Artist description The personal Bio comes a bit further down - my "band" is in my head. In the "band picture" you can find my alter ego, my little girl, and my dog. They all "play" a part. The images and descriptions attached to the individual “Movements” (or songs) in the CD Ai Tengri: Shaman's Piano are just the images and associations living in my mind, and are not intended as the stuff of “program music” . I like words, and actually do a lot of writing, so I tend to want to join that part of me with the musical part. I think you should be listening to the music with your own daydreams playing in the background. All of my music is improvised, including the oddities on Shaman's (re)birth. And while I played, I had fantasies about my own "past lives", which led to my researching these things: Tengere was the God of the Sky for Mongols, Turks and other peoples of Central Asia who practiced shamanism - "Ai Tengri" translates to "Eagle of the Sky God". It was Bela Bartok who carried the distilled musical influences of the Turkmens into Western Music when he incorporated Hungarian themes into his own work. Meanwhile, much of what we term "New Age" and "Ambient" is really the grafting of Eastern meditational "non-structure" onto the Romantic tone poem. The music on my CD is a rhythmic journey through the archetypes of my own racial memory. The sound is not easily categorizable for MP3's genres, but some of you out there will resonate with it.

Music Style Piano Improvisation

Musical Influences Eclectic (four classical: Beethoven, Bach, Bartok, Ravel) And, Mingus, and World Beat/ethnic.

Similar Artists None, BUT you can check out Cecil Taylor, George Winston. We are no doubt all connected on some profound level.

Artist History I grew up in the upper Hudson Valley of New York State where I absorbed as real folklore Washington Irving's stories and legends with their mysterious flavor of an earlier lost time ..and, for movie buffs, that includes "Ichabod Crane".Beginning piano study at age eight, I went on to attend the Albany Conservatory of Music as a teenager, by which time I'd already begun to digress from repertoire work into the vast realm of improvisation. My first "musical persona" was Beethoven. There was something about imitating Beethoven's rhythmic bass lines which evoked for me a kind of musical/spiritual core. Then, while attending Dartmouth College I met and studied under the composer Paul Nordoff who first introduced me to the music of Bela Bartok. But it was only many years later when I encountered first hand the drums and chanting of the Hadrat ceremony of Sheikh Siddi Hassan that I experienced the hidden shamanic root of Ravel's Bolero. I recognized what it was Ravel was "quoting" in that tone poem, which he wrote after having observed the Mevlevi Whirling Dervishes.So from across the centuries and speaking through the mysterious complexity of this shared interior we call "Mind", I want to share with you the intense experience of cultural "remembering" which inspires the improvisation in "Ai Tengre: Shaman's piano". Call it channeling, call it improvising, for me it is germinal.

Group Members Solo + certain mental co-travellers (see William Blake)

Instruments Steinway Grand [prepared piano and voice on track 4, Shaman's (re)birth]

Albums This Album is a collection of 7 inter-related movements (songs) ranging in length from 7' to 15'

Press Reviews Afterthoughts after the fact, a program music overview: "Time travels, reincarnations, channelings: whatever image you choose, first one, then another. Leitmotifs bind together, historical epochs blend and merge and become the synchronicity of the experiencing and inheriting mind"The pieces in this album form a cycle, episodes in the continuum of a single tone poem. Each time a theme surfaces, it appears changed, "remembered" as it were through a veil of intervening music, transformed by its submersion in the psyche. The brief descriptive images attached to the individual tracks also cross boundaries and apply everywhere in the larger whole of AI TENGRI: The Shaman's Piano.

Additional Info The web site listed is an indirect connection to my community through a graphic called Cloud Worlds.

Location Ukiah, CA - USA

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