Music for Everyone

Hi Donald!

I love that good old big band stuff too. There's something about it that just makes your bones want to do a little jig. I love music too. I mostly grew up listening to classic rock, but I've grown to love the digintal crispness with which electronic music can be compossed. and as i've begun to wrap my fingers around the guitar, i've also grown to love folk-type stuff as well (although, 'folk' is such a loose term these days). I'll mention Nick Drake as my favourite folk singer. The depth of feeling he transmitts will break your heart if you let it. Here's a quote i just found from this list:

“The ultimate shock of Drake’s still swelling reputation is how totally his music has transcended his generation, his era and even his biography…
His best work is beautifully poised between innocence and experience, wonder and melancholy, and his voice is still impossibly close, whispering in your ear, telling you that things should be better, calmer, more beautiful than this.”
WORD June ’04

Word, indeed.

Donald G Laird

Lincoln, (is that how I address you?).  I am not familiar with the artist you have mentioned (Nick Drake) but I do sense the thrill you get from hearing his music.  I like listening to music, but I am more interested in playing music myself.  Do you play guitar yourself or any other instrument?

Donald

For sure, I love playing as well as listening. I had a drum kit throughout high school and I played with a group of guys covering rock songs. Eventually I moved into hand drumming and have grown to love congas, bongos, djembe, and have recently found this new instrument called the hung, (hear it's sound here which sounds a little like indian tabla but on which you can play scales.The first time i heard it was in concert with a professional didjeridoo player (at an brillian vocal-improvisation concert featuring Rhianon) and my jaw dropped. I've also recently broken through the whole 'circular breathing' thing with the didjeridoo, and am now finding that instrument to be almost like a meditation. i don't have one myself but i'd like to get one or even make one out of PVC pipe.

The guitar has always been completely daunting to me, but over the last three years I've slowly chipped away and have recently had a surge in inspiration around practicing and singing as well, so that is my main focus right now, I just need to find a place, like a little jam hall, where I can really belt it out where no one can hear me for a while where I can work out a few frogs and stretch my range.

What instruments do you play Donald? 

In order of proficiency   Clarinet,  Alto and tenor Saxophone, violin, flute, guitar and I can do a few licks on a piano.  I also have purchased a piano accordian but have not done anything further with it.

 I like playing ad lib solos on the clarinet or sax.  The violin I use strickly for classical music!

I am impressed with your ability to do circular breathing.  How did you learn?

teaching the didj over a blog post, that oughtta be an accomplishment! i've sorta 'known' how to do it for a while, but it took witnessing a friend making a total ass of himself doing it without a didj in hand (i guess you'd call that 'air didj-ing') to actually grokk what it would <i>feel</i> like. (i've had a bad habit of only going as far as thinking about an experience versus actually doing it!).

so the short answer is practice.

but actually not that much. when i finally decided to sit down with an intention to get it, it only took me about half an hour before i was making a continuous sound. far from smooth and seamless, but continuous at least.

the basic sound that anyone can do is just blowing air through the lips while they're closed, keeping the lips as relaxed as possible, and humming - just like the way you imitated the sound of the riding lawn tractor when you were a little kid: "br-br-br-br" (okay that's just me). the trick seems to be keeping the lips very relaxed, because the more relaxed they are, the more full of air they are as you blow into the didj.

when you want to inhale, it's that remaining air in the cheeks that coninues to go out, while you - having closed of the passage between lungs and mouth by pressing the tongue to the roof of the mouth (as you would just before pronouncing 'k') - take a quick breath in, and then resume breathing out.

what i found was that it's important not to try and force that remaining air out by contracting the muscles in the cheeks; just let that remaining air go out as it will, as though you've blown up a balloon and then un-pinched the end. by the time it's out, you've taken a new breath with which to exhale another riff.

in that sense i find the instrument a beautiful metaphor for the continuous moment to moment process of life and death. if we could treat each moment, each breath, as though we were creating music, and then fully let go of it in order to fully embrace the new one at hand, we might find ourselves much more flexible in our creativity.