Randy Raine-Reusch – Plays an Amazing Array of World Instruments
Born : May 2, 1952
As I looked down the list of jazz musicians who are celebrating their birthdays today (May 2nd), I saw the name Randy Raine-Reusch a multi-instrumentalist. Since I am always interested in multi-instrumentalists I clicked on his name to find out more about him and I saw several pictures of Randy playing some very strange-looking instruments.One of them that interested me was this one… hum?? What instrument is that? As I explored more I discovered that…..
Randy Raine-Reusch was born on May 2, 1952 in Halifax, Nova Scotia and eventually made his way to the Pacific Coast to Vancouver where he began to explore various traditional music from around the world, starting with the Appalachian dulcimer. He has gone on to become a composer, concert-artist and improviser specializing in New and Experimental Music for world instruments. An innovator interested in extending the boundaries of music, he has created distinct new performance styles on a number of world instruments from his collection of 700!!
After the dulcimer Raine-Reusch moved on to a bamboo mouth organ used in Thai music called a khaen.(Ok so if you’ve read this blog before you know I’m dying to post more about this instrument, but I’ll give you the link and if you’re interested you can Read More!) In the 90s Randy moved on to the on the zheng (a Chinese long zither with more than 20 strings) whenever performing in improvised settings. The instrument that Raine-Reusch is playing in the picture is the Zheng or Guzheng.From his biography at AllMusic…..
….Over the years, he began learning to play an increasing number of instruments because he wanted to use them in compositions, yet couldn’t find anyone to play them. Raine-Reusch had the opportunity to privately study with teachers of the respective traditional instruments, sometimes in the appropriate country. As a result, Raine-Reusch has had the honor of studying and even performing with musicians named “grand masters” and “national treasures” by their homelands, including an ichigenkin (Japanese one-string zither) duet performance with the Hereditary Grand Master of Seikyodo Ichigenkin in Tokyo.Full Biography
Summarizing from his website…..
Raine-Reusch has spent over thirty years exploring the relationship of music to psychology, philosophy, and spiritual or religious practices. He studied at the Creative Music Studio in the 70’s with artists such as Fred Rzewski, Jack Dejohnette and Karl Berger, before going overseas to study with master musicians in Australia, Malaysia, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma and the Philippines, as well as with “National Treasures” in Korea and Japan. As a result his music now contains clear influences from a variety of indigenous cultures and is heavily influenced by Taoism and Zen.Read More
Reading all of this lead me quickly to Spotify, where I listened to several tracks from his albums Distant Wind and his 2012 release Kamura and after enjoying then, I concluded that this musician is one whose music I really need to check out, and I think you should, too!!
Links for Further Explorations of the Music of Randy-Raine Reusch….
Website
AllMusic
All About Jazz
Wikipedia
Here’s a short sampling of some of those 700 instruments that the birthday boy – Mr. Raine-Reusch can play!! Happy Birthday, Mr Raine-Reusch you appear to be a very special musician!!