DAVID
ZINK
YI
News
from
the
Comfort
Zone
by David Zink Yi
»I would say that Don Cherry’s music is, in a wider sense,
a source of inspiration for me.«
»I would say that Don Cherry’s
music is, in a wider sense, a source of
inspiration for me.«
David Zink Yi in collaboration with Angie Keefer, Being the Measure, Performance in St. Agnes, 2018 © Image Elda Oreto
“Inspiration strikes in moments of enlightenment and it comes in totally different ways. There are too many to list. I generally feel more inspired by experiences than by specific places. Things like encounters with people, or interacting with a piece of art or possibly a book. However, I would say that music, and specifically improvised music, has always been a source of inspiration for me and led me to specific works, as is the case with BEING THE MEASURE. Perhaps music inspires me particularly because it possesses so many of the properties I always yearn for in the arts. One of these is that in music, one’s own expression relies on the voices of the others. In other words, in order to find their own expression, musicians do not only need to accept each other’s changes and shifts, but they also have to feel and understand each other’s forms of time and space. This is a process which requires a constant renewing and transforming of one’s own point of view. I find that quite remarkable. I am totally into Don Cherry’s music at the moment. Whether playing jazz or free jazz, or later in his search for newer, more spiritual music, he always commands one of the most suggestive, but also human sounds. Don Cherry is well known as a multi-instrumentalist, but I particularly enjoy the way he elaborates endless dialogs between the trumpet and saxophone, for example, as he does with Gato Barbieri. Those duos are always particularly playful and open to process and transformation without losing the central ideas. I would say that Don Cherry’s music is, in a wider sense, a source of inspiration for me.”