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Jim Nollman’s first record included an orchestra of 300 turkeys, and it was a hit.
“It was a hit in the new music community,” Nollman tells WW, referring to the avant garde music scene popularized by John Cage, whose work includes non-standard instruments like conch shells, animal bones and thundersheets.
But Cage was speaking to the world of classical music; Nollman was more interested in popular music. For “Music to Eat Thanksgiving Dinner By,” the lead track on 1982’s Playing Music With Animals, Nollman sang “Frog Went A-Courtin’,” an English folk song dating back to the 16th century, to an assembly of 300 turkeys on a Bay Area farm. The rest of the record includes tracks recorded with wolves (at a wolf sanctuary in Nevada) and orcas. Sometimes the animals are accompanied by a human voice; other times a flute, cello or waterphone.
Nollman recorded with other animals along the course of a 30-year career—including Norway rats and dolphins—but he is probably best known for recording with whales.
“Nobody wanted to go and sit with me while I was playing with turkeys, except for some crazy TV shows at the time,” Nollman says. “But when I started working with cetaceans, I could attract people to support me. I was hooked, and I was as interested as everybody else in the powers of cetaceans. So at that point, and for the next almost 30 years, I got to do it. I was allowed to do this music and have a life that wasn’t completely impoverished.” He’s since retired, but his 1999 record Orca’s Greatest Hits was re-released in August by Smithsonian Folkways.
Nollman and Portland artist and filmmaker Rankin Renwick will appear at the Hollywood Theatre Nov. 1 for Interspecies Communication, a night of music and film featuring Nollman’s music, Renwick’s films and a question and answer session.
Renwick got interested in Nollman’s work two years ago, after making a video installation called Translation Please about humans trying to communicate with non-human animals. A colleague asked Renwick if they were familiar with Nollman’s work, and loaned them a record.
“He gave me one of Jim’s old records, and I listened to it, and my dog was also listening to it in my house, and I ended up filming him listening to it and him interacting with it,” Renwick says. “His head is tilted, looking at the speakers, and then he turns around and he steps on this squeaky toy that makes two tones about two seconds ahead of an orca whale making the exact same two tones. It was like he was in collaboration with the composition.”
That moment ended up in the Translation Please, parts of which will be screened Sunday. Also on deck is a short film by Renwick called Cold Holy Water, which includes archival nature footage from Portland Public Schools that a librarian friend discovered as they were on the verge of disposal. There’s also footage from the Internet archive, including footage of a dolphin giving birth. Rankin says while working on the film, they were reading stories about J35, the Salish Sea orca who carried her dead infant on her head for 18 days. The film’s score is by Portland musician Marisa Anderson, who according to Rankin made it as a kind of elegy for a three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned while trying to reach Greece.
But the film, they say, “is really beautiful and lyrical and hypnotic and relaxing.”
Nollman tells WW he and Rankin will be meeting for the first time at Sunday’s event—he lives in the San Juan Islands—but had spoken over the phone and exchanged email, and he enjoys their work: “Some of [the films] are just nutso on a certain level—but I love nutso.”
Renwick is excited to share Nollman’s work with Portlanders. “It’s real world stuff,” Renwick says. “To be in community together in a large theater, listening and watching, is totally my church.”
SEE IT: Interspecies Communication with Jim Nollman and Rankin Renwick at the Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-493-1128, hollywoodtheatre.org. 7 pm Sunday, Nov. 1. $15.
