Leslie Mandoki and his soulmates, the band of the band leaders of iconic rock bands and jazz legends, created a very special concert experience for their audience in these pandemic times of lockdowns and closed concert halls.

Under the heading “MUSIC IS THE GREATEST UNIFIER! BRIDGING THE GAP AROUND THE WORLD!” the Mandoki Soulmates are now playing their almost one and a half hour ProgRock suite “Hungarian Pictures” as an online live concert. This time, the virtual stage is not only top-class as usual, but really global, as the musicians from all parts of the world make music together live from home.

In addition to Leslie Mandoki and Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull), Nick van Eede (Cutting Crew), Till Brönner, Szakcsi, Jane Xie, John Helliwell (Supertramp), Steve Bailey, Al Di Meola, Peter Maffay, Jesse Siebenberg (Supertramp), Cory Henry, Deobrat Mishra, Mike Stern, Margarita, Randy Brecker, Bill Evans, Sirreal, Richard Bona, Moto Fukushima, Tony Carey, Julia Mandoki.

A Musical Community of Values

The Mandoki Soulmates band members combined have won 35 Grammy Awards and sold more than 350 million records. These illustrious musicians include the frontmen and leaders of legendary bands such as Supertramp, Jethro Tull, Manfred Man’s Earth Band, Cream, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Toto, Blood, Sweat & Tears, as well as great jazz musicians such as Al di Meola, Randy Brecker, Bill Evans, Richard Bona, Cory Henry, Till Brönner, and Klaus Doldinger. We make music together, but we’re not just a band, we’re a community of values that feels a responsibility to embody and promote values and standards.

The pandemic has made concerts as we know and love them impossible for the time being. Nevertheless, we cannot rest—we must be louder than ever before! The global challenges that humanity is facing—pandemics, financial and economic crises, migration and integration, climate change—will only be met if we overcome divisions across all borders.

That is why the Mandoki Soulmates, together with musicians from all parts of the world, are raising their voices for unity and against division across all borders: physical, cultural, and intellectual with this online concert series.

From our studio at Lake Starnberg, near Munich, we play with Tony Carey and the rest of the Soulmates band who are local. Our Soulmates in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Miami, Nashville, London, Berlin, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Delhi, and Moscow are connected to our digital stage. We all play live, whether it is in a living room on 52nd Street in New York, on the beach in South Carolina, or in a private basement studio of a castle in Northern England. Talk about unification! —this is the technology enabling the spiritual, to bridge the gap around the world.

The unifying power of music

The prog-rock suite Hungarian Pictures is based on Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s belief in the unifying, border-crossing power of music. With this online concert series, we are symbolically building a bridge around the world. Just as digital technology makes it possible for the Mandoki Soulmates to make music together despite their geographical separation, music makes it possible to overcome many of the divisions between minds.

Let us overcome these divisions, build bridges, and do everything possible for the unity of North and South, East and West. We are all Europeans, Africans, Americans, Asians and Australians! Music is the common language that connects us across all barriers.

Hungarian Pictures, the core piece and artistic highlight of our current double album, is constructed as suite, based on compositions and themes by Bartók, supplemented with our songs. Together with Greg Lake of Emerson Lake & Palmer, and Jon Lord of Deep Purple, I had worked on the seed of this idea years ago.

Thirst for freedom, responsibility and creativity

For Bartók, diversity in culture creates enrichment. He believed that it is precisely from these differences that art draws the power that enables further development. He mixed sounds and traditional melodies from different regions of the Carpathian Plain in order to set an example against the burgeoning threat of National Socialism (Nazism) through the unifying aspects of music. That unifying impulse inspired Jon Lord, Greg Lake, and me.

I am very grateful to our audience for the extraordinary chart success of our double album Living In The Gap + Hungarian Pictures and the enthusiasm resulting in sold-out concerts. A supporting concert series for 2020 was signed, sealed, and all but delivered when the pandemic arrived. This quarantine of musical expression has been a true test of character, but artistic souls cannot be locked in forever: the urge for freedom, responsibility and creativity are too great.

After completing our Mandoki Soulmates “Wings Of Freedom” tour through Europe, we received an invitation from the Grammy Organization to give a concert in New York’s Beacon Theater (where Martin Scorsese shot the Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light). The Soulmates show was a great success with an enthusiastic New York audience, standing ovations, and positive press reviews.

From the communist dictatorship to the land of unlimited possibilities

For me, a former asylum seeker who over four decades ago fled from a communist dictatorship to freedom, this success in the “Land of the Free” is a very special moment.

After the concert, I spent a few days with my children in Van Morrison’s former house in Topanga Canyon, one of the old “hippie” neighborhoods of Los Angeles. I used this free time to reflect on social developments over the past few years. It became clear to me that we as artists are being challenged to become louder, to be a thorn in the side of society, and to bring progressive jazz rock back to real socio-political relevance. This is how the first ideas for a new album came about. It is the most ambitious and best thing we have ever done: The concept double album Living in the Gap + Hungarian Pictures.

Living Future

The songs on Living in the Gap + Hungarian Pictures address the challenges in this and subsequent decades of the 21st century. Greed, hatred, and selfishness divide our society throughout the world. With these songs I am putting the common, uniting elements in the foreground instead of the things that separate us. Mindfulness instead of ignorance must become our credo again—a stop to “business as usual.”

And where, we must ask, is the big-picture vision for our children? When it comes to inter-generational equity, my generation, the boomers, has simply failed. With the euphoria of the peaceful revolution in Europe of thirty years ago—the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that entailed—we failed to set the course to build a mindful, sustainable, viable future for our grandchildren and future generations.

The Soulmates are breaking new ground with these online concerts on the “digital stage.”

Now is the time and here is the space for new thinking!

Mission Statement Update

Every crisis is also an opportunity. Covid-19 is an amplifier for all the weak points in our system. This crisis, with its accompanying norm-breaking phenomena, is a character test for our community of solidarity.

Especially in these times, we as artists are particularly challenged to stand up for unity and against the division in our society, and to formulate ideas for a better world, for “our colorful republic of Germany,” as my Soulmate Udo Lindenberg calls it—and beyond, for a Multicolored One-World.

Music can be the best inoculation against the penetration of extremist ideas into the center of society and thus an important protective mechanism for democracy and our community of solidarity.

We now have the opportunity to make a constructive update to our socio-political model so that people are the focus again, mindfulness defeats indifference, and humanity reigns over greed.

Who, if not we musicians with our direct line to the audience, should re-ignite the light at the end of this pandemic tunnel and rebuild society?

Music is the greatest unifier! Bridging the gap around the world!

Soulmates and their location in our online concert

Leslie Mandoki – Lake Starnberg

Ian Anderson – Jethro Tull – Oxford

Nick van Eede – Cutting Crew – London

Till Brönner – Berlin

Szakcsi – Budapest

Jane Xie – Shanghai

John Helliwell – Supertramp – Liverpool

Steve Bailey – Boston

Al Di Meola – New York

Peter Maffay – Lake Starnberg

Jesse Siebenberg – Supertramp – San Francisco

Cory Henry – Los Angeles

Deobrat Mishra – Delhi

Mike Stern – New York

Margarita – Moskau

Randy Brecker – Log Island / New York

Bill Evans – Nashville

Sirreal – Beijing

Richard Bona – Miami

Moto Fukushima – Tokyo

Tony Carey – Los Angeles

Julia Mandoki – Amsterdam

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No Alternative to Freedom – Music Against Division

In a free society there is no alternative but to have a robust discourse about the alternatives. Two aspects of an artist’s life cannot be quarantined even in lockdown: creativity and responsibility.

Artists are the soul of a society, and controversial, artistic reflections must bring vibrant discourse to the center of society.

In these challenging times, humor—even black humor—can bring the laughter that makes the pain bearable. Without this ironic and satirical turn in the Zeitgeist, divisions can cut even deeper.

It is deadly serious what this pandemic has brought upon us. And yes, we all must take responsibility for all areas, be it vaccine procurement, the vaccinations themselves, or contact avoidance. Every artist must formulate their own response in their own voice. The artistic soul overflows now, and must be channeled into a driving force to bring more light than heat.

Art is free, and art must be allowed to do anything and everything. Even in the darkest Middle Ages, there was only a fine line between the court jester and the artist, as in the truths spoken by a Shakespearean fool.

Judging others, let alone condemning others, has never been my thing. Rather, in the suffering of the past year’s pandemic, when being on stage was not possible for any artist in the world, I asked myself: What can I do?

That is why “We Say Thank You” was created, and why our online concert was born. Yes, music can be the answer to overcome geographic, demographic, and generational divisions. Only if we move together through this dark tunnel of the pandemic can we find the light of unity, and music can provide our locomotion.

In fall 2020, I survived a covid infection with a very heavy viral load. My self-medication against this evil virus was self-mockery, self-reflection, and, above all, music. Thinking that our audience shares our vision, it was my burning desire to use this crisis as a chance to advocate as an artist that the greedy egoism of our society changes to mindfulness toward our fellow humanity.

This is how “Music Against Division – Music is the Greatest Unifier!” came into being. Music for humanity and togetherness, for connecting and togetherness.

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We are learning day by day, again and again. Here in Germany, we have a history that teaches us what happens when racism horrifically poisons a society, killing a once vibrant and diverse culture by breaking the most fundamental rules of civilization. Of course, we have not learned this lesson perfectly. But even as I contemplate the bleakest aspects of today’s headlines, my heart is pushing me back toward an optimism rooted in one of our world’s great unifiers: music. But more on this later…

In the coronavirus isolation of my deserted recording studio, prior to the outbreak of protests across the world in response to the killing of George Floyd—before this I was thinking, hoping, that the enforced hiatus due to the virus could give us the space for new thinking and new policies to grow. Now I think we all realize: we don’t have time for that.

Right now, we must come together, making sure everyone feels they are being heard. We must bring the discourse of differing views no matter how extreme in to the fold of the center of society, both to learn from them and to hold them to account.

Here in Germany, we are asking ourselves why so many people are expressing their fears in the form of conspiracy theories. We need to listen attentively to them in order to present a cogent and robust opposing point of view, based on respect and knowledge rather than anger and fear. The resilience of our pluralistic, democratic society will grow if we can endure a diversity of dissent in a way that escapes the filter bubbles and echo chambers of our current chaotic public discourse.

The massive threat to life as we know it from the coronavirus crisis, combined with all the other concurrent crises—world finance, refugee, globalization, fake news, conspiracy theories, as well as the sustained protests in the US and abroad—is what existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would have called de trop, or “too much.” The only way out of this storm is through visionary leadership—political, cultural, and artistic. I call on my friends in prominent positions to lead from the front, not from behind political calculations based on polling, and to use these crises, together, as an opportunity to fight for unity and against division in society.

I am also making a special call to my peers in the music business to help our artist colleagues who are struggling for their existence. Young, innovative artists at the beginning of their careers have been particularly hard-hit. The paradigm shift in the recording industry has made breaking into the business harder than ever for artists who do not fit neatly into a mainstream commercial category. Culture needs diversity, and it would be a disaster if this diversity were thinned out by the corona crisis and only we established artists would be able to survive this time. Thus, colleagues of my generation and I need to hold the megaphone calling for support for these promising artists who are the future of the artistic soul of our society.

Not coincidentally, the Mandoki Soulmates 2019 double album “Living in the Gap & Hungarian Pictures” was made to express this ideal of the old rebels coming together with the young upstarts to fight for unity and against division in our society.

We cannot forget that the coronavirus crisis has provided a painfully hard-won opportunity to re-evaluate who and what is really, systemically important in our society, and to create new criteria for evaluating who creates added value, cohesion, and solidarity. At the same time, we must take a hard look at those who profit when our society is in crisis.

After the 2008 financial crisis, we failed to root out its causes. Because of this, uninhibited speculators have been able to shamelessly profit from the schadenfreude of short selling in this coronavirus crisis. Perhaps we can turn the corner from allowing financial markets to determine the course of events to having a community held together by humanity.

Especially in these times of rapid upheavals on many fronts, let us make sure that mindfulness triumphs over greed, and humanity over indifference. It is only with a unified effort that we can overcome these challenges, which are further exacerbated by the uncertainties of the current climate. Together, we must not only imagine, but create a new world of equality. So, let’s take a breath for a better world!

The Philosophy of Music

We need to bring our music back to socio-political relevance. We must once again sing and play together, against division and for cohesion. That is, and must be, the philosophy of our music. We musicians often think with our hearts. Our songs are created with an unwavering belief in the connecting power of music. Let’s change the world with our music! We are walking in the footsteps of the Woodstock generation—let us mount a new challenge to the world of similar proportions.

My most devout hope is that we will overcome these crises and live out our passion for life again with our audience.

However, as I wrote years ago on our album Aquarelle, “I am not young enough to know everything.”

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My first reaction was – hopefully not another sanctimonious, self-serving and smug pop star utterance we can really do without. But – when I actually heard the master tracks and loaded them up in my audio recording software I was very touched by the simple and direct sentiments of the lyrics.  So the usually-cynical and grumpy Mr A decided to give it a go.

Of course, we all thank the brave, hardworking front-line medics and care workers around the world. But he managed to put into the lyrics references to the police, grocery clerks, supermarket workers too. Even the dark reference to the speculators making a killing from the current crisis.

I would like to add to the list those essential worker folks who it was impossible to squeeze into a three minute song:

the farmers and all those in food production, distribution and retail; the fishermen out there on the high seas;

the refuse collectors; our military who continue to keep us safe; the delivery men and women who try to ensure our supplies with essentials; journalists and news-gatherers who keep us informed with often depressing but sometimes uplifting stories from around the world;

the medical and economic advisors to governments who have to carry the can, if and when they get it wrong, as unfortunately they sometimes will in this ever-evolving and complex world situation. And, of course, all the other workers who continue to toil in the background to keep this world turning, if a little more slowly, for the months to come.

To all, we say, thank you.

(Ian Anderson)

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