Soundwalker

I was fortunate to spend a week in the Amazon with the Wild Symphony Project at the Calanoa Amazonas Wilderness Lodge. With me were an international cohort of musicians and naturalists, including music writer Jeremy Eichler and Colombian percussionist Diana Maria Restrepo. In our conversation we discuss what it means to make music in the rich sonic environment of the Amazon rainforest, all the while backed up by the live insect and frog sounds of a spring evening by the side of the great river, considering the widest meanings of music for human history and nature's deep time.

Seems like whenever musical history was made over the last sixty years, Joe Boyd was there. He produced Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, Richard Thompson, 10,000 Maniacs, Billy Bragg, and introduced startling world music to Western audiences, including Trio Bulgarka, Ivo Papasov, and Toumani Diabate. The founder of Hannibal Records, He's even the guy who refused to unplug Bob Dylan when Pete Seeger complained at the Newport Folk Festival. So what does he think about what's happened to music today?

An hour and a half with the great improvising pianist Marilyn Crispell, winner of a 2025 NEA Jazz Masters Award. We learn how and when she began improvising, and how she has learned to combine energy and calm over the course of a long and ever-changing musical career. Photo by Andrew Pothecary.

A conversation with 86-year old musical master Allaudin Mathieu, who started out arranging for Duke Ellington and went on to become a great mentor and spiritual force, today making some of the best work of his career and continue to teach nonstop. Here we discuss his new memoir The Shrine Thief, what he is listening for, and how much theory and history a good musician needs to know.

Finally I dare to make myself the subject of an interview in my own podcast. The art/science pioneer Victoria Vesna grilled me on how I got where I am today: What I learned from John Cage, R. Murray Schafer, and all those birds, bugs, and whales I have made music with for years.