Codona
Codona 1

“The art of hermetic alchemy, contrary to what is believed, turns towards the mental plane and not the material one, to the transposition of mental waves into other kinds of vibrations and not to the transmutation of a metal into another.” The Kybalion

If we consider Manfred Heicher as one of the greatest musical alchemists, we will understand why only in his laboratory could a project like Codona be born. Let's imagine him transposing his mental waves and, probing the future of music, envisioning these three great artists as a single entity. From the union of their mental waves, something completely new is created, directly linked to the ancestry of man in the most diverse cultures; it's the boundaries of time that embrace and the limits of space that join together.

“It was a combination never thought of until then, of three completely free minds. Don Cherry was the son of a black and an Indian, a man who came from free-jazz, who played with Coltrane and especially with Ornette Coleman. Collin Walcott learned to play the sitar with Ravi Shankar and the tablas with Alla Rakha... ...when Collin was making his first album for ECM, he invited Don Cherry and said he had to bring me along as well. When we finished the first music, Collin told us that the album wouldn't just be his. Codona was born that way, as an unexpected thing, and it was a trio that opened up a ton of possibilities for me.” This dive into such precious memories is by Naná Vasconcelos, refined and gentle Brazilian percussionist, the third element.

These enormous possibilities that Naná hints at in his interview can be heard in the three beautiful albums that the Codona trio gifts to humanity, which deserve to be rediscovered and appreciated. It would be interesting to investigate the musical path of each of them up to the fusion in Codona; it's a task that I leave to those who are interested in delving deeper, as I don't particularly enjoy detailed analyses. Preferring a broader vision, I am spontaneously taken to possibly bold considerations that capture the idea: Codona with its three elements respectively represent the East, with its mysterious mysticism, the West, in the spirit of research and innovation, and the third world as a holistic vision of the original man, in symbiosis with the natural elements. Codona could be the musical syntax that represents these elements. It's the synthesis in time and space, in one of the first and, I believe, unsurpassed examples of world music. But beware, nothing could be further from the concept of ethnic music. If the latter, indeed, is specific to a determined region at a determined time, Codona does not have in itself any references to it, obviously excluding the characteristic timbres of the instruments. Walcott does not play Indian ragas, Cherry does not play jazz, Vasconcelos does not bring us any rhythm of his homeland. Thus Codona is world music in its most perfect meaning, far from the temptation to appropriate already ready cultural elements.

If Hermes Trismegistus were to manifest in me, it would be in this visionary journey that I would transmute the musical vibrations of Codona: from the glow of the golden columns and the crimson drapes of a Buddhist temple to the boundless spaces of a steppe, in the company of the tall grass that dances with the wind, waiting for the animals to awaken at the dawn of a new day. I see inhabitants of the same city speaking different and incomprehensible languages, and then a lonely man on a slave ship sees his Africa reflected in every tear, the orishas show him something he doesn’t understand: a smoky venue where people of his race play shining instruments. I see crowds of people coming from every part, of all ages and with all colors, holding hands and dancing in a circle that never stops growing. They smile and cry at the same time, knowing inside them that it would all be too beautiful to be real.