Jen Baker: Didgeridoo

DIDGERIDOO
Over the past 10 years, I have created a healing practice that involves playing the didgeridoo. There are so many benefits from playing the didgeridoo - a few include feeling more calm, relaxing overworked muscles, and improved focus.

LEARNING TO PLAY
It's really fun to learn the didgeridoo! Just about anyone can do it, and I've taught kids age 8 to 70. I teach didgeridoo workshops, private lessons, and also do private healing sessions with the didgeridoo. I will teach you how to make a basic drone tone, change the sound of the drone, vocalize while playing, and circular breathe. Circular breathing involves playing continuously while breathing in through your nose.

HEALING SESSIONS
After assessing your needs, I will do relaxation exercises with you and then play the didgeridoo toward different points of your body.

QUALIFICATIONS
My qualifications include courses in Acutonics (tuning fork) sound healing, Reiki training, and certifications in Crystal Therapy and Nutrition. Additionally, I have taught well over 200 didgeridoo students, and have done many years of self-study and research into natural healing methods. I hold degrees in Music from Oberlin Conservatory and Mills College.

I have released my first solo album, Blue Dreams, this year. It is already available at CD Baby, and I will have an official release party on October 4th, 2008.

The inspiration for this album began in 2003-4, when I spent 8 months in my childhood home with my parents, sister, brother, and cats. During that time of being in relative isolation on a dairy farm surrounded by miles of fields on all sides, I turned inward to reflect on my many intensive years in various music schools. I did not listen to music outside of personal practice and teaching private students. Although it was challenging, I needed this time of silence to figure out where I fit into the scheme of music. Who were my influences? My trombone instructors would have me study Wagner, Mahler, Strauss, Brahms, Schumann, Stravinsky and Shostakovich. My composition teachers, on the other hand, would recommend Lou Harrison, Morton Feldman, Cage, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and countless others.

Through the various rigors my musical training and professional experience have brought to me, one musical style has always enchanted me with its grace, simplicity, and sense of timelessness. Chant. And so it was during my months in Jonesville, Michigan that I developed multiphonic chant songs, or Lyrical Vibrations. Their melodies are circular, repetitive, meandering, and with their occasional parallel 5th movement are reminiscent of organum.

There are 13 tracks on Blue Dreams, all recorded on the last day of March, 2007. Except the last song, they are all improvised with some general idea of melody and harmony in mind.

The photos are of the barns the surrounded my house and were my playground as I grew up. I am increasingly interested in the process of their decay and decomposition and find them to be a source of great inspiration-they are so familiar to me, even though they are changing in form as they fall apart slowly, year after year. This concept of the familiar that constantly changes reminds me of improvisation.