Orcas’ Greatest Hits by Avant-Garde Sound Artist & Naturalist Jim Nollman—with Whale Collaborators—to Be Released August 14
–Magnet Magazine
The world has a long history of improvised collaborations between musicians—human musicians, that is. Smithsonian Folkways presents a new album of interspecies collaborations between humans and orca whales, recorded through underwater microphones called “hydrophones” in what may have been the world’s first underwater music recording studio. Created between 1985 and 2002 by avant-garde sound artist, guitarist, naturalist, author, and lifelong innovator in the practice of interspecies communication Jim Nollman, Orcas’ Greatest Hits is due August 14. It sits firmly in the traditions of boundary-breaking artists like John Cage or Marcel Duchamp and also celebrates the influence of conservationists like John Muir and Jacques Cousteau. The album is accompanied by extensive and insightful liner notes and track-by-track notes written by Nollman himself.
During the 1980s, when he recorded the bulk of Orcas’ Greatest Hits, Nollman innovatively synthesized countercultural environmentalism and avant-garde art in the Pacific Northwest. What we hear on the album is the product of that synthesis, and of the years of care that he and his collaborators (fellow artists, musicians, Tibetan Lamas, children, and everyday people) dedicated to creating artistic and personal relationships with the whales. We also hear focused listening by both the cetaceans and humans as they search out sonic space among one another, finding in that dialogue potential common ground for deeper understanding.
Today, Folkways shared the album’s first single, “The 47 Whale Raga”; six minutes of resplendent whale song and electrified strings. Recorded in 1986, “The 47 Whale Raga” is a composite gleaned from several hours of recordings made over the course of about a week, beginning with Nollman playing electric guitar on an August night, improvising around the Indian raga “Jinjhoti” and capturing the attention of three orca pods. HEAR/SHARE: https://youtu.be/1OKusBfV1I8
“The 47 Whale Raga” is drawn from the many recordings that Nollman made when he and his collaborators set up a summer artistic residency and community space at a cove along British Columbia’s Johnstone Strait, dubbed Orcananda due to the nearby gatherings of whales. In Orcananda, the group made music and broadcast it into the water via underwater speakers, hitting the record button only when the whales responded. Orcas’ Greatest Hits is drawn from over 60 hours of interspecies collaboration collected in these hydrophone recordings. Nollman and his cohort took a deeply caring approach to developing sonic relationships with the orcas and other animals they encountered. They kept their volume reasonable and performed after dark, both to facilitate moments of inspiration and to keep the sounds of motorboats to a minimum.
“Most nights the whales would eventually arrive. From far away, their whistles resounded through the speakers like a pod of bee-bop saxophones. Certain calls rose high above this fray, slithering, soaring, dive-bombing as if Jimi Hendrix himself had been reincarnated as Orcinus orca,” Nollman notes.
He adds, “The orcas themselves never seemed to care much about any specific genre or instrumental virtuosity. What did excite them was music with a groove… Resident orcas vocalize with one another in two distinct modes: the frequency modulated whistle and the pulsed click train. To a musician, ‘frequency modulated’ is an apt description of melody. A pulsed click train is rhythmical.” The orcas would often respond in the D major scale.
“The Three Jimmies” finds Nollman practicing James Brown-inspired funky “chicken scratch” riffs accompanied by keyboardist Jonathan Churcher and a digital rhythm track.
In “Rattle and Conk,” musicians agitate rattles and other shakers, pound a hand drum, and rub and clatter “dolphin sticks,” to which Nollman adds his guitar. Four orcas join in, vocalizing in lively response to Nollman’s loping riff.
Orcas’ Greatest Hits encompasses a number of musicians, including GRAMMY-winning oboe player Nancy Rumbel on “Nancy’s Connection” and master flutist and recording artist Gene Groeschel, whose store-bought elk call resulted in a call-and-response of that name.
Astute listeners will hear a natural echo effect throughout the album, the result of instruments and whale voices resonating off the four-hundred-foot-deep, glacially scoured strait bottom.
Nollman got his start composing music for theater in college before joining the new music scene that developed around Berkeley, California’s KPFA Pacifica Radio. He began producing experimental pieces for the legendary station, culminating in the performance of a burning piano that earned him notice in The New York Times. In 1979, after experimenting with playing music with animals, he founded the nonprofit Interspecies, writing extensively for the organization’s newsletter for over twenty-five years. Nollman collaborated with John C. Lilly, who worked with Timothy Leary and Ram Dass and recorded an album of dolphin sounds for Folkways Records in 1973. Nollman’s cult classic album Playing Music with Animals came out on Folkways in 1982. It featured songs like “Froggy Went A-Courtin’” and “Music to Eat Thanksgiving Dinner By,” and was recorded over the prior decade with whales, Death Valley kangaroo rats, wolves, and turkeys. Nollman has also recorded many albums of music without animals.
Nollman has authored numerous articles and books about interspecies communication, including pieces in precursors to and descendants of the deeply influential counterculture magazine The Whole Earth Catalog and a number of books: Spiritual Ecology: A Guide To Reconnecting With Nature; The Charged Order: Where Whales And Humans Meet; The Man Who Talks To Whales: The Art Of Interspecies Communication; and The Beluga Cafe: My Strange Adventure With Art, Music, and Whales In The Far North. In 1987, Interspecies was invited by Greenpeace, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and the indigenous Iñupiat community to use music and sound to help free gray whales caught in an ice hole off Barrow, Alaska. Nollman went on to consult for the U.S. Navy, in order to help prevent whales from being harmed by sonar.
The Atlantic said, “Nollman’s Interspecies argument… is that we only apply certain human techniques to the natural world. Our academic interaction with animals only happens within the domain of science and objective tabulation. If we went out in nature and attempted other human activities near and with animals, we might better learn, or begin to sense, how their minds work.”
The nonprofit Interspecies previously released three of the songs from this new album via cassette in 1987 under the title Orca’s Greatest Hits. That release contained only 25 minutes of sound and has been long out of print. “Ninety percent of the music on this new release has never before been made public,” Nollman says. “Some of the best excerpts I myself hadn’t heard since the day they were recorded.”
Orcas’ Greatest Hits Track Listing
1. Orca Yelps and Belches (1986)
2. The 47 Whale Raga (1986)
Jim Nollman, electric guitar
3. Rattle and Conk (1985)
Raymond Maurice, main rattle; Katy Nollman, Gigi Coyle, and Joan Halifax, various percussion; Jim Nollman, electric guitar
4. Boundary Line (1985)
Katy Nollman, Gigi Coyle, and Joan Halifax, vocals
5. The Elk Man (1992)
Gene Groeschel, elk call
6. Queen Charlotte Slide (1999)
Jim Nollman, electric guitar
7. Little Sir Orca (1985)
Milton Taubman, vocals
8. The Big Blue Blues (2001)
Jim Nollman, electric guitar
9. The Three Jimmies (1988)
Jim Nollman, electric guitar; Jonathan Churcher, keyboard and beats
10. Nancy’s Connection (1987)
Nancy Rumbel, oboe
11. Breakthrough Greeting (1986)
Jim Nollman, electric guitar
12. Deep Waters (1988)
Jim Nollman, electric guitar
13. Katy on Whale Time (1992)
Katy Nollman, keyboard
14. 60 Minutes (2000)
Jim Nollman, electric guitar
