We were lucky to catch up with Kai Eckhardt recently and have shared our conversation below.

Kai , appreciate you joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

The biggest risk I ever took in my life was to become a professional musician. The story goes back to the year 1973 when I had a key experience that made me fall in love with music. I lived in Germany at the time and had just entered high school in the city of Mainz. One day my class mate Christopher Schneider invited me and a few friends over to his house to show us how to rig a conventional stereo system into a guitar amplifier. He hooked up a home-made electric guitar to his stereo by connecting two wires to the back of the system and asked me to “try it out”. I began messing around with the guitar and instantly tapped into a “groove”. Without musical knowledge I was transported into a magical place and could not stop playing. The other kids were perplexed and the room was filled with happy faces. This was the beginning of my pursuit to “find my voice in music”. Always attracted to the low notes I eventually landed with the bass guitar in 1975. I remember spending hours by myself on a daily basis jamming near the radiator of my room, where it was nice and warm. One thing led to another and I soon found myself playing in bands in Germany and performing my first show which was a terrifying experience because I was nervous about people watching me “do my thing”. But the love for music overcame the fear of performance and so I kept going. What is worth mentioning on the sidelines is that I was raised as the only child of color in an “all white” environment which often made me feel alienated. Music helped me out of the alienation and made me feel like “I had something to say”. Fast forward to the day my father came from Liberia, West Africa to visit. I would only see him once every five years or so, and it was a special occasion. He asked: What do you want to become when you grow up? I replied: “I want to be a musician”. He abruptly said: “That’s not a real profession. In Africa EVERYBODY is a musician. You need to be a doctor like your father!” I was heartbroken, but decided to take him upstairs to my room where I had set up a Fender Rhodes piano which I learned to play along with the bass. I played for him a little groove I had invented and he immediately lit up, snapping his fingers with a big smile on his face. “Git it boy!” he kept saying. Then he said: “You must be musician” and then he left. It was one of the last times I saw him before he passed away. The rest of my family on the German side (I am bi-racial German/Liberian) always tried to discourage me from pursuing music for a living. They said: “Musik ist eine brotlose Kunst” – which is German for “Music is a bread-less art”. Against the warnings, I kept pursuing Music, playing shows, practicing, playing along with cassettes and LPs as well as teaching myself the basics of how to read music. I had no interest in classical music at all and was thoroughly committed to groove music. I was all about the Funk. Ultimately I left Germany in my early twenties after spending 2 years as a nurse’s assistant in a hospital for mentally handicapped children. I did this as a result of being a conscientious objector the the German military service. After my service years were over and I had graduated German high school (with the second best GPA of my year), I left for the United States of America where I received a scholarship to the prestigious Berklee College of music. Despite many years of struggle I never regretted the decision. It was the biggest risk I ever took. One that ultimately paid off as I kept following my dream to this day.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I was never a “planner”, one who carefully imagines the future an makes calculated moves to purse the chosen path. I was always the one who “stumbled upon” his path by following what feels right, making choices as unexpected opportunities came along. That ended up working very well for me until today, where I am in my early sixties. One of my open secrets for success is the art of the “follow up”. Once you make up your mind, commit and follow up with as much diligence and attention to detail as possible. Harness the small leverage you get from tiny accomplishments. This will carry a message into the universe and good things will come around. Once in music college I became a prolific player, circling through dozens of bands over the course of my 5 years of college education. I’d take summers off to play tours with various bands launching out of Boston, MA, home of the Berklee College of Music. There were many days where I’d study in school and then play 6 hours of jam sessions at night with my classmates. This rich experience was so exhausting that I almost dropped out college, telling myself “I don’t need to graduate, I can just go out and play and make money”. Maynard Ferguson offered me 375 bucks a week to join his band. But this time around I listened to my folks at home. “You are almost done, hang in there and get your degree”. said my Mom. Today I know she was right, because without this degree I would not have been hired by the University of California, Berkeley to teach the World Music Ensemble now that I am older. Then graduation day arrived and my proud Mom came from Europe to see the famous producer Phil Ramone (who produced Barbara Streisand) hand me my diploma with honors. It was also the time when the world’s doors were open for me. I had applied for a teaching position in the Bass department of Berklee College and was accepted right away by then head of the department Rich Appleman. But in the same week the famous jazz-rock pioneer of the electric guitar John McLaughlin called my house to ask me to audition for his new trio. He was tipped off by his friend Gary Burton who is a world renowned vibraphonist who happened to be my improvisation teacher at Berklee. John was the guitarist in Miles Davis’s band who recorded “Bitches Brew”, a legendary album that for the first time fused Jazz with elements of Rock music in the late 60s, early 70s. After leaving Miles, John founded the Mahavishnu Orchestra a pioneering Jazz-Rock band and later “Shakti” that brought together Jazz, Rock and Indian classical music. So by the time I auditioned for John in Boston (the years was 1987) he was a well established legend which made the decision to join his trio a “no-brainer”. Needless to say the audition went well even though I was nervous as hell. Somehow, my little fingers knew what to do even though my mind was all over the place. Once I received the material to memorize for the first tour which was to take place in Italy in 1988, I was shocked at how hard the music was. I really didn’t have it in me and needed to ‘up my game’ in a massive way. I moved back to Germany to join my foster parents who were at the time in their late 70s. Flashback: I went into foster-care at age 10 after my parent’s relationship ended in Liberia where I lived with my Mom and Dad from 1966 to 1970. So my old folk’s home was the place where I had 6 months to learn this impossible music, high tempos, odd meters, blazing unison lines. At one point I had a bucket of cold water standing next to me to duck my hands into as not to burn out on tendonitis. And once again, the effort paid off as we hit the road, stunning audiences around the world. Tours were up to 6 weeks long at the time with Europe, Scandinavia, the US, Canada and Eastern Europe (before the fall of the iron curtain) as destinations. Everywhere we filled concert halls with thousands of people while getting rave reviews. I was all over the bass player magazines from US to Tokyo to Turkey to Germany. My highlight was the recording of the live album “John McLaughlin trio live at the Royal Festival Hall London” which topped the jazz charts in the US and was greeted with rave reviews. John and I were joined by the Indian phenomenon on percussion Trilok Gurtu who was voted “best percussionist of the year” by Downbeat Magazine something like 7 times in a row. But as life goes, things don’t last forever and it came to be that my foster father received a double diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease while I was at the height of my career. As my old man lived with his wife (who herself was in her 80s) I’d come home between tours and see things fall apart. I became depressed and withdrawn on the road and finally was “let go” by John Mclaughlin. He said: “I need you to be fully present on tour”. At the same time he understood the situation and offered me financial support if I needed it. He was always a great role model, intelligent, gracious, fierce. No drugs on stage. A great role model indeed compared to everything else I experienced in the field. He also invited me to join him on another studio recording album in 1992. So I went from fame and fortune to being a caretaker, helping my foster dad in and out of the wheel chair, taking care of sanitary issues at home and returning to small local gigs and teaching students to etch out a living in music while helping out at home. This was a hard time for me and it taught me an incredible lesson. It was a blow to my ego. It was the biggest sacrifice I ever made in life and now, that all is said and done. It was the right thing to do. Sometimes “follow your heart” can mean sacrifice your personal glory for what is the right thing to do in life. At one of my trips when we came to Oakland with the John McLaughlin trio in 1989, I met a young lady who was an immigrant from Brazil who worked as a waitress at the old “Yoshi’s” jazz venue on Clairmont Ave. We fell in love and kept a long distance relationship going for 3 years before we decided to get married. My foster father passed away in 1991 and I got married in 1992. My foster mother literally “kicked me out of the house”. “You have to live your own life, don’t worry about me”. Reluctantly I left Germany for a second time and moved to Berkeley California where I got married in 1992. Now I had another problem to solve which was how to get a green-card. I had no work permit in the USA. With the help of Kip Steinberg a brilliant lawyer from San Francisco I managed to obtain an E1 Visa which is also known as an “Einstein Visa” reserved for those who have reached the very top of their profession. I was now free to pursue legal employment in the US and build my life together with my wife. We at the time lived very frugally on a shoe-string budget on the corner of Telegraph and Haste in Berkeley in a studio apartment that was so small, that I had to transform my bass speaker cabinets into furniture by putting a table cloth on it and placing a house plant on top. When I had gigs in town, I’d dismantle the “furniture” and carry the heavy stuff down 2 flights of stairs only to carry it back up after midnight to reassemble the living room. At the time teaching and gigging as well as workshops where my bread and butter. I plaid weddings, corporate function and rolled my gear into jail to play for the inmates. I had many magazine articles under my belt and could somewhat bank on my credentials to sometimes get nice gigs too, which you can read about in my biography. But all in all it was always up and down, up and down and up again. Good months, bad months. All of this became much more critical when my wife became pregnant while I was touring 160 dates a year on average. The strain on the relationship and my child (and later 2 children) became unbearable. I decided to make sacrifices to keep my marriage intact and to be a better father. Finding this balance while being self employed was -and continues to be- a science. I think I learned to keep a high moral character from my foster parents. They were growing up during the Nazi era and my foster dad was captured in a Russian Gulag while fighting in Hitler’s army at the Eastern front on the way to attacking Moscow. By adopting a black child and helping foreigners get a foothold in Germany he made good on a promise to himself: He had vowed to reform his life, should he ever make it out alive. And he did. To me he has been a role model and an example that people can change profoundly for the better. A high moral character is what I inherited from my folks and it is the secret of my personal integrity. In the year 2000 I began co-leading the band Garaj Mahal. We toured by van every state in the Union (except North Dakota) for more than 10 years until we became “thrown under the bus” by the 2008 banking crisis. Clubs could not get bank credit and turned guarantees into door deals which made touring too risky. This lead to the band breaking up, leaving me in financial dire straits. This time I shifted gears by teaching myself web-design to start an online business for musicians who are looking for mentorship. This is how I managed to stay afloat, stay married, stay present, play music and keep the boat floating. It was scary. I had nights where I woke up in a cold sweat, going to the toilet to throw up from anxiety, knowing the the US is the kind of place where you can go bankrupt and end up homeless with your entire family. I did not come from money and never had the ability to “invest” or save. My darkest period in life was when we lost our health insurance while I suffered an inguinal hernia from carrying heavy speakers in and out of venues. I could not fix it for two years and had to keep playing, keep touring, keep working. I took a large flat stone and taped it to my groin with gaffer tape to fix my guts in place. I could have died doing that so I later found out. My family was in that income bracket where we made too much money to qualify for Medical and not enough to pay for private healthcare. This is when I became a progressive leftist on the political spectrum. It was that experience. When Obama was elected president, Obamacare allowed me to sign up for healthcare again and I immediately got the operation to get my health back. I learned that fame is a double edged sword. To the outside you see the talented celebrated artists, but on the inside you realize the self-employed artist’s path is a wild roller coaster ride with many high and low points with no guarantees and no safety net. Since I graduated in 1987 artists like me have continued to suffer a string of financial setbacks starting with CD sales implosion through Napster, record companies going out of business and studio work imploding as the industry embraced drum computers, samplers, piracy, streaming and now the dawn of A.I. We musicians are always on the backfoot having to re-invent new ways to make a living. The system punishes us for daring to be outside the box. Today I am a web-designer, e-commerce specialist, live musician, teacher, clinician, producer, mentor, band leader and road manager. I am also a husband, father and care taker of an elderly mother. But to sum it all up if I had to do it all over again, I would do it exactly the same way, but with more faith and less fear. Now in 2023 I am beginning to see that most of us in the middle class are beginning to fear the advent of AI forcing us to multi-task, invent, be flexible and be innovative. Something inside me is saying: “Well folks, I am 15 years ahead of the game and you are all now facing what I faced long time ago. Someone is pulling the rug from under your feet and you have to re-evaluate everything. You now must build a new model of reality, divorcing the dream that the system promised and never delivered despite your extreme hard work. Therefore, my message to you all out there is this: Take on the challenge. Practice radical self-acceptance and radical forgiveness as not to harden and break. You need your flexibility and your vulnerability which is in essence your sensitivity to the universal truths independent of human interpretations. This gives you a starting point to rebuild your model of the world. Upgrade your operating system. Assume that you are ALL OF IT You are you, and other people are you on another time-line. You are in the tiny ant, in the trees and you are in the sun. You are a multi-dimensional being whose destiny is eternity. Your destiny is for you to become the entire Universe in a series of radical transformations. That is your final body and everything else, all the trials and tribulations are lessons in the school of life on the way to your glorious destiny. When it’s good, enjoy the hell out of it. When it’s bad, don’t let yourself down, don’t blame others, TAKE THE LESSON INSTEAD. Learn the lesson and it becomes your new super power. As you age you will become less and less afraid. Don’t get hung up on comparisons, fashion, looks or prestige stay humble always. Rescue spiders, don’t kill the bugs. They are part of you. Don’t be materialistic. Be spiritual. You are both : Life and Death on two sides of the same coin. Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Science, its all the same stuff, joined at the core. Embrace everything in your toolbox all the way from Grandma’s wisdom to Artificial Intelligence. If it’s here, make it work for you. Don’t waste your energy in fights and friction. Take what works for you and leave the rest behind. Refine what you love and discard all that is redundant by replacing it with things that give you joy, happiness and meaning in life.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

NFTs or “non fungible tokens” are a great example of a newly emerging value system which comes with great promises for artists as content creators, allowing us to individually claim ownership of our self-created digital items, be it jpeg images, audio files or video clips. Once our digital creations are uploaded to the digital ledger of the blockchain they can be individually traded or sold as unique items which in time can appreciate in value as our careers and brands (hopefully) become more popular. So much for the theory of things. For a while I was keenly interested in that world of NFTs and learned all I could about history of the blockchain as well as the crazy wealth raked in by artists such as Mike Winkelmann aka “Beeple”. He managed to cash in on the intersection of novel technology and the collector’s spirit which seems to be deeply embedded in the human soul as you can see with the trading of baseball cards or Pokémon’s. Even though a copied mp3 from the internet sounded exactly like it’s NFT counterpart, the fact that it was digitally stamped made it unique to those who wanted to “own” an object, be it for collector’s value, prestige or as a trading commodity. Curiously, this seemed to appeal especially to people who have more money than they can spend to the point that they get bored with the possession of the physical world. I soon noticed a pattern however, which greatly deflated my expectations. There is an apparent parallel between what happened to the world of NFTs and what happened with the advent of the Internet as a whole. It came with great promises and was soon taken over by corporations, creating hype, and FOMO (fear of missing out) while shifting the phenomenon in the direction of market monopolies. The internet btw. was first embraced by smart hippies from the West-Coast who hitched it on the back of military technology in a libertarian spirit. But instead of keeping things free and open source, proprietary models crept in and rigged the system in favor of a for-profit business model. This seems to always happen as it turns out. Someone takes over and uses first-come leverage to rig rules and corner the market, extracting crazy money. This became apparent in the largest ever Anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft way back in 2000, ending with a settlement where Microsoft agreed to let other PC manufacturers use its operating system in return for not being broken up by the Government. When the blockchain first became popular the British tech wizard and singer songwriter Imogen Heap first mapped out a brave new world that made me and many other artists perk up. It was the prospect of being able to cut the middle man of Apple, Pandora and Spotify etc. to market directly from artist to fanbase. Traditionally, the “middle agents” have always walked with the lion share of profits, paying meager royalties to artists. Now we supposedly had a way to solve that problem and get back our lost CD revenue which had been destroyed my the technologies of Napster and the CD burner. For that we needed only two components: The (un-hackable) Ethereum blockchain and the “Smart Contract”. The smart contract is a string of code which runs on the blockchain as the interface program between the artist and the consumer, automatically calculating micro royalties and depositing them into the artist’s bank account. This meant the artist would only have to fill out the smart contract by filling in the desired royalty rates for, lets say, a single stream, a CD sold or a license granted. A song would stream or be licensed, and the money would instantly be electronically deposited as crypto currency into the artist’s digital wallet crypto currency. Great idea, but it never took off for most of us. Even now, with us having access to ChatGPT, Claude or Google Bard AI agents which can write code, it appears easier than ever to set up such an interface but it takes a lot of tech know how and there is a huge learning curve as well as hurdles. One hurdle is the enormous carbon footprint generated by GPU farms running non-stop 24/7 to keep the blockchains going. So once you have everything set up on your website you still have to figure out how to get traffic to your site. That turns out to be hard, especially when you are just starting up. It took me some time to comprehend why people would rather go to my Facebook page then directly to my website to interact with me. There is a herd-mentality component hard wired into the species apparently and folks go “where the party is”. Everyone’s clustered on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok and so we artists are forced to have TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Linked-in, Youtoube and Twitter accounts to capture our audiences for the purpose of re-directing them to our website. Then you end up in this trap where you no longer practice your craft because you are spending all your time uploading to online platforms. Then you find programs like “Hootsuite” that help you post on multiple sites at once and you have to pay them. The same with NFTs. Folks don’t go to my website to buy the NFT, but to the market place which is again dominated by a handful of behemoths such as Open Sea, Rarible or Super rare. Whatever the new emergent technology happens to be there is always a tendency for it to become quickly co-opted by those companies who try to tap into the revenue flow of millions of artists. So you get a phenomenon where you are trying to cancel one middle man just to realize that the technology you are using to do so itself is increasingly moving towards becoming a new middle man in and of itself. Patreon is a great example. You get paid by your patrons, but Patreon itself makes the real kill by tapping into everyone’s revenue. When I first started touring with my band, there were all these small and midsize festival in communities around the US. After the bank crises of 2008 most of them went bust and were replaced by monster festivals such as Coachella, Bonaroo or Outside lands. Same scheme. Big fish swallowing little fish and controlling the market. Now bands all compete to get into the mega festivals which charge 1000 bucks or more for bulk tickets. There are still alternatives around, but the tendency is towards consolidation and market capture. This is not a healthy sign. You can even expand your horizon to including Air Bnb and Uber in the business model. New mega companies tap into the everyone’s revenue in exchange for convenience. And at that these large companies have one more thing in common. They start by attracting millions of customers by undercutting the market, operating at a loss. Then once they have you on board, they begin introducing rates which mercilessly increase over time. One day I understood that new technologies and opportunities for artists mean squat as long as the underlying mentality of people doesn’t change. It is our unwillingness to stand up for the commons as we are sold the idea of individual merit and genius. The moment I understood this phenomenon, I realized there is no shortcut. There is no replacement for touching people’s hearts in person, having folks remember you for the great show you gave, for the memorable music you created, for how you treated them, for how you followed up. So today from what I now came to understand, my advice to entrepreneurs is this: Don’t waste your time on schemes, hypes and shortcuts. Be concerned with generating real value you believe in. It’s OK to fail and to make honest mistakes. Not everybody is going to like what you do, but you don’t need everybody. Seek proportionate success not UBER success.
What sells itself as the big carrot on a stick is actually a kind of social cancer at which’s end you find pollution, resource depletion, economic depression, drug addiction and climate change. It’s all connected. Build instead over time a following by always of asking yourself the question: What can I do that I love doing which provides value for my community. What reduces stress and pain in the world? What inspires us to stick around for the hard work? It’s gotta be good for you AND for the world as well. One alone is not enough. If people love what you do, but you yourself are lukewarm, you’ll feel like an impostor as you age, playing a roll that’s empty of your soul’s purpose. And yes we all have one waiting to be discovered. Think as much a bout the “how” as you do about the “what”. Refine yourself. Focus deeply on the quality of your small moves in the world. If you love what you do, but it has no value for others, you’ll go broke doing what you love. Secondly, clean up your physical and digital clutter and save only the stuff you are proud off and the stuff you need for practical reasons. It’s a slow process. It’s very very slow and deliberate. And third, I’d say try to raise the bar for yourself and your community always without being a perfectionist stickler. Keep it loose and stay smooth and easy. Light at heart. Cultivate those qualities by removing your attentions from the redundant stuff and replacing it with new relevancy. Reach for your own evolution by means of acquiring relentless self-knowledge. The more you know yourself, the more grounded you will be when the next storm comes, and it always does. You ultimately want to rest in the eye of the storm with your spiritual center. Let the world do its thing and stay in a quiet center. That’s really hard and takes daily work. At 62 I am just beginning to understand the real game and how it is meant to be played. We are students of life and every little moment counts.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Yes there is. Rather than looking at my mission in life in terms of a specific goal, I am more and more seeing it in terms of a series of nested goals. I have for instance a grandfather goal : Making an new album. Then nested inside that is a parent goal: writing 7 compositions. Inside that is nested the baby : Working on what I am doing right at the moment which may be a section of one composition. My role model is life itself or the dual force of nature and intellect / the eternal couple. Keeping the two in love is my job. There is a way to be that liberates me from fear, anxiety and suffering.
It is systematic and there are specific rules of the game. I call it the long game. The one that leads to my awakening as an eternal being. I know it’s there but I can’t fully comprehend it. It’s as if there is someone behind an unseen veil who is my subconscious counterpart. That someone communicates with me through symbolic messages which I must learn to read in the unspoken story unfolding through my life’s day to day events. If I am on the right track, I get rewarded. Often the rewards come in form of synchronistic events. For example, I might think of something to do as I drive by a billboard which has a direct reference to what I am thinking. There is also a systematic way to get to those states of mind, but I must be perfectly aligned inside and cannot be distracted by things that don’t matter. The more at peace I am the clearer I can read the “instructions” of how to get to eternity. So a non-wavering inner state is the prerequisite for being able to see this mysterious path that is highly individual and yet connected to everything around me. The mission is this: To be able to separate that which is absolute from that which is temporary. There is a clear distinction. Events that happen here and there – are temporary. States of mind and game-of-life rules are absolute. There is for instance the angry state. Step into it and certain things go down that only happen when I am angry. The angry state is always there, always available, but I only experience it when I hook up with certain vibrations. There is the alert and peaceful state. When I am in it, the rewards come. Things fall into place. My goal is to have the control, the spiritual education to be in the peaceful state even if the world around me is not. That’s the big one. It’s super hard, but also super rewarding. I was very fortunate to meet music early in life as all those principles I so adore are crystal clear in the process of musical improvisation. I can get into that state the easiest with an instrument in my hand. Now my goal is to reach that state also when I am bringing out the trash or when I am not feeling well. The understanding is this: We do not have to micro mange the events of our lives to get the best outcome. Instead we have to make an effort to getting into (and remaining in) the state of mind from where all good thoughts and feelings emanate.

Contact Info:

• Website: kaieckhardt.com
• Other: Garajmahal.us

Image Credits
Garaj Mahal in Seattle – photography by Chris Davis. All other images no credit applies.