© Rita Draper Frazão

Inner Tour is a blog about People, Arts and Traveling by Rita Draper Frazão.
If you want to use my work, presented here, please send me a message.

4.26.2020

Days are not days and times are a-changin'

I guess this big change the world and us are in, requires new approaches on life.

Accordingly, I've been thinking a lot, in doing different things here, in my blog. In fact, I feel the need to do so. I have tons of unpublished material and several ideas. This article might just be the beginning of one of them. Wait and see!


Days are not days


Some days ago, the Swedish guitar player, Samuel Hällkvist shared on his Instagram account the album Days are not days is now available on streaming platforms like Spotify or Bandcamp.

For some reason, when this album was released, back in 2016, I didn't share it here and in any of my my social media, although it is mentioned in my Selected CV section, here at Inner Tour, ever since.

The little did I know, that the best thing to do would be not to do it at that period. Somethings need time to grow, to evolve, and the present context gave me the perfect timing to share with you, a little more about the story of this album, in which I was involved in, too.
 I also feel I have so much more to say about it now, than I would've had, back then. 

 Moreover, art in general, plays a very important role, these days. And as prophetic as it might seem, the title and the content of this project - Days are not days - are just spot on... 


The seed 


It had been, back in May of 2014 that I first heard and saw live Hällkvist playing. Even if, at that time, I didn't draw him at MIA Festival, where we met, I would later do it, a couple of months afterwards and when this album was in the making, one year after. These drawings were never officially published by myself, and I will share them for the first time now.

Back in 2015, Samuel Hällkvist, showed me, the fresh recordings he had just made with the Portuguese sax and flute player, Paulo Chagas (also co-mentor of MIA Festival) and the Danish guitarist Stephan Sieben.

I can vividly remember that day. I was at my studio, and you guys, I heard it once and I started writing about it, right away. Processes regarding music feel home in my brain, and my neurons apparently work faster to the point I, sometimes can't control its speedy reaction - normally in the shape of drawings and texts. This one took me minutes to do so.

Just out of curiosity, I decided to send it to Samuel. He and the rest of the band, decided my text should appear in the album. But they didn't do it conventionally. They've fractioned my text in parts and named the 6 tunes after each one of them. That was a total surprise for me!


My story of this sound


Below is the original text:

Golfinhos, mas também becos escuros. 
Um mergulho de um penhasco, e se fosse um reflexo, um vapor entre dentes, a trincar a núvem, voando na tempestade, no mau tempo, entre meteoritos.
Era um nevoeiro e um sapo, dos jogos de computador, do spectrum, dos xizes e das cruzinhas, das várias vidas por bater.
Havia pessoas nesse planeta. Era preciso sintonizar na praia e no espírito, onde havia ondas e marés.
Também era um caminho numa corda, num trapézio.
O ar enchia, em tubo, entre uma garrafa e um balão. Era uma mensagem no caminho.


And here's my alternative English translation (which is different from the version present in the CD, of which I am not the author of). The numbers correspond to the track division previously mentioned.


(1) Dolphins, but also dark alleys.
(2) A dive off a cliff, and if it were a reflection, a steam between teeth, biting the cloud, flying in the storm, in bad weather, in between meteorites. 
(3) It was a fog and a frog, computer games, the spectrum, the exes (x's) and little crosses, the various lives to beat.
(4) There were people in that planet. It was necessary to tune on the beach and in the spirit, where there were waves and tides.
(5) It was also a path in a rope, in a trapeze.
(6) The air filled, in tube, between a bottle and a balloon. It was a message on the way.


The drawings


© Rita Draper Frazão

As soon as I wrote the previous text, this was the image that came out. A progression from the darker to the light blue, the x's storm, turning into a plain blue sky. Or a polluted ocean, that through a storm, washes out all there is to clean, in a renewal process. I did it so, as a metaphor to this music, but it could so be an image used, to depict what we are going through, now. 


Samuel Hällkvist © Rita Draper Frazão

When I made this drawing, I wrote it was related to the ability to dream and be sensitive. Now I'd have something more to add.
The truth is, every single time I heard Samuel Hällkvist playing, I felt his sound as very graphic and cerebral, in the sense of having new ideas and having the ability to materialize them. Kind of like if his voice would build a color cloud from scratch into a consistent blue. 
More or less what he did here: he was the mentor behind Days are not days, and without him, none of this would've been real. Thank's!


Paulo Chagas © Rita Draper Frazão

I have portrayed Paulo Chagas several times before (see for example, here), but of all I have made, so far, this is my favorite drawing of him. Paulo is here playing flute, and in that day, he played sax too. I wanted to blend both, so I was inspired by his mother-of-pearl sax keys to fill his figure, while the silhouette itself, alludes to the flute playing.
Scans and photographs aren't sometimes the most faithful towards the original, and here's, another of many examples I have shared in this blog, whose true colors and energy, can only be accurately perceived live. 
It was made with watercolor (an earthy golden shade I specially bought, some years ago, in Berlin), pen, and acrylic ink (pearly white with shades of gold). One of the singularities of this drawing is that, according to the light, so the drawing glows. A natural response to the stimuli in the environment, like I feel he is sensitive enough to do with music and whatever landscape that surrounds him. Subtle that can only be better understood live.



Stephan Sieben © Rita Draper Frazão

This drawing has to to with Stephan Sieben's action, and fast reactions' mode. 
No doubt this guitarist is pretty ingenious in his resources: in the action (orange red) and in the concepts he puts in every note he plays. The word ingenious reminds me of the Genie lamp, and hence Stephan's coming out of one. A wish was granted!


© Rita Draper Frazão

This was actually one of the first I have done. It started out to be just the brick wall in watercolor. 
The background, for the ones who know this venue, could only be Zaratan's "manger charcoal bunker" (such an inspiring and nice place!). That's why the silhouettes of both, were painted with that same material. 


Bonus co-incidences


Other fact, relevant to the timing of this publication (you'll already understand why), is that this album was brilliantly mixed and produced by the monstrous American Guitar player, composer and producer, David Torn.

I affectionately call him monster, or better written how I meant it, monstar. I believe only such category of artists (and ultimately human beings) can keep up with giants like David BowieMadonnaDavid SylvianLaurie AndersonJohn LegendTori AmosRyuichi SakamotoSteve Roach, Don Cherry, Jan Garbarek, John Zorn or Tim Berne... just to mention some of the people in the music industry he's worked with. Curious fact: he's recorded with Mary Pastorius (Jaco Pastorius' daughter) as well. 
Besides that, Torn's also participated in the music making of dozens of movies such as The Big LebowskyFur, The Order, or The Departed

Two years afterwards listening Days are not days' music, I would later briefly meet and draw him in 2017, in Jazz em Agosto Festival. I have never published that drawing, and now, clearly, reasons aren't lacking to add it to this article. Funny, huh?



So, here it is! As free and loose as he expresses himself, the wind gave me the motto of this portrait: the sweep of the superfluous towards synthesis, the movement and being different, original. There's something very incorporeal about him and his work that I also wanted to convey here. Thinking about when materialization can be a matter of perception, of awareness...

A bit like I feel we are now... raising awareness of causes that matter. Trying to change our lives for the best due to an unpredictable and unprecedented cause. 
I have always felt music did that with me, helping me out to evolve as a human being. 

That being said, I'll end up quoting Bob Dylan's lyrics of Times are a-changin' (1964):

Come gather 'round people, wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin'

Then you better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'

Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide, the chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon for the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who that it's namin'

For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'

Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside, and it is ragin'

It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don't criticize what you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin'

Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'

The line, it is drawn, and the curse, it is cast
The slow one now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'

And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'


May all this inspire you too, in these times of change.



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