Pig hunting. That's were this all began. For the last six months I have been on a musical ride that has taken me in all kinds of funky directions. And it's all because of pig hunting.  The setting for this story is just post September 11th. Like most people I was just coming out of the fog of trying to figure out our new reality. I had been on a quest since July of that year to take digital photos of all the pigs in the Pigs On Parade in the City of Seattle.

Like many big cities, downtown Seattle was displaying hundreds of decorated fiberglass animals to raise funds for the arts. In this case it was pigs in the likeness of Rachel, the Pike Place Market's beloved piggybank. The display was only going to be around until September 30th. Time was running out. Soon all the pigs were to be carted away and auctioned off and I still had not seen and photographed hundreds of them. I took my son Derik along that day, since he is an expert pig spotter. We scored a large number of the swine. We walked all over downtown Seattle and we were dog tired. We had just made it through Westlake Plaza (a major hangout for street performers and buskers of all kinds). We just wanted to get back to the car and head for home when something reached out and grabbed us by the ears. I was not like anything I had heard before. It turned out to be the band SisterMonk Harem out busking for the day.

Derik and I were stopped in our tracks and immediately forgot about our tired feet. There was a petite woman setting the beat on a Djembe drum (the most powerful of the hand drums) with an amazing deep sound. Another guy playing a didgeridoo. There was a guitar player strumming out the rich catchy melody of the piece they were playing with his eyes fixed on on the drum player as if in some kind of trance. The song I was hearing turned out to be an early version of a song now called "Neapolitan", an instrumental piece. I knew I needed to have a copy of this immediately. Then came the next big surprise. The group launched into their next song which was a song with vocals. This one turned out to be the beautiful and meaningful tune "Confused With No Roots". Even with the challenging outdoor environment and ambient noise, the vocals came across like a jolt of pure emotion. You could immediately feel how much the singer identified with the song and was also purely enjoying the act of performing it. One recent visitor to this website descried his experience as follows:

"Kathy's voice is capable of penetrating ones very soul. It is raw in an aesthetically pleasant way. It is powerful in a Jesus clearing the temple way. Her demeanor appears to exemplify grace, humility, and sexuality. Jody’s rhythm help centers so many beautiful expressions from the other contributors. This provides the listener with a potentially spiritual experience."

When I finally snapped out of it, I realized that I was really late now. As the band took a break, I started rifling through my pockets to see if I had enough cash to nab a copy of the CD they had for sale (Residing in NowHere). This was the very first time I had been compelled to plop down hard earned cash to get my hands on some street performers material. I asked the guitar player if the first tune they played was on the CD and he told me that it was too new and not on the CD. He assured me that the CD had lots of great material and included the second song. That was good enough for me, so I handed over the cash and my son and I made a mad dash for the parking garage.

This normally would have been the end of it. I listen to a lot of different kinds of music and this would likely just be another nice addition to my music collection. However, as I walked back to the car with my son, I could not get the sound of Neapolitan out of my head. As soon as we got in the car, I ripped open the cellophane on the Resiging in NowHere CD and popped it into the player. I did not have high expectations, thinking that this was going to be some kind of garage studio quality. Instead, everything about the CD turned out to be top notch, from the packaging right down to the final note of each track. These guys were obviously a class act. What a breath of fresh air.

I listened to Residing every day over the next week and did not get tired of it. However, that Neapolitan kept coming back again, and I really wanted to hear that tune again...

By mid October I had Residing fully embedded into my psyche. One particular song "Who Am I" was a particular favorite with myself and my daughter Brooke. I thought that the lyrics captured the essence of the soul searching many of us did after the events of September 11th, even though it was written long before those events.

My daughter, on the other hand just thought the song was hysterically funny. I loved the fact that she did not even consider the questions raised by the song to be valid.

I was puzzled by the lyrics used at the beginning of the tune and decided to send an e-mail to the band asking about this as well as the status of a next album. I loved the year old material, but this had only fueled my desire to get the newer material that I had heard like Neapolitan. I wondered what the deal was and why they had not managed to pump out another CD. How hard could it be? Here is my e-mail...

The response came back the next day from Jodey Rubel the guitar player...

No mention was made of the next album. I e-mailed them back again with another prodding request. Kathleen Deanne responded this time with a list of their upcoming gigs but also ignored the CD question. There was only one solution to this problem and that was to start going to their gigs.

Over the course of the next few months I went to a lot of their gigs. I got a chance to hear both the new and the old material and also absorb the changes that were going on within the group and their music over time.

 Rather then playing in a smoky bars, this band plays primarily in coffee shops, book stores, festivals, house parties, and other interesting venues that are pretty compatible with taking kids along, so I started attending these events and taking along any of my family members that would go (see photos and venue documented on this website).

The composition of the band had continued to change and evolve with the departure of Joseph Sanchez and his didgeridoo. Joseph's instruments as well as vocals were a major component of the first album, but the bands sound is amazingly resilient and flexible and adapts readily to various instruments. The trumpet and trombone player David Ritt who had performed more of supporting role on the first CD was now making his instruments a focal point for the work. His background at the Seattle Symphony lent a more serious and polished flair to the sound while still maintaining the essential character of the music. David also brought Heather Woods into the fold as the official base player.

The foundations and core of the band, Jody Rubel, and Kathleen Deane remain the constant. Jody composes all the songs and lyrics and collaborates with Kathy to turn it into a complete work. Kathy defines the "beat" with her amazing Djembe drumming style. She also critiques and polishes the material, but even more importantly defines exactly how the lyrics are going to be sung. Jody does most of his songwriting using either meditation or by remembering his dreams. He manages to crank out a couple of new songs or song ideas per month, which is a pretty impressive pace. These two have been collaborating on music for over ten years now and their professionalism and polish is striking.

As I got to know the band a bit better and also got even more hooked into their new material, my desire to get access to this material grew. The songs they were perfecting in live performances were incredible. A number of fans including myself were asking Jody about the prospects of a new CD. By early March Jody had decided that it was time to get back into the studio. The band had now accumulated at least 16 well defined and practiced songs that Jody was now burning to record.  One of their major festival gigs - Northwest Folklife was rapidly approaching, and Jody really wanted to have the new CD out by then. By this time I had been inducted into the Harem as a volunteer worker to revamp the bands website and get the e-commerce thing going for the previous Residing CD.

Half way through March I got the following e-mail from Jody concerning the  new CD project...

It was time to get on with the production of "Original Mind".  Jody had booked his time with a local studio on Widbey Island called Blue Ewe, owned and operated by David Maloney. David was the recording engineer that did the work on their first CD and had a excellent understanding of what kind of sound they were trying to create. His studio is located up in the hills and woods on the west side of the island in the town of Freeland. It is a secluded location were the only real noise is from birds chirping or the occasional plane flying overhead. David has a unique log cabin studio set far back from his house that is continuing to be expanded and enhanced as time goes on.

It occurred to me at this point that I been pestering and hoping to see something happen from this band that I had little understanding about. My background and job revolves around computers, software, and digital photography. I have a deep technical understanding of these things, but for some reason had never taken a hard look at music. I had been following the goings on with digital music, MP3's, and - of course - the whole Napster thing. This is the output side of things. On the input side,  I had no idea whatsoever, what was involved in the production of a digital music CD. I pictured it as being what I had seen on TV in the media. A bunch of people are herded into a large sound proof room and set in front of some microphones while an engineer records the sound by pushing levers on a huge panel of some sort. You copy this onto a CD and sell it. What could be simpler? Err - not quite. I did just a little bit of research into the subject and found that it was a very complex process, to say the least.

I am a technologist by trade and I tend to focus on how to use technology to solve problems. This is what engineering geeks do. We can often be found slaving away creating elaborate machines to save ourselves the agony of doing a simple repetitive task just one more time. All problems can be solved with technology in our minds. In reality, most real world problems can be helped with technology, but the really tough issues are normally caused by human interactions. This is why Dilbert is so true to life.

As in any kind of project you have to have some kind of management structure and a bunch of workers that do what the management tells them to. In a creative project like a music CD, this task is assigned to a "producer" who is the final word on the creative and technical decisions that are being made by the recording engineer, and each of the performers.  If the band had an unlimited budget they would probably hire a producer and have them manage the entire project from start to finish. This has the main benefit of removing this burden from any single band member, which reduces arguments and stress, while at the same time adding a fresh and, hopefully, objective viewpoint to the project. In many cases, the band members can be too close to the music to see it from the end consumers perspective. In some cases the studio engineer is also assigned this role and thus plays a duel role. With a gifted studio engineer this can work out quite well since they also have the perspective of what is technically possible.

The rule is that there are no rules. It all depends on budget, personalities, as well as individual capabilities. In other words, it's messy! In this bands case, Jody Rubel was the natural person to take on the producer role. Since he wrote all the songs and lyrics originally, he had the vision for the entire work. He had already gone through the process once before and had allowed David Maloney to take on the lion share of this role previously. The downside of Jody being in the role, is that he is more of the collaborative soul then the hard nosed, no nonsense project manager. Rather then living for conflicts and their resolution, these thing cause him stress. He is also, obviously, very close to the music, so there is a danger that he could not see the music objectively and from an uninitiated consumers point of view. This is were David Maloney came in. David was effectively the co-producer as well as the recording engineer for the CD. He had a great appreciation for what the band was trying to accomplish and helped them to make the right decisions in how it should be put together. He was very opinionated on how things should be done and had a very specific style to his work.

So the whole process begins with a lot of talk among the contributors about what they are trying to do sonically on the CD. This talk is in a language that is strange to the point of bizarre. Here is a dump of some actually dump of typical music recording phraseology (taken from some of Rip Rowans writings) to you an idea...

Should the overall sound be majestic and lush, or tight and defined? Aggressive or approachable? Angry or melancholy? Dramatic, or understated? Simple, or complex. Subdued, or edgy? Tough, or pretty?

Then they also talk about the individual instruments their sound using terms like, warm, round, fat, bright, pointy,  heavy, thick, fuzzy, cardboardy, open, big, crisp, dark, full, ugly, airy, muddy, round, etc., etc.

It also sounds like the way wine connoisseurs talk about wine when they want to impress you with their knowledge. We have all heard stuff like this... "This wine produces a bouquet of black pepper, butterscotch, mulberry jam with subtle nutty overtones, followed by a wonderfully long, smooth finish."  Errr - I thought wine was made from grapes!  It's the same thing with music. There is not language to describe what people perceive, so they barrow all kinds of crazy words and try to assign them new meanings. When I sat and listened to some of these conversations, I had no idea what they were talking about and wondered if they really did either. Lots of hand waving and apparent communication. In the end - this is what Jody said they agreed on for the overall project sound.

"(David) Maloney asked what our concept for the album would be before starting to mix. He asked if we wanted a small tight sound or large expansive one and I replied that we wanted a big cosmic sound filling the universe or at least (a) stadium live concert sound. Later we criticized his overuse of reverb."

That seems clear enough - eh?

The day finally arrived to get into the Blue Ewe studio and I was invited to be on hand to record the events in photos. The objective and schedule for the first week in the studio was to get the "tracking" accomplished. This is the process of capturing all of the raw material needed to create the final performance. The basic idea is the you want to capture each of the individual instruments, and vocals as completely separate recordings that are called "tracks". This is a kind of a throwback to the days when everything was done by recoding to multi-track tape. These days they record things on the hard drive of a computer instead, but continue to call these tracks, so the process is called tracking. Don't confuse this with the tracks on the finished CD either. These are the raw material that need to be combined and massaged into the eventual CD tracks. This is yet another area were there are no hard and fast rules and the exact way you isolate each of the elements is a combination of art and science.

Think about what you are hearing when you hear a band play at a live performance. You are in a complex three dimensional environment with various players scattered across a stage as well as amplified speakers poised at various locations. Sound bounces off the walls in complex ways that lend to a certain kind of experience. One might think that you would simply move the band into a room inside the studio and setup a few microphones on stands and try to capture the same kind of sound. Sometime that is what is done, but more commonly, the recording engineer actually electronically or physically isolates each element and records it as a separate recording. He does this with the expectation of "mixing" these recordings together later on in the process to create the sound that was agreed on.  The focus is thus on getting recordings that serve that purpose perfectly and with few flaws. This means the best performances that you can get out of the artists.

The thing to keep in mind is that the recording engineer in the studio situation is capturing a kind of one dimensional sound. You might also think of this as flattened sound. The mics are positioned very close to the instruments so there is no possibility of capturing any depth as you would perceive in a live performance. That all gets put in later.

David Maloney's Blue Ewe studio is laid out as one fairly large main room with three sound isolate rooms attached to it on three sides. One of these is the control room were all the computers, and other recording equipment are setup. David's is not setup like the typical thing you see in the media with him facing the window that looks into the main studio. Instead his main console is set at a 90 degree angle to the viewing window. He does not communicate with the performers using signals and hand gestures. Instead, all the performers wear headphones and he directs them through these. The other two rooms are sound proof isolation booths for situations were the instrument or performer will bleed over into the other mics if they were not isolated. This was used on the David Ritts various horns for obvious reasons. Any blast from his trombone or trumpets would be picked up in every other mic in the main room.

There was a lot of discussion about weather Jody should hang out in one of these rooms with his Ovation guitar. Jody felt that this would not be workable since he relies heavily on Kathy for visual cues to get the timing right on the performance. In the end David simply setup Jody and Kathy in the main room and isolated them using sound barriers. These are simply movable wood walls with some sound deadening insulation attacked and Plexiglas windows so that the they can see through. David Ritt and Heather Woods were scheduled to arrive later in the morning and the plan was to completely isolate David in one of the other rooms since his horns had to have this kind of treatment. Heather would play the base behind another sound barrier in the main room on the other side of Kathy.

After these basic positioning problems were taken care of, the next problem was microphones. According to Barry Rudolph - "microphones, for a recording engineer, have been likened to a painter's brushes. The choice and use of certain mics for recording vocals and instruments have the greatest influence over the detail of the sonic pictures the recording engineer helps the producer and artist create".  One of the higher cost items that a studio has to invest in is an array of microphones. These can range in cost from a few hundred to thousands of dollars depending on what they do. The situation is complicated by all kinds of factors that are too involved to cover here.

Here is Jody's summary of the decisions that were made...

"As far as individual instruments he (Maloney) toyed with each instrument and asked our advice on the sound he was getting. For my guitar he used both a direct and a small clip on mic and although I preferred the sound of the mic to the direct I found that both simultaneously was overall richer and creamier. I expressed interest in trying a (stationary) Shure condenser mic on the guitar but Maloney insisted that I move too much when playing to be accurately tracked by a stationary mic. For Kathleen we tried the Sure condenser she used on the last album vs a new $300 hundred dollar tube mic. Initially Maloney favored the Sure thinking it was more biting but Kathy and I prevailed upon him to keep testing the tube mic as it seemed smoother. When he lowered the height of the mic significantly we found a sound that all were most pleased with."

This was the final set of decisions, which took a few hours to get setup and tested to everyone's satisfaction. By this time, Jody was expecting David and Heather to arrive, but they had not. It was getting close to no noon and Maloney had to attend to some other business so we all ended up cooling our heals out in Maloney's back yard. The first day in the studio is usually pretty tense and this small amount of chaos was already setting Jody on edge a bit. Eventually David and Heather arrived and hauled all their equipment into the studio and we all lounged around in the grass eating lunch and waiting for Maloney to get back so that the real fun could begin.

Some minimal time was spent getting David and Heather mic'd up. There was very little conversation as they simply went with Maloney's recommendations and their experience from the previous CD recording sessions. The band was now ready to start tracking the first song and Neapolitan was the first tune on the agenda. Cool! Although all the band members were playing their parts, the only instruments that were really being officially tracked at this point were the guitar and drums. The whole point at this stage of the tracking was to get the basic rhythm tracks down that define the tempo for the song and that depend heavily on each other.

There are no hard and fast rules here either. The main reason for capturing these two tracks first is that Jody and Kathy depend on each other for visual and sonic cues and their instruments are at the core of each of the songs. The base and horns are just as important, but can be layered in later as the other performers play to the previously recorded tracks. The way this band did it was a bit unconventional, I most recording studios, they say that they like to work from the "bottom up". In other words - they capture the drums and base tracks first and then add in instruments that go up the frequency spectrum from their. So why did they even have David and Heather in the studio at this point? The main reason was to provide that live experience for the other performers - which provides needed cues during the tracking.

As expected, the first attempt at tracking was not very fluid. Jody was having difficulty getting into it, and David kept poking his head out of his isolation boot at various points to complain about Jody being off the beat by a 1/16 or so. They did quite a few takes before everyone began to relax into it and get their normal timing and flow going in this foreign environment. It was not entirely clear whether they had actually gotten a great track on Neopolitan or not, but they seemed happy with it after at least five takes.

The band managed to track several more tunes before calling it a day, and they got more relaxed and confident with each one they did. By the time they finished up, they were doing the tracks in only one or two takes each. I stayed in touch via e-mail during the rest of the week, eager to hear how the tracking was going after a pretty strong start. Kathy sent this note out the next morning...

"Hey Bill - The first day of recording is always incredibly tense. I was wondering how you felt about us after seeing all our neuroses come out. Well, not all of them. Today and perhaps a little of tomorrow will be more of the same. The latter half of Wednesday, Thurs. and Fri will be tracking days as well."

I got another status report from a very tired Kathy again two nights later...

"Hey Bill - Well, another day bites the dust at the studio. Did about 6 vocal tracks and David (Ritt) did 4 songs (several tracks on some of them). They are OK with Talia playing on a couple songs so we're going to have her record soon."

So three days into the studio they were well into the material. The main tracks were all in place and a lot of the vocals and the horns were done. They were also beginning to think about the various "special" appearances that that would be putting into the mix. Talia Marcus (the artist formerly known as Toni) is a world-traveled violinist and composer friend that often performs with the band at their live venues. She is is practiced in their songs, and is well known for her classical training and improvisational skills. Jody and Kathy were eager to include her into the project. They also had wanted to introduce some other vocals into the mix, including their good friend and artist Deborah Koff-Chapin. David Ritt was also planning on doing some vocal tracks, although he does not consider this his strong suite. Although things were going along at a good pace, by Friday it was clear that the tracking was going to run over into the following week. This would put a lot of pressure on the budget and time frame to the next phase of the work - which is the infamous "mixing". The CD was suppose to contain between 13 and 15 tracks and it was looking more like 13 rather then 15 at this point due to cost alone.

The tracking went on into the second week in the studio through Monday in order to capture all the guest performance material that might be used in the final mix. By Tuesday, they were formally into mixing. This activity was taken care of by Maloney, Jody and Kathy sitting in the "sweet spot" of the control room between two "monitor speakers" with the "mix" almost blasting at them. The special studio speakers are not like the speakers you use in your home audio setup. You may not know it, but "normal" speakers actually have built in adjustments in them to accentuate various aspects of sound. Monitor speakers are specifically designed to let you hear the sound exactly as it was recorded. It thus takes a trained ear to use these correctly, since they don't "sound right" to the average person.

The process of mixing is more complex then I ever imagined. According to Lionel Dumon - " It's often useful to think of mixing a multi-track recording as akin to putting together a giant sonic jigsaw puzzle. Your job is to take all of the "pieces" (tracks), spread them across your "desk" (mixing console) and make them all fit into a beautifully assembled, suitable-for-framing portrait of a bowl of fruit or a gorgeously-rendered reproduction of Dogs Playing Poker (a song)."

Taking the picture analogy still further he states - "When listening to a soloed track, all by it's lonesome, it may sound great. A guitar track that really spreads across the spectrum can sound wonderfully cool by itself. A bass track can sound incredible fat and punchy if it contains everything from 60Hz to 4kHz. A piano can really sparkle, and that synth patch might knock your socks off. But take all these beautiful colors and mix them together, and you'll likely get what you'd see if you mixed all of the beautiful separate colors from a painter's palette together-- the sonic equivalent of something resembling a yucky brown goop!"

Not only does the engineer have all these wonderfully recorded tracks as his paints, he also has a dizzying array of painting tools at his disposal largely controlled by sophisticated software running on a computer. There are also a wide variety of special purpose dedicated devices to create various effects. Like all professional studios,  Maloney has a wide variety of equipment and seemed to be like a lot of engineers that are in a state of gradually phasing out all the special purpose devices and using more and more software running on a computers.

I don't want this article to get too technical and luckily it won't because the band had decided early on that they did not want to use what Maloney calls the "dark side" of mixing - were the engineer makes radical changes to the tracks to create special effects. This includes making it appear that people who can not sing, can actually carry a tune, and so forth. Our band wanted the mix to reflect the real performance and simply allow them to play more parts then they could normally play during any live performance. Special effects would be limited to "patches" and "fixes" to problems that would otherwise require re-tracking. This kind of thing would only be done for the really bothersome flaws, however.

If you set aside all the really fancy stuff, you are dealing with five essential elements for each track: 1) The volume, 2) The placement in space, 3) Relative timing, 4) Equalization, 5) Compression

We can all understand volume. This just says how loud each track is played relative the others.

The placement in space in the simple stereo world is just how much of the track comes out of each speaker, which fools us into hearing a sound as coming from a specific place around us.

The relative timing includes any kind of delays that are introduced that effectively create different kinds of echoes and lend to a sense of depth. This includes the effect called reverb.

Equalization is fairly complex. This includes changing how much of the total spectrum the sound can occupy that is being used. You have probably seen high end audio equipment that has a "graphic equalizer" with a whole series of levers controlling how much the sound is boosted in different audio ranges. The simple system built into almost all audio players is the bass, treble adjustments we all make in our home audio systems.

Compression is a bit harder to grasp, but it basically just watches the sound as it plays and reduces the volume of things that are over some threshold of loudness. It is designed to leave all the lower volume sounds alone. It has all kinds of tweaks that we will not discuss since the band did not want it applied very much at all for this CD.

I asked Jody some more questions about what the agreement was on all this and he had this to say:

"I said that I wanted compression to be used sparingly in the mix. There are definite spots where it is very effective but I didn't want it automatically smeared on because I was afraid of losing the live edge essential grittiness. Maloney tends to use it as a homogenizing process and I prefer my cheese raw. I was also able to listen to it before and after compression sounds and make decisions according to the actual sound as opposed to individual biases. As far as stereo effects, Maloney claims to be monitoring where things go according to weight and balance so he'd set the bass and drum apart and guitar and horn are separated. sometimes he'd split the guitar in two and send them in both corners. I feel that we did miss some panning opportunities merely by being distracted with the rest of the goings on and limited by financial constraints as to how long we could afford to spend on one piece."

By the time Friday rolled around the mixing was going quite well, but it was not completed. The goal was to have this CD completed before the big Northwest Folklife festival which was running May 24th through the 27th. It was now May 10th -- only two weeks away from Folklife and the idea of finishing all the production work was looking bleak. Maloney was also booked with other clients all the following week and did not know if he would have any time to continue the mixing on this project. Things were not totally up in the air...

With the clock ticking, Jody and Kathy put some pressure on David Maloney to give them some more studio time during the following two weeks leading up to Folklife. The did some half and one full day session and had ten of the thirteen tracks in very good shape by the fourth week in May. Maloney made one final push in the final week and completed the first ten tracks of the project. The idea now was to make a kind of promotional CD, or Folklife edition with this smaller set of tunes to help make some sales and help pay for the final project.

This leads us into the final phase of a CD's life, which is something called "mastering". This one surprised me. You sit in the studio for hours on end fine tuning all this stuff and and get it just right. Then you get to the end with all these carefully mixed tracks and have to adjust them again!  It seems hard to believe - but it's true. In fact the process of mastering in higher budget situations is suppose to be handed off to a mastering specialist that only does mastering. Rip Rowan has this to say...

"Mastering is one of the most important and least understood roles in commercial music production, and you have to understand it if you're going to engineer a product that will stand up on CD, on tape, on RealAudio, and most importantly, on the radio."

This is the key to understanding mastering. The process of mastering is suppose to check that the sounds are setup to play in a wide range of listening situations. This includes things like cars, boom boxes, radio, home theaters, headphones, etc. etc. There are many difficult tradeoffs in trying to create something that sounds good in all these different situations. The mastering engineer is suppose to provide another fresh set of ears and make sure that the final product "works" in all these potential applications. However, the band had very good results with their first CD using the same guy for both mixing and mastering. They opted for the same treatment this time as well, which goes against the conventional wisdom, but keeps costs inline with budget. It also made it possible to get the CD master out the door - just in time.

During this final week before Folklife the band located a local production house that would burn some CD's from the master with some minimal artwork applied to them for a reasonable cost. We tossed together some artwork and Heather printed some simple covers and lyric sheets. Everything went down to the wire with Jody picking up the finished prduct on the same afternoon as the festival began. Late on Friday, I decided to head down to the festival directly to nab a copy of the finished CD and maybe to snap some busking photos. I ran into Jody about 10 minutes after hitting the grounds and we all hung out watching some performances. I had not had the foresight to bring a CD player with me, so I had to wait for my trip home to actually listen to the CD.

It was a tiring an stressful week and Kathy was not really up to busking that night, but Jody convinced her to give it a shot. They decided to hang out in a main stairwell and try to attract some attention from the passing traffic. Not much was really happening. After a little while, they did attract some other players that started a pretty cool jam session. There was a flute player named Isaaac that started improvising to the tune, after only hearing them for a few seconds and did a great job. This is the amazing thing about the SMH style of music. The core of it is quite flexible and adaptable to being supported by a surprisingly wide range of instruments. Each of these is effectively a different mix of the same tune and a new experience. It's one of the things that makes the such a great band to follow.

After hanging out and watching the busking for awhile, I went off to do some other shooting and then get into my four wheeled CD player to see what had come out the other end of the mixing and mastering process. They ended up with 10 tracks out of a total of 13 that made the cut for the final CD. The tracks are: Neopolitan, Brothers in Light, Great Mind, Waking Souls, Shekinah, Original Mind, Lost Forsaken, Tree of Listening, Tarantula, Her Name is Light. Missing and still to be mixed are Moonsong, Spirit Wonders, and another instrumental called New Samba (to be renamed).

The Neopolitan track seemed to get off to a slow start but gained momentum as it went. This was the track that started me on this entire journey so I had high hopes. I was quite happy to finally have this tune in CD form, so that I could play it over and over now. However - to my surprise - this was not my favorite track.

I hit Brothers in Light and was floored. This is a very long song at just over 7 minutes with some amazing changes. This one is a signature piece for the band since it represents the kind of variety you can expect  - not just from song to song, but within a single song. The song include a little of everything including a great rap sequence. You then transition directly in to Great Mind, which has the best pure vocal intro that Kathleen has ever done in my opinion. It's an immediate grabber, with a strong impact that leads directly into a beautifully performed melody that is both simple and catchy. The emotional impact of this song on me was very strong. I literally had tears streaming down my face and missed my freeway exit in the process. I was part way to Vancouver before I came around. Luckily the song is only 4 minutes long, and leads into Shekinah, which has a nice long smooth intro featuring Talia's violin and also has David Ritt doing some surprisingly good backup vocals that blend nicely with Kathy's. Original Mind - the title track for the final CD was next. This is nice laid back song with fine vocals featuring their friend Deborah Koff-Chapin. Next was Lost Forsaken, which I have told the band could easily have been written about me based on the lyrics (but was not). It's another laid back tune, were you can enjoy the melody, lyrics, and vocals and relax into it. Tree of Listening was up next. I was very familiar with this one from live performances. It has a fairly long intro that sounds almost like a classical piece until you hit the 1:45 mark at which point you get hit with a very cool trumpet blast and what may the second strongest vocal track on the CD. The Tarantala track follows, which is a really fun memorable catchy guitar guitar centered piece and also features some sequences of Kathy on Dumbek instead her usual Djembe drum. The CD ends with Her Name is Light, that has a kind of poetic spoken word intro that changes into another high charged blast of emotion.

Of all the tracks, I would have to pick Great Mind as my favorite track. After that things get very difficult and I can not really pick favorites, it is all to good and it would just be splitting hairs.

Needless to say, I was impressed. I played the CD many times over the course of the next few days on various players like boom boxes, car stereo, as well as the typical cheap portable CD player with headphones. It held together quite nicely, even with some pretty big changes in volume. My wife Donna does not like to listen to music loud so we listened to it a what I consider low volume a few times. I like to crank it up a bit, so I did that frequently while listening in the car.

On the closing day of Folklife, SisterMonk Harem was scheduled to play as the closing act for a range of world music bands. The weather at Folklife this year had been exceptional, with rain threatening, but never materializing each day. Unfortunately, the clouds rolled in on that Monday night and managed to chase away part of the crowds by the time our favorite band took the stage. A hard core and animated group remained and were treated to a marvelous concert as we all got soaked and danced in the rain.

The story continues. This was suppose to be the end of the story, but there is still more to come. One side effect of not finishing the complete CD in time for Folklife, but doing the EP version is that people can lay there hands on the current mix and master and weigh in on what they thing. And weighing in they are!!!  Friends and family, as well as all the hard core types like me are freely making are thoughts known on the way the music sounds. Jody is getting a variety of e-mails with all kinds of notes and suggestions on how to do things differently or better. This has to be weighed against the costs involved, but makes the project even more interesting then it was before. How will it all turn out. In a few weeks, we will find out!