Jim Nollman’s Orca-stra
One evening in August, two hundred culture enthusiasts gathered on the rooftop of Nine Orchard, a hotel on the Lower East Side, to celebrate the release of the album “Orcas’ Greatest Hits” and a rare New York appearance by its creator, the seventy-nine-year-old sound artist Jim Nollman. “I’d also like to thank the orcas,” he said, after being lavishly introduced. Nollman is gray-haired and white-bearded, with a look of sharp-eyed affability, and he wore a lavender T-shirt illustrated with an orca-dominated seascape. On the album, he and collaborators jam alongside wild orcas, assisted by underwater microphones and thoughtfully positioned boats. Sharing the bill was David Rothenberg, a professor and a jazz musician who has improvised with collaborators including leafhoppers and humpback whales. The event was the penultimate this season in a series run by Nonhuman Teachers, a nonprofit offshoot of the beloved L.A. plant shop the Cactus Store. (“I did an event with them playing cactus music in California,” Rothenberg said.) The attendees were hip, all ages, and slightly giddy, ready to have whales blow their minds.
Earlier, Nollman, who lives in the San Juan Islands, in the Pacific Northwest, had admired the view—“I’ve never seen so many bridges from one room before”—and reflected on his career. He grew up in Massachusetts and attended Tufts, where, in a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he disoriented the audience by making footstep sounds emanate from the ceiling. He studied Strindberg, Klee, and Cage, inspired by the idea of the trickster artist. In Chiapas, Mexico, he played a saxophone-shaped clay flute and got a neighbor’s turkey to gobble. Later, at a farm in the Bay Area, he recorded himself singing “Froggy Went a-Courtin,” with three hundred turkey sidemen. “I nailed it,” he said. The song became an underground hit, and he branched out: kangaroo rats, wolves (“pretty successful”), dolphins in Hawaii (“my first grant”). For the dolphins—“a challenge”—he bobbed in the ocean, playing a waterphone and a drum that he wrapped his legs around, making for a great photograph but a frustrating jam session. “I couldn’t hear them,” he said. “I think they could hear some of my drumming.” But people wanted more, and were willing to fund it. “Dolphins have a power that turkeys don’t,” he said. “So I put together the world’s first underwater recording studio, on a big boat.”
Fun, fizzy dispatches from the city and beyond
This led to Nollman’s life’s work: music with orcas, in a place he called Orcananda. “We set it up in a little cove,” he said. “We were extremely careful about not harassing them. If the whales wanted to interact, they had to come to us.” He played electric guitar, and curious orcas approached. “We didn’t hit Record until the orcas started singing,” Nollman said. He kept the duets call-and-response, and invited “anybody with a good idea” to join—an old man chanting the Kaddish, three Tibetan lamas, “a whole family from Australia,” a classical musician with a synthesizer. “I discovered early on that the orcas didn’t care about human virtuosity,” he said. “What they were interested in was a groove. They’re interested in strong rhythms.” Syncopation can inspire humans and whales alike. He continued, “One night, I started playing a James Brown riff, this ‘diddle-iddle-it.’ We somehow got the whales to dance with us and to be in the band, and they stayed for a long time.” Another favorite is “The 47 Whale Raga,” in which Nollman improvises around the song “Jhinjhoti” amid a super-pod of forty-seven orcas. “The beauty of a raga for this is that it’s like a conversation,” he said. “The drone is always there.” In another song, “I made a kind of twelve-bar blues, and I got the whale to make the chord change. You’re on the one, and then you go up to the four on the fifth bar. The orca made that with me and then went back to the one again. I didn’t expect that. I was just out there trying things, you know?”
Nollman made orca music for thirteen years, collecting some sixty hours of tape, which sat on a shelf until a recent connection with Smithsonian Folkways. He’s glad to have “Orcas” out in the world. “Being the whale musician was a charmed life,” he said.
At the event, before Rothenberg triumphantly clarinet-riffed with recordings of sperm whales and humpbacks, Joe Valle, of Nonhuman Teachers, interviewed Nollman, with career-retrospective audiovisual enhancement. Turkeys, kangaroo rats, dolphins, and, finally, the showstopper: a toothy, looming orca photo, an excellent guitar groove, and shrieky, exuberant whale song, lead vocals like helium squeaking out of a balloon. Outside, a fire-truck siren joined in. ♦