Keyboard innovator Kit … Read Full Bio ↴The "Henry Thoreau of Jazz" Jazziz Magazine
Keyboard innovator Kit Walker thrives on new musical horizons. Although he was in his early years classically trained as a pianist, pipe organist, and composer, Kit wasn't content to stop there. His musical and spiritual explorations have taken him through a universe of styles and sounds, and he spent many years working with and developing his own personal slant on each of them. His groundbreaking albums for Windham Hill Jazz, "Dancing on the Edge of the World", and "Fire in the Lake", released in the late 80's, helped to broaden the spectrum of contemporary jazz. Both albums received international critical acclaim, high rotation airplay, and made the top 10 of Billboard's contemporary jazz charts. Many people attest to the fact that these albums still sound as fresh as if released today.
Kit also spent many years developing his mastery of the improvisational jazz vocabulary, and then, while weaving that in with his understanding of classical and contemporary music, and his love of world music from all directions on the globe, he forged a sound uniquely and unmistakably his. A veteran master of electronic instruments and recording technologies, he is also equally at home on acoustic piano, and Hammond B3 organ.
His lifelong spiritual quest has served to imbue his music with a transcendental quality that serves to further dissolve boundaries between genre and musical idiom. As well as his appearances on his own Windham Hill Jazz recordings, and his self-released world/jazz recording, "Freehouse", he has toured with, and collaborated in productions with numerous luminaries in the jazz, world, and sacred music fields, including sacred world music pioneer Jai Uttal, jazz/rock drum virtuoso Steve Smith, the popular devotional singer Deva Premal, and Brazilian jazz percussion legend Airto Moreira, and his vocalist wife, Flora Purim, to name but a few.
Kit has also been blurring the boundaries of contemplative music and modern classical harmonic structures, and mixing those with world music and experimental electronic music, to further push the envelope of sacred music. His forthcoming album, "Sky Blue Door", is his first release in that direction, and contains music composed specifically for the 8 hour mystery play, "The Mummery", written by the contemporary American spiritual master Adi Da Samraj. This music delves into the depths of contemplative experience, and is a journey into and beyond love and death.
As well, in 2008 Kit composed the soundtrack for "Presque Isle" a symbolically charged new film by the seminal underground film director, Rob Nilsson, which expanded Kit's musical palette even further into the uncharted waters of the human psyche. Kit's musical mission has always been to access and magnify the healing dimensions of music, no matter what the context he finds himself in at any given time.
Watch for another new release of Kit's signature world-jazz, coming in 2008, in which he explores even further the cross-fertilization of improvised world jazz and contemporary compositional style.
An in-depth listen to Kit's musical offering will reveal a multi-faceted approach rarely found in the musical landscape of today. This is what prompted Jazziz magazine to call him, in a tip of the hat to the great American iconoclast and writer, the "Henry Thoreau of Jazz".
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Norwegian Wood
Kit Walker Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
Or should I say she once had me
She showed me her room
Isn't it good Norwegian wood?
She asked me to stay
And she told me to sit anywhere
So I looked around
I sat on a rug biding my time
Drinking her wine
We talked until two and then she said
"It's time for bed"
She told me she worked
In the morning and started to laugh
I told her I didn't
And crawled off to sleep in the bath
And when I awoke I was alone
This bird had flown
So I lit a fire
Isn't it good Norwegian wood?
The lyrics of Kit Walker's Norwegian Wood tell the story of a night spent with a woman. The first verse sets the scene and the relationship. The unnamed girl, who may perhaps be a metaphor for drugs or alcohol, 'once had' the singer but now the situation is reversed. The suggestion is that she took control of him, and now he controls her. Moving on to the second verse, it is clear that the woman is interested in the singer. She invites him to stay, and when he arrives in her room, she tells him to 'sit anywhere'. However, there is no chair to sit on and so he sits on a rug instead.
The third verse is where the relationship takes a turn. The woman sighs that she has to work in the morning, but the singer tells her he does not have to. This is perhaps a metaphor for the fact that he is not tied down by responsibilities, and can live a life of hedonistic pleasure. The singer then crawls off to sleep in the bath, indicating that he is comfortable in his self-imposed isolation. The final verse shows that the situation has now come full circle. The singer wakes up alone, and as he lights a fire, he remarks that it is 'good Norwegian wood'. This implies that the situation – however bad it may seem – is ultimately comfortable.
Line by Line Meaning
I once had a girl
I used to be in a relationship with a girl
Or should I say she once had me
Perhaps it was the other way around and she had control over me instead
She showed me her room
She gave me a tour of her living space
Isn't it good Norwegian wood?
She was proud of the wood furnishings in her room and wanted to show them off
She asked me to stay
She requested that I spend the night
And she told me to sit anywhere
She welcomed me to sit anywhere I wanted in the room
So I looked around
I surveyed the room
And I noticed there wasn't a chair
I realized there was no place to sit aside from the floor
I sat on a rug biding my time
I waited patiently for a chair or another option to arise
Drinking her wine
I drank some of the wine she had offered me
We talked until two and then she said
We conversed until two in the morning, at which point she stated
"It's time for bed"
That it was time to go to sleep
She told me she worked
She informed me that she had work in the morning
In the morning and started to laugh
To which she then laughed
I told her I didn't
I shared that I didn't have work the next day
And crawled off to sleep in the bath
I proceeded to sleep in the bathtub instead of the bed
And when I awoke I was alone
When I woke up, she was no longer in the room
This bird had flown
She had left, perhaps while I was still sleeping
So I lit a fire
I started a fire
Isn't it good Norwegian wood?
The wood I used to start the fire was good quality Norwegian wood
Lyrics © THE ADMINISTRATION MP INC
Written by: GARY R. STROUTSOS
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind