My new recording, Wild Blue is out now!
(click right here to check it out)
And I can’t tell you how much trying it took – long haul, loooong road. I want to share it with you, now, see what you think!
Listen loud, if you can, and give the songs more than one hearing, okay? Cause it sometimes takes a few listens to learn my musical language. :-)
I’ve worked hard to invent my own voice, my own sound… I’ve cooked up my own genre, you might say, a kind of
acoustic-worldly-roots-singer-songwriter-Jazz-folk-conjure music… each song like a little play, or journey.
Let me know if you come up with a better name for it. I’m wide open to suggestion. All my influences are here – a long dream of music music, music -
a land with no fences around it, borders that touch, unafraid, water that flows from one sacred chamber to another, from sky, to lake, to river, to the spinal cord, to the veins under the skin and back down to the sea – no boundaries on music. No wars between sounds. I respect the music that shapes me. I make it part of me, no scattering of styles or sounds like ‘exotic spice’ to juice things up. Instead I apprentice my soul to the sounds I love, pay tribute by learning well, and making my own thing.
When I was a kid, I listened to everything. My brothers and sisters and I danced every week to music from all over the Levant, the Balkans, Greece. Those time signatures (5/9, 7/8,) went into our bare feet and took root in our bones! And then there was the trad Irish music, live everywhere, and the blues and Jazz. Persian santouri players traded with my instrument-making dad – a rug for a new hammer dulcimer…
When I was 11 or so, my dad borrowed a giant stack of vintage LPs from a friend. He told me to listen, saying, “this is the history of America.” In that stack I found Mahalia Jackson, Memphis Minnie, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Sonny Terry and Browne McGee, Mavis Staples and the Staples singers, the Georgia Sea Island singers, Woody Guthrie, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Reverend Gary Davis, Pete Seeger, Elizabeth Cotton, Charlie Parker, Jerry Mulligan, John Coltrane, Lester Young, Miles Davis, Joe Venuti, Django Reinhard, Nina Simone… that is the short list. I listened long and hard, couldn’t stop. Couldn’t get enough. Still can’t.
I went to a McCoy Tyner concert when I was 14, sneaked into the back and met some of the band, after. They grilled me. It was a kindness. They asked what I played, what I listened to. I told them. They pointed out something I had noticed already: all those artists had their OWN sound. They said, “keep listening; listen and listen and listen and then; be yourself. Find you and do you. Just be you…”
I tried to do that with Wild Blue. From my heart to yours -
I hope to start my next recording soon – and that it won’t be quite as long a haul. I believe the sound will be even closer to the rock of my soul, which is not one soul, but all the souls I’ve encountered and been changed by. Maybe it will be even truer to the heart of my voice, which is not one voice, but many, many voices…
If you want to get Wild Blue, here you go! or or or get it right now by contacting pan@panmorigan.com
And if you’d like to see a video made by Robert Jonas, from my song, Peach! go here:
