Five Inspirations

The five movements of Five Inspirations are my reactions to seminal books in my life. I read The Inner Game of Tennis as a teenager, looking for a way to improve my game, but absorbed the lessons on what would now be called “mindfulness” and have tried to use them in every aspect of my life. Siddhartha,by Hermann Hesse, is a fictional account of the life of a seeker, Siddhartha, who lived in the time of the Buddha. Chaos, by James Gleick, helped me to question my tendency to search for, and try to achieve, exactness in music.

Dreams, Dreaming refers to two books, one by Carl Jung and the other by Carlos Castaneda. Everything Else refers to Grover and the Everything in the World Museum.The last room in the museum opens to the outside and has “Everything Else” written at the top of the door. Don’t look for direct or elaborate connections. As the title suggests, these books were inspirations, not blueprints. Five Inspirations was written for Daniel Ramjattan, who premiered it brilliantly on February 13, 2019 at the Guitar Alle Grande Festival in Gatineau, Québec.

The recordings, available here with Dan’s permission, are from his CD Inspirations, released in 2021. If you like them, please go to Bandcamp and purchase them to reward Dan for his generosity!