Asian Musical Influences in Dream of Separation

WV: You've studied music from many cultures during your graduate studies in ethnomusicology. African. Caribbean. Indonesian. In Dream of Separation your musical influences are Asian, you've mentioned Persian and Indian. Can you talk about the influences of musical traditions other than your Anglo-European or Anglo-American heritage in your CD.

LA: On The Dream of Separation there are other musical influences coming in, besides the traditional ones, from my culture, whatever that is at this point, the Anglo-European culture.

They're really just, I don't know how to put it in words, they are really just other colors on my palette that I like to use. There are some times that are an exception like "Timeless", which was when I was with Windjammer, which was full on in the 80s when I was trying to and writing Reggae tunes. But a lot of the influences on Dream of Separation are Asian influences, the Persian stuff we talked about last time. The Indian stuff which isn't new to me, but I kind of went back and looked at that. As well as some South East Asian stuff which I studied with Michael Bakan, in particular, doing the gamelan. There's other stuff too. I've become more interested in Japanese music because of my interest in Zen.

But with any of those styles, I'm not trying to cop the musical style, or create a believable Indian Raga, or Gamelan piece or anything like that. I'm not even really trying to create an authentic hybrid. They are just sound influences. But it's not random, really. It's not like I'm just pulling digital samples out of a sound bank, thinking "Oh, a Sitar would sound nice here." It does relate to the mood of what I'm trying to get across.

I guess a number of the types of Asian music, and it could just be my Western bias, but a lot of the music that I listen to has a mystical quality that I like that I'm trying to go for in my personal life and in my music.

Now that I mentioned this... I wanted the balance between, to me, what is the organic rootsy quality of my own musical experience, in particular acoustic guitar and live drums, and acoustic bass when possible, acoustic instruments and the music pared down to almost a folkie quality, but then.. I wanted on the one side a folkie quality, for me anyway, and then having the more mystical dimension of these Eastern influences thrown in. I shouldn't say thrown in, they weren't thrown in, they were carefully arranged, yes carefully arranged.