Download the Extended Liner Notes here: cutt.ly/bSmrblp
They summarize the STORIES behind each track, complete with photos!
For the FULL STORIES, go to the Storyband Travel Blog: www.jordanferrinmusic.com/storyband-blog

Until a certain point in my life, I had relied mainly on music to express myself. I trained in the styles of classical and then jazz music exclusively, but always had an eclectic taste—this includes the likes of Sonny Rollins to Mahler to Radiohead—which manifested in wild bouts of creative output through performance and composition. However, once I started traveling, that creativity became more focused and more convincing beyond anything I thought I could manifest. Life began teaching me something an education could not.
For over four years I traveled the entire world, working as a cruise ship musician. In those four years I have known and experienced what most people never will. And it is completely, blissfully absurd that I have known and experienced what most people never will. Though I traveled the world, I still try to believe I did. I was forever changed, and because of this I realized there is no way for me to keep these experiences to myself. How can I? No; my mission is to give these experiences to the rest of the world. Through them I want to generate inspiration, connection, compassion, and happiness for audiences and humanity alike. I must and will always do my best, truly, to express the lifetime I lived. Tales of Transcendence is my first leap in this direction. It is more than an album of music; it is an experience that combines music and travel.
Though music speaks where words fail, even music can struggle to speak about the highest kinds of human experience. This album’s ultimate aim is to use the power of words, pictures, and music to represent some of the most powerful transcendental experiences I’ve known.
Transcendence is an expansion of normal consciousness beyond one’s body and mind into everything around one’s self. Consciousness and awareness rise above their everyday workings to include more than themselves, and more than that into which they expand.
In travel, we can feel a sense of wonder from an experience. From there, and through mindfulness, both an incredible wakefulness and an incredible calmness can be activated, leading to transcendence. It is ironic that a place, landmark, or other phenomenon can cause an experience which goes beyond that place, landmark, or phenomenon. Nevertheless, coexistence with the world and of the Universe is known as one’s self melds with that phenomenon and everything else contributing to the moment.
In music, too, the potential for transcendence occurring in musicians and audiences is great. Jazz, in particular, has mighty potential for transcendence to occur in musicians and audiences. Through ever-evolving interconnectedness between a group’s musical communication, the improvisational nature of jazz creates many moments that every person who is musicking can grasp as mindful seeds. Through individual and collective mindfulness, those seeds are planted one after the other, watered together, then bloom into extraordinary representations of human ecstasy as individual and collective transcendence.
Many of the world’s spiritual traditions agree on the idea of a transcendental state, whether it is reached through meditation in Buddhism and Hinduism, prayer in Catholicism, or the ritual of Sama in Sufism. These practices allow a person’s awareness to embrace more than just their own mind, body, and soul—their awareness stretches out into an endless place of purity, free from the influence of thoughts, bodily functions, conceptions, or any other surface-level activity of which their everyday consciousness is aware. The Dalai Lama equates everyday thoughts, like schedules, bills, etc. to ocean waves, chaotic and disorderly on the surface. These are “ocean-surface” thoughts that push us to and fro without allowing us to see the depths of that ocean, where it is calm, peaceful, and pristine….
A person in a transcendental state rises above it all. Think about the lotus, for instance: it blooms out and above the muck of the pond into an impossibly perfect, gorgeous flower.
The many experiences I have had throughout the world share common traits: I felt my awareness stretch to encompass more than the sum of my perception; I felt my perception become more than the sum of its parts; and sometimes, there was a level of wonder-filled euphoria reached that could never be portrayed properly….
In my travels I reached an eventual dilemma, however: was I relying on the “ocean-surface” of reality in each place I saw for my ecstasy, or was I actually seeing the depths of that ocean? The answer was both. I believe travel allows us opportunities of supernatural connection which include everything our “surface-level” perceptions and emotions give to us. A transcendental state does not exclude everything else.
But in the context of travel and music, it is not travel nor music alone that allow for transcendence. The depths of our consciousness play a vital role. As transcendence shines a light on those depths, they help us glimpse the ultimate reality. What is that reality? Everything is connected, and interbeing, with everything else, from the smallest particle to the most massive galaxy cluster.
Music can connect us to ourselves and to our lived experience in the world, and travel does something similar. Travel can connect us to ourselves and to the world directly, thereby improving our lived experience. Including the witnessing of sheer beauty, we witness other humans living differently than we do in places where we must rethink everything we do. All of this is instantly enlightening, humbling, and fascinating at once. If we are both attentive and mindful, this enlightened, humble fascination allows us not only to ignite our transcendental capacities but to sustain them. They will guide us toward a kind of wisdom that cannot be taught in schools, reinforced by role-models, nor found in books nor online. It is a wisdom which illuminates all of what we are. We see all the bits of ourselves while we go beyond ourselves into that ultimate reality of interbeing. This wisdom makes us happy, better, fuller, and it is contagious even when invoked in the face of adversity and hatred. It therefore has the power to change the perspectives of people so they can live in constant rejoicing, respect, compassion, and love for themselves, their environment, and their fellow humans.
Tales of Transcendence is a testament to some of my greatest transcendental experiences throughout the world. The music and the stories were born of the creative impulse within me which was kept roaring by those experiences. And what better music to use than jazz, an incredible dynamo of transcendental, interconnecting potential for musicians and audiences?