ケヴィン・ギルバートを聴いています。聴いて見てください。特にジェフ・バックリー、ピーター・ガブリエル、ニック・ドレイクのファンの人。カヴァーしてみようかな？ These days I’m listening to a lot of Kevin Gilbert. An incredible musician, singer and songwriter, who sadly deceased while still in his 20s back in 1996. People who like Jeff Buckley and Peter Gabriel may like his music, although his fame during the time he was alive may have been for the production and songwriting work he did for many established pop musicians including Michael Jackson, Madonna, and especially Sheryl Crow. His lyrics, music and singing can really hit you deeply.
Ironically, a few days after his death, the manager of Genesis contacted his manager for a meeting to possibly replace the departing front man Phil Collins. Would that have given him the success he deserved? Would he have gotten along with Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford of Genesis? That we could never know.
Here are some excerpts from articles about him:
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From wikipedia:
Kevin Gilbert was an accomplished composer, singer and instrumentalist who played keyboards, guitar, bass guitar, cello, and drums. His talents also extended to production. Gilbert worked on the projects of several established pop musicians, including Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Keith Emerson, acting as producer for the latter’s album Changing States. Later, Gilbert was part of the songwriting collective “The Tuesday Music Club” that met at producer Bill Bottrell’s studio in Pasadena, California. Gilbert introduced his then-girlfriend Sheryl Crow to Bottrell and his fellow Club musicians and the sessions allowed Crow to workshop new material, leading to the recording of her breakthrough debut album, Tuesday Night Music Club. Gilbert co-wrote many of the songs on that album, including 1995 Grammy Record of the Year “All I Wanna Do”.Gilbert died at age 29 in Los Angeles from apparent autoerotic asphyxiation.
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From “Kevin Gilbert” by Wil Forbes
Kevin Gilbert was a rock musician from southern California who worked in several projects during the late eighties and nineties…
Kevin Gilbert was also… Ok, I hear the snickering out there so I guess there’s something I should get out of the way right now. Some of you are saying, “Waitasec! Isn’t Gilbert one of these dudes who killed himself by autoerotic asphyxiation? Like he was wanking it while choking himself and it all went bad? Ha!” Sigh… yes, by all accounts this is true. But if you only think of Gilbert as a guy who jerked himself off to death then you are missing the much bigger and more important story.
As I write this article, I am presuming that most of my readers are unfamiliar with the career of Kevin Gilbert and that’s just plain sad; few people were more deserving of a successful turn in the music industry. Gilbert had the talent, skills, music philosophy, intellectual lyrics, stage presence (and good looks) that are often precursors to fame and fortune. Additionally, during his twenties, he built up a track record of composing great music. However, for a variety of reasons, Gilbert never got his big break and never became a household name.
When one reviews Gilbert’s ouvre, one is plagued with nagging questions. How could someone with all of Gilbert’s talents fail to become a household name?
http://www.acidlogic.com/im_kevin_gilbert.htm
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From an article written by his girlfriend, Cintra Wilson. A beautiful tribute that shows what kind of a guy he must have been.
Read this while listening to this song.
From “The Awful Truth: ”In Memoriam” By Cintra Wilson
“We were inseparable, knew each other inside and out. He was a handsome prince of a guy who really helped me in my life. He was the most talented human being I ever knew. A bloody musical genius. Picked up a cello one day and just started playing it. He was quite famous in some musical circles for writing and performing a lot of deeply personal rock songs with a lot of wordy lyrics and massive integrity. He never had the raging commercial success as a musical genius that he so richly deserved, despite the fact that he’d won a Grammy.
We had a rocking relationship…
We sat together in bed in the mornings and watched tapes of ”I, Claudius” and ”The Singing Detective” over and over and over, holding hands, eating pancakes. We looked at sea otters in the zoo and marveled for a long time over how in love they were, then we took hallucinogens and reenacted them. We ice-skated together in Vancouver, all wobbly and hand in hand like happy idiots. We took sleeping pills and got second-degree sunburns in Cabo San Lucas, and ended up covering each other with aloe vera in the hotel room the whole time – it was still great. We wrote funny songs together. He was like food to my heart, every second I spent with him I was aware of this delicious love for him I could feel like a tingle in my jaw – my heart always felt like it was stretching like a cat in a sunray around him, actively stretching to catch it all.
There are moments when you feel so good with somebody that you miss them when they’re right in front of you. Nostalgia is built into the moment, and you feel the excruciating pangs of too much joy.
I could never imagine life without him, and now he’s gone.
His death is a complete shock to me. When you have someone in your life who simply understands your every quirky nuance, every gesture, every tilt of the head…the loss of that is unspeakable.
This grief is phenomenal. It removes all thought and rips you down to your most basic enterprises of personality. You can’t eat, you can’t sleep, you walk like a zombie with nothing in you but a big grey dead lump of cold pain. The first primal urge I had was to find a swing set. My new beau said it was because my head was swinging back and forth and if my body was swinging too I might re-align, a little. We leapt over the fence of a closed park in the middle of the West Village at midnight. My God. I just rocked back and forth for a while, and figured out who I wanted to call, my face swelling up like a bruise from the torrential crying.
Kevin and I had the same psychiatrist – she called me and told me the news.
You imagine or fantasize at dumber moments about that phone call sometimes, but you can’t imagine how it actually goes down: ”I have some terrible, terrible news; so-and-so is dead.” Your face opens up like a volcano, you cry from the depths of the earth, you explode with a clean white agony that slides through all the cells in your body like a flash flood.
We ”separated” in the interest of becoming emotionally healthier individuals in February, with the express intent of getting back together at some point, but we were always in touch. I went to New York and he stayed in LA, but we met up a couple of weeks ago in London just to see each other’s faces.
He told me ”I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I don’t know where my head is going, I’m a little scared.”
I told him ”No matter where you go in your head, we’ll always be tight. We’ll always connect like this.” I didn’t know he was going way over THERE.
He told me that seeing me was like having an amputated limb back. When I left he said ”I’m losing my limb again” with tears in his eyes.
The last time I saw him, he stuck me in an elevator in his posh hotel and told me he loved me. He didn’t want to walk me all the way down because he said he wanted to spare himself the pain of seeing my taxi pull away. We were both crying. My elevator doors began to shut, he turned and walked.
Oh, God, Kevin Gilbert, wherever you are, I hope you know I loved you more than anything alive, and when I lay on my back under your piano and listened to you play your brilliant music I counted myself the luckiest girl in the world. You were beautiful inside and out, and I hope you’re rocking the biggest stadium in Valhalla, with the flames of a billion Bic lighters from your angelic fans guiding your soul ever upward to God. May you be infused with all light in the universe and blaze in blinding love forever like the star you are. Don’t forget me. ”
Watch this video from the British newspaper, The Guardian. It’s about 5 min.
Here, Slavoj Zizek presents an interesting view about why there is so much nationalism, racism, and religious fundamentalism in the world today. These people are looking for a different kind of freedom. He also talks about ISIS.
Watch it and see.
I would have wanted to translate some parts of it into Japanese, but I simply don’t have the time now.
まずはルーミー （日本語はすぐその下にあります。）
From “What hurts the soul?” by Rumi
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We tremble, thinking we’re about to dissolve
into non-existence, but non-existence fears
even more that it might be given human form!
What hurts the soul?
To live without tasting
the waters of its own essence.
Use night to wake your clarity.
Darkness and the living waters are lovers.
Let them stay up together.
(テキストの抜粋と翻訳：Ayuo)
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“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”― C.G. Jung
“I” and “Not I” 作曲：Ayuo (Full English translation is on the youtube link.)
この曲では、僕はエレクトリック・ヴァイオリンを弾いている。9月のOUTSIDE SOCIETYからの演奏。ジャーナリスト、ドナルド・リチーさんの日記、そしてカール・ユングの考えからインスピレーションを受けて作った曲。
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Near the end of his illness, he (Sigmund Freud) described life as ‘a small island of pain floating in an ocean of indifference’.
(from John Gray’s book “The Silence of Animals” (page 91)
暑い日は、呼吸を深くところから吸わなくなる人が多くなる。呼吸が浅いと怒りぽっくなったり、落ち着かなくなったりする。
このリンクはフランクリン・メソッドの一つ呼吸法のデモンストレーション。Eric Franklinはバレエの先生であり、振付師である。アレクサンダー・テクニークやフェルデンクライス・メソッドとよく比べられるフランクリン・メソッドを創立した。Cirque du Soleil(シルク・ドゥ・ソレイユ)等にもワークショップを教えている。
ayuo world music art poetry dance 