Hey, everybody, it's me, Jad, again. After you're done binging my new project about Felicuti, and by the way, that series is in a different feed, so search for Felicuti Fear No Man in Apple or Spotify wherever you do your podcasts. There seems to have been some confusion about that. Anyhow, after you're done binging that, I have one more thing for you to listen to. It's a new show called Our Common Nature, and it is about reconnecting to nature and to the natural world using music and the arts. It's also about world-famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma, kind of. Yo-Yo and the Yo-Yo experience. That's where the should be called as the Yo-Yo experience. Or the Yo-Yo universe. The Yo-Yo-Yo, Yo-Yo, Yo-Yo, Yo-Yo universe? Yeah. That voice you just heard, that is Anna Gonzalez. She is the host of this new show that I want to tell you about. I called up Anna because I actually have a connection to the show that she's making. We had finished Dolly Parton's America, and we had spent years thinking about the Smoky Mountains in Appalachia. I get a call from Yo-Yo Ma about a mysterious gathering that he was organizing in the Smoky Mountains. I was like, I don't know what this is, but I'm definitely going to go. My God, who would say no to that? We're there on the side of a mountain. There are all these incredible people. We're having amazing conversations. None of us knew why we were there. I remember one moment, Yo-Yo and bassist Edgar Meyer, this incredible composer. They walk out into a wheat field, just start improvising in waist-high wheat, and then suddenly a little baby bear shows up in the background and starts listening to them. It was that kind of gathering, weirdly magical and confusing. Anyhow, later they called me up. They were like, we want to make a podcast about these events we're doing. Who do you know that can work on it? I immediately thought of Anna. Well, I remember it exactly like that, except one phrase that has stuck with me the whole time. I guess you had to make a podcast out of this and you were like, I don't know, but I think you need someone with a microphone on the ground who can spiritually vibe. Yes. Yes. I remember that. And you were like, and I think that might be you. And I was like, this is the craziest phone call of my life. Okay. So then the first thing that happened after that was I went to West Virginia with them. They were like, just come, come to us, Virginia. Meet Yoyo. Bring your microphone. And I think one of the things that all of us here treasure, creating memories. From there, I just kept traveling with Yoyo at his team. We went to Kentucky down into a very, very long huge cave with the Louisville Orchestra. It's colder here. That is 55. Yeah, shit. Then we went to North Carolina, drove over the Smoky Mountains into Tennessee, and we went to Hawaii. You went to Hawaii too for this? Holy moly. I'm down to the water. All right. So Yoyo wanted to talk to the whales. He wanted to communicate with his cello to humpback whales. So in Hawaii, we boarded a traditional Polynesian vessel, a double-holed canoe called Hokulea. We went on it with a bunch of marine biologists who used the body of Hokulea as a cello basically itself in the water to project out sounds. Can you try the speaker? All right. Whoa. Wait, was so Yoyo on the... Yeah. ...with his cello playing into the boat, into the water, to the whales? Yeah. And they brought on chanters. We get into this in the episode of what chanting means, but basically prayers that you sing out and ask for things. They were chanting, Yoyo was playing, and before any of this happened, a double rainbow started arching over the water, and then Mauna Loa, the volcano, was erupting at the same time right over the bay. Wow. Wait, and did the whales sing back? You have to listen to find out. Okay. It's been truly a singular life-changing experience. That's amazing. It really just opened my eyes to how big this country is. Big in land and big in experience and types of people and ways you can live on it. It expands your world, and that's the purpose of... And Yoyo says this, that's the purpose of art is to expand your world, because when you live a more expansive life, you are more empathetic. You are more curious because you know that there's so much more to find out. You can find the new podcast, Our Common Nature, a musical journey with Yoyo Ma on a Gonzalez, wherever you get your podcasts. There are three episodes in the feed now. That's not this feed, not the Dolly Parts America feed, but their feed, and you can get more coming each week. I'm just jealous of this epic journey that you've been on. It could have been you. I mean, no, I think it... I don't know if I would have spiritually vibed the way that you spiritually vibed, because it sounds like you really did, and that's amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And to give you a taste of what is to come, here is episode one of Our Common Nature. Would you describe yourself as an outdoorsman? No. No, I'd like to pretend that I am. I have many fantasies of parachuting someplace and going, you know, fly fishing or rock climbing, but I'm not... Is this being recorded? Yes. Well, I want to know why are you making a podcast about being outside so much? Oh, that's a very good question. Well, first of all, it's what doesn't exist in my life that I know is missing. Hi, I'm Anna Gonzalez, and this is Our Common Nature, a musical journey with Yo-Yo Ma through this complicated country to help us all find that connection to nature that so many of us are missing. We climb mountains, play music, drive dirt roads, recite poetry, traverse rivers and oceans and even our own brains, all to figure out how to better live on our planet together. So, do you think people get that? Yes. Really? Yeah. Okay, let's get started. When you picture Yo-Yo Ma, he's probably indoors in a suit, maybe at talks, and he's playing a cello. He's probably playing this piece. The Prelude from Bach's cello suite number one in G major. He's played it everywhere in Baroque churches, mountain forests along streams on rooftops, in large concert halls for the BBC and a tiny desk for NPR. He even played it in an episode of Arthur. This is the best thing I've ever heard. And on a sunny spring day, you might even catch him playing this piece in a national park somewhere. Right after crawling on the ground in his khakis to take a photo with a baby named Jojo. Do we have a pic? Of course. Let's do this. Oh, that is so cute. Jojo and Yo-Yo. Jojo and Yo-Yo. I play Bach's cello suite number one because it's the closest piece of music I play that reminds me of the infinitude of life. It's also one of the first pieces of music he ever learned when he was a little kid. And now he's just celebrated his 70th birthday. Part of the Yo-Yo secret sauce is that he can make the leap from Bach to infinity. But what about the rest of us who aren't, you know, Yo-Yo Ma and who have maybe never played Bach and aren't really sure that they're even pronouncing the name correctly? Well, I've spent the last few years trying to figure that out. Over the next seven episodes, I will be traveling across these United States with Yo-Yo leading the way. As he plays music under the stars and deep down in caves, we're going to explore the unbreakable connection between the art and the stories that people create in the places that they're from. From Appalachia to Hawaii to today on the coast of Maine. But before we get to that, back to Yo-Yo and that piece. What about this piece connects Yo-Yo to nature? Well, it goes back, way back. I used to get into trouble. I used to think it's really hard to start this flowy kind of thing because I'm starting from nothing. Right? So it's like jump starting a car. Oh, yeah. But what made it work for me is when I started thinking of an image of seeing the flow of water and I join it. The piece has started long before I'm joining it. I use the energy of that flow that's happened before. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do has been happening forever. I'm welcomed into the flow. If you could zoom into Yo-Yo's brain when he plays this piece, you'd see images appearing. First the water and then that transforms. You start to see flying things. Birds flying through sunbeams. You look in the ground. You see roots and soil. You go underwater. Whales and coral reefs bubbling through notes that are more than 300 years old. It was clear when I started talking to Yo-Yo that he uses nature to connect to music and then he uses music to connect right back to nature. You know, the infinitude of life. And about two thirds of the way through the piece, all the music just stops. We don't like silence. And then it starts again. But differently. Oh. It starts to build up. It keeps going. It becomes more and more insistent. The music gathers more and more energy. Where are we going? And finally we hit almost the beginning, but a different version of the beginning at a higher octer. It's higher energy. And the piece ends. What could all this mean? Yo-Yo has spent practically his entire life thinking about this piece. About the power it contains. He's traveled the world playing it, sparking conversations on borders and deserts and ruins and rivers all because for him, this piece represents how human beings have the ability to overcome anything if they just take a step back. And this is especially important today when there seems to be more loud, conflicting opinions than ever before with people kind of stuck in their own extreme bubbles. We always had division, but family comes together when there's an emergency. I noticed you're saying we, like we as Americans, even though, you know, you were born in a different country and you immigrated here. Do you feel like you're an outsider to that division or are you a part of it? Well, you know, really it depends how you think of it. I arrived as an immigrant in 1962. So do I just own part of the country starting from 1962? Am I responsible for the slavery, for the removal of Native Americans? I think I am because if I am a citizen, I'm responsible for all of it. And so a good place to start mending our relationships to each other is by asking, What do we have in common? Big question, right? Let's just take the United States. If you zoom out, everybody who lives here on this land has one thing in common. We're living on this land. We have to learn how to live on it and amongst each other, despite division, disconnect a really tough history and an uncertain future. So the thing that Yo-Yo does best, the thing he's most famous for, is connecting people through music. And now he wants to take that out into nature. He's dropping the endpin of his cello straight into the dirt and he's inviting all of us to listen and help fold our lives back into nature, back to each other. I think the purpose of our common nature, if I've learned anything, is to reinforce the fact that we are part of nature. And if we acknowledge that, it means that whatever we do with or to nature allows us to live, to survive. So let's back up. Where do we even start? Well, Yo-Yo started this musical road trip where everything begins. It was a new day. How can playing music connect us to a sunrise? Oh, so this is going to be a really quick question. Well, both are forms of energy. One that actually allows for our ecosystem to exist. And the other is a system that we've developed that puts us in the necessary state of mind to function. You don't play lullaby when you want an army to go march into war. You don't do a drum set and loud percussion when you want a baby to sleep. It's something that we've invented and every culture has its own version of what works. One of the things that we're supposed to be doing is as the sun, that first beam of light when it finally peaks over the horizon, that's when we're supposed to be singing to welcome the sun. And that changes everything. That's Chris Newell. And he's going to teach Yo-Yo how to play for the dawn after the break. So the gap for public media when public media was propaganda. Peter Magyar vows to free up the media and will likely succeed, because the bar's so low. You're being compared to Viktor Urban. You can only be great for the press. On the next On The Media from WNYC. Find On The Media wherever you get your podcasts. Our Common Nature is back. I'm your host Anna Gonzalez and we're on the coast of Maine, where there's a group of people who have a long-standing cultural tradition of using music to bring the sunrise each day. And those were sacred times, especially as a young man. You know, the easiest thing to do was to just stay up all night. Five o'clock, you know, in the middle of summer. Just stay up at the fire and sing and have a good time. And welcome the sun. It's an amazing thing to experience that and feel that force of creation. You know, that's really what it is. It's the closest thing I can say or one of the ways that I connect with our creator. We don't imagine it as a singular person that's all powerful. It's rather more, you know, all of the forces of nature. And a way to experience that is to experience the sunrise. Chris Newell grew up in northern Maine. I am a Pasamaquati citizen born and raised in the community of Madhokma Gok, which is known on English maps as Indian Township, Maine. Pasamaquati is one of the five Wabanaki nations that encompasses parts of present day New England and Canada. Chris is an educator now, but he made most of his career touring different powwows as a singer and a drummer, a practice he learned from his community and his dad. My dad used to sing all the time. And one of the things my father did was preserve our language. So I was blessed to grow up with him, always imbuing that in me. Yo-Yo came to Chris because celebrating sunrises is a crucial part of his tribe's spirituality and creation story. We have the belief in a cultural hero named Gluska. They fired arrows into the ash trees and from the ash tree came the first men and women who he called Wabanaki, which is the people of the dawn. Gluska said we had a duty as Wabanaki people to welcome the sun with music. How would you describe that first, the dawn? What does it look like? What does it feel like? You know, it can get quiet at night time, but then you start to hear the bird life and everything start to rise just before. And then the colors. That first beam of light when it finally peaks over the horizon, that's when we're supposed to be singing to welcome the sun. Those first beams as they come upon us. And that changes everything. That first beam comes, it becomes so much brighter. The colors become so much more vibrant and life kind of restarts. My name is Lauren Stevens. I'm Pasum Kwadi from Madagamigold. Lauren is the voice you hear singing. When I sing, it's almost like I feel the power of those songs and they just come out. People make mention of, oh, that's so beautiful. And I'm like, yes, because that's our ancestors. Our ancestors held on to these traditions for thousands and thousands of years, despite not being recorded and despite not being able to practice them. So to be able to hold on to some of them and to be able to share them is a responsibility, really. Lauren is what she calls a true voice. She was given that role by her elders who invited her to sing at gatherings. Chris's dad, you know, he, every time he saw me, he acknowledged me by name and he'd say, hey, does come here. And he usually had me sing. Lauren and Chris grew up together and still play music together. And one day in the middle of the pandemic, when native reservations like the one that they grew up on were getting hit hardest by COVID, they got a call from a native native native who was a native native native. And they were like, oh, I'm going to sing. And I'm going to sing. And I remember the pandemic when native reservations like the one that they grew up on were getting hit hardest by COVID, they got a call from Yoyo. And I remember Yoyo asking, you know, how can I help? What can we do? And I remember saying, we're already doing it. That visibility factor of indigenous people when we were supposed to be eradicated, ultimately, we weren't supposed to be here. But we're here to be able to collaborate, to be able to share our culture in a space that was very visible. My suggestion was for him to experience playing his music as the sun rose. And so the plan was hatched. Yoyo would drive from his home in Massachusetts up the coast of New England, meet Chris and Lauren, and learn a new way of experiencing this land through music, which meant learning a new way of playing. Pow-wow music is so different from Western classical music. You really got to be immersed in it to get it down. The drum beat for a pow-wow song, a straight pow-wow song, is kind of a straight beat like that. But the song, the melody that we're singing over it is composed in triple or sometimes beats of five. If you're somebody that's used to snapping your fingers on the downbeat, this is left-footed as heck. You know, it really is. Chris started looking through old tapes of pow-wow performances that he'd done, and he found this recording of his old bandmate Kenny singing an original piece. I was listening to him sing it, and I was like, you know that melody, the way he's singing it? I bet you could pull that off on a cello. I actually created kind of a how-to video. I felt silly doing it. I was like, man, I'm making this for Yo-Yo Ma. And I was like, I don't know if he'll actually go for it. But then when we met to rehearse, he asked me the story and I told him... Kenny was a good friend, like a brother to Chris, who died a few years ago. It would be beautiful to see my brother's song this way. And that's how it ended up happening. All right, we're here, we're here. Boss, tell us what to do. So Yo-Yo arrived at Acadia National Park on a June night in 2021. He met Chris in person for the first time who was there with his parents. I'll never forget that I met Chris's father, and he was cold, and I was able to just have some words with him. Because it was a little chilly where we were rehearsing. He actually brought a blanket from his room and put it on my dad. That's how they met each other. Which was so comforting to talk to such a beloved elder. And my father at the time was nine years into being treated for multiple myeloma. A rare blood cancer. His body was in kind of rough shape, but when they met, it was like two human beings that really saw the humanity in each other. And it was like two old buddies that came together. After the dinner, they sat and talked and talked and talked, just having the greatest time. And everybody went to sleep that night, not exactly knowing how the morning would go. If Yo-Yo would be able to pull off an entirely new musical style with folks that he just met that night. But they set their alarms extremely early. And after the break, we'll hear what happens at sunrise. Our common nature is back, and we are on the coast of Maine just before dawn, walking out into a field. I remember that morning, it was kind of cold. That's Lauren Stevens again. There were a lot of bugs. They were happy, I'm sure, because they were getting fed. And while the ocean is very much present and close, it felt secluded, like we just had our own little bubble right there. Willis-Buzz Will? Good morning everybody. As part of Wabanaki People, our existence is to sing the sunrise up in the morning. For us as Wabanaki People, we understand our meaning of life. We are meant to do this. We are meant to start the day. We are meant to reside in our homelands here. This isn't normal, this isn't right. On a picturesque Danish dairy farm, the cows refused to drink. We heard of strange goings on. When she was near the barn, she detected this horrible energy that was coursing through the farm. I need to get out of here. As farms possessed. I didn't know what I would find when I went out to the barn. But then we also heard how none of this is really happening. The resistance of a cow from Radio Lab. Get it wherever you get podcasts. We are in Wabanaki in the land of the dawn forever. Chris and Lauren are standing in the middle of a field with a few other performers. Another singer, a storyteller, a floutist. Audience members surround them in folding chairs. Beams of light begin to pull over the trees. I knew it was important to perform the welcome song. That song is important for every time we gather or every time there were visiting tribes. As that welcome, as that kind of starting point. This was the first time I had ever heard our traditional music with a non-traditional instrument. And to hear the welcome song played by Yoyo on the cello, it resonated internally like I could feel it in my body. It vibrated my soul. Chris and Lauren walk to the side and left Yoyo to play by himself. He continues playing through the rest of the Bach cello suite. Movement after movement. Something he's so used to doing. But then, Chris joined him on the drum. And then they began to play that pow wow song that Kenny recorded into Chris's cassette player more than 20 years ago. That was like a really vulnerable thing that you did. As Yoyo Ma to be like learning music in front of people. Did it feel that way to you? No, well, you know what I think, right? I truly want to live my life where I'm a human being first, a musician second, and a cellist third. And what Yoyo just said involves thinking that I'm someone of note because I play the cello well. But actually I'm a human being first. So I'm the five-year-old playing with another five-year-old in the sandbox. 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It was a moment of transformation. You can transfer that energy onto people. You really can through music. In my experience, that happens in the power world a lot. You sing just the right songs for a dancer and they just get into it and all of a sudden they get it. That energy comes through and everything is working right and they nail it. After the performance, there was a talking circle, a place for everyone in attendance to share what they thought and how they felt. Like Hawk Henry's, a floutist from the Nipmuc people who also performed. My hope is that as we listen to the sound of our songs, that we remind ourselves of the songs of bird and insect and tree and water and those songs bring us joy. And they have the capability of allowing us to see the common thread that weaves its way through all of us. Thank you to the Wabanaki people for bringing the sun to me every day of the 60 years I have been alive. Local and national leaders spoke. Deb Haaland, very honored to serve this country as the Secretary of the Interior. Yo-Yo spoke. So this has been extraordinary. I'm left with two words that I'm thinking a lot about and their hope and gratitude. A lot of you spoke of both of these words but I think Chris's dad Wayne managed to make his way to the performance and he offered a prayer. Good morning, Donoghawk. If you can please stand, you notice I'm not. Let's get into a prayerful mood. We thank you for life for another day. We thank you for our sleep. We hope that each one of us had dreams that we can work on, dreams that we can understand eventually if we don't, dreams that we can ask other people for. We thank you for gathering here today, all of us. We thank you for our grandfathers and our grandmothers and most of all our children. They are our future. Let us hope that we can teach them well. We thank you for all that is past regardless of how that past was. It is a past. We thank you for today. We thank you for the future. None of us have an idea what that will be but this gathering certainly strengthened to the hope that that future will be a good one together. It starts with caring and because we went there we met people, we made a relationship, you don't break it. That honor is being human. How do you see sunrises now? You know I actually think of gratitude when I see the sun, that I'm part of the solar system and that there's magic to it and there's a miracle to it. And Yoyo is committed to making more and more of these relationships through our common nature and that means more performances with people who have special connections to this land. From underground time capsules, finding our names on the cave walls, walking in the footsteps and just filling the power to glaciers and it just looks like a river frozen in time from forests. The Cherokee people have always known of this mountain to coal mines. This is to kiss my butt curve. From the deck of ships in the Pacific Ocean, feeding sharks by hand, chanting to them and they swim in to the coast of the Atlantic and beyond. And the fact that with these different backgrounds we can talk and agree on things, we are going to actually learn about what people know there because we realize, my goodness, had we not done those things our concept of the world would be a slightly smaller and slightly poorer world. That is for me the purpose of art. Next time we go to the longest cave system in the world that just so happens to be in Kentucky, to hear a symphony explore the underworld. Our Common Nature is a production of WNYC and Sound Postings, hosted by me Anna Gonzalez, produced by Alan Goffinsky with editing from Pearl Marvel. Sound design and episode music by Alan Goffinsky. Mixed by Joe Plord, fact-checking by Anna Alvarado. Our executive producers are Emily Boteen, Ben Mandelkern, Sophie Shackleton and Jonathan Bays. Our advisors are Mira Burtwind Tonic, Kamakah Diaz, Kelly Libby and Chris Newell. Additional audio provided by the UpStandr Project. There are films storytelling and educational company doing amazing work. They're actually the reason Chris and Yo-Yo even met. You can learn more about them by going to UpStandrProject.org. And if you want to watch the film that their reciprocity project team made about Yo-Yo's visit to Acadia, you can find it in our show notes. Special thanks to Acadia National Park. And if you want to listen to more music from this series, you can check out the Our Common Nature EP, featuring Yo-Yo playing with Eric Mingus, Jen Kreisberg and an Icelandic choir, now available on all streaming platforms. This podcast was inspired by a project of the same name conceived by Yo-Yo Ma and Sound Postings with Creative Direction by Sophie Shackleton in collaboration with partners all over the world. Our Common Nature is made possible with support from Emerson Collective and Tambourine Philanthropies. This episode is dedicated to the memory of Wayne Newell, Chris's dad, who just a few months after we left Maine died. They wrote each other and stayed in touch. And when my father passed away that December, Yo-Yo actually sent us a tribute video form, which we were able to play the audio for for his funeral. That was special. I mean, the gift of music is is unreal to have a gift from Yo-Yo for him specifically. And we keep it private, you know, it's for us. Yo-Yo was like, no, we're not sending flowers. Hold on, you know. Yeah. This is more than that. Yeah. WNYC's journalism and storytelling is heard by millions of passionate listeners. Sponsors of our programming gain our listeners' attention and their respect. Learn about how your organization can support WNYC and WNYC studios at sponsorship.wnyc.org.
