NYC Radio Live · David Ellenbogen, host

Joe Westerlund reflects on Megafaun, Milford Graves, and the Ituri Rainforest

March 27, 2026·1 hr 24 min·6 clips

An Ituri Rainforest man calls cows 'ants' on a mountaintop — because he had never before experienced visual perspective beyond 20 feet of dense forest.

1. NYC Radio Live host David Ellenbogen interviews percussionist Joe Westerlund on the occasion of a busy festival and release schedule. 2. Westerlund is a drummer who co-founded Megafaun, which split from the band DeArmond Edison alongside Bon Iver after both bands relocated from Wisconsin to North Carolina. 3. The episode's core throughline is how studying with free-jazz percussionist Milford Graves at Bennington College from 2002 to 2005 permanently redirected Westerlund's musical and personal trajectory. 4. Megafaun released its first record on Table of the Elements, an avant-garde label associated with Tony Conrad, Arnold Dreyblatt, and La Monte Young, reflecting the group's interest in minimalist composition alongside North American folk traditions. 5. Milford Graves taught at Bennington in a deliberately anti-academic manner — students called him 'Professor,' not by first name — and delivered lectures that ranged from free jazz history to holistic healing, Afro-Cuban musicians, Central African indigenous music, martial arts, and cooking. 6. Westerlund kept messy notebooks of Graves's lectures, looking up bewildering references in the college library because he didn't yet own a laptop. 7. Graves's central laboratory work involved stretching heartbeat recordings until individual tones emerged, creating a personalized 'heart song,' and in one experiment feeding that sonic output into a vibrating acupuncture needle in a neighborhood man's leg as a healing experiment. 8. Westerlund visited Graves's Queens basement on a class field trip and watched this acupuncture experiment firsthand, describing it as mind-blowing for a 21-year-old whose entire life had occurred in a two-to-three mile radius of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. 9. He describes Graves's teaching style as street knowledge delivered in lecture form — practical advice about surviving as a musician, projecting confidence, and navigating different audience contexts, including a story about performing free jazz in Africa. 10. Westerlund and Graves reconnected at the Big Ears Festival in 2018 after years of lost contact during heavy touring, and maintained regular phone calls thereafter. 11. A significant portion of the conversation covers the music of the Mbuti Pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest — specifically the Colin Turnbull recording that Westerlund calls one of his top five recordings and uses to brief musicians before collaborative performances. 12. Host Ellenbogen recounts the Colin Turnbull anecdote in which a forest-dweller, never having experienced visual perspective beyond 20 feet of dense jungle, mistakes distant cattle for ants on a mountaintop. 13. The conversation also covers Shona mbira music — specifically the record 'Soul of the Mbira' — and the instrument's Shona name 'njari,' meaning 'telephone' because it calls the spirits. 14. Cosmos Magaya is named as a central figure in the Shona mbira tradition, with a tuning system attributed to him. 15. Westerlund traveled to Kinshasa in 2021 with his brother-in-law's family to visit Congolese relatives, noting the eerie silence of a city known for non-stop amplified music during COVID restrictions. 16. Through Crammed Discs — the Belgian label that released both Megafaun recordings and the Congotronics series — he arranged a meeting with Apparo, the guitarist and leader of the Kasai All-Stars, and two other musicians. 17. The power failed just before Westerlund arrived, so the session was entirely unplugged acoustic, including an electric guitar played without amplification. 18. The musicians showed him two unnamed rhythms and told him that outsiders are not shown more; Westerlund bought a hand-held lukembe from one of the players. 19. The episode has a conversational, unhurried interview format with Ellenbogen as a knowledgeable interlocutor who has heard Milford Graves on his radio show and is familiar with the records being discussed. 20. Best for listeners drawn to avant-garde jazz lineage, ethnomusicology, or the overlap between free improvisation and indigenous African music traditions.

As heard by us

A searching conversation that turns old records into a working method.

Joe Westerlund moves from Big Pink to Milford's class to a busted up CD copy of the Mbutu Pygmies of the Eritrean Forest with the relaxed drift of someone thinking aloud.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a musician's memory trail from a Big Pink drive-by to Milford Graves.

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