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Music, the purest of all the artistic mediums, was at the forefront of avant-garde experimentation throughout the 20th century. The collaborations between Beat poets and jazz musicians in the 50s gave rise to the 60s counterculture movement that was propelled by avant-garde experiments with music arising from chance encounters in everyday life and the popularity of rock, with its ideals of the sacred marriage through projection. The following decade, punk broke down gender boundaries along with popular forms made sterile through disco. |
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Music, the purest of all the artistic mediums, was at the forefront of avant-garde experimentation throughout the 20th century. The collaborations between Beat poets and jazz musicians in the 50s gave rise to the 60s counterculture movement that was propelled by avant-garde experiments with music arising from chance encounters in everyday life and the popularity of rock, with its ideals of the sacred marriage through projection. The following decade, punk broke down gender boundaries along with popular forms made sterile through disco. The New Age movement of the 80s delivered musicians who consciously used sound to move the kundalini through the charkas of the body. In the 90s, grunge was a valve for the emotional fallout from the toxic marriage arising from the chaotic breakdown of gender roles.
My personal search for the hieros gamos in millennial art forms began with my absorption in Peter Gabriel’s CD, US, prior to a visit to his Real World Studio in 1994. Last spring, I became acquainted with the genius of Darryl Tookes. Like Gabriel, Tookes is a pioneering Aquarian artist integrating heaven and earth through a personal narrative aligned with a 21st century icon.
Tookes’ newly released CD, Journey to the Hieros Gamos, brings us to the cutting edge of the avant-garde, where every word, every phrase, every sentence, every song reflects the self-contained holism of the complete work of art. Cyclical in content and form, the narrative is sprinkled with the awareness of nature while the alchemy of sound passes through the evolutionary spiral to ground this vision in the body.
Journey to the Hieros Gamos contains a radical new vision of love as an alchemical process. The first song, Baby Don’t Stop, is the Calclnatio (fire), the kundalini connection between two individuals known as hot love. Then, there is the Solutio (water), the dissolving of the ego, encapsulated in Losing My Mind. The Sublimatio, which releases the spirit hidden in matter, takes place in a flute trio following The Compromise, when the four elements transform into the quintessence (we fly to the top of the world to a place of our own). Measure My Life is the Coagulatio (earth) stage of containment, where the sacred marriage is made finite in a philosophy of everyday life. Finally is the Coniunctio of heaven and earth in the ultimate song, Love Will Survive, brings us right back to the origin.
The remarkable form that Tookes’ journey has taken provides us with a renewed conviction in the power of art, not only to encapsulate the human condition, but also to affect human evolution. The breath of life injected through men channeling their feminine energy into wind instruments on Journey to the Hieros Gamos injects the consciousness that we are interconnected on this metaphysical journey of raising the kundalini through the chakras to the crown of the head where the divine marriage takes place.Although the CD is being released outside the corporate-dominated music distribution network, Tookes’ confidence at finding an appreciative audience is boosted by internet technologies supporting individual participation in the collective experience. At the Lakeside Diner located between our Connecticut residences, Darryl and I sat below signed photographs of fellow Aquarians Renee Fleming and James Dean—along with an iconic image of the marriage between Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz—and engaged in a four hour discussion, highlighted below, on the factors that made his breakthrough CD a work of art that stands at this crucial intersection of zeitgeist and technology.
The Alchemical ExperimentLisa Paul Streitfeld: You are now fulfilling your vision with your own band after putting the sacred marriage into practice throughout your career with seamless collaborations with top musicians. If you HAD opened the door when fame came knocking at the release of your first CD, do you think you could have achieved this?
Darryl Tookes: You have to live in the now. The now for me had to do with experiencing and developing my ideas. I knew I had something extremely personal to express. Most opportunities are not for this kind of thing but to imitate some style or flavor of the moment.
LPS: Music is the purest art form and therefore the medium most capable of manifesting the metaphysical equation (1 +1 = 3) of the sacred marriage. Your collaboration with your own band has resulted in a totally original sound blending Bossa Nova, Latin, Jazz, Classical and Rock through the integration of the opposites such as masculine/feminine, sensual/spiritual and personal/universal. How did this extraordinary union come about?
DT: Sadly, what is happening in the United States is a corporate music scene that won’t allow for the creative energy or philosophical originality. So, enter Miami (laughs) where all these musicians from various places in the world are presently living. I started going there a lot playing with a lot of great musicians. On one trip, a bass player had put together a team of musicians. There is Brian McDougall, the (American) bassist; Rodolfo Zuniga, the drummer (from Costa Rica); the (Venezuelan) guitarist, Rolando Grooscors; and me. An eclectic group! Looking back on it now, I can see how it all worked but there was that magical, mystical element of 1+1=3. We knew it right away. A few weeks later, I went back and met with the same guys – this time at the recording studio Red Traxx with the engineer, Felipe Tichauer, from Brazil, and we were so relieved to hear the music was still there. It was shocking that we made it really happen.
Redefining the Avant-Garde
LPS: The authenticity of the totally unique global sound you achieved is so rare in this technological age of digital recording.
DT: The lion’s share of this CD was recorded absolutely live. For some technical reasons we had to do technical dubs but those things were recorded live. In today’s recording environment, I could record my part in my house and you record your part in your house and we send electronic files to one another. But that is not the way this was recorded. We were all sitting in the same room looking at each other. For example, Longineu Parsons played two recorders – alto and soprano – simultaneously. He had two in his mouth at the same time! The Compromise has a moment in it when it says: “listen to the breeze,” that is a live flute trio: Parsons, Johnny James and Ron Fattorusso. With a wind instrument, persons playing their own breath try to define that element.
LPS: The spirit or breath (pneuma in Greek) the alchemist struggled to extract from nature is believed to be equivalent to the incorruptible quintessence from which the stars are made. What is amazing about this CD is that you achieve triumph in this struggle not only through the sound but the narrative.
DT: You get it. The narrative (of the hieros gamos) is there. A couple comes to hear us play and the wife walks away saying this music is so beautiful, so romantic, and the husband walks away saying “these guys can play!” That is the masculinity…the virtuosity.
LPS: Talk about process by which this icon penetrates the psyche through the holistic integration of sound and words.
DT: My standard for myself as a writer is so high. The greatest writing is coming from a place of extreme self-actualization intellectually and emotionally. Every word is a pearl. Your words will live after you and you want those words to be saying what you want to say. That is the song component. The musical command had to be there, the musical authority each musician brought to the experience.
LPS: Your use of the everyday phrase enables the listener to enter this journey on whatever level of consciousness they happen to exist at. For example, in One Summer Day you use the metaphors of fate – the ball in the air, toss a coin – for your father’s message: take a stand. I cried when I heard that.
DT: The song right before that is Elephant in the Room…
LPS: …the archetype of the hieros gamos in the collective and no one will acknowledge it. The human fear of what is new.
DT: That is the penultimate emotional moment in the record right before it hits One Summer Day. It says: fly your kite, paint it green, red or blue, summer is gone, so are you – frou, frou, frou. Flowerchild cut her hair. Butterfly wore a suit and tie. That one will eat you alive!
LPS: Even within one song, you are going up and down the spiral and providing images of transformation (butterfly) and the collective consciousness of the Aquarian Age (flowerchild)! The philosophy is imbedded in the material: everything in life is cyclical.
DT: Yes, because if someone only gets a glimpse of what is going on, you don’t want to waste that glimpse.
LPS: The insight, no matter how narrow, places the participant on their own journey. And once they jump on, there is a global sense of interconnectedness—we are all on this journey together.
DT: The danger is that loudmouth people with a lot of support get huge followings. But you aren’t going that way. Your authority is coming from another place…
LPS: … which belongs to the emerging archetype, which we all share in different degrees of consciousness.
DT: And it really is about healthy living.
LPS: Purification is essential to the alchemical process. If the kundalini is activated when there are toxins in the body, it can make you crazy.
DT: The status quo doesn’t want you to think that way.
LPS: Yet, you invite the participant to ignore the status quo and follow their instincts. There is the interactive element where you take them on the journey through the chakras – from the base of the spine where the kundalini awakens in Baby Don’t Stop to the crown of the head, where the divine marriage takes place.
DT: The microstructure of each song ties to have moments that let you go. Some moments are just fun, like the liberation of Betty Crocker.
LPS: In one of your most virtuoso compositions, the ghost of Billy Strayhorn appears to tell you to play on, stay strong, and not let them steal your soul. My initial reaction to hearing this song was awe: you grab the listener as participant on so many levels.
DT: Billy Strayhorn was a prodigy that Duke Ellington discovered who wanted a classical trumpet career that wasn’t open to him. He was on the subway to visit Duke Ellington when he wrote The A Train. The most superficial listeners in my support group don’t have a clue what I am talking about but they just love that song. It really is a paradise! Invariably people will come and ask me what Elephant in the Room means but these same people, when they hear Billy Strayhorn, they jump around like they know Billy Strayhorn. That is your basic foot listener who just reacts to his feet. Then you have your head listener and your heart listener — and every permutation in between.
LPS: The final song, Love Will Survive, injects hope back into art, a reminder that the passage through the life/death spiral must be undertaken again and again, but it is the journey, not the destination that matters.
DT: The human journey is to live with the constant knowledge that at any given moment we could be dead. We can soften the blow. We can push it aside. The truth is… we are living with this realization of a finite physical existence. With that in mind, we are doing what we can to cope and somehow we emerge from it – whether it is Charlie Chaplin’s “smile when your heart is breaking.” How is that different from any other genuine art where people are saying, hang in there?
Icon of a New Order
LPS: Your music is imbedded with the awareness of this tension between Thanos, and its opposite, Eros, which is where life happens.
DT: That is where the hope is. And that is why I am tolerant and even curious about all genuine art. Even if the artists themselves don’t realize it, what they are doing is either raging against that fear or living in peace of that reconciliation. The Journey to the Hieros Gamos is in the doing. That is why the title stuck to the CD.
LPS: Which brings us to a last question, the iconic self-portrait of on your CD. This is a very biblical image, yet it rewrites the gospels to include the female as healing partner in a he art/mind connection with the male. She cradles you with her body with her right hand on your crown and left hand over your heart. The male gaze is not at the external woman but inward. How did this extraordinary revolutionary image happen?
DT: That happened when the model, Martina Mehta, told the photographer, Jay Gutveg, “Would you mind not directing us so much?” We were looking at his pictures as he took them and she was looking for something else to happen. He said OK and at that moment, in that one frame, she just put her hands on me and I just surrendered into her and everyone screamed. She had her hand on my rib like we were Adam and Eve, almost like we were one in that picture. A lot of people see a sexual image and I look at it and see one person, the singular WE. There was something so right about the way that worked.
