New ideas grow out of the soil of the past, and in music, the soil is rich and deep indeed. Bach and the other great Baroque composers began to develop the roots of the symphonic form, and on that step stood Haydn, who handed off to Mozart, who perfected the classical symphony with his polish and his genius, paving the way to one of the greatest composers in human history, Beethoven, who transformed the symphony into something more emotional, something that resonated more closely with the human experience.
Then there was Brahms, who brought the symphony to an unparalled level of technical perfection. Next came the romantics, like Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann; without whom Wagner wouldn’t have made his giant leap forward, pushing the envelope of emotion and storyline that the orchestra was capable of expressing in the language of pure sound called music; and many years later, laid the groundwork for the musical interpretation of the visual art of the movies: And so it goes, on and on, until this very day.
One Saturday, in the early 1990's at my house high up on a hill in Eagle Rock California, with a spectacular view from my music room window that reached out over the hills to reveal the tips of the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles, I had a vision to form a band with a new musical direction, create something that had never been expressed in quite the same way before. I called my brother, Loren Lichty, and Ron Muller, another musician and friend, and invited them to join me, and that was the birth of Terra Nova, which, in the Portuguese language, means, "New Earth."
Terra Nova has its roots in the fertile fields of seven different musical traditions. So, lets take a little journey, and make a quick visit with those varied and different traditions.
Our journey begins first in the Balkans of Eastern Europe, in Bulgaria, and Macedonia. In the rugged mountain valleys, the broad meadows, and in the cities as well, where traditions of music and dance evolved, rich in variety and complexity, like the chetvorno, the ruchanizta, or the daichovo.
Then we journey West, to Spain, where the Roma brought the Mediterranean Minor scale with them, and where the complex and fiery rhythms and scales of flamenco grew out of the Iberian caves and countryside.
Now, we set sail, heading West again, across the Big Water, and land on the islands of the Caribbean where we find a red-hot crucible of rhythm, giving us the scintillating sounds from Jamaica and the steel drum, or Afro-Cuban music with the bongos, congas, and other percussion instruments, and gave us dances like mambo, danzón, and others.
Finally, we take a coastal steamer back to America, the birthplace of swing and boogie; and the hot sounds of Jazz that grew out of Tin-Pan Alley in New York, and down in New Orleans, Louisiana, where the blues was born, in the steaming bayous of the Mississippi Delta.
After a long and dusty stagecoach ride we arrive back in LA, where the three of us grew up, with all of those sounds ringing in our ears, together with our training and experience playing Western art music and the glorious symphony orchestra with its wonderfully colorful palette of sounds, which led us to our own instrumentation; piano, synthesizers, flute, alto flute, soprano sax, bassoon, French horn, post horn, and double bass.
Those are the seven musical streams that merged on that Saturday to slowly-but-surely ebb down a new channel, a channel that led to the sound of Terra Nova, and the birth of a new musical idea.
For years the 83 four-track cassette tapes of Terra Nova sat silently in a box, until one day I decided to bring it out of the darkness and into the Light. Together with Nels Jensen of The Pie Studios of Pasadena California, we re-mastered the originals and with some of the most talented musicians in Los Angeles, we rerecorded the songs that were too badly damaged, and Terra Nova will now live on into the future.
Millions of years ago, the continents of the Earth were fused together into one single landmass, and that super-continent has been given the name of Pangea. Over the millennia that our marvelous planet has been spinning itself into existence this huge landmass began to breakup and the continents drifted slowly down their sundered roads.
Just like the continents began to separate and evolve, so did the music. On this album, Pangea symbolises the roots of that ancient folkloric music and the gradual transformation into the world of today.
And now, a new fusion has emerged, in Terra Nova.
