M5: You play more than one instrument (piano, drums and...?), but the Hammond B3, a Rhodes electrical piano and the synthesizer are like forever connected to certain musical eras. Do you feel you've been 'lucky', to be part of a generation in which certain musical developments and exploration created new sounds that kind of were the basic layers for jazzrock, fusion and anything experimental? And what made you lean more towards the jazzside of things than the rock influences...?

KW: I do feel lucky to have hit the wave of music that I did, when I was coming through high school and into college. It was an explosion of all kinds of things, and an international cross-pollination of influences as well. And it was before the corporatization of the music business, so people were breaking new ground and saying what they wanted to say, playing what they wanted to play. The music business today has a problem, that is hard to describe exactly, but it seems to me that there are relatively few people breaking new ground. Sure, there is a lot of new technology, and everyone has access to it, but musically I don't hear that much that really holds my interest. Where are the new Miles Davises, the new Coltranes? The new Hendrix? The new Cream? Now we get reunion bands (Cream is having a reunion!). Today it is all about "product", and entertainment, and we are losing sight of the power that music has to raise consciousness and transform and heal. There are encouraging things going on today too, I feel, with the coming of age of the internet as a distribution medium. But searching for something original and fresh in all of it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. That's why sites like Mizar5 are such a valuable service. We need people with taste and intelligence to search through the haystack for us, and report their findings!

But it is getting harder and harder to find music that hasn't been played already. I feel that to be original we are going to have to dig a lot deeper into ourselves. This is a subject that really interests me, what being "original" really is. Since all the notes have already been played many times over, our originality is going to have to be more about HOW we play those notes. And much as I love electronics, it's with an acoustic instrument that we really get to go into the creation of our own sound in depth. Creating tone on an instrument is like learning Tai Chi, or a martial art. You have to connect with the instrument, so that it becomes a living breathing extension of your body. I feel that this is something very sorely lacking in music education these days. There's no short cut to that. To really master music and develop an original sound we have to look at our whole life, and bring it into alignment. And this is going to take focus, dedication, and time. No way around it. But it is the most rewarding journey I could imagine, because, as the great Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan said, music is life itself.

The Hammond B3 is just the coolest instrument. I fell in love with it early on, with bands like Procol Harum, the Young Rascals, Steve Winwood and Traffic, and the like, and then later in jazz with organists like Jimmy Smith, and my all time favorite, Larry Young. I got my first B3 when I was a junior in high school. Somehow it dovetailed with my pipe organ studies. It's funny how it still is popular today, as is the Rhodes. I have a cherry 1958 B3 now that I got 5 or 6 years ago. I still look at it in amazement. It's like a classic antique car or something. And the Leslie speaker, with the spinning speakers, is still one of the coolest inventions of the 20th century!

What made me lean more towards jazz, was when bands like Weather Report and Mahavishnu Orchestra came out, and I heard the blend of influences, and the high level of improvisation. It brought together all of the kinds of music I had been interested in into one music. Somehow jazz fusion got derailed along the way, until now it's almost a dirty word: "fusion". It's too bad. I still think Weather Report is one of the best bands that ever happened. That is the original world music. Somehow North, South, East and West all came together in that band.

M5: You spent time in Boston and studied with a renowned teacher, Mme Chaloff. Can you tell us anything about these years and in what respect were they of major influence to you? What did she teach you in particular?

KW: Madame Chaloff was a legend around Boston, for being not only an amazing pianist and teacher, but also a kind of spiritual teacher. She taught a method of piano technique that had been passed down through generations of pianists, many of whom were quite well known, including Mozart, Czerny, Beethoven, etc. The technique involves using the breath, with weightless arms, and reminds me very much of a kind of martial art, like a miniature karate/kung fu, for the piano. The object is to create a singing tone on the piano. Madame Chaloff had many illustrious students, including Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, George Shearing, Kenny Werner, Steve Kuhn, and many others. Here is something I recently wrote to another one of her students about my experience with her. It was really quite serendipitous.

It was in 1976-1977 that I was studying with Madame Chaloff. I studied with her for about 7 or 8 months, and she died while i was studying with her. I got there just in time! It's funny, because she used to look at me with those piercing blue eyes and tell me I was killing her! With so much love, though, that I really didn't take it personally when she did pass on. But she was an extraordinary gift for me.

The circumstances of our meeting were quite powerful too. It was my birthday, October 4th 1976 (I was 25), and I showed up at her apartment unannounced. I had only just heard of her for the first time the night before from a friend, and when he told me Keith Jarrett had studied with her, that was all I needed to hear, because Jarrett was and still is one of my all time favorites. I lived in Northampton MA at the time, and the next day, my birthday, I rode into Boston with a friend who was going for a vocal lesson. She dropped me off, I went to a phone booth, and looked up Mme C's address, and just went to her place on Comm Ave and rang the buzzer. (I have never done this kind of thing before or since)... She buzzed me in, and started by telling me I would have to make an appointment for 2 weeks or so later. But then when she saw me, she told me to come in anyway. She felt the back of my neck, as she did with people, because she was deeply psychic, and said "oh, what a beautiful soul" and then told me, "this must be fate". When I told her it was my birthday, and that my name was Christopher (that's my full name), she was astonished, because, she said, she had a grandson named Christopher, and that it was his birthday that day. She also told me she had just kicked out a student for not practicing, which she had only done once or twice before in her life.

So she brought me in, and read my palm, and also read my playing card out of that book she used. I am 5 of diamonds. She told me we had worked together in a past life. I played a little for her, but was so nervous that I played terribly, but she didn't seem to care, she accepted me as her student on the spot. I was so blown away by this meeting, I will never forget it.

So then the next months I took on the task of trying to absorb the essence of the teaching. I felt like a Zen student with a koan from the Zen master to solve. It became my constant meditation. She told me to observe the birds, and I really took that to heart. Trying to get the weightless arms, the breathing, the whole thing. I worked and worked at it. Week after week I would come in, start my piece, get through a few bars, and she would say, no no, that's not it, and we would go back to playing one note, trying to get it to "sing". And then I would go back home, determined to get to the bottom of it.

Whenever I would come into her apartment I could feel a palpable energy field there. I do feel that she was a spiritually enlightened being. It was always with a mixture of excitement and awe that I would come to my lessons. She had this amazing way of making me shake in my boots, all the while however making me feel completely loved. And she would tell me how the tones can be directed to people for healing anywhere in the world, also something that has become a real priority for me with music.

Then a month or so before she passed on, I remember coming to a lesson, and as she was in her kitchen she told me to just play a little to warm up. I did, and she came out and said yes, that's it, now you are getting it. I felt so elated, because I really began to understand it. I had only a couple of lessons more, and I think it was at the second to last one I remember her saying, "well, I guess you won't be needing me any more". And then a few weeks later she was gone. I also will always remember going to see her lying in state, after her passing.

She also catalyzed a life-long spiritual search for me, that has run parallel to my musical life, because after her I began to feel that I needed a spiritual teacher more than a music teacher. That has been a long and winding road, but a very worthwhile adventure, and I really credit Mme Chaloff for starting me out on my journey. Being with her was really my first experience with direct spiritual transmission from a teacher, and since then I haven't been satisfied with anything less than that.

M5: You traveled back and forth to India. What was it you were looking for the first trips there and better yet, did you find 'it'?

KW: When I used to drive to Boston for my lessons with Mme Chaloff, I would go to a spiritual bookstore there, because I was starting to get very interested in meditation. I ran across these books by the teacher in India called Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, (now known as Osho) who was relatively unknown at the time, but later became notorious, especially when he ended up in America. When Mme Chaloff passed on, I realized what I really needed was a spiritual teacher, and simultaneously I realized that Rajneesh was accepting anyone who came to him as a student. I had such a strong affinity for his teachings, because he helped me to see that the real solution to the problems of the world is inside us, not outside, because ultimately inside and outside are the same. A book of his that I read at that time called "The Inward Revolution" really drove that point home. Something popped for me, and I made plans to go to India. All that winter I played with a horrendous lounge singer to save the money to go, and I went in the fall of 1978.

At that point, what I was interested in was freedom, self-mastery, and, for lack of a better word, enlightenment. And certainly something pretty unusual and revolutionary (in the true sense of the word) was going on there at the Rajneesh ashram. I went back again in 1979, and all in all spent about a year there. It was an initiation into a new relationship with life and myself and the world which hasn't let up for a moment since. It has been a long and winding road, and there have been several milestones along the way that have shifted my entire perspective. As to the question of whether or not I have found "it", I can say that at some point years after that I changed from a seeker into a "finder". It is clear to me that God, or whatever you want to call it, is a palpable, visceral experience like an electric current running through and around the body, and it has an undeniable radiance and brightness to it. It is just a byproduct of being present. And when you really begin to see through yourself, and your particular strategy for avoiding "it", then "it" finds you. It rushes toward you. It was always here all along. There is a threshold you cross, that is a point of no return. But there is nowhere to arrive. There is nothing to find, and there is no one to find it. It's all a kind of riddle.

M5: In 1982 you moved the the San Francisco Bay Area... How come, why there?

KW: After being in India, I felt I needed a new horizon. I had been around Boston so much, and it just seemed like I could see how things would end up if I stayed there. But it took a long time to get used to California. When the grass turned gold in May I freaked out. I still sometimes miss having more seasons, and some weather. It's a beautiful sunny day here every day. But I felt that there would be more musical opportunity in California. I was also getting more interested in ambient music, and music for meditation, and there is a lot of that going on here. It's a mixed blessing though, because a lot of New Age music is little more than sugar-water. It is a challenge to create something spacious and meditative that still has artistic value. That's why I love the ECM label so much. That seems to be a pretty consistent vision that they have, and they have managed to avoid being thrown into the New Age bin.

The San Francisco area has a pretty good music scene. What I like about it is, there again, the diversity. There is a lot of world music, and a lot of hybrid blends of things. There seems to be a pretty experimental spirit around here, and it is reflected in the music. There are lots of festivals, the SF Jazz always has interesting programs, there is a jazz school in Berkeley, and there is a music industry presence here, though not like it is in LA. But that's probably a good thing. Plus, it's a beautiful place. I live in Marin County near the coast, and the air is clean, and there is a lot of nature preserve here, even less than an hour from the city. One of my priorities is to have natural beauty around, and yet have access to culture, and it seems to me that San Francisco is probably the best place in the US for that. But I am concerned about the whole social and political context in the USA right now. It is a very discouraging trend, and the thought has crossed my mind more than once to try living elsewhere, perhaps even Europe.

M5: In a nutshell, you recorded two critically acclaimed records for Windham Hill Jazz, composed music for an award winning nature documentary and worked with a variety in musicians on even more varied projects. It's clear you love to work with different styles and genres of music and seem especially drawn to world music... Is this also something that appeals to you in a spiritual way, because you feel world music is spiritually based?

KW: World music is an interesting genre, because in a way it can include almost anything, because the world consists of all the countries. I guess part of why I like it, is because it seems to be the most free genre, in terms of what fits into it. I have always had this problem with genres. It seems that the minute you label something, you no longer have to really pay attention. You can say, "oh that's jazz, and I don't like jazz", so that's that. Or," I do like jazz, cool music. Now what were you saying?" And then you can go back to distraction, and the music fades back into the wallpaper. And then when you can't name it, you have to reject it, because it doesn't fit into any of the music slots in your mind. I think the corporate music business has done a lot to injure music in that way. We are losing the capacity to pay attention, and real music demands that of you. Music is a two way street. With no listener, there is no music. With no one to perceive this world, would it still exist?

So that's why I love things that fit between the genres, there is more room for originality. It's like the genres have already been farmed to death. All the country songs have been written many times over. All the real estate is built on. But there's still room for aboriginal country music! or klezmer funk.

Another reason I like world music is because it is more genuine. Most of it comes from people living ordinary life, not wanna-be rockstars. It is songs about village life, or about the ancestors, or about freedom for our people, myths and legends, and so on. Corporate music has some kind of disconnected quality that is either violent, or based on illusory values of some sort. And behind it all you can feel the money motive. When I feel that, I turn it off. The spirit is about truth, about being real. So yes, I feel the beauty of humanity in world music, and that keeps me going!

One of the things I love the most is having friends from other cultures, especially musical friends. It's a worldwide family, and we all speak the language of music. What better way to honor our common humanity than with music? And it is amazing how those 12 tones can be organized in so many different ways and flavors, both from different cultures, and in different genres. I love being in a room with friends from different cultures, speaking different languages, even if I can't understand what they are saying. I don't know why, it just warms my heart to hear people speaking with different accents, and playing music together is the best. Continue