The following Blog is the story of the nine months it took to record my second studio album, Music of an Invisible Enclave. It is the story of a musician in a small Australian city.
You can find me online at:
www.zebulonstoryteller.bandcamp.com, and www.facebook.com/ZebulonTheStoryteller
It all began with...
...a week in December
Monday: recording with Lord Stompy
Lord Stompy is a Harmonica player of legend, a multi-instrumentalist of renown, and an singer of worthy reputation. On Monday we recorded a song together called "Black Life", which he wrote some twenty years ago, and which is now being used for a film being made in Sydney. I played a metal box as a snare drum, and sang backup vocals for him. The box is the travelling box my Grandfather Frederick "Snow" Pedersen used during his travels throughout world war two, as a pilot of a Wellington bomber. After my Grandfather no longer needed it, my family used it as a camping chest, filling it with cooking equipment which was used on many family camping trips. Now, I use it as a drum.
That same evening, Stompy worked on mixing the first song of my new solo album, a track called "Thousand Cuts", which incorporates Persian Frame Drum, African Doun Doun, Indian Harmonium and Gypsy Harmonica. The song uses a mixture of Romani, Southern Egyptian and Hip-Hop rhythms, and is to be used to make a film clip for Regan Gardener, the Principal Teacher and Manager of Belly Dance Arabesque, a dance school here in Adelaide.
Tuesday: Recording with Operation Firehat
I wrote the following in the morning before work.
On the altar of music
I have sacrificed my mind,
Let the blood from my heart
Abandoned conventions of family
Sanity, economy and
Good common sense
I have gone hungry, gone
Sober, gone crazy for
These melodies, these drums
in the night my soul flies through
mountain vistas of sound,
the rise and fall of their
peaks and valleys,
the rise and fall of my
breath, my pulse,
I dream
while awake
making of each musical
moment, a scene of
harmony, composition, form,
the vibration of the air
the air i share with the
sound of my song.
I have given up a lot for music...
I gave up an office job,
a bad marriage, television,
boredom and grief.
I gave myself to music and though often
others pay the price for my devotion,
I persist, chasing a dream
that is part compulsion, madness
and terror, and part
Love, Divinity and Beauty.
Though my bones ache – I play
Though the hour is late – I play
Though my shoes are worn down
And my clothes threadbare – I play.
I play Cajon (spanish box drum) in a four piece rock band, Lord Stompy on Harmonica, Ryan Garde plays bass, and Nick Atherton plays guitar. We recorded two songs, first a cover of "Fumbling with the Blues" by Tom Waits, and second an original called "Working Class Blues". We tried to record an original reggae track called "make Believer" but I have a real lack of affinity with playing reggae rhythms, so after an hour of failing to record a decent take, we gave up and moved on with our lives for the time being. I have some music study to attend to.
Wednesday: Dinner with Inkpot Theatre
For the past eight or nine years, I have been involved with a small childrens theatre company based in Mt Barker (I live nearby in Nairne). In the past I have played music for three major productions, Jumping Mouse, The Lorax, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Wednesday night was a Christmas dinner for the theatre crew and supporters. At the long table in the Lobethal Tavern, were seated playwrights, actors, musicians, music teachers, a radio presenter, a costume designer, a circus teacher who is also the set designer and craftsman, committee members (accountants, secretaries, funding officers etc.) and a handful of supporters, as well as the towering pillar of inspiration and might that is the company director, Joanne Sarre. I will leave it up to you to imagine the conversations that night, shared over rich food and local wines.
Thursday: Home with the Family
Coffee, chatting with everyone, dinner, desert, a little playstation, the kids go to bed, B grade horror movie on TV, I curl up with my woman on the couch. Perfection is found in life’s ordinary moments.
The sunlight is like treacle,
the wind whispers in the grass,
your hair brushes across my face.
The laughter of our children echoes in the walls,
Insect orchestras sweep the hillside,
The birds sing upon their droning rhythms.
Friday: Dungeons and Dragons with the boys.
For the last twenty or so years, I have been an avid player of role playing games of the old variety. A gathering of people seated around a table with character sheets, rule books, multi-faceted dice, junk food and the limitless vistas of our imaginations. For the last two years I have been running a game for my two sons, Arkady and Wren, and their friend, Ali. Their characters, A Shadow Dancer Warrior, a Shapeshifing Alchemist, and a Necromantic Sorcerer are at present in the Goblin city of Grupnut, having just wittnesed the beginning of a parkour race in which each competitor is first fired from a catapault towards the city buildings. Some have parachutes, some rocket packs, one has wings and two blow up in mid-air for uncertain reasons. All have grappling hooks. Recently the characters also passed through a land populated with Spider-Ants, who harvest the acid rain from the volacnic mountain slopes and who made building materials from their own secretions, which are in turn, a sort of base matter for the making of more Spider-Ants.
Saturday: the big one.
11:15 – 12:45 Advanced Drum class.
I had three students today, we worked on two songs, Taken North of Egypt, and Street Dance Karsilamas. The first is comprised of North African and Egyptian rhythms, the second song uses the Greek 9/8 Karsilamas, closely related to the Turkish Kashlima, a new 5/8 rhythm I made up, a couple variations on the classic Baladi rhythm and call and response ending. My students have been with me around two years, and come from backgrounds in Belly Dance, Flamenco, Indian Traditional music, Classical and Jazz Piano. There is a photographer, a mental health nurse, a henna artist, a trainer in the mining industry, an author...the list does actually go on. They are quite an astounding group of humans.
4:00 – 6:00: Rehearsal with Rajesh, Solomon and Vinu
Through one of my students, Rajesh, I have become involved with a few musicians born in South India, now living here in Adelaide. All drummers, and all talented in drums I have never neen, nor heard their names. It’s all still a blur of Indian sounding words, the Chandra drum? Was that it? A double ended barrel, with an astoundingly tight skin on both ends. It prouces no bass note, just a high clear ringing sound and is played with sticks curved at the tips. Well this trio is Solomon on Djembe (but dear lord does he make it sing like a Tabla), Vinu on the Chandra, and me on Cajon, Darbuka and Tar (frame drum – not the 8 string instrument). We have been rehearsing for a Fringe show, a kind of world music and dance cabaret evening.
I have felt incredibly welcomed by them and their community, understood in a way that I am not understood elsewhere. Music is not just entertainment, it is devotion, and to be a devotee requires great fortitude, flexibility and sacrifice. The rewards of this devotion are not only reaped by the musician, for they are also showered upon the listeners, and through them, into the world. A force of good, an invisible wave of feeling spread out from the circle of the stage that inspires happiness, introspection, joy, exuberance, and all the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. I am honoured to be in the presence of such joyful, and sensitive musicians.
Worthy of note for the commonality of the experience, is something Vinu said. He got to rehearsal a bit late, having come from work, rushed home to shower and change, then bolted out the door to make it across town for practice. As he left, his wife was yelling at him for abandoning her on her birthday. Vinu told me that he did it because it was for music, and because it was for Rajesh who was his closest friend. I have lost track of the number of times I have abandoned my own family in favour of music. Being a musician has a price, and we musicians are not the only ones who pay it. My current partner and our children are familiar with the sight of my back as I walk out to attend to my musical duties. I am familiar with the look of disapointment on their faces and the thinly hidden grief in my partner’s voice as she says goodbye, again. Music has little respect for your personal life. I am a servant, but it still breaks my heart to have to live with the price others pay for my devotion.
7:00pm – 11:15pm Gig at the Governor Hindmarsh
I arrive a bit early, park by the bins round back to relax before loading in. As I wait I see a bright white kitten slink beneath the other cars and scurry away. I take it as a good omen and begin carrying my gear in. I bring my Ukulele, Setar, Tar, Harmonica, Cajon, Darbuka, Koncovka and one cymbal on a stand. Filling the streets all around is the crowd who have come to see Flume play across the road at the entertainment centre. A lot of young girls dressed glamorously, some already staggering drunk as they cross the road.
When I have all my gear stowed at the back of the stage, I sit down to read Hamlet. Nick, the guitarist arrives in good spirits, dressed all in black, Stompy shortly after wearing a tall leather top hat. Gardy comes later, a black cloud over him as he moves swiftly to the bar. (After the show he told me that only hours earlier, his best friend (his brother really) discovered that his girlfriend had died from a heroin overdose).
But, the show must go on.
Lord Stompy opened on guitar with two of his Harmonica students, Carrie (wife of the poet, Avalanche) and another gentleman I did not know, playing a Russian folk song, followed by I fought the Law and the Law won, Minnie the Moocher and a few others. The crowd sang and raised their glasses, the pub felt like a pub, all warm light, thick sound and old friends. Avalanche later commented that it was like being back in the old art school days in the seventies. It was perculiar watching from beside the stage, staring at the backs of the performers and looking out upon the audience they faced, seeing their smiles and hearing their voices singing back towards the stage...a kind of blurring of the stage line, who is onstage when everyong in the room is singing?
Next onstage were myself and two drum students, Jenny and Toby. From the moment the first rhythm ran four bars, the entire bar fell silent, and unamplified, the three drums completely covered the crowd with sound. It was a personal little achievement that I have been working half my life to achieve...to bring middle eastern music to people in pubs, to the public. To bring it in unexected moments, to slip beneath people’s guards and show them the beauty of a culture they may otherwise have been wary of. I thought my students played admirably, pushing into the music with confidence, running over our mistakes and playing on with determination. This was their first foray out of the Belly Dance world. We have played together for parades, street fairs, belly dance shows and school parties over the last two years, but always in the company of huge numbers of dancers. This was the first independent performance of the troupe Drum Arabesque.
Next I was on, doing a Zebulon set. I opened with these words from my poem God has left us all alone.
Our hands held out in supplication
We wait for change to come and loosen
These shackles that we are a shakin’
But I hear music in the makin’
Of slaves who dance to keep the breaking of their hearts
From the breakin of their minds
I played Dance the Pain away, Breathing Life Back into the Earth, Garyan and Crossfire. This last song, on Ukulele (tuned AEAE...like the Setar), I dedicated to my recently deceased family members, for whom the song was written.
Crossfire
The ending always comes too soon
caught between traffic lights
crossfire in the high beams
young, beautiful
and in love
But we are born, and must die
rabbit in the headlights
fish in the barrel
young, beautiful
and very much in love
What I remember most was the silence. I heard it, like you normally hear sound. The crowd gave me their silence, an incredible gift that filled me with gratitude, pride and confidence. I have always lived with the bottomless doubt that my music is not enough, that somehow it is deficient in some glaring element and that others find it boring. Moments like this one at the Gov remind me that my midnight scratchings and solitary study have produced something of worth.
Then came the final act, Operation Firehat! Gardy seemed a little more focussed, a half smile beneath his beard. As he stood next to me in the moments before our first song, he said that his day had been fucked, but that he was happy to be here, with his mates playing music.
Now I’m not going to be modest, we rocked the house. Well, we rocked and the audience thinned. Around halfway through our set, the crowd had halved, which is a surprisingly depressing thing to wittness. We responded in the best way we could, which was simply to rock harder. We play reggae, blues, funk, punk and noise music (with a 70’s Andean psychedelic rock song thrown in as well), so when I say we Rocked, what I mean is that our music is goddamn awesome and we pushed ourselves into it with everything we had. To be critical for a moment, it was not our finest show, little things felt out of synch, a few bum notes felt embarassing in light of our high standards as performers. To be honest, the crowd loved it, singing along with our murder ballad When Your Girl Runs off with a Hipster, and heartilly applauding our one cover song, a rather dirty and rough version of Tom Waits, Fumbling with the Blues. Having recorded it only days before showed in our playing, we really have that one nailed down and we play it very well. I like listening to both versions (Waits and Firehat’s) one after the other. Our favourite song Gardy vs the Jungle Bunny, a hard punchy funk song with some great breaks, breakdowns and chanting drew a cheer that put smiles on our faces. We finished with our classic Aussie pub rock song, Working Class Blues, leaving the stage sweaty and with hearts racing from the excitement.
I talked to a few people after the show, conversations about music, instruments, history, culture, travel. I met a nice greek couple who had missed our show, but who had just come from seeing a Greek band in the big venue room behind the Gov. We talked about the difference between Greek and Turkish music, and the difference between their people’s character. We talked about Catal Hyuk, the first city. One lady had a daughter who had won a singing competition when she was eleven. I gave them a CD and showed them a couple of my instruments. The hour was getting late, I packed my car, the streets once again filled with people leaving the Flume concert. The smell of their excitement clouded the warm night, their sweat and youth and exuberance. A crowd of people dissipating through the streets, united in their experience of what seemed to have been an excellent show. As I loaded my car I talked to a couple of high school aged girls sitting on the edge of the carpark, asking them what the show was like, they were very impressed. They asked what I had been doing, I told them that my Darbuka students had been opening a show for a rock band I was in....and here is the really strange thing. They already knew what a Darbuka was!!! In Adelaide, it has been a pioneering journey for me to introduce the instruments that I play to the people around me. Meeting people who already know, is always nice. I gave them a CD, they found my Zebulon FB page on their mobile phones, and then I got in my car and I drove away.
Sunday: The Harem Party
The end of year party for Belly Dance Arabesque was a loud and festive event, something like a hundred people filling the North Adelaide Town Hall. Classic Egypptian style cane dance, Unmata Tribal, Improvised Tribal, Bollywood, a solo veil dance, a mass of dancers all with tambourines and big Spanish skirts, laughing and spinning and revealing something Essential, as in, of the Essence, of Dance. The joy of unified movement is too intellectual a way to describe the feeling. Better put, it is the feeling of all bodies being one body, moving to and fro, swaying, turning, skipping, together. The sense of loosing oneself in a wider kind of consciousness, or awareness, peeling away the layers of separation. It is an ecstasy, in the old sense of the word. Bliss, timelessness...describing it can be misleading, the body has its own language and it does not use words.
My drum students played, seven in all. There is a comfort in our playing together, a familiarity, but one that still flows with excitement, and a sense of always exploring new territory. The solos each student play are developing, melodies are born in their fingertips, something of the character of each player reveals itself without words, without pretense. Music has a habit of showing your exactly who you are when you play it, the same is true of dance. These wordless artforms express things about humanity that cannot adequately be described with words, rather they are circumscribed by language, wastefully and to very little good effect. There is always so much lost in translation.
While watching Regan lead a huge group of dancers today, I wrote the following.
I will always remeber you with a tambourine in your hand,
zills ringing out against your shoulder, your hip,
a smile so bright it could end wars
if only the Generals could see it.
The wave of your skirt is a spring wind blowing cares like pollen to the sky.
How many times have I seen you dance?
How every time is it like the first time?
How you reinvent dance itself
each time.
But it is not just you.
It is the tribe of women who wear your smile,
Who follow your steps, who dance because
You dance, whose joy is your joy, whose
Laughter could end wars if only the Generals
could hear them.
I have seen you wear the crown of a Queen,
I have seen your bare feet dirty from the street.
I will always remember the tambourine in your hands,
zills ringing out against your shoulder, your hip.
