Migration of Knowledge: A Conversation with Gaia Wilmer and Ra Kalam Bob Moses

Zoösemiotics, the study of how animals use signals – including sounds – to convey information is an underappreciated field. Its value goes far beyond answering simple questions about what our pets try to convey to us. Instead, as biologist Marc Bekoff noted, “Animals speak to those who listen; their language is one of behavior, emotion, and instinct, rich with meaning if we pay attention.” By looking closely at how animals communicate, we can find new and better ways to strengthen our own conversations. The lessons from this perspective are many: simplicity, clarity, use of repetition for emphasis,  and adaptation to contextual surroundings, to name a few. In this sense, Gaia Wilmer and Ra Kalam Bob Moses’ Dancing with Elephants (Sunnyside, 2025) is a great study on how pachydermal messaging can shape musical communication.

For six decades, Moses has been an expert in the breadth of improvised drumming. In 1966, he and Larry Coryell co-created The Free Spirits, often credited as birthing fusion. The careful balancing of improvisational freedom and well-orchestrated structure has guided the drummer’s work since. This element is evident in his many collaborations, including those with NEA Jazz Masters Pat Metheny, Charles Mingus, Gary Burton, Dave Liebman, Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette, Herbie Hancock, Paul Bley, Dave Holland, Pharaoh Sanders, Sam Rivers, and Sheila Jordan. Not to mention the records under his own name that survey this space. One of his ongoing projects has been to record fully improvised drum pieces that he calls “sonic beds” and see how younger musicians can create with them.

Dancing with Elephants is one of these cross-generational expansions of Moses’ patterns. In this case, São Paulo-based saxophonist Gaia Wilmer, whose credits include working with Brazilian legends Egberto Gismonti and Jaques Morelenbaum, craftily composed intricate pieces for a fairly large ensemble around Moses’ beds. Such beds are fully improvised, moving freely and, sometimes even unpredictably. Instead of forcing these less foreseeable patterns to fit a preset idea or shaving off their more unwieldy edges, Wilmer expertly contours her writing to slide around and envelope those moments. In so doing, Moses’ phrases of spontaneous truth find more weight and the overall arching pieces greater substance. The rain-like pitter-patter or rhythmic babbling brook on “Finding Water” provides an environment of shifting textures; contemplative yet unrelenting. The delirious mirages of “Blue Desert” elicit Wilmer’s yearning saxophone solo.

That is all fine and good, but what does it have to do with zoösemiotics? This is where things get especially interesting. Fascinating parallels between this project and how elephants communicate. For one, the animals use sound to share information. In addition to vocalizations, elephants often use low rumbling sounds – well outside human hearing capacity – to convey messages on social interactions, matings, and group coordination. These statements can even travel long distances through seismic vibrations. Similarly, one cannot help but feel the depths of the music on Dancing with Elephants. The artists are doing something more than simply making pretty music through preset tones. Instead, they convey lessons to each other and the broader listening public. True to the nickname “Ra Kalam” given to him by Tisziji Muñoz, the drummer and his compatriots seemingly view music as a universal language through which the most important lessons can be shared.

Mimicry also plays a critical role in elephant communications with social intelligence built upon recognizing and recreating specific sound patterns. Some of these sounds – like truck engines – even come outside of the animals themselves. The artists do not mimic anyone in their creation but hues of influences from those past and present inevitably emerge throughout the work, as when George Garzone’s tenor sax solo on “Finding Water” evokes a late-career John Coltrane. Or how, as mentioned earlier, Moses’ bed on the same track suggests water.  

Finally, elephants are great problem solvers, learning primarily through experimentation. Fittingly, Dancing with Elephants is similarly rife with experimentation and spontaneous creation. Even with Moses’ intricate beds and Wilmer’s expertly composed parts, the members of the ensemble – guitarist Leandro Pellegrino and keyboardist Leo Genovese, flutist Yulia Musayelyan, vocalist Song Yi Jeon, and saxophonists Gustavo D’Amico, Daniele Germani, George Garzone, and Neta Raanan- are left room to improvise; space to experiment in hopes the listeners and each artist will continue to learn through sound.  

It is unclear the extent to which Wilmer considered pachydermal communication, if at all,  in crafting the recording. Its title comes from a combination of her interest in animals and a desire to honor Moses’ When Elephants Dream of Music (Gramavision, 1983). But the connections are suggest that perhaps the record is more than a beautiful listening experience. It is part of something far deeper. Something far heavier.  We sat down with Wilmer and Moses to discuss the weight of their gorgeous artistic dance.

PostGenre: Ra Kalam previously taught at the New England Conservatory (NEC), and Gaia earned her Master’s Degree there. Is that how the two of you met?

Ra Kalam Bob Moses: No, we met before then. We connected because I heard some of Gaia’s music online. I don’t completely remember where, but I do remember that what I heard really struck me. I was very moved by it. So, I wrote a positive comment about how I really dug the music. Gaia saw it and wrote back to me. 

Gaia Wimer: That’s right. We also have a friend in common, Gustavo D’Amico, who was already studying at NEC. I think Gustavo gave [Ra Kalam] my contact. By the time I went to NEC, we had not yet met in person, though we had talked. But I knew I wanted to study with him. Then, he had the idea for this project together while I was studying with him. 

PG: Ra Kalam, what was it about Gaia’s music that made you decide to collaborate with her? You are presumably exposed to a lot of great music, but there is a step between appreciating what someone else is creating and wanting to build with them yourself. 

RKBM: Well, I have these ideas that I call sonic beds. They’re percussion beds: a certain zone of percussion that’s symbolic in itself, and there are sometimes between three and six parts to them. They’re not meant to be solos. They’re meant to be either improvised over or used for composition. They’re very colorful and unique. Each is a unique zone of sound. I have given them to several people and told them to take them and have fun with them; to do whatever they wanted with them. Often, I’m not too thrilled with what they create with the sonic beds, but that’s okay. I’m happy to give them to them anyway.

But I thought it would be fantastic if Gaia chose to compose over these beds. I remember one time at NEC, she was with a partial ensemble, and we played a bed on these little, crummy speakers at the front of the room while the ensemble played along. 

The one piece that came out of that was so beautiful that it made me cry. I have eleven CDs worth of beds for her to choose from. I stand by all of them, but she chose some very interesting ones to use for her compositions. And I thought it was fantastic that she did. From when I first suggested that she use my sonic beds to recording with them took several years. But I knew she would do something great, and she did.

PG: If there are eleven CDs worth of beds, do you think there may be future albums where you take a similar approach as on Dancing with Elephants but using some of the other beds?

RKBM: I hope so. I know Gaia is busy with all kinds of other projects, but I would love it if she did that. I’d say that most of the beds she chose were from the very early ones, and I think they sonically got better as I went on. I would hope that she would be inspired to do some work with the later ones and would have the time to do that. I’m totally for that. 

GW: I would definitely consider doing more. But from when Ra Kalam mentioned the idea of composing over some of his beds to the release of the record took a long time. Life just takes us to other places. I had to finish my Master’s Degree. Then the [COVID-19] pandemic hit. Then I moved back to Brazil. So, while Ra Kalam and I both wanted to finish the project, it took a long time from when we first started it in 2015. 

I tried to go deeper into writing music with this project and would love to continue that search. But Ra Kalam is in Memphis, and I am in Brazil. When I go to the [United States], I go to New York, and he’s not there. So, it’s difficult to put something like this together. But, hopefully, we can do another at some point. It would be another amazing project that I would be very happy to work on. 

PG: Going back to when Ra Kalam discovered your music online, Gaia, were you very familiar with his work before he initially reached out to you?

GW: Well, of course, I knew his early playing from when he was very young. I had listened a lot to his albums like When Elephants Dream of Music (Gramavision, 1983), and found them – still do – very inspiring. But I don’t know if I would say I knew a lot of his music. I didn’t know what he was doing around the time he reached out to me. For example, what he was recording – he is always recording something – when I was studying with him. He was an amazing reference, not only because I loved his playing but his writing too. I don’t exactly know what drew me to wanting to study with him – I was not a drummer and was not studying composition – but I just had a feeling I needed to study with him. I didn’t even know about the idea of this project that he had. I just wanted to play with him. 

So, we started playing together. Playing with Ra Kalam greatly changed my life. Unfortunately, we’re very far from each other now, but playing with him was one of the greatest experiences that I have ever had in playing music. But, to answer your question, I knew his music. I knew his writing. I knew his playing. But I did not know it too deeply when we started.

RKBM:  Something to add is that Gaia has played on a few of my recordings over the last few years. One, Medicine for the Spirit (Ra Kalam, 2020), has been out for a couple of years. We recorded that one in Boston with Gustavo and a few other great people. But we also did one much more recently called Peace Universal (Ra Kalam, 2024), which, if I may say so, is a masterpiece. It has people from all over the world playing the same melody. And, trust me, it’s not boring at all.  And Gaia was a lead voice on it.  And there’s another record we have recorded together that is not done yet. Even though we started that one fifteen years ago, I am still working on it. It will probably be called The Dance of Life. But that recording is amazing, and the parts that Gai did are absolutely beautiful. And then there’s this new one, Dancing with Elephants, though I consider it more Gaia’s record than mine because it’s her compositions and she chose the musicians.

PG: If the beds are improvised, Gaia, was it difficult to write around them?

GW: It wasn’t too difficult at first. My process was simply hearing them out and choosing them. That part was great because I loved listening to them. Sometimes, I would hear one that would make something click inside me, and I knew that I could write something on top of it. But once I started writing, it was difficult to map out everything. Mapping things out itself is not too hard, but since the beds are improvised, there wasn’t always a steady groove that was easy to use. Some do have a steady groove, but not all of them. So, I had to understand how each bed was developing, where it would go, and then how my writing could fit with everything he had already played. 

The most difficult part was once I had ten people playing over the beds. I had heard the beds I chose many times before then. So, I knew where Ra Kalam would rush or slow down at any given time. But it was hard to make that work with other musicians who were not as familiar with them. It was a very different process of learning the form of his playing and writing from it. But on top of that, it was different and fun.

RKBM:  It was interesting not knowing which ones she was going to choose. It was also my suggestion to not just have written music over the beds but to let the musicians go off on it as well, sometimes simultaneously. So, even while you hear a beautiful, almost classical composition, you also hear George Garzone or Gustavo, flying around like birds in the forest. But when I heard what Gaia did, I realized that I needed a chance to react to it.  So, I booked a session in Boston with my engineer, David [Sullivan], and overdubbed some subtle drum set parts to add to the pieces. They didn’t add a lot to what Gaia already had, but I do think they helped make the project more unified.  

I’d like to add that on a musical level, most of my beds, if not all, are very tonal. But not everyone hears that. Every part of my drum set suggests a certain tonality. I knew that when Gaia composed, she was using the tonality of the percussion that was already there.

PG: Gaia, earlier, you mentioned Ra Kalam’s When Elephants Dream of Music. Is there a connection between that particular recording and Dancing with Elephants? 

GW: There is definitely a connection. Animals, in general, have an important role in my musical ideas. My first album was called Migrations (Biscoito Fino, 2018). Nature is always around me somehow. If you look at the song titles on Dancing with Elephants, each is related to one another. Every piece is connected to some type of animal’s great migrations. “Jellyfish Lake” is named after a lake in Palau. Every day, jellyfish go to the bottom of the lake, and at night, they travel a great distance to come to the surface. “Turning the Tide” reflects where so many different animals meet around water. You see both predators and prey looking for water. Every piece on the record is related to those great migrations. But the focus on elephants on this record is an homage to Ra Kalam’s music and his influence on my playing and my writing. 

RKBM:  As far as When Elephants Dream of Music, the concept behind that record came after I’d seen two groups, back to back, within a month or so. One was [Chick] Corea’s Elektric Band with Steve Gadd on drums. It was fantastic, but I felt like the music was overly composed. Every note was played as great as you could play it, but there wasn’t enough space or room for the musicians to stretch out. The other performance was by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, which went the complete opposite way. It was two hours of meandering around free music and maybe only ten minutes where every note was essential. 

I wanted to be able to combine the idea of having some very definite, composed, and rehearsed writing but also have certain musicians react to it. The idea was to make the composition itself like an environment to build in. The improvisers didn’t need rehearsals to learn anything. But it was also done with people that I greatly trusted, like Lyle Mays, Bill Frisell, Terumasa Hino, and Jim Pepper, who would come in and play on it as they felt best. But the idea was to get a balance between a very complex and well-rehearsed composition and free and spontaneous playing. And I think it was successful. I think Gaia has done a similar thing all these years later. In a certain way, I do feel like Dancing with Elephants is like a modern reincarnation of that concept because her writing is absolutely beautiful, but it’s also simultaneously so free and organic. That is a great combination, which you far too rarely hear.

PG: Perhaps related to that, there were certain moments, particularly on ”Finding Water,” that are reminiscent of John Coltrane in the sense of there being significant freedom but also structure. 

RKBM: It was very interesting hearing those connections. Musically, sure, there is a connection, but there is also a spiritual connection that comes from love and devotion. 

GW: I would also add that when you give the musicians space to create, it adds something special to the music that is beyond Ra Kalam’s beds or my compositions. I put the band together, and everyone I called was someone who had a connection with Ra Kalam or myself somehow. I didn’t want to be something just about me. 

With ”Finding Water,” I hear that connection with Coltrane, though I didn’t plan on it. But when George [Garzone] plays, he brings something beyond what Bob did when he put the beds together or what I did in composing. We have these amazing people playing with us, and they bring whatever they can.

PG: So, in terms of picking musicians, did you determine instrumentation first and then select the musicians to play those roles, or did you have specific musicians in mind first and build your parts around them?

GW: “Dancing with Elephants” was the first piece I wrote for the album. Between it and the second one I wrote, I kept changing the group of musicians. But, at some point, when I was writing the third piece, I  started thinking I should be at least a little practical and not do every piece with a different group of people.

I knew more or less some other people that I wanted. But at the same time, I also thought about the instruments I wanted to have. I think the last piece on the album was actually the last one that I wrote or one of the last. I wanted to have that unity of having the whole band in one piece, and then having the whole band again to finish. So, we do “Finding Water” twice, with the second as a bonus track. I consider the last track to be “Chase Machine,” which has the whole band again. Everything in the middle has the same group of people. I always use the same people in different contexts. There’s no bass player on the album, either. 

RKBM: Oh yeah, there’s no bass player, which is unusual. I love the bass, but I don’t miss it at all. Whoever you chose was beautiful. And some of the musicians I did not know. But I was really happy to hear the singer [, Song Yi Jeon]. I don’t know if maybe I heard their name or something, but I didn’t know their music. Of course, George Garzone, I knew. Same with Gustavo. I knew Leandro Pellegrino, the guitar player. I knew Leo [Genovese], the piano player. Most of the musicians I did know, but a few I didn’t. But I was just overjoyed and happy when I heard it. 

I think Gaia is a genius of sorts. A humble genius. She is also very good at leading and getting people together to play sometimes difficult stuff. I watched her do it and was amazed. She’s probably a third of my age, but I have a lot to learn from her. I have had a hard time getting people to play simple stuff, and here she is getting people to play hard stuff.

She’s a great leader and composer. I had faith and trust in her to write what she wanted to write and choose the musicians she wanted. My only suggestion, though I think she was already going to do so anyway, was to have a lot of free playing as well. 

GW: Yeah, I didn’t mention this before, but I already wanted to have free playing like Ra Kalam suggested. But his suggestion did remind me how it was very important to always be aware of those spaces and to write in different ways; to try to be also looser and freer in my writing.

PG: Did you intentionally exclude a bass player, or is that just how things turned out?

GW: So, the funny thing is that I initially did have a bass on the first piece, the title composition. But I started realizing that since Ra Kalam played so freely, he could be melodic. He could be the low end. He could play in every frequency that he wanted. He could do anything. And from that, at some point, I realized that we don’t need a bass part.  And it was great without it. 

RKBM: I didn’t miss it at all. Did you miss it? 

PG: No, not at all. 

RKBM: Well, there you go,

GW: Yeah, if you think of every piece independently, maybe I could have a bass, somewhere. But by the second or third piece, I realized I wanted some unity among everything. I realized the whole ensemble would only be these ten people, and a bassist would not be one of them. 

PG: It is interesting to hear Ra Kalam say that he is fine with there being no bass part, considering he worked with one of the finest bassists ever, Jaco Pastorius, on Pat Matheny’s Bright Size Life (ECM, 1976). Ra Kalam, do you have any recollection of the session that made that record?

RKBM: Sure, but I actually have better memories of the live gigs that we did. Live, we had a completely different vibe. I recently heard some pretty good recordings of one of our live recordings. Someone had snuck a tape machine into a club, or maybe it was already there and recorded us. Hearing that blew me away because I didn’t remember how good that group was. We sounded great, just a very different vibe than what is on the record. We were much stronger and freer. And we stretched out on tunes. We also did some of Jaco’s tunes, whereas the record was all Pat’s music. Pat’s a great composer, no question. But different from Jaco. Totally different vibe. Live, even when we played the jazz standards, there was nothing safe or stuck about it. On Bright Size Life, all the tunes were shorter and much more constrained in a way. They’re beautiful. It’s a great record. No question about it. I would say it had two master musicians and one kind of sloppy drummer.

The other thing about the day we recorded was that Pat and I were already in Europe for about a month. We were touring with Gary Burton at that time, doing twenty-eight gigs in thirty days. We were not jet lagged anymore. Jaco joined us there from Florida, and you could tell he had just come off a plane from Florida when he did. He was wearing no socks. He had those beachcomber pants that were neither shorts nor long pants but more like three-quarter-length pants. He also wore a white T-shirt. He came with just his bass. No suitcase. Of course, it’s cold in Germany. Even in the summer, it’s cold at night.  And he obviously came right from the beach; Jaco was a Miami Beach guy. 

Anyway, Jaco got to where we were in Ludwigsburg, Germany, the night before we recorded. He came by my room, knocked on the door, and said, “Hey, let’s go out, man. I want to go dancing and meet some girls.” I told him I didn’t want to go out because we were recording at a quarter to ten the next morning. He left, then came back to my door about twenty minutes later. He knocked on my door and, when I answered, told me he had found a disco, but they wouldn’t let him in unless he had real shoes. He had flat feet and wore special orthopedic shoes for support. I don’t know if his shoes did help him, but they were very heavy. He asked if he could borrow my shoes for the disco and I let him but told him to leave them at the door to my room the next morning. 

And, sure enough, they were there in the morning. Who does something like that? Goes out dancing the night before a session wearing somebody else’s shoes? [Laughing]. He was quite a character. But I miss him a lot. He was a very special person. A natural genius musician. Not just a great bassist but also a genius drummer. Jaco was a better drummer than ninety-nine percent of all the drummers who actually focused on drums. 

That trio was a great band too. Metheny is another genius. I respect him, and I love him with all my heart. He and Jaco were just very different personalities, and, sometimes, I had to play the referee between the two of them. But I enjoyed playing with them. And when I heard the live gig, oh man, that band was on fire. 

‘Dancing with Elephants’ is out now on Sunnyside Records. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. More information about Wilmer and Moses can be found on their respective websites.