Street roots., April 27, 2012, Page 8, Image 8

8
street roots
April 27, 2012
Beat of
a gypsy
Hart
Drummer Mickey
Hart comes to town
with an all-star cast —
and the universe
BY SUE ZALOKAR
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
rateful Dead backbeat Mickey Hart
has been studying the social and
cultural aspects of music for decades
from his perch inside the drum set. He
came by this interest in instruments of
percussion by heritage: His father was
drummer and owned and operated a music
store. But it was just after high school when
Hart’s discovered the music of Nigerian
drummer, educator and social activist,
Babatunde Olatunji, and it opened up the
world of possibilities for Hart. He would
later study with Olatunji, bringing the
unique rhythms of world beat music to the
both the Grateful Dead’s music and his own.
Hart’s 1991 album, “Planet Drum,” hit
number one on Billboard’s World Music
chart that year, and won the first-ever
Grammy for Best World Music Album. He is
the author of four books, has testified before
a congressional subcommittee on the
healing power of music, and has worked
with both the Library of Congress and the
Smithsonian to digitize and preserve
recordings of his own and others.
This month, the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame features a Grateful Dead exhibition:
The Long Strange Trip. And at 67 years old,
Hart has set out on tour with his band this
month promoting his newest album,
“Mysterium Tremendum.” Hart captured
the sounds of the universe and converted
the raw data into samples that he uses on
stage every night as the backdrop for his
latest musical exploration.
The Mickey Hart Band comes to town
May 10 at the Crystal Ballroom featuring a
world-class, eight-piece ensemble; Mickey
Hart, Dave Schools, Gawin Matthews, Tim
Hockenberry, Crystal Monee Hall, Sikiru
Adepoju, Ben Yonas, Ian Inkx Herman - not
including the universe.
“I’m taking light waves from the universe
and transferring them into sound waves and
using them as part of the composition on
space as part of the music,” Hart said when
we caught up with him on tour. “It’s a rock-
n-roll format with beautiful songs and these
amazing space sounds from 13 billion years
ago. It’s a wonderful adventure.”
G
S.Z.: For those of us who haven’t heard the
raw data, What does the universe sound like?
M.H.: That’s a good question. There are
a lot of collisions. There is also a lot of
chirping, a lot of thumping, pulsing. It’s not
what you would call music. It’s what you
would call noise. So what I do is I take that
data and I bring it from the form of light, or
radiation, into sound waves and bring into
our very limited spectrum And then I
make it so that it’s not noise, it’s music. I
sound design it. I take the raw data and I
make it so we humans can make it music
and dance to it and enjoy it. But it comes
from those original ‘seed sounds’ that
created the universe. It’s the trip of a
lifetime.
S.Z.: What is the significance of, or what
P H O T O B Y M I C H A E L W IE N T R O B
are you saying to your listeners with
“Mysterium Tremendum, ” your most recent
album?
M.H.: It addresses the giant mysteries of
the universe. Where did we come from?
When did we become human? Where are we
in the chain of evolution? My books in the
‘90s (Drumming at the Edge of Magic and
Planet Drum) both were in search of where
the groove came from. Eventually it led me
to the birth of the universe, the beginning
of space and time, from creation. Back in
1991 there were no machines or
instruments to read that data, but now we
have them. It kind of gives you your place in
the universe because this is kind of an
ancestral thing. These are the sounds that
created the sun, the moon, the earth, us.
So it’s really a family tree in a way, hearing
what the universe actually sounds like.
Each star, each planet sings its own tune.
I’m just listening in on the conversation. It
remains to be seen what the relevance and
the significance is except that you know that
you are dancing with the infinite universe
and that’s what music is supposed to be.
You are vibrating with the Gaia of vibrations.
Everything is interconnected in some way
and this is a real scientific way of
understanding that principle that we all are
in this kind of celestial clockwork. And we
are just this very small piece at the end of
the chain.
S.Z.: Explain, in your experience, the
relationship between science and art.
M.H.: Art is conceptual. Science is
absolute. When we play music, we are
postulating. Music is just a miniature of
what is going on in the heavens. And that’s
why we play music, every culture. Because
it emulates what is going on vibrationally
speaking in the heavens. Music is just
controlled vibrations. We aren’t just
drumming. We are using computers on the
stage, we’re using sounds from billions of
years ago that we bring up and recall every
night. The musician of the future will be the
musician scientist. The days of just being
someone on your instrument are drawing to
a close. The idea of enhancing it and taking
music to a new place with new colors and
sounds, new feelings it’s all about science. I
like to play, so I use machines in my work
and my art. Some people just press a
button. It’s not like that here. Mine is more
like an improvisational performance as
opposed to a beat box.
S.Z.; In 1991 you testified with Oliver Sacks
(a British neurologist whose 1973 book
“Awakeings” was later made into the film by
the same name) before the U.S. Senate about
the healing power of music on the aged. What,
in your experience, is the connection between
music, healing and aging?
M.H.: It’s the vibrations. What happens is
when you get older the connections, your
neural pathways, the way your brain feels
vibrations, those connections are lost
sometimes like (people who have) dementia,
Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, they’re cut —
broken. And vibration creates a synthesis
inside the cells and kind of reconnects them
while the music and the vibrations are
playing, so it becomes medicinal. It becomes
life enhancing and a remedy. At least for
while the music is playing. We don’t know
how to really make it into a longer lasting
See H A RT, page 8