More about RESTLESS URBAN PRIMITIVE:

A JOURNAL

Restless Urban Primitive is music about a journey - both interior and exterior. It is also stories about that journey. Music about stories, and stories about music. Like many well-thumbed journals, the album contains jottings, sketches and the odd portrait. These notes that accompany the music are snippets of a diary, postcards from abroad, views from a moving car, scribblings in life's notebook.

A few years ago, I embarked on an extended perambulation that took me to England, Turkey, Norway, Sweden, Quebec, and California...across mountains and oceans, through deserts and wooded vales, from dark alleys in the shadows of minarets to the freeway jungles of LA. Miles turned into seasons. I had heard so much music on this trip, and all of this slowly percolated through my system – Turkish melodies shoulder to shoulder with Swedish tunes and Quebecois reels. A few weeks after my return, I did something I often do - I set up a microphone and I improvised to tape. I did this three days in a row and when I finally got around to mining that improv tape and extracting the magical nuggets out of the raw ore, I found I had an album's worth of music on my hands. It was in fact a travelogue - a bit Swedish, a bit Turkish, loaded with impressions of the places I had been and the people I had met - a unique musical snapshot of my post-traveling brain.

On some tracks, I also added in fragments of field recordings I had made in those places. Then I got a few musical friends to add their magic to the tracks. The result is RESTLESS URBAN PRIMITIVE.

I love elephants. I'm sure it started way back with Babar. I'll never forget the first day I spent on an elephant in northern Thailand many years ago. The creature lumbered along, slow and sure-footed. Branching off from the main trail, I saw a very steep narrow path leading up the mountainside. I thought to myself, "Well, there is a trail the elephant could definitely not climb." And then, before I knew it, up we went. Halfway up the mountain, he stopped for a snack, which in this case was a small tree. With one slow sweep of his trunk, he stripped the tree of leaves and munched down. I was jammed against the back of the howdah, hanging on for dear life. The elephant took his time, quite unconcerned with my frantic clamouring. It was only after a great deal of persuasion from the driver that our elephant moved on. (It's hard to argue with a hungry elephant!) Moments later we got a repeat performance going down the other side of the mountain, except this time I was desperately trying not to fall off the front of the howdah. At various points during the day, the driver would give his charge a large papaya as a special treat. The elephant would toss it up and catch it in his mouth like a grape.

One fine fall day, an elephant appeared below my office window in Toronto. He wasn't just an ordinary elephant. He stood about 8 feet tall and was made of solid teak. He had red painted ears, a turtle on his back, and fine white tusks that were later filched by back alley trophy hunters. Not as valuable as ivory to be sure, but still, it was disappointing when they were gone.

The elephant, it turns out, belonged to Honest Ed Mirvish, a well-known Toronto discount retailer who owns the building where I have worked for the past 8 years. He had nowhere to park his pachyderm so he plunked it down behind my building. It became my friendly guardian. Took six men half a day to move it there, after that, it went nowhere fast. And then one day, just as mysteriously as it had appeared, it was gone. I knew then it was soon time for me to leave that studio.

This melody is loosely based on a polska (not to be confused with a polka). A polska is a favourite Swedish type of tune. Polskas are in triple time, with one of the beats just slightly longer than the others. It is as if you were dancing with some gum on your shoe, and you get a little stuck with every whirl on the dance floor. I spent my time in Sweden with Kjell Eric (pronounced Shell Eric) Erickson, and his band Hoven Droven. Hoven Droven is like Stewed Tomatoes meets Metallica. The rhythm section really has that crunchy metal sound. And they are LOUD. When we did shows together, the first thing they did is hand me some ear plugs. At a show for high school students, kids were actually leaving because of the excessive volume - so you know this is a LOUD band. But they are the nicest, cleanest living rockers. Their worst vice seemed to be watching too many subtitled Simpsons episodes.

Kjell Eric taught me many polskas. To the uninitiated, polskas are utterly strange. Some of the time, they sound like music played backwards, possibly from another planet, and maybe from another dimension. The thing is, a lot of my O2 solo violin pieces sounded vaguely related to this tradition, even though I did not grow up with this music. That fascinated me, and made me eager to visit Scandinavia in the first place. Pine trees and rocks we have plenty of in Canada. But this strange music - I had to find out more.

Kjell Eric took me on a drive through the counties and villages of his youth, the valley in which he had grown up. He showed me every single house in which he had ever lived. Then we went to get some moose meat from his brother Lars. Eventually, we ended up at the log cabin of Lapp Nils, a 19th century local fiddler of huge talent and influence. He was legendary both as a tunesmith and a player. His real name was Nils Jonsson, and he lived from 1804-1870. From the vantage point of Lapp Nils' cabin, Kjell Eric pointed out the homes of fiddler players, some long gone, whose houses dotted the valley below. Lapp Nils had had many apprentices who went on to become masters with apprentices of their own. Thus, though not a single note of Lapp Nils' playing survives on a recording, and there is not a single photo of him, people all over Offerdal are still playing his tunes to this day. In fact, tunes had been passed on in an uninterrupted line from Lapp Nils down to Kjell Eric. A genealogy of mentorship is very much at the heart of Swedish fiddle music, and Kjell Eric, as a living bearer of this living tradition, knew a vast amount about it all.

Lapp Nils discovered religion at a certain point late in his life. Becoming convinced of the sin of his musical ways, he buried his fiddle in his yard and swore never to play again. A young lad of 10 or 11 years really wanted to hear him play. So he went over to Lapp Nils' house and asked him, "Lapp Nils, if you can't play dance music any more, maybe you could play religious songs on your fiddle?" And Lapp Nils thought about it and agreed this might be acceptable. He dug up his fiddle and played for the boy. Then he reburied his fiddle and never in his life played it again.

When time was green, when the sap of the world was still rising, when our very genes were juggling, meaning and music sparking to life across elemental evolutionary gaps - way back then, the blues was born. Not to a man or a woman, or any creature of God (or the Devil, for that matter) but to a bubbling swamp, to a dusty plain, to a grim pile of stones. The blues was born from the nascent dream of a world giving birth to itself - dreamer and dreamed shimmering in and out of focus.

It seemed like every second person I met in Turkey was called Mustapha. At one point, I was sitting around in a little village in Capadoccia, eating and talking with three Mustaphas. I'm sure several more were lurking around the corner, just waiting for me to meet them. One of the Mustaphas ran an outfit he called PEACE HOUSE. It was his personal one-man Turkish public relations project. Mustapha was a night watchman at a lemon storage facility tunneled into the mountain. There were so many lemons in those parts that people would pile them up and burn them until they withered into little lemony briquettes. They would use those for fuel when it got cold. Heating your house with lemons - now I had seen everything! Mustapha had carved himself a little one-room house out of the soft Capadoccia stone. It was very charming and comfortable. Mustapha would find travelers in town and invite them over for a meal. He would gather some friends, musicians, and they would all have a little party. He didn't charge money for the food, or try to sell you anything - he really just wanted people to have a good time and to sign his guest book, which was thick with the testimonials of past visitors. People sent him photos of their babies and houses, Xmas cards, drawings. He had lovingly arranged them into a series of guest books that he proudly showed off. Mustapha wasn't going to get to see the big wide world, but he was collecting it anyway, right there in his room! (Hats off to you, Mustapha, for spreading good cheer so magnanimously.) If you are ever in Ortahisar you must look him up. Just ask for Mustapha!