Willy Schwarz - Live For The Moment

1. Leela Leela 3:39
2. Family Reunion 6:43
3. Live For The Moment 3:55
4. Arise 5:29
5. Saturday 3:56
6. Sticks And Stones 4:38
7. Laila Majnu 3:36
8. Masters 4:08
9. Minstrel Man 4:35
10. Lord Why Me? 5:55
11. Wake Me Lord 5:26
12. Holy Science 7:29

All songs composed by Willy Schwarz,
except "Masters", composed by Willy Schwarz & Warren Senders
All songs published by Rattay Music (GEMA)

THE PLAYERS

Willy Schwarz: vocal, accordion, piano, doira, santur, dramyan, sarod,
bass, bells

INDIA
Atul Keskar: sitar, dilruba, surbahar
Ajit Soman: flutes
Ramakant Paranpje: violin
Rajiv Devasthali: tabla
Rajendra Durkar: dholak, duggi, naal
Rajendra Zawalkar: tabla, tablabols
Dilip Kale: santur
Pramod Gaekwad: shehnai
Nikhil Sohoni: manjira
Vijaya Sundaram: classical guitar

USA
Paul Wertico: drums
Larry Gray: bass
Don Stiernberg: guitars
Stuart Rosenberg: fiddle
Howard Levy: pennywhistle
Thomas Keany: bass
Alejo Poveda: drums, latin percussion
Jose Valdez: piano
Tomas De Utrera: flamenco guitar
Bob Bowker: backup vocal
Joanna Klein-Hettinga: vocal
Judy Story: backup vocal
Warren Senders: backup vocal
THIRD COAST STRING QUARTET
Steve Gibbons: violin
Edgar Gabriel: violin
Bill Kronenberg: viola
Eric Remscheider: cello

PRABHAT BRASS BAND
Sripad Solapurkar: saxophone
Sarjaino Yaidande: clarinet
L.N. Tashewalle: clarinet
H.L. Bajantri: trumpet
Laxman: trumpet
Allah Kungoll: euphonium
H. Bajantri: euphonium
Allaudin: bass dhol
Ram Mane: snare drum
Jahangir: katchi dhol
Kashiniath Bansode: thapa dhol

Fr. Edwin Vas: recording engineer (India)
Scott Steiner: recording engineer, mix engineer (Chicago)

WILLY SCHWARZ

When I first met Willy Schwarz he was a voice on the telephone, forcing me to grind my brain cells into Hindi. Given my name by our mutual friend Steve Gorn, Willy was visiting my home city of Boston while touring with a theater group. Once back in English, we scheduled our first meeting, the beginning of an extraordinarily rewarding friendship and artistic collaboration. A few days later, we took a long automobile trip together, from Boston to Vermont and back again in a single day. The eight-hour journey was filled with snatches of song, improbable but true stories, recollections of the great, the near-great and the not-so-great, and (a vivid memory for us both) an hour spent listening to Krishnarao Shankar Pandit‘s dazzling vocal improviations on the car stereo.

Willy‘s own personal odyssey has taken him all over the planet in search of musical repertoire, instruments and essences. Essence is the central word here; although a capable virtuoso on more instruments from more different countries than most of us could name (let alone play!), his personal tales are always those of a seeker after truth, after essential quality - and the development of technique or acquisition of repertoire always seems a means to an end. Reflecting the dualities which give him energy, Willy‘s Chicago appartment is a nice blend of neat and cluttered instruments and recordings are everywhere, and he can just lay his hand on any of them at a moment‘s notice; need to learn an Uzbek wedding song? Just give him a minute and he‘ll pull out the appropriate LP- or more likely, burst into a lively rendition of his own. For Willy, music is a way of life, a way of thinking and breathing.

What forces collided in creating this unlikely musical world citizen? How did the fifth child of an Italian Jewish father and a German Jewish mother wind up travelling the world studying and playing music from almost everywhere? An eclectic folk singer in his teenage years, he serendipitiously acquired a sitar at seventeen, and within a few years was learning Hindustani music from master musicians - first in the United States and then, by the early 1970ies, in India. By the mid-seventies, with a solid base of knowledge in the Indian tradition, he expanded his horizons, learning from other streams of world music and applying his protean creativity to hundreds of instruments spanning the alphabet from accordeon to zarp.

Throughout his years of touring and performing (covering the spectrum from Tom Waits to Klezmer weddings, in scenes ranging all the way from avant-garde theatre to singing commercials), Willy never lost sight of his own expressive center. Over the decades, his notebook filled up with songs embodying his unique mix of the eccentric and the wholly traditional. He‘d been imagining them for years, refining his concept and waiting for the right set of circumstances. When I played him some recordings I‘d made with a group of gifted musicians in the Indian city of Pune, it seemed providential, a few months later he called me excitedly from California: he‘d made up his mind to go to India and record the basic tracks for the album you have in your hands. After weeks in his Pune hotel room preparing the material, and a fortnight in the studio, he took the master tapes back to Chicago, and incorporated some of the city‘s finest session players in a ground-breaking collaboration. I was there for the initial tracking and the final mixes, and it was a pleasure, an honour and an education to watch Live for the Moment evolving, for Willy‘s imagination is a rare and valuable specimen indeed.

It‘s been suggested that genius is the ability to sustain two contradictory propositions in the mind at once without going mad, and by this criterion Willy, who is both seeker and skeptic, is surely a great mind. A poetic style which expresses genuine spiritual aspiration on the one hand and heartfelt doubt on the other hand is linked to a multifaceted musical conception which allows him to find harmonic motion on the gestural flow of a Hindustani raga, backing Indian melodies with chordal sequences without compromising the integrity of either. Virtually every piece on this album embodies such a dialectic, whether in a resolution of seemingly contradictory musical elements (as the Hindustani zydeco of Lord, Why me?) or in a lyrical conceit like the ethically indignant nihilism of The Master‘s Gone Away (with an Indian brass giving us undiluted hit of raw, outraged energy). Yet these approaches are always reflective of musical necessity, not en passant flavour-of-the-moment aesthetics. In Willy‘s perception, national, cultural and historical boundaries lose their restrictive force; what remains is fuel for the play of imagination, for the game he describes so joyously on Leena Leena.

"... my whole life through, I‘ve always loved the thought of You, and I will try to serve You too..." Willy sings to God in Wake Me Lord, and then (summing up the existential dilemma which gives the song its force) "whether You exist or not." Later in the same song, Willy reanimates an image from an old Sacred Harp hymn, singing: "Broad the road that leads astray, and thousands walk together there - but wisdom treads a narrow path, with here and there a traveller." He may deny possessing the wisdom his songs so amply show, but we who listen can hardly doubt: Willy Schwarz is such a one, and we, his lucky fellow-travellers.

Warren Senders