Love Is Always There: A Concert I’ve Dreamed for Forty Years

By David Rothenberg, Safina Center Senior Fellow 

Douglas Ewart and instruments. Photo by: David Rothenberg

The year is 1979, I’m seventeen years old. My mother has just come home to Connecticut from one of her forays into the big city. She’s talking animatedly about a great musician she heard in an art gallery, Douglas Ewart, flute-maker and storyteller. “What a grand personality,” she announces. “I was transported by those sounds…”

Next time my birthday rolled around she had a present for me: an end-blown Japanese-style shakuhachi flute made by Mr. Ewart himself, all wrapped and bound beautifully in multi-colored ribbons and strips. A musical artwork made out of bamboo itself. I smiled with exuberance—maybe she did understand what I wanted after all.

That was a long time ago, and I’ve been wanting to perform with Douglas Ewart ever since. Last weekend we finally got the chance. In another Manhattan art gallery, Zürcher, a home for adventurous music for many years. In from Minneapolis, the now professor emeritus has brought with him a cornucopia of wild homemade flutes and stories. “We live in a bamboo world,” the Chicago-born shaman exclaims. “We walk on bamboo floors. We play bamboo flutes…. Forget plastic, get back to the Earth. Our oceans our clogged, our birds are choking…” His stories have been around forever as he makes them up ever anew.

Douglas and David. Photo courtesy: Gwenolee Zürcher

I wanted a third foil to our encounter so I thought a bass player would be good. Why not invite someone destined to say no? Immediately I thought of Bob Dylan’s sideman, Tony Garnier. He began his career playing avant-garde jazz right in this downtown neighborhood. “Well,” he mused. “The never-ending tour ends a few days before. Sure I’ll do it” and he was there.

Tony Garnier at the bass. Photo by: David Rothenberg

So my forty-year-old dream was realized. I could hardly believe it. None of us knew exactly what would happen but when it did we all three realized we had always been there, that the music came from the Earth through us and would outlast us long after we would be gone, whether or not anyone was still there to hear.

Tony, David, Douglas. Photo courtesy: Gwenolee Zürcher

But don’t worry about that, you all can hear a piece of it right now: