David Lewiston
Musical magpie who made beautiful recordings of traditional playing in Asia and Latin America
DAVID LEWISTON, who has died aged 88, was a sort of globetrotting Cecil Sharp – a British-born musical magpie who toured the world recording and collecting traditional music from dozens of countries, helping to generate interest in what is now known as “world music”.
His quest began in 1966 when he took a leave of absence from the banking trade magazine he worked for in New York and travelled to Bali, where he thought he might record some music. During a stopover in Singapore he spent $160 on a Japanese Concertone 727 – one of the first portable stereo tape recorders.
Bali in 1966 was trying to develop tourism, and locals were eager to help. In his 10 days in Bali Lewiston sometimes recorded three groups a day. As a result the Concertone gathered the first stereo recordings of bell-like, percussive gamelan music and the “kecak”, or “monkey chant”, a raucous re-enactment of a battle in the Ramayana epic, in which the monkey hordes came to the aid of Prince Rama in his battle with the demon King Ravana.
The kecak featured some 200 men squatting in tight concentric circles, mimicking the intense chattering of the monkeys by bouncing the syllable “chak’’ back and forth in a frenetic, ricocheting crescendo over a foundation of hypnotic repeated melodic fragments.
Back in New York, Lewiston had no idea of trying to find a record label to issue his recordings, but then, as he recalled, “I was riffling through the stacks in Sam Goody’s [record store] on Third Avenue and discovered there was this company called Nonesuch that actually put out records of this sort of stuff. So I sent a brief query to Nonesuch asking, you know, ‘Are you interested in listening?’ Got a prompt response, saying, ‘Yes, please bring them in.’ So I did.”
There he met Tracey Sterne, a former concert pianist who was making her name at Nonesuch by producing music that other major recording labels ignored.
There had been ethnographic recordings well before the 1960s, but most of them had been dry collections of short (and often poor quality) samples, issued for study rather than enjoyment. Tracey Sterne’s approach, by contrast, was to treat music from any culture not as an academic discipline (Lewiston’s definition of an ethnomusicologist was “someone who takes wonderful music and analyses it until all the joy has been lost”) but as music that was beautiful to listen to.
Even though field recordings had never before been marketed as entertainment, Tracey Sterne decided to use Lewiston’s Bali recordings to launch Nonesuch’s new “Explorer” series. Music from the Morning of the World: The Balinese Gamelan (1967), although still a sampler, would become a touchstone of the fledgling world-music movement.
From 1967 Nonesuch issued 91 albums in the series, documenting music from Asia, Africa, Latin America, India and elsewhere, to which Lewiston contributed some two dozen collections before the series ended in 1984. The Explorer series’s greatest “hit” was probably Golden Rain (1969), featuring the full version of Lewiston’s recording of the kecak. In 1977 Golden Rain was one of the recordings selected to be sent into the cosmos on board the Voyager space probe.
David Sidney George Lewiston was born in London on May 11 1929. He studied piano at Trinity College of Music, but while there, he grew interested in the Eastern-influenced spiritual teachings of GI Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff was also a composer, drawing on non-western traditions, and after graduating, Lewiston moved to New York to study piano with Thomas de Hartmann, Gurdjieff ’s musical collaborator.
To make a living Lewiston became a financial journalist, working for Forbes magazine and then for the magazine of the American Bankers’ Association, but gave up the day job as his “creative stumbling”, as he called it, took off.
Lewiston’s travels took him round South America, Tibet, India, Pakistan, Morocco and Central Asia. He liked his recording sessions to be informal. “It should be a party,’’ he explained. “It should be totally enjoyable for musicians. If it’s enjoyable, it’ll be reflected in the music making. These aren’t session musicians. These guys are farmers, and when they get together for music, it’s basically to have a good time. I don’t want to interfere with that.’’
In Colombia, he found, the music stopped when the aguardiente (firewater) ran out, so he would turn up with extra supplies. Sometimes, though, “I provided too much, and the musicians passed out.’’ In Indian villages he learnt to look for a man wearing a shirt, tie and jacket, most probably the local doctor or an administrator or a schoolteacher, to act as an intermediary and tell him whether the “traditional” music he was recording was really local music or whether it was a Bollywood tune.
After Nonesuch ended its Explorer series in 1984, Lewiston’s recordings appeared on the Bridge, Shanachie and Ellipsis labels.
In later life he moved to the Hawaiian island of Maui.
David Lewiston, born May 11 1929, died May 29 2017