Gaea Star Crystal Radio Hour #256

03-30-17   Gaea Star Crystal Radio Hour #256 was taped live at Singing Brook Studio in Worthington, Massachusetts and features evocative, visionary improvisations and songs from the Gaea Star Band- Mariam Massaro on vocals, native flute, baritone ukulele, acoustic guitar, Craig Harris on congas and balaphone and Bob Sherwood on piano.  Today’s first piece is Mariam’s galloping “Ponies Running Free” a dream of ponies set free from a rolling train corral to run through the fields and hills.  Driven by fierce congas from Craig and Mariam’s racing ukulele, the piece sets us free into a dream vista painted with lightning piano runs and a breathless narrative.  “Tambakiya” is a slower, more mystical dream of a black panther laying on a puffy cloud.  Abstract and floating, “Tambakiya” lulls like a gentle eastern wind presaging a distant storm.  “Just Like That” flows seamlessly out of Mariam’s concluding flute lines and invites us to focus on creating change from within.  This gently epic song moves to lush, repetitive piano figures and clever stop-and-start congas from Craig, supporting a particularly lovely vocal and lyric from Mariam.  A gently melancholic key change from Bob sets the stage for a gorgeous flute solo in Mariam’s most generous key, the harmonic minor, the sound of Mediterranean Europe.  An epic chorus brings the piece to its climax and gently deflates into a elegiac, gospel coda with exquisite vocal touches from Mariam.  “We See Right Through You” visits blues, jazz and latin as Mariam exposes the hypocrisy of the would-be destroyers of our environment, inviting them to confront the simple truth of the Earth.  “Shamai Kayheyo” visits the same harmonic and rhythmic territory of “Tambakiya”, a lush, pentatonic mode that evokes the islands of Japan and plays to Mariam’s sparse, haiku-like meditation on hummingbirds.