CSA Delivery

Hi, a produce delivery from me 📦

I recently performed a piece for singer and orange by vocalist/composer/scholar Matthew Rahaim‬. Matt was a graduate student in ethnomusicology back when I was an undergrad in the music department at Cal, and he was wondering where he might find a singer attuned to the orange when he came across me explaining orange hour.

Have you seen someone light up biting into an orange slice? A good orange provides respite, allowing us to dip into some spring of joy that flows under all that we’re saddled with in our day-to-day. In short, the orange is a spiritual fruit. (In contrast, I’d say that the peach is a carnal fruit, not because its emoji can signify buttocks, but because it’s a great pleasure to eat and not so much a portal into something immaterial.)

Matt explained the title “Ras” (sometimes written as Rasa in Sanskrit) as the essence, what you get when you squeeze out all that is incidental. He gave the example of extracting sap from a maple tree and then further distilling the maple syrup into the concentrate. Or in theater, when the audience is overcome with grief for someone who dies onstage, though they haven’t actually lost anyone. It’s pure experience, an “ache in your heart that doesn’t have an object.” Violence and destruction take place to get to the ras (see orange carcass in video). All of this made sense to me and was a timely reminder that I’ve still got the juice/ras, even if its latest vessel has shattered.

I remember telling a friend years ago that my musical intent in its indie folk/pop form is the same now as it was years ago when it was coming out as avant-garde, experimental music. I don’t know what the vehicle for my ideas and talent will be in years to come but the ras will be constant and constantly maturing, fermenting.

I’m going to stop clinging to incidental parts of my life as something core. It seems containers are due to crack.

Oh, in writing this, I remembered my piece for an onion from 2012. I guess life is learning and re-learning the same lesson.

After the performance in which I ate a whole raw onion, whenever the jazz department chair saw me, he would fake an expression of disgust and exclaim “onion!”

Now that I’m in a veggie state of mind, I’m also recalling a cover I did of the Beach Boys’ “Vegetables.” Any excuse to snack.

For a recipe using a lot of vegetables, let my mom show you how to make kimchi.

Please direct any produce-singing gigs my way. Also, I’m trying to be proactive in reaching out about performance opportunities for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month instead of just taking gigs that find me. So if your workplace has an AAPI employee resource group or a diversity & inclusion manager that may be interested in having me as part of their APAHM programming, please let me know.

Here’s a new song, so hot off the piano that the lyrics are still being finalized.

🔊 Listening to Erykah Badu’s “Green Eyes”