Ep24 Storm on a square rigger, Egypt & percussion - Jon Inder

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Luke 00:00:05  Welcome to another episode of the Impro Pod podcast. My guest today is John India. So you're a nutritional advisor and musicologist, would you say?

Jon 00:00:17  Yeah, I know, I've done some health writing and nutrition and herbal medicine and stuff. That's my day job. And then, creatively. Singer songwriter and.

Luke 00:00:28  Percussionist. Do you work in a green life in Totnes?

Jon 00:00:31  Yeah, I work in green life. Yeah. Marketing officer there.

Luke 00:00:35  And you run a band called The Bridge?

Jon 00:00:37  Yeah, an eight piece soul, funk, eclectic mix of stuff. Really.

Luke 00:00:43  So I'm going to play you a piece of music, and it's completely improvised. Okay. And I want you to tell me what it makes you think of. So that could be any kind of thoughts, emotions, ideas that come into your mind. What did that make you think of? What came to mind?

Jon 00:02:12  I think a sort of a moment of realization. And it had a point in it where there seemed to be a breakthrough. So it had that sense of someone opening out.

Luke 00:02:22  Was there anything more specific that came to mind?

Jon 00:02:24  Not really. No. The other thing for me is when I hear a bit of music, my brain starts firing off lyrical ideas. And that's just because of writing songs with other people. And being a poet, I respond to melody, and melody and word are very closely linked. I love a lot of piano music that is sort of tone poems.

Luke 00:02:43  Did you have any lyrical ideas for that piece.

Jon 00:02:46  In terms of how I would develop a song on that, that there would be an idea of someone coming to a realization about maybe a relationship with somebody and there being a breakthrough moment. And it had that sense to me and then opening out gets more expansive after that. Given time, I would work an idea into that.

Luke 00:03:10  So I'd like you to tell me a story of some kind, and then I'm going to break the story down into sections and improvise a soundtrack to the story.

Jon 00:03:18  Okay, so when I was younger, I was a member of the Sea Cadets in Dartmouth, where I grew up, and had the opportunity to go on a square rigged ship for a week.

Jon 00:03:30  And we went on the RTS Royalist from Portsmouth out to Alderney in the Channel Islands. And when we got there, we were told we didn't have any time on shore because we had to turn back quite quickly because there was a storm going to be chasing us. And as we headed back across the channel, it caught us while I was actually on watch and was sat at the back of the ship, strapped down with a safety strap. And the experience as the storm hit us and seeing the waves rise up like cliffs, taking out the stars, covering them. And then the stars would reappear again. Just seeing the shadows at that point. Feeling the immense energy of the storm, then getting hit with warm water, which I'm imagining was the sort of kinetic energy of the water being moved around by the turbulence of the storm. And then seeing these waves finally illuminated as we approached, Portsmouth and the light of the lighthouse there started to illuminate the deck and everyone on the ship watching the full time members of the crew sitting across the square, rigging and furling in the sails without harnesses, seeing them illuminated against the dark, and the cliffs of waves that were all around.

Jon 00:04:56  I was very comfortable, huddled and watching everything. Taking it all in. And then I got hit by a couple of waves and shifted position, and then started to get wet and started shivering and was shivering all the way into Portsmouth. And then when we approached Portsmouth, as dawn broke, I went into the cabin and had the best cup of hot chocolate of my life. After having gone through that experience, just to be in a high storm like that was something that as an an imaginative young kid, it stayed with me all my life.

Luke 00:05:32  First of all, you've got the initial the build of the storm, and then you've got this idea of not being able to see the waves. It's dark, and then the crew running about on the rigging and then the wet patch. You get hit by this wave and then the cup of cocoa. All right. So how did that reflect your experience?

Jon 00:08:13  The initial build was really lovely. Yeah, and the rhythm of the waves moving and cutting across each other.

Jon 00:08:20  I could feel that. The only thing I would say at the very end, which maybe I didn't express well, there was a sense of real clarity, that beautiful, clear light and then the calmness just at the very end. Just that sense of it just being. Yeah, calm again and and the brightness of that.

Luke 00:09:31  Does that reflect clarity for you? Yeah.

Jon 00:09:32  That's beautiful. Totally. That feeling of morning light and that dramatic shift of it. Yeah. That dropping away and there just being a sense of calm and light.

Luke 00:09:43  I was going for the idea of the swell and yeah.

Jon 00:09:47  At the end of that bit there, I think the, the waves were bigger too, which is good.

Luke 00:09:55  Just to point out, the pheasants tend to get a kick out of landing on the top of the roof and then sliding down the roof until they get to the bottom. That's the roof noise. Oh, for telling me another story.

Jon 00:10:10  Yeah. Okay. Another key memory for me. Many years after that first encounter was traveling in Egypt.

Jon 00:10:19  After I'd finished university, I went and spent time in Israel on a kibbutz and then traveled on my own into Egypt for a couple of weeks. One of the real powerful memories for me was sailing on a felucca down the Nile and passing these painted buildings, which were essentially non-major tombs and bits of architecture by the side of the Nile. And then there just being desert out beyond and then camping at night, sleeping on the boat, moored up against the river side and walking out onto the desert and just looking out and seeing shooting stars just raining down and seeing more stars than I'd ever seen. And I grew up in Devon, so I saw lots of stars as a child, just the southern hemisphere, and seeing the desert sky was absolutely staggering. But it was combined with this. I'd had some Nile water accidentally that the captain's son, who was on the boat crewing it with us, had filled up our water bottles and I was violently sick. So I had this experience of going up onto the side of the Nile and being sick and being a lot of discomfort, and then looking up and seeing shooting stars and literally going and then looking up and go, wow, well, who are wow.

Speaker 3 00:11:49  Just kind of.

Jon 00:11:50  Bizarre extremes of emotion at the same time. But that's a favorite story of mine. Yeah.

Luke 00:11:56  I think you don't realize how important the Nile is until you take a boat on it.

Jon 00:12:00  There's a thing about this rivers, isn't it? And human beings have lived by rivers and been nourished by rivers, the lifeblood of such an incredible culture. And what you also see in Egypt when you're away from the Nile itself, is the desert on either side. And the fertility stops and it turns to desert and it's the Nile is it's is absolutely crucial for obviously the agriculture and for the at that time civilization to, to flourish.

Luke 00:12:31  So back to your story then I'm going to go for, you were on this boat. What kind of boat was it a.

Jon 00:12:36  Fluke, which is a small sailboat with a with a single sail, beautiful white sail and very small crew. And there's a captain Mohammed and his son were our crew, and it was just myself and another fellow traveler, someone I'd met whilst traveling.

Luke 00:12:52  So you're on the boat, you're looking at these tombs, having a good time, and then it starts to get dark and you get these amazing stars, right? And then because of the dodgy water, you've got this weird paradox. What were your thoughts on that?

Jon 00:15:30  I could hear the sunlight on the water in the early part of it and then obviously the disturbance.

Speaker 3 00:15:38  Yeah.

Jon 00:15:38  And the contrast between that and the stars. I could see them twinkling. Yeah. But whether we need to add a shooting star or two, because that was the other experience, is the speed of them moving and the race of those.

Speaker 3 00:15:54  Yeah, I was trying.

Luke 00:15:56  To go for that.

Jon 00:15:56  But yeah, I think I heard it a little bit.

Speaker 3 00:15:58  It's a shooting.

Luke 00:15:59  Star because it's such a sudden thing, isn't it? And it's a sort of bright light.

Jon 00:16:04  But it was the frequency of them. And that's what I didn't explain very well. It was almost like a bombardment. The skies were just electric with light.

Jon 00:16:14  It was jaw dropping.

Luke 00:16:16  So? So musically, a shooting star for me is maybe. A thing. Because they're not. They're not rhythmically consistent.

Jon 00:16:26  You're absolutely right. There's no rhythmical kind of nature to it.

Luke 00:16:29  I was trying to go for Egyptian, but without going harmonic minor scale, because that's just so cheesy. When you go, yeah, it's like it's the Arabia kind of stuff.

Jon 00:16:43  So yeah, it wasn't that feeling. Anyway, its brightness and light was the kind of chief thing. And seeing the tombs is the presence of the past, which we take it for granted. When you walk around the countryside here and we see Norman castles around us, remains of megalithic culture and stuff. I wrote a poem at the time about the feeling being the same. Years later, when I went to Selby and seeing Silvery Hill and seeing all of the kind of megalithic stuff there around Avebury, and having that same feeling that I got when I was in Egypt, when I traveled there, when after university.

Jon 00:17:17  And for that sort of presence of the ancient and that sense of continuity you get with that is quite profound, to be looking at something that's been there for 3 or 4000 years. Yeah. And it's quite reassuring in a way. Human culture, the continuity.

Speaker 3 00:17:33  Do you feel like.

Luke 00:17:34  Reflected that in the music, the sense of the present ancient?

Speaker 3 00:17:37  Yeah, it's.

Jon 00:17:38  A tricky thing. I definitely got the light and then I got the stars. I'm not sure about the presence of the. It's not tombs, as in, it wasn't macabre in any way because it was just seeing the painted buildings and just thinking, oh my God, that's paint that's been there for a couple of thousand years. That's quite bonkers. And the brightness of the pigment still there.

Speaker 3 00:17:58  That sharp V.

Luke 00:17:59  For some reason conveys the sense of magnitude anyway, something big that is not necessarily obvious, but it's there. It's a presence or something. Would you agree with that? Yeah.

Jon 00:18:22  Definitely. You've immediately got that sense of story in your imagination.

Jon 00:18:26  Is yeah, fired by that.

Luke 00:18:28  So what did you get out of this podcast?

Jon 00:18:31  I've always found piano to be one of the most expressive instruments, and the visual imagery I get when I hear piano. And to hear that married up to a couple of memories is really nice. And given significantly more time, you could definitely structure much more of a comprehensive story around any of these things. Yeah, it's fascinating to me to see how your creative muscles work in terms of interpreting a couple of visual imageries and a few kind of short bits of information, and suddenly knowing what to do in terms of key choices and things to get the emotional weight and to get the right kind of pitch. But even though I enjoy writing music, I rely on other people to know. I know, you know you want. C Major's going to be the thing for that. Or know we want a minor key here. Don't speak the language well enough. Unfortunately, I'm fine with rhythm and texture and stuff, but it's lovely to hear how you're able to translate it.

Luke 00:19:29  First ask you to translate some of that onto percussion instrument. Do you think you could do that? Like shooting stars?

Speaker 3 00:19:35  Stars, actually.

Jon 00:19:36  That that's a tougher one because I think piano, without being cliched about it, you can twinkle on a piano.

Luke 00:19:44  A lot more easily.

Jon 00:19:45  Than you can on a cowbell, in terms of rhythms of the sea and rhythms of winds and stuff from the earlier story. Definitely. Obviously you can express things with percussion and with washes of shakers and things like that, and that's something I, I would love to do more of. One of my favorite percussionists, Carlinhos Brown, a Brazilian percussionist, does some amazing stuff on Bebel. Roberto's brilliant album Tanto Tempo, and he just expresses so much sound. Lack of a summer just on different percussive percussive sounds with shakers.

Luke 00:20:22  Thank you very much for being.

Luke 00:20:23  On the podcast.

Jon 00:20:24  Thank you. Been a pleasure.

Luke 00:20:26  Join us next week for another episode of Impro Pod. Thanks for listening. I'll leave you with some of John and me improvising on his story about being in a storm on a square sail ship.