Gingko-infused: new compositions
After we told our friend Raoul Bjorkenheim that van garden (aka JJ!) would be studying in Seoul for four months and that we’d all visit him one after another (a plan to keep him from being homesick) Raoul rushed to his album collection and played some of his favourite...
Opera of the Unspoken: Island of Unrest
This experimental jazz opera is a musical investigation into the mysteries of an ancestral tragedy from WWII, as revealed through vocal rituals, ancestral tarot, free jazz and dreaming. With this work I wanted to answer several questions. The first was, what could I do to honour ancestors who were...
Opera of the Unspoken: the creative process
Perhaps it is logical that after spending some time singing my dreams I find myself carried along by complex ancestral stories. And what is the next logical step when that happens? Over the past year I have been researching different ways to deal with this kind of magical material...
why I sing Brontë poems
When I finished reading every single book in the juvenile section of our local library as a kid, the librarian suggested I move along to romantic fiction. There I discovered the timeless novels of Emily Brontë, Jane Austen and so many more. Later I discovered the poems by Emily...