortly after the storm, my friend Peja Avramovic´s beautiful live recording of this Debussy work drifts out my window in the opposite direction of the inbound mosquitos:
Dear readers, it could be the beautiful open sky, or possibly the wonderful micro brewery close to Andora I just visited- either way I was inspired to offer most of our 2007 concert the The Embassadors at the Cologne Philharmonic Hall for free download. Recording engineer was Robert Nacken. Enyoy, amigos:
Treatment (Wogram)
Desert-Post Desert- Myth (Wogram- Chisholm)
Dragon Pearl Massage Music (Chisholm)
Suite (Chisholm)
Eternity (Messiaen, arr. Chisholm)
Flesh Connection (Chisholm)
I have my dear friend Gareth to thank for making me aware of this recording of the St Matthew Passion conducted by Phillip Herreweghe. The beauty in these tracks is the balance- the solo instruments are taken down in volume, the inner voices are given more emphasis, and the final blend is something astonishingly new. On the surface these are only minute changes and yet the final result is something that really struck me as radical. It is subtle changes like this to known forms that have really moved me of late. Here is Aus Liebe will mein Heiland Sterben and Erbame dich:
Barcelona-Zurich
Close to where I live in Barcelona is a beach on which you can see every possible variant in the human form. Transvestites of all kinds, midgets, and amputees all strut their stuff, stark naked, caipirinhas in hand. Apart from the lobster-related species of sunburnt Anglo-saxon, I have observed almost every kind of biped species I know of. What I like about this beach is that anything goes. The motto seems to be “no matter what you have, just let it hang out”. What an inspiring place.
Some hours later I am onboard another difficult jet flight en route to Switzerland. You exit the plane directly onto the runway, pope-like, I love this. The platform sign at the train station informs me that the train will be 4 minutes late (there goes my day). This is an interesting deviation as even in Germany the delay times go up in increments of 5. The sign jumps now from 4 minutes to 7 minutes late- my whole schedule in Zurich is in jeopardy. Scanning the train station I observe all of the clocks easing forward in perfect unison. There is something so comforting in this subtle Swiss precision. The way they elegantly slide forward without clicking into each second has always fascinated me.
My first job when I came to Germany was teaching recorder to six year old girls in a small town on the side of Rhein, nestled underneath the hero´s gold now long-forgotten. The girls used to laugh hard and make fun of my German and at the end of every half hour I was drilled by the mothers who resembled their daughters in many details. But I digress. The thought that arose was that in these parts of the world, little budding musicians are often told that a good instrument is important to begin with. I don´t agree- a substandard piece of plastic trash is fine to start with. This reminded me of the German Tai Chi group I attended when everyone was donning silk chinese suits after the second lesson; my new-born yogi friends return with spots on their forehead, the buddhists with beads, while others wear them on the inside. Any instrument no matter what the quality can and should be made to sing and until today, the purest instrumental sounds I have heard live have not been produced on top instruments. The instrument is within and can be trained on almost anything. Some of the little girls would sing through their little pieces of gene modified plastic like I coerced them to and the results would sometimes sound like a seventy year old shakuhachi master on coca leaves, for those who don´t know how this sounds just let me say that it sounded “pure”.
Here´s a man who only has nothing other than an inner instrument and he really takes his time to develop his melodies with it. Sources like this are the best models in my view for the perfected development of instrumental and in particular woodwind timbres:
Years later I still sometimes wake with the voice of these young blondies “wieso sprichst du so komisch und hast komische haare?” A rare live recording of Pandit Pran Nath as a 50 year old:
From the coast of Catalunya I come today with a quadruple offering of sounds. Christian Weidner is a saxophonist I greatly admire and this piece Cantus is beautiful in it´s reduction:
A small jingle I made for TimeOut in Belgrade, a haunting song from southern Ethiopia, and the inner core of Radulescu´s Inner Time 2 fused with Beckford´s Hold him Joe (I like the tambourine on the four). These last three somehow got merged somewhat on my server, a digital hiccup now frozen on this blog:
Any other news perhaps from my home shores? In innocent little New Zealand, where lost cats and stolen cars make front page news, banjos are now being used as weapons of murder.
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: