~

~

~

About the music – No Beginning, No End

This recording marks the end of a long journey that began in early 2006. My great friend and
musical soul mate, Joe Lovano called me one afternoon while I was at home lunching with my
wife and daughter to ask me to write music for a performance at MIT. The concert would
celebrate the 80th birthday of Bradford Endicott. Being major supporters for the arts in
Massachusetts and MIT in particular, Bradford and his wife Dorothea commissioned the piece
for this occasion. I accepted the commission with the idea that the piece would be written for the
MIT Wind Ensemble featuring Joe and Judi Silvano for a performance in May of 2007.

While I had more than a year to write the piece, I had never written for this type of ensemble
before. I didn’t even know there was such a thing. I called Fred Harris, the conductor of the MIT
Wind Ensemble and the one who suggested me for the project, to ask him what exactly a wind
ensemble was. Fred sent me a stack of scores and recordings that he thought would be
particularly of interest to me.

While I had a number of writing projects to complete prior to this one, and a summer’s worth of
gigs, it became most difficult for me to keep up as both a player and a composer simultaneously,
so my plan was to finish the other projects, get through my summer gigs and settle down in the
fall to start writing the piece.

Well, needless to say, the world changed drastically for my wife and me that fall. On October 2nd,
as my daughter was driving home from her martial arts class she had a terrible car accident and
was killed.

At the same time, I was in Los Angeles having just given a clinic at a university there. I was
having dinner with a close friend before leaving for the airport. While at dinner, I received a call
from my wife Lorraine. Though tears and cries on the phone she said to me, “Kenny, something
really bad has happened. Kat has had a car accident.” I said “Oh no. How bad is she hurt?” And
she said, “She’s dead!”

It took me a few minutes to process the news. This couldn’t be! Katheryn’s destiny is to live a
long life and do great things. This is something we read in the newspapers about other people,
but would never happen to us! Slowly the news sunk in and I began to scream and had to leave
the restaurant immediately. Fortunately, Delores Aguanno, one of my dearest friends, was driving
me to the airport. As she paid the bill, I sat on the sidewalk crouched over, experiencing the
worst nightmare of a parent’s life. Dee was just as shaken, but somehow we got to the car in an
attempt to drive to the airport. I was in no shape to go to the airport and be among strangers but I
had to get home as fast as possible. Luckily I was booked on a redeye that would get me back in
New York by early morning. And, thankfully, Dee canceled all her plans and accompanied me on
the flight home. I was most fortunate—if one can use that word—that she was with me at that
point in time.

We have an incredible community of friends where we live who came to our aid with so much
love. We wouldn’t have survived without their support. They took care of us for months,
cooking, cleaning, and helping us to arrange things necessary under the circumstances. One of
these friends offered us their condo in Puerto Rico for as long as we needed. I canceled all my
gigs and we traveled to Puerto Rico in January to decompress with Lorraine.

When we arrived in Puerto Rico, we were alone for the first time since the accident. It hit us like
a ton of bricks, so we did nothing but sleep for almost the first week. Both of us would pick our
head up for a moment; look out at the beautiful sea through the window, and collapse back into a
deep sleep. As the week progressed, we started to feel a little better, and began to revive our
spiritual practices of chanting and meditating. Every morning we’d wake up, almost with the sun
and do these practices. Through all the pain we started to experience occasional moments of
illumination.

Lorraine and I are most fortunate to have enlightened teachings that have shown us another way
to view our lives. There are two ways to view events in one’s lives; one way is living exclusively
in the human drama. When bad things happen we suffer and when good things happen we
celebrate. But there is another way, a transcendent way. This is viewing the events of our lives
through the divine eye if you will. In the first state of consciousness death is the end of things,
loved ones lost. In the second state death is a transition to another plane, another destination
though a succession of lifetimes. Souls often travel together throughout the journey, teaching
each other and learning from each other as they go.

In those inspired moments we still felt Katheryn’s presence and our connection to her. It was
more like we had to work on our love and light in order that our tears alone wouldn’t impede her
journey. I know when I am being lifted by these practices because I start to write poetry. Light
starts to stream out of me and being an artist, a communicator, the light manifests in words,
music and whatever other media I choose.

To affirm that death was in fact not the end of life I wrote a poem titled No Beginning, No End:

No Beginning, No End

Voices from within,

Voices from without.

Voices fill the void

Voices fill my heart

Voices from the wind,

Voices reach out

Voices sing the lyrics,

Of love devout.

No beginning, no end.

Rather a series of moments.

Flocks of souls travel together

On wings of eternity.

No beginning, no end,

No such thing as loss.

The voices say,

That we are never lost.

Family of souls

Share a love sublime.

They play throughout the universe

And beyond all space and time.

Now is the gift.

Earned over many lifetimes.

Loved ones may depart,

But spirit never dies

There is a flame

That lights the way

It blazes with the force

Of a thousand suns…

There is a flame

That shines, that shimmers.

With this flame She lights the way.

Through the night of transition.

A flame so small

Yet so mighty

Illuminates the inner world.

And all the outer universes.

The light of a thousand suns

Is Her pedestal

The light of existence

Is Her servant

The goddess dances

Her intoxication.

She dances the Self,

The source of all being.

Life is not a start,

Death is not an end.

There is no loss

To the God of time.

Who are we?

Where are we going?

What do we represent?

What is the goal?

Time, changes,

These are the tools of improvisation.

Voices sing our song, which has,

No beginning, no end.

~

The question of what to do about the MIT commission was not even addressed, nor did anyone
approach us about it. Needless to say, I wasn’t in the mood for writing a wind ensemble piece at
that time. But suddenly I had a reason to write the piece! I would use phrases from my poem to
create a simple message. The singer, Judi Silvano, would sing melodies on single notes or pedal
points. In Indian music this is called the Sa. In western music we call it the root. The singer
would sing words of wisdom on the Sa and the wind ensemble would swirl around her like a
hurricane, she being in the eye of the hurricane.

Now I came home on a mission, a conviction about a piece that needed to be written, a
composition I very much needed to write. And I had about a month to write it, so I got right to
work. With such a short time to complete the piece, I began writing day and night. At one point I
had a gig with Betty Buckley in New York City that lasted two weeks. I wrote all day, played the
gig, and then wrote through the night. Lorraine came in to be with me. She’d watch movies all
night and I’d sit at the desk with headphones as I wrote on my computer. I was so grateful she
was there because I knew that I’d be more productive if she was with me.

This was a time of madness. I was on the phone constantly with Fred Harris, getting advice about
the conventional rules of writing for wind ensemble. As I completed each section, I’d send them
to Fred to rehearse. He would send recordings back to me and then we’d discuss what was
working and what wasn’t. As I look back on this time I honestly don’t know how I did it. It’s a
blur, a dream, but it engaged me and put me on a mission that helped me climb out of the abyss,
if only for a moment.

In April, I traveled to Cambridge a few times to work with the ensemble. The week before the
concert, Joe, Judi and I went to MIT for rehearsals. At the performance, the piece was ragged and
unfinished at best, but the MIT students had worked hard and did a great job. Judi was fantastic
and Joe, well, he’s a modern miracle! He played what was a very loose and difficult part so
naturally that it sounded like he was improvising throughout the piece. I don’t know who else
could have pulled that off.

Ragged as it was, the piece was a great success. It was exciting, dramatic, at times complex and
most importantly, deeply moving. We all knew we had been part of something special, but with
only one performance the piece for me still left a lot to be desired. Bob Brookmeyer once told
me, “If there are problems with the piece you’ve just written, fix them on the next piece.” Which
is another way of saying don’t look back. But this piece was too important to me. I vowed I
would rewrite it and record it someday.

No Beginning, No End didn’t have one great moment where people came together in a common
cause, but two. Moving forward to early 2009, I’m in a car with Jeff Levinson, producer of Half
Note Records, the recording arm of The Blue Note Jazz Club. While driving I played a recording
I had made of the concert. Jeff was so moved by the piece that he said that Half Note had to
record it for their label. While Half Note is known mostly for CDs recorded live at the Blue
Note Jazz Club—two of which I made for the label—amazingly they were now willing to record
a 37-piece wind ensemble that might be perceived as more of a classical piece then something
from the jazz world. That was quite a gamble for them! Given the go ahead in the spring of 2009,
I began rewriting a large sections of No Beginning, No End, now with the luxury of hindsight. It
was such a chaotic piece in some ways that I didn’t really know what worked and what didn’t
until I heard it. With the benefit of a few years to re-listen, I accentuated what worked and
eliminated what did not.

Jeff devised a way to fund and complete the project, but we both realized that we would have to
rely on the good will of many other people. Enter Dave Schroeder and the NYU Steinhardt
Music Program. Dave is head of the Jazz department. He used his position and resources to help
organize the ensemble, which was mostly made up of NYU music majors and some
professionals, and he secured the Frederic Loewe Theater for us to record the piece.

In August 2009 we gathered, almost 40 of us (minus Joe and Judi who would overdub at a later
date) at the theater to simultaneously rehearse and record No Beginning, No End. I was most
fortunate to have Paul Wickliff as the engineer for this recording. He has been a close friend and
partner for many years.

At the recording session there was a great feeling amongst all the participants that I compared in
my mind to the famous “Great Day In Harlem” photo. There was an indelible sense in everyone
that something special was happening. We experienced three days of recording that were
amazing and moving, and I believe enriched us all. I was so happy that it was such a win-win for
everyone involved.

In another case of symbiosis a Danish documentary filmmaker, Søren Jensen came to New York
to video everything involving the recording sessions. He also came to our house after those three
days and shot footage and did interviews with Lorraine and everyone he could who were
involved in our lives or Katheryn’s life. There is a lot more to say about the miracle of what
Søren got to shoot, but for another time.

As Jeff had said many times, the project felt as through there was a destiny being fulfilled. I too
believed that events were being guided by an unseen hand and always guiding us in the right
direction. In my spiritual path that is known as grace. It has not been easy for me to use the word
grace over these last three years, but grace it was nonetheless. Other pieces on the CD were
yielded through grace as well, they all happened as if by accident. For example, the last thing we
recorded before turning out the lights in the theater was an afterthought I came up with involving
the harpist and two of the mallet players. We improvised a piece for marimba, vibraphone, harp
and piano, I gave them an E mixolydian scale, which they all knew, and told them to pick notes
from that scale and just play them gently. The E mixolydian scale is very much like an Indian
raga and allows me to languish, creating an Alap, a sort of introduction where one can serenely
explore the notes of the raga. I told them, “As you play around the scale, listen only to the entire
sound. Whenever you notice your own notes more than the ensemble sound, stop playing, and
refocus your awareness on the whole, then begin again.” There is an open mind and ear that is typical of my favorite improvisers where one is aware of the whole and not aware of oneself. I gave them this one simple direction and Jeff just loved it. That piece is the closer on the CD that Jeff titled Coda.

This is what is so wonderful about pure improvisation; individuals surrender their smaller ego,
their finite self and merge into the One. This is not only my philosophy for music but for spirit
and life itself. There is a word in Sanskrit, maya. It means illusion. This is an important word in
Hindu philosophy and religion because Indian wisdom recognizes that we are born into illusion.
What is that illusion? We think we’re separate from each other. The truth? We are all one divine
organism that may be called “God.” What always spoke to me about Indian philosophy is that it
says we come into this world as perfect beings, absolute angels. Our only sin? We don’t know it.
I think of myself as a fallen angel more than anything else. A lot of this music is about nearly
attained love and joy. That is more my experience in life than anything else. But this bit of
wisdom I just mentioned gives me hope.

The other pieces on No Beginning, No End:

Visitation: Waves Of Unborn is a choir piece I wrote after the recording of the wind ensemble.
There is another shorter story about this that again illustrates the unseen forces that guided this
project. In 2007, while I was writing the piece, Lorraine heard it played back (synthesizer
version) many times. She kept saying she thought it should have a choir added to it. I knew why
she felt this way because when I’m writing I use virtual instruments (samples) of the actual
instruments in order to play it back. But for Judi’s part all I could use was a choir patch (sound)!
So yes, all the vocal parts sounded great as a choir but they were, in fact, Judi’s part without the
words.

When we finished the recording in 2009 Jeff said to me, “You know, I really think there should
be a choir on this piece. It just feels like it belongs.” I agreed and said that Lorraine would love
him for that suggestion because that’s what she had been saying all along. I noted that I didn’t
think there would be much opportunity for a choir to be added so in order for it not to be
gratuitous the choir had to appear somewhere else on the CD with another, newly written piece.

I went home to compose and for some reason I felt like writing the new piece first, and then
going back to the wind piece. That is when Visitation was written. Afterwards I was dragging my
feet in doing the other job of adding the choir to No Beginning. The following week I was at the
Blue Note playing with my quintet. On a break, Rich Shemaria came up to the dressing room.
Rich contracted all the players for the recording and helped me in numerous ways. (More about
his contributions in the thank yous on the CD) I said, “Guess what Rich, I’m going to add a choir
to No Beginning, No End! He looked at me in the eye incredulously and said, “What on earth are
you doing that for?” That one sentence liberated me! I knew what he meant. When you write a
piece with one set of instruments in mind, you orchestrate the weight and tone of every passage
for that ensemble. You don’t just add other ensembles. That will bury the original orchestration.
But I hadn’t let myself realize it until Rich slapped me in the face with his statement!

But because Lorraine and Jeff exhorted me to add the choir, a new choir piece was born. My idea
for the piece was that this was what music sounded like on the other side, that wondrous place
where souls dwell between assignments. I envisioned a world where music wasn’t a “thing.”
Music was the air itself. Harmony could be heard and felt at all times and was influenced by
every movement of the beings living there. If you waved your hand in the air you heard a chorus
going “Whoooooa” with the relevant chord. That was the motivation behind Visitation: Waves
Of Unborn.

Cry Out
In 2006 after Katheryn’s death, Lorraine and I were just numbly hibernating day and night in our
house. I said that I couldn’t write any music but that’s not strictly true. One day I went into my
studio to write a string quartet. I can’t say exactly why because I can’t remember most of my
thoughts and actions of those first three months. Kat died on October 2nd. Three events were
coming up that would absolutely kill us: her birthday, December 1st, Hanukah and Christmas. We
celebrated both as I am Jewish and Lorraine is not. It gave us a chance to teach Katheryn about
both traditions, but for her it was an opportunity to cash in (presents!) on both holidays plus her
birthday! Needless to say, December was just hell. I cried mostly and at some point I must have
needed a melody to express the crying so I went to my studio and decided it would be a string
quartet. I never finished it but I did manage to write a melody that expressed the pain. That
melody remains in the piece today.

When we started the CD project I knew the string quartet would have to be on it. I thought I had
almost finished it and all I would just have to do was dot the I’s, etc. But when I opened up the
file I found that it wasn’t even half finished. More music needed to be written to finish the piece.
I completed it with what I think might be my best pure composition to date, and more
importantly, without losing the cry of the melody.

Thank you.
Kenny Werner

For further information about Kenny Werner:
http://www.KennWernerLive.com