Music Memory Project
A story collection project where music is played and the participant tells us what it reminds them of, where they were in life at the time the song came out, and or the meaning it has for them. This is a simple project surfacing profound meaning that is archived in music.
Example Memory
Watermelon Man
It’s funny how a song can move my soul so deep that I have no words to explain it! I just have to dance it.
Last night I dreamnt of a call to excellence in my most fundamental, primary, simple powerful self. I witnessed a man stand on stage as simple as can be and move the room to the depth of their soul with his words and his tears. Then they called me up. I was not expecting it and I was not prepared, and I had to try to find something that I could bring to the stage and offer to the alter of that spirit.
I felt fraudulent and bumbling and empty…at first working in the shell of imitation. Then I stilled myself. I knew I had the power to conjure the power from the depth of my soul’s power and bring the power of vulnerability and the gift of bearing it to others. I had done it so many times before, but I was out of touch and out of connection to my own soul.
I had to throw off the cloak of ego and find truth and excellence in that work of removing myself and letting something beyond me and something from us…the oneness of us…the oneness of the organism of us…and the spirit of the unknown...flow through me.
I had to get out of the way and let it move me. I had to move out the fear and move in the faith. I had to be naked and generous. I stood on the stage feeling the expectation of doing what he had just done. The expectation to perform written words and bring the people to tears. I desperately tried to recall any of the monologues I knew from thirty years ago in acting classes or plays, but only fragments came and none came that could even begin to match the fullness I was called to bring and empty on that stage.
So I stilled myself and felt, not thought, but felt what I was called to do, something no one else could in the moment in that time in that place, honoring what he was called to do a moment ago, in his time but in the same space…
I was called to take the audience on the next part of the journey…not to imitate his moment and time and excellence.
So I stilled. I waited and I reached down and prayed up. Then I felt the rhythm of the woodwind from from my roots, then the bird call and the low rumbling, that sounds like a rumbling of an ocean, then the beat dropped and laid it on with bass then trap set then guitar then piano, then horn and the composition came to fullness then dynamically calmed back down.
The unison of all if hit for a moment then went back to their individual purposes in the compositions and my body started in subtlety and power, as if I was trying to tease the people with the power just under the surface of my skin…as it was under theirs….just the tease of anticipation, and it moved to express the next and the next and the next, trying to keep up with the expression of each one’s power.
Then losing my self in somewhere that doesn’t exist in any one of them…something that only exists in that space between all of them…that interstitial space where the spirit actually lives. That place of everything. That place of excellent nothingness.
WATERMELON MAN by Herbie Hancock
Head Hunters Album 1973
Herbie Hancock (Producer, Composer, Synthesizers, Piano, Vocals, Pipe); Paul Jackson (Bass, Marimbula); Harvey Mason, Sr. (Drums, Arranger, Composer); Bennie Maupin (Clarinet, Saxophone, Flute, Saxello, Reeds, Percussion); Bill Summers (Percussion); Oren Waters (Vocals); Fred Catero (Engineer); Waldo Bascom (Photography); Victor Moscoso (Cover Design, Art Direction); David Rubinson (Producer); Jeremy Zatkin (Engineer); Scott Thompson (Liner Notes)