Kelan Philip Cohran And The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble

Approaching his eighty-fifth birthday, sharp and lean, Phil Cohran lives a couple of blocks from the lake on the north side of Chicago. His modest apartment is filled with a palpable richness. His cornet and trumpets, zithers, French horn, harp and frankiphones (an electric kalimba of his own invention); his beloved telescope; African art; a mural of the Chinese monastery where Muslim monks bestowed on him the name Kelan (‘holy scripture’); hand-printed posters from the culture wars of 1960s Chicago; all reflect a life dedicated not just to music, but also to science and astronomy, to history and activism. In its range of subject matter the track-list of Kelan Philip Cohran & The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble embodies this invigorating and all-embracing curiosity: a Mexican hill-town filled with perfume and flowers… an Illinois state prison where Cohran taught inmates in the 1960s… heavenly dancers in the temples of Cambodia… a tribute to a sixteenth-century Venetian musicologist. Welcome to the musical world of Kelan Philip Cohran.

• 1 cuernavaca
• 2 stateville
• 3 frankincense and myrrh
• 4 apsara
• 5 ancestral
• 6 spin
• 7 spincali