Planetary Gig Talk

Chris Anander is an amazing musician. His earliest memories are musical memories, such as when he was in a stroller at age two with Tchaikovsky’s B flat piano concerto in his brain. We had a great conversation at Victor Wooten's Spirit of Music Camp. Chris started violin in kindergarten and was always an avid listener. He went to Berklee College of Music for trumpet, but played a lot of guitar and now considers himself a bassist. He has played all sorts of music, from classical to heavy metal. He says the power of music “might be greater than any of us can describe. … There is a primal thing to music that defies explanation.” He is aware of the profound effect remembering music has had on him and he says, “I want to impart the passion” of music to others. “I try to use my own experience as a guide for what is possible, what music can do. When the memory of a song can bring me to tears without hearing it, I would like to show people how to get there.” There are more great musicians now than at any time, he says, but the problem is with compensation, that everyone is getting paid but the musicians. The secret, Chris says, is that “everybody is important.” He says, “Music is truly one of the last things I have faith in.”

Stephen Jay is a fabulous musician, composer, and really smart and spiritual guy! He has played based in Weird Al Yankovic’s band for decades, but also has amazing insights and stories, such as music in Africa during his younger years. He also is working on new discoveries about rhythm and pitch, as he explains in this podcast. We recorded this under the Pavilion one afternoon at Wooten Woods during Spirit of Music Camp. Stephen’s mother was a beautiful pianist and his father played several instruments. So, seeing his mother in such joy while playing, Stephen knew when he was only about 5 years old that he wanted to be a musician. Music was simply paramount around the house when he was young, he says. He started piano first, then guitar when he was about 10, and bass when he joined a band at 13. His high school group Covington Tower was good enough to get a record deal! He majored in music and composition in college, and was fortunate to hang around with some real luminaries on the cutting edge of music, including John Cage! Nonetheless, he’d always been inspired by African drumming, so he and his wife Barbara left for West Africa in 1971. It was quite a trip to get there, which he describes in the podcast, but central to the experience was that the Africans he met in the villages were really still of the hunter/gatherer culture and they had a really special relationship with music. Musical instruments were seen as living beings, and “music nourished every phase of life; … music was everywhere, and it was alive and beautiful.” Everyone did music, and musicians were not in some rarefied atmosphere as today in modern areas. Stephen says, they had no written religion, other than “a sanctity and respect for all things, including inanimate things.” He says quantum physics has shown this to be correct. There was also no money or ownership out in the wild; everyone shared everything. He says Africans felt “music was a life form, not an art form. Gigantic, spanning the entire universe, and all know time, that lives, and needs musicians to help it live, at least in the audio realm.” He is currently exploring pitch and rhythm and you will have to listen to understand it. Essentially, he says, harmonic intervals each have their own signature rhythms. You can check out www.stephenjay.com for an article on this topic, among others. Stephen says that we have tapped into music to make a better world; look at how much peace, fellowship, and brotherly love music has brought to us. He says music has an inescapable beauty. When you witness something so beautiful and so much larger than yourself, it diminishes ego, and with that you worry less of things that are to come, have less fear of the unknown, and so we can get to more love and peace. “Music is sacred; it’s not a commodity.” He also says, “Music can help us distrust our fears.” “Music, and art, is our savior,” says Stephen Jay.

Roy “Futureman” Wooten has been playing music with his brothers his entire life. I was fortunate to be able to talk with him for the 100th Planetary Gig Talk podcast at Wooten Woods while there for Victor Wooten’s Spirit of Music camp. Please check out this amazing performer and futurist thinker. Here are some of the conversational tidbits for you:

- Roy says artists and musicians are carrying the weight of the world, because what we do with art will speak for the ages. - His mother loved music, especially listening to Nina Simone on the Sunday morning radio, and she said that music helps people get through the week, and could carry people through tough times. - Roy says, “Music is taking us on a journey, and … if we have a question about something, the question is the beginning of the quest; … if you stick with your questions, it’s gonna take you on a quest with intention.” He says, “You don’t know how you’re influencing people when you are doing what you love.” - Roy discovered the seminal book A Course in Miracles when he was young; he still remembers the line in the ad he saw from the Course: “Only the veil that is drawn across reality is lifted, nothing has changed, yet the awareness of changelessness comes swiftly as the veil of time is pushed aside.” - Roy says he and his brothers used to discuss spiritual principles like those in the course quite a lot. Victor mentioned the Course to me when I interviewed him last year for this podcast. - The Course says, according to Roy, there is only love and fear, and love has to take the form of forgiveness, which is the axis of the world. - Roy also talked about the principles of the Hawaiian principles of Ho’oponopono, based on the book Zero Limits. Roy says it is really about forgiving ourselves first. Ho’oponopono says everything is in you, and if you can look at life in a different way, it can change you. - Roy says the world often leans toward a chaotic place, but that the artist is the centering thing; the artist has a role in society that is more than most artists know. There is a heroic journey for artists. - He says, “The only thing that will create cohesion and order is frequency.” Music has a sacred quality, and “when we are dealing with music, we are dealing with the theory of everything.” - He says, “Musicians are magicians; there is magic happening [in music].” - He talked about the theories of the Dogon tribe in Africa, where Stephen Jay visited, who believed that, “Music is a conscious force and what we call god is really music.” - “Music knows who you are … when you join music, music joins you, and you begin to be able to speak your voice.” - “Some people are afraid of their truth … a lot of times your genius is residing in you, but it’s in a comfortable place, and you have to get uncomfortable before it can come out, before you are willing to let it come out.”

Vance Umphrey says, “Music was there before I can start remembering anything.” His mother was a singer and his grandfather was a choir director. Vance began playing with the family’s electric piano when he was 5 and started lessons when about 10-11. He joined the middle school band and took percussion. So, when he went to Humboldt for college, he ended up with a double performance major in percussion in piano, but more importantly, he was introduced to the steel pan and it’s fair to say his life has never been the same. Vance has played the steel pan ever since. It is really a complex diatonic instrument, and is often played in large steel pan orchestras, with up to 120 pan players! The steel pan was originated in Trinidad and Tobago, where the African population was prohibited from playing drums from the 1880s until the 1940s or so, and based on the need to play, they came up with the steel pan instrument made out of the hammered bottoms of steel oil drums.  “When I hear a steel orchestra,” says Vance, “I hear the elements of triumph and overcoming oppression.” Vance says, playing the steel pan is “super meaningful” and that, “I am just following music; … music is directing me. …Most of my decisions are actually guided by music.” He says that the philosophy of Victor Wooten as brought out in The Music Lesson has really impressed and influenced him; “it opened my eyes to the enchantment and magic of music.” “Internationally, pan has been a huge gift of bringing people together. … Everyone is trying to become one in the band.” He says music gives an appreciation for different cultures. Vance also likes the community aspect of music, and has a vision for music-based community centers for people.

Dan played music at school growing up in California, and was in several bands, but also conducted music. He says music education is very important, like team sports, but it is not competitive, and helped him get in touch with his emotions while growing up. Although he dropped out of college to be in the music industry as a session musician and record producer, he eventually went back to get his degree and became a college professor primarily researching the neuroscience and psychology of music. His bestseller This is Your Brain on Music opened many doors for him, including meeting and becoming friends with Victor Wooten.  He says that recent research on music and the brain confirms that music activates pretty much every region of the brain that has been mapped. Music also can reduce pain and pre-operative anxiety in hospital settings. Music can also combat depression and has great therapeutic benefits, including reducing anxiety in people with dementia. Dan says that preforming, writing, or even appreciating music requires very complex memory modulations and sophisticated brain mechanisms that other animals don’t have; it requires being able to hold an idea in one’s mind that is not in front of you. Dan says that music can lead to mutual cooperation, passing on education through schools, and creating systems of justice. When people play or listen to music, their brain waves synchronize, which also can lead to cooperation. Dan Levitin is truly a trailblazer in the science of music and has a new book coming out titled Successful Aging. Please check out www.daniellevitin.com. 

Greg Crossfield started with music in church, played trombone from 4th grade through high school, and later came back to music with guitar. He says, "I have a belief about music, that music has an interest in what it wants us to do with it." He likes to share music with people who don't play by showing them how to play Ode to Joy on two strings of the guitar. "To be a musician means to facilitate a WE of people, versus just the I of myself in a fairly I-centric society." He also says, "Music is very powerful and builds community quickly and helps foster energy that other things don't."

Mester Bo and Tina Israni form the group Ritual Sound in Copenhagen, and conduct sound baths by playing singing bowls, gongs, and the handpan. Their goal is for every home on the planet to have at least one singing bowl. Bo’s mother played piano, and Bo played various instruments through his life, guitar, piano, and saxophone, but a few years ago found the handpan, which is like an inverted steel drum instrument. He said the handpan came into his heart and he knew this was the instrument for him; “the instrument was waiting for me.” The handpan makes a very beautiful sound. Tina was born in New York but her family was from India, where she has lived. As a child she did a lot of dancing and moving her body to music, using her body as a musical instrument. She played a few instruments, but lost touch with music for a time. Recently, when dealing with some mental health issues, she got into sound healing and reiki, found a woman who played gongs, went to some sound baths, and at a gong training, she met Bo. She said that was sort of magical, there was amazing energy and she and Bo then started playing together. “We played (one time) and lost track of time and space and were just one with a sound wave.” During their sound baths, they play singing bowls, gongs, and the handpan, which helps tune the human body, because the human body is an instrument and sound can flow through us. Check out Ritual Sound on Facebook and http://mesterbo.dk/.

Singing has been Sara Wood's passion her entire life; she just happens to also be an association executive. She started singing with a children's chorus when she was 11 years old and sang classical and opera, before beginning to sing Barbershop harmony six years ago. When singing Barbershop, you're focused entirely on singing together, she says. "For those few minutes, I feel a freedom and peace that I don't feel other places. ... Music forces me to slow down and be present." She also loves the community aspect of Barbershop harmony singing.

 She loves the performance aspect of singing, "it's you and the audience with a shared experience." She feels that she has a duty and obligation to bring the music and the best of herself. She urges musicians to put it all out there for the collective experience that you can have. "If you can take ten minutes a day for a musical activity, your blood pressure will go down," she says. She also encourages everyone to make space in their lives for music, and it will impact how you see life, and the more who do that, the better the world will be.

Chef Daniel Ben-David is currently a chef at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego and has a passion for music, art, and cooking. His father was a chef growing up in South Africa, and music was always playing in their house and at parties. Chef Daniel says that when you put music and food together it becomes more of a unity rather than an event and it is very natural. Chef says there is almost always music playing in kitchens, and the chefs and food preparers often sing to enhance the rhythmic chopping and sounds of cooking. There is always sound and rhythm with people working and creating, says Chef Daniel. However, in a very large kitchen like at the Hotel Del, the power of music is so strong and there are so many people moving around with knives, heat, and hot oil that music is not permitted for safety reasons. Chef Daniel is very passionate about music and listens to music all the time. For example, when taking time off with his dog and listening to music and eating good food near the ocean, he says “I find myself at peace this way.” He says that chefs are often called kitchen pirates because they are rugged, but they all love food, art, and music. He also says, “Food is art, and music is art, and art is art, and you can’t judge somebody on it, just try to relate to it, figure out what can tie you to their art and don’t be so quick to judge it.” Please check out Chef Daniel’s Instagram account @chefdbd616. 

Dave “Razz” Rasmussen grew up in a family that played music around the house all the time. His mother was a pianist who played piano until very late in life. His father played the gut bucket, and Razz’s brother and sister played music too. He remembers living in Hawaii at the Navy base where everyone was playing ukulele, but he liked guitar because it had two more strings. He was constantly playing gigs and with people, and when he was twenty-nine went to the Guitar Institute, which really opened up his playing.  Razz says that, “people come together through music … they can’t help themselves.” He says everyone can play some instrument, that it lowers personal barriers, and helps people get in the same harmonic resonance. He says that music can even relax animals, and Razz at one point remembers playing with a parrot named Wilbur, who would bob his head and whistle and sing along with the music! He believes that meetings of world leaders would be much more productive and beneficial if they started off conferences with jams to set the tone! Razz has wanted to implement a movement that he refers to as the Harmonic Unity Musical Ministry (HUMM), which would be a global network for musicians to hang out and play together in cities all over the world. Instruments would be provided to those who needed them along with screens and chord charts so everyone could play the same songs together. HUMM would also use, promote, and instill collaborative precepts so that players would be able to play and jam cooperatively, such as “those that know, help others to grow!”