Liner Notes

David Kunian (listener from outside the band who has been there since the beginning writes...

There are a lot of bands in New Orleans, but there are none like the Naked Orchestra. There may be none like the N.O. in all the world.

Their members come from funk bands, blues krewes, brass ensembles, the creme de la creme of the New Orleans avant-garde, and the guys sitting talking shit on the neutral ground. Not only that, but besides being terrific players, the musicians in the band are all personal friends of mine. It is always great to hear your friends make music onstage, but to hear them make this music in front of a crowd is unparalleled. It hits me in my hips, my head, my heart and my soul. I feel it everywhere, and as it makes me aware of every individual part of the band and of me, it unifies me. I feel more whole when I hear this. I feel not only part of the entire joyful noise of this band who are 22 individuals and one ensemble at the same tim, but I feel that I am this band. Like Walt Whitman said, "I contain multitudes." And while I am an individual and encompassing all of what I witness, I, the band, and everyone else listening is.

All is one, indeed. All is a lot more than one.

But what does the music sound like? It has a majesty. If you were to be crowned Queen, you would want this music to be playing gloriously as you walked to your throne over the red, plush carpet. It is coronation music, music of serious occasion. It also has the right degree of whimsy. Everyone in this band is serious as a heart attack, but they have fun and laugh at the spectacle of the music. With song titles like Nicholas Slonimsky's Freedom Mambo Jazz Dance Party, how can you not? But at the same time, this band wails like all happiness and laughter in your life concentrated on one stage. When this band gets loose and really starts blowing, you'll be blasting off with them as your breath catches in your throat from the sheer heights that they attain. Seeing the Naked Orchestra puts your body and sould into the place where you wanted to be when you first realised how good music can be. Woodstock 1969? Minton's in Harlem 1942? Dew Drop Inn 1954? CBGB's 1977? Naked Orchestra 2001!! The Naked Orchestra has that kind of higher energy that fuses the sacred and the profane, the art and the dance. You're furiously grooving a step that you never have before while your heart cries for joy and sorrow simultaneously, and your head follows the logic and ill-logic of the melodies precisely. The Naked Orchestra is music like all those crazy, drunken nights of finally discovering elusive truths through sound every mystic from Kabbalah writers to Lao-Tzu and Basho to Derouac and Ginsburg have been trying to communicate. This band and the music they play is a great truth of existence. It's the sum of much more than its parts.

I have been trying to explain it, but words are reductive. Words, always being less than they portray, are inadequate to describe the Naked Orchestra. So put on this CD and turn it up so loud that it reverberates off the walls of your house and your heart. Let the vibrations resonate in you and become you. Then you will begin to see and hear, as Arthur C. Clarke wrote, "Oh my God! It's full of stars!"