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 In the Global music scene Stephen Kent is among the most established musicians playing the Didjeridu in a contemporary context. As a solo artist, Kent has produced 3 albums: Songs From the Burnt Earth, Landing, and most recently, Tree--a double CD that includes both a retrospective look at over 10 years of recordings with the Didjeridu emphasizing previously unreleased music, remixes and also a 2nd CD of solo Didjeridu journeys into deep space. In concert he has played all over the world and shared the bill with many renowned performers. Apart from his own musical projects, Stephen is also involved with promotion of World Music on radio, programming a weekly show on KPFA 94.1 FM in Northern California. Tune into "Music of the World" on Thursdays from 10 am to 12 noon. Check out the Stephen Kent webpage.
There is perhaps no other musician living on the planet that has done as much to popularize a relatively obscure and ancient instrument as Stephen Kent. Since 1987 Kent has been playing the didgeridoo. He began his partnership with the didge when he was touring Australia as a performing member and musical director of Circus Oz, a new vaudevillian troupe that was an early adopter of Cirque Du Soleil. While there, he was initiated into the didge under Aboriginal influence. Kent had already established himself as a musician that was willing to take chances, his first group; Furious Pig was a hard punk noise unit. He even gigged for a brief period of time with Jimmy Cauty, who went onto fame with The KLF. But it was the didge and the group he formed around it, Lights In A Fat City, that brought the 40,000 year-old-instrument and ceremonial tool out of the dreamtime into the 20th century.
Somewhere, Lights In A Fat City first record combined elements of industrial soundscapes, samples and slammin' beats alongside the timeless blasts of the didge. It was a revolutionary recording and literally took Jon Hassell's fourth world esthetics to the next level. World Music hasn't been the same since. Kent moved from London to California in '91 and started a new group Trance Mission, with Beth Custer, John Loose and former Lights In A Fat City member, Kenneth Newby. We caught up with Kent over a Mocha in his new hometown of Oakland just prior to The San Francisco World Music Festival:
Radio-V: How were you introduced to the didgeridoo?
Stephen Kent: I was hired by an Australian circus that was similar to Cirque Du Soliel--in that they had no animals. They were a contemporary theater group masquerading as a circus. And they had a slight political agenda in their show. I was taken from England to be their musical director. The show had content in it that through light on the condition of aboriginal people at that time and asked questions about the state of aborigines in relation to the wider state of Australia-we're talking about the early eighties. Given that I was interested in bringing a sound into the show that was truly Australian, or rather an Aboriginal in perspective-even though I was an Englishman and was way out of my depth. I learned the breathing techniques for Didgeridoo and applied them to brass instruments and then I orchestrated the circus band for various parts of the spectacle around the sound of a Tuba or Sousaphone played like a didgeridoo. That's how I initiated myself into the culture of the didgeridoo. But it wasn't enough to be transferring the sound of the didge into western instruments. After I had been in Australia for a while, I began to spend as much of my time as I could away from the group playing out bush and spending time with Aboriginal people in Aboriginal settlements and learning as much as I could about their culture. It was about that connection and especially the connection with the land, even more than the people that drew me personally closer to the didgeridoo. It became obvious that I as a non-Aborigine I could play the didgeridoo if I wanted to-I'd wondered if it was appropriate-but it was okay.
RV: What was it like when you heard the didge for the very first time?
SK: I guess it was love at first sight, or sound. The sound related back to me as a sound that I had heard as a child growing up in Uganda. It was at a wedding ceremony where forty or fifty people were blowing animal horns simultaneously. They had this incredible rolling wave of sound. When first I heard the didgeridoo, I was reminded of that. And that piece that I heard recorded by an ethnomusicologist named Gene Jenkins back in the 60's. When I heard that piece, it was a call to me that, that was the kind of music that I wanted to make--kind of orchestrated wall of sound that could be achieved-like forty or fifty wedding players in Uganda. What is it in the sound of the didge that draws people to it? I think a lot of global musical cultures are based in drones. I think the drone is a very familiar territory for most people. I think that most people can relate to a sound, a single note that underpins the rest of music. I mean it even lives with us right here. We're in this courtyard in the back of a cafe and we can hear the sounds of electronic machines that are continuous. I think in some ways people are comfortable with that kind of a sound. The didgeridoo is at once completely out of this world and yet relates to something in people that is connected to an innate memory pattern-some sort of physical and emotional memory. People recognize it as a part of themselves even if they can't rationalize that connection. Or they run a mile from it. It's a very visceral response. It's a bit like the Tibetan horns. People say that the low, long drone of the horn is to familiarize the person with the same sound that they hear at death. I think the didgeridoo does the same thing, but I wonder if that in a way the didgeridoo has a sound that you hear at birth as well. It's like you're going through the tunnel, the birth canal. What does a person hear at that time? I don't know but I think that the didgeridoo connects you, completes a circle somehow.
RV: When Somewhere came out, what kind of press did you receive?
SK: The press was almost universally positive in response to Somewhere. It was the culmination of almost two years worth of improvised work that Eddie Sayer and myself were doing and were later joined by Simon Tassano. We just found that it (the music) connected people a lot. First in the streets and marketplaces and then in more concert venues and touring with sound systems. The press was phenomenal. It was like we had broken into new territory with this sound. Nobody really knew what to do with it. They didn't know what this music was. It was sort of hard for some people to accept that these were White people playing these instruments from ancient cultures but weren't related to these cultures. It was a contemporary phenomenon. So people had trouble pigeonholing it. And I think we suffered as group with the progress we were making because of the lack of recognition with the validity of the music from business people. But the journalists were really into it. But there were people though who questioned (especially me) from urban Whites with middle class backgrounds who aggressively questioned my right to play the didgeridoo and use an instrument from another culture. There was a backlash of cultural imperialists who thought that I was maintaining that direction, that movement that I was stomping on the natives-whatever that was. My universal experience with Aboriginal people and people of more rural areas, was that of incredible, positive response. I wasn't too concerned with the death threats-and I did get a death threat. The whole scene in the early eighties isn't like what it is now. Now you can find didgeridoos in all manner of retail situations. It was very unusual for someone to play didgeridoo at that point. So it was very unfamiliar sound for most westerners.
RV: Have you ever stepped back and surveyed the effect you've had on people and people taking up the instrument?
SK: I'm faced with that increasingly as time goes on. I came to California nine years ago from London, because I wanted to escape that kind of effect. There was an influence in Europe in the late-eighties and early-nineties where Lights In A Fat City was a significant player in the didgeridoo world. I felt that as becoming increasingly claustrophobic for me. I wanted to get away from taking responsibility for any kind of movement. It's only really quite recently that I've woken up to realize that I have been quite an influence on that movement. I went back to Europe for the first time to play-about six years after I had moved to California and was quite amazed that there was an incredible audience for the type of music that I was involved with. I never really thought that much about my influence, but I get more and more starry eyed people that come up to me to tell me what a profound effect my music has had on their lives. That's at once gratifying but also frightening, because in a way I view my own musical journey as being just that. It's been undertaken without reference as to how it might affect it others. It's my own path. I'm a little embarrassed when people come up to me and tell me how much my music means to them. It's wonderful and yet a little strange to have that place in someone's life.
RV: Do you ever think of the didge as a divining rod that leads to people, place and experience?
SK: I've not really thought about it quite like that, but sometimes it is. You can look at your life in hindsight and the decisions you made might seem very small, but these seemingly insignificant moments in ones life play out and become huge tectonic plates in the large scheme of your earth experience. So in a way I do I suppose. I played a small event last week in the Mission to raise money for a small independent art space so that they can keep going the threat of increased rents and the dot-combination of the Bay Area and it was in a venue that I played at when I first came to San Francisco nine years ago and maintained something of a relationship with. Sometimes I play certain events where the meaning of what I do transcends me. The moment takes me into almost shamanic territory. And it felt to me during that performance that I had the sense that it is a divining rod, a shaman's tool that it focuses whoever's there into something deeper inside of them. What I can do with the didgeridoo has a much greater articulation to the spirit world then I as a human have. So where has it lead me? Well it's taken me all over the world. It's been only recently that I've accepted that the didgeridoo is my voice. It's the most powerful voice I have and the greatest gift that I can give to the world-my own breath-it's not always been an easy thing to accept.
RV: Can you talk a little about the Aboriginal concept of "songlines"?
SK: From what I know, Australian Aboriginals and for many other Aboriginal peoples around the world, the ritual of song and dance, painting, storytelling is inherently connected with the spiritual relationship that they have with the Earth and the Spirit World and the maintenance of life here. So when the aborigines play their songs they literally sing up the land, that's what they say. If they stop singing their songs and dancing their dances and maintaining their ritual culture, then the Earth will die. So each tribe has responsibility in their own rituals and ritual life for their own maintenance of their own tribal territory. So when the British first came to Australia 212 years ago, the country was at that time occupied by over seven hundred tribes. And each of those had their own territory that they had to maintain in its pristine form, in the way that it has always been. Sine the ancestral spirits and creator being roamed on the featureless landscape and in their mythical journeys created the world that we now live in, or the world that the aborigines lived in. And so they believed that each tribe and each area has a responsibility to maintain the country and the songs that they sing are the songs of those journeys taken by those ancestral creator spirits. These are criss-crossed all over the continent of Australia and so the "songlines" are the depiction of the ancestral spirit as they created the Earth. So when the aborigines sing the songs of their land, they are literally singing up that land. The they will get together with different tribes and sing the whole map of Australia, or as far as their territory goes.
RV: Do you see yourself as creating a post-modern songline as a part of your own journey?
SK: (Long pause) Ummm, when I'm conscious of what I'm doing I could say "yes." The work that I've done with the didgeridoo has always, or largely maintained a relationship with technology and with contemporary forces. And I'm very interested in the balance between those two fairly polarized realities. One being consciousness transmitted through the music that I'm playing and the other being a relationship with the contemporary and high tech. So yes, in a way that could be said to be so. We're so crazed with the current reality that it can be very hard to be clear. I say that with a qualified "yes."
RV: Are you surprised that San Francisco hasn't had a world music festival prior to the one that you're about to play in?
SK: Honestly, yes. I never really picked up on that fact until this festival was about to be programmed. It's extraordinary. But in a way I think that San Francisco is a constant world music festival unto itself. The Bay Area in general is an amazing cultural zone, commingling and producing different musical experiences and events in that there is a non stop musical festival going on here.
RV: If you could tell people something about yourself that you might not be able to articulate in your music, what would it be?
SK: (Longer Pause) Wow! (Slight chuckle) I find that a really hard question to answer, I don't really think about that. I feel like the bottom line about what I'm doing is the music. It's not so unusual and that anyone can do it. I feel like I'm a normal guy who's brought many positive influences to bear in this one area of sound and that it's really not that hard to live that and do that. I really think that people think put musicians and performers up on some kind of pedestal. I would like people generally to understand of me, that I don't want to be on a pedestal. I guess that I'm one of the masses-one with everybody.
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Watch a video interview recorded at the Ambient Groove Temple,
