From the beginning, I can’t help it: lying fevered beneath a slow ceiling fan, dozing to ragas, ragtime and Ravel.

Ah. The Orchestra naïF. It starts out in 1965, in Delhi with my 5th grade chum, Jhaff Campbell, who makes mirth; a guy who hears everything and returns the favor. He plays fully and always has.

In Delhi we'd while away weekends with instruments and noisemakers we'd find around his house. People would leave sitars, flutes, guitars there (his dad welcomed a huge variety of transients to crash there). Ash trays and lamps gave as good as they got; we even found a heavy-gauge reel-to-reel tape recorder. We fooled with one of the hemisphere’s first Philips cassette recorders.

Technology, you should know, collapsed (and still collapses) before music and poetry. It bows, it bow-wows; it sacrifices itself to the genuine articles, eventually.

True musical purity gathers rather than safeguards. So we improvised.

India is rife with a full spectrum of sights, smells and sounds - everywhere -   with obvious, lovable purpose: musicians for hire, sellers of fruit, birds and monkey on the make. Everybody's Bollywood radio, everybody's wedding party; everybody’s devotional hymns, rich and within earshot!

My parents turned me on to silly farm tunes from Ohio and North Carolina,Western European classics, Broadway soundtracks and live, jazz standards played in hotels with Portuguese, Goan elan. They took me to see Pete Seegar when he came through town. They encouraged me to study guitar and piano, and to sing.

I listened to a lot of records with narratives, like Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite, a Pirate LP with ballads and shanties, Andy Griffith's early radio riffs, and Peter and the Wolf. I listened to my mom play Chopin on the piano. She actually bought the Manfred Mann LP that had "DooWaDiddyDiddy" on it for me and my brother. It also had some great blues on it: "Smokestack Lighting," "Got my MojoWorking," and the like.

Before long I inhaled the Beatles, the Stones, Beach Boys, Dave Clark Five, Herman's Hermits, Jan and Dean. That was about all that made it to the record stores back then. Several great eras of Hindustani classical and filmi music swept through me.

When folks would return from America, they'd bring back armfuls of albums of everything that was coming out in the '60s, good and bad. But the cover art was great!

I am still lost and found in variety.

Jhaf and I formed a dance band, the Guava Jamn, in 9th grade.

We waded through covers and finessed our way through extended, brazen yet sober improvisations. Jhaff hovered between bhangra, Elvin Jones and Charlie Watts. He played a bamboo flute solo on Good Golly Miss Molly. I can’t honestly say I knew what he or I were doing, now or then.

And we were paid handsomely. We played at the finest hotels in Delhi, pool parties, took taxis, the works.

Both of us studied French with Paul Haines, a poet whose sense of the absurd pervaded every pop quiz. He'd play crazy music every Friday if the class paid attention for the first four days of the week.

Haines, you might remember, wrote the libretto to "Escalator Over the Hill," a jazz opera that featured John McLaughlin, Jack Bruce, Roswell Rudd, Don Cherry, Linda Ronstadt and a bunch of other improbable collaborators.

I remember him chuckling over my writing, even the mistakes (maybe especially the mistakes) in French. They were probably compliments; I consider him a great poetic influence.

When I came back to the States in 1971, halfway through 11th grade, I was intimidated by the suburban punks who could race through Jimmy Page solos, note for note. How'd they do it?  I retreated into headphones of Hindemith, Ravel, Bartok, Tarrega, and a whole mess of other stuff from the public library, including Segovia and his student, John Williams; Chet Atkins; Baroque recorder music, the "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" album with Vassar Clements, Doc Watson and their pals.

Haines kept sending his legendary “K-7s” (Kay-Septs) and Jhaff continued to ply me with music that sidestepped convention and exceeded expectation. Still does.

We both find public libraries to be among the best sources for fresh, honest discovery. And birds. And sounds with obvious, lovable purpose.

So: Orchestra naïF has a lot in the back catalog, a lot on the griddle, and decades ahead.

Listen in, folks.

was born to the sound of the whistling thrush and the wind in the Himalayan cedars at 2100 meters in the hill station of Mussoorie in India.  He grew up dancing the bhangra with wild abandon, entranced by the sound of bicycle spokes, the raga of crows at dusk, and the antiphonal monsoon symphony of dogs and night watchmen, the clanging of temple bells, the trance of qawali, lilting hymns in Punjabi and the anguished cry of running quails. The world as the ear of lived sound without boundaries was then layered with the structured tones of popular Hindi film music, rock and roll, blues, Nepali folk tunes, jazz, ghazals, Hindustani classical, and early twelve tone composers.  He grew up immersed in sacred music (English, Hindusthani and Punjabi) that seemed to seep seamlessly out of buildings into the babble of vegetable markets and the cacophony of crowded Delhi Streets.  Campbell/jhaffur took up organized percussion at age 10 and in the same year began his musical partnership with Joel "Bannerji" Baird - with whom he continues to record as the core duo of "Orchestra naïF".  At thirteen he began playing and later studying the bansuri (eventually training with Debu Prasad Bannerjee, Steve Gorn and the Lineated Barbet).  He and Baird formed the Guava Jamn - a rock and roll group that played at schools, beat contests and bizarre balls of United Nations ladies clubs.  

Studying French with the absurdist free jazz poet Paul Haines in New Delhi inserted an important edgewise lilt in jhaffur's lyrical outpourings. His playing modulated into a freely flowing, impressionist, narrative style with guitarist and painter, Rupak Roy and the larger "Indian Avant Garde Ensemble" that also included multi-instrumentalists (and also painter) Tobit Roche and Vikram Kapur and vocalist Suresh Unny.  A degree in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University in the US provided the stimulus for a study of the popular modern music of Nepal with nationally adored composer, Gopal Yonjan. and the beginning of a lifelong collection of tunely ethnic instruments.  Campbell performed with Bulgarian keyboardist Simeon Venkoff, and the great Anglo-Indian bassist Carl Evans at Dukes Place, the Delhi Musical society and other New Delhi haunts. After a stint in Indonesia, Campbell has been living in the US where he has been recording and performing with "Orchestra naïF along with fellow mutli-instrumentalists Joel Bannerji Baird and Cameron Campbell.  

Orchestra naiF has performed at the Tonic Club in New York city, the banks of the north fork of the Shenandoah and beneath Copper Beech trees in Ossining, New York.  Orchestre naïF perform and record "trans-genre, instantaneously composed free world music" with an essential emphasis on jubilation and have distributed dozens of CDs, including "Earthlings in Ossining", "Over an Hour, "Auf Garde," "Les Bonbons," Too Dada," "Get Macho," "Salamandar," and "Melting Moments."

Video exposure began in earnest with "Punjabop."

Grew up blasting drum beats, rock and alternative, with large doses of trans-continental metal, punk rock and hip hop across the India Ocean, trading ear phones in India and Indonesia while absorbing the musical expressions of prayer and worship through gamelan, dangdut and Indian classical traditions. New York brought a harsher deeper sound to my mindscape, metal signs and intense faces made me play the drums harder and faster a la Slayer.

College was a time of rebirth and reincarnation. Drinking Sufi wine, and doing Bhakti with the mystic masters, while  jazz-jam fusions, funk, psychedelic madness and concoctions of conscious hip hop, with some prog-rock on the record player, filled both my melodic, rhythmic, and poetic appetites with substance. Rocked Brattleboro Vermont with psuedo-intellectual hip hop as Mc Matahari, and jammed all night with crazy shit all the time.

Travel took me away from the drum-set frequently, so I began to beatbox for indigenous groups in Borneo and  rural farmers in India. Touching whatever instruments I could to keep my hands from going numb with neglect, I gained appreciating for the more melodic elements in composition. As I get older I have become more and more obscure and con-fused in the positive sense, balancing influences from musical traditions of lesser known times, and regions of the globe such as Nias, Bihar, Suriname, Tajikstan, with the modern sounds of Latin jazz, slow organic metal, dub step, didgeridoo, drum and base, Bhangra and analog synthesizers.

In music I search for a skeleton that can deconstruct its own bones and become the tastiest powder for the most ridiculous soup recipe ever consumed by earthlings. I’m inspired by hybridity, spontaneity, and the endless echoing of self and self-less. I never think too much before I play.