‘Through the telling of stories we try and make sense of our world’.
I invite you to share a live story and a journey.
A story in the present tense, a journey about to begin!
Our ancestors gathered around the campfire, our grandparents the radio, our parents the TV. We gather now around the luminescent glow of the World Wide Web.
Is this the ‘The Global Campfire’?
The Millennium draws us to reflect. Our technology has woven a powerful web but has eroded personal contact, many of us crave a ‘sense of belonging’.
My journey in Central Asia is an epic quest. In the tradition of storytelling, I invite you to participate to engage.
Let me hear your voice.
I’m a musician. Musicians are traditionally storytellers, poets, philosophers, priests, teachers and inventors. In Central Asia this holistic role is alive. As we encounter these musicians, shall we rediscover the integration of life and music?
Nomadic musicians now settled in former Soviet cities, cling to their music. Do they retain an urge to wander?
This will be a ‘live’ journey from ‘concrete jungle’ to wild nomadic pasture. I will travel from the ‘Holy City’ of Bukhara through Samarkand, the ‘Pearl of the East’, along the borders of Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Together with the nomads I plan to venture into the Tien Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan and the Alatau range of Kazakstan.
I want you to share and contribute to discovery, to meet others whose lives echo distant truths. We will encounter musical traditions and ancient rituals closer to nature and rooted in a shamanistic* past. The desire to search for ‘alternatives’ and ‘chase’ dreams persists.
Share your dreams
‘When we travel there is no past or future. We engage with the moment. So much that we take for granted, is suddenly in question as we pack our world into a suitcase.’
Much ‘modern’ life is built around obsessive planning for some mysterious almost mythical ‘future.’ When you travel you live in the ‘now’ – that for me is dangerous and exciting.
As this aircraft descends to Almaty on the 28th July I will again be truly alive!
I become ‘the digital hunter-gatherer.’ Tell me what you seek
What’s out there in that dark city full of new smells and unfamiliar sounds? What secrets lie on tomorrow’s page?
For the next six weeks share the sounds and culture of Central Asia, experience that sense of the present, engage daily with each new corners’ revelation.
The ancients said ‘the person who arrives is not the one who left’.
Join me on a journey of 2500 miles, a thousand faces and as many stories. As the ‘Old Silk Road’ merges with the ‘information superhighway’… perhaps we too will change?
- ‘the drummer who gives life to the spirit’