As a musician, I can appreciate where Tim Donahue’s Still Dreaming is coming from. There are times when you reach the end of whatever instrument you’re using and feel that there’s more there. Some of us might choose the well-worn path — sticking with what’s tried and true, squeezing a few more drops from a dry lemon — but others take matters into their own hands and build something new to chart a different course, to find more there, there.
My first introduction to Tim’s music came via the Fond/Sound Discord channel over a year ago. On a sub-channel dubbed #share-something, user “austint” kindly shared this video of Tim performing his “Last Friday Night” from Still Dreaming on Japanese TV:
In that video, one can witness Tim performing on an instrument of his own making: the fretless electric harp. To this untrained eye, I spied an instrument that seemed to draw inspiration from several musical worlds — the harp, the bass, and the electric guitar. I dug through my memory bank to think of other musicians — Patrice Moullet, Jaco Pastorius, Tony Levin — who helped shape or create new stringed instruments when older ones could no longer speak to them as before. To my ears, I heard something else, something inspiring, that reminded me of the music of Eberhard Weber, Andreas Vollenweider, Yoshio Suzuki, and others who created wonderfully meditative songs blending jazz, New Age, and other styles — all through one instrument. You could say I was more than impressed.
Wowed by the music, I made it a point to dig a little deeper and see if I could find the album it came from and the person behind it. It’s here where I seem to have caught the same wavelength that Peter Barakan — the writer of the original liner notes for this album — rode.
As related in those liner notes, Peter mentioned that his “first encounter with Tim Donahue in 1985 also came about through video.” It was through Tim’s video for “Impression Music,” which later became “Image Music,” from his 1986 debut on Avalon Records, The Fifth Season. Although that video has been lost to time, one can interpolate from this other video released in the same period, “Watching A Movie,” just how unique Tim must have appeared to Peter:
Peter would later explain that 99% of the music videos he received for his Japanese MTV show at the time were label-driven. Of the remaining 1% — the rare few that slipped through — those arrived through a different route, entirely self-earned. Tim’s powerful solo performance was one of them.
A native son of Niagara Falls, New York, Tim had built his first guitar at age fifteen, and by seventeen was already well-known enough as a performer and composer to be teaching guitar. Before he’d even taken a step inside the Berklee College of Music — from which he’d later graduate — he’d already “Mk.Gee’ed” himself, and went for an instrument less spoken for, creating a fretless version of the electric guitar after growing frustrated with the limits of the fretted version, and from then on never returning to fretted instruments by choice.
Long fascinated by Eastern music, prog, and jazz, Tim graduated from Berklee with top marks and, as a luthier, took it upon himself to create his first electric harp — an instrument that would allow him to express the fuller tonal range needed to play more esoteric music. He debuted it in 1984.
Strung in twelve courses, his guitar section is tuned nearly standard (E-A-D-G-B-D), while the harp strings form an ascending A major scale (A-B-C#-D-E-F#), allowing him to navigate multiple keys and modes without frequent retuning. On it, Tim used his right hand exclusively to pluck the harp strings, while his left hand tapped and articulated notes on the fingerboard — creating a seamless, woven interplay capable of melody, harmony, and texture.
It would take nearly a decade before Tim followed up his impressive debut. During those years, he moved to Los Angeles, fell in love with a Japanese woman, Kumiko — to whom he’d dedicated a gorgeous ballad on his debut — and soon after relocated to Japan.
In 1994, now settled in his adopted home, Nippon Crown Records, inspired by Tim’s music, offered to release a follow-up to his debut and granted him nearly a month of studio time. Used to working mostly by himself, Tim now had the opportunity to collaborate with renowned session musicians: drummer and percussionist Jun Saito, bassist Tatsuhiko Hizawa, and jazz pianist Masayo Nakano. The leap in audio fidelity, compositional depth, and musical chemistry allowed Tim’s new songs and instrumentation to take on a fuller, more imaginative flight.
What’s quite lovely about Still Dreaming is how tastefully Tim plays his self-made instrument. On songs like the opener, “As Birds Fly,” there’s a certain grace to his economical playing. On fully accompanied tracks like this one, he floats effortlessly between foreground and background, giving the music an airy chime. On completely solo creations like the aforementioned “Last Friday Night,” Tim’s gossamer playing lands softly, ringing with harmonics honed to ruminative perfection.
One of the album’s highlights, “Still Dreaming,” drifts through another floating scene of ambient jazz modality, even managing to squeeze in a fantastic, fiery fretless electric guitar solo that nods to Tim’s prog beginnings. It’s a sonic dream theater that extends to tracks like “Time,” which recalls the panoramic, prairie-like ambience of Pat Metheny, with Hizawa-san and Tim taking turns leading the spirited piece.
In hindsight, another track, “Soft As A Feather,” reads less like the album’s tonal statement and more like the heart of its musicality. Sounding like a lost Gontiti track, its sepia-toned Spanish melody reveals the graceful ideas that inspire Tim’s writing here. The album’s other completely solo piece, the spiraling “Tell Me A Story,” once again weaves something special out of all his simpatico strings, letting each intertwined melody speak for itself.
What truly impresses me about Still Dreaming are tracks like “I Hear Those Voices” and “Aurora,” which sound like nothing else. On the former, surely the influence of someone like Manuel Goettsching must have informed the piece — Tim’s minimalist phrasing, built around a digital looper, slowly forms the fabric of each measured moment before breaking free into a cathartic finale. And on “Aurora,” the guitar-synthesized textures form an atmospheric sound that lifts you on a cloud of dreamy ambient jazz.
In many ways, the more I hear this record, the less I hear the influence of Western music. On songs like “For You,” everyone involved helps Tim steer his sound toward something closer to his adopted home. “Forever Friends” sparkles with the gorgeous romanticism of sacrificing your past for something devoted to its future — something that comes through clearly in the music. Although Tim would go on to create other works, and this album would remain obscured by clouds — available only to the Japanese listeners who stumbled upon it — there’s something unmistakable, unplaceable, and universal within it that speaks to anyone who gets lost in Tim’s unfettered instrument.
In the end, it seems, sometimes, we need to remove all those fixed positions.