Linsey Pollak Transcript
Episode Podcast, Video and Show notes
Leah Roseman:
Linsey Pollak is an Australian musician who is known worldwide as a passionate and creative advocate for community music. His life has been full of unusual opportunities to explore different styles of music, and his inventiveness has spurred him to create countless instruments from found objects.
In this episode, you'll get to hear him play four different instruments in different improvisatory styles, and I'm sure that everyone will be inspired by stories from his life describing some of his incredibly unusual, fun, and beautiful collaborations and creations.
Please follow this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. The video link is in the description along with detailed timestamps.
Good day, Linsey Pollak.
Linsey Pollak:
Good day.
Leah Roseman:
Thanks so much for joining me.
Linsey Pollak:
My pleasure.
Leah Roseman:
So, you are holding a Macedonian gaida?
Linsey Pollak:
That's correct, yeah, there it is. It's actually made in Australia with Australian timber and an Australian goat skin. But I've modeled it on a particular Macedonian bagpipe that I had access to many, many, many decades ago.
Leah Roseman:
Fantastic. Thank you so much.
Linsey Pollak:
My pleasure.
Leah Roseman:
So, how is that bagpipe different than a Scottish bagpipe and maybe there's different types? I don't know about bagpipes.
Linsey Pollak:
There are many different bagpipes. Well, definitely over 235 different types of bagpipes, so-
Leah Roseman:
Wow, okay.
Linsey Pollak:
... there's one particular book about bagpipes that lists or quotes 235 different types. Since that book was printed, there have been a few different ones invented, including by myself. So, how it differs from the Scottish pipes, so we have one chanter. The difference with this chanter part from the look of it is that it's got a single reed. So it's a very primitive single reed. So in a clarinet-type instrument, rather than the double reed of the Scottish pipes, it has one drone rather than three drones. But apart from that, it's the same animal. It's using a complete goat skin, in this case. They sometimes use sheep, but more often goat skins. Yeah. So that's the main difference.
Leah Roseman:
So I have to say, learning about you, you're so adventurous and very generous, and we're going to talk a lot about community music-making today. And also, such an expressive player. I've listened so much to your recordings and just, yeah, fantastic musician.
Linsey Pollak:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
And your story of getting to know Macedonian music so deeply, we'll get into in a moment, but when you first got really interested in listening to the gaida, I understand you were on this rafting trip in Australia with a bunch of friends. Now, I was just surprised because I mean, in Canada, people don't go on rafting trips that I know, living on rafts for two weeks. It seems very dangerous to me. How did that work?
Linsey Pollak:
Well, we chose a very slow and relaxed river. You probably wouldn't be allowed to do it nowadays. And this is back in the 1970s, so a fair while ago. And so, we built the rafts ourselves. It was something that started off with seven of us and it ended up with 14 of us. So we started off, I think, with three rafts and ended up with seven as the word got back to friends, what a great time, we're having it. And most of us did it for about three months.
The bagpipes I had discovered actually just prior to that trip. And so, it was on that trip that I was listening over and over again to this album that I'd discovered. And how I'd fell in love with the Macedonian bagpipes was as simple as listening to an album in a friend's record collection.
I was staying over and I found this album. I went, "Hmm. Okay, that looks interesting." Macedonian folk dancers. And I put it on, and it was like instant love. I just fell in love with the sound of that instrument of the gaida, of the Macedonian bagpipe. And I knew pretty much straight away that I would somehow get to learn that instrument.
And then on that raft trip, basically, that cassette that copy that I made of the album was on permanent rotating every day. And then it so happened then that the following year I ended up going to Europe and ended up living in London for two and a half years, making musical instruments and found a group of musicians who were playing that music and managed to borrow some Macedonian bagpipes and eventually went to Macedonia and found a teacher.
Leah Roseman:
And when you got there, I understand your van broke down, and then you had this three-month immersion living-
Linsey Pollak:
That's right.
Leah Roseman:
... with your teacher.
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah. Well, in fact, it was lucky that the van broke down because myself and Adam Heilbrunn, who was another musician that I was playing with in London, he played the kaval, the end-blown flute, Macedonian end-blown flute. We decided that we wanted to go to Macedonia and find teachers of those instruments. And so, we bought a Kombi, and we were traveling across from London to Skopje, our destination. And the Kombi broke down on the coast of Yugoslavia. And it was pretty much we thought we'd be able to fix it, but it was pretty much irretrievably lost and that was the best thing that happened. It could have happened really because the plan was to live in that Kombi during the Macedonia winter, which would've been freezing. It was freezing. But it meant we had to look for accommodation. And in looking for that accommodation, we just happened to find somebody who had a granny flat.
And not only did he have that granny flat, he was a Macedonian gaida player and he played and he just recently retired. He had a lot of time on his hands. And I ended up learning from him for three and a half months. He basically spent three hours every day with me for that three and a half months. And we came very, very close friends. He'd recently retired, but he'd retired fairly early because of an injury. And in the long-term anyway, how many years? Two years, after that, I ended up bringing him to Australia and as part of a group, Orkestar Grupa Pečalbari and he ended up living over in my place for a couple of months.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, and in terms of acquiring the language, how did that work for you?
Linsey Pollak:
Just basically pretty poor street Macedonian, which I still maintain, still at very beginner's level, but it allows me to communicate and understand. But basically, started off with nothing. It was just lots of smiles and laughing at I don't know what.
But over that period of two and a half months, I learnt basically street language very, very quickly because very few people were speaking English in those days. Well, particularly where I was staying just outside Skopje.
Leah Roseman:
And since you grew up playing clarinet, so you didn't find the embouchure too different playing the gaida?
Linsey Pollak:
Oh, it's totally different because really the embouchure is... We're not looking at blowing of... The reed is inside the bag, really, that's inside at the top of the chanter. And so, it's really just a blowpipe. So you're not really looking at an embouchure at all.
But I really did have to unlearn a lot of the classical way of thinking that I had from my clarinet training. And it was a fantastic experience because it's part of an oral tradition and that's how I learned from Lazzo. I had the advantage of having a cassette player. And so, in that three hours every day that we spent, I'd record. And then the rest of the day I just practice. And it was the perfect learning situation really.
Leah Roseman:
Wow. And I was just thinking, because you also studied the Greek klarino. I'm not sure how they say it, as well as another trip. Was that very different style of playing?
Linsey Pollak:
Very, very, very different. And that was-
Leah Roseman:
Like physically beyond a musical, I mean.
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah, well, physically for sure. So we're back to an embouchure that is similar but having to use a very different way of expressing. And so, the embouchure changes because you're wanting a very open throat you're using, and that particular Greek sound is what I was striving for, never really getting. It's interesting because that was... Let me think, 12 years later that I went to Greece.
I'd stopped playing clarinet for a while, but I had really fallen in love with the sound of the Greek and the Turkish styles of playing. And so, I managed to find somebody to teach me in the North of Greece, in Sérres, Stavros Vasthekis. And so, I stayed there with Jess, my partner, and she was playing darabuka, the drum. And we were just lucky because Stavros was just an incredibly kind and generous teacher, but he also had a whole group of friends that at least four nights a week would go out to different tavernas scattered around the countryside and we'd get to go with them. And many of them were musicians. So it was four nights a week, there was just this fantastic music that we were exposed to.
And my take-up of the Greek language was definitely a lot slower than the Macedonian. I think I was a bit older by that stage. And also, it's a more difficult language, but we communicated again through smiles and jokes and through music, and that was also a great experience.
Leah Roseman:
So Australia like Canada's country of immigrants. And I found it really interesting part of your story that when you first got into Macedonia music, you didn't realize what a vibrant community there existed already.
Linsey Pollak:
That's right, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
It was just something over there. Can you talk about the experience when you first discovered that community back in Australia?
Linsey Pollak:
Well, yeah, that's quite an interesting and funny story. So yeah, as you say, I was very ignorant when I went over, I'd fallen in love with the music, but I knew nothing really about the Macedonian community in Australia, which on coming back I found it was a large, large community, half a million people in what is a big continent, but with a small population. Even now, we've only got around about 30 million.
And I came back from Macedonia, I was totally broke, so I was out busking and I was busking with my gaida, with the Macedonian bagpipes in front of a cinema complex. And I did that fairly regularly when I came back. And one night, a group of pretty tough looking guys in the early 20s came out and they surrounded me in a circle and I thought, "What's going on?" And all of a sudden their arms came up and they started dancing to the music. And I went, "Oh, okay. They're obviously Macedonian."
And then as soon as I finished the music, they came over, "You're playing our music. How come you're playing the gaida?" And so, we got to talking and it turned out that a lot of them were from a dance group there. And I found out that there were about 25 different dance groups that they knew of and that they turned out, there were literally dozens of Macedonian bands in Sydney where I was living at the time, many dance groups. And then over a period of time, I got to be very much welcomed and accepted by the Macedonian community and found out a lot more about the whole Macedonian experience in Australia.
And that then ended up inspiring me to search a lot more in other different communities and then led me to eventually setting up a center for multicultural music over in Perth that... Yeah, it kept going. It doesn't exist now, but it went for 30 years and was a very important part of the growth of multicultural music in Australia.
Leah Roseman:
I wanted to say congratulations for setting that up. And I was so sad when I read the funding got cut and it's just such a tragedy.
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah, unfortunately, that's the problem with funding. Certain things go in and out of fashion. There are other organizations that are doing similar things. When I set it up back in 1983, at the end of '83, it was very much because I just believed that there was this amazing diversity of incredible music that most Australians were totally ignorant of and were not exposed to. And so, I really wanted to set up a center which nurtured that music, which acknowledged those musicians, which paid those musicians properly, rather than always asking them to come and play for free at community events and so on, which was the normal case.
And so the center, which in that first of all was called the North Perth Ethnic Music Centre, then became known as the Multicultural Art Center WA, and then eventually became called Kulcha, K-U-L-C-H-A. And that lasted for 30 years. But there were groups like BEMAC, the Brisbane Ethnic Music & Arts Centre in Brisbane across the other side of Australia, well, sort of where I am now, a little bit south of here. That organization set up directly in response to that first center. And then there was also an organization, which is still going now in Melbourne, which set up about the same time called The Boite. And so it was still a part of that very early acknowledgment of the amazing cultural diversity that we have in Australia.
Leah Roseman:
There's so many tangents. But if we can just go back a little bit to that first trip to Europe, I found that through your whole London story quite interesting. So you were making renaissance flutes and you set up a business to do so.
Linsey Pollak:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
Did you bought a lathe and you were backpacking, and you couldn't carry it?
Linsey Pollak:
That's right. So to go even a little bit further back. When I left school, my plan was to study science and I took a year off. And during that year, I discovered a grove of bamboo and made my first bamboo flute. And again, that was another instant love affair. Just the whole process of making one's own instrument was for me, very, very exciting.
So I did start my science degree and I did the first year of the science degree, but by the time I'd gone into the second year of the science degree, I was already starting to earn a bit of a living by selling bamboo flutes. And I used to do that at the university, outside the library. I'd sit down and roll my swag and put out the flutes on the ground. And gradually, I'd drop back to part-time and eventually then postponed my degree and started making wooden flutes as well, because I thought, "Ah, I want to take this a step further."
I became interested in early music. I was making specifically renaissance flutes, three different sizes, the soprano, alto, and tenor. And then I was lucky enough to get a small grant to visit museums with important collections of early wind instruments throughout Europe. And I traveled around Europe for three months just visiting these wonderful collections of instruments and making detailed measurements of those instruments with the idea of one day making copies of them.
And the final museum that I went on that tour was the Horniman Museum in London. So I ended up in London and walking through the Clerkenwell area where a lot of watchmakers. I was just looking into a watchmaker's shop, and there was this beautiful old treadle wood lathe, wood turning lathe, cast iron. So like a treadle sewing machine, it's powered by just the foot pedal.
And it was for sale for 20 pounds. And I went, "Oh, that's ridiculous. It's so beautiful." And I did an impulse buy knowing that I had no way of taking it anywhere. I was backpacking. And so, I was traveling with my girlfriend at the time, I said, "Do you want to stay in London for a while?" And she was making reeds and so we both set up a workshop. She was making double reeds for early winds, and I was making woodwind instruments. But first of all, specifically, renaissance flutes and supplying players and also the early music shop.
And that's how I got to end up staying in London for a couple of years. And inadvertently, well, not so inadvertently, I guess it was also a desire to find other people but finding other musicians who were interested in Macedonian music by finding a Macedonian or Yugoslav dance group who danced the dances of Yugoslavia, Serbia, Croatia, but particularly were interested in Macedonian music and dance. And just luckily there was this group of musicians already playing music with that dance group. And then I became part of that really vibrant of Macedonian music scene with those other musicians.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So Linsey, I have a couple questions about that, but I was just curious, did you ever perform in the Renaissance World as a woodwind player or a flutist or not? You weren't playing that music?
Linsey Pollak:
I definitely was playing it. During that time in Europe when I was traveling from museum through the various museums, I also went to summer school in Austria, and there was an instrument maker, John Hanchett, who is a very well-known early wind maker based in England. And he was running that course, and I actually made myself an alto curtal, so that's a predecessor of the bassoon.
But so, at that stage, they would have four sizes, the bass curtal or dulcian, which eventually became the bassoon. The tenor, the alto, and the soprano curtal. And so, they double reed instruments with a parallel board that doubles up on itself like the bassoon. And I played in an early music wind ensemble associated with the early music center in London. We weren't performing. It was just something that I loved doing. And so I got into playing the curtal with that group, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, so cool. And you mentioned briefly before about busking. So I know you busked a lot across Europe. Did you ever have any... You had mentioned that story, you were worried about aggression when it was actually friendly Macedonians, but did you have any experiences where people tried to steal from you or was it bad?
Linsey Pollak:
No, no. With that trip, I wasn't busking so much in Europe. Later on, on different trips, I busked a lot throughout Europe and-
Leah Roseman:
Later, yeah.
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah, and always it was very friendly, except one time in Zurich when the police took me into custody for a little while for playing a prohibited instrument. And I was playing the bagpipe, and the bagpipe was prohibited.
And another time in Zurich when a pot of water was poured from the second storey balcony over my head-
Leah Roseman:
Wow.
Linsey Pollak:
... and some local passers-by said, "You were lucky. It was more than water that was poured on the last busker." so yeah. So-
Leah Roseman:
That's unfortunate.
Linsey Pollak:
But in London, I did quite a lot of busking, just usually with one of my little soprano folk flutes and added to my income from the instrument making.
Leah Roseman:
So back to Macedonia and dance groups, I'm curious, so did you learn some of the dances and did that help you with the rhythms, the polyrhythms?
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah, absolutely. Really, the dance and the music are... They're intrinsically linked. There's not one with the other. I mean, the gaida is very much an instrument for dancing. It's used also for accompanying songs. But the traditional dance, very often is accompanied by a gaida and a tapan, that's a large Macedonian drum.
And so, when I was with Lazzo, he also taught me a lot of the dances to the tunes, and I notated all of those. And I had originally got into the music. Also, partly from learning the dancing, I had found a group, this is before I went to Europe in Sydney. There was a wonderful dance teacher, Gary Dawson, who's remained a close friend ever since then. And he taught regular weekly dancers as part of the Sedinka folk dance group.
And it was through that group that I also started becoming aware of this amazing music from Eastern Europe, whether it was Macedonian, or Bulgarian, or Romanian, or from Greece. And that was my first real exposure to that music. And so, at the Živko Firfov Dance Group in London that I was part of the band playing for, all of us would be dancing as well when we weren't playing.
Leah Roseman:
And you also got interested in the Romani brass band tradition, which is different.
Linsey Pollak:
The-
Leah Roseman:
... tradition, which is different.
Linsey Pollak:
That's right. So, to take the story a little bit further, after returning from Macedonia, going back to London for a little while, the dance group, the Živko Firfov Dance gGoup, were invited to go to Macedonia and perform at a festival, large, large festival, Ilindenski Denovi festival in Bitola, one of the main towns in Macedonia. And the whole group, dance group and the musicians, all went. So this was six months after I returned from Macedonia. Went back to Macedonia, but this time with a group of about, it must've been about 20 of us. And we performed at that festival.
And through that festival met so many wonderful and amazing traditional musicians from villages and towns all over Macedonia, and received countless invitations to come and visit if we were staying on. Well, a few of us did stay on, particularly myself and a friend, Chris Gunstone, who was one of the tambura players in the Živko Firfov Group. And so we stayed on for a month or so, and followed up those invitations. And one of those invitations was from a wonderful musician, Romany musician, Destan Destanovski, from the town of Berovo. And so, we went and stayed with a very hospitable Destanovski family. And that was my introduction to that incredible Romany brass band music, wild improvisatory. Again, it was just, totally fell in love with that.
And later on, when I returned in Australia, but maybe a decade later, I started notating and writing some of my own compositions in that style, and then also running workshops in that style of music. And eventually having a 24-piece street band called The Unusual Suspects, where I'm living now, here in Maleny, which went for about seven years until a few years ago, playing in that style.
And to extend that story, it was many years later that I finally returned to Macedonia, after about a 36, 37-year break. And unfortunately, by that stage, Destan who, really, he and I had become like brothers, he had died only a couple of years earlier. But I became very, very close friends with his two sons, Milo and Dzafer. And Milo and I organized so that I'd come back and stayed there. And I thought, no, really, this music is so fantastic.
Because when I returned in 2013, the music was more vibrant and alive than when I'd been there in '78 and also '81. So we're talking about a big gap, but the music is stronger than ever. And I thought, now I've got to somehow get these musicians over to Australia. And so, with the help of a wonderful folk music festival here in Queensland, the Woodford Folk Festival, we brought 19 of those musicians across for a couple of weeks, to Australia, to play at that festival also in our town here in Maleny and also down in Brisbane. And that was an extraordinary experience. So that music also had a big impact on me.
Leah Roseman:
There's so much cross-pollination in music, in general. And I'm curious, because some klezmer music I've heard has that brass band, that Romany sound. Have you played with any klezmer musicians in Australia or elsewhere?
Linsey Pollak:
No, not really. I've come across klezmer musicians. And there are some great musicians down in Melbourne, in particular, playing that music. But yeah, as you say, there's a lot of cross-pollination, and you can see the roots of that music and where it's come from. And for me, that's the beauty of that music and how it spreads and how it's shared. And, for example, one of the musicians who played clarinet in the Unusual Suspects was also very interested and had played in various klezmer bands. Yeah, so there's definitely that cross-pollination happening over here as well.
Leah Roseman:
I saw a wonderful YouTube video with the Unusual Suspects that you guys had filmed, and one of your friends was dancing like a clown figure and just engaging with the people. It was really wonderful. And you've done so much performance art and theater and humor as part of your shows, really meshed together.
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah. Yep, yep, yep. Yeah, for me, that's an important part of it. A lot of my, we have solo shows, which really were a major part of my life and work, I guess, since around early '90s. And those solo shows have taken me all over the world and probably been my main bread and butter for a long while. But for me, that sense of fun and humor is really important, because it opens the possibility to, I guess, to a range of people who might not have been necessarily attracted to that style of music if it was being displayed on a concert stage.
But when it's brought in with that element of fun and humor, they're more open to it. And then, finally, they realize that they actually do like this music, even though it's very different from anything they've heard before. Yeah, I do certainly love adding that element of fun and humor. I mean, even if it's something as simple as making an instrument from a watering can or using a rubber glove to show people the different possibilities that there are in terms of music-making.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I was reminded, many of your videos have gone viral over the years, especially your clarinet. But I was actually looking for a duduk player for the series, and then I saw one of your duduk videos, and I was like, "Oh, of course I should talk to him, if he'd possibly agree to speak with me," was just so wonderful. And then I saw your video teaching people how to make a duduk reed from just a pipe, a plastic pipe. It was just, it's so inspiring. Would you be up for playing some duduk music for us?
Linsey Pollak:
Sure. Sure, sure. What's the best way to describe this? Again, the duduk is another instrument that I've totally fallen in love with. And I do have a number of Armenian duduks, but have never, I guess, become a player of the Armenian duduk as such. But I became very interested in the idea of, as an instrument maker, but because by the 1990s and the early 2000s, and also for the last 20 years, I've been making instruments a lot from found objects. And so, I wanted to come up with an instrument that was very much like the duduk, but maybe using a reed that was a little bit easier to make and longer lasting.
And so here we've got, it's basically a bit of plastic irrigation pipe or polypipe, polyethylene. So here in Australia we can buy 20 meters of this for $8. And this is pretty much the shape, very similar shape to the Armenian duduk reed, which is made from cane. And... That's what it sounds like by itself. But when I put it on onto this tube... And so, this is a particular instrument that I have designed, which is based on the Armenian duduk, but I've designed it so that I can use cross-fingering, like on a recorder to get a fully chromatic scale.
So it's only got the range of a ninth, but using cross-fingering, I can get a chromatic scale. So this is a hybrid duduk. And the reed itself, I must give credit to Xavi Lozano. He's a wonderful Spanish instrument-maker. And in a way, we've got a very similar approach. He makes lots of wind instruments out of found objects. He loves the use of humor in his work, as well as being a maker who also performs and makes his own videos. And I'd been mucking around with us this idea with making these duduk reeds out of polypipe, but fairly unsuccessfully. And then one day, I came across a video of his Ted Talk, where, in three minutes, he made a reed very similar to that.
And so, I thought, "Oh, I'm going to try again, because he just did it in three minutes." And so, his approach was a little bit different. He used a hammer to flatten this out, whereas I'd been sort of squeezing it and sanding it and so on. And so, I tried his technique and straight away, there was more success. And then I thought, I think there's actually ways, also, of improving this, and let's try and make it sound more like the Armenian duduk. So, I'll give you a listen to what it sounds like. I might just give myself a drone just to work with. And also I'll just turn around and turn that on.
Leah Roseman:
So Beautiful, Linsey. Thank you so much.
Linsey Pollak:
You're welcome. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about improvisation, because you're such a beautiful improviser, and all those styles of music with improvisation have attracted you for so long. But when you were growing up doing, I presume, classical clarinet, when you were a young man, were you doing any, just making stuff up or writing music?
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah. So I started learning clarinet when I was about 11 and went through about, yeah, nine years of classical training. But like a lot of kids all through high school, I played, had a few different bands. And more and more, those bands got involved in improvising at first, I guess, in a jazz style. One of the people that I played with was quite a good jazz pianist. And we had our first band, which was in the first year of high school, was called the Hoot and Twangers. And then we had a group called the Rajazz, R-A-J-A-Z-Z. And then we basically playing contemporary pop, a mix mixture of Rolling Stones and Beatles stuff, but also, giving it, I guess, a bit of a jazz twist.
But by the time I got to the final years of high school, I had discovered contemporary, I guess more contemporary, serious contemporary classical music. And my first, I guess, really huge excursion improvisation was deciding, and this was when? I think it was in my final year of high school, deciding to put on a performance of the Tiger's Mind by Cornelius Cardew. So that is a, well, at that stage, was a very contemporary work. But the score was a story, and it was about the tiger, Amy, the mind... Trying to think of all of the different characters.
But each performer represented one of those characters. And the score was basically the story of how the mind, the tiger, and Amy, the girl, intertwined. And we ended up doing two performances of that. And so that was the first excursion publicly that I did into of very free improvisation. But I always have been interested in improvisation and have just explored different ways and different styles of doing that, I guess.
Leah Roseman:
I wanted to ask you about your live looping, because you were a real pioneer when you started this in the early '90s, and the technology was very primitive, right?
Linsey Pollak:
Very primitive. I first started looping when I moved from Sydney, where I was living, and Jess, my partner, who we've been together for 36 years, we just, one of her sons had been living with her, down in Adelaide, but then moved back up to Queensland, and another son was living up in Queensland. So we moved back to Queensland, where Jess had originally been living and we lived in or moved to a very small town of 300 people, called Kin Kin. And we actually were living there for 19 years until about 10 years ago.
But, of course, it meant that I left all my musical colleagues behind me in Sydney and I thought, "What am I going to do?" And I came across a woman who had a performance name of Via Linda, and she did a solo looping show. And that was the first live looping that I've seen. And this is back in 1990. And so, I thought, "Oh, maybe that's what I... Let's try that." And at that stage, as you said, the technology was very quite primitive. And my first looping device was a delay pedal that had a hold function, and that hold function gave me a 1.8-second-long loop. And so, my first solo show was totally built around a 1.8-second loop.
I've got no idea what that sounded like now, many years later. But then over the next 30 years, I've developed a whole range of different solo looping shows, which, as we're talking before, involved an element of fun, and particularly, was based around the whole concept of instruments made from found objects. That very first show was called Bang it with a Fork. And I was a kid at the sink doing the washing up, and everything was made from the sink and all of the pots and pans and everything in the sink, as well as a few wind instruments that were made from found objects.
The next show after that was called Knocking on Kevin's Door, where I was a roadie, setting up for a gig, totally ignoring the audience for one hour. But as I set up, in the guise of Kevin, the roadie, he created music from all of the stuff that he was setting up, whether it was the music stands, the microphone stands, the gaffer tape, the music folders or whatever. The next after that was called The Art of Food and I was crazy chef called Ivan, and all the music was made from food or kitchen utensils. And that was where the first carrot clarinet raised its head, and I've ended up using that for many years.
Yeah, that was basically the looping that developed over that period of time. And also, as the technology evolved, I would move from one different moving set up to another. And right now, I'm still doing some looping, but not with the current solo show that I was working on earlier this year. Is a little bit different because, really, that's called Searching for that Sound, which is a little bit like this podcast in a way. It's like me telling about my journey and playing music along the way. And it's from stepping from instrument to instrument, but also using some looping.
Leah Roseman:
Wow, that sounds great. I was thinking how I loved your thing you did with the bicycle, so brilliant.
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Was that part of one of those shows, or was that a totally separate...
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah, that was one of those shows. Yeah, the show was called CYCOLOGY, as in cycle, C-Y-C-O-L-O-G-Y. And in that performance, my character was Professor Squealy Deetbum, who was basically lecturing on the possibilities of the bicycle as a performance tool or instrument. But he also had a sidekick called Dietrich, and Dietrich opened the show, and then Professor Squealy Deetbum took over. Actually, I brought that over to Canada at one stage.
Leah Roseman:
I'm sorry, I missed it. Where were you touring in Canada?
Linsey Pollak:
Mainly up in the northeast. Yeah, so right up to Prince Edward Island. Yeah, mainly in the Quebec province. Yeah, yeah. The agent who was running it at that stage was based in Montreal.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. And you don't normally... Do you speak in these shows or is it just all miming and music?
Linsey Pollak:
The early shows were very much more about the music and the mime, with just occasional key expressions, which became a very important part of each show. And some of the character, Ivan, the chef, grunted a lot and exclaimed, and certain exclamatory remarks. The Squealy Deetbum, the professor, spoke in a very, very high pitched voice, which was gobbledygook.
But after around about the first five shows, then there was a lot more talking, and it became less character based and more about demystifying the whole process of making music and making instruments. And so, I used language and talking quite specifically about the instruments to inspire people to have a go themselves, basically.
Leah Roseman:
In terms of looping, during the pandemic, I get the impression a lot of people were isolated and started to experiment with looping, who were looping-curious. Did you get people asking you advice about that?
Linsey Pollak:
Actually, no, not really. I mean, over the years, of course, I've run quite a lot of looping workshops. And I have noticed that, through the pandemic, that did happen, but I haven't had so... I think now, because there's so much online, people can explore it quite easily online. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty transparent in so many ways now because of the amount of information there is now available.
Leah Roseman:
Did you bring any instruments today that are with found objects?
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah. Yep, yep. We could explore the bagpipe theme.
Leah Roseman:
Whatever you'd like.
Linsey Pollak:
Well, let's do that. Seeing, we started with the Macedonian bagpipe. So obviously, I've got this peculiar attraction to bagpipes, or not so peculiar. But I discovered quite early on, quite in my very, very early shows, and particularly, shows that I took onto the streets of Europe, created different bagpipes using rubber gloves. Because the beauty of a rubber glove is it holds air. And because it's rubber and flexible, as it expands, it provides its own pressure. And so, it's this wonderful bag that you don't actually have to be pressing with your arm. And so, I've created a number of different types of bagpipes with the rubber glove.
So it's very simple. Basically just like the Macedonian bagpipe or other bagpipes you blow in, that's your bag. It's self-pressured because of the rubber. This is the most recent version I've made of rubber glove bagpipes. So it's got a drone here. The interesting thing about these, the chanter and the drone, is that... Oh, I won't pull it off, because it's going to put it a little bit out of tune. But the reeds that I'm using are membrane reads.
So it's basically some plastic garbage bag, which has been stretched over the top of the tube. The air goes into the bag and then comes back out through these tubes here, one into the drone and one into the chanter. And it's the vibration of that plastic garbage bag membrane on the top, which is creating this sound.
Leah Roseman:
For those listeners, who are listening to the podcast, you should definitely go to the video afterwards, just for the humor value of seeing that giant glove and blown up. Did you get that idea from somebody else or did you just come up with it?
Linsey Pollak:
Well, I came up with that idea. I mean, since then I've seen other people who have been using that idea. That was, again, in the early '90s. That was a time of great ferment, I think, for me that was. I'd moved to Queensland. I'd left behind, as I said, a lot of musician friends. And so I was sort of exploring and discovering, I was getting into instrument making and I was mainly earning my living as an instrument maker. But then I started developing the solo shows and so the rubber glove bagpipe was sort of right from that very first show with the kid at the kitchen sink, called Bang It With a Fork. That actually had, because that was all about washing up because the kid was washing up and so he had the rubber gloves and the gloves actually were built into the sink and they came up out of holes and blew up. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. I was thinking how I really enjoyed those recordings you've made. I think you live near a beautiful forest and you go early in the morning and you record and we hear the ambient sounds. It's not like many people are super imposing field recordings. This is live.
Linsey Pollak:
Yep, that's correct. And the amazing thing is that I recorded a whole album that way. And I just discovered that the microphone in my iPad Pro was actually incredibly good way of recording in that context. And that's all I'm using. I'm actually just using the iPad with the onboard microphone and nothing over dubbed. So it's just picking up the bird sounds with whatever wind instrument I chose to play on that particular day.
The only thing that was prerecorded was that I just had a drone that I was listening to and then was part of the recording, but basically the instrument that I'm playing and the birds is just all being just recorded from that little iPad mic. And yeah, there's one, a whole album of those tracks. And it's something that I'm planning to do a lot more of in the coming year, just doing sunrise concerts, just inviting people to come along and just picking beautiful locations with great bird calls.
Leah Roseman:
I did listen to the album and also your album with the frog sounds that somebody else had recorded, an entire album.
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's the done a little bit differently. So the frog sounds are recorded by a fantastic naturalist and frog and bird expert who's recorded a lot of Australian frogs, David Stewart. And I've used those sounds with his permission with a sampler and then created music using that sampler.
Leah Roseman:
You have such a great sense of groove your music, a lot of it's so rhythmic. And you've worked in a duo for many years with your percussionist friend. Let me remember his name. Tunji Beier.
Linsey Pollak:
That's right, that's right. We worked together as the duo Dva, which is the Macedonian word for two. And so for about 20 years we played as a duo. We're now actually are playing with another friend, Philip Griffin, a fantastic string player. And so the three of us are now playing as a trio. That's a fairly new current project, simply called the Beier -Griffin -Pollak Trio. And that's along with Tunji, wonderful percussionist, who when he was 16, took himself to South India to Bangalore and studied for three years South Indian percussion there. And Philip Griffin, who's a wonderful string player playing a huge range of different string instruments, but in particular the instruments like the oud and the laouto, as well as electric bass and guitar and the Afghani rebab.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. And have you learned any of that hand percussion from Tunji? Has he taught you any of that? I was just curious.
Linsey Pollak:
I've always been interested in and played a bit of percussion, but when you have a percussionist as amazing as Tunji, I'm very happy just to sit on the winds and play along. And so yeah, I haven't actually specifically had lessons or learnt from him, but just collaborated a lot on the music that we create together.
Leah Roseman:
I wanted to talk about your Humarimba project.
Linsey Pollak:
So again, with my fascination for making instruments and making them simple, I've always loved the marimba and the xylophone, particularly the marimba, and had the idea that it would be a wonderful community instrument. But one of the difficult things when traveling around and running workshops is, with a marimba, it's a big instrument. And a lot of that bulk and weight is to do with the stand that's holding up the keys.
And one morning I woke up and I went, "But what if the people playing were the stand?" And so I got the idea of hooking a marimba onto belts of two players, one at each end, and developed a whole style of marimba music of which I've written a lot for the various workshops and groups that I've run, where the music is three part marimba music played by three people, one on each end and one in the middle.
And first of all, I really was more involved in running, making workshops so people could make their own marimbas. And then more and more got into writing and composing music, which people who'd never played before could handle and gradually build that. And then when I moved to Kin Kin, as I mentioned before, moved up to Queensland, I guess after about being there for nearly 10 years, it was about 10 years, I was approached by one of the mums from the local school saying, "Would you teach our kids to play marimba?" Because they knew that I'd sort of traveled all over Australia running these workshops. And they also knew of the band that my partner, Jess and I, and our two closest friends, we had a band called Xylosax, which was based all around the humarimba, plus other instruments that I brought into the group.
And they said, "Would you teach our kids?" And I said, "Well, you know what? I think I'm going to say no. What I'm going to say is that I'll teach the parents." I said, "It's a very unnatural thing for kids to learn something before the parents. Why don't we do it in a more traditional manner where it's something that can be then sort passed on." I said, "I'm very happy to teach the parents and then let's wait until the kids themselves want to play. I don't want you to want them to play. I want the kids to really have a hunger to do it themselves."
So I started running classes and a group called K-Karimba started, which ran for seven years eventually was when I left Kin Kin, it was taken over by one of the people that I'd been teaching. And we had and always would have pretty much 24 people in that group. Over the seven years it eventually developed so that we were out sometimes out performing. But every Tuesday night in this small town of 300, we had 24 people playing and sometimes people left the group, but there were always people who came in.
So I worked out that over the period of those seven years, we had 40 people from Kin Kin playing. Well, that's over 10%. So I think that pretty much that was the marimba hotspot on the planet, when you look at the number of people playing marimba in that town. Certainly 10% of the town were playing marimba. And that was a mainstay of my community music making for quite a while.
One of my big passions is teaching people to make their own instruments and make their own music. And the humarimba was perfect for that because it was an instrument that anyone can make. And there was one point, where a music festival, that is now called the Queensland Music Festival. At that stage, it was called the Brisbane Biannual. Back in 1995. They commissioned me to do a project to, within the community, make a whole lot of marimbas, enough so that we could put them right across the Brisbane River, which is a wide river.
So we made 160 marimbas that went end to end attached to the railings of this bridge that went across the river. And for nine days of the festival, those marimbas were up for people to play and then they went back to the families or the people who'd made them. So we had, over the 10 weeks that the workshop was open, we made, I think, there was 2,400 marimba bars were made and tuned. And I've forgotten how many people exactly, but I think we had a huge number of people involved in making them from 11 years old to 91 years of age.
Leah Roseman:
Wow. It's such a beautiful story. I saw the video of that project. The tuning, I mean, that must take such finesse. I mean, if you cut it off too short, it's too high. You have to start again.
Linsey Pollak:
Well, yeah, there's a few things involved. So the length, as you said, the length is important. But that's quite easy because I've worked out all the measurements for the instruments. It's different depending on the instrument. But actually most of the tuning is done by how much you cut away underneath. So the more you cut away, the lower the note. So there was one, just for example, I designed a children's show where all the whole set was musical instruments made from different things. There were four houses side by side, and the garden fence on one of the houses was a total marimba, but all the lengths were all the same. And so I managed to get at two octaves just by the amount that was cut out from underneath from just that same length. So it is possible to actually tune it that way.
So it's more the fact that when you're actually cutting away underneath or you're just using a tool called a surform, which is sort of just like a big handheld rasp, you get to a point where you've just got to start slowing down on the amount that you're taking away. So as you get to within a semitone of the sound that you want, of the note that you want, then to slow down.
Yeah, there were three of us that were running the workshops there and the workshops were open for that 10 week period. And basically the main job you had in that workshop was keeping an eye who's getting close, who's within a semitone of the note that they're going for and they're getting them to sort slow down on their work. But yeah, it's a really great way to gain an understanding about pitch and the relationship of pitch to length. And in terms of barred percussion instruments, or tuned percussion, great to get an understanding about that cutaway and how that slows down the rate of vibration as you cut more from the center.
Leah Roseman:
What a beautiful thing. What happened to that fence?
Linsey Pollak:
That fence? I don't know. It's interesting. That show was back again in the early '90s and we just, about two months ago, had a reunion of all the people that were in that show. And so the instruments ended up being scattered around many of us. But I still, from the Big Marimba project, the one that went across the Brisbane River, I still have a number of those marimbas still with me.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I was just thinking, I mean, the installation, it should be in some public place or museum. I mean, the work that went into building that garden fence that's a musical instrument. It's an amazing thing.
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So you've done so much theater. You had studied some theater right? Early in your career?
Linsey Pollak:
No. No.
Leah Roseman:
It helped you?
Linsey Pollak:
No, now I've never studied theater. It's just sort something I guess I've picked up along the road creating shows and working with other people and being lucky enough to have the opportunity work with some fantastic people. And so I've sort of learned over many years just really, I mean, for example, that performance out of the frying pan was a cast of five of us, but just working with a fantastic lighting designer, fantastic theater set designer, fantastic director. Those sort of things you learn from those people that you are working with.
So that first show, that was one of the first really big shows that was in the Brisbane Concert Hall. So it was a show for three to eight year-olds. And I'd never done a performance quite like that, but that ended up touring all over Australia, that particular performance. And since then I've sort of created great works, but of learning as I go a lot and learning from other people and collaborating. So it's just one of those things. It's a lovely way to learn.
Leah Roseman:
And you had this group, the Paranormal Music Society, where you would improvise with audience participation for the titles and the themes.
Linsey Pollak:
That's right. Yeah. So the Paranormal Music Society were, along with Romano Crivici, a very, very old and dear friend and another great friend, Blair Greenberg. And as you said, pretty much the whole performance was improvised based on title suggestions from the audience. So they could make up whatever title they liked and we'd create a piece of music based around that.
But it also created music from throwing a giant dice. Somebody from the audience would throw the dice and on the six sides of the dice there were musical notes. And so might throw it once A, throw it again G, throw it again another G, throw it again C, and throw it again fifth time E. And that five-note musical theme then would be the basis of that piece. So that was totally improvised piece. And a lot of my projects have been very firmly based in improvisation. Another of those projects was a project called QWERTY.
Leah Roseman:
I was going to ask you about that. Mm-hmm.
Linsey Pollak:
And I think for me, that's one of the most incredible improvised projects that I've been involved with. So again, it was a trio, three of us, Peter Rowe has autism and Down Syndrome. As a result of that can't speak. However, he's got an incredibly brilliant mind. And luckily, he can communicate through a process called facilitated communication. Unfortunately no one found out until he was 30 that really there was this amazing, active, incredible intellect, until he was able to be shown this means of communication.
And basically facilitated communication is, it's like a QWERTY keyboard, but just can be just on a cardboard board or a wooden board. And Peter, or whoever's communicating, points to the letters on the board and spells out the words. And with practice, that can be incredibly fast.
And I met Peter as part of another project and we created a theater performance using that facility, where two of the performers would write songs on stage live, and then their facilitators would sing the words. So we created a trio where his facilitator was also a great singer. And Peter would write the words. We'd have no idea what the song was going to be about. Sometimes I'd start the music.
So I was using, again, live looping, but I was using also a MIDI wind controller. So I had a huge range of sounds through the MIDI wind instrument. And then live looping those and then working with Peter's words and with Delaney who was singing those words. If you can imagine being a singer, singing the words that you've just read, as you're singing them, you're having to watch the next line that's being created at the same time as singing the previous line. So it's an amazing sort of feat really.
And just the whole process even to... Well, I was saying even to me from being inside the group, I think, but probably, especially for me being inside the group, it was always exhilarating and incredible just of being part of that process of walking on stage and not having an absolute clue where it was going to go over the next hour.
Leah Roseman:
So beautiful. My mom worked at a children's hospital and I remember, this was in the '80s, talking about that technology, which I think was relatively new at that time and how it was opening up these children's worlds.
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's wonderful.
Leah Roseman:
You mentioned the MIDI wind controller. You have something you've developed, like lyrebird, I think you call it, just to imitate different sounds that you've used in some of your new work.
Linsey Pollak:
Well, the MIDI wind controller is that I use as quite an older version. It's a Yamaha WX5. Lyrebird is just my name for that instrument. So I haven't developed it. It's just that it's an off-the-shelf wind controller made by Yamaha called it WX5. But I'm using it differently in that the project that I've been doing with a wonderful singer Lizzy O'Keeffe, we've been working together for eight years on a project called Dangerous Song. And I'm using the MIDI wind controller to play the sounds of endangered species.
So in the same way that I use frog sounds on that album that you mentioned before. Here I'm using the sounds of a whole range of endangered species. And it's basically a project that is using our art form to express our response to the current extinction crisis. And so we've done a number of different multimedia shows and many concerts using those sounds. And again, using live looping, but because the wind controller, using breath, and I can control the length of the note which follows obviously the cry or the sound of the animal. I can use that incredibly emotive sound of some of the gibbons, for example, and lemurs and various animals that use the melodic nature of their call to create the melody as well as the six octaves that I can play using that MIDI wind controller, but using those sounds.
Leah Roseman:
So you must have studied the sounds of these animals quite a bit to be able to do that.
Linsey Pollak:
Well, I guess rather than studying them, I've collected them over many years. And many of those sounds are available online now and many more now than there were say 15 years ago when I started doing it. So there's an extraordinary range of just fantastic sounds. And of course, as I'm collecting them, we always are studying those species who sounds that they were using to get a sense of why they're becoming extinct, where they are, where the ones that we've lost and so on.
Leah Roseman:
But you must have a really amazing oral memory to be able to. It just strikes me in general that you must have a great musical memory.
Linsey Pollak:
In which sense do you mean in terms of-
Leah Roseman:
Well even these animal calls, Linsey, that you could remember them so well and be able reproduce them. Most people couldn't do that.
Linsey Pollak:
Well, I guess I'm not having to reproduce cause the calls are right there. So it's just a matter of me dialing them up on the iPad. So just so-
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah. So how it works is that I collect the sounds, so there's a whole range of sounds, and then I might tweak a sample so that I know from a 27-second recording I've got, "Okay, this three seconds is going to be musically really useful." And so let's say that indri, which is a giant lemur from Madagascar, which is critically endangered, it's got this extraordinary sort of voice that's sort of very, very melodic and long calls.
Now I could use, say, 10 seconds of that call or five seconds, but that in a way is too long to be able to work in the way that we are working with the music we're creating. So I might use just three seconds of that call and then that's stored in the iPad in a particular program that I'm using called Thumb Jam, which is also a live looping program. So it was sort of made for me really, even though it wasn't, So those sounds are stored in the iPad, the MIDI wind controller, which is-
... sounds are stored in the iPad, the MIDI wind controller, which is just basically like a clarinet, but it's controlling those sounds. So it's like a synthesizer, but with breath control. When I play a particular note, it's going to play that pitch-
Leah Roseman:
Oh, okay.
Linsey Pollak:
... of that sound. So if I play an A, I've set it up so that I know I'm going to get an A, that the indri indri is going to the very attack, the attack of its call is going to be an A. It might move off the A over the next few seconds. So if I just blow a short note, I'll just get... I'll just get the very... How long I blow determines how much of the call is used. Then I can play melodically so I can play a melody using that animal's voice. But I can also, by changing the length of my breath on each of those notes, it gives me different degrees or lengths of that animal's call. It's a little bit hard to... Yeah, I should have actually have it set up here so I could show you how it works.
Leah Roseman:
No, you described it very well and people can listen to your recordings. No, I misunderstood that somehow you were imitating live.
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah, no, it's the actual sound, so I've got all of those stored in a program and I can access them and change very, very quickly and live loop them very, very quickly.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
But I still think you must have a great musical memory because you've learned so many different styles over the years and so many traditional tunes and modes and...
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah, well that's true because if I'm using that indri indri sound, I've got to know exactly how it sounds, so that it's not just this random sound that comes out. I need to know how I can use that call at each pitch, because I might be dropping that pitch by say two octaves, because I want to use it as a bass sound. So in that sense, I might be using just like half second lengths of that bass sound, but I'll be playing melodically. So I might loop a bassline with it, but then later on I might be actually using the longer aspect of the call to create or partly create the melody.
Leah Roseman:
Wow. Yeah. It's a very beautiful project that's very poignant. Your name for it, the lyrebird. Lyrebirds are those birds that make... They can imitate chainsaws and cell phone rings and all that, right?
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. That's why-
Leah Roseman:
Do they live in Australia or...
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Have you heard them before?
Linsey Pollak:
I've never heard them. I've never been lucky enough to hear one live. They're not common common, but they're not... I know many people who have heard them. Yeah. Where do you want to go from?
Leah Roseman:
Well, what do you have there?
Linsey Pollak:
Well, I might just do that description of how it works and build a piece so I can... And that way we can look at some live looping as well.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful.
Linsey Pollak:
So with Dangerous Song, this is the instrument which I call lyrebird. It's a Yamaha WX5 wind controller. So I've got the different sounds stored in the iPad, and the WX5 or lyrebird is connected so I can control the sound. So if I play the full call... So that's the full call. Or an octave up... Octave down... I can use it at bass two octaves down. So I can do something like this, for example... Add another loop layer... So that gives you just a very simple idea how the loop's built up. So if I select now a different instrument, if I go to, say, Blakiston's fish owl. So once again, I can play it very short... Or the full call...
Leah Roseman:
Beautiful. So was that first call that you used at the end, was that a whale or...
Linsey Pollak:
No, after Blakiston's fish owl I changed to this one... Which is a black cockatoo. It's Carnaby's black cockatoo, which comes from over in West Australia. It's endangered because of habitat loss. It originally or still is living in an area which is a wheat growing area, and so as the wheat growing has taken out and wiped out the natural bush land, that's reduced the amount of natural habitat of that particular cockatoo. So the beautiful birds, we've got a number of different types of black cockatoos around Australia, and that's one of the endangered ones.
I had no idea what I was going to create then. I just put something just very simple down with those two bird sounds. But that gives you an idea of the live looping combined with those animal sounds. And so the original pitch of that bird call, so that repetition is actually the bird itself. So I'm doing a very long breath... So that five or six calls was all one call from that animal. But then I can take it down... So I can use it just using those short breaths as a melodic way, but then I can use it in a more emotive way using the full call. Earlier on, I mentioned the indri indri, the Madagascan lemur... So that's the original pitch, and then I can use it... Hopefully that gives an idea.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Did you have that idea percolating for a long time before you started to use it?
Linsey Pollak:
I guess it developed... It probably was percolating in a way, and just trying different... So for example, the frog music was created from the samples, not using this instrument, but using a sampler. And it was used percussively, so just triggering samples on the sampler. Then when I first started experimenting with this, I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with it, because I just longed for a more acoustic and more organic sound. And then I thought, well, what if I experiment with animal sounds? That's going to give me a more... Just because of the flexibility in the way that the calls move, straightaway it's going to be more emotive and more organic in the sounds, even though it's digital because it's stored as a sample.
And so I started with that idea, and then I thought, just because of my ecological concerns, just looking at a musician's and artist response to the current extinction crisis, I came up with the idea of a show called The Extinction Room. So it was originally a solo show, and all the audience wore headphones, and I was in the center of the circle, but the audience were all facing outwards away from me. So I was in the middle of them, and all my gear was in the center with all of the lead going to the headphones. I originally had 20 different sets of headphones. And I took that show over, it was commissioned by a festival in Singapore, and did that over there, but everyone was blindfolded so they had a total good quality stereo audio sound of what was going on, and no external visual senses.
And that was the first time that I used those. And I did that for a couple of years. And then I still was a little bit dissatisfied with... Even though they're the real sounds of the animals, it still had a very digital quality to it. And then I just had the idea of combining with a singer, and initially I did a project, a big outdoor project. It was an outdoor show called The Dream of Zedkat Nabu, and that used four singers, but it was a big production, and I realized it would be hard to keep remounting. And I thought it would be nice just to do a stage show where it was just with a number of singers, but where we weren't having to build a set every time we wanted to do the show.
And then I met Lizzie, coincidentally, around that time and invited her to come and have a jam in the studio, thinking that maybe she could be one of those singers. And I'd heard her singing some jazz and she had a great voice, and we, with The Unusual Suspects, that gypsy Romany brass band sort of style, one night we were playing at a festival. It was New Year's Eve, and Jimmy, the trumpet player in the band, said, "Oh, there's Lizzie, get her to come and sing with us." And I'm thinking, that's not really fair on her. We've got a cruddy little microphone going through a little speaker where we've got five percussionists and 17 brass players. It's not really a fair thing.
But I thought, "Oh, why not? It's New Year's Eve. Let's do it." And anyway, she got on mic and just blew me away, and I thought, "Oh, okay, maybe she might be one of those singers." So she came into it right here where I am at the moment, and we had a jam using these sounds and with me doing the sorts of work that I'd been doing in The Extinction Room, the solo show, and straight away, it just became obvious that... I said to Lizzie, "I'd love to work with you on this if you're interested." And she said, "Yeah, I'd love to." And then at that point I thought, "Well, actually, I think one singer's enough." And so we've been working together for the last eight years on that.
Leah Roseman:
Collaboration is so wonderful. And of course so many of us were so isolated in the earlier part of the pandemic. And so much of the work you've done in community music over the years is just convincing everybody that we're all musicians. You can make your own instruments, you can use your voice.
Linsey Pollak:
Yep. Yeah. For me, that was probably the main through line of my work, and my love for music was just exactly as you've articulated then. That's exactly what I was on about. And then as well as that, I love creating my own work. And so it's been a mixture of those things throughout, I guess, running workshops and showing people how they can make their own music. And for me, the joy is... I love listening to great music, but the real joy comes from playing it and playing with others, and I've wanted to share that. And through the instrument making and showing people how to make their own instruments, that's another part of, I guess, the demystifying process of just that joy of not only making your own music, but making your own instrument that then makes that music. And so that for sure was a whole through line through a lot of the work that I've done.
Leah Roseman:
The creative flow that you get into when you're improvising, is it similar to the experience when you're making, or is that very different for you?
Linsey Pollak:
I think it's quite different. Yeah, because the playing and the improvising, you're very much there in the moment, and so it's much more condensed, and with the making and... Because even making has got different aspects. So the designing of an instrument is different from the process of once you've designed an instrument and you're actually just going through the process of following a design that you've already come up with. So the designing of an instrument is something that sometimes happens over a period of many months or even years, and so that's quite a big point of difference, because when you're actually creating and improvising, it's right there in that moment, and you're just thinking about that moment and where you are and the people that you've working with, if you're also working with somebody.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. But I mean, there's a process, so you're hammering down the Polypipe for your duduk reed.
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
You know what I mean, in terms of... Or are you going off into planning mode when you're doing that?
Linsey Pollak:
No, I think you're pretty much a 100 percent there when you are making an instrument, you're focused on that. Of course, we all go off into those other levels of thought and thinking different things, and it's to do with how much one does one particular thing. If you're making instrument after instrument, then sure, it becomes more of a process. But say for example, when you're working on the concept of the duduk reed for the first time, I think you're totally in there. So it's like what you're saying, it's a little bit similar to that improvisatory process, I guess.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So you have toured a lot in your life, and certainly coming from Australia and going to different continents, it takes a toll. Do you have strategies for staying healthy mentally and physically when you're touring and being away from home a lot?
Linsey Pollak:
I do generally keep pretty healthy. I think I look after, you know, careful what I eat and drink and exercise and so on. But that's changed a lot for a different reason in that I'm not traveling much now, not just because I beat COVID to it in a way. In 2018... Yeah, during 2018, I decided that I would stop. Yeah, 2019, beginning of 2019. I'd realized that 30% of my carbon footprint was my what was virtually an annual trip to Europe performing, and I just thought, "No, I can't keep doing this, not in the current condition that the planet's in." I just couldn't live with that. And so I made a decision at the beginning of 2019 not to do any more long haul flights. I didn't limit myself within Australia. I thought, "Oh, well, I'll still travel within Australia." But even... Over the last three years that hasn't happened, obviously.
So I made that quite firm decision. And although it was a difficult decision, I felt really good about that decision. I think it was the right decision for me to make. And it meant that I wasn't going to be seeing a lot of the friends that I'd made in Europe, and also it was like a real shot in the arm too, going and just traveling to different festivals and performing and meeting other musicians. But I'm actually really glad that I made that decision, rather than it having been imposed on me by COVID. I think it was, in a way, a lot easier for me because I'd already made that decision and it was a conscious choice, a positive, conscious choice of mine. So yeah, nowadays I'm actually not on the road nearly so much and not touring, but I'd always find that I just love that touring process. Just as much, and even more than the performing, it was also just the people that I would meet and the things that I would learn on that journey.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. But with the magic of the internet now, I mean, it astonishes me every time we're able to do things like this.
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
You're tomorrow in the completely other side of the world.
Linsey Pollak:
That's right. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Well, do you have any words of wisdom before we close out for younger musicians who are scared to take a chance? Like, you've been so adventurous in your life.
Linsey Pollak:
Yeah. Well, it's funny because I don't feel like I've been adventurous really, because I've just... So I guess that would be the... I don't think they're words of wisdom, I think it's just... I'd say do what you believe in. I think I have been lucky that I've been able to make a life and a living from what I love doing. And I often do tell kids that if I'm... Because over the years I've performed, done a lot of kids' performances, and I get to talk to kids a lot after the show and they say, "Oh, how do you do that? How did you get to be a musician? How did you get to do that?" Because they could see what fun I'm having. And I said, "Well, the thing is, if at all possible, if you can work out a way to live a life doing what you love doing, that's probably one of the best things that you can do."
And luckily haven't... Yeah, I don't feel like I've taken these huge risks, but one of the things that I've done, I've never worried too much about what's going to happen next. I've just followed really my passion and what I love to do, and I've said yes to opportunity when it comes, and often you don't even realize that it's an opportunity. It's the combi breaking down on the coast of Yugoslavia. Rather than getting all depressed about it, go, "Okay, well, what's next? What do we do?" And just realizing that... Well, you don't even realize it at the time, it's years later you go, "Wow, that was the best thing that could have happened." And just rolling with the punches, really. You just take everything as a new and wonderful adventure.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. Well, thanks so much for sharing your music and your stories today.
Linsey Pollak:
My pleasure. Thanks, Leah.
Leah Roseman:
My life is so enriched by getting to know these incredibly inspiring creative guests and their perspectives on their lives and music. Please follow this podcast and sign up for my podcast newsletter to get sneak peeks for upcoming guests and find out about newly published transcripts.
