#101 Stephen Jay, Bassist Composer - a podcast by Planetary Gigs Society

Stephen Jay is a fabulous musician, composer, and really smart and spiritual guy! He has played based in Weird Al Yankovic’s band for decades, but also has amazing insights and stories, such as music in Africa during his younger years. He also is working on new discoveries about rhythm and pitch, as he explains in this podcast. We recorded this under the Pavilion one afternoon at Wooten Woods during Spirit of Music Camp.

Stephen’s mother was a beautiful pianist and his father played several instruments. So, seeing his mother in such joy while playing, Stephen knew when he was only about 5 years old that he wanted to be a musician. Music was simply paramount around the house when he was young, he says. He started piano first, then guitar when he was about 10, and bass when he joined a band at 13. His high school group Covington Tower was good enough to get a record deal!

He majored in music and composition in college, and was fortunate to hang around with some real luminaries on the cutting edge of music, including John Cage! Nonetheless, he’d always been inspired by African drumming, so he and his wife Barbara left for West Africa in 1971. It was quite a trip to get there, which he describes in the podcast, but central to the experience was that the Africans he met in the villages were really still of the hunter/gatherer culture and they had a really special relationship with music.

Musical instruments were seen as living beings, and “music nourished every phase of life; … music was everywhere, and it was alive and beautiful.” Everyone did music, and musicians were not in some rarefied atmosphere as today in modern areas. Stephen says, they had no written religion, other than “a sanctity and respect for all things, including inanimate things.” He says quantum physics has shown this to be correct. There was also no money or ownership out in the wild; everyone shared everything. He says Africans felt “music was a life form, not an art form. Gigantic, spanning the entire universe, and all know time, that lives, and needs musicians to help it live, at least in the audio realm.”

He is currently exploring pitch and rhythm and you will have to listen to understand it. Essentially, he says, harmonic intervals each have their own signature rhythms. You can check out www.stephenjay.com for an article on this topic, among others.

Stephen says that we have tapped into music to make a better world; look at how much peace, fellowship, and brotherly love music has brought to us. He says music has an inescapable beauty. When you witness something so beautiful and so much larger than yourself, it diminishes ego, and with that you worry less of things that are to come, have less fear of the unknown, and so we can get to more love and peace. “Music is sacred; it’s not a commodity.” He also says, “Music can help us distrust our fears.”

“Music, and art, is our savior,” says Stephen Jay.

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