Congratulations to album contributor Dobet Gnahore on her Grammy in Best Urban/Alternative Performance category!  Dobet collaborated with India Arie to cover Sade’s song “Pearls” [Soulbird/Universal Republic], and India Arie accepted the award on behalf of the two collaborators thanking Dobet for her inspiration.  Here’s what Dobet says on her myspace blog:”Originally a studio project, the two artists recently met in Washington, DC and performed “Pearls” together for the first time in a special concert honoring Dr. Martin Luther King held at the John F. Kennedy Center. President Obama spoke at the events and the entire first family was in attendance.”

As we’ve mentioned there will be two or three forest interludes on the album creating track clusters, like the silence bisecting Robert Wyatt’s ‘Cuckooland’ but with more of an emphasis on continuity.  Yesterday I met wildlife sound recordist John Paterson at his home studio - he was recording in Ecuador during December - to begin shortlisting soundscapes, birdsongs and so on.  There’s a hilarious moment where we overhear a Howler Monkey harrassing a Capuchin Monkey, while the Capuchin breaks off branches and throws them at John.  A triangle of territorialism!  We’re tempted to include the sound of a Chestnut-Mandibled Toucan purely on the strength of its name.

Today, on the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’, brilliant wildlife sound recordist John Paterson arrives in Ecuador on behalf of Ginkgo Music to begin making recordings for Tropical Forest Project: Ecuador.

There are many perfectly good recordings of individual birdsongs by ornithologists, but John belongs to a small group of expert sound recordists who specialise in making recordings in nature that vividly bring to life stunning and detailed 3-dimensional soundworlds in crystal clear stereo. We asked him if he would record for the album ambient forest soundscapes and birdsong from the forest reserves that the project is benefiting.

Our vision is that brief (eg. 10-45 second) extracts will be introduced between some of the tracks to add vividness to the whole project. Robert Wyatt introduced a complete silent break into the middle of his Cuckooland album, and our thinking is that these short interludes will create clusterings of tracks punctuated by moments of forest soundscape. I guess we could call these ‘forest clearings’.

It is perfect that he arrives on this day of all days…

We are eternally grateful to Abbey Road Studios who have agreed to master Tropical Forest Project: Ecuador.  It is an honour for us and for the project that the studio that made the Beatles’ albums and has such an incredible history will be handling the mastering for us. Onwards and upwards!

Audio engineer Peter Junge will begin mixing the album next week.  Peter was selected as the mixing engineer for the project after a number of auditioning engineers submitted mixes of David McAlmont’s song ‘Fog on the Mountain’.  We selected David’s track to put the engineers through their paces because it is the most complex on the album, including a 16-piece orchestra recorded live at Blackheath Conservatoire of Music. Peter’s mix really stood out as stunningly rich, warm and beautiful.  In addition to being a freelance Recording, Mixing and Live Engineer Peter is also a Lecturer at the SAE Institute of Audio Engineering in London.  We’re delighted that Peter is bringing his talents and his ear to the project.

Looks like Vivienne Westwood is going to help us out by dressing one of our artists for a magazine photoshoot. More later…

In case you hadn’t noticed, this year sees both 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his momentous On The Origin of Species, and earlier this month I had the pleasure of attending many of the events at Cambridge University’s Darwin Festival 2009 as a volunteer. Each day of this six day festival took a different theme, distinguished academics at the forefront of research into evolutionary biology and other disciplines giving presentations and taking part in panel discussions. Luckily they put me on babysitting the audio-visual system so I got to sit in on most of the presentations. Given Ginkgo Music’s mission to safeguard the future of this planet’s forest biodiversity through projects linking music & ecology we had to be there, particularly when a number of events were devoted to Charles Darwin’s impact on the arts.

Many highlights, and several themes I’d like to pick up on in the coming days. Here’s one: recent research presented on the origins of human cooperation. A commonly held assumption has been that early humans initially developed cooperative behaviour in order to fight it out with neighbouring tribes and so gain dominance over local resources. Professor Sarah Hrdy of the University of California presented evidence suggesting that almost the opposite may have been the case - that the initial driver for cooperative behaviour was the cooperative rearing of young or, as she put it, ‘alloparental provisioning’. Bringing up baby. Whilst an Orang-Utan mother may be in unbroken contact with her baby for up to 8 years and can therefore rear only one youngster at a time, early humans and hunter-gatherers had the advantage of being inclined to pass baby to aunts, uncles, grandparents, siblings and friends - and mothers could therefore rear more than one child at a time. I find something tremendously hopeful in the implications of this understanding of the way human beings evolved cooperative behaviour. It lays less emphasis on competition, fight for resources and ‘winner takes all’, more on community, and indeed, leaves space for culture to have its impact on our survival because culture mediates the way we cooperate. If it is true then perhaps we don’t have to accept the idea that we are hard-wired only to compete blindly for domination of local resources and shake spears at each other, but first and foremost to figure things out cooperatively. I will be following this line of research with interest.

In the next installment: Sir David Attenborough’s speech at the Festival Celebration Dinner, King’s College.

So, this week I’ve been mostly trying to get us to Ecuador. The plan, the dream, the vision, etc is to take our splendid, young and totally-up-for-it sound & film crew from Bournemouth University deep, deep, deep into the forests and then leave them there to be consumed by bugs and creatures and mulch. Hmm… that’s not right, although there’s probably a movie idea in there somewhere, with a series of ever-more-preposterous sequels no doubt. But ack-chew-leigh, we want to record the sounds of the forests for possible, indeed probable, inclusion on the album and the sights for our promotional film, which is certainly taking shape in terms of interviews with our contributing musicians. Now, here’s the even more interesting bit than the last interesting bit; we want to take Vivienne Westwood with us! Yes indeedy. Dom and I saw Vivienne talk at a discussion on Arts & Ecology at the RSA a few months back and were both totally blown away by VW’s passion for the rainforests; imagine the awareness we could raise with her support. We might even get to meet Ecuador’s president. So we’ve asked, and we wait. And then we thought it would be great if Virgin Atlantic could help get us there; Sir Richard Branson has committed $3bn over the next 10 years to fight global warming and we’ve heard a little rumour that he’s a bit interested in music (he had a shop or something), so the perfect choice, non? And then right, get this, I’m chatting with my friend Mandy over Skype (we both wore masks, but don’t ask) and she mentioned that at Virgin Atlantic’s 25th birthday celebrations, who should be on the guestlist but none other than Vivienne Westwood! I allowed myself a small squeal of delight. Are the planets aligning on this? Fingers, toes and everything-else-crossable crossed. I’ve also sent a proposal to Radio4 this week as I reckon our journey would make for marvellous, arresting and inspiring radio, And finally, could I just give a grateful shout out to Anna Francis at Mango PR who has offered to help us out with getting ground support from tour companies in Latin America. I’m constantly heartened by the level of generosity shown to us at Ginkgo Music; humans are alright.

Last night Ginkgo Music and Tropical Forest Project: Ecuador had their second mention on radio. Multi-talented Josie Gallo, film & TV editor, radio presenter and member of the crew helping us film the artist interviews for our promotional movie, was presenting a pre-Glastonbury warm up show on Frome FM and kindly gave us a mention. Her radio rocks! Or something.

Oh Lordy, at last

Jorge Drexler’s producer is sending us a song tomorrow(ish), so they have something for us. Phew!

Plus we have a string quartet recording the backing track for Vania Bastos ‘The Rain Makers’ on Friday the 3rd of July; Ben is hard at work as we speak on this.

So we may have ALL recorded material in end of week commencing 6th July - how cool is that?

I’ll keep you posted