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| Andrew Sterman - 'The Path To Peace' Orange Mountain Music announces the CD release of The Path To Peace, music inspired by the inner journey of one of history's most remarkable individuals, the Indian political and spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948). This CD release, due February 12th, is culled from the interdisciplinary project of the same combining the music of composer/saxophonist/flutist Andrew Sterman, the choreography of Sridhar Shanmugam (a blend of modern western and traditional Indian dance), and archival film footage of Gandhi from the early 1900s. The recording of The Path To Peace's strikingly beautiful yet complex music highlights the realization of Sterman's lifelong creative and personal journey, which has led him to focus on the spirituality of music and the potential it has to speak across cultural and national borders. The Path To Peace was born after Sterman and Shanmugam were introduced at New York City's Rubin Museum of Art, where Sterman often performs. The duo instantly recognized that they shared common artistic ground, discussed their own experiments with rhythm and the pace of the breath, and how each wanted to utilize them in their respective art forms. They also shared their profound respect for Gandhi, and realized that his personal search for inner truth was the perfect inspiration for a collaborative artwork. "Gandhi's message is entirely spiritual, yet his action is of the body", says Sterman. "This union is great for both music and dance: I use breath to give sound to my ideas, my musicians play with deeply focused physical action, and then, of course, there's the dance itself." Sterman's music for The Path to Peace comprises an "Opening", seven core movements, and three transitional sections of chant. The Path To Peace traces the primary stages of Gandhi's personal development in the main sections of the work: Truth, Faith, Fearlessness, Ahimsa, Satyagraha, Democracy, and Peace. These seven layers also highlight the cross-cultural commonality of humankind's spiritual beliefs, reflecting symbolic similarities in other major world religions, including the seven Hindu chakras, Mohammed's famous meditation-journey to seven levels of heaven, as well as the seven-day week from the western Bible. During his lifetime, Gandhi underwent numerous transformative periods where he experimented and coalesced his ideas to eventually become the Gandhi we know. Both the periods of internal struggle and the resultant clarity are musically represented in The Path To Peace. As part of his compositional process Sterman dove into Gandhi's writings until they actually moved him to interpret Gandhi's inner journey via Sterman's own musical language. "In a way, the piece passes along various states of being, as each section represents a chronological stage in Gandhi's development", he says. "I read his autobiography very, very closely-a brilliant work-and piles of his letters, which are fantastic and very literate. I would read them until I felt that his words had somehow leapt from the page into my body, and I was in the state he was in, as if his inner state of being was something you could catch, like a virus. I felt he would infect me in the very best way." Throughout this process, Sterman made his explorations of breath integral to his music. Sterman calls the resulting music "pulse breath jazz." Sterman has practiced Tai Chi and Chi Gong for 20 years, and has learned lessons of healing from his wife, Ann Cecil-Sterman, a practitioner of a classical version of acupuncture. "The idea is that everyone is breathing, but not everyone's breathing with a kind of trueness", says Sterman. "You can't artificially say that you want to breathe deeply or calmly, because you can only keep that up for so long. But on the other hand, if you resolve to go deep enough, you can actually change and become more your potential self. That's where I try to write music from." This introspective examination led Sterman to take a closer look at the elements of his music, which, in The Path To Peace, created something entirely new and distinctive within his style of "Breath Pulse Jazz." While his musical core lies in the world of jazz, Sterman's compositional style has developed as a reflection his personal and spiritual interests combined with the wide variety of genres and of artists with whom he has performed, a huge list including Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Aretha Franklin, and even Kelly Clarkson. He has been a featured performer with Philip Glass (since 1992), from whom he learned to use interlocking inner voices to drive the piece and sustain precise musical moods. Sterman is also greatly influenced by his early professional work with Frank Sinatra. Sinatra's famous style shunned excess virtuosity in favor of "plain-speak", which sounds casual, but is actually complex and special. "Sinatra's music is complicated and irreproducible-nobody else can do it-yet listeners can 'get' it the first time. The details of a piece, and there are many, are the business of the composer and performers; what should come across is only the human feeling." Sterman also strives to relieve the traditional division of labor within the jazz group. In The Path To Peace, rather than asking the drummer to keep the beat, he composed parts requiring great rhythmic accuracy for violin, guitar, piano and bass, something that he learned from his time with Glass. He "utterly depended" on the performers' interlocking parts to stay in pace, which allowed him to play with a "loose brush" over the top-honoring his inner breath-while not changing the inner propulsion of the piece. This freed the drummer to converse with great freedom across the group with Sterman. The churning "Satyagraha" movement, for example, relies on this style and becomes one of the most intense sections of The Path To Peace. "Satyagraha" (a combination of two Sanskrit words meaning "holding firm" or "passive resistance") represents the time after Gandhi committed to non-violence (as explored in the earlier movement "Ahimsa"), when he found a means to action by leading peaceful demonstrations against the British. Sterman's musical give-and-take in "Satyagraha" gives voice to Gandhi's concerns. The movement balances the steady propulsion of the inner lines against Sterman's intense solo work to characterize the emotional pressure Gandhi felt during this time in his life. "I imagined him alone or with a few trusted counselors thinking about the demonstration planned for the next morning", says Sterman, "knowing that while they were committed to non-violence, the British had made no similar promise. He could expect that there was going to be bloodshed of some kind. Imagine the complexity of his feeling at such a moment." The positive energy behind The Path To Peace reflects the contributions of the many people involved in the collaboration, and Sterman hopes that this cross-disciplinary bond helped to create an artwork with authenticity that will spread Gandhi's message beyond national and spiritual borders. The Path To Peace is not particularly about a political or a religious viewpoint; rather, it is just an individual's perspective, which Sterman offers to the world as a wake-up call. "Music has the capacity to be a healing force, a sacred force. What I'm trying to do is pass on a necessary medicine to wake up people's inner Gandhi, without manipulating them. It's a human thing; if you peer deeply into yourself, there is this tremendous beauty. Gandhi found the way to put that into action and he changed history. Music has its own way of reaching inside, to that core, and bringing it alive. If The Path To Peace brings something to the people who hear it, it is because that joy and glow is already there, waiting to be resonated with." write your comments about the article :: © 2007 Jazz News :: home page |