Performance of July 25, 1999 Beanbenders at Fine Arts Theatre Berkeley, California. On-location digital recording and original mastering & mix by Michael Zelner.
Thanks to Dan Plonsey who invited me to play at Beanbenders and to Michael Zelner who exquisitely captured the diverse sounds of the instruments.
listen to Nepal Flute – Soprano (excerpt)
listen to Rhaita (excerpt)
In June 1999 I attended the Festival National des Arts Populaires in Marrakech, Morocco, a 10-day music and dance extravaganza that featured more than 30 indigenous ensembles from diverse parts of the country.
Most musical performances took place at the city’s centuries-old palace, the Palais Badia, but ensembles also appeared in parade – an opportunity to hear all of the music side by side – and in Marrakech’s storied square, the Djemaa el-Fa. In the Djemaa el-Fa, one would regularly encounter a wild mix of snake charmers, storytellers, magicians, jugglers, acrobats, and others demonstrating strange skills, such as the ability to walk unscathed over broken glass and fire.
At the center of nearly all of the music were exuberant and captivating melodic/rhythmic flights of fancy built upon an evolving series of lines in repetitive motion. These were played by flutes of various types and sizes, by double-reed rhaitas, by plucked or bowed string instruments, or ritually sung by male or female voices.
The sweltering dynamic of this part of the music – surrounded by a bold mix of rhythmic counterpoints emanating from drums, hand-clapping, singing, high-pitched female ululations – could easily sweep one away. But the music was nearly always grounded by dance, which often included movements of great athleticism. And despite the music’s insistent forward momentum, it was not really going any place; rather, its effect was to propel one immediately into the Present. This aspect of the music is what I came to think of as its Ecstatic Center.
Less than a month following my return from Morocco, I performed at Beanbenders’ new series at Berkeley’s Fine Arts Cinema. The improvising for this solo performance was inevitably inspired by the in-depth experience of the music I had heard on my recent journey.
For the performance, I dressed in a silky cream and green-striped Moroccan djelaba and wore an emerald green half-face mask, the intention being to remove my known personality from the presentation and to allow the music to be heard as much as possible on its own terms.
The music, excellently recorded by Michael Zelner, has been sitting quietly for a lot of years. Not long ago, I came across it again, and it felt like it was time to bring it into the light.
1. 2-IN-VISION (Duo in 2 Parts) – 4:12 Tenor Saxophone & Voice, Java Gamelan (saron slendro) – August 5, 2013 2. BRIGHT VISION (1st Trio) – 10:24 Bali wood xylophone& Mali balafon, Java gamelan (saron pelog),Thai wood xylophone – July 20, 2012 3. MYTH*STIC VISION (3RD Quartet) – 6:48 Balinese gamelan (gender), Thai wood xylophone,Tenor sax, Java gamelan (saron pelog) – October 1, 2012 4. LONG VISION (1st Quartet) – 6:49 Bamboo flutes, Mexican Indian violin, Tenor sax, Balinese gamelan (gender) – April 14, 2012 5. ROUND VISION (2nd Trio) – 8:59 Balinese wood xylophone, Balinese gamelan (gender), African balafon (Mali) – February 17, 2013 6. VISION SPEAK (2nd Quartet) – 10:22 Tenor Saxophone & Voice is added to the 1st Trio – July 20, 2012 7. DANCE OF DEER, SHADOW OF TIGER – 21:52 Guatemala slit drum & bass drum, 2 different Mexican toy violins, Mexican black clay flutes (Oaxaca) & bells – October 1989
Tape to Digital: Fantasy Studios – Photos: HK 2012 (Mexico) & 1988 (Costa Rica) by Martha Winneker
C & P Humming Bird Records 2013 – Humming Bird CDR 10
Envision: to imagine something not yet in existence
From the beginning, in creating the multi-track pieces, I’ve brought into play a concept I refer to as “festival form”, an idea that has been an essential part of the overall creative approach to what I call Total Music.
“In Total Music, a player’s total musical intelligence may come into play at all times… (In each part of the music), a player’s awareness is that of a total field of activity rather than of specific notes or thrusts. In each part of the music, something like a total musical process is occurring, unique to itself, perhaps able to exist by itself, compatible with but not dependent upon or leading the other parts. The whole, in this way, takes on a considerably greater complexity, having mainly to do with the types of instruments combined, the ‘natural’ differences in ways of playing those instruments, and the actual conceptual approaches employed… I’ve likewise combined instruments with regard to sonority but without regard to pitch, so as to allow a new range of pitches and ‘harmonies’ to result.”
– Notes to Total Music, 1991 (Humming Bird Tapes 009-010)
As a concept, Total Music has served me well. This is music based in real-time free improvisation that occurs within an open-ended “ritual” form – which means that the pieces are mainly meant to be experienced as ongoing processes rather than “heard” as net results.
But it is time to go a step further with experiential form.
Festival Form is itself an experiential form that can fully accommodate all of the elements of “total music”.
It is the umbrella form of any number of festival occasions around the world during which different musical and sound events are occurring simultaneously in the same physical space at the same time. Each “separate” event, however, is fundamentally important to the creation of the whole.
How would this concept work in an actual group improvisational situation, of which the multi-track creations are a type of avant-sonic sketch?
Each player would simultaneously create an organic complete music. Each player would relate or not relate to the other music and sounds going on around them, similar to when one is playing at home and sounds are occurring in the environment which may or may not influence one’s music.
While the players would not necessarily relate to each other in a compositional sense, they would relate to each other and to their shared environment experientially and together create (or “compose,” if you will) a sympathetically-in-tune experiential musical space – a space defined by the composite layers of sound that make it up, similar to the way the simultaneous layers of sound at a festival define and create the festival.
As Archetype: the Fullness of Individual Being in Collaborative and Existential Flow with the Fullness of All Life.
In early 2012, I had the idea of putting together an ensemble of this sort – multi-directional, multi-dimensional, and pan-cultural – which I would call the Envision Ensemble. However, the practical difficulties of organizing such a group and of bringing together players to play the types of instruments I wanted to include moved me in the direction of creating the new pieces which appear on this release. My hope is that they might serve as conceptual prototypes for the music of such an ensemble.
Does this new music sound so different from the multi-track music I’ve been creating all along? I’m not sure, but I believe that new thinking and clarity of thinking about the way one is working can itself give impetus to new form and can begin to expand the music in multiple new directions.
To provide a longer view of what I’ve been up to, I’m including with this release an early multi-track recording of mine from 1989 when I was only beginning to create in this way. Dance of Deer, Shadow of Tiger has a festival form feel to it and reminds me of being in “the village” at festival time. Duration itself (the piece’s 20-plus minute length) was intentionally employed as a means of moving the music out of summation-al/compositional time and into present/experiential time. This is a piece that was meant for release a long time ago but was forgotten about as newer music was created.
With all of these pieces, my intention is to construct a conceptual platform from which to Envision New Music.
Humming Bird Earth Series CDR 3 (Previously Earth Series Cassette 500)
Note: All of this music was recorded outdoors on basic equipment in “real life” circumstances, under conditions far from optimal for recording. Yet the ambience, excitement, and electricity of the music shine through in ways that fully reflect its cultural authenticity. It is to provide a small cultural looking glass into a world or worlds barely known to most of us that these recordings are presented. I hope they will encourage you to want to know more, to open your world up more to the many fascinating and diverse worlds around us.
Pieces 1 & 2 were recorded on the eve of the festival, October 30, 1990 and were played by four players from the nearby village of San Juan Atitan. Pieces 3-10 were played by three players from Todos Santosand were recorded on the first day of the festival, October 31, 1990. The players are playing a single 40-key marimba with resonators. On the recordings by the band from Todos Santos, the “middle” player changes after Pieces 3 & 4.
Tracklist: San Juan Atitan: 1. 7:21, 2. 4:15; Todos Santos: 3. 4:00, 4. 4:20, 5. 3:39, 6. 4:01, 7. 5:08, 8. 3:49, 9. 4:39, 10. 4:38
listen to Henry Kuntz Guatemala 1990 | Track 3 Todos Santos
While most of Guatemala and much of Latin America is celebrating the Day of the Dead, Todos Santos—the village of All Saints—is celebrating its village festival as well. It is a nominally three-day affair that begins October 31st, though the festivities are in the air some days before. The festival is the major event of the year, and everyone from the village, no matter where they are—many men work on the lowland coffee plantations for much of the year—makes every effort to return for the occasion.
The people of Todos Santos are Mam (meaning “grandfather” or “ancestor”) and they are descendants of the ancient Maya.
In spite of a road being built only a few years ago connecting the village with the larger town of Huehuetenango, it is still a relatively isolated place. The road is not much to speak of —a winding boulder-strewn dirt road full of pot holes, certain to cause havoc with any vehicle of less than super strength.
Todos Santos is situated 8,000 feet above sea level, in a valley of the Cuchamatanes Mountains. The road to get there climbs to nearly 11,000 feet before its descent, at its peak looking and feeling as much like some part of the Andes as of Guatemala. And at festival time, the Guatemalan buses are as packed with people as the stuffed-with-humans trucks that ply the Andes. From Huehuetenango, it is 3 ½ slow hours by bus, an experience no foreigner arriving at this time of year will ever forget!
For all that, Todos Santos is a magical place—perhaps not even all that special, but extraordinary in its geographical setting and in its own ordinariness. By “ordinary” I should say that it is ordinary for Guatemala, for like all of the country’s traditional villages, it is a visual delight. Men and women both still wear their traditional dress. Vibrant reds and pinks stand out everywhere, impressionistically offset by every color of the rainbow. And the earth itself is thick with red dust and clay.
It is a mysterious place too, for though the mornings at this time of year are sunny and bright, illuminating the green-forested mountains that ring the village, by 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon, the highland mist is so thick and damp you can barely see half of one adobe block ahead of you.
No matter what is happening once the village has moved into its “festival time”, marimba music is the glue holding it all together. At about 4:00 in the morning on October 31st, the music began in earnest and continued with only the slightest interruption for three days and nights! There were at least a dozen different bands, some from other villages, playing in every far-flung nook and cranny, with incredible physical demands placed upon the musicians.
Each band plays a single marimba with 40 tuned wooden keys, underneath of which are progressively-sized, loudly buzzing, wood box resonators. The buzzing is as integral a part of the music as the playing itself, a combination of notes and their vibrations always lingering in the air after they’ve been played. There are four players for each instrument, though usually only three play at one time, the fourth person acting as a timely and much needed relief for one of the other three.
One player plays the high end of the instrument, another the low, while the musician who plays the “middle” is often the leader, at his best (listen closely to piece 6 or any of the ensuing pieces) both countering the rhythmic bottom while at the same time adding decoration to the higher-pitched melodic line.
The marimba accompanies every kind of event —the festival’s “main” event, the out-of-time “horse race” of November l, during which riders power their runs with shots of rum or aguardiente (not so long ago, the riders would also competitively yank off the heads of suspended chickens but, thankfully, no more!); commemorative ceremonies in the cemetery November 2nd; the colorful day-long masked dances and other ceremonies in between—but the playing of the music is also an event in itself.
The back yards of various host houses are the sites for much of the playing throughout the festival, and these are occasions for copious rum consumption, dancing, hooting, and passing drunkenly into the void for the men. The women may not get drunk until November 2nd, the festival’s final day.
The marimba, however, sets a tone for the entire festival, and often more than one band can be heard playing at the same time while one is walking through the streets of the village. Indeed, without the marimba, the festival itself may not exist.
On the recordings presented, the first are from a band of four young players from the nearby village of San Juan Atitan. The remaining recordings are from a band from Todos Santos playing a brand new marimba with a mellower tone and with older musicians of somewhat more professional caliber.
Throughout the village, as I have mentioned, there were other bands and other musicians from other villages, each making their own contribution to this year’s festival of Todos Santos.
Recordings, Notes and Photos by Henry Kuntz. Digital Audio File by Michael Zelner. C & P Humming Bird Records 1991/2013 – All Rights Reserved
