Album Notes

Nitya: Music, through its contact with our emotions, helps us nurture our inner being and realise what it is to be human, with aspirations, as well as joy and suffering. This is what I had in mind in creating the music for The Heart Takes Wing. My own life, and hence these compositions, has been greatly informed by the Hindustani Ragas and Jazz, but I am also deeply humbled by, and in awe of, the other great musical traditions and disciplines, composers and performers that embody the expression of the whole range of human experience with dignity, acceptance and compassion.

Kathy Kituai: Originating 1300 years ago in Japan, tanka has traversed centuries offering spirituality and healing. This ancient five line form invites us to pause and sit with ‘what is’, be that the splendour of a glory vine, a wombat on a country road, rosellas full flight or the pain of love, loss and longing and to go beyond the reach of the ordinary moment and heal.

Poet, diarist and creative writing teacher, Kathy Kituai began writing tanka seriously in 2005. She has published three poetry collections: green-shut green, The lace-Maker, and Straggling into Winter. She’s won the Fuji Award, Eucalypt Tea-towel Tanka Prize, as well as ‘Honourable Mentions” in the Saigyo Tanka Award and the Mianichi Haiku Award, has published three anthologies and a children’s picture book.

Nitya Bernard Parker, psychotherapist and social worker, is Australia’s foremost player of the bansuri as well as a gifted composer and multi-instrumentalist. His skillful and melodious playing on this CD fills the listener with the colours of compassion, beauty, awe, devotion, courage, love and
peace. Originally from New Zealand of Irish lineage, Nitya studied the Ragas of North Indian classical music under Pandit Malhar Kalkarnii in Mumbai and is graduate of the Australian National University in jazz flute performance.

The bansuri is a six-holed transverse bamboo flute, used in folk and classical Indian music since ancient times. It is the instrument on which Krishna, the Hindu-god of love played irresistible melodies of exquisite enchantment.