This post is inspired by a drawing that I found by the Jazz musician, John Coltrane. something about it was magnetic to me and has kept me curious…

Here is the drawing:

Sometime in the mid-1960s, Coltrane sketched this circular map of tones and intervals and gave it to Yusef Lateef. Lateef later included it in his seminal Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Today it’s often called the “Coltrane Circle,” and at first glance it looks like something any musician might recognize: a cousin of the Circle of Fifths, a wheel of the twelve tones, a way of seeing pitch instead of just hearing it.

But when you sit with it, really sit with it, as I have, you realize it isn’t just a practice sketch. It’s a whole cosmology of sound…a worldview; A geometry of sound, that leaps off the page.

Physicist and saxophonist Stephon Alexander writes about this in his book The Jazz of Physics. He describes encountering Coltrane’s diagram and feeling, almost instantly, that he was looking at something more than music theory. To him, it carried the same kind of geometric intuition that drives modern physics, the same instinct that led Einstein to describe gravity not as a force, but as the curvature of space and time itself.

you might say…they were speaking Different languages, but shared the Same impulse.

Both Coltrane and Einstein were, in their own ways, listening for structure beneath the surface, the musical cosmos. Both were searching for the hidden order that doesn’t reduce mystery, but deepens it, opens up worlds in us.

We’re often taught that music is emotional and physics is rational. That one belongs to the heart and the other to the mind. But that division has always felt a little artificial to me. When you look at Coltrane’s work, especially in his later years, you see someone who wasn’t just playing songs. He was mapping reality. He was asking how sound moves, how it organizes itself, how it can travel through tension and release, chaos and coherence, and still return us to something whole.

The Coltrane Circle hit me as one expression of that question. Yes, it’s a twelve-tone circle. Yes, it has relationships that overlap with familiar tools like the Circle of Fifths. But it’s organized around deeper symmetries too: whole-tone divisions, tritone relationships, chromatic pathways that suggest motion rather than stasis. It’s less about functional harmony and more about fields of relationship. Less about “where do I go next?” and more about “what is the shape of this sonic universe I’m moving through?” I know this may not interest some…but I’m gonna go deeper.

That’s a very different question…one that leaves both normal realms of physics and music behind…

Yusef Lateef described Coltrane’s music as a spiritual journey, rooted in what he called “autophysiopsychic” music: music that arises from the whole self, body, mind, and spirit together. In that light, the diagram stops being a clever theoretical device and starts looking like a mandala. A way of seeing the total field. A way of orienting yourself inside a living system of sound.

And this is where Stephon Alexander’s insight becomes so beautiful. He doesn’t claim that Coltrane was secretly doing physics, or that Einstein was secretly writing jazz. He’s pointing to something subtler and, to me, much more interesting: that both were guided by geometry, by symmetry, by an intuitive sense that reality has shape, and that those shapes can be felt, not just calculated.

In physics, symmetry isn’t for decoration, it’s harmonic law. It’s how we know what’s conserved, what’s possible, what transformations leave the deeper structure intact. In music, symmetry shows up as scales, cycles, intervals, repeating and evolving patterns that our nervous systems recognize long before our intellect names them.

When you hear Coltrane move through key centers in something like Giant Steps, you’re not just hearing virtuosity. You’re hearing someone explore a geometric space at high speed. You’re hearing motion through a tonal landscape that has axes, centers, and strange, beautiful…

Don’t take my word for it, Listen for yourself:

GIANT STEPS (Whole Album)

Einstein did something similar with spacetime. Instead of treating gravity as a push or pull, he asked what happens if space itself is curved. Suddenly, motion isn’t just movement through a grid. It’s movement along a shape. Objects don’t just travel. They follow the geometry of the field they’re in.

Sound does that too.

Your voice does that too.

When we sing, when we tone, when we let sound move us instead of trying to control it, we’re not just producing notes. We’re tracing pathways through an invisible architecture. We’re surfing a field of resonance that already has contours, tendencies, and centers of gravity.

This is why I don’t think Coltrane’s diagram is really about scales.

It’s about belonging to a larger pattern.

It’s about remembering that music isn’t something we impose on silence. It’s something we reveal in it. The relationships are already there. The symmetries are already there. We’re just learning how to listen for them, and how to move with them without collapsing them into rules. In fact, we are born knowing how to perceive this form of Beauty…

There’s a quote often attributed to Thelonious Monk: “All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.” Whether or not he said it exactly that way, the sentiment rings true. But Coltrane feels like someone who made that mathematics conscious, not to become more mechanical, but to become more free. To feel the grid and then transcend it. To know the map and then use it as a doorway, not a cage.

That’s the part that matters to me.

This isn’t about turning music into numbers or spirit into equations. It’s about recognizing that the same intelligence moves through all of it. The same ordering principle that shapes galaxies also shapes overtones. The same instinct that guides a physicist toward elegant equations guides a musician toward a resonant phrase.

Different instruments, same listening.

In our work with voice, we talk a lot about the body as an instrument and the nervous system as a tuning system. When you start to feel sound this way, you realize you’re not just making expression. You’re navigating a field. You’re participating in a living geometry that includes breath, tissue, memory, emotion, and attention.

That’s musical cosmology to me. That’s what originally struck me…

Not the idea that music explains the universe in some neat, poetic slogan. But that music is one of the ways the universe practices being itself through us. That when we sing, we’re not just telling our story. We’re tracing the curves of something much larger, something that existed before us and will continue long after us.

Coltrane’s circle isn’t a final answer. It’s an invitation beyond these three dimensions…

So is Einstein’s spacetime.

So is your own voice.

They’re all asking the same quiet, radical question: What if reality isn’t made of things, but of relationships? And what if sound is one of the ways we learn to feel those relationships from the inside?

This summer, in rural France, I found myself wandering into old cathedrals and abbeys. They were empty, no choirs, no tourists, no priests, no candles lit. Just stone, light, and silence.

I sat. I walked. And then I sang.

It felt strange at first, singing alone in a cathedral. The sound was so alive it almost startled me. My note went out into the vaulted air and came back as if the space itself were breathing with me. It was eerie, like ghosts were listening. Or maybe the stones themselves were the listeners.

I realized those places are designed not only to hold sound, but to receive it. To drink it in, to turn it over in their ribs and arches, and then to give it back magnified. Singing there, I felt lifted beyond my own emotion. As if the sound was no longer mine. As if I was being sung.

Last weekend, my brother and I sang in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, for a concert for peace. That same sensation returned. The space took my voice, stretched it to the back wall, and then poured it back into me, like a tide moving in and out. Each note traveled further than I ever could alone. Each tone lingered like an echo of belonging.

It made me wonder about the spaces we choose for our voices.

What rooms, what landscapes, what chambers help your voice feel larger than you? Where can you go that lets your sound come alive, where the environment itself becomes your living response.

It doesn’t always have to be a cathedral. Sometimes it’s a circle of trees where your call bounces between trunks. Sometimes it’s the ocean that swallows your roar. Sometimes it’s the tiled echo of your bathroom, or the long corridor that makes your whisper stretch further than you thought possible.

Every space has its own way of listening.

When we sing into spaces that receive us, something shifts. Our voice stops being just ours. It becomes part of the air, the stone, the water, the wood. For a few lingering seconds, we are not alone; we are in relationship.

Maybe that’s the gift: to remember that our voice is not a private possession. It’s a conversation. A collaboration. A resonance between body and world.

So next time you feel the urge to sing, don’t just ask, What song? Ask also, Where?

Let the space sing back to you…

Notes:

• Grace Cathedral dimensions and Gothic influences (nave 329 ft, transepts 162 ft, vaulting 91 ft; use of concrete/steel; Spanish/English elements).

• Reverberation at Grace (approx. seven seconds; described “7–12 second delay” in sound-bath series).

Lately I’ve been living inside a book that feels like it was written for me. Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines traces the Aboriginal Dreamtime tradition of singing the land into being — of walking country with a song that both remembers and creates it. The song is not just about the place. The song is the place.

This strikes a deep chord in me. I’ve been a wanderer most of my life. I left my birthplace of Adelaide, Australia nearly forty years ago, and since then I’ve sung my way through Sydney, New York, Woodstock, Long Island, Bucks County, Hollywood, Ojai, Pine Mountain, and the Catskills. Each of these landscapes has become a verse in my own wandering songline.

I’ve sung to the hills and the peppercorn trees, to the pines and the oaks, to tall grasses and walnut groves. I’ve sung to lizards and mice, to deer, bear, crow, magpie, earthworm, bat, and hawk. I’ve sung to figs, apples, pears, lemons. To the great oceans — both Pacific and Atlantic. To the mountains of Utah, Colorado, and Jackson Hole. The Catskills, too, with their wild symphony.

Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve carried a song — one that seeks belonging through call and response with the land itself.

In 2014, I returned home. Back to Adelaide. Back to the red earth where my ancestors first entered from the west, and chose to remain. I arrived carrying the songs I had gathered in the world, and there on my first morning I sang them into the dawn. That night, twenty thousand people gathered with me, and for the first time I felt that deep resonance of home vibrating in my bones.

What astonished me most was the birdsong. Adelaide’s magpies — way-showers, lovers, tricksters. Their calls pierced the morning, and in them I heard my own name. It was as if the land itself remembered me, and was singing me back into existence.

Martin Heidegger, in his essay What Are Poets For?, writes: “The song still remains, which names the land of which it sings.”

That morning, the song remained. And it named me.

Now, I am writing these words from rural France — a tiny town called Juillet, near another village called Melle, famous for its annual jazz festival and a café that somehow draws a surprising bohemian spirit into pastoral countryside. I’ve been wandering among old churches and abbeys here, astonished by the resonance of their sacred architecture. The stones themselves seem to sing, carrying forward the voices of our European ancestors who built them.

It feels as if every place I pause to listen adds another verse to the songline I’ve been following all my life.

And so I wonder, as I write to you: where might you find your own songlines — the places, voices, and songs that sing you into being?

PS Here is a MAGPIE call: https://youtube.com/shorts/QrDZ1DFGJ6c?si=3hwv1H17iFsQLHhT

PSS have you watched, Netflix’s Building the Band? The winners created the strongest place to belong to…the music as the experience of Be Longing.

A Self-Portrait to mark my Solar Return

This year I’m treating myself to a staycation at the brand new, El Roblar Hotel in Ojai. I write this post poolside before dinner, feeling especially grateful to be alive.

After reflecting on my brother’s early musical cosmology, I felt called to mark my own solar return with a self-portrait—one composed not with paint, but with songs.

It may be a common experience, but my greatest gift and greatest cause of suffering so far in my life, has been human love. Starting with the demise of my parent’s marriage and my own path of discovery and recovery.

To honor this path to love I have walked, I am releasing a cover of the standard, “I Fall In Love Too Easily.” The songs below reveal a portion of my musical history that tell a tale of someone who was wounded and crowned by love.

Pre release preview

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple

Below I explore a part of my own musical cosmology. If musical cosmology could be distilled into a question, it might be this: What songs have truly loved you in this life? And if you had to choose just ten, which would remain?

For me, throughout my whole earlier listening, there’s a recurring theme of love—its beauty, its ache, its breakdowns. I inherited the musical longings of my mother and father—through their heartbreaks, through my own teenage missteps—and music was always there, guiding me, holding me.

The first song that surfaces is one my parents were married to: Bette Midler’s The Rose. I’ve come to truly understand the weight of that song now. I don’t have a vivid memory of hearing it then—more like a faint impression etched in the background. But even in that vague trace, there’s a tender ache that lives on. It also shows up in many of the musical cosmologies we get to study today, particularly of those women entering their third chapter of life.

Watch and Listen Here

For me, that same ache appears again in Like a Prayer by Madonna. I cried when she got married—convinced she knew my soul. “Love is a mystery,” she told me. And I believed her. She felt like someone who understood what I was here to learn.

Like A Prayer

On my sixth birthday, I was rushed to the hospital with a strange burning sensation. They discovered I had three kidneys. As a reward for being brave, I was allowed to choose a gift—I asked for a VHS player rental so we could watch Thriller by Michael Jackson. His magnetism carried both awe and terror for me. That raw edge became familiar throughout my life.

Thriller

The next imprint comes through my father. His presence—and absence—have been themes I’ve worked through deeply, in life and in song. The father wound is one I’ve met again and again through the stories of those I serve. And for me, one of the songs that first brought a healing was Beautiful Boy by John Lennon. His voice carries something ancestral, something that reminds me I’m not alone across generations.

Beautiful Boy

Another song tied to my father—perhaps his own grieving over his mother’s passing—is Pink Floyd’s Signs of Life. He was a champion rower at Geelong Grammar, and the rowing sounds that open that track felt like a memory forming in real time. The meditative quality of that song, the rhythmic creak of the oars—it felt like a journey inward, and in some ways, the start of a lifelong practice.

Pink Floyd

My mother’s musical cosmos brought Janis Joplin into the mix—especially Me and Bobby McGee. When she sang along, full voice, I felt overwhelmed, emotionally overexposed. Janis’s voice carried both freedom and heartbreak—like a soul that had seen too much. And I inherited some of that ache.

Me and My Bobby McGee

The first song I bought myself, on cassette in Mount Gambier, was Walk Like an Egyptian by The Bangles. Something about that track stuck—carefree, cool, a little grungy. Later, I became fascinated with ancient Egypt, and this early obsession made sense. I still love this song.

Walk Like An Egyptian

Then came Sade’s Love Deluxe. I was in love for the first time—myself obliterated in the bliss and ache of it. That whole album held the harmonic field of my initiation into devastating romantic devotion.

Sade

At the same time, our family was splitting apart. Our parents’ divorce had been building for years, and I had always sensed it. I had become my mother’s confidante, and my father confided in me, too. It was too much, too soon. Then came Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit—the soundtrack to my rage.

Smells Like Teen Spirit

I also remember the first time my brother and I cried together—listening to End of the Road by Boyz II Men. A crack opened. A shared grief. Something changed between us that day.

End Of The Road

My heart was shattered not long after. Her name was Penny. She left me for an older guy. I was obliterated and initiated into love’s threshing floor. That ache found a home in Chris Cornell’s voice—Black Hole Sun becoming the sound of my inner loneliness.

Black Hole Sun

When I was eighteen, I was invited to be the lead singer for a band called Satori. Shawn Windsor brought me in, along with Andrew—a philosopher and guitarist, who introduced me Mahavishnu Orchestra. These men helped shape me, musically.

Mahavishnu Orchestra

My father—despite his absence—was still introducing us to new music. Massive Attack became a new obsession. The magnetic darkness and purity of sound, made for a glorious soundtrack for my loss of innocence.

Massive Attack

Then came OK Computer by Radiohead—an album that captured the postmodern fog of university life. My mother had left for New York. OK Computer stayed with me—it was the perfect expression of my disillusionment and the disfigurement of modern life.

Radiohead

One more Soundgarden song shows up: Pretty Noose. That anger, that bottled heartbreak—it had nowhere to go. I was 19, asked to leave my father’s home. There weren’t enough rooms. I accepted it without protest.

Soundgarden

That first year living alone cracked something open. My first real depression. One song caught me—Sting’s Moon Over Bourbon Street. A shadow man. Alone. Exiled. I started looking for housemates the next day.

Sting

I got a job at a CD store in Bondi Junction. Suddenly, music was everywhere again. One woman came in asking for Cassandra Wilson. I took the CD home. I was living with a few male roommates, battling anxiety and the aftershocks of quitting music. I hadn’t sung in over a year when I got foodborne hepatitis A.

The doctor had nothing to offer me. So I turned to what I knew: music. I trusted my voice and music to guide me home to my body. Within three months, I was healed.

I remember crying a river of tears to this song…one day they just stopped flowing and I could sing again.

That live version of Cassandra Wilson’s voice…Still medicine.

You Don’t Know What Love Is

Here is one final song to share. This time with me singing it. My project with Mikael Jorgensen (Wilco) is called EXPANDARDS and here is our own version of Nature Boy.

Nature Boy - Expandards (Isaac and Mikael)

If you’ve listen through this cosmology, what have you heard? I’d be so curious what through lines you hear…

Thank you for sharing your deep curiosity in the magic of music and the mystery of love.

Your comments are welcome!

Today, on the eve of my brother Thorald’s release of his first solo album—a long-awaited transmission of his soul into sound—I feel moved to offer a tribute in the form of a musical cosmology study. Not just a playlist of influence, but a deeper journey into the invisible songlines that have informed his creative voice and expression.

Thorald is my brother, my bandmate, my co-dreamer—but more than anything, he is a sonic mystic, a carrier of stories through voice. His voice is not just an instrument—it is a threshold. And today, with the release of his solo work, he steps fully into that role, offering not just songs, but a mirror through which others might remember their own inner music.

This is not just about a new album. This is about tracing the threads of a life’s symphony. Here is a map of some of the voices, melodies, and emotional textures that shaped the man behind the music.

1. John Farnham – “Burn for You”

We begin at home, in Australia, with a voice that blazed through our childhood like a lighthouse on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Farnham’s ability to lean into a note until it breaks, to sing with his entire being—face open, heart on fire—is something Thorald absorbed. Listen closely and you’ll hear the blueprint of Thorald’s delivery: raw, surrendered, luminous. He burns too—for truth, for love, for expression.

2. Wendy Matthews – “The Day You Went Away”

There is gut wrenching abandonment in this song. An unquiet heartbreak, a sorrow that doesn’t ask to be healed, only to be witnessed. This, too, lives in my brother’s voice—the ache of childhood, the unsolvable mystery of loss. The emotional DNA of this track can be heard echoing in his new songs like “One More Night You’d Stay.” Matthews showed him how to grieve inside melody, how to turn heartache into something holy.

3. Michael Jackson – “Beat It”

Before soul-searching and heartbreak, there was rhythm. “Beat It” was the moment Thorald becamemusic—a little boy learning dance moves, connecting beat to body, groove to his unyielding joy. He didn’t just hear this song—he embodied it. And in that embodiment was born a lifelong devotion to musical aliveness. This was an ignition point.

4. Rage Against the Machine – “Killing in the Name”

Rage. Sacred rage. The sound of a teenager breaking through the surface of conformity, yelling into the cosmos, I will not be controlled. This song forged Thorald’s fierce backbone. Behind his gentleness lives a storm, a righteous fury, an unwillingness to accept silence in the face of injustice—both internal and external. His voice carries both balm and samurai blade.

5. Joni Mitchell – “That Song About the Midway”

As he navigated the complex terrain of adolescence in New York—new city, away from his father, a mother in an unknowable transformation—it was Joni’s “Clouds” that offered him shelter. Her poetic ambiguity, her fearless self-reflection, gave him permission to be more than a singer: to be a wanderer. Her music was a language for the things he didn’t yet know how to say. It taught him to sing the unspeakable.

6. Ennio Morricone – The Mission Soundtrack

From a young age, Thorald was drawn to the sacred. The cinematic expansiveness of The Mission pierced him. “On Earth as it is in Heaven” and “Brothers” were hymns of his inner world—resonant with reverence and longing. These were the sounds of soul memory. Listening to them now, I hear his devotion to the unseen, the eternal, the holy ache.

7. Bonnie Raitt – “I Can’t Make You Love Me”

This song is an altar of vulnerability, and Thorald knows how to kneel there. Bonnie’s restrained heartbreak, her aching surrender, is something he channels in his own way. When he sings, you hear the willingness to stay open even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts. It’s the kind of singing that’s less about performance and more about prayer.

8. Donny Hathaway – “For All We Know”

If I had to choose a musical twin flame for Thorald, it might be Donny Hathaway. The way Donny communes with his voice, as if it’s a river pouring straight from the soul—this is the depth I’ve always seen in my brother. Donny doesn’t sing to impress. He sings to feel. And so does Thorald. This is the soul lineage he walks in.

9. Damien Rice – O

Here, we arrive at a cabin in the emotional wilderness. Damien Rice’s stripped-back confessional style showed Thorald how naked a song could be. How silence could say as much as melody. This album didn’t just inspire him—it gave him permission. To be messy. To be real. To let the edges show. There’s something coming in Thorald’s next season that echoes this rawness.

10. Sleeping At Last – “Saturn”

This song is stardust. It represents the most modern echo in Thorald’s cosmology—a longing to transcend, to spiral outward from the personal into the galactic. “Saturn” captures a kind of cosmic yearning that I’ve heard in Thorald’s whispers, in his choruses, in his reverent pauses. It is the sound of someone remembering the sky inside themselves.

11. Pachelbel’s Canon in D

Let’s not forget structure—the hidden mathematics of beauty. This was the first piece of classical music that opened Thorald to harmonic complexity. In this canon is a kind of divine order—a reminder that beneath the chaos of emotion, there is always form. There is always return. It is the harmonic foundation from which all other emotion can safely rise. It also happens to the be the song to which he lost his virginity. (That’s what brothers are for!)

His self titled Album, THORALD

And now, today, he offers his songline. His own constellation of memory, feeling, heartbreak, healing, and hope. It is a sonic self-portrait, painted in the colors of those who came before, but unmistakably him.

Dear reader, dear listener—go now and listen to his album. Find it here!

Listen with your whole self. Trace the contours of the past woven into the now. Hear the echoes of Farnham, Joni, Donny, and Damien—but more than anything, hear Thorald.

He has walked through fire, through silence, through sacred noise—and come out singing.

Today, we celebrate not just a musician, but a brother, a carrier of voice, a weaver of wonder.

With pride,

Isaac

Your brother.