Ben Neill: Mutation and the Groove

I was fortunate to spend a week in the Amazon with the Wild Symphony Project at the Calanoa Amazonas Wilderness Lodge. With me were an international cohort of musicians and naturalists, including music writer Jeremy Eichler and Colombian percussionist Diana Maria Restrepo. In our conversation we discuss what it means to make music in the rich sonic environment of the Amazon rainforest, all the while backed up by the live insect and frog sounds of a spring evening by the side of the great river, considering the widest meanings of music for human history and nature's deep time.

Seems like whenever musical history was made over the last sixty years, Joe Boyd was there. He produced Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, Richard Thompson, 10,000 Maniacs, Billy Bragg, and introduced startling world music to Western audiences, including Trio Bulgarka, Ivo Papasov, and Toumani Diabate. The founder of Hannibal Records, He's even the guy who refused to unplug Bob Dylan when Pete Seeger complained at the Newport Folk Festival. So what does he think about what's happened to music today?

An hour and a half with the great improvising pianist Marilyn Crispell, winner of a 2025 NEA Jazz Masters Award. We learn how and when she began improvising, and how she has learned to combine energy and calm over the course of a long and ever-changing musical career. Photo by Andrew Pothecary.

A conversation with 86-year old musical master Allaudin Mathieu, who started out arranging for Duke Ellington and went on to become a great mentor and spiritual force, today making some of the best work of his career and continue to teach nonstop. Here we discuss his new memoir The Shrine Thief, what he is listening for, and how much theory and history a good musician needs to know.

Finally I dare to make myself the subject of an interview in my own podcast. The art/science pioneer Victoria Vesna grilled me on how I got where I am today: What I learned from John Cage, R. Murray Schafer, and all those birds, bugs, and whales I have made music with for years.

David James Duncan worked on his masterwork novel SUN HOUSE for nearly two decades, and it has now arrived. I met him last in the early days of the project, and now sixteen years later we sit down to talk about why the best things often take time, and why it was indeed that we all spent so much of  our youth musing on distant spiritualities and philosophies. How to put all that effort into practice? This far-reaching novel gives us the answer.

Sun Chung founded Red Hook Records after working for more than a decade at ECM Records in Munich. It's rapidly becoming a beacon for what a creative music label can be in our tumultuous times. In this extensive conversation, we discuss why it can take years to set up a recording session for improvised music, and why it then might take a few more years to get a project ready for release. Sun Chung, booked up with releases until 2025, explains his meticulous process.

A far-reaching conversation with one of the finest bass players of our time, Glen Moore, known for his work with the Paul Winter Consort and Oregon, he also recorded many albums on ECM and Intuition with the likes of Tim Hardin, Larry Coryell, Art Lande, Rob Scheps, Larry Karush, and of course Ralph Towner, Paul McCandless, and Collin Walcott. Why is he now living in a remote town in the desert? Why has he started playing a brand-new tuning on the bass now that he's over 80 years old?

Today I speak with the poet, activist, and environmental writer Lisa Wells, author of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World. We talk about the anger of youth, the fallibility of heroes, and the value of art and beauty in dark times.

Composer-performer Ben Neill reveals the history of his invention the Mutantrumpet, and his work over the years with Jon Hassell, John Cage, and La Monte Young, along with new ideas on where music will go in the coming decades. It will still have a beat, but will be played and heard in ways we can only dream of.