The Cello and David Darling in Love

Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, I speak with David Darling. “Maverick cellist” is the phrase most often assigned to Grammy®-winning artist David Darling, a man who literally redefines the way the cello is played and the way music is taught. His eclectic recordings, innovative performance style, and unconventional teaching methods have helped open the world of music and improvisation to thousands of individuals.

With Sounds True, David has released a new record along with vocalist Sylvia Nakkach, In Love and Longing. He’s also collaborated on a three-CD set with Coleman Barks, Just Being Here: Rumi and Human Friendship—a combination of music by David Darling and the poetry of Rumi translated and spoken by Coleman Barks. David Darling is also collaborating with pianist Jacqueline Bhuyan to release a new record in early summer called Cello and Piano Meditations. David—along with Jacqueline—will be at Sounds True’s Wake Up Festival, August 20th–24th, 2014, in Estes Park, Colorado.

In this episode of Insights at the Edge, David and I spoke about the cello as an instrument of melancholy. We also talked about what it takes to be a good collaborator, and the art of deep listening. Finally, we listened to three selections of David’s music from his releases with Sounds True. Here’s my conversation with David Darling.

David, I want to start with a question that’s intimate in a certain kind of way—which is I’m wondering if you could share with me and with our listeners [what it’s] like on the inside when you’re playing the cello. What does it feel like to you?

David Darling: Well, the cello’s always had a feeling of romanticism and of longing and of tremendous emotion. I feel all those things in myself. When I start playing, the cello itself—the sound—I fell in love with it when I was a kid. I started and the more I played it, the more I loved the fact that it was, in a way, so emotional and such a sound that I loved because it felt so expressive.

So, as I’ve gotten older, it’s even deeper in me. I could easily say that it’s one of the great spiritual adventures of my life. When people talk about God and stuff like that, my answer is that music is the god and the cello is the path through which I certainly love expressing myself. Something like that.

TS: As a young person, tell me how you fell in love with the cello.

DD: I was very privileged to grow up in a lower-middle-class family where my mother was a highly respected pianist and my father was a businessman. He loved classical music to such an extent that he was president of the local symphony board. In our house, my brother and sister—we all were listening to classical music all the time because that’s what my father and my mom wanted to listen to. It was part of the sound in our house for all the time I was growing up.

I remember going to the symphony concerts. I always liked seeing the cello even though, in the beginning, I didn’t realize how expressive it was. I sort of liked it for its size and—being an athlete as well—I liked the idea that you got to carry around this sized instrument.

Then, in my grade school, when they introduced instruments to us in fourth grade, when the cello was demonstrated I just immediately knew that I wanted to play that. As I went home after school, I told my mother, “I want to play the cello,” and she was just tickled pink. She loved the fact that I wanted to do that. We got a cello right away, and I had a private teacher right away.

So, I’ve been playing ever since. My mother accompanied me in grade school and high school at all the contests. She was quite a well-known accompanist in Elkhorn, Indiana—where I grew up. She was a terrific accompanist because if students made mistakes, she could always cover for them or know where they were at, too. So, she was my accompanist all through high school.

I remember the first time that I was playing my first song—I think it was called “The Volga Boatmen Song.” I was learning it by myself. She came in and she said, “David, let me play the accompaniment to that.” I said, “OK.” And then, wow! When she played the piano and played all those chords, and I played the cello, it just killed me. It was so beautiful to play with piano accompaniment. It was just a moment of a kind of miracle. I realized, “Wow. This is fantastic to have piano accompaniment to the cello.”

One of the favorite memories I have of listening when I was kid to a professional cellist play—or artist play—was getting a recording of Leonard Rose. At that time, he was one of the most famous solo cellists, and he taught at Juilliard. The record I got had something on it called “Schelomo,” which is one of the [greatest] rhapsodies that’s ever been written, by Ernest Bloch. All cellists love it because it’s one of the great expressive pieces that’s ever been written for the cello. Of course, it’s called “Rhapsody” as well.

When I heard that, I was just even more in love with the cello. The fact that that piece was so beautiful, so emotional. Of course, Ernest Bloch was Jewish, so in way “Schelomo” has always been music that has been played in the synagogues, because it has such a melody that’s sad—and at the same time so rhapsodic and beautiful.

By that time, I was in fifth grade, sixth grade. I got the music and was able to start learning how to play that along with all the other great concertos that students learn, like the Saint-Saëns cello concerto. And then of course starting the Bach unaccompanied suites—which was just a pleasure, because my mother would play Bach in the house. I always thought Bach was just wonderful. To get to play the Bach unaccompanied suites was fantastic.

The more I learned about it, the more I realized that a man named Pablo Casals had discovered them when he was very young. He discovered that Bach had [written] those six suites, which are very famous. He found them in an early music store in the late 1800s and couldn’t believe that nobody knew about it. So, he made them famous, because he recorded all of them.

I don’t know. The influence of classical music was really huge in my life. Of course, it still is. I feel like classical music was my first love of music.

TS: Now, David, I think of the cello as the instrument for grieving, if you will. The instrument of melancholy. The instrument to sort of carry human emotion—especially the emotion of letting go and loss. I’m curious if that’s your experience. Talk a little bit, for you, about the cello and this idea of it being an instrument for the release of melancholy.

DD: I would totally agree with you. I didn’t think about [it] myself when I was kid, but as I grew older and older, I realized the reason I loved the cello was the melancholy that it gave. As I grew older and I began to realize that the world was full of horrific things—I learned about the Holocaust and [other] things—the cello was fantastic because you could put your feelings in it and express your feelings through the cello.

It was just such a gift to play the cello because of what you just said. It had this melancholy sound. People loved the cello. The more people I met, the more I realized that the cello is a very favorite instrument of a lot of people—much more than the other string instruments, like violin and viola. The cello is one of those instruments that—as I’ve met people in my life—it’s not untypical that people say to me, “Oh, that’s my favorite instrument.”

I think it’s remarkable that an instrument can have such a depth of feel because of the sound. You know, the sound is in the range of our human voice. It’s like a baritone tenor. It’s very much in the speaking sound as well. It’s so human-like—if someone’s talking to you—rather than the violin, which is so high. You don’t speak in that voice. But the cello and even the viola—they’re sort of in the human sound that we make when we’re talking.

That was a wonderful thing to discover and to realize—that it had such feeling in it. I realized that when I would accompany a wedding (or whatever) that people wanted it because it was emotional. You could try to play something happy—and of course, you could play happy music. But the melancholy was always there, in a way.

So, I think what you feel is something that a lot of us feel about the cello.

TS: It’s interesting that you’re saying that it’s on the same wavelength—broadly speaking—as the human voice. It seems somehow connected to our hearts. Our heart, then, expressing itself through the human voice in a certain kind of way.

DD: You know, it’s quite amazing. In my teaching workshops and things, I tell everybody that they can play the cello. They come up one by one and I give them the cello. They begin to realize that the top of the cello is resting right on your chest, where your heart is. Then, your knees are holding the instrument. So, there’s actually a circular vibration that’s going through the cello and down through to your knees. There’s this vibration.

It’s amazing—that you almost are hugging the cello. One of the few instruments that the player encompasses the whole instrument. It’s like hugging someone.

The more I play the cello, the more I realize that because the cello is against my chest, the sound was going into my chest near my heart. Also, your ears are very close to the pegs that tune the cello. Many times, the peg is also on your neck or maybe on the lower part of your head.

So, you feel this vibration because it’s such an instrument that you’re so intimate with, in a way. I’ve realized that—the older I’ve gotten with the instrument—that was just remarkable. [It’s] within your body, and you’re hugging it all the time.

TS: In just a moment, I want to play a track from a record called In Love and Longing that you’ve created with Sylvia Nakkach. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about this collaboration with Sylvia Nakkach in creating this record.

DD: I met Sylvia some years ago, because I was invited to teach at a very progressive school in San Francisco. She was part of the faculty. When I met her, I began to understand that she was an expert with ragas and Indian music. When she taught, she could teach Indian music.

By that time, when I met her—which was not that long ago—I had already had a lot of experience with discovering Indian music and starting to imitate it on my cello. You can bend the notes on the cello like you can with a sitar. It was amazing to realize that in Indian music that there’s nothing that’s in squares. Everything is part of a glissando or sliding around. All the notes are bent. Of course, when I discovered that you play in a raga—which is a series of different notes, but there were no chord changes like they have in Western music. I just thought that was incredible—that you just play over a drone. I was just blown away that the fact there was such a thing as the Indian style and that I was able to imitate it on the cello very well.

In meeting Sylvia—who was a master of singing Indian music, and she was studying Indian music in San Rafael. We shared the teaching. She would teach her 20 minutes and I would teach. The students really enjoyed both of us teaching, because we’re both interested in the spirituality of music and the sound more than anything else—because music can be defined as just sound and vibration. It doesn’t have to be so much what classical music is—which is defined by right and wrong notes. Many people who try to play classical music—what drives them nuts is that they don’t want to make mistakes.

Of course, Indian music is very exact. But the fact that you slide around and every slide has a lot of emotion in it—and it’s over a drone, so you slide your notes so that you’re finally in a unison or you’re in a perfect fifth or perfect fourth. Then you shake the note. Hearing her teach ragas to the class and hearing her voice sing in a masterful way was just wonderful for me.

So, we continued doing that for about six years. I sort of stopped doing it a year ago because I wanted to take a rest from it. That’s how we met, and we always talked about, “Let’s do a record together.” So, we finally made the time and we started creating it. We did some in San Francisco. Then, she was teaching out here in the east, and she came to my house and worked in my studio. We did some pieces here. Also, the pianist on the record, Kit Walker—who’s just a genius piano player. He’s a great jazz player, but he’s so melodic when he plays. He was with us. So it was just incredible to have him offer his piano stylings to whatever tunes we were working on.

What I like about the record is that it’s such a—in a way—variation of what you might call “modern ethnic music.” I feel like the record has some African feel. I think it definitely has some Indian feel. And then just kind of Westernized mellow jazz changes and stuff.

But I was just a huge fan of Sylvia and I’m really glad that we decided to do that. I must say also that she’s the one who I would say is really responsible for it getting done, because towards the end of recording, I got sick and couldn’t participate very much. She was her very strong self and really finished the mixes and stuff like that while I was not available. So she deserves a lot of credit for the CD.

TS: We’ll listen to the track, “Now, Awakening” from the record In Love and Longing. Sylvia Nakkach and David Darling.

[The musical track “Now, Awakening” plays.]

TS: David, I think of you as a really brilliant collaborator. You collaborate with so many other artists, musicians, spoken-word artists, performers—and I’m curious to know what you think makes a good collaborator.

DD: I think it’s some kind of recognition that music is one of the—if not the—most profound entities in this consciousness. When you have—for instance, with Coleman Barks, the poet. He also—even though he’s doing spoken word, his voice and his love for music [make] the collaboration like it would be with three musicians—like we just heard.

It has nothing to do with commerciality. It has to do with—I like the idea that music like what we just heard is from the infinite. It’s not from the finite. Finite music usually has a melody and a title that reflects the melody. But infinite music is unprogrammed music—which, of course, when I grew up, I began listening to that. Most classical music does not have a materialistic title. It’s just “allegro” or “largo,” and then the vibration of the music and the emotion in it just always killed me, learning that music. As I started joining groups, I realized that musicians in general really love what they’re doing. They get really inspired by other musicians.

So, I think—for me—it was quite easy in a way to play with other people and create with other people. I even accompanied dance and stuff like that because I loved all of the arts. It was always amazing to do improvisations that had a lot to do with improvisation, rather than reading music. There’s some of my music that has some thorough, composed things, but a lot of the music—like what we just heard—that’s largely improvised. There’s [maybe] a loose form around a few changes, but basically what we did was deep listening to each other and also giving space to each other. One of the great qualities of making music is to realize how important silence is—that you don’t play all the time. [Instead,] you give space to the other musicians. You stay out of their way.

And it’s a conversation, also. You really listen and answer what people do. In the case of improvisation, you don’t know what people are going to do—so one has to be right there. If you’re not present—if you’re not really listening—it probably won’t work. But most of it is musicians who really communicate with people. They’re deep, deep listeners.

I always thought that when you started playing music, you started soaring. You weren’t really on Planet Earth anymore—you’re on this other plane, floating in the cosmos or in that infinity. It was so inspiring to be in that place for a while.

Then, of course, you come back to the planet and all of the stuff we have to deal with. But the music just gives the human being a chance to soar in a different way—in a more mysterious place.

And to have their emotions be directly connected to sounds. Various sounds have certain emotional content. Most musicians really realize that. They really know the difference between minor and major, and complicated kinds of other things that they use—but not in such an intellectual way. Rather, [in] an emotional, feeling way.

So, the collaborations that I’ve been lucky to have—starting with when I was asked to join the Paul Winter Consort. That group represented all kinds of styles, including classical, Brazilian, African. I just couldn’t believe that I was in a group like that because it fit all of the yearnings I had in feeling how much I loved ethnic music. Then, to be in a group where—from time to time—somebody from Wesleyan University here in Connecticut would join us for some concerts. We would sit with an Indian musician and learn things from him or her. That was just unbelievably beautiful to me—to get to do that in a group.

Of course, also it was wonderful that Paul was such an environmentalist and a person interested in saving endangered species, and all of that.

I think my mother was a great collaborator. I think I must have gotten some of her qualities because I like accompanying people. I don’t necessarily have to be a star. I love, for instance—I learned how to play jazz bass. I just love playing bass, and you don’t necessarily solo all the time. But you’re giving a texture and a sound to the group. You’re holding it together with the sound of your bass.

Of course, in classical music, the cello is always playing the inner harmonies and sometimes the basic phonics. It feels like—when I played in chamber music and orchestras—that the cello was—well, orchestrations have such an interplay between all of the instruments. Nothing could sound very good unless everybody was doing their part well. So, one learns that in structured music.

When I fell in love with jazz, I realized that musicians didn’t sometimes have any music and they just expressed themselves. For me, that was like an amazing idea—that there was music that was free. Or it was based on Indian drone and ragas, in which you had a lot of freedom to interpret—in a freer way—what you wanted to play.

Paul Winter used to say to the audience, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to turn all the lights out in the auditorium so you can hear the music more clearly. I invite you to lose your mind and come to your senses.” [Laughs.] So, that was a free piece. We musicians couldn’t even see each other, but we listened like mad and there was this interplay and it was just a fabulous experience. Another pillar of learning in my experience in music [is] that very sensitive musicians who really, deeply listen to each other can make wonderful, wonderful music together.

TS: I’m curious to know a little bit more, David, about how you listen. How do you do it? And I say that because I’m around lots of people who don’t seem to be listening very well to others. Then I meet certain people like yourself, who seem to somehow have the space to really open and receive other people. I’m curious if you could share a little bit about what your internal experience is—how you listen.

DD: I think some of it comes from my family. My father was a good listener. He taught us—or we learned by example—that he was extremely interested in other human beings. If I brought a colleague home to my house, I’d always tell them, “Now, you’re going to have to sit and talk to my father, because he’s going to want to know everything about you.” So, I witnessed my father being very interested in who the person was and whether he knew their parents and all of that stuff. Not in any kind of examining way, but just out of curiosity or interest in human beings.

I think that I grew up feeling almost the same way—that I loved to ask people questions and see what they had to say. What nationality they were and all of that. So, there was always a natural curiosity for me to get to know people in a more intimate way.

Music, of course—it’s remarkable that there’s such an art form that you interact with other people. It’s answering a question. People will play something and it’s either a statement or a question, and you answer it. Or, you know—when you’re an experienced musician—that you’re doing something that you might call “counterpoint.” You know that you can play together for a while.

I mean, the greatest example—[which] is in Dixieland music—this sense of interplay or point-counterpoint is such a delicious way to relate to other musicians.

Same thing with dance. I loved the first time I was asked to accompany dance. It was never classical classes. It was always modern dance. I just loved the fact that all I had to do was watch the dancer and make up something that they could dance to. I just was, “That’s fantastic!”

During that time, I met other major figures like Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis—they invited me to create some music for them. They just sat at a table and they’d give me a tempo. They’d say, “The piece we want has this tempo. So just keep it in that tempo, but let’s see what you make up.”

So, I had so much encouragement in my growing years from many people who were freer with what they thought music was. It wasn’t just so much in a box. It was very free, and it fit me to a tee because I had trouble practicing sometimes because I wanted to do it my way. That’s when I realized that I was a composer—that I really liked making up my own music.

I’m of the opinion that everybody is a composer. If we didn’t have such structured school, if we had more time for children to be freer, and that school gave them time to be freer—and also encouraged them to think of themselves as composers and artists. I just cannot believe that that spirit isn’t in every human that’s born, because you see it in babies. Babies are so creative. They do things their own way. But when people start to go to school, there’s so much structure and teachers say negative things to children. Or fathers that are naive, or mothers that tell their son or daughter, “Well, I can’t carry a tune, so I’m sure you can’t either.” You know—that kind of naive sense of adults relating to other people.

TS: David, I want to play now a track from the collaboration between you and Coleman Barks published with Sounds True. The record is called Just Being Here: Rumi and Human Friendship. You mentioned your work with Coleman Barks earlier. I wonder if you can introduce for us before we listen to this track. We’re going to hear “Entering the Shell.” But if you can introduce for us a little bit the background about the creation of this record.

DD: I met Coleman quite a few years ago at the Omega Institute, where he was speaking. Also, a friend of mine is an ecstatic dancer—a kathak dancer named Zuleikha. I was introduced to him, and he right away said, “You know, I always like to have music with poetry. And Rumi never did his poems or poetry without music, and many times also with dance.”

So, he loves that tradition and he’s very friendly to the musicians who play for him. In fact, they play in such a way that he likes it.

In starting to play for him many years ago, he liked it and then we started doing some shows together. Then Bill Moyers invited Coleman to be on his interview show. Millions of people listen to that. So, the people who didn’t know Coleman Barks heard him on this program and just thought—everybody thinks Coleman is unbelievable when you hear him, because he has a very beautiful, low voice and is always relaxed. He’s an extremely articulate person. [There’s] something about him that’s almost like he’s your best friend, or he’s fatherly, or something. He also always has a sense of humor. You get that this guy is very gentle, he likes humor, and he likes people.

He’s always blowing his own mind because these stanzas or one line of Rumi will just knock him out while he’s doing it. He’ll stop and say to the audience, “Isn’t that amazing?” and read the line again.

I just was in love with what he did. Then we had some very long tours after the Bill Moyers show where we—as a band—we had the wonderful Glen Velez, probably one of the world’s greatest percussionists. [We had] Zuleikha doing kathak and myself as a cellist. We did tours together, and we’ve been doing that almost every year in San Francisco.

That tour solidified a lot of relationships between the three of us and Coleman. Then, Coleman started asking me to do duets with him because sometimes the budget for some people couldn’t afford so many people. So, I was lucky enough to be asked by him to accompany him as a duet partner. We grew and grew together. He was always so kind to me. He’s just such a kind man.

So, I said to him once, “Coleman, I think that you would do well with music that was more symphonic because you have such a beautiful voice. Not just one or two instruments, but something more symphonic. I have a lot of compositions that are orchestras of cellos—like 21 cellos playing at the same time—and I think that some of my music would go beautifully with your voice.”

And he said, “Wow! OK, let’s do it.” He came to my studio and we started. It just went down like mad. No problem. He would say, “I’m going to read this poem,” and he would read a few lines. I had my library of compositions—I would pick one and I would play with it, but I would play the basic track with him. Every time I picked something, for some reason it worked. We didn’t have to look at all. It just started making itself. I mean, it was just amazing. We were both quite amazed that it went down so easily.

So that’s how it began and that’s how we created the beautiful CD that we put together.

TS: And this is a three-CD set—Just Being Here: Rumi and Human Friendship. We’re going to listen to the track “Entering the Shell.”

[The musical and spoken-word track “Entering the Shell” plays.]

TS: David, before we got on the phone together, you mentioned to me that you’re in the recording studio working on a new project. Here you are, David, and you’re now 73 years old. I’m curious to know—you’re so prolific. So tremendously prolific. You keep releasing records year after year. What sustains you and keeps you interested in creating music at 73 years old?

DD: The music, of course, is what keeps me engaged. It’s so inspiring to be involved with music. It keeps you young. I always feel that I can do better—that I want to do better. That I want to figure out what’s going to be next and whether it will create something that I haven’t done before or just [to] create music that really satisfies me in my own style.

There are a lot of people that listen to my music and they’ll say to me, “Don’t you ever write anything happy?” [Laughs.] I say, “Well, I think my music is very happy. It’s coming from a place that is trying to say to the world that we live in that there’s no reason for war, there’s no reason to be negative. We don’t need poverty. We have such a wealthy planet that I just hope, pray, and work towards trying to get people to just not be prejudiced. I feel like I have that in my music.

I was so glad when I won the Grammy that I had a chance to say to the audience that the record that I made was dedicated to Howard Zinn and to Amy Goodman, because I thought both of them were creating such wonderful information for the world we’re living in. [A People’s History of the United States]—I mean, that book just inspired me so much because I finally found a book that told the truth about the history of the United States and how it really went down, rather than what political people write in the history books. This was about people and what happened in little towns. I just couldn’t believe that somebody finally wrote something like that.

Actually, I was in Boulder at a time when my friend Mickey Houlihan—my producer. I saw Howard Zinn on his television one evening and I just said, “Wow, I got to get that book.” The next day, Mickey came into the studio that we were at there in Boulder and he said, “David, I just found out that Howard Zinn’s speaking at the university.” I said, “Oh, man!” So I actually got to go that day. We went to hear him speak. It was sold out, and all of those wonderful people who care about the political scene in terms of not being—well, just much more liberal people and also people who want peace. And people who want to figure out how to feed the poor, help the poor, and help educate everybody.

He gave a wonderful talk. I was so inspired by him. So, I got a chance to tell the [Grammy] audience that my album was dedicated to Howard Zinn. I was amazed that the audience all applauded, because he was well-known among that conscious audience. I was so glad.

TS: David, as we come to the end of our conversation, I want to end by letting our listeners hear a piece from an upcoming release. You’ve partnered with pianist Jacqueline Bhuyan to release a record through Sounds True called Cello and Piano Meditations. It will be coming out early this summer. You and Jacqueline are also playing together at Sounds True’s Wake Up Festival, August 20th’24th in Estes Park. And to end our conversation, we’re going to hear this song, “The River at McNaughton.” David Darling and Jacqueline Bhuyan.

[The musical track “The River at McNaughton” plays.]

TS: David Darling and Jacqueline Bhuyan, from a release coming out early this summer: Cello and Piano Meditations. They’ll both be at Sounds True’s Wake Up Festival, August 20th–24th in Estes Park, Colorado. David has also released with Sounds True a collaboration with Coleman Barks—a three-CD set, Just Being Here: Rumi and Human Friendship—and a new CD with Sylvia Nakkach called In Love and Longing.

David, it’s been great to have this chance to get to know you better and to hear you talk a little bit about your work—to understand a little bit more what it’s like on the inside. Thank you so much.

DD: Thank you, Tami. I’m so happy that you are interested in my music. It’s been wonderful to work with your company. Thank you.

TS: SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.

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