Welcome to the cosmic roar

  

 

By Felix Carroll

 

Mallet in hand, one of about 50 gongs he owns before him, Ed Mann is sharing his own big bang theory.

 

The theory goes something like this: We are resonant beings living in a resonant world. And the gong, this Bronze Age marvel of efficiency and complexity, can serve as a profound teacher, a therapeutic tool, and a producer of some “really, really cool noise.”

 

It’s a theory that’s resonating in its own right. These days, Mann is a wanted man. He and his gongs. He gives gong seminars all over the country at business retreats, holistic healing centers, even homeless shelters.

 

He never expected to be doing this. But it doesn’t surprise him. Not much can surprise a person who for 10 years served as a percussionist and electronic sound designer for Frank Zappa. Indeed, Mann, who played in the marching band at Monument Mountain High School in Great Barrington and went on to study Karnatic music of southern India, became a layer unto himself in what he calls Zappa’s “sonic comedy-cake.”

 

But Mann, an accomplished vibraphonist who continues to make a living as a composer, producer and performer, is delighted by how his side fascination with gongs has slowly taken center stage in his life.

 

 “I brought them into a homeless shelter in Pittsfield recently, and the people just closed their eyes and enjoyed the sound,” says Mann. “It’s as simple as that. It’s a not a belief system. There’s no dogma. There’s no right or wrong.”

 

In his home studio in Pittsfield, he demonstrates with a gong that has the circumference of a beach umbrella. Using a big, padded mallet, he strikes it softly at the center. The gong gives off a deep, mystical ker-ploosh. Then, with short, soft strokes he moves out toward the edge of the gong where the upper harmonics emerge like delicate, small footprints. Then, back toward the center. All the while a blend of low, mid and high tones blend and spill into one another like buckets of expensive champagne poured into a kiddy pool.

 

Mann holds back and lets it all fade slowly into the vanishing point. A minute goes by.

 

“For me,” he says, “it’s the cosmic roar. It’s a reminder of the infinite, a glimpse of something that if we tried to perceive in its entirety, we’d go mad.”

 

It’s still fading — all that sound. It’s as if the gong created brand new space, purified for silence. 

 

In our culture, we tend to associate gongs with the wide-jowl inanity “Gong Show” or with the bombastic, encore implosions of a 1970s rock band. 

 

Even when gongs first began appearing in Western civilization in the 1700s, they were used in orchestration for big effect and dramatic purposes. But in the East, for thousands of years, the gong has been “an orchestra unto itself,” says Mann, and has served as a centerpiece in rituals and meditation. 

 

Today, acupuncturists, yoga instructors and holistic healers all over the world have embraced the gong as a therapeutic tool. Why? Simply put, says Mann, the sound of the gong can help “shake loose the tension of stress.” 

 

More complexly put, “when the gong is sounded,” he says, “we are reminded of our physical connection in resonant wave energy … Irregularity and resistance are cleared and the mind and body are reset to a state of greater alignment.”

 

If this is all a bit too abstract, consider that a long line of Greek philosophers believed that the universe and everything in it are in harmony. Pythagoras, for one, is associated with the concept known as “music of the spheres” — that celestial bodies in orbit create an inaudible music that governs the rhythms of nature.

 

Gongs — like planetary systems, like cells, like atoms — are highly efficient circular systems of resonance in which energy flows outward from the center, says Mann. 

 

That is to say, gongs allow us to experience this system as sound. 

 

That is to say, the gong tolls for thee.

 

Still too abstract? Consider the Swiss scientist Hans Jenny (1904-1972) whose remarkable experiments made the link between sound and its effects on the physical world. Using sound waves set in accordance with one another, he was able to animate inert powders into symmetrical forms that mirrored patterns found throughout nature, such as flowers. Discordant sounds merely made a mess.

 

The great lesson of the gong, says Mann, “is that all is one, and that the path of least resistance is also the path to well being.”

 

Plus, he says, “there’s something about experiencing the sound of a gong, like maybe it’s a part of our cellular memory — that cellular remembrance of the big bang. For me, the gong is just the big bang played on a smaller instrument.”

 

He strikes the gong again and listens.

 

“The crash, the fading, the sustaining,” he says. “It’s like taking a billion years and condensing them into an experience that lasts a minute for a single stroke.”

 

He pauses again.

 

“I don’t know,” he says. “Those are just my theories. All’s I know is people like it, and I want to bring these sounds to other people because I dig them so much.”

 

Mann says music defined who he was probably as early as when he was 18 months old. “I always said I would be a musician when I grew up,” he says. “And I still say it. I never even considered anything else.”

 

In 1972, he left his conservatory upbringing in the east and headed to Los Angeles to attend the California Institute of the Arts. While there, he immersed himself in the complex music of the Far East with its poly-rhythms and poly-meters. He also embraced the chaotically euphoric experimental music of John Cage, Louis Harrison and Harry Partch.

 

This all served as suitable primer for that late night phone call in 1977, when Frank Zappa — whom he met a couple years prior — invited him to come over “right now.” So Mann did. It was about 1:30 a.m. Down in Zappa’s dimly lit basement with red velvet walls, Mann was given a try-out. It didn’t take long.  Zappa said, “Great – you want to be in the band?” And that was that — for the next decade.

 

“It was a great time,” says Mann. “Frank really challenged you to be the best you could be as musicians in an environment that was very supportive of creativity and experimentation.”

 

Mann is done reminiscing. He takes a super ball that’s speared with a wooden skewer and rubs it across the gong. The noise is heavenly — what Pythagoras must’ve heard on his deathbed — an aural thrill ride that drops you off someplace you’ve never been before.

 

“It kind of clears your head, doesn’t it?” he says.