Remba Records bio

Sometimes just a phrase, or even a single word, is enough to spark a musical composition and/or improvisation. "The desert is singing"--I'm not sure exactly when or how the words first came to me. It was probably close to a decade ago. At first I thought it was going to be a band name, which didn't happen. I do know that I kept the short sentence in the back of my mind, transferring it to the memo section of my electronic organizer. Whenever I got a new organizer, I would always type it in there again, without exactly knowing why.

As a lifelong resident of Southern California, the strongest bond I share with my region of origin, along with the unique multicultural experience of my Silverlake youth, is that with the geography, the landscapes. I've spent countless days and nights in those environs, an urbanite refueling his spirit in nature's filling stations.

So I knew that the brief sentence had a couple of meanings to me: First, it evoked the wonderful music that is unique to the desert, that wind that sings to all those who listen in short and long phrases, both symmetrical and asymmetrical. Native to the area and a musician as well, the sentence also had the additional meaning of my unwittingly being a voice for the (artificially irrigated) desert that has always been home. It sings to us, and it sings through us as well.

Eventually the phrase inspired a short composition/improvisation, which then became the title of a bigger work in progress, a complete CD.

While I'm a jazz musician by discipline, and a jazz violinist by lineage, descended from Stuff Smith and Grappelli plus the moderns Ponty, Shankar, Charles Burnham, and Eyvind Kang--I consider this to be an electric violin blues album. The forms (such as they are) aren't generally blues forms and other musical dialects and accents pop up out of nowhere, but it still feels like a blues CD to me. The human themes that have inspired the compositions are the same ones I figure inspire everyone else: life, death, love, yearning, loss, spirit.

After being on the outskirts (sometimes even the suburbs) of the L.A. music scene for over two decades and making my debut as a leader at this juncture, I would have to be considered a late bloomer. There have been countless gigs from Madame Wong's West to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, from blues and salsa bands to symphony concerts and western swing shows. There was the avant garde collaboration with the band CPD, with whom I recorded a CD entitled "The Process." There have even been small brushes with celebrity, such as the years spent with the Radio Ranch Straight Shooters, with whom I appeared on the soundtracks to a David Lynch film ("The Straight Story") and a mainstream baseball flick ("The Rookie"). It's been an interesting musical journey, yet somehow I feel it's just beginning, here in the desert land of Southern California.

David Strother
Joshua Tree National Park
October 19. 2006