So there I was at the Spirit once more yesterday, in front of me one of the greatest bass players of all times, Tony Levin, and he told us this moving story. How he went to Atlanta, to the Language Research Center at Georgia State University, by invitation of his old friend Peter Gabriel, in order to play along with him and with two bonobo apes on the keyboards. (Peter is a great fan of experimental and world music.) One of the two apes was Panbanisha and Tony said Peter said „Panbanisha, this is Tony, he’s going to play bass with us today“. And Panbanisha started playing the keys with her flat hands, but Peter said: „Panbanisha, I liked more how you played yesterday.“ And she actually understood and switched to only using her index fingers, playing two notes at a time. Tony expressed that this and the next two hours of playing really took him a very long time to process and realize what happened there. (He also mentioned a funny anecdote that after the „gig“ he took a taxi to the airport and the taxi driver looked at him in amazement and said: „Hey, isn’t this the monkey place, what are you doing with a guitar in there?“)
The song „Fragile as a Song“ was an instrumental initially, but after this experience he added lyrics to it. He performed it yesterday on the keys, a beautiful and calm song with jazz-like harmonies that made me grin like a Cheshire cat the rest of the evening (although the lyrics are somewhat greasy). The song can be found on his current album Resonator. My final remark: this concert will need a long time to process for me, too. It was freaky, partly atonal, groovy, resonant and mostly amazing. Good Lord, what a musician!