XAVIER RUDD TALKS ABOUT HIS UNIQUE STAGE SET UP

Fans are still buzzing about Red Hot Chili Peppers, Anthony Kiedis and their Coachella set.

Xavier Rudd, currently gearing up for an upcoming tour and recording new material for his next album, which will be the follow up to his multi platinum album ‘Solace,’ is by far and away one of the most unique musicians our world has ever witnessed. With a multi instrumental ability to write and perform original music, Rudd has demonstrated his internal gift of captivating his audience, which continues to grow with each album, tour and performance. It’s not only the lyrics and chord progressions, which are in itself tremendously inspiring, but it’s Xavier’s ever growing stage set up of instruments gathered from around the world, which surround him onstage and truly bring his uniqueness to the forefront. We caught up with Xavier Rudd to discuss his extensive stage set up and asked if he ever planned to have such a spectacular musical rig.

Xavier Rudd has the natural ability to simultaneously play the guitar, the stomp box, ankle bells, tongue drums, djembes, harmonica and slide banjo, but one of the most alluring instruments of his rig has to be the brain thundering, body shattering didgeridoos from his homeland of Australia. It’s these three didgeridoos, which surround Rudd’s stage set up, that have a different key and vibration all their own. These ‘sticks,’ as Rudd likes to call them, have been played by the indigenous people of Australia for over 50,000 years. It’s these didgeridoos that continue to captivate Rudd’s audiences as well. We caught up with Rudd to talk about the blessing of playing his ‘sticks’ or yirdaki, which is the aboriginal word for didgeridoos.

Rudd is currently gearing up for a tour Australia and the United Kingdom. The tour, which will begin October 25th in Launceston Australia, will extend until November 20th in London, England. Rudd is already in the process of writing and recording new material for an album which hopes to have a 2006 release date. For those unfamiliar with Xavier Rudd’s multi instrumental talent, take a peak at a solo jam from a recent show at the El Rey Theater, in Los Angeles California August 5th 2005, keeping in mind it’s just Xavier!

“Yeah, you know I never really planned to have what I’ve got. Over time I just sort of gathered more and more things. I just pick something for a mood and I try to blend it together with something else. And after years of doing that, I developed the stage set up that I have now. But I never really planned it, no.”

“My sticks are from the same piece of land that they’ve been taken from, yirdaki, for the last fifty or sixty thousand years, so I’m really lucky to have that kind of wood, that spirit wood. It’s a blessing to be able to take those sticks and to be able to play them around because they definitely travel with their own spirit. It’s interesting outside because there’s always some kind of weather reaction to them. Yeah, they’re very intriguing. There like no other instrument.”