That’s the piece Bells, from the album Winter Rose, recorded live at the Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, Florida, in the Fall of 2005. It is the trio plus string quartet.
Here is a 2005 Diary post regarding that piece of music and here is another one from that particular concert in Clearwater.
It’s not a rumba or tangos. It’s not upbeat at all. It’s in a strange meter – 21/8. But it’s very nice music to hear while viewing the moon.
You can download a high quality 320kbps mp3 file here.
Looking for something to do this weekend? These fly great!! Most useful Wired piece ever.
Fold Your Own Sky King Paper Airplane – Wired How-To Wiki Takuo Toda’s signature paper airplane is no ordinary bit of origami. After launch on April 11, the snub-nosed craft wafted so high into the rafters of the vast Fukuyama Big Rose Hall in Hiroshima, Japan, that the camera operator recording the flight lost sight of it for a couple of seconds. The clock kept ticking. Finally, 27.9 seconds after it left Toda’s hand, the fittingly named Sky King drifted to the ground, ending a flight 0.3 seconds longer than the previous world record for a paper plane.
Built two of them this morning.
Saw this in the morning:
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. – John Muir
Since some of you liked the interview from Thursday, here is another one from this past week:
Looking at your tour schedule, it looks like you have a break from touring right now. Hope all is well with you, and you are happily relaxing, or perhaps traveling or doing absolutely nothing with grace and style. I am not a great interviewer, and certainly not a fast one, but I was wondering if I could throw you a few more questions via email to round out that interview I did with you AGES ago. No worries on timing; I certainly can’t ask for speed considering how long it’s taken me to wrap this.
Not so much going on this week. Next week we’ll have rehearsals for the new trio, then a trio-gig at Villa Montalvo in Saratoga on the 18th. On September 29th I fly to Europe for two weeks of solo-concerts.
Here are a few questions to answer at your leisure. Feel free to not answer any particular question either. Thank you!
1) You once quoted Carl Bielefeldt,
“If we have an historical obligation to criticize our tradition, we must also recognize that the more we fix the tradition to our liking, the less power it may have to challenge us to fix ourselves.”
and added how important you felt the need for us to have something to push against is. How is that relevant in your music, and/or in your spiritual growth? Any specific examples?
Trying to play something on the guitar that doesn’t come natural, for example.
I often either play either a melody or rhythm, but playing solo-concerts has made me try to play melody while playing a chord or developing a harmony that moves with the melody.
Or, some of the Flamenco techniques I use did not come natural since I learned them in my late twenties and early thirties. I had to really work at them.
Spiritual growth is similar, isn’t it? We seem to fall back to the things we do well or that come easy, and avoid the stuff we don’t like. Real growth is learning new things, and that often means stuff that doesn’t come natural.
I don’t think I have natural patience for things, but have developed some over the years. The practice of playing guitar and the practice of sitting (and getting older) have taught me that. But, man was it hard sometimes!
Zen-specfic I would answer that while I love sitting, I don’t like ceremony, and I don’t like crowds. Therefore doing a sesshin can be hard for those reasons. But it is a good way to learn.
Playing to one’s strength is easy and can be very useful, but one should never forget to train that which does not come easy. At some point it may even become a strength!
2) You were ordained as a Zen Monk by Dennis Genpo Merzel, at the Kanzeon Zen Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. What led you to that? Who was your Roshi there?
I was introduced to Genpo Roshi by Ken Wilber and met Roshi at Ken’s house in Boulder in February of 2004. In the Summer of that year I asked him to be my teacher, in December I experienced my first sesshin, in May of 2005 I received Jukai (ceremony of becoming a Zen-Buddhist), in May of 2005 I became a monk. Being a Zen monk is quite different from being a monk elsewhere. Roshi said something like this to me: “What you are becoming is neither monk nor priest, for those are Western words. It is something similar, but different. You are becoming a Buddha-apprentice.”
I went to Japan in 1978 with Zen in mind. As a teenager I had decided that Zen was the most stripped down religion of them all – if it is a religion at all.
None of the glorious colors and sounds and ceremonies of the Catholic church, none of the thousands of Gods of Hinduism, none of the fancy geometrics of Islam…I kept trying to move towards the essential then, and Zen seemed just that. (I have heard it said that Tibetan Buddhism is complete Buddhism and Zen is essential Buddhism.) Anyway, I didn’t stay in Japan very long, but I kept reading about Zen. I met and listened to several Zen teachers throughout the years, but didn’t make the right connection – until I met Genpo Roshi.
3) What about the great imagery you’ve photographed set to your music, and shown in the background of some of your shows. How did that come about?
I have done solo concerts since April of 2006. After the first tour I decided to add projected imagery to the performances. I went to art school and wanted to become a photographer or designer before I decided to become a musician. While I disliked darkrooms, especially the way developer and fixer feel and smell, I loved getting back into photography when it went digital. I almost always travel with at least one camera. I probably have 15,000 images on my harddrive, from which I selected about 700-800 to be projected at random for about 9 seconds a piece. What I like about the randomness is that, in combination with the music, every member of the audience creates their own story. The brain in action… like watching TV with the sound off and a Pink Floyd album playing on the stereo. It always fits, it always makes sense.
For this year I am using a different approach. I am no longer using randomness. Photographs are grouped according to different visual or location elements, and I added “long” photographs – videos about a minute in length that are done with a tripod, i.e. the camera does not move at all, but waves or leaves move… I want to shoot a scene from a rooftop in Manhattan that appears to be a photograph of the street from above… but in the last 5 seconds a yellow cab drives through the image and we realize that it is indeed not a photograph… So, the new slideshow combines still and moving imagery plus a few words in different languages… little snippets of poetry…
4) I counted 27 albums spanning 16 years on your website’s catalog and i think it added one more while i was counting. How have you come to make so many albums?
I started late, received my first recording contract when I was 30 – I felt I had a lot of catching up to do. Once I started I couldn’t stop. The record company tried to slow me down – too many releases they said, but I couldn’t help it.
5) You recently went to Tibet through a Upaya program. Please tell me a little about that. I know there was a guitar involved. (you can keep this short)
In fall of 2006 I went to Kham, in Eastern Tibet, with a group of people from Upaya. I bought a cheap guitar in China, on the way to Kham, to practice while I was in Tibet and also to entertain my fellow travelers and the Tibetans we met. The main focus of the journey was to bring medical care to several remote areas. At least half of the participants were doctors and we set up clinics in several monasteries. We also delivered sunglasses to people. Many Tibetan eyes suffer from prolonged UV exposure!
I loved walking at the altitude, loved the Tibetan culture.
In fact I want to do another long walk, this time in Japan, perhaps following the footsteps of the great poet Basho.
The following is not a music post. It belongs in the category “Journal”. If you are here for the music only, you can avoid these posts by going to this URL.
Took a walk yesterday Morning. Arrived at my destination a little too late and the green chile croissants were already sold out. Had a Pain Au Chocolat instead. Wrote most of this (((using Evernote on iPhone))) in the cafe, while sipping coffee and eating the croissant.
The space I talked about in Friday’s re-broadcast is time. Time has changed, or rather, our perception of time and especially our use of time has evolved. At some point (((a long time ago))) we used to say “I’ll see you in Spring,” later we might have said “I’ll see you at the beginning of the third moon,” which became “I’ll wait for you during the second week of the seventh month,” until we arrived here: “I’ll meet you at 6:15, and don’t be late – I’ll only wait five minutes.”
The grid has narrowed, from a year to a nanosecond (one billionth of a second), and the hatch-marks are so close now, we can barely distinguish them. If your watch slows just a little bit you miss your appointment – unless you are a doctor: they are always late for your appointment.
Is time an eternal and infinite and mysterious NOW or is it this finely hatched grid we superimposed? Like body and clothes, perhaps? Of course it is both. Something I wrote in the email-interview on Thursday stuck with me: poetry versus data (((maybe that is also beauty versus information or being versus having?))).
The moment, this now is poetry. The grid we superimpose is data. And isn’t that what is happening to everything? Aren’t we choking beauty with our grids, our data? Music (((and soon books))) have lost their magical beauty and have been reduced to bits, data files and streams. Is it a teeter-totter (((like so many things in life))) that swings back and forth… now towards poetry, now towards data? After these decades of reduction, will decades of expansion follow?
I think we can choose walking and biking over cars, we can choose to vacation in an area we can discover on foot or bicycle, as opposed to doing ten cities in two weeks – many of us have to do that for work already, so why do it for leisure also. We can find ways to counteract the tightening noose of time that we are ourselves superimposing on our world. We can insert space into our time, little balloons of NOW, like airbags in cars that save us from a collision with the dragnet of self-imposed time.
Maybe that’s enjoying a cup of tea or coffee in the morning, before you open up your laptop or read the newspaper. For me meditation is such a buffer. Sometimes my brain begs to keep working and does not want to relax into ininity. Sometimes it wins, but mostly it doesn’t. My gut knows better!
But that’s impossible, or is it? Numberless… that’s infinite
I should print a t-shirt that shows this little formula (((I know it is a nonsense formula, but it would be fun to see who gets it))):
Infinity (numberless) divided by X, which is NOW or awareness or dropping body-mind or freeing or saving or whatever works for you equals one divided by X. When we multiply both sides with X, which is the action to be accomplished (((I hear the ancient voices say… nothing to do and nothing to accomplish))), we eliminate X and what remains is this: numberless equals one. You, me, the world. All one. All saved when you are saved.
And isn’t it interesting that we have to move the goal-post of sentience continually? We keep discovering that more animals are sentient according to our own definitions – so we change the definition… I wonder whether someday we will arrive at the same understanding many old tribal cultures had, that the entire world, every animal, plant and rock, is sentient. See this:
Until recently, humans were thought to be the only species to experience complex emotions and have a sense of morality. But Prof Marc Bekoff, an ecologist at University of Colorado, Boulder, believes that morals are “hard-wired” into the brains of all mammals and provide the “social glue” that allow often aggressive and competitive animals to live together in groups.
Today I woke up at 05:15. I uploaded the second half of the “Under the Rose” album, which you can find here. By 06:45 I was at Aspen Vista at 9,500 feet and started hiking up to about 11,600 feet. Here are some images from my walk:
Today this was automatically published in the Diary:
We practice to create space. This is true for playing a musical instrument, but applies to everything else as well, I think. Practicing creates familiarity. Familiarity creates intimacy.
When we practice playing a piece of music or a scale, we train our brain by using our body. We scrub those neural pathways by moving our fingers. And that creates space. If moving from this note to that note has been trained and ingrained, we no longer have to think about that move and are free to consider other or additional moves. If moving from point A to point B has become utterly natural, then I have established space between those two points in which I can make additional moves. Or, imagine jumping from a rock to another rock. Once that jump has become easy, we might add a turn, a twist or a salto. In music, we might add a new note, a trill, a tremolo, a vibrato… We have created space (or time) in which to make additional moves – or choose not to! The more natural that jump or that piece of music becomes, the more space we have created. Then we have more time and more choice.
I find it important that the space we have thus created should not necessarily be filled with additional notes as we can use that space to embue the sound with more intent or emotion instead. When we no longer have to work at getting to the next note or musical sound, we can enjoy playing the current note with complete conviction.
From time to time I select posts for automatic re-broadcast and then I forget about them and am surprised to see them. This one was a nice surprise.
Here is more about my adventures with High Resolution sound – from last night:
Right now I am listening to an HD version of Jon Hassell’s album Fascinoma (((one of my favorite albums))), which I downloaded in 24/88.2 FLAC format from HDTracks. The whole album in 24/88.2 FLAC quality was $15.98.
We’re working on creating a non-proprietary, cross platform, extensible tool that will help enable new ways to playback, manage, and discover music. There are lots of ways to contribute your time to the project. We’d love your help!
Songbird is a free open source application that is available for Mac, Linux and Windows. It plays back a bunch of different file formats including FLAC files in 16 and 24 bit, from 44.1 to 96kHz. Very nice.
If money was no object I am sure the Amarra Plugin for iTunes, made by highly respected SonicStudio would be nice, but it’s $995 (((for a plugin!))). Weiss in fact recommends Amarra on their website.
My D/A, the Digital-to-Analog Converter, is the Weiss DAC2 I mentioned before (here and here).
This Tech Manifesto by the Water Lily label, who recorded and released Fascinoma is pretty entertaining. I don’t agree with it, but have to say that the album does sound damned fine. Here is wikipedia entry.
