Hidgi Chuan is the first person I met who is able to combine two aspects in music: sensible improvisation and spirituality.
Before meeting Hidgi I met many great musicians with high abilities to improvise in music. But whenever I met people of spirituality who were practising music I was disappointed because they were always stuck in a level of music that I would describe as aloof, unreal, spaced out and new age.
Improvisation with Hidgi Chuan is very real and very intense.
I experienced many sessions of improvisation with Hidgi Chuan that happened to be way more intense in a deep and private way than anything I experienced with other musicians before. In “normal” sessions of improvisation people are usually drunk or high, you either play a “reggea tune”, a “blues tune”, a rock tune” or some other tune and then you create an improvisation with lyrics, chords and scales.
Hidgi Chuan kind of skips this whole process of scales, chords and formalities and goes directly to the the expression, the electricity, the energy without the words.
In the beginning this process made me a bit insecure but with the time I learned to enjoy and to trust this direct way. We played hours of music laughing, being stunned by the intensity or being amazed by the power of music.
I remember another day where Hidgi and me would play an improvisation with me playing the guitar and him playing an alto recorder. I was going through a difficult farewell that I had not yet communicated to anyone. During the improvisation my situation became so crystal clear to me that I felt as if my feeling was formed through the music we were playing. And as it seemed to appear completely inside the musical manifestation I started to cry while I was playing. It felt like a relief to let the feeling show itself on the physical as well as the musical plane.
I did not stop the music, I kept playing and crying at the same time, until it appeared, then slowly disappeared and finally was gone.
These kind of things are happening very often while improvising with Hidgi Chuan, even though the fact that I was crying during a music did not happen so often. Most of the times we played music together I was experiencing magical, delightful, strong, happy, deep or thoughtful manifestations. Hidgi Chuan´s way to play music is so different from other musicians. He does not play in “scales” but he is playing in something like “energy prints” and this is why improvising with him is so intense, so interesting and so different.
Playing Music with Hidgi Chuan 