The Global Peace Initiative of Joss Jaffe & Jim "Kimo" West's "Santhi": The Echoes Interview
On Weekend Echoes stations, two masters of strings, from guitar to ngoni, when we talk to Joss Jaffe and Jim “Kimo” West. Jaffe is a musical explorer. West is a guitarist with a reputation for Hawaiian slack key music but he also plays with Weird Al Yankovic. Go figure. Jaffe studied tabla drum in India and has picked up instruments from around the world. Together they’ve made a serene recordings called Santhi and it includes instruments like the West African ngoni, Indian tablas and bansuri flute, and e-bow guitar.
Jim “Kimo” West: We didn’t want to go heavily Indian or heavily African or heavily Hawaiian. We just wanted to have a blend of these different influences, stuff that we like from around the world and just do it naturally, just play what we like.
John Diliberto will when he talks to Jim “Kimo” West and Joss Jaffe on Echoes from PRX.
On the next Echoes, we celebrate the 40th anniversary of It’ll End in Tears. It’s an album by a musical collective on the 4AD label called This Mortal Coil and was headed-up by 4AD founder, Ivo Watts-Russell.
In 1984, the 4AD record label was ascending as one of the go-to- places for inventive, dreamy and dark music. Emerging out of the goth scene with Bauhaus as one of their early signings, the became purveyors of shoegaze and dream pop with bands like Modern English, Cocteau Twins and Clan of Xymox. But one of their defining albums was It’ll End in Tears from This Mortal Coil. This Mortal Coil wasn’t a band however. It was a production concept of 4AD founder Ivo-Watts Russel. Although he’s associates with leading edge music of the 90s, he was fan of the psychedelic and early singer-songwriters. Spirit, Pearls Before Swine, Pink Floyd’s debut album and Tim Buckley were the sounds of his youth in England. It was Buckley in particular who inspired the album. The singer-songwriter was one of the iconoclastic artists of the late 60s and early 70s. He died at age 28 from a drug overdose. One song in particular, haunted Ivo, “Song to the Siren”, recorded in 1970 on Buckley’s Starsailor album.
Ivo asked guitarist Robin Guthrie and singer Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau twins to create a version of it. And that launched This Mortal Coil. Ivo brought in Lisa Gerrard from Dead Can Dance, Howard Devoto from Buzzcocks and Magazine, and members of The Wolfgang Press and Colourbox to cut a mix of covers and new ambient instrumentals and that became the debut album of This Mortal Coil. We’ll hear a suite of music form the album, a virtual manifesto for dream pop and we’ll shed some tears with it on Echoes from PRX.