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The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra describes tomorrow night's Feel the Seasons Change as "an audio-visual journey through Aotearoa landscapes and culture".
Joining the orchestra onstage are Salmonella Dub, Whirimako Black, Paddy Free and Richard Nunns, with visuals handled by John Chrisstoffels, Tim Budgen and Warp TV as well
as the versatile Salmonella Dub.
Richard Nunns will play the taonga puoro, or traditional Maori instruments, that he has made an integral part of our cultural surround.
He first came across these sound-makers, fashioned from shell, bone, wood and greenstone, in the late 1950s when, he says, "they were beautiful, sculptural objects in the Auckland Museum that were thought to be musical instruments".
Working with Hirini Melbourne, Nunns rescued their lost voices using replicas fashioned by Brian Flintoff.
Nunns had come from the worlds of theatre and jazz. He is now sure that the late playwright Mervyn Thompson "whispered something that seemed like philosophical or Buddhist koans in my ear, about shape and balance, which are now the core of what I believe".
On the jazz side, student days at Canterbury University Jazz Club meant jamming with friends like bassist Paul Dyne and saxophonist Jim Langabeer.
"Coltrane, Rollins and Coleman were the gods," Nunns remembers. "We tried in our simplistic way to emulate them. There was an honesty, a rawness, an essential human cry to their sound."
A sound that he now admits to hearing in the taonga puoro.
Decades on, Nunns' ancient instruments would blend with the jazz of British saxophonist Evan Parker and the American pianist Marilyn Crispell. With Crispell, who toured New Zealand as part of the Urban Taniwha collective, "there may be an album coming up, based around conceptual things to do with amulets and the protective nature of amuletic charms".
Nunns is fiercely proud of Puhake ki te rangi, his recent album with Gillian Whitehead, and is now involved with expatriate Annea Lockwood, evoking the spirit of the Arahura River through the sounds of greenstone.
Poland, Germany and Australia are just three countries that have heard his music. Nunns reels off a stream of upcoming commitments including visits to Italy, Turkey, Chile, Scotland and the Faroe Islands.
He still sees his work with Moana Maniapoto as "ground-breaking". Here and elsewhere, younger musicians are following in his footsteps, and Nunns is pleased the calling is largely being taken up by young Maori as "part of a reconstructive process".
He recalls one critic who came up with the term "cultural sweetening" to describe his contribution to one project. "While there is always a potential to use these sounds for exotica or clip-on, things are reaching well beyond that now."
Just last October, Nunns was on the Aotea Centre stage receiving a Tui award for Rattle's remix album of Te Ku Te Whe, in which a group of electronic composers took to the original 1993 material.
Tomorrow night, Richard Nunns returns to the Aotea as a performer, working with some of the artists who remixed him so deftly. "Everything has blossomed," he says. "The world has just opened like a lotus flower."
* The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents Feel the Seasons Change. Aotea Centre, tomorrow at 8pm
