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Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Formative lessons in world fusion music: a musical biography of sorts

I grew up surrounded by popular music and, like every red blooded American boy in the throes of hormone overdrive, I was bent on being a rock & roll star. I was also good with electronics and had a dubious fascination with stripping down and reconstructing anything I could get my hands on, including the family entertainment console which was about the size of an old Volvo. In Junior High I had a paper route and earned enough money to buy a cheap amp and an imitation Gibson SG solid body guitar, which I ran through an old Webcor tube reel to reel and into the entertainment console. It sounded something like Jimi Hendrix's freak albino mutant twin- shrieking, distorted polyphonic sonic booms which left the neighborhood windowless for months. Later on I had a band in High School but no one ever showed up for practice unless there was beer, so we did the sensible thing and retired after having our farewell tour of the lower desert.

Around the same time I discovered "world music" through buying foreign records from thrift store bins, which gradually began to dethrone American rock and heavy metal- actually, nearly everything western- from being the main point of my life. I regularly scoured the bins of local stores and came home with my arms full of foreign music. Groups like Kraftwork, Focus and Golden Earring were already growing in popularity and I soon found other bands which were seminal in the growing new wave of art rock, synth and world music- Amon Düül II, Tangerine Dream, Nectar, early Genesis with Peter Gabriel, Can, and a slew of others. My mother found it incomprehensible that I preferred to listen to music that I don't understand what they are singing about, but to me that was the beauty of it: it was pure, simple and practical, it wasn't American and there were no stupid, meaningless lyrics to get in the way. My all time favorite discovery was a recording of Middle Eastern music titled "The Devil's Anvil: Hard Rock From The Middle East".

My best friend, Richard Anderson, and I shared a love for strange bands that played unusual songs with curious subject matter in odd and experimental tempos. For me it was Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention (which my oldest sister introduced me to) and City Boy, a band from England. For him it was BeBop Deluxe, also from England, and Crack The Sky, from Ohio. We hit it off socially and musically and, fresh out of high school, formed a musical collaboration/ band and wrote our own music and lyrics, following the model of Fagen and Becker of Steely Dan. The band fell somewhere off-center of punk, power pop, and new wave, with a delight for montage-like experimentation with differing styles (I ask you- have you ever heard a Calypso-Punk version of Khatchaturian's Sabre Dance before?). Through the next several years- and several name changes, from Little Baby Strangers, A Soft Zoo, and Freaks Amor- we worked and played with some interesting and talented musicians in the area- The Reactors, The Neophonics, The Avatars, Pagan Myth, Montage, Cabazon Dinosaurs, The Unforgiven and some folks who would later form Camper Van Beethoven. Our home quickly turned into an artist commune, first with Casa de Cara in San Bernardino and then the Mellow Manor in Riverside, which was also home to Spike & Mike's Animated Film Festival. We recorded a couple records of original material and remained largely unnoticed except by local artists and party goers. We did get to open twice for Suburban Lawns, a punk band from Los Angeles who we mysteriously got hooked up with and who seemed to enjoy our music.

The most influential person I met during this time was Jack Johnson. He was brought in to play bass for us and quickly became our artistic mentor and creative muse. Jack was the sort of person who could do anything and was suspicious of formal education. Mostly self taught in everything he did, he studied dance when he was in college and then taught himself music so that he could understand dance better. He often showed up at our house with an instrument he'd never played before that he'd just picked up at a pawn shop and would have it figured out in a few minutes, or with raw materials, like hollow bars of iron which he cut into varying lengths to build a make-shift gamelan with. Through him I discovered another world of sound which was only hinted at in my attraction to foreign music, and he introduced me to microtonal and serial composition, atonality, foreign and experimental tunings, and through him I discovered the composers John Cage, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley. If we accomplished anything of note in our music it was all due to his inspiration, encouragement and guidance. My waning interest for playing contemporary music continued to grow. I eventually decided that it wouldn't benefit anyone, particularly myself, to pursue something that I didn't enjoy, and I eventually left the world of music to concentrate on writing.

I returned to music composition several years ago while I was adapting the book of Tobit for theatre. It seemed particularly suited for opera so I began studying music of the Middle East, Judaism and Islam. Oh, and opera, too- just in case it might prove handy. Something about non-western music has always appealed to me more than contemporary American music, and I discovered a vast world of musical creation outside our boundaries that never seemed to be part of the country's melting pot. From there it branched out and blossomed, and I felt like I had returned to the thrift stores of my youth, bristling with excitement at the discovery of new worlds. Composing and orchestrating music, experimenting and exploring it's possibilities continues to provide that same spark of wonder and elation.

© emburke/ emberarts 2004

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