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click pic to play film clip of melodica and sunset in oman

atop bogd uul

with andrew colwell

It was when we left the UK and ventured out to first Mongolia, then China, Oman and Dubai, that the melodica came into its own. I had done a couple of recordings with it in England - such as a trio performance at the FiZZLE Free Improv Club, my Urquhart Fifths CD, some tracks for the Hydrogen Jukebox album, and it had featured a little in some of Sid Peacock's SURGE concerts, but with weekly access to a keyboard or a piano, the melodica stayed pretty much in the background. After we arrived in Mongolia, however, the melodica became an essential tool for composition, arrangement, improvisation and performance. I used it to create all the new pieces played by the U-Bop Band, and it was my primary instrument with Khiimori.

With all that travelling by plane and train, what with the variations in temperature and humidity etc, the tuning of the instrument began to creep away from Equal Temperament as the weeks went by in Mongolia. This for me is when the instrument first came truly alive. As a keyboard player, I was used to being "in tune" with Equal Temperament, but had grown to think of ET as alien (pun intended), rooted as it is in the squaring of a circle - the division of the octave into 12 equal steps - and completely at odds with the nature of sound itself. The melodica's "de-tuning" with the process of time and environment gave me the perfect opportunity to get away from that ET perfection and explore a world of fresh relationships between notes.

For example, the timbral richness one gets when an octave or a fifth is not ET is extraordinary. Or the physical "beating" sensation one feels coming through the instrument when what used to be a minor second is played at the bottom of the instrument, and that minor second is now substantially closer than 100 cents together. This extra unexpected colouring of the melodica's sound provides a great source of inspiration for free improvisation, and I definitely have no plans to have the instrument returned to ET, in the near future at least.

Melodica in Mongolia
In Mongolia, the melodica's portability made it an essential item to take on our mountain hikes into the Bogd Uul range, south of Ulaanbaatar. No recordings atop Bogd Uul exist, unfortunately, since the wind was too strong to ever capture anything substantial, but I have enduring memories of solo improvising next to the ovoo (sacred Shamanist rock heaps) on more than one occasion. The extremes of Mongolian winter curtailed my plans for extended performance on Bogd Uul and the three other holy mountains surrounding Ulaanbaatar, and a return visit and the height of summer will hopefully bring success to my 2006 plans.

In the summer of 2006, just after the khoomei singing festival in remote Chandman sum (near Khovd, North-Western Mongolia), there was an opportunity to record a series of improvisations with a German khoomei singer, Felix, and Andrew Colwell, my friend and indispensible collaborator in all things musical in Mongolia. The session took place at my barely-furnished apartment in the Bayanzurkh ("Rich Heart") district of the city, and - after some rough-and-ready positionings of both microphone and musicians - two excellent improvisations were committed to disk. Having no piano in our 5th-floor apartment, the melodica again proved to be the right instrument for the job in hand. And, on a purely musical note, the reedy timbre of the melodica was perfectly suited to blending alongside the harmonic richness of the two-string Mongolian Morin Khuur ("Horse-head Violin") played by Andrew.

Melodica in Oman
A brief summer in Muscat, Oman, provided the opportunity to get to the beach and record some surf-and-sound improvisations at sunset. Any other time of day (except sunrise of course) is just too damn hot to do anything outside. The ebb-and-flow of the tide added a perfect backdrop to the melodica lines and chords, similar in function to the Indian tampura. And over the course of one month, it provided an aural continuity between the dozen-or-so recordings made on various dates during June and the beginning of July 2007.

Melodica in Italy
During the spring of 2008, the Northern Italian city of Carpi, in the province of Modena, was the location for some melodica improvisations amidst the local bird song. I found that the timbral qualities of the melodica fitted very well alongside those of the various bird songs I encountered near my apartment, in parks and in the farms and vineyards of the surrounding countryside. This led to my creation of the album Melodica Travels: Carpi Diem, the second release as part of the Melodica Travels series.