Australia: Australian HUG Lullaby

The Australian lullaby that Jan and I just created features the continent’s unique animals. Early in our stay, a visit to the Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary in Tasmania was both touching and educational for us. This facility cares for injured animals, and we toured it with an exceptionally well informed naturalist.

He went into remarkable detail about the habits and abilities of Australian marsupials—even explaining how a mother kangaroo (a “Jill”) can express, from different teats inside her pouch, different kinds of milk to meet the varying nutritional needs of the different-aged “Joeys” she may be carrying. How cool is that! 

At Bonorong we saw wombats and Tassie devils, and also got up close and personal with maybe 100 kangaroos, in a very large enclosure, after a sea of school-aged children left on their bus. “Kangaroo Care” never seemed so real to Jan!

Jan’s idea for the lyrics of this lullaby is to link Australian animal behavior to some of the sleep issues that she helped Australian nurses and parents solve.

Musically, I tried to bring together several traditions that are fundamental strands in Australian popular music. First is the Aboriginal tradition. Didgeridoos, bull roarers (elliptical discs that are twirled to make unearthly sounds), and clapsticks—as well as chant, of course—are the dominant elements of Aboriginal music.

A second major musical strand in Australia is the Anglo-Scottish ballad tradition—the same one that settlers translated to Appalachia. In Australia the “convict heritage” is in the spotlight these days (after years of being disclaimed). Vandemonium Lags is a stage show and recording of convict-inspired music, much of which is written in the ballad tradition. 

I created a melody for this lullaby that draws on the ballad tradition—although part of it also echoes the American blues idiom, which is the third major strand in Australian pop music.

It's fun for Jan and me to work together creating these lullabies. Such creative work helps preserve our memories of particular things we especially appreciate about the cultures we visit. Working together on songs also helps us pass the time—sort of like gin rummy, but with more cards to play! Jan is doing something new for her, and I’m enjoying teaching her a musical thing or two.  Hopefully, the "HUGs Around the World" lullaby project can present HUG Your Baby ideas in a unique format that others might find entertaining, fun, and informative.

Australia: Tracks from a Soggy Dog

It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be to find a saxophone in Australia. Jonathan and Kaira Ba (www.kairabamusic.com) asked me to add tenor sax tracks to several of the new songs they’re recording. I was pleased to help and said I’d find a way to do it. However, making good on this commitment required more effort than I’d anticipated. Schools and conservatories turned me down, and friends of friends came up empty-handed, searching for saxes—in all the wrong places, apparently!

After pursuing a number of dead-ends, I finally was able to rent a reconditioned Super Action 80 from the good folks at Ozwinds in Melbourne. I’m traveling with my mouthpieces and reeds and was delighted to blow into a newly overhauled Selmer. It wasn’t the same as playing my old Mark VI, but it was closer than I thought I'd get to the sound I’m used to.

So what a treat it was, the next day, to ride a Melbourne City train to the end of the Belgrave line and meet Steve Vertigan, of SoggyDog Recording. Steve is an accomplished musician (classical clarinet and pop piano) who has also been a school music teacher and administrator and a sound engineer at a broadcast television station. His very successful recording and production business has evolved, over the years, as a natural outgrowth of Steve’s interests, abilities, and wide-ranging professional contacts. (I got to stick a pin in New York, as my birthplace, and joined hundreds of others, from all continents except Antarctica, on Steve’s world map of Soggy Dog musicians!)

Soggy Dog is beautifully located in the hills outside Melbourne. I told Steve that it reminded me of the late Les Paul’s house in Mahwah, New Jersey, where I used to go to rehearse in the late ‘60s with Gene and Russ Paul, and Doug Schmolze. (That band, The Dynamic Answers, is beyond the reach of even Google’s long arms!)

It was great to work with Steve. He has two good rooms, excellent mics, and is very quick with the Cubase program he prefers to DP and ProTools. (He’s sponsored by Yamaha, just like the Ozwinds people.) What’s more Steve has a keen ear for pitch, rhythm and musical form. Recording these Kaira Ba tracks with him was a great way to spend a soggy spring morning!

Before lunch we had two good tenor parts for each of the three new songs that feature horns. Zack Rider’s trumpet part was already down, and it was fun to follow his able lead. I know Quran Karriem will sound great on tbone too!

  

Steve said he loved Kaira Ba’s music—even the rough tracks we worked with—and was excited to be involved with the project. Steve and I called Jonathan on Skype to say, “Mission accomplished!” and then took a few photos, including some with Charlie, his Labradoodle—the eponymous “Soggy Dog.” (When you have a blog, and no editor, you get to use words like eponymous!)

I can’t wait to hear the final mix of the new Kaira Ba songs—and hopefully to connect Steve with Tony Bowman in order to collaborate on the Australian HUG Your Baby lullaby that Jan and I have written and Tony is poised to record.

Cheers, mate!