DREAMING THE DIDJERIDOO
by William Thomas

Once upon a cold dark night a long, long Dreamtime ago, three men were camped in Australia’s outback. “‘ey mate, throw another log on the fire,” one of the men sang out. Feeling the ground behind him, his friend’s hand closed on a thick eucalyptus branch. Normally quite heavy, this meter-long log was hollow. As he turned to toss it into the flames, flickering firelight revealed the inside of the log crawling with termites.

About 40,000 years later, Jesse Capon was readying for a run through a park in Melbourne. As the Gabriola Islander stretched, an aboriginal boy ran across the field from a nearby housing project. Capon watched incredulously as the lad picked up what looked like a stick and blew into it. “It was a kid-size didjeridoo,” he recalls, “perfect for his chops.”

The talented drummer returned to BC inflamed by this “hunter-gatherer stuff.” He was all ears when his father, John Capon - a professional bass-trombone player for 40 years - asked Jesse’s grandmother to pick up a didj while she traveled Down Under. “She really got into it,” the junior Capon says, seeking out an aboriginal didjeridoo player and buying his best didj.

Fashioned by trees and insects to give a planet voice, this simple Shamanic instrument brings magic in its wake. One day Jesse’s dad was out for a walk with his new didj, sticking it into stumps to change its tone, when he came upon a cottage deep in the woods. The kid living there had a didj, too. Even more remarkable, this Vancouver visitor had never played music before awakening one morning to find a didj on the porch. “He’d never seen one, never played one,” Capon explains. “He was a hippie, not a musician. He got totally into it.”

Jesse joined him for a duet. As eagles circled overhead, their didjes’ low drone seemed to answer the Great Spirit Byamee’s injunction to the first woman and man to “sing” birds and animals into form using the didjeridoo.

An open, termite-hollowed tube of eucalyptus measuring from a meter to a meter-and-a-half in length, this “primitive” instrument of many names and several spellings was first heard in northern Australia, where it is still used to accompany twirled carvings of whistling wood called bullroarers and “click-sticks” at Corroborees. During these festive clan-dances, the didj draws neighboring tribes together to celebrate and retell their sacred stories.

Instantly recognized by its deep, ululating drone, the didjeridoo sounds like someone “pitch-bending” a single, sustained note. For millennia, the didj’s unearthly wavering sound exactly matched the 7.28 hertz frequency in which Earth sang. (The planet’s slowing rotation, notes Greg Braden in Awakening to Zero Point, has recently raised her frequency beyond 8.6 hertz.)

In the mouths of virtuosos, the didjeridoo has an astonishing range. While didjeridoos played in Australia’s West Arnhem Land still hum the slow, long-wave patterns perfected long before history began, Eastern Arnhem players sound a second pitch, employing tongue, lips and breath to weave faster rhythms. Didj players in Northeast Arnhem Land add the first overtone, about a tenth-step above the didj’s fundamental drone.

Intent is everything in dealing with the didj. “If we can direct our intent to the creation of Sacred Sounds created by our Sacred Breath of Life, and offer this to the Sacred Oneness of all things,” writes aficionado Allan Shockley, “we can merge the frequencies of the body and become a tool and channel for our Creator to do miracles of healing and balancing... through the sacred circle of sacred sounds.”

Tanya Gerard and Robert Thomas play the didjeridoo for the survival of all aboriginal cultures, and “for the revival of indigenous thinking worldwide.” They, too have found the didjeridoo’s droning overtones to be “a conduit to multi-dimensions of sound and harmonics, which may be entered and explored, revealing primal truths of the universe.”

If all this sounds a bit far out, go find a didjeridoo. Explaining why “people of all ages, all over the world are attracted and mesmerized” by its hypnotic sounds, didj explorer Alistair Black reminds us how Creation is recreated with every movement of sound, light and rhythm. Energy creates sound as it moves, bringing forth various frequencies or tones, just as various vibrations of light manifest as colours.

“Because all matter is energy vibrating at various frequencies,” Black continues, “we can merge the vibratory frequencies of the pipe with our own bodily frequencies and awareness.”

With this primordial connection re-established, deep healing begins. Just as high-tech ultrasound is now employed to treat certain ailments, the didjeridoo’s organic “ultrasound” directs low Earth frequencies deep into organs and tissues.

Black believes that the didj’s lower, subaudible harmonics are also felt in “our subtle energy fields.” Reminiscent of Tibet’s brass long horns, the “Rainbow Serpent” or Yurlunggur is a 2.5 meter-long didgeridoo used in sacred Djungguwan ceremonies to depict creator ancestors - or propel initiates into the Dreamtime.

Drumming goes with the didjeridoo like heartbeat and breath “Any instrument which connects to a fundamental and also connects to a rhythm, induces some sort of trance when it’s played,” Capon comes in. “The didj, the North American Indian frame drum, the Chinese stone drum, zillions of African drums, the Indonesian frame drum - all those instruments are used in religious services for a good reason, because they induce some sort of trance state.”

Besides its basic signature drone, this deceptive device can produce a remarkable range of sounds. The didjeridoo on Native Ground’s astonishing One Fine Mama CD lays a haunting vibe under drums and guitar strums. Employed like a megaphone, the same didj suddenly “spirals” the voice of Gary Thomas in a series of barks, howls, growls, yips and purrs that propel digital dreamers into primeval realms remembered in our genes.

Ironically, Capon says, some West coast musicians still struggle to return to “traditional” African and Australian roots - while the turned-on traditionalists they wish to imitate are saying: “We’ve got all these new instruments. Lets have some fun!” The didj master who made Jesse Capon’s instrument plays in an aboriginal rock band. Other “world beat” ethno-musicians are happily marrying this archaic woodwind with silicon sounds to invent a sparkling new tradition

In seducing the didj, Capon stresses the expression of each player’s individuality. “Don’t be culturally attached,” he advises. “Realize it for yourself. It will dawn on you why it’s there pretty soon after you start to play it.”

Picking up his own didjeridoo, he puckers his lips and blows into the mouthpiece, trumpet-fashion. The low-frequency drone goes on and on until I suck in my own breath in sympathy with lungs that aren’t straining at all.

Capon explains that after producing a continuous tone for 40 minutes or more, players are transported beyond their immediate surroundings. “That’s what I like about it, it’s a totally escapist thing,” he says. “You can get in there with nature and really go for it.”

Hyperventilating has nothing to do with inducing the didj player’s telltale theta brainwaves, indicative of deep meditation. Instead, the technique of “circular breathing” maintains an even breath by pumping the cheeks like a bellows to produce an unbroken tone.

“Glassblowers may understand,” writes AP Elkin in The Australian Aborigines. But for the rest of us it’s a mystery how didj players “snap” quick snorts of breath through the nose while retaining enough air in the mouth to keep the sound going. As didj devotee Ed Drury describes it: “Two quick breaths are usually taken, but some of the incoming air is kept in the mouth to be blown into the instrument while the next quick intake is being made.”

An excellent-sounding didj made from mallee or stringybark eucalyptus costs between US$159 and $359. Didj’s made by Djalu Gurruwiwi flare into a large bell, giving exceptional sound. Arnhem artist Wendy Yunupirgu decorates her large didjes with scenes depicting local animals.

If you want to make your own didj, debarked, termite-hollowed mallee wood from Western Australia can be purchased for US$75.

It’s easier to learn proper technique by blowing through a trombone or trumpet mouthpiece first. My first try with the didj produces a thin screech. Under Capon’s coaching, I “blow a raspberry” into this heavy tubular resonating chamber. Buzzing my lips, I gradually bend the pitch down.

Calling the didjeridoo “a transcendent instrument,” Jesse Capon explains how this “internal instrument” can lead listeners deep into individual introspection and interpretation. “It’s so subtle and so melodic and so amazing,” he says, “it fills us all in.”

The late African author and adventurer Sir Laurens van der Post might have been referring to the didj when he wrote how “Art, poetry and music are matters of survival. They are guardians and makers of the unbroken chain of what's oldest and first in the human spirit.” In conversation with Michael Tom concerning the Bushmen of the Kalahari, van der Post explained, “the older I got, the more and more I felt that there is a Bushman in everybody, and we've lost contact with that side of ourselves.”

The didj can reconnect us to the hunter-gatherer huddled around our internal campfire. But when van der Post pressed a Bushman for the secret of his existence, the hunter grew silent, transfixed. “I can’t tell you more,” the Bushman finally told the author, “but there’s a dream dreaming us."

That dream is the didj, singing a sound that fills the world.

Winner of four Canadian journalism awards, articles and photographs by William Thomas have appeared in more than 50 publications in eight countries, with translations into French, Dutch and Japanese. Clips from his video documentaries have appeared on CNN, NBC, the CBC and the current mainstream movie release, “The Corporation”.

www.willthomas.net/Investigations