Ep21 Pink Dolphins & Divorce! - Jack Judd

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Luke 00:00:05  Welcome to another episode of the Impro Pod podcast. My guest today is Jack Judd Carpenter and musician. How are you doing, Jack?

Jack 00:00:13  I'm well. Yeah.

Luke 00:00:15  It's a bit about what you've been working on with the house.

Jack 00:00:18  I've been restoring some old windows, doing some sort of restoration, some painting.

Luke 00:00:24  So I'm going to play a piece of music, and I want you to tell me what that makes you think of. And just think about any kind of emotions that come to mind. Any kind of thoughts, feelings, ideas, that sort of thing. And it could be as abstract as you like. Okay. And this is all improvised. I haven't thought about it at all. You know.

Jack 00:01:44  Yeah, quite an ominous start. And then it suddenly broke out and I felt I was swimming in the sea. And then as everything sped up, it started to become quite hypnotic. And Transdimensional. And then it brought me back to earth again, and I felt I was in a lounge by a burning fire at the end.

Luke 00:02:05  You're swimming in the sea. And then there's this. This change which is of some kind of magnitude of other forces.

Jack 00:02:13  Yeah, it's correlated with the speeding up and the repetition. Yeah. It started to become quite mesmerising and yeah, a rocket taking off.

Luke 00:02:24  I don't know if you've seen the film passengers where they're on the spaceship. They wake up way too early, so they're supposed to be frozen in time, and they've got 100 years of flight time. And basically, there's no way that they're going to live through to get to their destination. Anyway, there's a scene where one of the characters is swimming in a swimming pool, and then the gravity system fails. She starts to drift around, and all the water goes into the air of the ship. And there's this whole chaos. And what you said there just reminded me of that anyway.

Jack 00:02:55  I'm remembering that that feels like correlates a lot, Actually.

Luke 00:03:04  I'd like you to tell me a story of some kind. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to break the story down into sections, and then improvise a piece of music to the story.

Jack 00:03:16  When I was 18, I went travelling with some friends in South America, and we ended up in Bolivia and took, a 32 hour bus ride out to the Amazon. And one of the days in particular was very memorable because we started at Piranha Fishing. One of my friends got bitten, but the most memorable part is we went swimming with these famous but rare pink dolphins, and we motored out in these long canoe boats down this offshoot of the Amazon. And it was where the Dolphins were supposed to be. And we were lucky in that they were there. And so our tour guide, Billy, was his name. He stopped off and and let us jump in, and they were extremely playful. But there was a mixture of emotions around being in the water with them, with whatever else might be in the water, with us in the Amazon River. The freshwater dolphins, they are quite different from what we know of ocean dolphins. They're much smaller. They look a little alien, a little bit unnerving, and just pink in color.

Luke 00:04:37  Can you talk a bit about these mixed emotions you're experiencing with these dolphins?

Jack 00:04:42  Yeah, it was an ominous feeling. Part of that was coupled with just being in the water, knowing that there were other things, anacondas and caiman and spiders and things like that. It was a feeling of fear, But also there was so much joy because I knew in theory that they were friendly creatures. The guide told us that we weren't in danger of the other creatures, the anacondas and the caiman, because when the dolphin are there, they're the top predators, and so they scare everything else off. And it's funny that the friendliest creature in the Amazon happens to be at the top of that hierarchy.

Luke 00:05:20  So what was the Amazon like?

Jack 00:05:22  Rich in sensory experience. Yeah, hypnotic would be a word as well, with the constant lull of all the the frogs and insects. Always.

Speaker 3 00:05:36  Yeah.

Luke 00:05:37  So you got kind of like a drone stuff is happening all the time in the Amazon, right?

Jack 00:05:41  Totally in the colors, the array of colors and all the more shades of green.

Jack 00:05:46  And you know, I wouldn't.

Luke 00:05:47  I'm colorblind, but I get me. Okay. And this bus journey, what about that with that really long and tedious.

Jack 00:05:54  And it was extremely long. It helped to be with friends. The bus was so rattly, so all of the doors and windows and the road was bumpy and we had chickens and donkeys on there with us and children sleeping in the foot wells. Yeah, it was one of the least comfortable journeys and my longest journey.

Luke 00:06:13  Okay, so I'm gonna go for bus journey and then I'm gonna go for the Amazon and then this great, but also slightly mixed feelings about this dolphin experience. Did that reflect your story in any way?

Jack 00:08:43  Yeah. Certainly the first part felt a journeying experience. I felt it reflected the bus journey quite a lot. And then the sudden breakthrough and arrival into the Amazon with all of its stimulation and and the sort of busyness you really picked up that nicely.

Luke 00:09:02  I was trying to go for the diversity of things there, some sort of creature that goes, maybe it's a giant slug or something with tentacles, and then you've got the, the drone of the maybe loads of insects.

Luke 00:09:16  Yes.

Jack 00:09:18  And then the dolphin part. The mixed emotions. I forgot to mention that obviously you can't see into the water because it's so murky. So you couldn't see these dolphins, but they would suddenly appear and you could feel them brush up against you. One of the dolphins clamped its jaw around my leg very gently, but I could feel all of its teeth around my leg. And yeah, that's what I meant by mixed emotions as well. And I feel you captured that.

Luke 00:09:50  Oh, great. Okay. Because they do have very sharp teeth, but they also have incredible self-control.

Jack 00:09:57  As though they're socially aware.

Luke 00:10:07  Do you have another story?

Jack 00:10:09  Yeah. Give me a minute.

Luke 00:10:10  Okay. Yeah. Take your time. I mean, sometimes what I do is I play with these music and then gives people ideas.

Jack 00:10:15  Well, it brings back stories. Ideas. As you played that, it brought back early school memories, actually. And it's actually the story of when my parents split up. I was ten and it's been breaking apart for a while, but I was too young, so I was sort of oblivious.

Jack 00:11:05  We all sat together in the living room and she told us, and it was just such a shock, and it was the most painful moment of my life, I think, actually. And as you played that piece of music, it reminded me of joining my secondary school, and it was just around that same time that had happened, and it was a little bit overwhelming going to this new big school, wearing a blazer and having to make new friends and having this big part of my life, having just fractured a bit, I suppressed the emotions quite a lot so that I could be in the world and ultimately not be so vulnerable. And part of that was not wanting to be a burden to people. And I was needing to make friends and try and focus on school. And so it was quite tricky holding that down. But in some ways school was a distraction. It was called Hampshire Collegiate School, and it happened to be Florence Nightingale's home, actually. So it was this amazing big Hogwarts like school, which was quite something to arrive at as a ten year old.

Jack 00:12:24  But school was a good time as well. I had a lot of friends and played lots of sports and got on with the teachers. I managed to keep my head down and not get in trouble.

Luke 00:12:35  All right, so what I'm going to go for in terms of your personal soundtrack to your life by Luke Tomlinson. So you're having genuinely a good time. But then on the other side, you've got this breaking apart of quite an important relationship and I'm going to try and get this to world thing going on, and we'll see how that goes. All right.

Jack 00:15:07  Part of what's special about what you do with your improvisation is that it can be not only evoking of amazing memories, but also possibly quite therapeutic for more painful things. It's funny that you ended on a note like that, because in a way, the emotional underbelly of that whole thing, it was unresolved for me emotionally. And there are parts of it still there now, in a way. So it's beautiful that you left it like that, because it's true.

Luke 00:15:40  That that piece of music work for.

Jack 00:15:42  You. Yeah. You captured the grandeur of the school that I was at. I could really feel that. I could feel the uniform on me and the towers and spires. And then it turned and it became slightly scary. Captured fear for me, and then spiraled into sort of turmoil. And I really could feel that a sort of spinning in overwhelm. And then as you were hitting the sort of lighter notes, it was capturing the innocent and vulnerable and tender confusion that I was in at that age. I thought it was amazing.

Luke 00:16:19  Even though it's quite an emotional process, I'm imagining quite physical things. So for the breaking apart, I was thinking terrible concrete. For example, if you don't mix it properly, you get this kind of breaking thing that happens. I was just imagining that. And then the spires, really tall, almost medieval style architecture, which was probably completely wrong. That was what was going through in my mind.

Jack 00:16:42  It was quite accurate, actually.

Jack 00:16:43  It was quite. It was a bit like that. Yeah.

Luke 00:16:47  You should play it to your parents?

Jack 00:16:49  That's been running in the back of my mind thinking, when do I pull this one out?

Luke 00:16:58  So what did you get out of this podcast?

Jack 00:17:00  A lot that I wasn't expecting, actually. I came knowing that I was going to talk about pink dolphins. I didn't quite know I was going to go into my family wound. That's a really big part that's come out of this, actually, is having a piece of music that I can associate with that particular thing that's quite big for me in my life still. And yeah, also just greater appreciation for improv and actually what it can do and also have greater appreciation for what you can do. It's pretty amazing how you can express yourself out through the music or express stories through it. I think improv could seriously be looked into for therapeutic use.

Luke 00:17:49  I think it does have a big part in that. What is your relationship with improvisation when it comes to guitar?

Jack 00:18:19  I explore things with the guitar.

Jack 00:18:22  The quality of my exploration can depend a lot on how I'm feeling. I tend to follow sounds that feel good in some way. Something that speaks to me, and then it becomes something that I enjoy playing. I enjoy listening to, and often I write songs from those explorations. Okay.

Luke 00:18:45  Yeah. Me too. And there's often that unexpected thing, which is the interesting thing. I never sit down and think, oh, I'm going to play CEG. I'm not sure where it's coming from. And sometimes it feels like I'm channeling it rather than making it up.

Jack 00:18:58  Yeah, totally. I often feel I can't lay any claim to what's coming out of me. I feel like I'm doing a listening, and that I'm in a listening of some kind, and that I'm just conduit somehow. Yeah, I feel the same. But I'm not so eloquent with improv. I realize it's something that I do only when I'm alone. I don't do it in front of people. And maybe that's rooted in actually that feeling of needing to only reveal something that's in quotes.

Jack 00:19:31  Right? Or correct or together. So scared of that exploration in front of people.

Luke 00:19:39  Thank you very much for being on the podcast.

Jack 00:19:41  It's such a pleasure.

Luke 00:19:42  Join us again next week for another episode of Improv Pod. Thanks for listening.