NAPRA Trans

Mickey Hart on the Subject of World music

As interviewed by Peggy Randall for the NAPRA ReVIEW
March/April 99 issue

This interview contributed information to an article on World music published in the March/April 99 issue of the NAPRA ReVIEW, a trade magazine for the independent book and music retailer. Randall is a free-lance writer and music industry consultant living on Orcas island in Washington State. You can reach her at randall@rockisland.com.

PR: …A Musik International study showed a 73% growth in World music sales among independent and new consciousness book and music retailers last year…

MH: Well it’s about time...But let’s put this in context, it started with Moe Asch. In those days, Folkways, are you familiar with Folkways?

PR: The Smithsonian’s label?

MH: Yeah, but it wasn’t the Smithsonian’s then, it used to be Moe Asch’s project before it was given to the Smithsonian. Yeah, the Smithsonian is just a late comer. The collection is over 2,000 recordings of World music, and it was founded by Moe Asch in the 50s. So Moe Asch started Folkways and this was one of the first World labels–if Moe sold a hundred copies of a record, a 78 or 33, it was giant success.

So world music was third rate music until recently. Most of the information we’ve had until recently about World music was written by anthropologists around the turn of the century who didn’t realize what they were witnessing or what they were hearing and they were recorded sort of off hand. There was no such thing as ethnomusicology then, and it was usually an afterthought on their way out leaving a country. It was done on very primitive equipment and it was terrible; never presented as the first rate cultural icon it is.

So you have to put it in context, the amazing growth that you see, sure it comes along with the greening of the world or the eco-psychology that goes along with the music. It’s music with good head, good music well being, good music good government, good music good life and people are looking for a good life now and they are moving into this spiritual dimension, people are looking for more in music than three chords and a back beat. So it’s sort of been pulled along on the coat tails of that, the movement of people looking for a little more dimension and connection. So what did you say, 73% growth?

PR: Yeah, in this New Age market.

MH: That doesn’t surprise me at all. These musics are perhaps these cultures greatest creations and I look at them as masterpieces as you would a Renoir or a Monet, you know? People are starting to realize that these cultures took thousands of years to develop, not only in the passing down of these oral traditions, but also in the making of the instruments by all these incredible craftsmen, so a lot has gone into this music. This music is not third rate tribal folk music, even though folks make music. All folks make music. Usually when you say folk music, indigenous music, ethnic, usually it has the ring of second third or fourth rate, right?

PR: Right.

MH: WRONG! Because all music is folk music, except music that is made by computers, and even then folks run the computers.

So now you see the beautiful packaging, people are starting to present the world’s music–it’s not World music, it’s the world’s music in a way that can be appreciated. My friend Bill Graham, the great promoter, says "you give someone a brown paper bag and you package the music in a brown paper bag and the people are going to think it’s worth about as much as you can get in a brown paper bag, but when you present it like it’s going to be selling a million units or something of great value and people will take it and it will be like a little treasure." Like I’m sitting here looking at some of the world series, they happen to be sitting here on my desk, the Albert’s Series and the Library of Congress Endangered Music Project. Have you seen these yet? Feel them. Aren’t they beautiful?

PR: Yes, Mickey, I’ve seen them, they’re rich.

MH: Yeah, they’re rich. And you know great care was taken in the liner notes and the restoring of the music and this obviously had great value or I wouldn’t do it, or anybody else who makes this kind of effort to bring this kind of music to the surface wouldn’t do it. Why would you do it?

PR: Mickey tell me about the Endangered Music Project...

MH: The Endangered Music Project really came to be when I hooked up with the Library of Congress, and the Library, of course, is one of our greatest reservoirs of indigenous musics from around the world. I mean there is 50,000 plus recordings there.

PR: Whoa...

MH: Not really well curated, but the money has never really been set aside for the curation of it. Like the Smithsonian has millions of items not curated...

PR: Stuck away in the basement somewhere...

MH: The nation’s attic, well this is the nation’s music archive, one of them...

PR: When did you get hooked up with them?

MH: Jesus, I don’t know. Ask Howard, my manager, five years ago, six years, I’m not sure. They allowed me to roam free in the archives and to bring certain musics to the surface that I thought were important. I’ve always like rain forest musics and certainly African Diasporan music was always a favorite. I love Indonesian music, these reflect my personal interests.

There are so many places to go. It’s an exhausting task going into the Library, because usually when somebody gives a collection there they put the liner notes somewhere, the diaries go ones place, the photos go to the photo archives, the sounds go to the sounds archive. When you go into a collection to recreate this, you have to go to all of these separate entities in Washington to pull it together. It takes months and months and, of course, you have to take it into the digital domain and clean it up.

The Project focuses on the social political aspects of the people of these endangered cultures, these endangered musics. It’s the way I have of amplifying their voices, cause they can’t speak for themselves. Much of this music has been lost to their own culture.

PR: Have you recorded some of it yourself?

MH: The Endangered Music Project?

PR: Uh huh.

MH: Oh no, absolutely not, it comes from the 40s and the 50s. These are pre-war some of them. It goes back to March 15, 1890, that was our first recording. So you have to put in perspective. Our first recording was done by a fellow of the name of Jesse Walter Fewkes, on 3/15/90 and Jesse walked out into a field in Maine with a little spindle kinda like a sewing machine version of the Edison cylinder and he recorded a Passamaquoddy Indian harvest song. So we’ve only been encoding music for a little over a 100 years. So this industry, this art, this collecting of the musical artifacts of our world is only a little over a 100 years old. It’s pre-history.

PR: That’s the year my grandmother was born.

MH: That’s another way of putting this in context. We are experiencing a growth in it, because it is relatively new. The digital domain allows us to now bring these things into the ear with more clarity.

PR: To clarify, when the researchers said 73% growth, they were including contemporary sounds like Deep Forest as being World music.

MH: Well, Deep Forest had pygmies sounds. It’s all indigenous music. Some of it is amplified. All of it is mutated. All of it is changed, except what I was talking about.

PR: I just wanted to make sure we were talking about the same thing.

MH: Yeah, I consider that, well, all music is World music.

PR: OK, (laugh) I got it.

MH: World music is a misnomer really. It’s a pretty poor way of defining what we are talking about really. We understand, I hope, what we are talking about. World music is a generalization, but World music exists as archival and what you just mentioned is a modern mutation or hybrid of World music. So those are two, they’re sort of cousins, they’re related.

PR: So what do you think about Deep Forest that takes pygmy voices and mingles it with a dance track?

MH: I have mixed emotions about that. With that particular project I don’t think they really gave the credit to the pygmies, I don’t think they really paid them for their work. I think they just ripped them off. It’s like colonization, musical colonization, or imperialism. I don’t go for the missionary-ization or the colonization of World music. When you take someone’s music and you don’t respect it and pay for it and honor it and you mingle it with other sounds, that’s not right. To honor that music, you pay them for their contribution and you bring the music back into that culture, then it’s legal. It’s how to deal with it. With that particular release, there’s a lot of questions, but not because they took it and mixed it in the electronica world.

PR: Because you do stuff like that, too.

MH: Yeah, oh sure, and that’s fine and that’s the way music lives. That’s the future of music. Music must change in order to survive. It must change, when music does not change, it doesn’t fulfill a need in the community. Music responds to the mirror of your soul, of your community’s needs. If there is no need in the community for the music the music dies, evaporates, it’s over. When music mutates, transforms, becomes hybrid, then music, and only then, does music have a life, a new life an ongoing future, so music and community, community and music. Music needs its community, community needs its music. They are inseparable.

PR: Why the surge in the popularity of World music?

MH: Cause people want to hear the mixing of old sounds, the archaic world, with the world of the digital domain. Cause we live smack dab in the digital domain. But yet we crave for the analog world. We crave for the great old sounds. So here we have a hybrid. This is my favorite thing to do.

PR: I saw the Supralingua tour in Seattle, it was amazing, the electronic with the analog sound...

MH: That’s the challenge. How do you do that? There’s a certain amount of taste involved. Picasso said, "Good taste is the worst enemy of creativity." So who’s to say? It’s a subliminal subconscious kind of thing, not a head thing. It’s more like a gut thing, what elements mix with each other. It’s more to be determined in the doing. Music is in the making of it. You can’t really talk about music really well. It’s in the hearing, doing and the playing. There are combinations untold, unsaid, that lie right out there ahead of us. I’ll go into the studio later today, hopefully I’ll discover a new combination, new ways of making music with old sounds.

PR: What you are doing is an evolution, it really is fulfilling a need.

MH: Yeah, I get that. It was real successful. Supralingua was very successful. You know it’s not pop music. It’s not meant to be pop music. It’s edge stuff, just like World music is. It’s peripheral. But I think the best things are found on the periphery of society. Not necessarily in the codified world of pop music.

PR: This World music and this fusion of World is filling a hole that has been in me for some time.

MH: You are absolutely right. It fills a hole for me. That’s why I do it. I could easily opt for playing pop music all the time because that’s sort of what I do, or did. When I was doing IT, the Grateful Dead, I was always doing what I’m doing now, only not as much.

PR: When did you start?

MH: I guess the Diga Rhythm Band was the first–in what? 1972 or 73 or 74?–was the first real, the first percussion ensemble. We sort of started this whole thing, the percussion World music thing, or that’s what they say anyway.

PR: What about your pow wow recordings?

MH: I’ve always had what we call MERT, mobile engineering and recording team. I always had a machine. I’m a remote recordist, and a multi-track recordist. I’ve done a lot of field work. I just came back from Bali last year and recorded an amazing triple CD that’s coming out in about three months of the finest of the Balinese music.

PR: On Rykodisc?

MH: Yeah, it’s called the Bali Sessions and it will be music that has never been recorded and it’s an amazing digital recording in the field and I’ve always been doing that. You have to go out there for some of the music.

PR: Well, um...

MH: Does that answer all your questions?

PR: Yeah, that about does it. It’s given me plenty of stuff to work with (ha ha). Thanks for talking to me Mickey. I really appreciate it.

MH: Well, I appreciate you taking some interest in this. I was reading in the paper today and there was this World music thing in the San Francisco Chronicle about pop World and it mentions Graceland and...it wasn’t very favorable. It said a lot of the sounds in pop music today are coming from world influences.

PR: So why wasn’t it favorable?

MH: It said that it’s mostly a rehash of…well, they didn’t like it. There’s two ways to look at this, the colonization, the taking of the world’s music. There are people who think music belongs to a people. The rituals and the songs do, but not the instruments. The instruments belong to the world. Anyone who invents it... So it’s a different thing. There are purists who are saying "don’t mix." That’s poppycock.

PR: That’s like anti-Art.

MH: Well, of course, it is. No music on this planet that is is without fusion. You know the Gyoto Monks, the Tibetan Choir that I record, the Dalai Lama’s Choir?

PR: Sure.

MH: Well, once they left Tibet, you know they were untouched for around 600 years when they lived in Tibet. No music reached them, they didn’t go out. OK, as soon as they left they were exposed to other music on the radio or what have you. So whenever you are exposed to other sounds, you are never the same. They are still reciting the Sanskrit text and they are still chanting their chants, but they are not exactly the same people and their music is slightly changed. So unless you live behind monastery walls and don’t go out and don’t let anything in, can you be free of musical influence. So all musics on this planet are now part of other musics. It’s just how much.

But taking music from other cultures without honoring them, whether it be monetarily, or creditwise, or what have you, is really wrong, so that’s what’s getting the bad rap by the anti-imperialists. The music that I try to do; I give it back to the communities that spawned it, to their libraries, their museums, their schools. Part of the profits go back into music programs from where this music comes from. These are the kind of things that must be done when you take one’s music and use it in your music. It’s co-compositional in a way. That’s really important. So there’s a lot of bad taste out there in the world. Art has no boundaries, it sees no gender, it doesn’t know about geography. It’s funny like that, but it makes it beautiful, doesn’t it?

PR: Yeah, it does. The spiritual component of oneness starts getting in there. What are we supposed to do? Keep all the musics apart or something?

MH: Well, what we are talking about really is the sound of God. Music leads to the spiritual dimension. Do you know what psychopomp is? It’s like a guide to the other side. A psychopomp is a guide that takes you from here to there. And when you talk psychopomp, well in this case it’s music. Music is the carrier, like in prayer, when you raise your voice and you look up to the heavens, you either chant or pray or Om or sing praise or play your instrument, you always use vibration to contact the other side. So that’s the spiritualization and the core of the world’s indigenous music, it’s always been used for the sacred. So it’s music as psychopomp, and it’s starting to creep in, unconsciously, and that’s why you see this 73% number, that’s my take on it anyway.

PR: Well, thanks Mickey.

MH: You bet. Bye!

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