“Freak-out, psychedelic and so on, that’s all pretty limited. I don’t want anybody to stick a psychedelic label around my neck. Sooner Bach and Beethoven. Don’t misunderstand me, I love Bach and Beethoven. I have many records by them, also by Gustav Mahler.” Jimi Hendrix

 

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Mahler’s music during his lifetime was the way in which he used vernacular musics. Seen from  a wider historical perspective, this seems a bit like a tempest in a tea cup. After all, there have always been vernacular elements in classical music. What would a Mozart or Haydn symphony be without a minuet? Did not that most rigorous and austere of German composers Johannes Brahms not love his Hungarian finales and gypsy dances? 

I have long thought that there were basically two reasons why Mahler’s use of vernacular and folk elements was considered more provocative. First, he dared to incorporate the musical colours of those outside polite society with his use of Klezmer and other Jewish elements, country band marches and other musics of poverty and outsiderness. And second, his embrace of nature and folk elements has, at its heart, a wild and untamed temperament. The bucolic countryside one might hear in much of the first movement of Mahler’s First Symphony might seem no more threatening than Julie Andrews singing “The hills are alive!”, but the opening movement of his Third Symphony shows us just how terrifying  nature can be. And by the time he adds actual cowbells in the Sixth, we’re aware that flowers are not the only thing to smell on the mountainside. Mahler’s nature is not just beautiful alpine vistas, it is the dirt under our feet. His music is of, and from, the Earth.

Jimi Hendrix was another composer whose feet were far more firmly planted on the ground than most people realise. What the funeral march was to Mahler, the blues was to Hendrix – neither was ever far away, because both embodied an inescapable truth about life. Hendrix’s masterpiece, Machine Gun, might seem the ultimate expression of its times. It brings together a hear-wrending evocation of the horror of VietNam with a range of guitar sounds that have perhaps never been equaled. Many would call it quintessentially psychedelic, but it’s deadly serious stuff, of and from the earth. In fact, strip away the univibe, the octave fuzz, the wah-wah, the whammy bar, the feedback and the Marshall stack, it is basically a very traditional one-chord Delta Blues, with Hendrix singing in unison with his guitar just as his forebears might have done in the 1920s and 1930s. 

Mahler’s cosmic ambitions are easy to see in pieces like the Second, Third and Eighty symphonies. His awareness of his historical position as the culmination of the symphonic legacy which began with Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Beethoven is there to be seen in works like the first movement of the Ninth Symphony. But he never left his roots behind. Hendrix also refused to let his creativity be fenced in. The public and the press may have wanted him to remain forever the bad boy who sang Foxey Lady and lit his guitar on fire, but even by his second album, he had largely left that musical persona behind. And for him, Bach, Beethoven and Mahler were just as much his to learn from and be inspired by as Robert Johnson and Son House.

Tonight’s gig is not really intended to be so much an exploration of what it might have sounded like if Jimi had played Mahler as it is a celebration of both men’s courage to reach for the stars and to stand on the earth. You’ll hear some Mahler, some Hendrix, some Elgar and some Woods. The vibe is most definitely not “hooked on classics” nor are we trying to introduce classical elements into rock as groups like Deep Purple or Yngwie Malmsteen have been doing for generations. It’s more about finding commonalities of feeling and experience through music. We all breathe the same air, we’re members of the same family. Electric Liederland is about celebrating the beauty of singing each other’s songs and playing each other’s tunes, as long as we listen with love and play with respect.