To Hum is Human

The Sound of Purpose: Discovering Your True Path Through Your Inner Hum

• Donnabelle Casis

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What if sound isn’t something we listen to, but something we live inside?

In this immersive conversation, I sit down with composer and filmmaker Jake Meginsky to explore how intuition, deep listening, and embodied experience shape a creative life. We talk about the physicality of sound, the pressures and revelations of filmmaking, and the lasting impact of his mentorship with legendary percussionist Milford Graves.

Whether you’re a musician, dancer, or simply tuning into your own inner frequency, this episode is an invitation to trust what can’t always be named—and follow the hum beneath the surface.

Find me on Instagram @ToHumisHuman and www.sonorouslight.com

SPEAKER_02:

Hi friends, welcome to another episode of To Hum is Human, the podcast where we explore the transformative power of tuning into our intuition to express our passionate purpose. I'm your host, Donna Bell, and today we will delve into the sound of purpose, discovering your true path through your inner hum. Because when you trust your inner wisdom, you align with your soul's path. And I am so excited about my guest today. We are joined by composer and filmmaker Jake McGinsky. He's a New Music USA Award winner and Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in both music and film. He's collaborated and performed with an extraordinary range of musicians, including Milford Graves, Alvin Lucier, Kim Gordon, Greg Kelly, Bob Rainey, Thurston Moore, William Parker, and Bill Nace, among many others. His work has been presented widely and internationally including at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the South by Southwest Film Festival, the Click Festival in Copenhagen, the Duelon Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, the Lincoln Center, the Guggenheim Vision Festival, Museum of Arts and Design, the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology, and the Mead Museum of Art here in Amherst, Massachusetts, among many other national and international venues. Jake has been reviewed extensively in leading contemporary music, art, and culture publications worldwide. He frequently collaborates with choreographers. And in 2018, he directed and produced the award-winning feature film Milford Graves' Full Mantis, which the New York Times called the film a stunning documentary. Jake is currently a dance musician at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and has had previous appointments at Bennington College, Amherst College, Matt Holia College, and the American Dance Festival. Welcome, Jake.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks, Donabelle. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, my gosh. It's kind of a thrill for me to be talking with you, especially about this subject today. Now, you are quite the fixture in the sonic realm, both locally and beyond. And I've experienced several of your live shows, which were really mind-blowing. Jake, you've said, I resonate with the idea that music is coming from somewhere else or maybe growing up. through us. When did you first come to the realization? Can you tell us about a particular experience that clearly led you to play and experiment with sound?

SPEAKER_00:

That's a good question. I'm not quite sure I can pinpoint a particular time, a particular moment, but I think there's a journey that I am on, and I think many artists have this experience. My father's a musician. There was music in my house. I wouldn't say I was a expected to be a musician, but there was a lot of access and there was a lot of musicians in my family. So I gravitated towards that. And when you first gravitate towards learning music, the technical side, at least from my own perception, it's very amplified, meaning to learn to play an instrument is to learn to practice and to learn to get your small muscles to start doing things that they don't normally do. And then trying to kind of get there, I I think can often lead a young person to think that that's what it is, that to play an instrument, to have other people respect you, you know, celebrate your aptitude, that that's kind of like what you're going for. And I think that that taken too far can kind of lead you away from that other thing that's calling you what you are going to make, you know, what's wanting to come through you. You can kind of avoid that by focusing on the technical Yeah. and it was competitive jazz band. So I think that's what I'm going around. There was a competitiveness that was inherent in my first experiences with music that I had to learn to thaw out from to even get to the point where I could even be listening to something that was trying to come through me or come out that had never existed in the world before or that seemed like it was connected to my own personal interests and journey. So, you know, I think luckily moving up here to Western Mass, Northampton area after high school, I think the creative ecosystem at the time, which had a lot of improvisation, a lot of experimental music, that was kind of the norm, you know, so everyone that I met was meeting musically in this way where anything could happen, you know, that I wasn't meeting people who were saying, here's my song, I want you to play this. It was more like, let's see what happens. And being in the area, being young and being surrounded by that. And then also the programming that was going on at the time was like, Michael Eilers was programming at the Unitarian Church in Amherst, lots of really great improvisational jazz concerts, bringing people here from New York City who were, part of the scene at the Vision Festival. And just kind of absorbing all that, it started to feel like there was something else with music that wasn't about becoming better and better at an instrument that had to do with something else. So I think it was a slow process of momentum.

SPEAKER_01:

And

SPEAKER_00:

along the way, just meeting and learning from people that had a different vision of music than I had previously experienced. So a really big one in my life is Milford Graves, who you mentioned. He was my teacher for almost 20 years. And when I first met him, I think it was before I met him, but it was kind of through this fertile environment in the early 2000s, late 90s, early 2000s in Western Mass. There was a series at the time that glenn siegel did called the magic triangle and it was umass fine arts center shows and there was this one season that had all solos and duos and and he brought milford graves up to the fine arts center to play a solo and i went with my drum teacher at the time another big huge part of my life and a huge part of western mass percussion culture joe platts who no longer lives in the community but made drums and taught here for many many years in hadley and a bunch of other drummers and friends went to this show and you know the lights turned down you're in the fine arts center it's like a proscenium theater it's meant to kind of present music in a pretty typical way where the audience kind of stays quiet and perceives the music and at the end usually get a nice clap but this was like a completely different experience it was milford came down in the crowd he was picking people up out of the crowd bringing them on stage carrying them playing drums playing sustained tones And when the lights came up, I remember my friends and I, we weren't talking about how good the music were. We were talking about, is your heart beating faster? You look really flushed. There was all this physical

SPEAKER_01:

stuff

SPEAKER_00:

going on. And I think it presented a vision of music that was more... about an energy exchange and less about presenting a technical skill or presenting virtuosity or and another element of that concert and many other concerts that featured the great um iconic masters of free jazz the sense in the audience was that you were really part of what was happening also that like the music that was happening was happening at that moment And it had never happened before. It represented a collection of energies that were present in the room at that time. So you felt very kind of, my sense was you felt very alive, both as a performer in that situation, but also as an audience member.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And I

SPEAKER_02:

imagine it was like a very embodied experience. And I'm wondering, it sounds like the instruments you play mostly, were they percussive instruments in the beginning? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

At that time, yeah. I started early on the cello. That was probably the first instrument that I was practicing seriously as a kid. And then my father's a classical bassist.

SPEAKER_02:

He

SPEAKER_00:

plays for the Springfield Symphony. He's a really serious practicer too. I grew up with this sound of the bass being practiced, classical bass being practiced for hours per day and started practicing cello that way too. And then moved to trumpet in middle school. And I think I always was tapping out rhythms. I was always curious about rhythm things. I don't know when it was, but you know, my dad's also a multi-instrumentalist and drums probably was the instrument he seemed least comfortable with so I think that helped me find a little pocket of the instrument that my dad wasn't necessarily a stratosphere away uh than me and um Back then too, I think I do have this fortunate history of just meeting really great teachers along the way. The percussionist for the Springfield Symphony at the time, which was the first person my dad got me lessons with, he had a different way of teaching than the cello teachers that I had had. Even then, the way that my father presented a life in music, which did have a linear progression through books and through a technical mastery to get to a place where you could possibly hope that someday you could compose something new. That's how it felt to me, at least. But Michael Kars, who was the percussionist in Springfield Symphony, he lived close by in the Forest Park neighborhood in Springfield in an apartment just filled with percussion instruments, you know, single guy smoking cigarettes. And his thing was just like about he was so much more excited when I wrote something that was I cared about than when I was able to do an exercise. And I think that stuck with me a little bit. And I think there was also just the fact of being in drums inside a Western classical landscape. You're kind of left alone more than other instruments, especially in this competitive band situation that I'm talking about where the band director is concerned about everyone being in tune. you know, drilling things. And as long as the drummer sounds okay, they often don't even check if you're playing what's written unless it's like a percussion centric part, especially in competitive jazz in high school, you can basically choose your own symbols, make up your own part. So there's this kind of slow awakening of like compositional or making something sensibility that I think was creeping in there just by being fortunate enough to meet grownups at the time who celebrated that, even if they weren't in my own family or in my own circle, I did always kind of hold that. And I think like, you know, you mentioned the physical, and I think drums and bass are two of those places where that part of music can be most pronounced, that kind of like place where music or sound and touch meet. Growing up with the bass, this low frequency, the tailpin of the bass being in the ground, vibrating the ground, that's probably where I was falling asleep, taking naps as a little kid while my dad would practice. This kind of very physical sense of sound comes in those bass frequencies where you can kind of feel the tension on your skin, not only through your ears. And drums just has this amazing way to project power and to project volume It doesn't get more physical than just picking up something and striking something. I see my toddlers do it all the time.

UNKNOWN:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

So that kind of sense that sound is a physical experience was also something that I can trace back to those early times, early experiences with music.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, it's such a rich and diverse exposure to sound and instruments in so many different ways. So I could see how that would really influence you. And I'm curious about the composing aspect because when you were talking or working with one of your teachers and they were really interested about your composing, When you're composing sound for a piece, how do you distinguish between what your mind wants to create and what your intuition or spiritual sense is guiding you to create? Are there moments where the two feel at odds and how do you navigate that tension?

SPEAKER_00:

was coming out and just kind of examining what that is. And I think, you know, more and more over the years, I kind of turned to just showing up in the studio and just making things and kind of having a devoted amount of time that I do that every day. And now that I have small toddlers again, That time is very precious because I don't wake up and think, maybe I'll do this now, maybe I'll do it later. It's like I have a couple hours at the end of the night after kids go to sleep. I think, you know, the times where I've been able to do something that I do feel is connected in that way, they often come from long periods of just studio practice where lots of things are being made. Sometimes the process just happens and other times it doesn't. And I don't know that I necessarily feel like I have that much control over how that is, but I can kind of show up over and over again. I was thinking about this today, maybe it was in the last couple of days, There was a time when I was at Bennington where I worked with a choreographer named Susan Swarbody who did this improvisational practice called emergent improvisation. And she was really collaborating a lot with scientists and especially evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists, people that worked with systems, emergent systems, like very complex emergent systems like the brain or like an ecosystem. And we would tour and meet with scientists essentially and kind of show what we did and they would talk about what they did and And we would come up with ways to kind of play together, come up with scores or forms that were based on the work they were doing. And there was a neuroscientist named Gerald Edelman, I believe. And I think he got his Nobel Prize around the immune system. What he discovered was that the cells, the attacking cells, the T cells, they were... they were kind of pre, they were already in a myriad different kinds of shapes. And what would happen when there was a pathogen was like the right, but there was like some experimentation, but the right shape that was like the closest fit would come and neutralize. And then that shape would get propagated. But it wasn't that the cells would kind of improvise in the moment. It was that there was such a vast amount of creativity around all the shapes that were present in the body that the way inoculation worked or the way immunization would work is that that shape then gets propagated so it made me think of kind of like that what I'm doing I'm making all these different things I don't really know what they're for I'm trying to stay present be playful and then I get a commission and someone talks to me oh this piece I'm thinking this and this and this and I kind of have a memory of some place I was with my materials that seems like it could be the right way but without that practice it's almost very hard to get to those kind of meaningful things that really mean something to me. I can really, as far as like a composition commission.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, being an artist, I think showing up is really... Half the battle. You have to have a studio practice in order to be receptive to anything that's possible. And I think you're right when you're sort of starting out from nothing, you're just making it harder for yourself, for sure.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And I think those things that are meaningful, they have a way of just creeping in. The sublime has a way of creeping into the mundane. I think the process can be so dynamic that sometimes for me, it's just like, let me focus on this one thing that I need to do with this two hour period. Let me record that sound onto this tape. And then rather than thinking about a more broad idea, just focusing on what's something doable in the moment. And then I think the collection of those things kind of invites something in. And then I do think there's another aspect. We all go through our day and there's little things that we see and mundane things that we have to keep in our head that have to do with just surviving and lots of other parts of life. And then there's often some stuff that's deeper, that you pay attention to once in a while. Then there's stuff that's really, for me at least, I only can sense it a little bit. I kind of sense it from in the corner. And I think sometimes making things, at least making new things, is kind of a process of finding that space and moving it, moving it, moving it, moving it over and over until I can see it more clearly. Because it's like a strong, strong feeling, but I don't really know what it is. That's kind of what's also exciting about it, that it seems to be asking for it. And like I said, sometimes that thing can just come into the forefront and other times it just feels like chasing and chasing. Yes.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, it seems like there is this flow and it could trickle or it could be quite immediate. And I'm curious, what would you call that sensing? Would you call that intuition?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I mean, I think intuition makes sense. I think to me, it may be... I think I may think of it more just like in a sense of listening, you know, how you could be talking to someone at a party and you sense there's something really important happening here, but you just, you can't hear it. Even though you do hear it, the sounds are hitting your eardrum and moving, but you're not able to take that lens of perception and move it to this other sound or conversation. It's kind of like that, that sense of deep listening. The composer Pauline Oliveros had a practice called deep listening. All right. And it really had to do with inviting more and more of the soundscape into that perceptual framework. So you start and you paint a tent, you sit down by the traffic and you hear the traffic and you say, I'm here to hear the traffic. And that means, you know, maybe if an airplane comes, it's like getting in your way and that's kind of noise and that traffic is the signal. And Pauline's thing was to kind of expand and expand that sphere of awareness so that you're kind of including everything that's in the soundscape in your listening. and I think it can be a bit of that like just expanding your sphere of awareness places that you don't normally bring attention to.

SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely, because it's almost like a state of mindfulness when you're really wanting to become present in whatever situation you're in and not having any idea of projecting anything, just receiving something. How do you see the relationship between sound, movement, and what you call the spirit of space

SPEAKER_00:

when you create? This relationship between sound and movement and sound and space That's where a lot of my interests are. And I think that sound essentially is movement. So it starts as movement. It's waves propagating in space. And what we perceive as sound has to do with this relationship between something in motion and the way that it reflects off space and the way it articulates space. And I think it does seem to me, at least when I think about my experience of the world, this feeling of way Mm-hmm. Each sound is kind of articulating a wave shape inside whatever space you're listening to it, or just even in the space of your own listening, it's articulating relationships between waves and patterns. And that's what we think of as as sound. So when you're using that as your material, making art, you're kind of shifting into a playful space with that experience of just being, being in space, walking into a room and having the room feel different. There's the sonic level, the sonic part of that is very strong and kind of, I'd say like maybe easier way to articulate some of this stuff that maybe if you were more interested in physics, you would have to go into like the realm of quantum physics or kind of have a more deep mathematical i mean i think one of the greek definitions of music was was it's like a way to play with mathematics and not to say i totally agree with that but i think that when you do music you your material is essentially movement and space so i work with dancers and and their material is the body in space we find that we share a lot of sensibilities and and language around making because we we make in time we make in space and we're both dealing with movement so that's been a really uh valuable part of my career that i've had have so so much of my musical life is my professional musical life right now at smith is just spent in dialogue with dancers So we often find we have ways of talking about what we do that when you take them out of like the musical field, like let's say like an idea like counterpoint or counterpointal motion and you apply that to two bodies in motion, there's just a lot of resonance there.

SPEAKER_02:

It's so dynamic. and so much a collaboration because it's almost like you can't not work with the dancer as you're working with the music. I mean, there's such a relationship and a cohesion together as you're going. When you are creating a piece and you've spoken about this sort of urge or this pressure building to start a project, which I find curious, can you give us some insight into what that looks like?

SPEAKER_00:

That's just the way I experience it. I think... Um, I think that does have to do with this feeling of something calling you, something calling your attention, something asking you to listen to it. I'm going to be 50 soon and it's like I've been working in art for a while and I think there's as many ways to make new things as there are artists. I've met people who feel like it's more of a revelatory process, like they receive something and it's kind of fully formed. It may come in a dream and their process is getting this thing that they're thinking about out where I don't have that at all. I don't have a tune in my head or anything like that. It's much more, it's kind of like the blurry thing is asking, it's asking to be clarified through the process of being in relationship to the materials that I work with, if that makes sense, rather than to be executed and realized. So I feel a little bit of pressure that builds that kind of, I sense it, it gets released inside a musical or a sonic experience. Mm-hmm. So I enjoy that part of creativity more too. I like being surprised. I like not knowing necessarily what's going to happen. I'm excited by... the feeling that something new that never existed could happen through an interaction with another artist or with myself. So I think it goes with my own predilections, that process. But yeah, I do find that ever since I've been making and doing shows the last 30 years or so, pressure will build and then it'll release and then it starts to build again, which is very much the way waves work. So it seems like many things I think the natural process has that quality

SPEAKER_01:

of

SPEAKER_00:

pressure and release or tension and release. Wilford described to me like with improvisation he would say something like you know you don't need to get too cerebral or too heady. It's basically just the parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system. And you play for a while if you feel like you've been in the realm of the parasympathetic and you can feel that there's a relaxing kind of sensation. That might be time compositionally or improvisationally to be looking to transition to a sympathetic kind of state, to find the other end of that spectrum of that waveform. And then if you've been in a place where there's a lot of tension and you're ready to move, you're you have the sympathetic nervous system engaged, that might be a time to find a way back into a parasympathetic state. This is in the course of like a 20 minute to an hour improvisation. And I think it seems to me that that's one of the many ways that we go through life, that there's peaks and there's troughs and in between, there's like a way to get from one to the other. And I think that's kind of where I'm at with my stuff too. These wires that are in front of me, just because where my computer is, the instrument that I've been working with most recently, the modular synthesizer, it's kind of unique quality and it uses waveforms as its basis for constructing rhythm and constructing tone. as far as the organizing principle. It's not discrete boxes the way maybe a sequencer in a drum machine would be. It's using waves and combining waves. So I could kind of get that. There's like a metaphor of it. And then there's like a very real part of that, which you combine two waves and they clash and you can make them go silent if the trough and the peak are opposing. So I think tension and release, parasympathetic nervous system feeling and sympathetic nervous system feeling, those are my guiding principles. principles for the way that I work. And that really comes from Milford.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I was just going to speak about your film. So in 2018, you directed the documentary film, Milford Graves, Full Mantis. Can you speak a little bit about this film? When you actually started the production, what inspired you? Aside from the man himself? Yes.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, um, I think it was 2002 when I saw that show at UMass. This was before I met Milford, but I was like a fan. And because of that show, because of of how cataclysmic it was to kind of, you know, first have like experienced Milford's records and his recordings, then to see him live and realize this is, you know, I just felt compelled that if there was a way to learn more, I wanted to figure that out. So I found out he taught at Bennington, which wasn't too far from here. And I went there and waited for him to show up there. I didn't enroll as a student or anything like that. And he basically saw me at his door of his office and told me, you know, come on in and then asked me to sit at the drum set and he played piano and we improvised for quite a while. That was our first meeting. Yeah, and I was so nervous because I had projected all these different ideas about what this great artist, you know, what it would be like to encounter him as a teacher and it was just like he dispelled all that stuff with a... this pure dialogue through music. And I also remember feeling like, wow, he makes it really easy to play with him because his music was so strong and so vital. I played with him several other times, many times in his studio, but several other times live and had kind of a similar progression of feeling super nervous while I'm about to play on stage with his master and then the music would start. And then I would remember at that moment again, oh yeah, this is making music with Milford. This feels as natural as it can be and doesn't feel challenging or hard at what he presents. It was like, yeah, with the wave metaphor, you can just get on it and ride it. So I went to Milford looking for a teacher and fortunately I found a teacher. He also hired me as his assistant. So we had a bit of collegial kind of dynamic from the early times and And Bennington eventually had to figure out what to do with me and put me in the track for an MFA because I was just there, you know, living there, getting in where I fit in. I was like managing audio visual stuff. I would do whatever work I needed to do around campus basically to stay there and keep learning from Milford. And I would also go to Milford's house in South Jamaica, Queens, where he lived since he was born. He was living in what was once his grandmother's house in South Jamaica, where he was teaching and gardening and just a huge community fixture in Queens. So I was working with him basically as his assistant, as his student, and eventually as his friend. And I didn't set out to make a movie, you know, with the story of this movie is very emergent also. It came from at first, I would take these one-on-one lessons with him after I would be his assistant for all the undergraduate classes. And they would often be really late at night, like midnight, post midnight. Wow. Yeah, he had an amazing energy, really amazing energy. He would come up to Bennington and essentially teach for 12 hours and then drive back to Queens late into the night. So I asked him if I could record our conversations because this was a different type of teaching than I had ever experienced. Sometimes we would talk. Sometimes we would do Yara, his martial art. Sometimes we would play. Sometimes he would show me something that he was working on on the computer with his lab view and his heartbeat soundifications. And I was kind of like, I knew it was everything was so powerful, but it was so much information for me as like, you know, mid-20s. I felt like I needed to record it to be able to reflect and analyze it. So I asked him if I could do that. So some of the earliest material in Full Mantis, this film that you mentioned, come from those tapes and those DAT tapes and stuff that just were me recording our lessons and recording our conversations. And then over the years, he would ask me to help with different things since I had access to the audiovisual materials. At Bennington, he had a lecture early on at Harvard about gardening, and he asked me to make a short presentation that had to do with his garden. He asked me to slow down gardening footage, to do an improvisational show at Roulette with him and William Parker. He had me digitize the stills for the Yara martial art history that he had in his house. And so I guess what I'm saying is a lot of the parts of the film, they have to do with things I was already working on with him as a student. And then at a certain point, we kind of decided together we were going to try to make a film, like a larger film. And that also had to do with um just having other people come through the house and try to make films that didn't quite they just didn't sit well with with him so we were kind of like let's try to do it ourselves but i had never made a feature film i had done video you know had made video art and kind of like more gallery type context but the idea of making like a full-length documentary was um seemed something people do far far away from where i was other people became involved neil young who was local at the time he was the audio visual person at hampshire marcus de mayo who was the audio visual person at amherst so there was like it was all diy no budget but we had access to some of these equipment cages at the at the colleges especially during the summer when students weren't around basically it was a 15-year process with no deadline where the only pressure was creative pressure but more so it was like the pressure of having said we're gonna make the film and then it was either are you gonna make the film or are you gonna have a whole bunch of hard drives in your closet that you have to return to over and over again trying to figure out how to make the film so At a certain point, it just picked up and picked up. And me and Neil, Neil's a drummer also. And Neil was a huge part of the creative community here. He did many different presentation series and was part of a lot of bands. At a certain point, we just said we were going to edit it. And we set two computers up, almost like two drummers. And we were just making cuts and trying to impress each other and putting this thing together, seeing how long it would be. And yeah. found a form in this emergent idea. It was very present inside Fullmanthus also in the sense that I had seen lots of films that I liked about musicians. And I think many, many parts of the process, I tried to make something that fit into those molds and basically got thrown to the concrete every time. And just, it just never worked properly until the form that needed to happen for this film kind of emerged. And that was a process of watching and listening and noticing that, you know, it wasn't right. And many times feeling like, wow, I'm not going going to figure this out, you know, and having someone's legacy and someone's life, essentially a trust to be part of that was daunting at times. Ultimately, it was really a film that had to do with me reflecting back to my great teacher, the lessons that were most resonant for me and a little bit in there of wanting to show him that I was listening to him all the time and that basically the way he taught me about art making wasn't just the subject of the film, but it was also like the way the film had to be made, ultimately. What I often say is you could look at Milford Graves' Fullmanthus' film about this amazing drummer's creative process and find instances in the film where he discusses things like polyrhythm. And you could also look at the formal quality of the film and you could find polyrhythm in the way the film is made. And that goes for almost all the subjects, the parasympathetic and sympathetic thing, which he articulates really clearly in the film about teaching yourself to cry and where where sound lives in the face, you could go through the film and look for that dialogue between the parasympathetic and the sympathetic sensation in the film and the formal part of the film. So the film ultimately became a lesson The lessons he gave me were the lessons that I ultimately had to turn to to figure the film out. So it was like this great experience where I got to kind of... And then the beautiful part of that film was it took 15 years, meaning from the first time I recorded till the end, but that wasn't 15 years of saying or making a film. It was like the last couple of years, but... I got to show him the film. And when I showed him the film, I was looking for basically permission to enter it into festivals. And he just at the end looked at me and said, well, that's me on the screen and that's what I do. And we did enter and we did have this wonderful journey with the film where he got to be in the theater and see the film with other people and have lots of talk back. So I got to have this experience. this amazing experience with him before he passed. He passed in February of 2021, where for a couple of years, I got to go on this journey with the film and with my great teacher and share these lessons with so many people around the world and continue to learn in that process, this new dynamic of like a filmmaker and a subject, which was a new dynamic for us.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes.

SPEAKER_00:

So yeah, long-term process and basically like a labor of love always that just gained momentum over time. I

SPEAKER_02:

mean, what an incredible tribute to your mentor who was so equally generous based on your experience of just first meeting him and having him allow you to come into his office and then just start improvising. How magical and so present that moment must have been for you with him. And how amazing that he was able to experience the whole evolution of that film. It really was. And I mean, if

SPEAKER_00:

you see the film, that generosity is present towards the audience. Like he really talks about the way he thinks about living and drumming and gardening and life in his characteristic way. you know, just extremely generous and open hearted way. And I think that the film really tries to put the viewer in that place to receive that full generosity.

SPEAKER_02:

And what a teaching lesson for you. Now you've now have a film under your belt, in addition to all the other things you've accumulated in your experience and learning. What would you say to to an aspiring composer or filmmaker about working in this creative state? or ways to tap in differently?

SPEAKER_00:

I would just say keep making things. Keep making things. And yeah, keep making things. And I think I'd just leave it at that. Just keep making things all the time. And I guess there's something in there of the reason to make things isn't because people necessarily are going to care about them. At some point, you have to find a different reason. Exactly. So if you're not there yet... There is one for you, but that if you're making things because you want to impress anyone or that's not going to be where the the thing comes from that keeps you making things over a long period

SPEAKER_02:

of time. What I also loved and heard throughout this whole conversation is the amount of play that you incorporate into the work. I mean, there's a certain element of play and openness that helps make you receptive when you're not pressuring yourself to produce or to create

SPEAKER_00:

an audience. Yeah, I think that's huge. Totally. Playfulness is It's the best way to start anything, playfulness and humor. I think especially when you go to school for making things, for going to school for art or going to school for music or doing something creative, the way school is set up is... People get really good at like asking questions and not that there's anything wrong with that, like kind of being in touch with your questioning self, your intelligence, your analytical self. It's not to knock that, but that I think for me, at least learning to get into a different kind of stance with the material where you're starting to recognize that it has questions of you and you can kind of be there to answer. do what it says rather than trying to figure out exactly what it is. I've found a more richer process in that kind of position with the material rather than the analytical part. And not to say that the analytical part is not valuable. I think that what I find is when it gets too much in the way or it's happening at the same time as the other part that you can be like on the highway with your foot on the gas and your foot on the brake and your foot on the gas and your foot on the brake where sometimes you need to just open up and let it come and see what's there when you're not trying to ask it what it is and what it wants to be and when it's kind of starting to tell you what it is.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, roll down the window and look at the view while you're driving.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah, take a deep breath, no doubt.

SPEAKER_02:

Take a deep breath. What's next for you, Jake? Is there anything exciting you have on the horizon that you're particularly excited about?

SPEAKER_00:

I've been kind of excited about taking this opportunity way of making sound, modular synthesis, which I've done a couple tours with soloing and moving into kind of more collaborative improvisation with other musicians. This summer, there's a new art institute in London that focuses on ecology and biodiversity and art, and they're going to feature some of the short films I made on Milford. I made a bunch of shorts, some with my partner, Sarah, during Milford's last couple of years on focuses on his last summer in his garden. They're going to show that and I'm going to make something new for this more gallery type of films on loop situation this summer. And I've really been enjoying these last couple of summers being a musician in residence at Bates Dance Festival, where I get to meet a lot of dancers working in the field, one of whom I worked with last year, Kendra Porter. We're working on a new evening length thing. And this summer, I'll be working with Shayla V, who was a dancer at Smith a while back and now part of Bill T. Jones' company. Also, I get to meet a lot of musicians who work with dancers, which is really fun. And we do a musician's concert. And yeah, working on a new record with another Milford student, Ben Hall, who was at Bennington when I was there, making new stuff. And yeah, just getting deeper into this process with this new instrument that I've been working on.

SPEAKER_02:

amazing it sounds like you're definitely in the flow of this wave whatever's happening just so many opportunities and I just love all the different modalities that you work in to really just express this part of you in so many ways it's been such a fascinating conversation today I really enjoyed learning about your creative process and how you're really intuitively guided in your work there's such an incredible pull and draw that you just trust and you just go with it. And it's so beautiful what happens when you do that. So thank you so much again for joining me today. And I look forward to seeing more of your work out in the world.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks so much, Donabell.

SPEAKER_02:

Thanks so much for tuning in today. I'm so glad you spent this time with me. If something in this episode resonated, feel free to share it or pass it along to someone who might need that little spark. Until next time, keep humming.