The 1960s gave us many artistic firsts from pop and performance art to psychedelic rock and free jazz to interspecies music-making between humans and whales. From Grammy Award-winning saxophonist Paul Winter’s Common Ground to Judy Collins‘ Whales and Nightingales to pioneering synthesist Bernie Krause’s Ocean Wonders, musicians have engaged in and recorded a call-and-response with these massive sea mammals that has produced some singular sonic wonders and oddities. With his cheekily titled new album, Orcas’ Greatest Hits, Jim Nollman is adding what may be the most varied and expansive chapter to this tiny but intriguing corner of the musical universe.
Nollman is an avant-garde sound artist, guitarist and naturalist whose work stands at the intersection of John Cage, Marcel Duchamp and Jacques Cousteau. His history of recording and releasing interspecies music dates back to his 1982 Smithsonian Folkways album, Playing Music with Animals, which featured his duets with wolves, kangaroo rats, orcas and a chorus of 300 turkeys. The latter collab actually spawned an offbeat cult classic, “Music to Eat Thanksgiving Dinner By!”
To capture these jams, Jim Nollman created what may have been the first underwater music recording studio, featuring submergible microphones called hydrophones. He also built a custom electric guitar and kayak equipped with an underwater speaker to project his sound to the orcas below. The music featured on the album was recorded between 1985 and 2002, culled from over 60 hours of recordings made over summers at Johnstone Strait in British Columbia.
So what’s it like? Some of it is pretty damn enjoyable, like “The 47 Whale Raga”. In this track, Nollman improvised around a well-known Indian raga, which captured the attention and musical callback from three orca pods. The orcas’ response to rhythm is captured in another track, “The Three Jimmies,” which finds Nollman playing a ‘chicken scratch’ rhythm like James Brown‘s guitarist Jimmy Nolan and the orcas answering with sounds akin to Jimi Hendrix. The album also includes collaborations between the orcas and other well-known musicians, including Grammy Award-winning oboist Nancy Rumble and master flutist Gene Groeschel.
You consider yourself a sound artist dedicated to playing and recording music with non-human animals. Why did you decide to focus on this area? How did it lead to your debut collection, Playing Music with Animals (Folkways Records)?
In college, I learned to create incidental music for theatrical productions. I recall one particular effect I achieved in an audience attending Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I worked on. For the production’s sound, I asked two friends to walk across a creaky wooden floor in opposite directions, with stereo microphones placed at the start and end of their walk, pointed just inches from the floor. In the circular theater where the play was produced, I installed several speakers on the ceiling.
Together, they produced an effect in which people watching the play kept hearing ghosts walking across the ceiling. Achieving this kind of physical and intellectual disorientation through art was also influenced by the Theater of the Absurd. For one example, the dialogue of Eugene Ionesco’s Bald Soprano is the story of people having deep and emotional conversations that are actually utter nonsense. But at the end of the play, the disconnected dialogue clearly accrues a powerful internal sense.
After college, these influences inevitably led me to John Cage, who once wrote that music is anything you can get away with. The problem I had with Cage was that it was all too intellectual, too serious about having no known direction. For me, music is alive and shows us its vitality through a heartbeat, which we call a groove. This led me to speculate about a new version inspired by the Theater of the Absurd but with a detectable groove. This led me to record myself singing the old folksong “Froggy Went a Courtin'” with 300 turkeys. That premiered as the single, “Music to Eat Thanksgiving Dinner By”. I was 25 years old and had just created a new musical genre.
With the first collection, you recorded several animals: wolves, turkeys, kangaroo rats and orcas. What was it about these particular species that attracted you?
The director of the San Francisco-based radio station that sponsored me to create Thanksgiving Day music featuring turkeys was Charles Amirkhanian, a hero of the American avant-garde. He asked me to try music with a different animal. I soon set off for Death Valley to seek out kangaroo rats. These rodents are champion thumpers. They build elaborate burrows with discreet aboveground sections that function like Caribbean steel drums, with the desert earth itself as the tuned drumhead.
During an earlier trip to Death Valley, I had discovered a colony of these kangaroo rats thumping to one another on their burrows at midnight. I tried thumping along with them but didn’t get great results. But I recorded enough of their own tuned thumping to get more airtime on the radio station, perhaps the only music with rats ever performed as a radio special event!
After that, I tried wolves who howl in chorus as a re-invigoration of community each dawn and dusk. I was learning to play Indian ragas at the time and couldn’t escape the idea that both classical Indian music and wolves have unique calls (or ragas) played at specific times of the day. I played the shakuhachi flute with wolves, and they welcomed me heartily into their chorus. However, they would get very agitated and stop howling if my own playing was out of tune or even strayed far from the melodies they were singing.
On and on, I kept doing it. Dolphins, orcas, beluga whales, ravens, cowbirds, etc, so on. Along the way, I accrued generous fans and sponsors who let me set down roots at the intersection where the musical avant-garde and field recording interact with environmental activism.
Why did you decide to play with dolphins, which led you to focus on orcas for the past four decades? Tell us more about that initial session with them in 1976, in which you collaborated with two famous musicians who have also worked in this area, Paul Winter and Bernie Krause?
I worked briefly with dolphins off a beach in Hawaii. To interact, I built and purchased a few different floating instruments to support my full weight in the water. Then I bought an underwater speaker and a hydrophone. But these animals were spinner dolphins, and like most dolphins, they communicated in a range beyond the top end of human hearing: dreamy but squeaky and very difficult to record and interact with, especially in water.
I wrote about trying music with dolphins in a magazine called Co-Evolution Quarterly and was soon contacted by a guy working for the brand-new Greenpeace organization. He invited me to go to Japan to make a media event based on playing music with dolphins at a place where Japanese fishermen were killing thousands as their best idea of reducing natural predation of the fish the fishermen themselves had overfished. I honor Greenpeace’s continuing effort to protect the environment, but making media events in places I wasn’t wanted was too political, and no one cared about the music.
Soon after, a Japanese filmmaker who had watched my event on TV invited me to join a cast that included Paul Winter and Bernie Krause to try to make music with wild orcas at Paul Spong’s Orca Lab in British Columbia. My interest seemed to lie somewhere halfway between Paul and Bernie. Unlike Paul, I had no interest in recording music with orcas as an incentive to compose a beautiful piece that included the calls.
Like Paul, I devoted significant time to promoting the calls of the orca pods of Western Canada as distinctly musical. Unlike Bernie, I was never motivated to practice the science of animal acoustic behavior. Like Bernie, I was a bona fide real-time field recordist. My new Folkways album, Orcas’ Greatest Hits, has minimal editing. It is mostly monaural. I’ve always thought of Paul and Bernie as compadres.
Can you describe, for the layperson, how orcas vocalize with each other and why they are the ideal animal for this kind of collaborative art form and for human listeners?
It was with the orcas of Western Canada that I found my calling. Perhaps their most critical attribute is that they vocalize in much the same frequency range as human beings both talk and hear. Perhaps oddly, their own calls often seem to be grounded in the key of D. The notes D to C to D comprise one stereotypical call of the orca pod of Johnstone Strait in British Columbia, where I worked and continued to return.
My first task was finding people with the talent to build a portable underwater recording and performing system. When I finally made it happen, it transformed our chartered, 42-foot cabin cruiser into an underwater recording studio. When it was first operative, we began attracting lots of enthusiastic and talented volunteers. Some of whom designed and built a very snazzy wilderness camp out of driftwood and flotsam that we easily dissembled at the end of the season. Other volunteers had skills in ecology, spiritual practices, and building community.
Eventually, we got offers from mainstream media to document our camp. Over the years, these included National Geographic, ABC-Prime Time Live, and CBS 60 Minutes, to name a few.
In hindsight, none of these crews ever truly captured the spirit of our nighttime musical interactions with the orcas. Part of it was due to logistical issues; for example, we only interacted with the whales at night, and by candlelight to save all the battery power for the sound system. The musicians we invited to play with the orcas ran the gamut. We had children singing children’s songs, drum sessions, Mozart sonatas, old-time fiddlers, rhythm & blues, pretty much everything you can think of.
In the first years, I focused on Indian ragas, mostly because the ongoing drone seemed to keep the music alive and happening even when neither me nor the orcas knew what to say. Tibetan Monks also came aboard for three seasons and chanted their prayers from the deck of our boat while the orcas were nearby.
From your experience, is there any specific style of music or instrumental approach that orcas respond to most? From “The 47 Whale Raga” and “Queen Charlotte’s Slide” from your new album, they seem to really respond to the sound of slide guitar, the bent notes and glissandos, as well as the drone beneath it?
My opinion is this. They don’t care about virtuosity. A perfectly played Mozart didn’t interest them. But they do respond to a well-played groove. It’s catchy, and it’s organic. A musical groove is a kind of enhanced heartbeat. When I first started trying to interact with orcas, I often played Indian ragas on an open-tuned electric guitar. The raga groove flows like water – a gentle, organic drone without any hint of aggressive movement. Apparently, both humans and orcas can not only sense it, but also respond to it, even before the tabla drum enters to make it explicit.
To that groove, I would also include the grooves of soul music, exemplified by the James Brown riff that I played underwater. It actually startled me when the orcas responded so closely and so much in the groove. Maybe it all means that a great dance groove is capable of transcending species. It can prompt humans and orcas to respond to the beat. Perhaps oddly, it also reminds me of the tempos of whale echolocation, a communication mix of sharp, loud, and rhythmic notes enhanced by rhythmic silence.
Tell us more about your approach to playing with the orcas?
My main instrument was a custom Prince guitar with three hand-wound pickups. One was set traditionally, just below the fretboard. The other two were placed next to each other within a heavy brass chamber embedded into the wooden body beneath the strings. This brass chamber added a powerful sustain that sounded both clean and gorgeous when transmitted through an underwater speaker.
The two tunes on guitar that you mention are both strong tone-wise, which suggests to me that you must be a lover of full-toned electric guitar. “The 47 Raga” has a little bit of Jeff Beck and a lot of Sarod master Ali Akbar Khan”. Charlotte’s Slide “is my personal tribute to all the great bottleneck players who have influenced my own playing. I may be wrong, but it seems that one orca appeared to catch on rather quickly to the essential chord changes in this song.
Let me explain our one-of-a-kind sound system. All of the sounds you hear on Orcas’ Greatest Hits were played through underwater speakers and recorded entirely underwater by hydrophones. What you hear on the recording—the instruments, the vocals, the percussion, and the orcas—is 100% underwater sound. We tried stereo recording but couldn’t quite pull it off. You have to realize that sound travels 4.5 times faster in water than through air. Although our two hydrophones were about eight feet apart in the water column, it wasn’t a sufficient distance for the two distinct tracks needed for stereo.
“Nancy’s Connection” is an interesting track. How did that one come about?
Nancy Rumbel and her husband are longtime friends of my wife and me. She’s also a Grammy Award-winning oboist who worked in the Paul Winter Consort before stepping out on her own. She’s a natural player: good-humored and technically expansive within any musical situation. I love the way she starts off this piece by playing something that contains a few twinkling shards of “Peter and the Wolf,” but immediately glides into these improvised passages. They are performed with such incredible ease and enough moments of silence that it leaves plenty of room for the orcas to participate in a meaningful manner. It’s just terrific.
When do the tracks of your new album, Orcas’ Greatest Hits, date from? And what was it like editing these pieces together from your over 60 hours of recordings?
I started recording interactions with the orcas in1984. Our group returned to the same cove each August until 1993. And then I decided to seek out beluga whales (white whales), an Arctic species that sounds very different than orcas.
In 1998 I met Bob Wood, who owned a beautiful boat and wanted to make a film about cetaceans. Bob invited me to spend a few weeks each August between 1998 and 2002 interacting with huge herds of Pacific White-sided dolphins, humpbacks, and orcas in Queen Charlotte Strait, an area 40 miles northwest of where I’d spent so many years previously recording orcas. In all these many sessions, I would usually return home and simply place the recordings onto a shelf in my studio, without ever listening to them.
These recordings piled up over the years, and I never did listen to most of them. Just after COVID-19, Folkways Records expressed an interest in packaging and distributing the best of them. They wanted 45 minutes of material, which I edited from about 60 hours of recordings. As I listened, I realized that some of the interactions I had never heard before were far more worthy than I imagined.
What impact has all these years communicating with and recording these majestic creatures had on your life and your belief in what I would call the elevated consciousness of whales?
Yes, they are elevated. I firmly believe that every species, plant and animal is elevated in some amazing way or another. Who is sentient and who is not? I don’t know. I do know that it is on us to figure out how to see, hear, touch, observe, or interact with them as equals. Who can do that? As someone once said, we pray to all our relations. And yet all our relations are now struggling to survive. How about the weather? I fear we too will be struggling sooner rather than later.
Are there any musicians that you would have liked to have had the opportunity to record duetting with the orcas? I’m talking “in your wildest dreams” here. Maybe Jimi Hendrix, Charlie Parker or Pavarotti?
Hard to say. The whales never seem very interested in musical virtuosity. Nor was I ever smart enough to judge if certain orcas sounded jaw-dropping while others sounded run-of-the-mill, ho-hum. You get my point. But having said that, I feel quite strongly that the orcas definitely responded to a great groove. You can hear that on this album again and again. Listen to a tune entitled “The Three Jimmies.” It’s based on James Brown’s most famous riff performed by his stellar guitarist, Jimmy Nolan, and interpreted underwater while surrounded by orcas by me, Jimmy Nollman!
Are there other animals that you would like to play and record with more in the future that you haven’t?
I’m working on a recording right now entitled The Cowbird Variations. All the pieces feature cowbird calls. Individual pieces showcase one or two other bird calls and songs, including barred owls, Swainson’s thrushes, crowned cranes, bullfinches, various woodpeckers, ospreys, bald eagles, butcherbirds, herons, black-headed grosbeaks, and song sparrows.
When you’re not jamming with orcas and other animals, what do you listen to?
Recently I’ve been listening to Arvo Pärt, Oud music from Egypt, lots of old-time fiddle tunes, Bach, 1970s soul, Dylan, Dire Straits, and Bix Beiderbecke. Like Mother Nature herself, I have a pretty broad palate.
