Maybe Not

Cat Power
13 x 7.5 inches, oil on wood, 2018

Maybe Not is another track from the Cat Power album You Are Free of 2003. "We can all be free" she sings in the song "maybe not with words." A beautiful video set to the song appears as a bonus on the 2004 DVD Speaking for Trees, a movie of Cat Power performing solo set in a forest in upstate New York by Mark Brothwick. The image where this painting is based on is found in the booklet to the DVD/CD set by Brothwick. The painting forms a pair with my previous Cat Power painting of two months ago illustrating the song Fool also from You Are Free.

Kuu: The Swan

Raushan Orazbaeva
13 x 7.5 inches, oil on board, 2018

The instrument depicted in the painting, and played by Raushan Orazbaeva on The White Swan, is a qyl-qobyz. The qyl-qobyz is considered a sacred instrument and "only shamans or people who are close to the spirits could play it." [Orazbaeva quoted by Theodore Levin in Where Rivers and Mountains Sing] Raushan's grandmother was a famous Kazakh shaman. The swan is a sacred animal not touched by the hunters, the qobyz, when played transforms into a swan. The tradition of the instrument is rumored to be thousands of years old. The information provided comes from a chapter that deals with animal mimicry in shamanism and traditional music of central Asia in the book Where Rivers and Mountains Sing (Theodore Levin with Valentina Süzükei, Indiana University Press, 2006). The origin of music in traditional central Asian shamanic tradition is animal imitation. Here's Orazbaeva again quoted by Levin: "When I go into trance—I don't know how else to explain it—when I reach a kind of summit; when I'm really alone in myself and no one else is interfering; when I detach myself—then I really give myself with my soul and heart to this instrument."

Sound??

Rahsaan Roland Kirk
12.5 x 7 inches, oil on board, 2018

The focuses of the top 100 for months have been on the origin of music and that of shamanism. In this context the film Sound?? (Dick Fontaine, 1967, 25m) is especially insightful. Featured musicians in the film are Rahsaan Roland Kirk and John Cage. Cage is seen rehearsing with David Tudor and Merce Cunningham. Cage also narrates the film in which he asks existential questions about music and sound. "What is sound?" he asks and muses on the answer. Kirk is seen live in concert performing Three for the Festival and Here Comes the Whistleman. The pairing of the two is natural as Kirk illustrates the concepts of Cage. Cage was influenced by Zen Buddhism and the Chinese I Ching, the Book of Changes, Kirk, as I wrote a few years ago, the embodiment of a twentieth century western performer with characteristics of a shaman of the ancient tradition. The film is a great introduction to a deeper understanding of that thing called music where the whole world is so infatuated with.