After a beautiful spring tour in Italy and Switzerland as well as a return to the bliss of Cortes Island and Hollyhock, I was ready for the international improvisation community of Circle Songs School with Bobby McFerrin in San Francisco at Grace Cathedral. Amazing global faculty and strong and ready singers from around the world. Then I spent three days in studio with Julie Wolf who is producing a cd I hope to release by 2024. We recorded 4 songs as well as a whole bunch of WeBe3 live improvisations.
Whew! What a blessing to live in these various music communities. Thank you all for your visions.
I have been home on the farm on Hawaii Island for 5 weeks soaking up time with Janne. Every day is precious.
I am now gathering my energy to travel one more time this year. I’ll be in Montreal for 4 weeks which is also precious.
Margie Farmer will post a complete list of the projects there which include singing a live score for Margie Gillis and her legacy dancers in a production of Pull of the Seasons which we premiered last fall.
Then All The Way In session three with final performance, and a new endeavor called The Murmuration Project involving 26 singers joining me and Margie Gillis to innovate and rehearse body and voice in a continuous flow using Vocal River forms and the irresistible pull of murmuration. We learn it from the starlings, from schools of fish, from the many animal communities who move together in dazzling shapes and all the while we are singing.
Then I’ll go to NYC to work with Laurence Hobgood my dear pianist friend who is a mighty professor on that instrument. We are preparing some tracks to add to the album. A concert at the new Shapeshifter Lab space in Brooklyn on October 12, 2023, and a workshop on Oct 14th.. Please come if you can.
I finish this tour in Guelph, Ontario. You may not have heard of it but it seems to be a vortex for creative artists with an institute dedicated to the study of improvisation in many aspects of life. I am happy to meet Guelph after hearing so much.
Then I come home to fall on the farm. Lots of harvesting avocados, mangos, lilikoi, ulu, coffee and cacao.
What I observe this summer is event after event, catastrophe after catastrophe of weather conditions; floods, fires, hurricane winds. I would call it climate change but embedded in that phrase is the knowledge that these catastrophes were put in place many years ago by colonial, patriarchal thinking; using up resources, changing habitat without regard to the future, using water, air, land and working people as commodities rather than the precious relations that they are. Now we are feeling and seeing the effects. On Maui which is just one ocean channel away, Lahaina has been burned to the ground. Difficult to imagine how lives lost, jobs lost, schools lost, community lost will ever recover, but new ideas must lead the way. Not rebuilding the same but rebuilding with real affordable housing, gardens for the community, options to create a livable reality for people. Multiply this by all the places on earth suffering. We remember we are all in relation no matter where we are.
The music is part of this healing, this change. Please find a community to sing with, sing to. Go out into nature and sing to her.
Thank you for your lives and your musical passion.