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Lustful Elephants Trumpet Spring

by Ancient Future

Alternate Reality Concerts from the Ancient Future

Guitarist Matthew Montfort was the inaugural performer of a series of online Alternate Reality Concerts from the Ancient Future on his birthday in February 2021. Ancient Future’s last pre-pandemic performance was in September 2019 at the Kentucky Mine Amphitheater in Sierra City, California. Indian tabla master Aditya Kalyanpur shared a video of that concert with Jhankar, an Indian arts organization in Ohio, and they came forth to sponsor a virtual concert featuring Kalyanpur, Montfort, and keyboard wizard Frank Martin in June 2021.

Lustful Elephants Trumpet Spring (L.E.T.S.) was composed by Matthew Montfort after studying Rag Basant, a springtime raga that captures the feeling of separated lovers longing to unite. The caption on an associated ragamala painting read: "Bound with a peacock's feathers...his face is as a flower. Elephant-like, he joyfully wanders in the forest among the gopis. Such is Basant raga." Montfort woke up in the middle of the night dreaming of a melody that conjures elephants in mating season. It begins with a low riff that depicts an elephant's legs, and then moves to a jump from low to high like an elephant trumpeting in excitement. The piece quickly became a part of Ancient Future's live repertoire, and a studio version is in production.

L.E.T.S. Save the Elephants

On Endangered Species Day, May 20, 2022, the audio of Lustful Elephants Trumpet Spring (Live 6-12-21) became the first streaming release from the Alternate Reality Concerts. You can save L.E.T.S. at your favorite digital music platforms by following this link: https://orcd.co/letslive. Musical elephants will appear in your accounts!

L.E.T.S. Watch from A.F.A.R. for Elephant Appreciation Day

The full video of the live performance of L.E.T.S. premiered on YouTube at on Elephant Appreciation Day, Thursday, September 22, 2022.

The video is currently available as a download with hi-res audio exclusively to supporters of the Archive of Future Ancient Recordings, Ancient Future's fan funded recording project.

Raga and Tala

A raga is a melodic recipe for a mood. Raga could be described as a "super scale" using a set of notes in ascending (arohi) and descending (avarohi) order, sometimes including prescribed alternate routes, a hierarchy of note importance, and a key phrase that shows the heart of the movement of the raga. This ancient system is both an art and a science of how musical notes create certain moods. Lustful Elephants Trumpet Spring is based on Rag Basant. However, it incorporates harmony, and in passages follows the muse of the moment over the rules of raga. It starts with an alap, an introductory melodic improvisation that shows how the raga moves.

Once the alap comes to a conclusion, the gat, or main theme, is introduced in the tala, or rhythmic cycle, in this case keharwa, an eight beat cycle. Each tala has a theka, which is a standard groove represented by onomatopoeic drum syllables and played as an accompaniment. The ending of Lustful Elephants Trumpet Spring features a tihai, a rhythmic pattern repeated three times in succession that is commonly used in North Indian classical music to create a cadence. The last note of the tihai is timed to fall on sam (the first beat of the tala), resolving the wonderful rhythmic tension created between the tala cycle and the repetitions of the tihai pattern.

Track List

>orcd.co/letslive (All Participating Digital Platforms). >soundcloud. >YTmusic. >iTunes.

1. Lustful Elephants Trumpet Spring Live 6-12-21 (Matthew Montfort) 8:01. Matthew Montfort (scalloped fretboard guitar), Aditya Kalyanpur (tabla), Frank Martin (keys)

Digital Liner Notes

Educational Digital Liner Notes- $1.98 (SALE $1.50): Add Liner Notes to Cart. Buy Liner Notes Now. This download is a seven page .pdf of liner notes for Lustful Elephants Trumpet Spring by Ancient Future. These entertaining and educational liner notes feature cover art, musicians biographies, and detailed explanations of the musical concepts of raga and tala behind the music.

The Musicians

To enable its core mission of creating world fusion music, Ancient Future has grown to become a large chamber ensemble of world music masters with many smaller ensembles within it, including this trio featuring world guitar pioneer Matthew Montfort, renowned Indian tabla virtuoso Aditya Kalyanpur, and keyboard wiz Frank Martin. L.E.T.S. was recorded at the trio's very first concert in which they presented an innovative and accessible take on Hindustani classical music and contemporary jazz fusion, with expressive and energetic renderings of raga and tala.

Quotes

"FLUID FANTASTIC: Ancient Future creates music using traditional acoustic instruments producing a calm, mind-altering sound that's difficult to describe." — Ancient Future: Global Music Without Limits, j. poet, East Bay Express