Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Nur Michael Keith has been living on Cortes Island for the past 6 years, but has been a professional musician for most of his 56 years.
In the beginning of a two part series, he talks a little about his earlier life, inspirations and we listen to three of his songs.
At one point during our interview I asked about his first name, ‘Nur.’
Michael explained, “It was something I gave myself. 'Michael' is from my birth parents, 'Keith' is from my adoptive parents and 'Nur' I gave myself. I sometimes go by Nur Michael Keith.”
“‘Nur’ is an Arabic name that means ‘light’ and one of my biggest inspirations on my journey musically and spiritually was from a man named Nur Ali Elahi.”
“He is mostly known as Ostad Elahi, and he passed away in the early 70s. He was a spiritual figure, but he played an instrument that I've studied from Iran called the tambour, it's a lute with two or three strings. He never performed publically. He just played at home. He was a judge, but his family recorded him without his knowledge. Fifty years after his passing, they started to slowly release some of these recordings.”
“I was so moved by the brilliance of just a man and a three stringed lute. It was really life changing for me. A few years ago, as I started to feel a transformation of myself spiritually after a lot of difficult things, I decided, as a tribute to him and to inspire myself - someone who's struggled with a lot of anxiety and self doubt for decades - I gave myself the name Nur.’”
“It’s confused a lot of people here. They have asked me, 'What the heck is it all about?' I debated for so long if I should use that, but, it felt like an important thing for me jnot to attract attention, but more to inspire myself to explore and move in and allow myself to grow and change.”
“Some people asked if I was Muslim. I'm not a Muslim, but I'm a big fan of Sufism and also of Advaita Vedanta, a non dualist thought from India. So many words and things, but they all go to the same thing.”
Michael said he comes from a ‘total unmusical family, being an adopted guy. It was the hobby that everyone wished would go away, and it still hasn’t.”
MK: “I was very much into heavy rock when I was younger. I probably started playing because of Kiss, which is odd to me, but not long after I started listening to Johnny Winter, John McLaughlin, jazz and blues people.”
“In my early twenties, I knew I wanted to do it full time. I was really into the blues and then realized I needed to try to start singing because that was the only way I was going to be able to be independent and not have to worry about a band. In Toronto, where I'm from, I had a bit of a name and a following as a blues rock guitar player for a while in my late twenties.”
“Carlos Del Junco is a pretty famous harmonica player, a virtuoso, jazz and blues, and I toured with him, as his guitarist, for many years in the 90s.”
“Then I spent a period playing free jazz in the early 2000s and toured in Europe and Asia with people doing very avant garde stuff, but there is a scene for it worldwide. It's usually just other practitioners of that music going to see it. I was very, very fortunate and I even played in Venice, which was still one of my favorite experiences. Going to a gig in the little boat with my amp and going through the canals. I played in Taiwan because I composed some music for a pretty famous Buddhist master Hsing Yun from the Fo Guang Shan temple. I studied traditional Chinese music for a while, Persian, Iranian music and in the last two years, I've studied some Carnatic music online, with a Indian music Divina. So I've all kinds of exciting stuff and managed to make a meager living through it all, just scraping by.”
