with Pure Music, playing my Toca hand percussion drum, accompanying sitarist Ravi Shakar in the living room as the sun streams warmly in from the East. The music comes from without and within connecting something necessary and spiritual that only fingers, hands, ears, and soul can possibly understand and appreciate. Pure Music with no distractions, nothing to draw away the attention, becoming in the end just the music spontaneously composed and played in an instant. Ever-changing, ever-gliding from one mood, one nuance, one depth to another.
I have always needed and known different types of music: Eastern, jazz, rock, pop, folk, country, etc. But it is too classical and Eastern that I return again and again these past ten years. And repeatedly of late to Eastern and its quiet calm and sureness. Natural, free, and very much expressive of the Inner Life, Inner Being.
I first discovered Ravi Shankar in 1967 when he was being lauded by George Harrison of The Beatles, who used Eastern music significantly within his songs. Something completely fresh, yet basic is to be found in the eastern sounds of sitar, table, and tamboura. Something truly basic, vaguely primitive and wild, and extremely free/ing. Eastern music is about Being, the Soul, and its mysteries. It is about heart and head merged with soul in their expressions together, simultaneously. Always with Eastern music, a sweet and/or sad sublimnity and quiet power. When I finish playing, passing time long-forgotten, I awake in another fresh world–clearer and more peaceful. More myself and freer than I was when the music began and I became a key part of it and enhanced it by playing from within.