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DAVID DARLING
David Darling is a classically trained cellist who began his career as an elementary and secondary school teacher and conductor of band and orchestra. He later taught music and served as conductor and faculty cellist at Western Kentuky University. Then from 1969 to 1978 he played with the Paul Winter Consort, an extrordinarily progressive band for its time whose sound blended jazz with Brazilian, African, Indian and other world music. Since he left the Consort he has dedicated himself to a solo performing and recording career, and to teaching music and improvisation. In 1986 he co-founded Music for People, a non-profit educational, network that teaches and fosters improvisation as means of creative self expression. For the past 10 years, Darling has also enriched the lives of thousands of young people through in-school programs in his work with Young Audiences, Inc.. Darling has collabarated on performances and recordings with dozens of musicians, among them Bobby McFerrin, Spyro Gyra, Peter Paul and Mary, Oregon, Jan Garbarek, Terje Rypdal, and the innovative dance ensemble Pilololus. Among Darlings film credits are his contributions to the movies "Until the End of the Earth" and "Far Away, So Close" by Wim Wenders as well as "Nouvelle Vague" and "Heat." David Darling's 1992 CD "Cello" on ECM features multi-layered voices of acoustic and electric cello and combines the spirit of "Adagio" classical music with the flaoting quality of Gregorian chant. Other ECM recordings include the solo release "Dark Wood" and collaborations "The Sea" with Ketil Bjornstad, Terje Rypdal, and Jon Christiansen, and "Window Steps" with Pierre Favre.
SOLILOQUY ON A SAND DUNE - The Music of David Darling
by Kris Larson
"...and you walk with steady feet calm on a bottomless sea." Ralph Mills, Jr., Sky Above Clouds
Cello players. Pablo Casals, Yo Yo Ma, Carter Brey. These names might come to mind. Or Eugene Friesen with the Paul Winter Consort and Erik Friedlander with the Joe Lovano Septet.
Yet for the past decade-and-a-half, one cello player, more than any other, has touched me deeply. David Darling. His music is emerald fire on a midnight sea, an arctic exhalation amidst stifling summer heat, a northwest wind driving out a confusion of fog. It is archaic, intense and yet almost always calming. And thus far it has not ceased to carry me wherever it travels, however mysterious such places might be. Born 56 years ago in Elkhart, Indiana, Darling picked up the cello at age 10.
During high school he led dance bands, and took up the cello seriously when he enrolled at Indiana University. This was followed by teaching stints at high schools and then Western Kentucky University.
The bend in the road of normalcy to uniquedom may have been when Darling joined the Paul Winter Consort in 1970. In 1979 he set foot on ECM soil when he recorded with Ralph Towner on the latterŐs exquisite Old Friends, New Friends. It was just a short time thereafter that an overseer, Manfred Eicher, beckoned Darling to leave his own footprints on the Norwegian/German label. And he has, depositing Jolmal, October, Cycles, Cello, and Darkwood, like gems, in the sands of 1980, ‘82, ‘92 and ‘95.
Darling is no stranger to Maine, having visited the edge-of-the-earth wildlands of Trescott, along the Bold Coast, in the early Eighties. On the evening of September 7, 1983, I was privileged to meet David Darling at the now defunct 5 Water Street restaurant in Machias. He was gracious, humble, and fascinating. A man whom I would dearly love to meet again, and to hear in performance. I was introduced to Darling by his friend, photographer and artist, John J. Domont. It is how Domont met Darling that serves up a wondrous little story... Sometime back in the Baja region of California, John Domont was out, in search of elusive shorebirds to capture on film, but what he found instead made an indelible impression on his life. Sitting in a chair atop a sand dune and playing cello for none but the passing winds, was Darling. Friendship was inevitable.
The fact that David Darling still remains not well- known troubles me only a mite. He is a man true to his music and those who love his music will somehow find what he has played. When I mentioned Darling to cellist Erik Friedlander after the Joe Lovano show in Lewiston last January, Friedlander responded "Pioneer." As a musician and composer, that’s what Darling has been... and may always be.
S.O.S. Message:
Please E-mail me if you can find anything about David Darling. For example; local albums and the addresses that I can purchase them, information about concerts, reportings,new albums and details of them.
email : mete_s_studio@hotmail.com
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