All photos by Philip Laubner

Telesma Celebrates its 10 year anniversary at 8×10 on December 27th, 2014

I can’t even pretend to give an unbiased or professionally detached history of Baltimore’s electro-acoustic psychedelic world dance sensation, Telesma. That’s not just because I became a footnote to the band’s history as part of the emergency response when founding member Ian Hesford died on stage in April 2012 (don’t worry, he didn’t die completely) but because I’ve been a diehard fan since the earliest sonic experiments, when there was just noise in the basement.

It was the fall of 2002 and I was sitting in the living room of one of the big old houses across from Patterson Park, visiting a woman I was dating at the time. We were watching a movie, and I slowly became aware that the ethereal music I was hearing was not part of the soundtrack.

I turned to my lady friend. “What is that music?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s my housemate Jason down in the basement. He plays keyboards and his friend Ian comes over to jam sometimes.” (Ok, it was twelve years ago and I’m probably not quoting her exactly.)

Thanks to that chance connection, I like to brag that I was a fan before there was a band, at the embryonic stages of Telesma’s formation.

But more than that, when I sat down recently with the band to talk about their early history, I learned I had been nearby, if not actually present, at the moment of conception.

 

Magical Seeds, Sowebo Soil

The Starwood Festival describes itself as “the largest Pagan/Magickal/Consciousness gathering in North America (perhaps the world).” It’s a week long alt-culture event that’s been held every year since 1981, with nightly bonfires, drumming and dancing and jam sessions, and a lineup of speakers that has included over the years such luminaries as Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Stanley Krippner, and Stephen and Ina May Gaskin.

Starwood 2002 was a milestone for Hesford. It was his first week-long festival and a transformative experience: “Just being there, in the environment…I felt changed when I came back from it,” he says.

I didn’t know Ian yet, but I was there, my first year on the event’s speaker’s roster. It’s probable that during that week I heard his didge from across the field, or danced around the fire to his drumming.

He credits the musical environment at that Starwood, including the “Didge Dome” gathering of didgeridoo and other primal instrument players, along with a “heavy duty” psychedelic experience and his subsequent discovery of the art of Alex Grey shortly after, with opening his mind to new musical possibilities.

And so there was a seed. But a lot of people have ideas for bands. It takes fertile soil to make something happen. In this case it was Sowebo’s Carriage House gallery.

People who weren’t around at the time may only have heard rumors of that amazing series of potluck open mics at Marc Braun’s Carriage House around 2002 and 2003. It played a role in the artistic development of not just Telesma but also Fractal Cat, Shodekeh, Pasadena, and a score of other musicians and poets. (Myself included.)

That’s where Hesford first met Jason Sage: “That was a great space for a little while,” says Hesford about the Carriage House. “Like a vortex…I heard about the open mic, and I just wanted to get out and start doing something. When I was warming up, I closed my eyes and I started just playing rhythm, and Jason was there… I just started hearing drums, and jammed out for a little bit. Opened my eyes and there he was. We just decided to try to get together and jam.”

With jam sessions at the Carriage House and in Sage’s basement, Telesma started to take shape. Over the course of 2003 that Carriage House vortex brought guitarist Miles Gannett, bassist Mike Drakos, and violinist Sine Jensen to join them. (Gannett’s current musical project, psychedelic rockers Fractal Cat, joins Telesma for the December 27th show.)

This was the lineup for the first public gig under the Telesma name, when they played an open mic/competition at the Funk Box (the once and future 8×10) in December of that year.

This show turned out to be a big break for the band. In the audience was Joanne Juskus, now Telesma’s lead vocalist. She was enchanted. Says Juskus, “€œEverybody there were just guitar players, singing, folk music or whatever. And then these guys got on and I was just so blown away. I was in the audience, and I was dancing and I was chanting and singing,” pretty much what I ended up doing with them as a band member later on.

 

Creative Alliance Creation

At the time, Juskus was hosting a concert series at the Creative Alliance’s Patterson theater. This proved to be a key connection for the band, as three big shows at the Patterson in 2004 shaped Telesma into the form we know today.

In January Juskus invited the band to open for the South African group Sharon Katz & The Peace Train, thinking that their world music approach would be a good match. “And it was perfect for that show,”she says. “So I wrote them an e-mail thanking them for coming and I said, ‘If you ever want a singer I would love to sing with you guys.'” Juskus’s kirtan-inspired vocals would soon become a key part of the band’s sound.

The band was invited back the Patterson in May as part of a series pairing silent movies with new soundtracks. To help create a score for the 1925 silent film version of Ben Hur the master improvisers needed someone with strong skills in musical organization. They recruited conservatory-trained guitarist Chris Mandra, who they had met through the monthly “def Dumb and Bass fREAKoUT” event he hosted at the Royal in Federal Hill. (This was another artistic vortex, where amazing things could be heard and scene on a regular basis.)

But it was the July 31st show at the Patterson, when an early Telesma lineup (Hesford, Sage, Gannett, Mandra, Juskus, and Kevin Morris on bass) played with funky drum and bass group Naked Jungle, that the band considers their birth.

Telesma had been introduced to Naked Jungle (drummers Rob Houck and Mike Kirby, and bassist Bryan “Jonesy” Jones) through common friends at the 13th Floor where both bands had played. Naked Jungle had previously opened for Telesma, but for the Creative Alliance show they set the stage so that the bands could jam together.

And the gods of music smiled on the Patterson that night.

It was immediately obvious to both bands and to the audience that this was a connection meant to be. Think of those old Reese’s peanut butter cups commercials (“You got your Naked Jungle in my Telesma! Two great tastes that taste great together.”) or the opening of The Brady Bunch (“It was much more than a hunch / That this group must somehow form a family”), or whatever cliche of two things destined to be together comes to mind.

Over the course of a few shows together the bands merged so quickly that Kirby says, “I didn’t even know I was in Telesma! It was Naked Jungle opening up for Telesma, then it was like, well, your drums are set up, why don’t you just play along.”

Naked Jungle brought the yin of structure to Telesma’s yang energy. As Jones puts it, “When I first heard [early Telesma] I was like, this is really great, they just need structure. They just need some sort of parameter to focus it…not all the time, but at some point it needs to be reigned in. It seemed like it was a good fit for Kirby and I (or Rob and I) to come in and help.”

 

Hearing Visions

With the core lineup set (except for enough rotation through the drummer’s chair to invoke Spinal Tap jokes), Telesma continued to hone their sound and build their audience for the next few years.

Their next big break was a connection with one of Ian’s inspirations and heroes, visionary artist Alex Grey. Through the Starwood Festival the band met the woman who handled bookings for Grey’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors gallery in Manhattan, and were booked for a gig there in May 2008. They gave Grey a copy of their 2007 CD, O(h)m; and a few months later, the band was invited to meet with him when he visited Baltimore.

They had lunch together, then went to the Science Center where Grey wanted to see the “Body Worlds” exhibit of plastinated human anatomy. Sage says Grey “was just enthralled, sketching the whole time. In the course of walking around, he and I ended up split off from everyone, and he mentioned to me how he had listened to our album on repeat to Burning Man and back, that he was that into it.” Grey had even been painting to the sounds of Telesma. Sage immediately grabbed the opportunity to ask Grey to collaborate on a project.

The result was the Visionary Winter Solstice at Sonar that December, with both Grey and his wife Allyson painting live on stage while Telesma played. Thousands of people packed Sonar for the event, which was captured on the DVD œHearing Visions: Live.

For Hesford the opportunity to work with one of his heroes, one of the people who he says “set the tone for everything that I wanted to do,” went beyond cool. “It was a surreal thing for me.”

The event has been a model for others. According to Jones, “Since then so many production groups and bands and event promoters have come up and said, ‘We were at that show! We’re modeling our event after what you did there.'”

The only downside, notes Mandra, is that the success of the event may have caused some people to overestimate Telsma’s size and resources. “Telesma has been an independent entity since its inception. We have our own label, we pay for everything ourselves, we do everything ourselves, and people don’t seem to think that that’s the case. A lot of people seem to think we’re much bigger—it’s six people in a van! It’s funny, I think in some weird ways people don’t consider us for some things because they think that we’re somewhere else….We are available!”

The Greys joined Telesma again in February 2010. And continuing the visual arts connection, the band subsequently began working with MICA graduate Adam Scott Miller.

 

Death and Resurrection

In fact, Miller was a headline attraction for the fateful “Visionary Gathering” show at Ram’s Head Live on April 20th, 2012, when just a few minutes into their set, Ian Hesford dropped dead on stage. The cause for sudden cardiac arrest in such a fit man was never completely established, but may have been a viral infection.

In the first miracle in a series of them, Shock Trauma nurse Sarah Saccoccio was on the scene and started CPR until the EMTs arrived. (And I helped.) Ian was rushed to Mercy Hospital, where—second miracle—doctors and nurses worked for over an hour and half to restore his heartbeat.

The third miracle was that Mercy is using a new protocol to treat cardiac arrest victims, cooling the body to prevent organ damage. But even with that, an hour and a half is a long time to be pulseless. Nobody knew if Ian would recover, or what the damage would be.

Ian’s hospital room was so continually packed with visitors that the people at the reception desk often commented on how beloved he must be. Rules were bent to allow people to play didgeridoo and harp at his bedside.

Bending the rules to let the love in must have worked, because Ian woke up. And other than losing memory of the week or two immediately before his collapse, he suffered no lasting effects from his death.

Hesford came out of the hospital with an implanted cardiac defibrillator. And maybe that’s a great image for what Telesma is all about: the most primal human rhythm backed by the creative and nurturing potentials of technology.

Telesma returned triumphant to Ram’s Head Live that July for the Resurrection show to celebrate this series of miracles. Ironically, while the rest of the band (and much of the audience) found returning to the scene a highly emotional experience, Hesford himself was completely calm—he had no memory of the night he died!

 

“We’ve always done exactly what we wanted to do.”

Ten years—twelve, for Hesford and Sage—is a long time to work on a project. How have they managed it?

By doing what they want.

As Mandra put it, with agreement from the band, “I think we’ve always been very lucky because we’ve always done exactly what we wanted to do. In the beginning it was just fun to just go on stage and not know what would happen for three hours. We’d play the 13th Floor and we’d play all these shows where we were the only band, playing for the whole night— frankly because we had so much stuff, it was a pain in the ass to play with other people!”

“All we’ve done with our entire career with this band is exactly what it is that we wanted to do. We’ve just got more refined at figuring out what it is we want to do.”

In a world where overproduced music is targeted more and more narrowly at marketing demographics, Telesma has remained true to their own unique vision. And that’s something worth celebrating.