established 01/04/00 Sustaining the principles of love in action : ubuntu /sharing PORTFOLIO OF CULTURAL JOURNALISM : the doors of culture and learning shall be opened struhuru@gmail.com

On another note let me Quote once again from Nachmanovitches book, ´Free \ Play`. " One of the most insidious kinds of pressure to which an artist can succumb is the pressure to be accessible. Well meaning advisors may tell you that X is accessible, marketable, popular and so on, and there way be artists who naturally do X out of their own being and become popular and wealthy. But if you alter your work to be more X-ish, people will spot it as inauthentic; it will not be heartfelt X because it does not originate in your own being. By all means develop and revise your work to communicate more and more clearly; but if you alter one word in order to please some imagined market "out there", the integrity and originality of everything you do is at risk. Whereas if you create your own material in your own way, developing artwork that is more and more authentically yours, people will spot it as genuine. In resisting temptation to accessibility, you are not excluding the public; on the contrary, you are creating a genuine space and inviting people in. Ideally, artist and audience are close, inter-responsive, accessible to each others minds and heart. But in a world of mass economics and mass communication, producers and middlemen of all kinds insist that our work conform to a lowest common denominator. Natural communication between artist and audience is stimulated by the banalities of market research and advertising. This is a particularly insidious process because it arises not from anyone's bad intentions but from the fundamental nature of large systems and institutions. The danger to the artist is that under pressure of these institutions he might internalise those demands and replace his immaculate, natural voice with an artificially synthesized one. On the other hand, if we self-consciously try to be original, we can wander in the opposite direction, going for a distinctive voice or look that sets you apart from everybody else. Young artists easily fall into the trap of confusing originality with newness. Originality does not mean being unlike the past or unlike the present; it means being the origin, acting out of your own centre."

“Rules don't make works of art. Works of art make rules.” Debussy

“What unites classics and jazz is the search for new things. When you are searching you make statements like John Cage did with silence for 3 minutes fourty-four in 1945. He arrived on stage opened up the piano to premiere his new work and sat there for exactly 3:44. He closed the piano and walked off the stage and that was a piece of music. He can't do that again. What he was trying is what happens within silence is actually music. He wasn't doing that to try and be different. He was a deep thinker. When you try to be different it becomes a gimmick. When you search you become experimental.”

Carlo Mombelli is neither classics nor jazz. He is an improvised musician, one of the highest evolved human beings I have ever been blessed to know.