MB: Can you talk a little bit about how the music is a catharsis for the region and how the connection with their voodoo religion helps to revitalize the downtrodden?

MH: Music is everything. The music celebrates life. It brings people together to comfort each other and to have comfort in numbers. And of course, these are trance-based religions. You go into these altered states that reveal what they call the spirit world. Basically, they use drums, singing and dancing. That’s the bottom line. And trance is chorded – their trance-based religions. That’s what the Clave is all about, the 3/2. That comes from the Caribbean. It all comes from the Yoruban traditions of West Africa, it just settled in the Caribbean. After going to Brazil, it worked its way up into the Caribbean and took home really powerfully there. And then it was given to us, like a hand-off, like a baton in the musical tradition. That’s what Bo Diddley got it from, Buddy Holly – all of these guys, everybody that you can name – Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, Coltrane, Carlos Santana, Grateful Dead. We all got that big, giant hit of that. And that’s what made American music.

MB: What do you feel led these unique sounds to be cross-blended?

MH: It’s very simple. These people are earth-bound people. They’re harvesters, they go to the land. So these are rhythms that are based in the earth. And then there are rhythms that are based in the heavens, the celestial rhythms, when they pray to the gods. It’s very delineated. Like I said, it’s a very powerful echo of West Africa. The music is like a musical totem, the very centerpiece of their daily life; it’s done on a daily basis. There’s no rhythm without a dance and no dance without a rhythm. They are linked – totally, inseparable. That’s how you overcome hardship, you overcome colonization. The Church missionized their music – the terrible things that have happened to them over the years, the dictators. It was never really set up as a very strong state because there were so many people coming and going there, claiming ownership. That wasn’t really what they were all about. They were very peaceful people and very spiritual. So that’s why the music was so important and became so powerful. You can look at it as rhythmically muscular, right up there with the West African and the Indian traditions of North and South India, which are very muscular – very adorned, very rococo, lots of ornaments. It headed straight to the spirit world. There’s a little on the entertainment side, but mostly to them, they see it as powerful, spiritual material.

MB: It’s very fascinating stuff.

MH: It’s a natural occurrence when people are oppressed to come together and to try and celebrate the few things that they can. It’s what they sound like – it’s their badge of identity. It’s something you can’t take from someone. When a colonial power or anybody comes in and takes everything, they can’t take that spirit and once they do, the culture is finished. Then it’s over. Then it has no reason for it to exist. So when it loses its music, it loses its soul, it loses its very center. So that’s why it’s held onto so ferociously and still practiced. I understand 90% still practice the old religions – the Voodum.

MB: Changing gears a little bit, you’ve recently worked with Nobel Prize winning physicist George Smoot to explore the sounds that are generated from the cosmos. Can you talk a little bit about that?

MH: Everything, every story, needs a beginning. George was searching for the beginning of time and space, the Big Bang, which happened 13.7 billion years ago. And in my books and as a drummer, the cosmology of beat one – where it all started, Big Bang – was where I started my story. In all my books, Drumming at the Edge of Magic, Planet Drum, all that stuff, talks about the Big Bang. I kept tracing it back – back to the biblical times, the origin of the drum, then back to the Neolithic, back to the Paleolithic, on and on, back, back, back – and finally, I was looking for the story of why we drum and why we make music and the vibratory stimulus that is involved in music and life and everything. How does it all connect? Where are we in the universe? Why? Are we part of the universe – did it spew us?

That’s where it all started. Then about a year ago, I started thinking about going back and finding the wave forms from the Big Bang and other epic events that happened in the universe because I wrote about it, but I never thought about actually listening to it. So that’s what happened. I started with the Big Bang and then what I was writing about was absolutely true. There are ripples in time, and we’re part of that evolutionary, vibratory, concept. But now science has proved it. I mean George discovered the Big Bang in 2006 – we knew it was there, but no one actually had scientific proof that there was a fluctuation in the cosmic background noise given off by that arrhythmic event that started 13.7 billion years ago.

It started on the Dead tour – every night we brought the audience a piece of some galaxy or some epic event and played with it. Kreutzmann and I did it during the Rhythm Devils segment. We started with the Big Bang and wound up on earth transmissions. We went through Pluto, Saturn, Jupiter, heartbeat of the sun – we went through all of these wonderful places in the universe. Then after the tour, I started to get more serious and started cutting it up and doing things to it with the computer, enhancing the sounds and making music with it, as opposed to a drone or a pulse or something like that, to actually make what we call music. That’s where it started.

George Smoot is a Deadhead, and I knew of his work, so I just thought, “Wow, go see George.” So we took this down to Cancun – he had a conference there last month, “Cosmology for the Next Decade” – and I played the work, the sounds of these different stars, to his people, to the astrophysicists from around the world who came to the conference. They think of it only in wave form, like light. Basically, I’m taking these waveforms which are light waves – very fast – which are gathered by NASA and radio telescopes and different measuring devices around the world and changing them into sound, bringing them down into our auditory frequency. It’s like playing with the fabric of the universe, or playing with the beginning of space and time; who could resist that!

Pages:« Previous Page Next Page »