89.5 WPKN, Bridgeport CT NPR affiliate Arthur Lipner Interview January 2, 2023  by Pete Stewart

PART 1 Audio
As I promoed at the beginning of this set, vibraphonist Arthur Lipner is in the house.

All right, hello.­­­­

Hey, good to see you.

Pleasure to be here, Pete. Thank you.

Yeah, I’m happy to have you. We’ve had you in once before when you were doing a benefit show in Weston, at the old joint, at the old WPKN, a little different here right.

Yeah, it’s exciting to see everything in its new transformation.

A pretty good upgrade. My stock line is it’s like moving from your mom’s basement to a fancy Soho loft, you know, a TriBeCa loft.

Does have that look.

Good thing for WPKN. Although that means we needs lots more, we need lots of support, to keep this whole operation going. I guess the reason for having you down at this time is that you just are releasing a bunch of music into the world. I was honored to get to go to a part of your recording session for some of that music which was fascinating for me. So talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, for sure, thank you. The new album is called Mallet Poet and it came out in mid November. It’s an EP, there’s 5 songs, and it had been a few years since I did my own solo project. This is actually number 10, over the course of my career, and I’ve appeared on maybe 50 other albums as a guest or a collaborator. So this particular album has a very cool mix. The first track is a Caribbean version of Sunny and mostly all instrumental except for the end of that track a friend of mine from Trinidad is singing. It’s a lot of fun to have the new energy of putting new music out. You know, it’s part of what we do and regardless what happens afterwards, it’s always a great milestone and a turning point, wherever it may lead, to having new music released.

Yeah, I mean the vast majority of this was recorded at the Carriage House in Stamford, right? Which is, talk about that studio a little bit.

That’s kind of an iconic studio in this part of the country. So many major acts and Grammy winning acts and Grammys have happened there, and interestingly I actually lived above Carriage House in the mid 80s.

You’re kidding me!

Yeah, it actually is an old carriage house and there are some residences upstairs. I lived there after doing a record there and I needed a place to live, and I ended up leaving when I came home one afternoon and Verdine White, the bass player from Earth Wind and Fire was in my living room.

Oh, wow!

So you know, at that point the studio was transitioning into having that space available for incoming artists who were doing longer term projects and needed a place to stay. But I’ve done maybe 15 albums there. I just love the place. The live room there with stone makes the vibes, marimba, and steel drums sound super bright, and when you record with those sounds then you have the option of utilizing them later. But if the sound, the original sound that’s captured, doesn’t have a fully robust frequency spectrum, then you don’t have those frequencies available later. So it’s a great place to play. It was a treat to see you come down. I’m glad you enjoyed it!

Yeah! On one level it was a real blast from the past for me. Well I had been there once before doing a video project with Arlan Roth years ago, but what was really nostalgic for me was that they have an old Neve board.

Sure do, yup.

Which is still I guess kind of a great board, right? One of the best, right?

It’s fantastic, yep. It is.

Which was a board that I had learned when I was at Syracuse University.

Oh how cool!

At a recording studio there. We had a Neve board and I was like, “That’s a Neve board!” I couldn’t believe it. I was so dazzled by your recording engineer who was just so on and could do the most amazing stuff with the tracks like, you know, doing little time shifts and things like that. It was really, it was impressive.

Well Angie, I actually met her through a nonmusical situation. She lives in the East Village, as does my sister, and their kids play together. So I went to my nephew’s birthday party and I met her.

You know I think I met her at some kind of an event once before.

Oh really? Wow!

I recognized her too.

For your listeners out there, her name is Angie Teo and she’s based in New York.

Yeah, and so anyway, you know, I have a little bit of a sound background myself, recording sound for video, and I remember when I met her. We started talking sound stuff. I’m like, oh yeah, this is a real sound person, not like me.

Yeah, yeah.

I was like woah, this person’s got some chops, man.

So the other parts of the album were done by a guitarist in LA. And on one track I put tabla on and that was actually done by someone in Singapore who I met when I toured down in that part of the world some years ago. We’ve just stayed in touch so that was a lot of fun.

Now did you record those parts of it or did you do it from the Carriage House or how did the technology of that work?

Right, well each of those two guest musicians, they have their own home studios. This is a pretty common part of our business these days. People will send me tracks and I’ll get wired up and make my parts and then send them back and everything gets mixed and with the right gear and with all the machines talking together smoothly. A lot of projects are completed this way. It’s an exciting way to do it because you can bring people in without having to be with them together. If they have the skill to make it work. You know, I really, for all of my albums, I really like the live playing sound, whether they’re live records or not. So I need musicians that can really lock into that and make it sound like they’re in the house with you, you know.

Yeah, you were functioning also as the producer of this. You were the producer.

Yup, wrote and arranged the music, producer, car parker...

Which is an issue at the Carriage House! I was in a very marginal kind of parking spot. Yeah, there’s not a lot of parking there.

No, it’s cool. You know, mallet players end up doing that a lot, Pete. If there’s any vibes and marimba players out there listening or any instrumentalists who are band leaders and are playing instruments that aren’t commonly used in rhythm sections. A lot of that is common for us because I write music that features the sound of the vibes and marimba. Vibes and marimba are not used in mainstream bands and pop bands and jazz to some extent. So it sort of comes with the territory. Those of us that started in their 20s like I did, you learn that. You know you have to know how to write and arrange and have to have some basic chops to book studios and carry works from pen to paper all the way through to the release and promotion. It’s just, it’s a full spectrum job.

Well, I’ll tell you what. So that people can I have a sense of musically what we’re talking about let’s play something from the newly released CD which is called Stick Poet.

Mallet Poet.

Mallet Poet!

It’s close! Stick Poet, that’s a good one too.

Alright, alright. We’ll talk about your mallets too by the way. You have your own mallets.

I do, yes.

A mallet line. Which is kind of, that’s kind of prestigious. I was impressed by that.

Oh, thank you!

Alright so, what are we going to hear?

So this first track we’ll listen to is Sunny, the Bobby Hebb classic, and I wanted to present on this album just a taste of so much of the Caribbean music that I play: Calypso, Reggae, Soca. So the melody winds through the vibes and then marimba and then steel pans, and those tracks are layered to accompany each other. The last melody out, there’s actually a vocalist. His name is David Gaskin from Trinidad, and he and I have been working together since the mid 80s. We’ve literally done a couple of thousand gigs together!

That’s a lot of gigs!

Seriously! So I thought it would be really fun to have him come in and just do a quick guest performance. He sings the melody going out in the last head.

Great! Alright, here we go! Arthur Lipner from his new recording.

 

Sunny track plays in entirety

 

Sunny from Arthur Lipner from his recently released five track EP called Mallet Poet, and Sunny! It’s great!

Thank you! A lot of fun to do that.

Yeah, so we were talking about the recording process as we were listening to it, and I was asking if you audition it in a lot of the mix down in a lot of different locations to see. You know, I know that was a thing back when I was studying recording that they would have several different kinds of monitors in the studio from really cheap stuff to like really audiophile kind of stuff so you could see how it would play on a lot of different kinds of equipment.

Yeah, you kind of have to shoot down the middle. The first step is the most important and that’s capturing the acoustic sound, using the best mics you can find, the best studio like Carriage House as I mentioned earlier, and then you have all of the materials to work, all the sonic materials to work with. In terms of mixing, it’s always a challenge to mix for earbuds and for audio files and everything in between. So if you’re familiar with the speakers you’re using, which I am, and I’m familiar with what Carriage House sounds like to mix and my home speakers. I kind of mix in between those two and also of course Angie engineered it, and since she recorded it, Angie Teo I’m speaking of, since she recorded it also, she knew what was there. So it’s always harder to mix an album that you haven’t actually recorded. Although it’s good to use a different set of ears. You know, different situations end up happening different ways.

Yeah, I’ll also tell you something. This is kind of funny. When I went to see your recording process, I walked into the studio and you enter and you’re looking at the studio through glass and you can’t hear the band really. So I look at these guys and I’m like, oh this is some kind of punk band or something. Arthur must not have started yet. And then when I walk into the control room I’m like, woah these guys are serious jazz players! Really talented young guys, but young guys! Very interesting. Is that a band that you play with on a regular basis?

It’s going to be. Yeah, you know, because of the pandemic, so many things just got put on pause and projects that were happening were, and touring projects that were happening weren’t and you know, intermittently I started playing with those guys. The drummer was actually a student of mine and he goes to NYU now and playing with younger guys is fun! It’s a nice energy. So we’ll see where it all goes.

Yeah and they were very very good, I thought.

Yeah, we rehearsed quite a bit in New York City before that date.

So talking about playing out live, we might as well mention that you are playing in January on the 25th in Bethel at La Zingara.

Yes! La Zingara has a jazz series. It’s been happening for quite a while. That’s a Wednesday night. It’ll be fun to hit there.

Yeah I’ve seen some really great stuff there. It’s really high level series I would say. Very small, intimate venue. Like in the summertime, when they can play outside, it’s a bigger crowd. But in the wintertime it’s a small venue. But if you really want to see what people are doing it’s pretty great.

Yeah, I’ll have the vibes there and they’ve changed the format now so that the dinner, dining happens from 6-8 and then the music starts so it’s kind of like a show. It’ll be fun!

Yeah, which by the way, I’m just thinking about. I don’t know if people are familiar with the instruments of vibraphone and marimba, but these are large instruments!

Indeed

Which must mean: a) you must have really advanced moving skills and b) you know, moving and set up, there’s some work there!

There is. My left shoulder can attest to that, you know! But, no. Part of the calling of these instruments is the willingness to move them around. The vibraphone has metal bars and a pedal like a piano, and the marimba has wooden bars made of rosewood usually from Honduras or Belize.

Beautiful

And yeah, they’re crazy to move around, but I’ve been doing it for so many decades it’s just that’s how I get around when I need to.

Like what of weight are we talking about?

I think the vibraphone with the bars on it is around 130 pounds and the marimba is probably more.

Ah, oh interesting!

But the interesting thing is for local gigs when I’m driving I bring gear but when I fly, all I bring is my stick bag. The days of flying these instruments around when you tour are over. We used to do it, I used to do it in the 80s when I was first starting. But now...

When you could give the guy at baggage claim like 20 bucks and get your stuff on.

Yeah, but these days the family of percussion instruments is really growing at universities and in orchestras. So it seems no matter anywhere in the world I go, I never have to bring an instrument any more.

Also via Internet access you can locate things in advance...

For sure, for sure!

Where you perhaps wouldn’t have been able, back in the 70s and 80s, you probably wouldn’t have been able to do that.

Yeah, should we check out that tune Texas?

Texas? OK, talk about Texas.

Texas has a funny title by the way. It’s not gonna fit on your screen or a phone or on Spotify or what not. The actual title is “I Think I Wrote the First Part of This Song on a Gig I Played in Texas Last Year.” So that’s the complete title, and I was on tour in Texas, and I came back. I was working actually with an organist named Eric Scortia. Do you have, ever play any of his stuff? Scorch?

I don’t, I don’t know.

He’s amazing! So he’s kicking the bass pedals and we had a great trio. We did some tunes, and I had all these blues lines in my head and then when I came home, I ended up writing a song, and after I looked at it a couple months later, I thought, hmmm, I think I played the first part of this song on a gig in Texas last year! So that ended up being the title.

It was kind of an improvisation when you’re playing with him or?

Well, we were playing traditional jazz heads, traditional melodies. And ah, this song came out really really great, man. We have a horn section and the guitar player in LA actually went to Weston High School where I went.

Oh no kidding!

We played together at that time, and he really kicked it with three different guitar tracks on this, so it’s really a lot of fun!

Oh cool, alright so. I Think I Played The First Part of This Song

On a Gig In Texas Last Year. We’re calling it Texas!

It’s Texas! Here we go! Arthur Lipner.

 

Texas track plays in entirety

 

Texas, from Arthur Lipner. From the new EP, Mallet Poet, and good? Alright?

Yeah, yeah, it was great!

So, yeah. So this is recently released. You got it in November? When was the recording sessions? It must have been pretty quick turn around.

Turned it around pretty fast. Yeah, there’s an annual trade show I go to for percussion. It was in Indianapolis this year, and that was on November 10th. I played a vibraphone concerto actually. That’s the orchestral side of my world, and I wanted to have it done for that convention. We mixed it all in a month. It can be done! You just have to be organized and make sure you know the touching points that you wanna make in the mix and how the tracks ultimately will sound. You just go for it.

A vibraphone concerto? Which is to say a classical music piece?

Yes, this particular arrangement was for percussion ensemble, and there’s an international organization called the Percussive Arts Society. It’s been around for over 50 years and they have a convention every year. People from all over the world come. I’ve been on the Board of Directors for eight years in the past, so it’s a really important focal point and a meeting place for percussionists and for the whole industry really. And that piece was for percussion ensemble last year, well last year ‘21 now, I actually played with an orchestra out in Washington state. I played a marimba concerto with the symphony in Walla Walla so that’s a whole other side we can talk about.

That could be a track name for the next EP.

There you go!

The Marimba Show in Walla Walla!

That orchestra was killin! You know, there’s good musicians all over the world now.

That is very interesting. You know, vibraphone and marimba. I guess I would say, well marimba is a little bit broader because there’s a kind of, there’s an ethnic, there’s an African aspect to marimba. But otherwise I tend to think of, and I really do tend to think of both of those instruments specifically in the jazz idiom. But is that, are there much more capabilities that you feel are not utilized in those instruments?

Well, it’s really an interesting question and an interesting topic to talk about because the vibraphone was created in basically late 1920s during the jazz era and the metallic sound lends itself to certain styles of music. But the marimba, being an acoustic instrument that’s tens of thousands of years old, has other applications in other places that it can fit, also because the marimba’s range is so much larger. So there’s a bass section down there. And I still after playing for so many years and doing so many albums am still trying to figure out what sound works best in what places. There was a documentary I was involved in called Talking Sticks, probably some of your viewers have seen it? We screened it.

I think I watched that when we were doing the first interview!

Uh huh, we screened it.

I’ll have to go back and watch that again.

Yeah, and you know we talked about the different differences between the instruments and there’s a lot of music.

And there’s something about the making of the instruments.

Absolutely, yup! And we made a xylophone out of ice in Norway.

Yeah, crazy!

But, anyway, you know I’m doing another album in March, a duo album with a guitarist named Jack DeSalvo. We’ve done two other albums together and he just sent me some music yesterday. And I’m looking at it and I have my own six contribution, six compositions to contribute but looking at the parts and trying to think exactly what we’re talking about - which sounds work better, which pieces work better on vibes and marimba in the different ranges. It’s a bit of an orchestration and an arranger’s perspective that helps you find the best ways to utilize the different sounds.

Yeah. So the next thing we’re gonna play. I’m just, oh you know what, by the way, you are tuned to 89.5 FM WPKN Bridgeport. We are listener
PART 2 Audio

sponsored community radio. I’m Pete Stewart, and with me in the studio is Arthur Lipner. And we’re talking about his new work and his career and other stuff, whatever comes up I guess.

That’s it!

We’re gonna play... oh which one? Oh we’re going to do the Strayhorn piece next.

Let’s do Song for Strayhorn, yeah.

Alright so. Let’s talk about that a little bit and the roots of that.

Yeah, this is a beautiful piece for me that has a beautiful connection to earlier times in my life when I used to study with Dave Samuels, a very well-known mallet player who played with Gerry Mulligan, the composer of Song for Strayhorn, and also probably many of your listeners are familiar with Dave or had seen him in the area when he was live, playing with Spyro Gyra, playing with his own band, The Caribbean Jazz Project. And I studied with Dave when I was in high school, when he was playing with Gerry Mulligan. I used to go see them play, and this particular song really really struck me. The way Dave was mixing the vibes with baritone sax, and Dave and I went on to be good friends as well as teacher student relationship personal friends and I thought it would be really nice to dedicate this song to him. So I played vibes you’ll hear when we listen to the track in the moment. I played a vibraphone intro and then I wanted to stay away from using a traditional rhythm section. Now Dave had a duo, a vibes and marimba duo with another vibes and marimba player, another icon in our world named David Friedman, and David lives in Berlin but was also an earlier teacher of mine. So I thought to try and through multi tracking, re-create a little bit of that vibes marimba duo sound. So I played bass lines on marimba and I played the melody on vibes, and then I did some overdubbing of marimba to complement and round out the sound a bit. And then I had a percussionist from Norwalk named Damon Grant. I don’t know if Damon’s been up here or not?

Probably!

He probably has. Damon and I have done various gigs over the years. And Damon brought in some percussion toys. We did some rehearsing. Toys I mean by hand percussion, different kinds of cymbals. And we created a texture that I think speaks in a little more of a personal way as an homage to Dave as opposed to just a traditional rhythm section. So the sound colors for percussion are sparse, and you’ll hear the sound of the vibraphone in the beginning, using that live room in Carriage House. It just sounds super bright and very present.

Define that term, live room.

So, different studios have different acoustics for different purposes. I mentioned live room a couple of times. For certain instruments having a reflective sound like stone, it really helps to bring out the sound color versus other studios or other rooms that we use are deadened where you don’t want certain reflections or reverberations on any or all of the surfaces, and some rooms are changeable. Like they have sound panels that can be moved around and shifted. So the live room at Carriage House is what I was referring to for the instruments. Now the other special part of this piece is that I did, at the very end, bring in a baritone sax player. His name is Steve Fasoli and Steve is the band director at Weston High School. Steve, if you’re listening, how you doing buddy? And Steve also coincidentally worked for Gerry Mulligan and coincidentally I found out when I got there, Gerry had actually recorded this same song at Carriage House with his big band!

Oh, no kidding! Oh wow!

Yeah, that blew me away! So it felt like the universe was saying all these parts really go together well and you know these are the kinds of things that are hard to express when you’re making an album. When invisible forces come together in a beautiful way it just, it made a lot of sense that all the decisions I made to put the track together came together in this way. It was beautiful!

Yeah, that’s very cool. I don’t know if everybody knows, but Gerry Mulligan was an area resident for a long time in Darien.

Sure was.

Alright, let’s listen to it. From Arthur Lipner, this is Song for Strayhorn.

 

Song for Strayhorn track plays in entirety

 

 

I like that last strike right at the end.

Oh thanks.

That’s got a nice little bang to it.

The mallet at the edge of the bar and then Damon playing that last heartbeat on the low drum.

Ah! Oh so that’s like a little, definitely a different sound to what you did, that strike.

For sure, yeah.

Ah cool, cool. So that is Song for Strayhorn from Mallet Poet, a newly released EP from Arthur Lipner. And where can people get that?

Well, it’s on all of the digital platforms: Spotify and Apple Music. Our favorite place right now is Bandcamp. Because Bandcamp allows the artist to provide actual information about the tracks, and we can write as much as we like so you get to know the album, and you can also purchase it there. And the price is less than if you buy the tracks individually, but Bandcamp, it’s my first album that’s digital only, hard to believe! I’ve been on 50 something records, albums, CDs, whatever we’re calling them. And this is the first time I’ve done something that’s digital only, so I thought I would give Bandcamp a shot. Please hop over there and have a look around. I have a lot of information at my website arthurlipner.com. There’s my schedule, there’s videos, there’s lots of cool stuff there, sheet music for people that are into that.

That was something I thought was so interesting and so kind of magnanimous of you to take your music, your charts from some of these songs and put them out for people who want to play them for themselves. I thought that was really cool!

Oh thank you! Thanks, man! I’m going to do that on Facebook with all 5 charts from this album. Because there’s a lot of musicians out there and there’s a lot of people that can read music or are playing or just want to follow along. You know, and at my Facebook page, I’ll just tell your listeners, there’s two Facebook pages for Arthur Lipner. You want the one with the cover of the Mallet Poet album. So when you go there. But you know, all the limitations of Facebook, we all know them. But it’s also, it has so much to offer for people being able to be in touch with each other, and at that page you can follow me and then you’ll see these charts come up. If you’re a musician out there, they’re in the same key, of course, they’re the same charts that were recorded and you can play along. It’s a lot of fun!

Yeah! So in working now. You’re working. You have a lot of channels of work. I mean you’re a performer, you’re a writer, you’re a teacher. You actually, that’s not necessarily work for you, but the name of this group of work Mallet Poet comes from the fact that in some part of your life you write poetry as well.

I actually do. Yeah.
 

Have you ever, do you ever write lyrics for your stuff?

I did. I’ve written lyrics to two songs of mine. One was on my very first album called City Soca. That song was sung by the Trinidadian vocalist who we heard earlier on our program singing the melody at the end of Sunny. And then I’ve written lyrics for another song of mine or two, but most of the poetry I write is very personal and personally contextual for friends and family. It’s funny, but I stopped buying birthday cards about ten years ago! So even though I’d written a lot of poetry prior to that time, now I write everything to my kids, to my family, to close friends.

Oh that’s really special. That’s really cool!

It’s really really cool. Yeah and it’s fun for me. I used to read Ogden Nash when I was a little kid and always saw Dr. Seuss as having a little more depth, from an adult perspective the type of writing. So that’s my poetry career at the moment. It stays in closed doors!

Shared with your close family and friends.

Yeah, you never know when these things might pop out, but I’m not really thinking about it that way for me.

Just a little personal thing for me, my stepfather was a commercial artist.

No kidding!

Yeah and for our birthdays he would create these amazing artwork cards, you know, just for us. And boy, that was really special, that was really an amazing thing.

Wow that’s cool.

 

Impressed me as a kid. I’m sure your kids love your, getting your poetry and stuff.

It’s fun to do. It’s a nice refuge too from the craziness. You know you mentioned work. It seems like most of the things I do in music have an element of work to them. You really have to, when it’s your life and it’s been that way forever, it’s a challenge to separate sound and the making of sound and the listening of sound to what we do for our livelihood, you know.

Whenever I’ve talked to you in the recent past, it seems like you’re on your way to a teaching thing and you have a lot of students. Is that something, I mean are you still looking for students or are you totally filled up?

I do, you know the schedule varies. If people are interested in taking lessons on vibes and marimba they should definitely give me a buzz. I do teach some piano as well, but I’m mostly interested at this point in having new vibes and marimba students, and I really enjoyed teaching that. I’ve written some of the more popular method books that are used at schools around the world.

Oh, is that right?

So I like teaching improvisation and technique.

And you do steel drums too, right?

I do a lot of steel drums. I first got the steel drums in the mid 80s to play on a record, recording session at Carriage House in fact. And in 2010 I started a steel band in Wilton called the Wilton Steel Community Band. And that band is open to anyone who would like to join, anyone that’s hearing should drop me a note.

It still exists?

Oh yeah, we do gigs in the summer, and it’s open to anyone with any level of experience including zero. Including zero! You can get up there and play. It’s an opportunity for people to be on the bandstand side of watching music instead of in the audience. So there’s that and also touring is going to start to pick up now with the pandemic fortunately.

Yeah, let’s hear it from your lips to God’s ears.

So, it’s always an interesting time of year now to see what, we don’t know what’s going to develop over the course of the calendar year, but I’m up for it! It’s not my first rodeo!

Yeah, well, you seem to be flexible and resilient and also accepting of a lot of different ways of making it happen, you know.

Thank you, I appreciate that. I think that’s a survival skill and a practical skill.

You know one thing I wanted to ask you, I mean I was watching you play in the studio and I’ve seen you play several times. I mean it’s really physical what you do, right?

It is, yes.

Also I know from, because I worked on a documentary about drum corps, which had a, you know like a percussion line, guys playing vibes. It beat them up!

It did!

And marimba too. Like, as you get older is it hard to keep going? Is it getting harder or how do you change as a player as you age?

You know it’s interesting, I’m waiting for my chops to start to slow down but they’re not yet. You know I think I’ve learned to play a little more economically in terms of the physicality of the instrument and I don’t carry things around as much as I used to. I have someone else do it.

Good policy!

But I haven’t felt a slow down at all yet. You know the mind, particularly in improvisation and composing, the mind thinks of things and my hands and my technique are still able to execute everything. So I’m good with that fortunately!

As we mentioned, I had a little connection growing up and later in my adult life too to the Brubeck family and one thing I remember about Dave. I remember Dave coming out, later in his, much later in his career and he’d come out and he’d be like, see him walking out to the piano, and he’d be like this old guy walking out to the piano you know, kind of shuffling along, sit down at the piano and like 30 years would fall off of him and he’d be burning it up! You know, just sit down and just wail on the piano

Oh nice, nice!

It was so cool, it was like such a thrilling thing to witness, you know. It was very cool.

Well these instruments have been part of my DNA since I was a kid, and they’re not going anywhere, you know. These are the creative vehicles that I’ve chosen or they chose me, I don’t know. So I like to look at it as all just being a positive experience having the ability and the opportunity to play and record.

So let’s go out with one more track from the EP. What’s this one?

This piece is called The Eagle Flies With the Dove.

In the recording studio I asked if I knew where that came from, and I failed. I was like of course I do!

Well it’s an interesting title because you know my last band album, well a previous band album of mine called Modern Vibe has the first song is Love the One You’re With by Crosby Stills Nash and Young. Well Steven Stills wrote it I believe. The eagle flies with the dove and you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with. So I thought it would be a nice tie in too and the song itself is a bit free because there’s some odd meter in there and I use the tabla player from Singapore on here as I mentioned earlier, so I thought it’d be nice to name the song that and have it just sort of connect through to one of my earlier albums.

OK cool. We’ll play that in just a second. One more last time with your website and other ways to get in touch with you.

Yeah yeah, the best thing is arthurlipner.com. I’m right in Bethel now and if you Google “Arthur vibes” or “Arthur marimba” I’m gonna pop up.

Cool. Thanks for coming down.

My pleasure Pete. It’s great to see you and I want to say hi, a personal hi to all your listeners, and thank you for the years of your support, and I wish everyone a very happy and prosperous 2023.

Yeah, you too. Alright. Arthur Lipner. Eagle Flies With the Dove.

 

Eagle Flies With the Dove track plays in entirety

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[thanks to Erika Racz for transcribing this interview - A.L.]