Sakura Jonathan Day catalogue number niimiika 231

Release 17th February 2023

‘Sakura’ comes from spent two years spent living overwhelmingly alone in a mountain cabin in the remote Berwyn Mountains in mid Wales. Surrounded by the life force and individuality of trees, stones, water and sky, and through conversations with raven, hare, minnow and songbirds, the work was written, performed and recorded in the evanescent sun, wind and rain, dappling the mountains.
It turned out a surprise. Jonathan says “The album took it’s own course – and is not at all what I was anticipating. I thought I might produce something quite orchestrated and perhaps experimental – traveling new directions and exploring new sounds. Instead the songs are in many ways quite traditional, instrumentally less eclectic and thematically, I suspect, more familiar. Above everything else the album seems to celebrate moments – remembered and imagined – particular times and places that I have come to see have real power in my tiny microhistory. Though I hear the power, beauty and awe of the landscape running through everything, what ties this collection together, in the end, is love. As I say – it took it’s own course.”

Jonathan contributes voice, acoustic, electric and baritone guitars, bass guitar, harmonium, soprano and tenor saxophones, bass clarinet and vibraphone.
Through the mediation of wireless technology the album also features Bert Webb (from France) on cello, Simon Smith (Worcestershire) contrabass, Adam Knight (Shropshire ) vibraphone and Jon Kypros (United States) on shakuhachi.

Track Listing

wind in the tall grass/ a garden among the stones – imagination melds with memory – of the immense silent plains of east central asia and the wild barren people less ridges of the Berwyn. There is a garden, high among the living stones

isolde – a remembered experience from years ago that strongly chimes with the Arthurian story of Isolde and Tristan
youtube video youtu.be/rnCajKmpa3k

thrift store dress – a late summer day in powerful weather on a high ridge, two of us alone in the wind

karasu – Karasu – written from my mountain cabin window – east wind, late winter, a crow in the tree. A song about making friends with winter - not the glorious snow covered sunny days, or the hoar frost heavy trees, half lost in fog but the grey dismal shivering ones when all life seems to be hanging on by a thread, hunkered down and enduring. That too has its own beauty.
Put your moments in a handkerchief and write on it ‘this was my life’.
Youtube video youtu.be/84K_9c0B80U

dressed in orange, as I remember it – northern and eastern Europe – touring with the band. A polychrome remembering.

mu tu – a homage to the hermits who went before and the mystery and wonder of their discoveries. From Suigyū shashin to the desert saints to Kerouac and Tashi
Youtube video youtu.be/H5m6BLAsYX8

a magician’s blade – a question song, a kind of manifefsto for the efforts engaged in on this and previous albums

shrine ghosts – high in the hills with my son on one of his visits. Summer wind across the moorland. Comfortable in the sun – in this most forbidding of places, sitting where a rare band of rock breaks the peat. No need for a Torii gate or a precinct fence to mark this place as holy. No need for us to leave a mark or flag – like shrine ghosts beneath the endless sky

wind flower – T S Eliot wrote
‘We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.’

Walking the world and listening (sometimes in secret) to musicians play the music of their hands, hearts and histories somehow feels to me like moving towards to it – by osmosis letting it become personally less distant, less strange, less other. We are all genetically the same, with the same history if we go back far enough.
This is a piece for a grey spring wood – just outside the open door and window of the cabin/studio room where it was recorded. It’s music of home – but could I have played it if not for an evening spent crouched outside a closed temple door in Nara, listening to the music of the secret wedding within? Making that music a part also of my story?

Forthcoming performances

26th February – St Mary’s Shrewsbury www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/shropshires-wellbeing-seminar-exhibition-concert-tickets-489392525217

13th April – Mellowcroft, Llandegley, Powys

26 – 28 May Chester Folk Festival with Bigswegen www.chesterfolk.org.uk


20 – 23 June Raising Steam Festival, Bromsgrove
www.facebook.com/events/1383408588806809/

20 – 23 July Conscious Tribal Gathering, Glyndyfrydwy, Denbighshire
www.facebook.com/events/1660271494290970/

28-30 July Landed Festival, Rhaedr Gwy, Powys
www.landedfestival.co.uk

Links
For this album

youtu.be/rnCajKmpa3k

youtu.be/84K_9c0B80U

youtu.be/H5m6BLAsYX8


live performance

youtu.be/onyCWRJ-cbw

youtu.be/2Ah7Ih1SAfo

youtu.be/o6jzJlZ34gY

jonathanday.net

facebook.com/bookofrain

youtube.com/jonathandaymusic