Curious Melodies
from the Lost Travel Diaries
of Sir Albus Manchild
by Beston Barnett
digital photo collage

Beston: The cover of Curious Melodies... is a collage of one of the classic daguerreotypes of Manchild (complete with coffee stain) and some old maps that have been colorized for the composition.  Though this image was taken before he set out on his travels, Manchild's interest in all things exotic is already evident in the collection of totems and fetishes displayed on the bookshelf behind him.

Scroll below for more miscellanea...
Here's another of the antique maps used in the design of the Curious Melodies... CD package.  All of the maps included were of imaginary places.  This one from the sixteenth century, though clearly Northwestern Africa in general design (note the Nile running along the top left edge), claims to be a map to the mythical kingdom of Prester John, believed to be somewhere near Ethiopia.  Sir Albus had a more than passing interest in the myths concerning the "Christian King" - he wrote a whole symphonic cycle entitled "The Realms of Prester John".  Thus, instead of showing Manchild's actual travel route - which anyway is still debated - Beston chose to trace the places Manchild had been in his mind.  Other maps included in the design show a Koranic heaven, a Chinese fantasy Dragon City, and a map to the garden of Eden, complete with little figures of Adam and Eve (on the cover).
Here's another portrait of Sir Albus Manchild looking dour in his usual Oriental smoking jacket.
The next four photos come from the Beston Barnett Quartet's last rehearsal before the recording.  They were taken by Dean Rither.
In the liner notes of the Curious Melodies... CD, Beston writes: "dedicated to three ghosts by whom I have been happily haunted: Mary Lou Williams, Italo Calvino, Joseph Cornell."  The latter often used maps with hypnotic blue tones in his assemblages, like "Trade Winds No. 2" from 1956, at left.
The dedication to Italo Calvino arises from parallels between the Curious Melodies... project and Calvino's prose-poem Invisible Cities, which chronicles the fictionalized travels of Marco Polo.  In each page-length chapter, Marco visits another fictional city - a narrative framework which Calvino uses to delve into the philosophical or psychological lives of cities and their inhabitants.
Curious Melodies... is firstly dedicated to Mary Lou Williams, a jazz pianist and composer, whose mentorship mothered a generation of beboppers versed in tight and dissonant harmonies, and whose playing and arranging - especially in her famous 1945 Zodiac Suite - informs Beston's own at least as much as the more obvious influence of Django Reinhardt.