My good friend Stephen Kent, one of the worlds best non-aboroginal didgeridoo players just turned fifty. It seems like just yesterday when we met in 1993, some fifteen-years-ago when we teamed up for a booth selling CDs at a folk fair up in Davis. I was deep into my leather phase then, sporting a Euro-leather, motorcycle jacket, black stovepipes and black boots. Meanwhile, Stephen had the Gandalf look in full effect, with tresses flowing well past his shoulders. Needless to say, we made for an interesting contrast that day.

Fifteen years later, he is still blasting away on the didge and he might not have the same cultural cache of Ganga Giri (a former student of his) and Xavier Rudd, both of whom feast upon the jam band and trance groove circuit, he is making waves with the reunion show of Trance Mission and a brand new release.

Trance Mission was one of those groups that deserved more acclaim during their six-year-run on City Of Tribes, the SF label that was the love project of Patti Clemens, a member of D’Cukoo and post-modern chanteuse. They were critically acclaimed and toured the world with their intricate ethino-ambient, groove driven esthetics. I’ve missed them and the community that evolved around them. But for one night in August, the 12th, at Yoshis in SF, they will play together for the first time in ten years.

In addition to bringing the Trance Missionaries back for a long overdue encore, he’s also releasingSnakes And Ladders from his new side project, Australian Be Bop Ragas. It’s a driving combination of didge, tablas drums and the Chapman Stick, a fretless bass/guitar made famous by Tony Levin in the eighties and nineties when played with Peter Gabriel and King Crimson.

Fifty is the new forty or so they say and if the first few months of Kent’s half-century mark are any indication of where he’s headed, it might take him back even further in the space time continuum..

by Robert Phoenix
Robert Phoenix moves freely among a vast array of realities, but tends to focus-in on music and human evolution.