Kora Band Retreat
Posted on | January 16, 2010 | No Comments
After the recent holiday festivities, I was lucky enough to do something I’ve always wanted to do, and hope to repeat again: go off to a proverbial (or almost literal, in this case) cabin in the woods with a band for a weekend and work on new music! The Kora Band‘s trumpeter, Chad McCullough‘s parents were gracious enough to let us use their nice house on the Puget Sound in the small hamlet of Allyn, WA for a weekend of working on new music, old music, and of course, eating fresh oysters which we harvested from the sound at low tide, threw on the grill, and ate with nothing but a small amount of salt and pepper. Certainly the freshest thing I have ever tasted:
Oops, I digress. Anyway, it was really a fantastic experience and I promise that the purpose of this post is not to make anyone jealous! I do want to share some pictures and thoughts on the band and experience though. Chad’s father is an avid collector of old signs and (get this) vintage gasoline pumps, and though the pictures we took don’t do it justice, check out this vintage Shell pump that adorns the living room! (Mark took this one while Kane was showing off his bizarrely awesome fusion drumming chops:)
Anyhow, besides the gas pump (or maybe including it), we had a nice little setup in the living room, where we found ourselves rehearsing up to five times a day (sometimes unwittingly: after dinner on Saturday night, we mysteriously started gravitating back towards our instruments. “Are sitting at our instruments?” I found myself saying, and next thing we knew, we had come up with a great idea for our March 20 gig at Empty Sea Studios in Seattle, a great space focused on smaller acoustic groups. We’re going to try something a bit different and do the whole show without drumset, in a more “intimate” and acoustic format. Never fear, Mark will not be exiled, but will play only calabash and other percussion, and we’ll have Kane on kora and acoustic guitar, rather than electric. It should be a cool evening, and a shift from our regular sound:
In addition to working up some of our old material in the more acoustic format, we learned a bunch of new songs, some of which we performed at our Hidmo gig on the 10th. I’ve written a new tune (“Kora Tune #6″ for the time being) that I’m really proud of – I think it’s the best integration of my general musical aesthetic with some kora-specific material to date, and it really came to life in a sort of more epic way than I intended, which is always nice! It’s been, and continues to be an interesting journey figuring out exactly what sort of things to do as a composer to work with the unique qualities of the kora. On one hand, I don’t want to just sound like I’ve written some modern jazz and stuck a kora in it, but on the other hand I don’t want my own musical ideas to be completely overshadowed by the kora itself. This tune feels like the right direction and I hope to have some more time to work on music during this brief hiatus (more on that in a minute). We finally got the Rail Band’s tune “Maliyo” together, more or less – that’s one we’ve been trying to learn for 6 months but the deceptive beat placement continues to elude us! One day we will rock it for sure. Kane taught us a new tune “Amadou Sekou” by ear, which is always one of the best ways to learn anything of course, and the time afforded us on the retreat was great for that method of learning, which we usually don’t have time for, what with me living in Portland and the rest of the band in Seattle. Chad brought in a tune by a German trumpeter, Volker Goetze, who has a great duo project with a Senegalese kora player, and of course, for good measure, we added another tune from the library of the great Franco, “Bolingo ya Moitie-Moitie.” Watch for all of those tunes coming up in our spring gigs!
In addition to all that playing and eating, Kane brought his set of Mandinka drums and we worked on some traditional rhythms, which was really fun, though I felt a bit self-consciously white while doing so. Nonetheless, I think it was really good for our general progression in hearing some complexities of African rhythms. It was also very viscerally exciting, though quite loud (check out Chad and Brady in the background):
And, finally, we had some time to sit down and listen to some interesting recordings from West Africa, past and present (Kane brought a large portion of his unique CD collection, which was awesome). I’ll leave you with a few more photos and a recording that I discovered on the retreat from Bembeya Jazz National, one of the foremost nationally sponsored bands of Guinea post-independence, which advertises the national airline, “Air Guinee” Check out the awesome intro: “Security? Speed? Comfort? AIR GUINEE!!!” (click to listen)
Bembeya Jazz National – Air Guinee
And here’s Kane and I listening to it, in true African music nerd fashion:
(In doing further research on this, I discovered that Air Guinee lost their only jet plane (the others were all Russion turbo-props) in a botched takeoff in 2004 (long after this song was written, admittedly). Fortunately no one was killed, but they just left the jet in the field where it crashed at Freetown airport in Sierra Leone, where it can be seen to this day!!)
In conclusion, we were very lucky to have the opportunity to go on our little retreat and we’re really excited for our upcoming gigs this year. We hope to go into the studio in the late spring to record our second album and perhaps even embark on a short tour in the fall. More on all that coming soon! Meanwhile, here are some other classic moments from the weekend. Chad and subsequently Brady are out of town until March, so we’ll be having a brief hiatus until then, but our spring is pretty full of gigs after that point. One more note, I apologize for not having post-quality audio ready of any of the new material, but I will be sharing lots of that after we work it up a bit more in the spring. Thanks for reading!
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