34 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY JULY 20-26, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com FACE TO FACE Multi-instrument musician Brian Wallace lives quite a mobile life, often moving back and forth between Big Sur, Mount Tam and Berkeley, where he has steady gigs. Wallace belongs to a third generation of Big Sur and Carmel dwellers, and that’s his “permanent Earth,” he says. It’s the place to which he always returns. Many of the instruments Wallace plays are stowed in his van, which looks exactly like a musician’s beaten vehicle should look—dated, colorful and decorated with personal ornaments. The instruments include a bamboo flute (called a bansuri), a couple types of drums, a viola and a guitar. There’s also a sarode—a stringed instrument used in Hindustani music. Wallace plays the sarode every Saturday at Aabha Indian Cuisine in Carmel, keeping with the food and ambiance. He picked up his sarode while traveling through northern India with Ali Akbar Khan in 1982. Khan (1922-2009) was sarode virtuoso and Wallace’s teacher, who in 1967 moved his Calcutta-based school to San Rafael in Marin County. With Faustin Bray, Wallace co-founded Sound Photosynthesis and the Association for Cultural Evolution, as well as the bands Nomadband and Intuit. Weekly: Despite all this traveling, you consider yourself a local. Wallace: I always return here, either for years or seasons. In Monterey County, there’s my only private post box, and where I pay my only property taxes. But most importantly, it is the “home” feeling derived from sleeping and waking in the depth of the redwood forest, the wild coast and my ancestral roots and stories—basically where my inner infrastructure, artistic upbringing and passions seem, at core, mirrored. Tell us about your family. We were always a California family, a continuous chain. My grandfather was involved in the early artist colony [in Carmel] and helped to start the Forest Theater. He was a writer, a graphic artist and a visionary. My father was a journalist and that’s why we traveled a lot. But Big Sur has been home since the late ’70s. From my mother’s side, my grandmother’s grandfather not only wrote songs but had them published during the Civil War era. Early music experiences? My first instrument was the piano in the house, when I was 3 or 4. I picked up violin between the ages of 5 and 6, but switched to guitar in high school. It was the ’60s, there was no question about it, I became interested in rock and jazz bands. I graduated from college in 1971 and around that time traveled to South America and began getting to know music, learning different styles. I started with guitar, moved to viola and drums. I learned by learning songs. That was my way of learning. Different instruments teach you how to play different songs. And India? After South America [Bolivia, Columbia, Brazil], I came back to California and met Ali Akbar in Northern California. People were telling me to go listen to him, and they were right. He was the absolute primo. I became his friend and his student. I started to travel with him. To mirror what he was doing. I was trying to get close to his sound. It’s the method of Indian music teachers. Tell us about sarode. It’s soulful. It simply sings. It has 15 sympathetic strings, 25 strings total. That means that there are strings that are not played, but resonate in sympathy with strings that are played. You also sing at Aabha. In Sanskrit? Yes, that was part of what I learned from Ali Akbar. It’s a more reflexive, less intellectual way of learning. I’m not Indian, I’m a California guy. But I learned all those songs from him. Indian music is not your only love. No, I’m a composer, poet and colorful brush painter. I can create original songs and improvisations for concert performance, deep ceremony, convivial space, or yoga, with voice and guitar. I play and sing to offer the comfort and enjoyment and convivial atmosphere of easygoing songs. What is music to humans? We emerge in our shy childhood fascinated by songs and, for better or for worse, singing—allied in a heartbeat. Music, like native beauty around us, is a part of spiritual intelligence pouring forth from our brutally oppressed lives to flood this culture with one passionate truth. You can listen to Brian Wallace 6pm Saturdays at Aabha Indian Cuisine, 3690 The Barnyard, Carmel. For more, visit Wallace’s website, whirledmusic.org. Life of Brian While Big Sur is his “permanent Earth,” Brian Wallace revisits India through his music. By Agata Pop˛eda Brian Wallace is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, poet, composer and painter. The Big Sur redwoods are his home. Wallace has a regular Saturday night sarode gig in Carmel. 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