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

Ooh look! While having a bit of a rummage around the internetty thing, I came across an article on Morgan Szymanski in November 2008’s edition of Classical Guitar magazine. Lo and behold, we get a mention: http://www.morganszymanski.co.uk/content/news/featured-artist-classical-guitar-magazine-november-2008/

Thanks very much to Valentin Gerlier, whose track This Is the Waltz adds a bit of 3:4 to the mix on Tropical Forest Project: Ecuador.  He’s name-checked us with considerable enthusiasm on the front page of his site http://www.valentingerlier.com

Well have we got a crazy 3 months coming up. In readiness for promoting the album we’re making a short film/documentary about our story so far, featuring some of the contributing musicians along with footage of Ecuador we’re hoping to record on a trip we’re planning; we’d to visit some of the forests we’re helping to protect and we’re taking a sound-recordist to capture the noise, buzz and hoo-ha for the album. (We’re hoping to involve some rather splendid and well-known people in our journey so keep checking back for news on our success - eek.) Next up, our website’s about to get an upgrade to start accepting donations and pre-prders for the album AND we oh-so-know we’ve gotta get into Twitter and do more with our Facebook & MySpace pages. Finally, it’s all hands to the pump on getting the tracks mixed & mastered along with all the designwork for our beautiful, gorgeous absolutely-must-have booklet to accompany the album.

I’m so excited, and I just can’t hide it.

Great news!  Jorge Drexler confirmed this week that he wants to contribute a track to the album, and his producer is searching for an alternate take of one of his songs for us.  So (provided they find one) the line-up for Tropical Forest Project: Ecuador is complete.

Jorge is a poetic and politically engaged lyricist.  In 2004 he became the first Uruguayan to win an Academy Award for composing the song “Al Otro Lado del Río” (Across the River) for the soundtrack to The Motorcycle Diaries, a wonderful biopic about an early episode in the life of Che Guevera.  Though Drexler himself sang the song on the movie soundtrack, it was performed by Antonio Banderas and Carlos Santana at the Academy Awards ceremony.  His latest album Cara B (2008) received a nomination for Best Latin Pop Album at the 2009 Grammy Awards.

We have a few additional instrumental parts and finishing touches to put on the album before it can be mixed & mastered - I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve had an email from our producer, Peter Larsen, saying he’s just added some more elements (cello, violin and vocal harmony) to Martha Tilston’s track, with 2 of her musicians.

In typically understated Scandinavian style he was “mildly blown away by their musicianship” and how they “took the track from the universe of amazing, to even more amazing”‘.

Officially his favourite song… this week!

What a crazy Dane.

I am always a little apprehensive about recording new Ginkgo artists, partly because I don’t know them and partly because I worry my game is up, they’ll see me as I am, a fraud, a scheister who can’t get it together.

Maybe it’s all because I am Danish.

The Nextmen turned up on my doorstep, all 3 of them. 2 blokes and a girl, I figured, in a fight against me they would definately win but since we were here to make music I quickly forgot about that.

They were wildly enthusiastic and friendly, me a little nervous. I made them a cup of tea and after disposing of the wet tea bags in the bread container I showed them the flat. They walked straight into the living room and said hello to my wife Mel who made fun of their names and asked them if they were American (good to have a funny wife, it creates an easy vibe).

Time to make music and was blown away by their level of musicianship. We recorded all 3 of them at the same time live in my bedroom (idea for album title: live from the bedroom!!!) Brad on Fender Rhodes, Dominic on acoustic guitar and Zarif lead vocals. We had some problems with the Fender Rhodes, it did’nt cut through properly but we went ahead with the recording anyway, my attitude was a bit like, “hey it’s rock’n'roll” and I was keen to get something recorded.  They nailed the track first take and after fixing a few rhodes parts afterwards it was time for another cup of tea. I had a good chat with Brad (chat with Brad is a good rhyme), he and Dominic are also producers. Sometimes putting 3 producers in the same room can be a recipe for disaster and again I was amazed how well we were able to communicate without the typical schoolyard competition, I really liked all 3 of them a lot. Zarif is an incredible vocalist and in her field probably one of the best I’ve worked with.

And so it was time to finish, they left and I cleared up. It took me 3 hours to set up for the session and one hour to take it all down. Weird how it seems easier to undo something than to do it - it took several years to build the twin towers and a couple of hours to tear them down which is actually quicker than it took for me to setup my studio for the Nextmen.

On Friday I am going to my good friend Andreas’ studio to put the rhodes through a guitar amp and record it back into the track, then off to have a drink.

Hope this was interesting.