{"id":3720,"date":"2022-04-29T09:06:18","date_gmt":"2022-04-29T08:06:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fr-nt.nl\/?p=3720"},"modified":"2022-04-29T09:38:51","modified_gmt":"2022-04-29T08:38:51","slug":"too-many-birds-jim-nollman-playing-music-with-animals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fr-nt.nl\/en\/2022\/04\/29\/too-many-birds-jim-nollman-playing-music-with-animals\/","title":{"rendered":"Too many birds: Jim Nollman – Playing Music with Animals"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his series Too many birds<\/em>, Ruben van Dijk highlights overlooked albums, new and old, that renegotiate our human relationship to all that is non-human. What can we take away from these albums that might make us look a little differently at the natural world around, and within us? This time: the gleeful interspecific jazz of Playing Music with Animals: Interspecies Communication of Jim Nollman with 300 Turkeys, 12 Wolves and 20 Orcas<\/em> (1982), a hard-to-describe, one-of-a-kind record by composer and environmental activist Jim Nollman.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Written by: <\/strong>Ruben van Dijk<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It's quite telling that when Jim Nollman went and recorded himself singing the Scottish folk song \u2018Froggy-Went-a-Courting\u2019 surrounded by three-hundred tom turkeys, in an attempt to harmonise with their incessant gobbling, it was a turn towards the conventional for him. Nollman, who grew up on the East Coast, had made his way to the San Francisco Bay Area as a young adult to immerse himself in the city\u2019s infamous improv scene. (In college, tasked with creating the music for a production of Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>, Nollman used \u201crecordings of people rubbing glass milk bottles together, bending slabs of plate steel, and playing with springs.\u201d) By 1973, when he first made his \u2018Thanksgiving recordings\u2019, he was already on his way out, a musician in his mid-twenties \u201clooking for something to hang a career on\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Froggy-Went-a-Courting\u2019 had Nollman playing with an ensemble \u2013 for the first time in his professional career. He\u2019d struck gold, never mind the fact that he would, from then on, always be the sole human member in any of his ensembles. By the time he released Playing Music with Animals<\/em> on Folkways Records in 1983, Nollman had become a regular Sun Ra among the turkeys, wolves, and whales of the Pacific Northwest, successfully playing with<\/em> animals, communicating with them as equals \u2013 for \u201cman is no longer the crown of creation; nature itself is the crown\u201d, says Nollman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Listening to the \u2018interspecies\u2019 improvisations on Playing Music with Animals<\/em> \u2013 some abrasive and vexing, others surprisingly beautiful \u2013 you realise Nollman was always the most devout and reverential musician around, whether singing on a farm, playing the vihuela in a wildlife refuge or a waterphone in the open Pacific. The intention was never to intrude, but to highlight how music was \u201cmore universally understood than any single human language, and arguably, as profound.\u201d Nollman, writing about \u2018Vihuela and Wolf Pack # One\u2019 in the album\u2019s liner notes: \u201c[The wolves] were not given too much improvisatory call and response and would promptly stop singing if we humans got too radical in our own response to them. I felt honoured whenever they would sing in harmony with my own playing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was curious how Nollman looked back on these methods now, forty years after the album\u2019s release, and so I reached out. He currently resides on San Juan Island, Washington, retired after a lifetime of working for Greenpeace, National Geographic, the U.S. Navy, and playing and recording with many more animals. We exchanged several emails. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has been forty years since you released Playing Music with Animals<\/em>. How do you look back on the album now? Which moments from recording the album have stayed with you most?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn general, I recall how difficult it was at that time trying to predict what animals might be willing to respond to my own music in a manner that would be just as coherent to a human listening to the recordings. It actually took me ten years to research and then explore the potential of improvising music with many different species. The great successes from the 1970s and early 1980s were turkeys, wolves, and orcas. During that same time, I also field recorded sessions with many other species including bobwhite, kangaroo rats, and spinner dolphins. Those were a few of my duds. What I remember best about those years of the sessions were the breakthrough recordings that seemed so obviously examples of interspecies communication that I didn\u2019t feel any need to make claims to the listener about what I thought was happening. If it was happening, the listener would hear it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You were a conceptual, rather experimental artist a few years before you made this album. What first drew you to start doing jam sessions... but with non-human band mates? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI played blues in a New York City club when I was a teenager. In college, I learned the craft of composing and recording music for theatre and dance groups. I rarely used traditional instruments, preferring to use ambient sounds to create a unique sonic space. In those days before computer technology, that meant learning how to play a tape recorder like an instrument, cut tape creatively, and design speaker arrays to give the music a sense of space. I eventually moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where I was welcomed into a tribe of young composers busily building on John Cage\u2019s legacy. Unlike most of the other \u2018New Music\u2019 composers, I wasn\u2019t classically trained nor did I read music. Naturally, I sought a less intellectual and classical expression of the remarkable concepts that were getting composed all around me. After I dreamed up and realised my Thanksgiving day piece with turkeys, it received enough unexpected attention outside the scene, to make me realise that, as far as conceptual music goes, I had a hit on my hands. I mean it occasionally gets played on Thanksgiving day national radio to this day. That\u2019s a big deal for a young musician sniffing around the edges of what our culture calls music. I started expanding on the general context of what I accomplished with turkeys in one afternoon, to include other animals, longer durations, more collaborators from the environmental, shamanic, and scientific worlds. I think that\u2019s how lots of unplanned careers unfold. In my case, one adventure led to the next, and usually included enough remuneration to let me make a career out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n