Twilight of the Titans

Rochelle Bowles, myself and Peter Toose RIP - Masala - Circa 1996, Lismore NSW.

In the ongoing sequence of mourning the slow fade of musical era’s, it’s impossible to not say something about the passage of the trailblazers that headed up said eras. Yeah, there’s ample rock stars passing on - and I’m fearing for a few to come - but just yesterday it was time for Zakir Hussien, an indisputable spearhead of modern Hindustani Classical Music. It’s funny how this happens, but I’d been thinking about an album I made in 1996 with two of my university peers, Rochelle Bowles and the late Peter Toose, a project directly addressed by the music of Hussain, and the next day, he was gone. >>>> Ever since I started playing guitar, I’d been dabbling with the DADGAD tuning, trying to cop the acoustic stylings of Jimmy Page. The tuning was popularised by British prog-folkies such as Davey Graham, who inspired by a trip to Morocco and the sounds of the Oud, brought the influences back home and established the tuning as a Celtic standard. The sonarity of this tuning keep things open-ended and suspended, lending mystery to folkish whimsy, but it also has a foot or two in the territory of Indian Classical harmony by default. When you use this tuning, ideas seem to pour out… or at least they do when you make the effort. Whatever the case, I love the sound of it, and once I met up with Rochelle, a tabla devotee, travelling many times to India to shore up her commitment, a circle became complete in my musical development and inspired me to go further and deeper. The rhythms, the precision and the endurance grew during that period, leading to a situation today where I consider that perhaps, I can’t play like that anymore. I remember being in the studio, putting it all together, honing the performance, walking the tightrope. When you have three musicians all pushing in the same direction, doing what they do best, the synergy kicks in and you end up well further down the track. The Titans strode across the earth, the rest of us in their thrall. Thank god it happened, giving rise to precious troves of art and culture. >>>> So I thank Rochelle and Pete for going on that brief but inspirational traipse in the footprints of Zakir Hussain et al. Maybe I should try to play this way again before I can’t. I’m pretty sure this doesn’t sound like funambulism, but here’s Pivot, an instrumental we came up with for that album known simply as “Masala”. I remember the onset of RSI trying to get it down. Great times. I seemed to have so much energy then. That energy is still in my head, but it’s pensive in the physical world and I wish I knew why.