Derek Gripper: Transcript
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman. The internationally renowned guitarist, Derek Gripper is famous for his groundbreaking technique for evoking the West African kora on the guitar. During this episode, you'll get to hear Derek play quite a bit, do check out the timestamps, and you'll hear his wonderful insights on how we listen to and learn music, the influence of Montessori and Alexander technique in his life, his reflections on important collaborations in his career, and his perspectives on changes that have been imposed on creators and performers.
Please share this episode with your friends. Review this podcast and follow this series either on YouTube or your favorite podcast player. All of these will help new listeners discover Derek Gripper, as well as the other inspiring musicians who are featured and gain new insights on how much breadth and depth there can be to a life in music. Derek Gripper, thanks so much for joining me today.
Derek Gripper:
Yeah, thank you for having me, Leah.
Leah Roseman:
I heard you by chance when you were on tour recently, in Canada, and I'm not a person who listens to guitar music, but then I just dove into your discography and I've so enjoyed all your creations. And I kind of went from the beginning and I just listened through your progression as an artist and it's been fascinating journey, actually. So many of my listeners won't be familiar with you, some of the maybe fans, and I want to dive into quite a few topics, but I know you're willing to share some music. Did you want to start by playing or you want to start by talking?
Derek Gripper:
Oh, playing. Playing is nice. Okay, let's play. Well, I have a guitar here. (Music playing). And what I actually was doing this morning was recording part of a Bach project that I've been visiting. I've been looking, re-looking at the Bach Cheddar suites, and what I've been doing part of ... I recorded in two ways. One, I went up into the mountains and I have a reel-to-reel recorder, which is really ... makes beautiful sounds.
So what I've been doing, one of the things as project that I've been doing is playing and learning Bach using a tempura, or the drone from Indian music. So this kind of thing. (Music playing).And then slowly, we'll make our way back. So you kind of get a sense of the journey that's been made, the harmonic journey. Quite a beautiful way. Maybe, I'm not yet sure about if it's my process or if it's something I put on record or not.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Derek Gripper:
That's what I'm busy doing.
Leah Roseman:
Beautiful, beautiful phrasing. This is interesting because when you were 19, you had an opportunity to go study carnatic violin for a little bit.
Derek Gripper:
Yeah, a big mistake. Who knew? Who knew? No, it wasn't. It was a wonderful experience. I went back a few times, but I very quickly learned that South India, they have the violin sorted. It's fine. The violin is in good hands, and I left sure that I was going to become a guitarist. So that was mostly the repercussion. And then I went back a few years later and spent it about six months studying the rhythmic theory, which was wonderful.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I really enjoyed your recording with a tabla player. Remind me of who-
Derek Gripper:
Udai Mazumdar.
Leah Roseman:
Yes. Beautiful.
Derek Gripper:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I love that recording very much.
Derek Gripper:
Oh yeah. It was so long ago and it was a live concert, and we were still ... we didn't have the greatest technology to capture things. And I actually, I got that off, that record we recorded, and the best mixdown was an MP4 that someone had sent me as a reference, but there was some, the tabla was going a little bit into the red, and I went through the whole record and I just put a volume dip on each tabla hit that was a little bit too high, instead of using a blanket compressor. I was so like, "No ways am I going to use this thing." So that was a long time ago.
Leah Roseman:
Yes. I've had to do that for some podcast episodes actually with my-
Derek Gripper:
Oh yeah?
Leah Roseman:
Rudimentary editing skills. I interviewed a carnatic violinist last year on the series, Subhadra Vijaykumar, and I remember she was saying in their style of music, she said there's no concept of rehearsal. And you've done quite a few collaborations with Indian musicians, but of course in that time you had your whole exploration of kora music. So coming from your classical background, I'm curious, getting off the page and, you know what I mean? Learning to improvise, how was that journey for you as a creative musician?
Derek Gripper:
I mean, I'm still really a classical musician. I'm not the greatest of improvisers in the improvising sense. Well, improvising is such a strange term because we think of it because of how it's been handed down through jazz, this idea of improvisation in jazz and composition on the spot, Keith Jarret coming on stage with this piano and making up something as he goes along. Whereas when you come across it in Indian classical music, maybe even flamenco, certainly in the Manding music of West Africa, it's a very different kettle of fish, really. And I'd say I'm veering more towards this kind of improvisation, which is more a sort of structural improvisation, where you have a repertoire of fragments and parts and pieces, and you put them together in different ways. So you never play the piece the same way.
Or with Bach, you've got an improvisation of nuance. I mean, Bach takes anything. It's so resilient. You can do anything to Bach and you can kind of hold up. And so as a result, it's the most free place to play music, Bach's music. Because you can really bend things to anything. You can explore kora phrasing on Bach. If you hear kora music and you think, "Wow, I'd love to try that," you just pick up a piece of Bach and play it like the kora. So that's what improvisation is for me. It's like the improvisation of nuance and the improvisation of form. And sometimes also in this sort more Jarret style as well. Every now and again that happens.
Leah Roseman:
Well, I have to disagree with you about your level of improvisation. I mean, I've heard some of your free improvisations are amazing. And actually, I was curious about specifically, oh what was it? Oh, Cedarburg, I think, and Billy Goes to Durban where you said you just-
Derek Gripper:
Oh, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And Alexander technique would be wonderful to talk about as well. I studied it as well, at a certain point.
Derek Gripper:
Oh wow. Yeah. Well, the Cedarburg, I've just got back from there again, it's a friend of mine has this place up in the mountain and you can be there for days and you don't see another human. And they're incredible mountains, the Cedarburg Mountains. They go forever and they're just beautiful. I just had a conversation on the phone with a Alexander technique teacher called Barry Cantor, in Cape Town, and we'd been talking about creating spaces in between things just to pause. I mean that's totally Alexander. Just to pause and wait. The stimulus comes, you wait. And we'd had a kind of really interesting conversation about that, which I've now completely forgotten. But what I came away with that was I had these microphones set up and I came with a guitar and I sat down, and it's beautiful out there just outside on the veranda and there's a little fountain that's running and there's quite a lot of frogs usually.
And I played one phrase, and I waited. And then I played another phrase and I waited. And I did this for a very long time, like an hour or so. And then I took away afterwards all the gaps and that's the piece. And it was quite a cool way to compose actually. And I'm so pleased you reminded me of that because I'd forgotten that that was the process and that was how I'd done it because then I listened back recently to it and I was like, "Wow, I really like that piece. I really like that piece." And I'd forgotten that it wasn't just improvised, it was improvised with Alexander's space. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And as a guitarist, Alexander technique must have influenced you so much in the way you approach your instrument, the way you sit. Did you come to that from a place of pain or just curiosity?
Derek Gripper:
Originally pain, I managed to debilitate myself quite well by even age of 19-20. My elbow wasn't straightening too well and got really a lot of pain in the back. So I started working with an Alexander technique teacher, and that was kind of a light bulb. Wow, okay, this is interesting, this is what's possible. And then I explored lots of different things and got really into yoga, which doesn't change your underlying pattern of use, of course, you can do ... I was doing loads of yoga and that doesn't change how you're using your body, it just fixes your body every time you misuse it.
So I was in this pattern of breaking my body and fixing my body on a daily basis. I'd play guitar and then I'd fix it. So at least I had the ability to fix it, which was great. So I didn't have any problems. But if I didn't do yoga and I played, then I'd feel it pretty quickly.
And I had this kind of distrust of playing as well because it felt like this is not good for you. In fact, this is not a good, it's not really healthy thing, this playing guitar. For a while, I thought of it as something that is kind of best avoided because it was kind of one of those unhealthy things to do. But I came across a lot of ideas and one of them was this wonderful writer from Japan, who was writing in the seventies and eighties, called Masanobu Fukuoka. And he wrote a book called Natural Farming, the Theory and Practice of the Green Philosophy. That's the book that I came to first. There's a more famous one called The One Straw Revolution.
So I came across this book by Masanobu Fukuoka called Natural Farming, The Theory and Practice of the Green Philosophy, and it's this beautiful description of Fukuoka's farming techniques, which he called Do Nothing farming. And his idea was to look at what is the accepted principles of, in his case, Japanese agriculture, and see, well we do this thing, let's say it's plowing, is it necessary? Can I not do it? And he practiced this method for 40 or 50 years, saying, "What less can I do?" And that's really Alexander. If I'm picking up my guitar, what less can I do?
So this kind of philosophy became really central for me and I made a decision at some point to, what do I do as guitar as a guitarist? I asked that question and one of the things was I practiced. So I made a decision to stop practicing. And I remember my friend, Redmond, in Ireland, saying to me, "Yeah, well it's all very well, you can stop practicing and it'll be fine for a while because of the work that you did, that you've done, but eventually everything is going to fall apart." And that is the kind of received knowledge, and this is us talking, I don't know, 15 years ago.
But the idea behind it was to really tap into a kind of playing that followed interest, that followed joy in music, that followed sound and not this kind of idea that you beat yourself with, "Okay, I'm going to learn this whole piece now and I'm going to practice this much every day and I'm going to build it up slowly because at the end then I'm going to have this piece and I'm going to work out how to play it and then I'm going to play it to everyone in that way." It was much more about, "Ah, what's happening today? Do I feel like playing? And if so, what?" And letting things kind of spontaneously develop. And so that's built over the years as a way of working. So if I go onto stage, I don't have a plan of, "This is what I'm going to play or this is the first piece I'm going to play, or this is what I want to do at all."
I've mostly got able to be free of that compulsion to have a plan, which is rather nice because then you can arrive on the stage, you can sit down, you can see the people there, you can hear the sound, and you can play a note, and you can go and you can start playing. Because I used to find that if I had a plan, halfway through the concert I'd realized the plan was really getting in the way, it would really be ... and I kind of forced through, "No, no, no, no, but I wanted to play them this whole thing," whatever it was. So that's how it all began.
Leah Roseman:
I remember reading what, because you studied violin quite seriously as a child, that at a certain point your teacher said, "Well you maybe you'll have an orchestral career, not solo." And then you were thinking, "Well, I want to be by myself," right?
Derek Gripper:
Yeah. Well the violin there was, you went to violin lessons once a week and then you didn't practice, and then you went again. It was more like that. And I went to live in the middle of South Africa for a year when I was 10, in De Aar in the Karoo and they didn't have a violin teacher. And so I took up the piano. And by the time I got back to Cape Town and wanted to go to a secondary school that offered music as a subject, I wanted to do violin, but I couldn't even remember how to read. I'd lost it all. A year and a half out in the desert and it's gone.
So I had to kind of rehabilitate myself and then I got really into it for a while, but I met this wonderful guitar teacher and it really worked out better for me.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. But you recorded so much beautiful solo Bach, the violin pieces. Very beautiful recordings. Which brings me to your ethos of recording, Derek, because you love using reel-to-reel, and mostly you do one take or live recordings, I've noticed.
Derek Gripper:
Yeah. So the reel-to-reel is a new thing.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Derek Gripper:
New as in a few years. So I started off recording, I wanted to just hear the guitar. And I made some early recordings like that, we're using old ribbon mics, which are very beautiful. They have a lot of bottom resonance. But I was using really old ones, these BBC Coles things, quite dull. So the earlier recordings, were very ... there was nothing extra there. Very like you're hearing the guitar, no artificial reverb, no equalization, nothing.
Then I met a guy called Howard Butcher, who suggested to me, he said, "I like what you've been doing, but I think we could do something else." So I said, "Great, let's try it." And I put myself in someone else's hands for the first time. This was after doing five or six records in my own way. Not by myself, I was working with an engineer, but I was really kind of saying, "This is what I want to do," beforehand and not just saying ... not pitching up.
And so we did a recording called the Sound of Water, which was some of my compositions and some of Egberto Gismonti's compositions. And I was really excited by that, and it's like fully, bam, you're in that world of what a microphone can actually do. And then six months later we did One Night on Earth. So that way of recording and using the studio, I've been doing for the last 10 years or so. But I've still got this little bite that I want to ... that I'm inspired by the simplicity, a more simple approach. Fukuoka said, "I take my mandarin oranges and I pack them in unmarked boxes, and I send them off to market, and I get to bed early." And I love that idea.
And so I got this Nagra, a reel-to-reel recorder, which is one of the classic reel-to-reel recorders that was used in all films because it was hardy enough to be able to ... you could sling it over your shoulder and run up a mountain in minus 20 degrees, and it would still run beautifully. And it's got wonderful pre-amps. Made in the kind of late seventies, early eighties, my model, but originally from late forties.
So I got that and I'm trying to learn how to use it, and I've used it on the album, you mentioned , "Billy Goes to Durban". There are three tracks on there and I've just finished this Bach recording that I'm ... well not finished, I've just finished tracking it, which I went up to the ... at Cedarburg again, and made it. And it was a miserable experience. You're trying to record and then the tape gets stuck, and this happens and that happens, or what does happen. And I was really like, "I'm never doing this again." And then I came home and I played it back and I really actually love it. And so I'm feeling inspired about this really silly and difficult process again.
Leah Roseman:
When I first listened to "Billy Goes to Durban", I hadn't read the notes on ... so I was a bit confused when I heard Billy Graham's voice in the stadium. Do you want to explain about that?
Derek Gripper:
Yeah, so I needed tape and I was given a box of old tape, and I didn't listen to it, and got into the car and drove 15 hours to Durban, or outside of Durban, to work with a friend of mine called Guy Buttery, who's a wonderful steel string guitar player. And he hadn't seen the machine before. So he said, "Yeah, show me this thing." So we took out the first reel in the box and we put it on, and the tape's on the one reel and you pull it over to the second reel, and we pressed play and it said, "Hello, welcome to Durban." Which was quite interesting because these things are from the seventies. They didn't have GPS, they didn't know I was in Durban.
So we carried on listening and it turned out to be a Billy Graham sermon, we realized pretty quickly. And then I did some research and apparently he came to South Africa in 1970-odd, 1973 and he did a huge sermon in a stadium, in Durban, to 70,000 people. Totally wild. So anyway, we recorded over that and that's the record. Sorry Billy.
Leah Roseman:
But you left these little bits.
Derek Gripper:
Yeah, you can still hear little bits. They're calling "Mrs. Burns to please come onto the stage "at one point. And there's a choir, and there's a lovely announcement when he says, "We're going to have a this and that," and it's all very important and I like that. So I kept little bits that play through.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So your one "Night on Earth", the live recording you did 10 years later is so expressive, it's so powerful, and freer, it seems to me, than the initial recordings.
Derek Gripper:
Oh, thanks.
Leah Roseman:
Some people listening will know what a kora is, or might have heard my interview with Sophie Lukacs and her story with a kora. But for those people who have no idea and have never seen one, could you get into that a bit? Maybe play a bit of that music?
Derek Gripper:
Yeah, so I'm with you a hundred percent, if you don't know what the kora is, because I'm from Cape Town and there are no koras in Cape Town. So 2002, I got given this record by a ... well, I was given a record from a friend of mine. It was a copy pirated CD and it said Kaira, K-A-I-R-A, and Toumani Diabaté. And I knew nothing about either. And in 2002, you didn't really jump onto Google and look things up. I didn't.
So I just put it in and I was blown away. It was the most wonderful thing in the world. Two or three people playing these minuscule wonderful, kind of what sounded like perhaps nylon string instruments. I was just, wow. Okay. Then I did some research, somehow found out that it was a solo record on an instrument called the kora. And so that was like, "Wow, okay. So this is just one guy," and this bass line's going, but there's this internal counterpoint, and then there's these improvisations on top. And I just became obsessed with this record and listened to it nonstop for 10 years.
And so the kora, the instrument that it's played on is a big calabash. Has a long wooden neck and it has two lines of strings that are played kind of alternatively. One note, one note, one note. And I tried to play the kora. I eventually got one into Cape Town, but then realized I didn't have it in me to really learn another instrument, but I had a wonderful few months trying to pick out things on it and from recordings, or whatever. And then gave up the idea again.
And then around 2011, I suddenly thought, "Well, what happens if I just think Toumani is actually a composer and I could actually transcribe this music from the recordings?" And that had just never occurred to me. The idea more was I thought it was a style of improvising. But then when you start to really listen, you realize, "No, no, no. He's playing these melodies and they're coming back over and over." So I took the guitar, which is (Music playing). So that's a standard tune guitar. And it's going to mean that if you want to hear these open strings, and the kora is a harp, you're playing those 21 strings open, not as closed strings like on the guitar. You want to have that kind of feeling. And I just spent a year playing Vihuela music, which is an old Renaissance ...
Renaissance lute. It's a guitar-shaped instrument and it has this beautiful music. (Music playing). So that was in my ear a little bit and I realized, I thought if you weren't going to play this music, you'd need a 10 string guitar that had bass notes that you could keep, because they'd have the bass note like bass note like ... bass line. So I thought, "Okay, if you want to have these crazy improvisations on top, you're going to need to have those as open strings."
But coming from the Vihuela music, I realized somehow it all worked out. So I retuned the guitar many different ways first, so every piece had its own tuning. And then I realized that there was a kora tuning that you could play everything in there. So this is the first kora piece I transcribed called Tubaka.(Music playing).It Goes On.
Leah Roseman:
So Beautiful. And listeners should know they can buy the transcriptions you've written on your website.
Derek Gripper:
Yeah. So two things have happened with getting other people to play this music. One was I was always making the transcriptions. And so a lot of people played from those scores. And I used a kind of modified tablature, which was what was used for guitar and lute music for many hundreds of years.
And then around the 1800s guitarists started getting insecure and felt that they wanted to be real classical musicians. So they started using staff notation. And the problem with that was that the location of a note had to be fixed because there's A on the page, it means you need to know that the A is on the second fret of the third string.
But the great thing about guitar is that you can change the tuning, and then the A will suddenly be on the third fret of a third string, et cetera. And that's tricky if you've got a fixed notation system. The wonderful thing about tablature was that you could have any tuning you liked and the second fret was always the second fret because that's what it tells you. So I've kind of more and more gone towards that, and that's how I do the kora of music. And what that has meant is that many people who aren't classical guitarists can play the music because Tablature is quite a lot easier to read.
So there's those. And then during COVID, I started a group online where I run these group classes a few times a week, there's probably often about nine a week, between six and nine a week. They're each an hour and it's a lead class, and the people who join can't be heard. They're all muted, so everyone can play. Everyone's playing with me and I'm playing alone and guiding them through some process. And it's been really wonderful. I've met some of the greatest people through it all over the world and it's been such a brilliant thing for me in my practice. Just it's so regular. You've got the nine hours of the week where you've got to look in depth at some things, and we do a lot of the kora music, we do a lot of Bach, and then every now and again we'll do something else like Arvo Pärt or Villa-Lobos. But 80% of it is looking at the Toumani, Mali repertoire.
Leah Roseman:
I believe the Kronos Quartet has done arrangements based off of your arrangements for string quartet.
Derek Gripper:
Unfortunately, I missed them because they did a recording with Trio de Carli, who I've also played with. And they did a beautiful record with Trio de Carli. Around about that time I connected with them and I sent them an arrangement of Miniyamba, which is ... Miniyamba is a traditional song from Mali, but Toumani Diabaté and Sidiki Diabaté his son, did a beautiful record together and they did a really crazy virtuosic version of that piece.
And so I transcribed that for two guitars when John Williams and I were doing some concerts together quite a few years ago. And then, from that, made a string quartet version of it and sent it to them, and they performed it, I know at least at one concert in Turkey. But it was actually too hard. It was really hard and I would do it differently now.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Yeah, the online music economies kind of changed our business, right? Like in terms of selling digital versions of things rather than albums.
Derek Gripper:
Totally. Well, first of all, I always say I don't complain about this new reality because I'm from South Africa, so we never had the music industry really to speak of. So I can understand how people in the US are like crying because they were making millions from selling records. We weren't. So it's all good.
On the other hand, I love the cottage industry aspect of making my own records, printing them up myself, making beautiful covers. I used to write these long liner notes and make these booklets. I love that. And I really do miss that. There was this whole ceremony. You made this recording and then you sat on it for a while and then finally you've got it all mixed up, and then you'd make some sort of cover, and it would just be this whole thing. And that's gone.
Then we had another golden age around about the time I released One Night On Earth, which was 2012. That was the golden age of the digital download, which was an amazing time to be an independent musician because you could put your music, you could record your music and make a cover, and then put it up online and people would buy it, and you could actually make money. And you didn't have to post anything, you didn't have to put up whole lots of hundreds of thousands of dollars for printing 500 copies because that was the most cost effective, especially in South Africa. And I had these ways of printing albums where I only used [inaudible 00:32:01] presses. I'm really problematic that way, actually. As I'm speaking to you, I'm really hearing this. They were simpler ways, but making much, it was a nightmare.
But I used to make these little, I used to have these generic cardboard covers and every album had a collection of rubber stamps. And so I'd print up the ... I'd make the CDs would be burnt, or no, I had someone do it. So I'd get a spindle of the CDs and then I'd put them in the generic cover, and then I'd have a rubber stamp that would be Derek Gripper. And then I'd have a rubber stamp that would be the name of the album. And then I'd have a big rubber stamp that would be the track list at the back. And then I'd have the booklets printed up and they'd be glued inside this thing. And then later on, because I had a lot of records and they were all rubber stamps on the same generic brown cover, I started making little pictures, which I got printed up at the shops where they do the IDs, the passport photos, and I'd decoupage them onto the front. So every album had its own little passport photo. And before a gig I would sit there and I would just make up 50 CDs.
And then I started a record label and that's when I stopped making money from CDs. And I printed up my whole catalog with these beautiful covers and wonderful designs and booklets, and that. And that was very satisfying and wonderful, but you have this huge outlay and you never make it back. And they sit under your bed. Some of them work and some of them don't.
But the digital downloads, you didn't have that. You just put it up and a week later you could pay the studio guy that you owed for the studio time. I loved that. I really loved that. And then I read a book by this guy who was talking a lot about the digital economy and this not creating pay walls. And I got very interested. Looking back now you realize how stupid and naive it is, of the idea that the internet things could be free.
And that is the wonderful thing about the internet. But unfortunately, we are now give everything away for free to the benefit of the platforms that provide. There was that moment where you could put your stuff up on Bandcamp and say, "Pay what you want, even nothing." And I loved that. That was great because you could see this organic growth. And people did pay and it was marvelous. 70% of people would take it for free, 30% would pay a lot, and you'd sell way more. And it would get onto the top of the algorithms because there'd be so many downloads. And it was really marvelous.
Then that all died with streaming. And streaming became ... yeah, then it was actually pointless to make an album and I stopped recording because I just didn't really know why you couldn't sell CDs so easily. It all just became not too interesting. And then I've just the last few years been working with a wonderful label called Platoon and they are supporting my recording in amazing ways, and getting me into streaming in a way that makes it work. And doing amazing things like record labels used to do, like paying for your studio time and letting you explore things. And supporting you in experimenting. So that's quite amazing. They're like a new world old school record label.
Leah Roseman:
I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit about your Montessori guitar method that you've developed.
Derek Gripper:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Montessori. So I had a bunch of children, and being a guitarist, you can't really afford to send four children to a Montessori school. Because here, Montessori schools are all private schools. So my wife, at the time, and I had the bad idea of training ourselves up as Montessori teachers and building a Montessori school in the house. We were living on a kind of nature reserve in Cape Point. And so we got all the materials, we learned how to use them all. I did a course through a Canadian online thing. Well, it wasn't really online because you had these huge files that they sent you because it was a little bit pre everything being digital, and had to do these exams. And then I saw the miracle that is Montessori. It's quite amazing. But I had this contrast because I was teaching at two schools twice a week and it was so difficult to teach people to play guitar.
And it was so easy to teach these five-year-olds to do fractions. So I thought there has to be a better way. And because I was too full of ideas, of guitar, I thought that you had to use the Montessori method to show them all the wonderful things that we've learned in guitar, from phrasing to technique to think a position to this, to that, blah blah blah, blah blah. So I had this huge complicated method of Montessori, which was as complicated as the whole of Montessori is because there's so much to the guitar.
And slowly, I whittled it down over a period of four years and realized that there was one presentation, one group of presentations that you had to give, and one way of teaching, and all the other things didn't need to be taught anymore because you didn't have this problem that was created through this over overstimulation, this fear reflex, because you get into the car and you've got to steer and press the brake and do the thing, and you've never done it before and you've got to look left and right. And so you go into flight mode, and then unfortunately you succeed.
So then your body goes, every time it sits in the car, it goes, "Okay, well in order to succeed I need to feel like this," and it brings about that level of tension again, and this is what we do. And so I started teaching these children, I had about 60 of them, and it was just amazing. It didn't matter who was walking in anymore. Before it'd be like, "Oh God, it's the guy with the fish hands, I'm going to be holding his body together for the next hour." His hands are going to, or there's this one who never does anything.And it didn't matter anymore. It was all just wonderful to see them. "Hi!" Because I knew that I could work with whoever they were, wherever they were. Got to the point where it was too easy. It was actually too easy to teach. And I stopped teaching. Because it was just too easy. It was like, "Oh, this is so great." And they all played wonderfully.
And I did a final test, I went into a Montessori school twice a week, and I just quietly did presentations to people in the middle of the class. And after a month and a half there was the music class and they all got up and I sat in the audience with my children and about 15 of them got up and did this wonderful concert, one after the other. They made the order. They all played wonderfully. They didn't use music. Their phrasing was beautiful, and they'd only played for six weeks. It was so nice to see. And you see this in Mali you go to Mali and you see some nine year olds going crazy on the guitar and they'll say, "Oh yeah, he just picked it up last week."
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. You may not want to go here, but I wanted to ask you about "A Year of Swimming" because your liner notes are very obscure, that you'd gone through some really difficult personal stuff and it's a really powerful album.
Derek Gripper:
Oh, thanks. Yeah, so I separated from my wife at that time, I think. Well, it wasn't actually then, it was before, but it was a long, difficult process. You build a family with somebody and children, and then you separate and you have to ... So we carried on trying to homeschool and we shared this process together, but that eventually didn't work, and it was terribly disruptive for everyone. And there was this horrendous process where we needed to find a new way forward. I have an aversion to official processes and paperwork, and things like this. So there was a lot of that, lot of lawyers, lot of courts. And I found that extremely stressful. And I was living with a friend of mine who's Canadian actually. He was staying, well, he was living with me in my basement. He was a poet. And every now and again, you always have to shelter a poet in your basement, if you can. It's what we have to do for poetry.
So I was sheltering a Canadian poet, and he took me to the ocean and he said, "Come, we're going to jump in." And it was so cold. I don't know if you know the Cape Town, Atlantic Ocean, we've got the Indian, it's a bit warmer on the one side of the peninsula, on the other side, the Atlantic, freezing cold. I went and it was like being attacked by knives. It was just awful. But the next day it was better. And we did this every day and then it became a thing. And for a year, pretty much every day I was touring as well. And so I would do it in different places so that it obviously wouldn't be every day, but every day I was in Cape Town, I would drive over the mountain to this one particular little beach, which was surrounded by rocks. And I would spend at least 20 minutes or half an hour floating in the water and having a wonderful time. So that was where the title came.
Leah Roseman:
Okay, wow. And also, Alex Van Heerden, you were very close friends with. He was also your brother-in-law?
Derek Gripper:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Derek Gripper:
We married sisters.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Such an incredible musician and such a tragic loss.
Derek Gripper:
Oh my gosh. I mean, it comes, I don't know if it's like a thing that comes in time periods, but now when I was in the Cedarburg, I was really thinking about him a lot because he's really the one musician that I could just, we could sit together and we could create together in a way that I haven't really experienced. And I suppose it's being in your early twenties as well, and discovering things fresh. So I can't attribute too much to the ... all of it to the connection that we had. But we had a great thing going and we made ... it all started with a record called Sagtevlei, which I played viola on. And we kind of made a string quartet and we wrote this music, which was dubbed avant vastrap, which was Alex's passion, was this music called the vastrap. He taught himself to play the accordion. He wanted to understand his Afrikaans roots he'd come from, all the Cape Jazz side of music.But he wanted to understand the Afrikaans music. And on both sides of the Color divide. The Afrikaans is a language and a music that happens on both sides of the artificial divide that was created in Apartheid and especially this is in the Western Cape. And so inspired by his knowledge of this music, and he's kind of encyclopedic, all these melodies would just flow out of him. And then I would bring these processes that I had in me from being in university for too long, things from Messiaen or Steve Reich, or Stravinski. And I'd say, "Okay, well there's this thing Steve Reich does called phasing, where you take a melody and then two people play it at the same time and one speeds up and then it slowly changes.
So Alex would provide the melody. And then we'd do that on and we'd phase that. And then we had a beautiful bass player called Bryan Bolton, who Alex had worked with since he was very young. And then we did another piece for a string quartet called the Sontongo Quartet. So was around, must be 2006 or something, 2000, something like that, called Spore by die be van ’n ystervarkgat , which means footprints at the mouth of an Iron Pigs hole, an iron pig is Porcupine. And this was inspired by a drawing in, it's a long story. And then we made a reunion album 10 years after Sagtevlei, with Bryan, and we got together and we made an album. Well we did a live recording and somebody came, my friend Alex Boez came to record it. And thank goodness because two weeks later Alex was killed in a car accident and I chatted him on the phone before and he said, "Keep the flame alive," and all this, and off he went. And so luckily we had this recording of this performance of the three of us playing together.
Leah Roseman:
It's such a powerful recording and I think any Miles Davis fans out there would really appreciate that recording.
Derek Gripper:
Thank you. Yeah, Alex was one of those truly just incredible musicians. The people who can understand the language very quickly, who can pick up an accent very quickly, who can connect with people in speech. He spoke every type of Afrikaans and he would engage with people, and that's how he was with music. He didn't read music much, but he just had an incredible memory and ear, and just a beautiful sound. And it's just a wonderfully creative and always looking for who was he, What music was he supposed to be playing? What is he supposed to be doing? Asking questions all the time.
Leah Roseman:
And your friend, Guy Buttery, you mentioned him before, I also enjoyed that album. And he's playing sitar as well as still string guitar. Yeah,
Derek Gripper:
Yeah. Guy came up, I think when he was around 19, he released an album and won a Sama Award, which is our big music award. And he's been on the road in South Africa and all over the world writing his own music, releasing beautiful records for many years now. And we have ... first, I went to see him because I'd heard about this young guy, he's a bit younger than me, who was playing. I remember going to see him in some awful restaurant and he was playing electric sitar and it was really loud and honky, and that must have been, he must have been 20 or something. And then he released this beautiful record, which I really liked, and he started talking, and we probably got put on the stage every now and again and played it, a wide guest on a gig, something like that. And then that record that you heard was the first time we were actually sitting and doing a concert where it wasn't just half-half. And then we'd do something at the end.
I think we probably did a lot of double bills, but we decided let's actually do a gig together. And then COVID happened, but we had the album, so we released the album. And now we're kind of getting it together. We had a recording session booked, which is when I did "Billy Goes to Durban." Guy's father passed away and ... Well, was about to, and so he had to leave. And so I ended up recording by myself and those are three Nagra tracks there.
And then we were due to play in Cape Town and Guy got sick and couldn't make it. So we've had a lot of setbacks. But we've rebooked a tour in November, here in Cape Town, and I'm hoping to get us on the road a little bit as well. And to really write some music together, like Alex and I used to do. Because often on these on-the-road collaborations, you don't have that opportunity to sit together and really write music. It's about improvising together. Like Debashish and I, when we played together. It's about surviving or you've got a little bit of time, but mostly it's improvised. And certainly with the kora players, like Yacouba Sissoko, that I've played with [inaudible 00:47:58] Sissoko. You're arriving, you have a common repertoire and you improvise. So I really want to do that again. And so we are hoping that that's going to happen.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So now that you've started touring again after the lockdowns, I imagine South Africa was pretty awful. There was a lot of death and you were really shut down for a long time.
Derek Gripper:
We thought it was going to be awful and things were going to fall apart. I think it's awful now for South Africans in the lower income brackets. The economic ramifications of COVID have been huge. So I think our real disaster is now, not to say that we didn't have a disaster during COVID, but it wasn't as bad as everyone thought it was going to be. I think our government did some weird things. They responded in some kind of weird ways, but they were also great. And I think on a whole, it was actually managed pretty well. I mean, they're people who would totally disagree with me, like why weren't we allowed on beaches and that? But they just did these blanket precautions and people who could afford to or had the space, could lock down, did, and it was enforced hugely. And people who couldn't, people in the townships, they weren't dragged off the street and imprisoned, just they understood that there was this difference, that not everybody could do this isolating, et cetera.
And people respected, they respected the fact that this was here and everyone took precautions. And I think we did marvelously well, really. But now, I mean the economic thing was hard and you can see that the repercussions 100% out on the streets.
Leah Roseman:
I wanted to ask you about the musician, Madosini. I'm probably saying her name wrong.
Derek Gripper:
No, you're saying it right.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Derek Gripper:
Madosini. Yeah, I mean, I'm not an expert on how to say it either.
Leah Roseman:
Well, I bought that album you put up on Bandcamp to support her during COVID, and it's really incredible, and I never heard that style of music before.
Derek Gripper:
Yeah, she's amazing. Madosini is amazing. She's a force of nature and she plays a bow, two bows. One is uhadi, which is a gourd resonated bow. You'd be familiar with the berimbau .So this is the ancestor of the berimbau. It would've come from Angola to Brazil.
And then she also plays an instrument, which is kind of the baby version, it's called mhrubhe, and it's a mouth bow. So it's resonated with the mouth. And so I'm told that mostly the mouth bow is played by younger people, the children. And then you grow up and you play uhadi. But Madosini, she had polio as child, and so I think she spent more time playing than most. And she is, for me, her mhrubhe playing is what drives me crazy. I love what she does and no one can do that. And I've transcribed one piece of hers, which is on that album, from that album. It's got like (Music playing).It also goes on.
Leah Roseman:
Well, I wish you'd go on. So beautiful. Actually, I was thinking about world music, it's a beautiful thing, but it's also used as a marketing label. What do you think about that?
Derek Gripper:
Yeah. Well, I mean world music, my feeling is world music as a genre, out there in the world, is kind of over. There still are other festivals and there's still other things, but this idea ... Well, you had various phases. You had the discovery of so-called world music. In other words, finding out that other people also played music and realizing that there ... which was interesting to have that on stages. And mostly in the 1980s, really, where it really became popular. And where we are now is we've got a lot of the festivals that were started back then and are still going. So there was that first moment, and then there was the second way it was about collaboration. Oh, wouldn't it be interesting to get a kora player and a sitar player together? Ooh, wouldn't it be interesting to get a jazz trumpeter and a, you know. And that happened.
And of course, there was some amazing things that happened from that. I mean, one, this is actually a more recent one, which Ballake Sissoko and Vincent Segal's album called "Chamber Music" which is kora and cello, and beautiful. But that is actually different because it's not, "Oh, wouldn't it be interesting if," it's two people who connected as people and played together, and that's ... I'm interested in. Forever, that must happen.
But this kind of became a programming thing of, "Oh, wouldn't it be interesting if we did this?" And so you had a lot of collaborations created by outsiders and people kind of chucked together because it was great for funding and that. And of course lots of wonderful ensembles did come out of that.
But I think the fascination of, "Oh, this person comes from 70 generations of kora players, or this person is this," that fascination, the idea that you're getting access to the other. You're going into this other world where the musician has never experienced the music that you know, and you're going to enter into a new realm, like the Beatles discovering Ravi Shankar. Wow.
But now we all have the same phones, we all have the same YouTube accounts. And of course, the training and thing. But I think now it has to go back to finding the great music, you can't just go, "I'm the lineage of this thing, and blah, blah, blah." And you can see that the interest is less, just in the global interest. People aren't interested in that anymore. And I think that's fine. Just like we are probably not interested in the fact that someone is the fourth generation from lists or something.
We want to hear, we're back to the problem of now we have to listen to great music and your CV isn't going to persuade us.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Derek Gripper:
And the idea of world music, obviously it's hugely problematic and ridiculous, but it comes at a moment in time when record stores were full of jazz and classical and rock. And then they suddenly we're like, "Oh, what do we do with the sitar album?" And someone came along and said, "Well, let's call it World Music." And I think it definitely, in record stores, like, "Where do you put them? Oh, let's make a world music box and we can put the" ... And Ravi Shankar was clever about that. He said, "No, this is classical music." And he didn't get involved in that game. And the music, I think, got pushed in a particular direction through, obviously the countries that had the money to buy the music, that had performing circuits, that had festival circuits.
South Africa's not one of those countries, those countries that can buy the music, define the music. And I think world music as we know it, like going to the World Music Festival came out of post rock. It came out of people who were tired of the rock music festival and thought, "Wow, what happens if we take the rock music festival and get Ravi Shankar to play. And so it goes. But that means that you're making a music very much for an outdoor party stage. And that means that you're going to get a certain type of music. And if you track Toumani Diabaté's career, for example. He releases this beautiful album, he's 21. It's a solo kora album. It is the Horowitz of West African music. He is playing instrumental music of just the most incredible virtuosity and melodic beauty, and endless invention. It's like listening to Glenn Gould play the Goldberg Variations.
And the trajectory of that in one world could have been that he just was in Bamako as a kora player accompanying singers at weddings. It could have been that he was playing the concert halls of the world on the same bill as a classical pianist. And because we recognized, "Okay, well the concert hall is a beautiful space to hear a piano. It's wonderful. It's designed for this for people to sit quietly and listen. And wouldn't it be amazing to put this kora player?" And that has certainly happened with Toumani, but much more of what's happened is that he's looked at more bigger ensembles, because if you want to headline a world music festival, that's what you got to do.
And so you see that progression happening much more, big bands and you hearing ... and it might not be because of this, but there is that, I've felt that myself, I've had to be really firm about saying, "No, I can come and I can play your festival, and I don't need another musician. I can do it solo. I don't need a trio. No thank you." And I've had to really fight against that, and I've lost rarely movement and work as a result because once you're there, it's fine. Then everyone's like, "Oh, this is wonderful, we love this." But, "Really, you're going to have a solo guitar or a solo kora on stage. Woo. I don't know."
Leah Roseman:
I'm curious, Derek, the show I heard, you ... I'm wondering if you always tend to do this now, it was very narrative and you kept playing while you were talking between every song that you just chose to do. Is that something you tend to do to keep a ...
Derek Gripper:
Yeah, I've had this, as you've noticed, I've got these kind of purist obsessions sometimes. And one of them is like this conflict between the pure musical experience, unmediated by speech. And I think from a Montessori perspective, for example, if you're giving a presentation that is about color, you don't speak because the brain has to split then. And I mean the world that we live in, wow, she was saying this a hundred years ago. Our brains are constantly split between media, looking at the visual hearing, the audio, all this. So I think something happens to our minds when we hear music for an hour and we go out of the verbal. I think that's really important. Indian classical music is a wonderful example.
But story and context is also very important. And we are in an age where they're often, music is stripped of all context and story. There's not even line of notes anymore. There's barely an album that there's barely an album title. Just got a bunch of songs all stuffed together on the internet, and you've got to hear them. So I think the story is important. And of course, for what I'm doing, there's a lots of stories that are important and that's become an important part of ... But I didn't like how it broke, I used to speak for a long time and then play, and I didn't like how it broke. So lately I just carry on playing and talking at the same time. That seems to solve that problem. Which is what the Griots were doing. This music was in West Africa. The Griots were the hereditary storytellers, musicians, matchmakers, peacemakers. And they, when they were speaking, would play the kora, whatever instrument as an accompaniment. So maybe I'm copying them.
Leah Roseman:
It works very well. So you do tour a lot, when possible, and I'm curious if, like you mentioned a little bit about yoga before, and Alexander technique, if there's things you use for your physical mental health while touring and dealing with jet lag and everything,
Derek Gripper:
Alexander's, some of the principles of Alexander are very important to me. The main thing I rarely gain from him on a daily basis is the idea of inhibition. Inhibition is giving yourself permission to say no to something. Say no to a stimulus. So any kind of stressful situation is usually created by some kind of idea that you have about what it is that you have to do or react. So I've got to get on this plane on time, and my visa has to arrive, and this is super stressful. That idea, my visa has to arrive on time, I'm going to France, I'm going to the US now, and then I'm going to France and I'm waiting for my European visa, and you get stressed out. You think, "Oh, but what it doesn't arrive before and I'm going to let down these people and blah blah."
So from an Alexander point of view, you want to inhibit that. You want to inhibit that thought because it's creating a whole stress reaction. So the inhibition of that thought would be, my visa doesn't need to arrive. I don't need a visa, I don't need to play in France. I don't need to show up for those people who needed me to show up. This tour doesn't have to be a success and I don't have to leave my house.
And this is not to say that those are the things that you're going to do. It's just we are interested in a physiological reaction. Similarly with you playing a piece of music and you're halfway through and you start finding that you're going to have a memory lapse or you start stumbling, the first thought you're going to have is, "I've got to remember this. I mustn't make a mistake. This is going to be the huge disaster." And you go into this whole thing and start sweating and going crazy, and it all gets even worse.
So then you just start inhibiting, "I don't need to remember this, I don't need to play this piece properly. I don't need to get to the end. I don't need to make this audience happy." Whatever the thought is. So that's a very important, that's a sort of pillar for me, is internal resistance. And then Alexander technique, in the physical sense, I'm usually fine. I think it's been ... that inhibition thing does wonders for you physically as well, because if you're not in the fight of flight, your body is in a much better state. And then for me, performance isn't an event any different to another. So I don't get myself stressed out and think, because I'm not going to ... there's nothing, there's no way to succeed in a performance.
I'm not thinking, "I've got this piece, I really hope I get it right tonight. Come on, let's go." I'm just going and sitting there and I can do anything I want to. So it's really chilled. There's nothing that can go wrong because the audience is on my side, I'm on their side. I'm not trying to prove anything to them in my head. So if I forget something, I can talk to them about it. It's no problem.
So that's not a stress. So traveling is usually fine. And then really the secret to being super relaxed when you're traveling is to live with three children. Live with three teenagers. And when you go to the airport, you're not with them anymore. And you don't have to manage anybody's day-to-day existence or finding out who's got this or what or whatever. So I find when I get to the airport, I get completely, like my whole nervous system just relaxes, and I can really chill. And touring is great, you don't even have to make your own bed, you never have to wash dishes. It's wonderful.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I relate about both of those things. There's a piece you wrote, the name escapes me at the moment, I heard you play it live as well when you're in New York and you missed your flight, I think it's ... and then you were walking-
Derek Gripper:
Oh, Seeing Nobody. Yeah, Seeing Nobody.
Leah Roseman:
Would you be willing to play that for us today?
Derek Gripper:
For sure. So you persevered with the violin.
Leah Roseman:
Yes.
Derek Gripper:
Amazing. So hard.(Music playing)
Leah Roseman:
So beautiful. Thank you, Derek. I was thinking how you really became famous, and I think your career took off because of your obsession with this Griot music of the kora. Do you ever think, "Well, what if that hadn't happened," in terms of your creativity? And ...
Derek Gripper:
It's interesting because we were talking about this Alexander thing and body and stuff. I also, really, another thing I do, actually, is I have a few body workers that I go to who work in different, very different ways. Three, actually. I'm really lucky to have found these people. And one of them is, well another Barry, Barry Burkett. And he has this really wonderful, interesting way of reading your body and checking through your body, where the contradictions are. And he really made me look at my musical ethos that had grown out of my work with Alex, which was, it's about here. My value as a musician is about the fact that I'm South African, therefore I have to be somehow referencing and working within that. So there were a lot of ideas like that, that were shutting down my ability to reach a wider audience and be out there, as well as personal things, young children and ideals about homeschooling, all sorts of things like that.
And Barry actually, in the first session I went to him, he really challenged me on that. And he does it in this wonderful way because you're not telling him anything. He's just going, "Oh, there's this thing you're supposed to be doing, think of it." And then you're like, "Oh yeah, it's that." "Yeah, but you're not doing that because why?" And then you keep thinking you. No one's ... he's only talking, you're not talking back, but you are guided through eventually and you can see, like wow. And one of the things was like that my musical world is much larger than just the nationalism. Some kind of stupid nationalist idea that my value is because of where I was born. So this idea, and I suppose it's an idea that I keep struggling with, the playing is enough. That the playing is enough. Doesn't have to be some fancy technology of recording or anything. The playing is enough.
And so that moment of realizing that was when I realized I needed to be collaborating and engaging much more actively with other musicians. And the first moment of doing that was the transcriptions of Toumani's music. And you know ,as a musician, that wonderful thing of being able to engage with a musician that you love, with a composer that you love. I think we have a big value structure around originality and people who write their own music, it's better and blah, blah, blah, but it's just the most marvelous thing to be able to sit inside someone else's musical world and explore it. Especially if they come from a different place. Like Bach. Wow, I mean to spend an hour of your morning being inside that guy's head is just ridiculous. And I would never want to give that up. And I had given that up for a period of time.
And so that moment of kind of discovering Toumani, and of course that created a bridge, I think, to the rest of the world, where the story I was telling was still very small when I was here. I was talking about this music that it was in this very small place and I was keeping it small, and just this ... and that led to recording in a different way. So creating an album that sounded completely different and connected me to people like Lucy Duran who had produced Toumani's albums, and John Williams, who I'd been listening to for years, and to play with him, and in getting invited to a guitar festival called the Ellnora Festival, by their ... what's the person who runs the festival? The festival director, David Spellman, who knew of some of the albums you were talking about, the earlier ones. So that's that movement starting, but coming from this thing of opening up the music a little bit, a little bit more.
Leah Roseman:
Mm-hmm. And some people listening will definitely be guitar nerds and they might be interested, you played an unusual guitar early on. Was it eight string with an end pin? I was curious about that.
Derek Gripper:
Yes. You see, this is the problem. So at university, I learned that guitar wasn't enough, that you had to do more, that it had to be more harmonically complex, music had to be this, and blah, blah. So Paul Galbraith, the Scottish guitarist who invented this thing called the Brahms guitar, which is an eight string guitar, and he played it upright to get a little bit more movement in the body and various ideas. So I was very, very ... what's the word? I was just captivated by, he did a recording of the Sonatas and Partitas as a complete, so it just was everything for me. It was solo, it was a tour de force. All the things that I kind of valued were in that record. And so I had a guitar like that built and tried to make it work, and I made one album on it called "Bloomdorns". And I also tried to learn Bach in that way on it.
But it wasn't a great instrument to play. It was very hard to play, not the eight string part, but the actual physical guitar that I had. So I eventually found Hermann Hauser, who became famous for making Segovia's guitar in around the late 1930s, and managed to get hold of one by the grandson, Hermann Hauser III, which is the guitar I'm still playing now. And so I had to give up this hope of grandiosity, which the eight string gave me for the more simple, for the real reality of an instrument that just worked, that absolutely just followed you. And that there was also part of giving up practicing was just like, "Oh, I didn't have to work against an instrument anymore," so could just play. So the was the 8 string.
Leah Roseman:
And it had a removable frets? Fretboard?
Derek Gripper:
Ah. Well, for a moment it had this. It ended up, when I did "Bloomdoorns", it was just a normal eight string.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Derek Gripper:
We had 31 frets. Oh we are talking to the guitar nerds, right? Yeah. Yeah. May there always be guitar nerds because it is fun. I have a few friends started around the world that I can really go crazy and geek out about, and luckily we don't see each other too often. One of them is Redmond O'Tool, who actually has continued playing his eight string guitar. And just did a performance of the run with guitar concert on eight string guitar for the Dublin Philharmonic, I think. But anyway, that's a tangent.
So the movable frets were as a result of, there was a period of about a year or two I didn't have a guitar. I'd ordered a guitar and I was waiting. And so I thought too much and read too much. And I was doing a master's in a kind of interdisciplinary masters that I kind of designed myself because we didn't really have such a thing. And I was really interested in this kind of interdisciplinary studies, and all these things and ideas.And so I was bringing together ideas from linguistics and I was reading Adorno, and this and that, and all the old music theorists. And right in a center is this book called "The Genesis of the Music" by the American just intonation Composer, Harry Parch, who had this idea of a new musical theory based in just intonation or pure tunings. And I got very into this idea and constructed in my mind a whole universe of possibilities. But of course, you need an instrument. And so the movable fret thing was tricky because you lost too much sound. So I had a 31 tone equal temperament fret board made. The 31 tone equal temperament will give you up to the 11th over tone. It'll give you, in other words, you can play in any key, but instead of the five, the fifth overtone, which is what our system is based on, you can get the seventh and the 11th, which have a whole different kind of identity that is not represented in western music.
But yeah, it's a complicated business. And I eventually had that 31 tone temporary, because you can imagine so many frets. Where there were 12, there were now 31. I took ... and then it didn't work, so structurally it started, the neck started moving. So I just said, "Oh quickly, let's glue the 12 one back."
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Derek Gripper:
So now I compromise by bending, by tuning slightly differently, by using alternative tunings, by working in drones, and just more with the back of my mind rather than ... Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
You had played a little bit of Vihuela music at the beginning. Did you ever try playing a lute at all or an Oud?
Derek Gripper:
Yeah. I love the idea of both of them. So it's such a pity, when you play the lute, you realize it's a completely different instrument. We are trained to be such ... so our hands are so over the top. It's like a pianist that it's a big instrument and the guitar is actually a big instrument. The lute is so small and fragile, and you play it and you realize, "Oh my goodness, this is a whole everything, you've got to attach it." So it's kind of unsatisfying to play until you're used to it.
And Oud, I've played around with, and obviously the microtonal thing would make most sense, fretless. But harmonic music, that becomes difficult. But every now and again, I go on these tangents. I have a veena here, but I'm much pretty much rehabilitated now to being a guitarist. And I'm really happy now. I was a really reluctant guitarist for a long time. I thought it was terrible. It just didn't do what it was supposed to do. Didn't have the right range. It was unequal temperament. It was too soft. It was too this, it was too that, blah, blah, blah. Now I think it's great.
Leah Roseman:
To close this out, do you have any advice you would give for musicians coming up, starting their careers?
Derek Gripper:
No. I have no clue because it's so crazy out there. I would've said, 10 years ago, I would've had a million things to tell people.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Derek Gripper:
Like I was talking about the pay what you want model and how to use the internet, and that. But now, it's so perplexing, the whole thing is so strange. And I don't really understand it. And so I think if there's any value in music, it's the fact that music has a value, and the point that ... and in order for it to have a value, we have to spend time doing it. And all the things that they tell you that we supposed to do, like keep an Instagram account and blog every five seconds of what you're doing, and they have everything on video, and record everything on your phone, and remember everything this, and check out every possible version of this thing that you've done and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and listen to 20 versions by YouTube.
It's all a lot of noise and it all means that you've got much less time to play. And one of the wonderful things about coming into music in the nineties, in South Africa, was that I couldn't even get a lot of recordings easily. You had the top 20 stuff, but you couldn't get a Toumani Diabaté recording, you couldn't download it on the internet. You couldn't get a score that you wanted very easily. You had to make do with the library at the university and the records that they had there, which were 20 years old. And that was actually great. It was great because it meant that you didn't have too much input. Because you don't actually need as much input as we have. It's enough to meet a guy on the road, having him say something really incredible that can change your life, and you can remember that forever. But now we meet someone on the road every 15 seconds with a brilliant idea. It's too much.
So I would like to see that we've explored this now, this digital reality and how we can connect to people. It's largely being taken away now. If you want social media to work for you, it can, in a miracle you can have these miraculous things, but most of the time you have to pay for it and you have to spend a lot of time, you have to feed the algorithm with your attention. And I feel that we just need to feed our instruments with our attention. And just, there's a kind of an energetic thing that happens with music, I think. And things seem to work out if the music is going. And I find that if I feel like my career is dying and things are not looking good, and it's all going to come to pieces, and I'm going to have to get a job, it's usually just because the music isn't going well. And if I forget about it, that's the inhibition again, and go back to playing and get inspired by playing.
Then suddenly I realized like, "Hey man, I've got this great idea. I should call this person." And then that person says, "Yeah, you should come and play my festival." And before you know it, something's happening again. But that connection with the people that make things happen only happens if you're inspired about music. If you're not, they're not interested. And it doesn't matter how many times you post what fabulous things you're doing, nobody cares. And you only become interested by doing it. Sorry. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Well, thanks for your wisdom. That's actually fabulous advice, I think for everybody, not just professional musicians. Although that's a whole discussion of what is a professional versus amateur, which is a bad divide that we still use that.
Derek Gripper:
Totally. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, thanks so much for your time today, Derek. It was really wonderful.
Derek Gripper:
Yeah, thank you Leah. That was really great. It's really nice to speak to somebody and just to map it out again, and to be reminded of things. I think it does something really good. It's always very good for me when people do this for me, because sometimes I forget what it is, all the ... you forget the parts, kind of how things fit together, and you forget what you're supposed to be doing. So thanks.(Music playing)
Leah Roseman:
My life is so enriched by getting to know these incredibly inspiring creative guests and their perspectives on their lives and music. Please follow this podcast and sign up for my podcast newsletter to get sneak peaks for upcoming guests and find out about newly published transcripts.
